“We’re taking the gym,” she announces.
Sam watches her lope to center court. The girls are already on the floor. At the sidelines, the boys stand together, giving angry, disgusted looks to both Sam and the girls. Sam crosses his arms and leans against the door of the closet.
“Fuck this,” Pete Fosse says, striding across the floor toward the Mutant. “Gimme the ball, bitch.”
Stonily, she passes it to Billie Figueroa and flips Fosse a bird.
Tim Kasten closes on Figueroa. When she attempts to pass the ball to Nat Linscott, Tim snatches it away. Laughing, he bounds away from the girls. In an outburst of angry cries, the girls start after Tim and suddenly the rest of the boys are there, forming a wall like some enormous law firm marshaling against a class-action suit. The girls falter and come to a stop.
“Get the fuck off the court,” Fosse says, jerking his thumb toward the sidelines.
The Mutant walks up to him. “No way. This court is ours today.”
Sam approaches and curls a finger at Fosse, to whom Kasten has handed the ball. Sam holds out his palm. Pete hesitates. Woods, Sam’s co-captain, is suddenly at Sam’s side. Pete releases the ball into Sam’s hand and is rewarded with a smile.
“Five on five,” says Sam.
Amid an outbreak of cursing and protest from the boys, the Mutant whoops triumphantly. Fosse grabs for the ball but Sam holds it high over his head.
“Now, now, Peteybird,” Sam reproves gently. “Gram, Woods, Michaud, Fosse and me for the guys.”
“Black, Carver, the M & M’s and me,” the Mutant calls.
All the girls but the ones she names drift to the sidelines. The boys hold their ground, arguing among themselves. Finally they also go to the sidelines, leaving only Rick Woods and Billy Rank to represent the boys.
“Volunteers?” asks Sam.
Joey Skouros, everyone’s nominee for Nerd of the Universe, shuffles back onto the court, wincing at the curses and insults heaped on his badly barbered head by his teammates. Acting as ref, Sam places Skouros to tap for the boys’ team. Shaking, Skouros manages to lift his six-foot three-inch gantry of a body high enough to knock the ball into Woods’s hands.
The scrimmage, such as it is, commences. Sam leaves the court long enough to plug a cassette into the sound system. When he turns around, the Mutant has stolen the ball from Woods and is taking it to the girls’ hoop. Rick looks extremely pissed. The boys on the sidelines jeer at Woods, at Skouros and Rank, who falter and come to a standstill. Skouros abruptly walks off court. Hands on his hips, Rick Woods glances toward Sam and then also abandons the court. Billy Rank gives Sam a beseeching look and follows Woods.
The Mutant smoothly hooks the ball into her hoop. It comes down into Melissa Jandreau’s hands. Melissa dribbles it, looking toward Sam to see what happens next.
He shrugs and lopes down court as the sound system finishes feeding the leader of his dub past the tapehead. There is an easy jingly island-sounding pump and then the vibrant guttural voice of Wilbert Harrison urges,
Together we will stand
divided we fall
come on people,
Let’s get on the ball
and work together.
Come on come on
let’s work together.
Now now people
say now together we will stand
every boy girl woman and man.
His choice of music has the Mutant grinning. Almost dancing to it, he fakes, Melissa buys it, and he plucks the ball away from her, pivots, and heads toward his hoop, the Mutant on his heels, her team racing to get there ahead of him.
“ ‘Aw yeah,’” he shouts with Wilbert Harrison. “ ‘Aw look a here, look a here,’” as he rockets straight up from just short of the key and sinks a three-pointer over the heads of the defending girls.
He descends into applause and cheers, finds the floor solid under his feet and the atmosphere suddenly rowdy and gleeful. Shaking his head, Rick Woods trots back onto the floor and high-fives him. The Mutant takes the ball and moves down court again.
“Defense!” Todd Gramolini shouts, bounding onto the court.
Grinning, Joey Skouros stumbles behind Gram and Billy Rank follows.
On the sidelines, the members of the two teams dance one on one, girls with girls and girls with boys and one boy—Kevin Bither—with two girls. Anyone looking into the gym would wonder is there a dance going on or a basketball practice. The only holdout is Fosse, who stalks away.
Sam bears down on the Mutant again. The matchup is ridiculous; she’s so much smaller and lighter than he is but Jesus is she into it. If he’s dancing, she’s kick-boxing. She has less power than he but a magnitude of fierceness he doesn’t expect from a girl. He has seen her on court enough to be familiar with the intensity of her play, but this morning she is tuning herself up to try to meet his overwhelming height and weight advantage and it’s so quixotic, he is tickled.
As Sam advances on the Mutant, he is aware that between them they have created the circumstances of his dream on the bus. It is reassuring to know this time he is not wearing his uniform but a union suit and sweats, most unlikely to suddenly dissolve. And she wears cutoff Levis over one of those whole-body tights things, only the legs stop at mid-calf. Totally thready, of course, so when she lifts her arms, a slight pale bulge of breast is visible in a ripped seam under one arm, and the rusty black tights show through the rents and unravelings in the skintight bleached-out cutoffs.
But the music lifts him and it all feels right in a way the dream had not. He is glad of his choice of hard-driving ZZTop for the second cut on the
