Hot Shot Read online

  After my head quit ringing, I eased into my chair at the table and began to eat, and the chow was pretty damn lousy, besides being cold, and the only reason I bothered to eat at all was because I’d worked up this big appetite. Pretty soon the old man got up and said he was going up the street to the tavern to watch the fights, and I said if he’d quit blowing all his money for beer in the lousy tavern he’d have enough to buy a television set, and we could all watch the God-damn fights. He looked like he was figuring to clobber me again, but he hardly ever bothered to clobber me more than once a day, and so he just belched and rubbed his fat gut and went on out. I finished eating and went in the living room and sat down and tried to think of something to do with the damn night. There wasn’t any use going back uptown, because I didn’t have any money, and I’d had plenty of Bugs for one day, a little of Bugs going a hell of a long way, and finally I decided I might as well go over and see if I could stir up something with Mopsy, so I went.

  The whole damn sky was lousy with stars, and the moon was floating around big and yellow up there among them, and when you walked under a tree and looked up you could see the moon and a big mess of the stars through the bare branches of the tree, and it was like seeing it all through a God-damn black filigree or something, and it was a pretty good eyeful if you cared for that kind of crap. The wind was blowing pretty strong in the street, stirring up the dead leaves in the yards and along the gutter, and it was damn cold, and I got to thinking that it was too cold to sit outside with Mopsy, and what the hell could you do with Mopsy inside with her old man and her old lady hanging around, and I was about to turn around and go home and to hell with it when it occurred to me that there was an outside chance that the old man and the old lady had gone out to a movie or somewhere, and so I took the chance and went on, and that’s just the way it turned out, as luck would have it.

  Mopsy opened the door when I knocked, and I said, “Hi, Mopsy,” and I could tell by the way she looked half glad and half scared, like she knew damn well she was going to do something she wasn’t supposed to do, that no one was home but her.

  “Hi, Skimmer,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  I said, “I just came over to do a little diddling,” and she said, “Don’t you talk like that, Skimmer. Besides, you can’t come in. Mom and Pop are gone to the movies, and I can’t have boys in the house when they’re gone.”

  “Nuts,” I said. ‘Who’s going to know besides us? I’ll get the hell out before they come back.”

  “Well,” she said, “they’ll be back around nine, so you’ll have to leave by eight-thirty.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be gone like Callahan,” and I went in.

  She had her goggles off and her hair pushed up on top of her head and pinned there, and the fact was, she looked pretty good, sort of sophisticated, if you know what I mean, except she was too heavy, not really fat but damn plump, and she was wearing these crummy saddleshoes and white sox instead of high heels and nylons like any smart doll wears when she wants to send a guy. She was stacked up good, though, even if she did pack a little too much altogether, and her tail had a nice little wobble to it when she walked. I sat down on the sofa and watched her wobble it over to the radio-phonograph, and she said, “You want to hear some music?” and I said, “Sure. Put on a stack.”

  She started the first platter spinning and came back and sat down beside me on the sofa, and I began to think that she was just the soft-headed kind that would be impressed all to hell by something like a guy playing on the school basketball team, so I said, “I’ll bet you can’t guess what I’ve been doing,” and she said, “No, what?”

  “Playing basketball,” I said.

  “Basketball?” she said.

  “Hell, yes, basketball,” I said. “Can’t you understand anything?”

  “Where you been playing basketball?” she said, and I said, “I been playing at school. Where the hell else is there to play basketball?”

  “On the team?” she said.

  “God Almighty, yes, on the team,” I said. “You think you play basketball all by yourself or something?”

