“I’m sure,” she says. “And I’m just going to say good-bye now.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Good-bye now,” she says, and we hang up.
The little cowgirl across the alcove gives me a fretful look. Possibly I was talking too loud again. Her big Texan daddy swivels half around to look at me. He has a big tough-jawed face, unruly dark hair and enormous pipe-fitter’s mitts. “No,” he says decisively into the phone. “No, that ain’t gonna work, that’s way outa line. Forgit that.” He hangs up, crumpling his little scratch of paper, which he drops on the carpet.
He fishes in his breast pocket, pulls out a pack of Kools, takes one out with his mouth, still holding little Suzie’s hand, lights up one-handed with a thick, mean-looking Zippo. He blows a big, frustrated, lung-shuddering drag right at the international NO SMOKING insignia attached to the carpeted ceiling, and I immediately expect to be drenched in cold chemicals, for alarms to trigger, security people to skid around the corner on the dead run. But nothing happens. He gives me an antagonistic look where I’m lost in front of my phone screen. “You got a problem?” he says, fishing back in his cigarette pocket for something he doesn’t find.
“No,” I say, grinning. “I just have a daughter about your daughter’s age”—a total fabrication, followed hard by another one—“and she just reminded me of her.”
The man looks down at the child, who must be eight and who looks up at him smiling, charmed by being noticed but unsure exactly how to be charmed. “You want me to sell this one to you?” he says, at which moment the little girl throws her head back and lets her whole self go limp so she’s hanging off his big mitt, smiling and shaking her pretty head.
“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” she says.
“They’re too expensive for me,” he says in his Texas accent. He raises his child off the ground, limp as a carcass, and gives her a dainty little swing out.
“You cain’t sell me,” she says in a throaty, bossy voice. “I’m not for sale.”
“You’re for sale big time, that’s whut,” he says. I smile at his joke — a helpless fatherish way of expressing love to a stranger in a time of hardship. I should appreciate it. “You don’t have a house to rent, do you?”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not from Springfield. I’m just here for a visit. My son’s running around in here someplace.”
“You know how long it takes to get up here from Oklahoma?” he says, his cigarette in one side of his big mouth.
“It’s probably not that quick.”
“Two days, two nights straight. And we been in the KOA for three damn days. I got a highway job starts up in a week, and I can’t find anything. I’m gonna have to send this orphan back.”
“Not me,” the little girl says in her bossy voice and lets her knees give way, hanging on. “I’m not an orphan.”
“You!” the big guy says to his daughter and frowns, though not angrily. “You’re my whole damn problem. If I didn’t have you with me, somebody would’ve been considerate of me by now.” He gives me a big leer and a roll of the eyes. “Stand up on your feet, Kristy.”
“You’re a redneck,” his daughter says, and laughs.
“I might be, and I might be worse than that,” he says more seriously. “You think your daughter’s like this outfit?” He’s already starting to walk away, holding his daughter’s tiny hand in his great one.
“They’re both pretty sweet when they want to be, I bet,” I say, watching his child’s quick knock-kneed steps and thinking of Clarissa giving Ann and me, or possibly just me, the finger. “The holiday’ll probably change everything.” Though I don’t know how. “I’ll bet you find someplace to stay today.”
“It’s that or drastic measures,” he says, walking away toward the lobby.
“What’s that mean?” his daughter says, hanging onto his hand. “What’s drastic measures?”
“Being your ole man, for starters,” he says, as they go out of sight. Then he adds, “But it might mean a whole lot of things too.”
Paul, when I walk out to find him, is not waiting with an armload of vending-machine provisions but has taken up an observer position alongside “The Shoot-Out” exhibit, which dominates one whole wall-side of Level 1 and where a lot of visitors have already become noisy participators.
“The Shoot-Out” is nothing more than a big humming people-mover conveyor belt, just like in an airport, but built right alongside and at the same level as a spotlit arena area, full of basketball backboards, hoops and posts, at varying heights and distances from the belt — ten feet, five yards, two feet, ten yards. Along beside the moving handrail and between the little arena and the people-mover itself, a trough of basketballs is continuously being replenished through a suction tube under the floor, exactly in the manner of a bowling alley rack. A human being getting on the moving floor (as many already are) and traveling at approximately one half of one mile an hour, can simply pick up ball after ball and shoot basket after basket — jump shots, hooks, two-hand sets, over the back, one’s whole repertoire — until he reaches the other end, where he steps off. (Such a screwy but ingenious machine has undoubtedly been invented by someone with a dual major in Crowd Control and Automated Playground Management from Southern Cal, and anybody in his right mind would’ve fought to get ground-floor money in on it. In fact, if the Hall of Fame management didn’t insist that you first mull past murky old Phogg Allen pictures and replicas of Bob Lanier’s dogs, everyone would spend his whole visit right down here where the real action is, and the rest of the building could go back to being a dentist’s office.)
A pocket-size grandstand has been built just on the other side of the conveyor, and plenty of spectators are up there now, noisily ya-hooing and razzing their kids, brothers, nephews, stepsons who’re taking the ride and trying to shoot the eyes out of all the baskets.
Paul, who’s on the sidelines by the entrance gate, where there’s a line of kids waiting to get on, seems on the alert, as though he were running the whole contraption. He is, however, watching a scrappy, thick-thighed white kid in a New York Knicks uniform, who’s hustling around among the backboards, kicking trapped balls toward the suction tube gutter, tipping stuck balls out of the nets, snapping vicious passes back at kids on the conveyor and occasionally taking a graceless little short-armed hook shot, which always goes in, no matter what basket he shoots at. No doubt he’s the manager’s son.
“Did you try out your patented two-hand set yet?” I say, coming up right behind Paul and over the noise. I instantly smell his sour sweat smell when I put my hand on his shoulder. There’s also, I can see, a thick scabby jag in his scalp, where whoever authored his skint haircut made a mistake. (Where are such things done?)
“That’d be good, wouldn’t it,” he says coldly, going on watching the white kid. “That nitwit thinks because he works here his game’s gonna improve. Except the floor’s tilted and the baskets aren’t regulation. So he’s actually fucked.” This seems to make him satisfied. He has purchased no food that I can see.
“You better give it a try,” I say over the basketball clatter and the thrum the giant machine’s making. I feel exactly like a dad among other real dads, encouraging my son to do what he doesn’t want to do because he’s afraid he’ll be bad at it.
“D’you always dribble before you shoot?” someone in the bleachers shouts out at the moving conveyor. A short bald man who’s about to try a precarious hook shot yells back without even looking: “Why don’t you try eating me,” then wings a shot that misses everything and causes other people in the bleachers to laugh.