Basketball helped to distract him from the disappointments of love, at least for five days of the week, with loveless weekends to be endured by seeking further distraction from such things as pickup games with his friends, occasional Saturday night parties, movies with whatever person he could find to go with him (often his mother), and concerts with Gil or Gil and his mother both, but there was no question that playing basketball for the eleven weeks the season lasted helped to keep him from falling into too many mope-holes, beginning with the one-week tryout period and the grand satisfaction of making the last cut, followed by an exhausting week of after-school practices as the team knit together under the direction of Coach Nimm, often referred to as Coach Numb because of his placid disposition, and then nine weeks of games, eighteen games in all, one on Tuesday afternoon and the other on Friday evening, half the games on their home court and the other half on the courts of other private schools scattered around the city, the newsreel-cartoon freshman game before the curtain rose on the main-feature varsity game, and there was Ferguson, the oddball who had asked to wear number 13, running onto the court with the other members of the starting five and taking his position for the center jump.
All those Saturday mornings in Riverside Park with cousin Jim had helped transform the raw, twelve-year-old beginner into a solid if unspectacular player by the time he scored seven points in his first game for the Riverside Rebels at the age of fourteen years and nine months. Ferguson knew that his talents were limited, that he lacked the exceptional speed required for basketball greatness, and because he was less nimble with his left hand than his right, he would never be more than an iffy ball handler when pressured by quick and aggressive opponents. No flash, no razzle-dazzle, no fake-them-out-of-their-pants one-on-one moves, but there were enough strong points about Ferguson’s game to keep him off the bench and make him an indispensable part of the team, most of all the spring in his legs, which allowed him to jump higher than anyone else, and when you combined that ability with the reckless enthusiasm of his play — an insane form of hustle that earned him the nickname of Commando-in-Chief — the result was an unusual knack for muscling deft, clean rebounds when he crashed the boards against taller players. He rarely missed layups, and his outside shot was good, with the potential to become very good, but the accuracy he showed at practice was seldom matched by his performance in games, since he tended to rush his shots in the heat of competition, which made him an erratic offensive player that first year, someone capable of scoring ten or twelve points when his shot was on or two points or no points when it was off. Thus the seven points he scored in the first game, which turned out to be his average for the season, but with the games only thirty-two minutes long and the point totals somewhere in the thirty-five-to-forty-five range for each team, seven a game wasn’t bad. Not terribly exciting, perhaps, but not bad.
Rah-rah-sis-koom-bah! Rebels! Rebels! Yah-yah-yah!
The numbers meant little to him, however, and as long as the team won he didn’t care how many points he scored, but even more important than winning or losing was the mere fact that he was on the team in the first place. He loved wearing the red-and-yellow Rebels’ uniform with the number 13 on it, he loved the nine other boys he played with, he loved Coach Nimm’s pepless but insightful pep talks in the locker room at halftime, he loved riding on the bus to the away games with his teammates and the ten varsity boys and the six varsity cheerleaders and the four freshman cheerleaders, he loved the chaos of merriment and loud jokes on the bus and especially when junior-class cutup Yiggy Goldberg got suspended for two games for pulling down his pants and sticking his bare ass against the window to moon the people in the passing cars, he loved playing so hard that he was no longer aware of being inside his own body, no longer conscious of who he was, he loved working himself into a sweat at practice and then feeling the hot water from the shower blast the sweat from his skin, he loved that the team had started off slowly and gotten better as the season went along, losing most of the games in the first half and then winning most of them in the second half to wind up with an almost even 8 and 10 record, and he loved it that one of the wins came against Hilliard at home when he scored just three points but led the team in rebounds.
Ho-ho-tic-tac-toe! Rebels! Rebels! Go-go-go!
The best part of it was that people came to watch, that there was always a crowd in the small gym at Riverside for the two games, not thousands or even hundreds but enough to make it feel like a spectacle, with Chuckie Showalter pounding on the bass drum to urge the team on, and nearly everyone in Ferguson’s family showed up at one time or another to root for the Commando-in-Chief, Uncle Dan most of all, who didn’t miss a single home game, and his mother next, who failed to come only when she was out of town for her work, and several times an appearance from Mr. No-Sport Gil, and once cousin Jim, down from Boston on his midwinter break from college, and once, for the game against Hilliard, Miss Amy Schneiderman herself, who saw Ferguson take a hard tumble trying to save a ball from going out of bounds, who saw him thrust his shoulder into a Hilliard player and knock him to the floor as they battled for an errant pass, who saw him block a layup from going into the basket in the fourth quarter to keep Riverside ahead by three points, and after the game was over she said to him: Good show, Archie. A little scary at times, but fun to watch.
Scary? he asked. What does that mean?
I don’t know. Intense, maybe. Super intense. I hadn’t realized basketball was supposed to be a contact sport.
Not always. But under the boards, you have to be tough.
Is that what you are now, Archie — tough?
Don’t you remember?
What are you talking about?
Toughen up. You don’t remember?
Amy smiled and shook her head. Ferguson found her so unbearably beautiful at that moment, he wanted to throw his arms around her and attack her mouth with kisses, but before he could do anything that foolish and disgraceful, Uncle Dan walked up to him and said: Terrific job, Archie. The jump shot might have been a little off, but I think it was your best all-around game so far.
THEN THE BASKETBALL season was over, and it was back to the no-girlfriend void of no Amy and no one else. The only girl he saw with any regularity was last year’s Miss April in the copy of Playboy Jim had passed on to him before heading off to college, but Wanda Powers of Spokane, Washington, a grinning twenty-two-year-old with gravity-defying cantaloupe breasts and a body that seemed to have been manufactured from a rubber model of the real Wanda Powers, had begun to lose her hold over Ferguson’s imagination.
Antsy and demoralized, ever more frustrated by the stuckness of his position in the world, dragged down by his dulled hopes and the feverish daydreams that had supplanted those hopes, the useless and incessant mental journeys into realms of voluptuous happiness where everything he wished for came true, Ferguson decided to make a last attempt to patch things up with Amy and start their romance again, but when he called her five days after the end of the season, asking her to accompany him to the team party that would be held at Alex Nordstrom’s place on Saturday night, she said she was busy. Well, he asked, what about the day after that? No, she said, she was busy on Sunday as well, and then he learned that she would continue to be busy for as long as it lasted, it being the mutual love she had formed with a person she refused to name, and that was that, Ferguson said to himself, Amy had a boyfriend, Amy was gone, and the green fields of hope had turned to mud.