  By that time her eyes were sort of shining, and her mouth was hanging open a little like she was in heat, and she said, “Oh, Skimmer, that’s wonderful,” and I could see that she was already thinking about me being a school big shot, maybe, and dragging her around to dances and places with me, and I thought, Fat chance, sister, if everything old Bugs said about the classy dolls turns out to be true. Meantime, though, I was making a hell of a lot of points, and old Mopsy wasn’t too damn bad while I was waiting for something better, and as a matter of fact, we wound up doing a lot of kissing and having a pretty hot tussle there on the sofa, and if I hadn’t had to clear out at eight-thirty — except it was almost nine before I left — I got an idea I might even have got past that holy and precious stuff she always came up with at the last minute. Anyhow, on the way home I decided that if it worked like that on Mopsy there wasn’t any reason why it shouldn’t work on a lot of others, and I made up my mind right then and there to give this basketball crap the big try, and I didn’t worry any about the old man’s guff about no kid of his playing, either, because he didn’t really give a damn what the hell I did, or if I ever came home for supper on time or any other time, and he’d only stirred up a brawl over it tonight because he was handy and felt like raising hell.

  I did it too. I went for it whole hog. I got me a jock strap and went out for practice every God-damn afternoon after school and sometimes on Saturday, and I guess I ran up and down that court damn near a million miles, and as a matter of fact, old Bugs was right, and I had to ease up on the gaspers some, but I didn’t quit entirely as a matter of principle. Old Mulloy would make me stand back on the outside of the keyhole, which means the black lines painted on the floor in front of the basket that look like a big keyhole, and he’d stand in the keyhole under the basket and fire the God-damn ball out to me and yell, “Jump and push,” and I’d jump and push the ball at the basket, and he’d grab it and fire it back like the son of a bitch was hot and yell, “Jump and push,” and I’d jump and push again, and after a while he’d have old Tizzy Davis stand in there under the basket and fire the ball out, because Tizzy was center, and it was really his job, and before long I got free and fancy and loose as ashes and could flip the ball through the net almost every time with a little swish, and it was just like shooting a lot of God-damn fish in a rain barrel.

  Like I said, old Tizzy played center, being so tall and skinny and sort of limber, and the idea was to slam the ball to him under the basket, and if he had a chance he was supposed to jump up and away from whoever was guarding him and hook the ball over into the basket — only the other guys called it a bucket instead of a basket, and I got to calling it that too — and if he didn’t have the chance to hook the ball in, he was supposed to fire it back to me outside the keyhole, and I was supposed to throw it through from there, and I don’t mind saying it worked damned good. As a matter of fact, you’ve got to give the devil his due, and there weren’t any flies on old Tizzy when it came to playing that pivot position, which is what we called it, and the only thing wrong with him was that every once in a while he’d lose one of those God-damn contact lenses off his eyeball, and then we’d all have to stop and go crawling all over the lousy floor until someone found it.

  We always wound up every practice with the first team playing the second team, and I was on the first team right off, and old Bugs was on the second team. As a matter of fact, he played guard and was supposed to keep me from making any points, and I really gave the poor bastard a hard time, and before we finished playing his tail was always rubbing out his tracks. Old Mulloy would stand along the side, sometimes running up and down a little, and he’d keep yelling, “Run, run, run! Move, move move! Pass that ball, pass that ball!” Once in a while he’d run out on the court waving his arms around to stop the action and chew somebody out for not doing something the way he should’ve done it, but he never called it chewing out because he didn’t go for cussing, and once when I did a little in a natural sort of way, damned if he didn’t give me a five-minute lecture on sportsmanship and clean speech, the son of a bitch, when all the time he wasn’t interested in anything, really, but running the hell out of you, and he didn’t give a damn if you dropped dead just as long as he won his God-damn games.

  We came up pretty close to the time for our first game, and along about then I had some trouble with a God-damn old grandma named Cupper. He taught geometry in the school, and if you’ve ever tried the stuff you’ll understand what God-awful tripe it is, and I’d taken it once before and hadn’t done any good with it, and now I was taking it again, because I had to, and I wasn’t doing any better this time, and as a matter of fact, I wasn’t doing a damn thing. Anyhow, old Cupper got wind of my playing basketball, and he served notice on the coach that there wasn’t any way on God’s earth I could make a passing mark in geometry, and that I couldn’t play, and old Mulloy just hit the God-damn ceiling and went screaming down to the principal. I got called down to the office later, and the principal and the coach and old Cupper were all there, and you could tell they’d been raising hell because the principal was red in the face, and he kept taking off and putting on these fancy goggles with a black ribbon on them, and the coach was red in the face too, but old Cupper was white as a sheet, so I figured the principal and the coach had been dishing it out, and old Cupper had been taking it. He looked like he was about a hundred years old, and he had a little gray curl that hung down over his forehead, and these God-damn plates kept clacking around in his mouth. Take it from me, he was so damn dry it made you thirsty to look at him, but maybe it was what you’d expect in a guy who’d spent most of his lousy life teaching something as dry as geometry.

