That afternoon, James wore his Allen Iverson jersey to the gym. He waited courtside for someone to pick him up, and after three games when nobody did he found an abandoned ball and jogged over to an unused side basket to shoot around. He made a lay-up, then a free-throw, pulled up and sank an elbow jumper that touched almost nothing but the bottom of the net, retreated to the top of the key and prepared to execute his signature crossover-dribble, a move he’d mastered back in high school by studying his hero Allen Iverson’s technique, then practicing out in the parking lot without relent, without a hoop, just dribbling, just crossing over until his ankles ached from the relentless lateral starts and stops; it was an offensive weapon he had never been able to deploy against an actual high school opponent before an appreciative crowd of friends, teachers, family, members of the custodial staff, teammates’ parents, alumnae, and any number of shy pretty local girls who’d nurtured a throbbing secret crush on him all season long as they sat with hands tucked under thighs and admired the spry ballet he danced across that polished hardwood stage, because he’d never had the ball during an actual game. Tonight, though, it would be unleashed on unsuspecting pick-up competition just as soon as someone picked him up, and thus needed to be maximally primed. The lopsided Spalding glanced off his outside foot and spun onto the adjacent court, James giving chase, pursuing the errant bounce into a mobile copse of large men executing the fast break, so that at more or less top-speed he encountered a tall broad-chested shirtless man whose upper arms were canvasses for traditional Maori ink—a cop, James had learned, eavesdropping on a courtside conversation one night several weeks ago while he improved his shooting form by lying on his back and flicking the ball from his fingertips straight up toward the rafters until his wrist was stiff and difficult to bend—and this tattooed gendarme now stumbled and nearly fell, and James actually did fall, tumbling to the false parquet, winded by the blow, and he rolled onto his back and looked confusedly up at the cop and other players who had broken off their sprints and slowed to a halt and now stood glaring down at him in what appeared to be real disgust.

“Brah, what the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me?”

The cop scooped up James’s borrowed basketball and punted it across the gym.

“Shit my bad,” James said, not meeting eyes as he rose and trotted after his borrowed equipment.

“Get the fuck out of here, Iverson,” someone called after him, eliciting lots of different types of laugh.

James jogged coolly from the gym as if he were just one more dehydrated athlete on his water-break, but once outside he sprinted to the bathroom, locked himself in the far stall, and thought he might be going to cry, but: no, it turned out he would not.

The courageous thing to do after such humiliation would have been to go back into the gym to confront his fears, so this is what he did. Inside he grimly honed his jumpshot and crossover-dribble on a different peripheral hoop that was much farther from any of the main full courts given over to the evening’s competitive action, and he imagined the bloated gendarme trying futilely to detain him as he crossed over and laid in bucket after bucket, more or less at will.

“Hey. Hey brah: we need one!” James heard, just as he once more blew past the cop (whose knees he imagined buckling with a rifle-crack indicating career-closing ligament wreckage), exploding to the basket for a sweet reverse. On the very court where James had recently embarrassed himself stood a hefty large-headed headband-bedecked man with enormous nostrils, the breadth of which latter impressed even from James’s distance, beckoning him to join. James nodded, pursed his lips, jogged over, ready to contest the next eleven points.

After several possessions during which he was not featured prominently in his new team's offensive scheme, James retrieved an errant bounce and faced up toward the basket, calmly set his feet and lined up a long two, released, and when the opposing player whose upper-body’s sculpted bulges and striations seemed almost magnified under their shellac of sweat sprang higher than seemed possible and swatted James attempt into a group of shoeless spectators—lingering to watch this last contest but done competing for the night—it was a real surprise.

But James refused to be shaken or discouraged: next time he gained possession, his squad down 10 to 8, he raced downcourt for an unprotected net and flipped a lay-up rimward before the long, lean arm came gliding into his periphery from just above his head, pinned the ball hard against the backboard’s Plexiglas, as its proprietor hollered something triumphantly profane. Crumpled on the glossy wood beneath the hoop, James watched the rejected sphere squib out of play.

“Yeah!” shouted another policeman, this one as white as James, racing over to offer his teammate a fist to bump. “Yeah! Get that shit out of here! Weak bitch! Haha!”

A bit later, after his team had lost, other players hootingly disbanded, headed for the bar or home, James was back at the far basket with the Spalding no one’d bothered to claim—it was a shitty ball—practicing his jumper and crossover alone until eight-thirty, when it was time for the gymnasium to close.

On the bus-ride home to his apartment in Halawa Heights, the H1 was still plugged with traffic, and a light drizzle softened the nighttime landscape and cast wet rainbows over the mountains and pedestrian bridges and passing cars whenever they were filtered through the streetlamps’ glow. Passing the Likelike on-ramp the bus began to pick up speed, and James thought of a song he remembered listening to with his favorite cousin in New Jersey one summer when his family had visited, back when he was just a boy and hadn’t expected to stay in Honolulu for the duration of his youth. He closed his eyes, and there was the backyard pool with the little diving board from which he’d loved to jump or dive but never been able to work up the courage to backflip, having once flipped straightforwardly and landed on his back with an unholy splat. The song he and the favorite cousin had loved was by a band he’d long since given up listening to, and its lyrics were beyond recall, but here was the tune, note for note, flooding back to him suddenly, as if the intervening years had never been, and here was his cousin, so pretty and smart and sweet to him as they sat beside the pool and tried to decide what would be a fun thing to do with the rest of the day, should they first prepare a snack?, and it was such a sad, haunting melody that right there on the city bus, seated beside a pretty girl whose honey-toned bare legs he’d been trying not to stare at for the past twenty minutes, right there, on a bus full of people who probably had much shittier lives than his (for instance, the fat grizzled Samoan-looking man taking up two of the far-back row’s three seats who appeared to be missing his right eye), he had to bite his lip so that he wouldn’t cry because it was no good, there was no reason for it.


Jonathan Callahan’s first book, The Consummation of Dirk, was selected by judge Zachary Mason as the winner of last year's Stacherone Prize for Innovative Fiction and will be published by Stacherone Books/Dzanc in early 2013. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Unsaid, Witness, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Quarterly West, Keyhole, >Kill Author, Used Furniture Review, Western Humanities Review, Underwater New York, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Honolulu, studied and taught in New York for a while, then spent a few years in Japan. He is actively seeking representation for his second book, Notes from a Burning Underground, a short novel in three parts. Contact Jonathan at jonathancalla@gmail.com.