  Well, the principal had me sit in a chair just like the rest of them, which surprised the hell out of me, and he started in telling me what great things he’d heard about me from old Mulloy, and what a fine thing he thought it was for a young man to serve his school so well, and I knew he was just breaking it off in old Cupper, but he lost control of himself and overdid it, and I kept remembering some of the other things he’d told me at different times, and it was confusing as hell, and I had a feeling generally that he was talking about someone else. He wound up saying there had been a little misunderstanding, but he was sure everything could be worked out all right and that Mr. Cupper wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt the team, and old Cupper broke in with his voice trembling and said that nothing could ever be worked out unless Scaggs, meaning me, did a little work himself, and then the principal got mean as hell and said right out that Scaggs, meaning me again, would receive a passing mark in geometry or else someone, meaning old Cupper, would suffer the God-damn consequences, only he didn’t say God-damn. Old Cupper got so excited that his teeth began to rattle like a hot crap game. The truth is, I felt kind of sorry for the damn old fool, but I wasn’t going to louse anything up by saying so. What’s more, I had a sneaky feeling he was right, and if I’d been him and he’d been me, I wouldn’t have given him nothing, but nothing. Not that God-damn Mulloy, though. That righteous bastard didn’t feel sorry for anyone ever, and all the way back to the locker room he kept crowing like a banty rooster about how it was time certain people were learning that there was more went into the making of a man than what came out of a crummy book.

  The night of the first game finally came around, and I might as well come right out and admit it, I was as nervous as a whore in church. It was a home game, and I’d never been to see a damn game before, even though I was a senior and was there my fourth year, and to tell the truth, I was surprised at the big fuss they made over it. Man, the God-damn place was jumping. All the seats were full up in the sections where people were supposed to sit, and they brought in a lot of folding chairs and set them up around the sides of the court, except where the benches for the teams were, and the school band sat down at one end of the gym just off the court and played all these snappy marches that are enough to make you get your rocks off, and all the time these crazy guys in white pants and dolls in little white pleated skirts ran up and down on the court and jumped in the air and waved their arms and yelled, “Fifteen for the team, fifteen for the team,” and everyone, even the ones old enough to know better, jumped up and yelled fifteen rahs in batches of twos and threes with three big teams after them, and in my opinion they all acted like God-damn maniacs.

  The game finally got started, and I guess all the rest of the team were as nervous as I was, because every time we got hold of the ball we threw the damn thing away, and the only good thing was that the other team was even worse than we were. After a while, though, someone managed to get the ball in to old Tizzy, and Tizzy banged it out to me, and I banged it through, and you’d have thought from the racket that went up that I’d won a war all by myself or something. After that, we settled down, and I could hear old Mulloy yelling, “Run, run, run!” and we ran like hell, and I’m telling you straight that the other team didn’t have a sucker’s chance from then on. We really ran the pants off the poor bastards. They must not have been so hot, anyhow, to tell the truth, because they finally wound up in the cellar at the end of the season, but it was a damn good game to get us started off on top, especially me, because I got hotter than a bitch in August and scored thirty points altogether. To tell the honest truth, it would have been better sometimes if I’d passed back in to Tizzy under the basket, because he’d broken free of his guard and could have laid it in like nothing, but you don’t make points for number one that way, and besides, I was hitting the bucket myself, so what the hell. The God-damn goofy creeps up in the seats and all around the floor in the folding chairs kept yelling, “Scaggs, Scaggs, Scaggs!” and once, during a time out that the other team took to suck their guts in, the guys and dolls in white pants and white shirts got out on the floor and got everyone to yell fifteen rahs with three Scaggses after them, and I’m bound to say it gave me a funny feeling in spite of myself to hear my name yelled out like that. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, or any other Scaggs, either, for that matter, except in a kind of way to Eddie when the paper printed his name as a war hero, but he was dead then and couldn’t appreciate it. And incidentally, the guys who led the yells weren’t the only ones who wore white pants. The girls did too, and you could see them when they jumped up in the air and made their skirts fly up, and I thought myself that it was a better show than the God-damn game.

  In the locker room after it was all over, everyone was yelling and horse-playing and acting as wild as a pregnant fox in a forest fire, and no one but the principal himself came in and shook my hand and said, “Congratulations on a great game, Scaggs,” and I was naked at the time and felt silly as hell. Old Mulloy kept prancing up and down the room in the steam and stink, taking big breaths of the air like it was blowing over roses and sticking his God-damn chest out like Tarzan, and he kept saying, “Great game, fellows, great game,” but then he’d stop and say, “Don’t let it go to your heads, though. There’s a lot of kinks in this team, a lot of kinks, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get them out,” and it was pretty plain that he was trying to give the impression that he was about the only God-damn coach on earth who could do it. It all got pretty pukey, to tell the truth, especially the horseplay, and while I was in the shower old Tizzy Davis reached around inside with one of those skinny arms of his that were about as long as an ape’s and turned the hot water off and damn near froze my tail. I never did go for that kind of stuff much, and I was about to go out and slap his stinking chops for him, but then I decided if I was going to mess around with this bunch of goof-balls I’d have to learn to take that kind of kid stuff, and I might as well start now, so I didn’t do it.

  It was a good thing I didn’t, and I’ll tell you why. When I finally went out of the locker room into the hall, there was old Tizzy talking to a couple of dolls, and he said, “Come on over here, Scaggs. I want you to meet my sister.” Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard him say that, because I was already beginning to get the idea that Bugs had been right about the classy dolls, and some of them were already beginning to look at me that hadn’t ever looked at me before, but I’d never expected anything like Tizzy Davis’s sister, and that’s no bull. Anyhow, I went over there, and Tizzy said, “Marsha, this is Skimmer Scaggs, the best damn forward in the state,” and Marsha laughed and said, “Well, it isn’t exactly true that Tizzy wanted you to meet me. It’s more that I wanted to meet you,” and I thought, Oh, oh, hold on to your God-damn hats because here we go.

  I said I was glad to meet her, and I was, and that’s the truth if I ever told it. She was a junior in school, a year younger than Tizzy and me, and she had this very pale blond hair and this willowy kind of body that looked like it could wrap itself around you and tie a half-hitch, and besides, her voice had this kind of little laugh running through it all the time that made you wonder what the hell she was thinking about, and her eyes, which were blue and kind of shining, came up at you through her lashes with a sly sort of look that made you wonder what they did for entertainment over on the side of town where people like the Davises lived. She was a classy doll, all right, doubled in spades, and I don’t mind telling you that I met and had a lot of dolls after her, but there never was a damn one of them a damn bit classier, even in college or the city or places like that.

  She said, “Do you have anything in particular to do?” and I said I didn’t, and she said, “We’re going over to Tompkins’ for hamburgers and cokes. Would you like to come?”

  I said that sounded pretty good to me, and she said, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Tizzy?” Tizzy said he did, and I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he really meant it or not, and to tell the truth, I didn’t give a damn. We all walked over to Tompkins’, Marsha and me behind, and she hung onto my arm real tight, sort of running her hand up and down the inside of it every now and then, and all the time she kept telling me what a wonderful game I’d played, and just to think it was the first real game I’d ever played in my life, and she bet someday I’d be one of the best basketball players in the country and make All-American inCollier’sandLookand all the big magazines and newspapers.