The Sidekick Read online

  Well, I tried, I thought, just at the point where I had stopped trying.

  Eventually Caukwell blew his whistle. “All right, fellas,” he called out. Sneakers stopped squeaking; a ball slipped out and bounced slowly to the wall. You could hear the boys breathing and the hum of the air-conditioning, like a factory noise. “Line up, line up,” he said. He could raise his voice when he wanted to. It filled the gym. “Everybody’s shooting free throws. When you miss, you can go home.”

  So that’s what we did, forty kids standing in a long snake. The first kid missed and Caukwell gave him a pat on the back, and said, “What’s your name, son?” and the kid said, “McGinley,” and Caukwell wrote down his name on the clipboard and told him, “Check the board in the morning.” The second kid made his shot, it hit the front of the rim and rolled in, but when he started to leave, Caukwell called him back. “Son,” he said, “you need to listen. Get to the back of the line. You’re still in it.”

  At that point, when I figured out what was going on, my hands started to sweat again and I tried to dry them on my legs. There were about twenty kids ahead of me … It’s funny, when you’re young, you think, every stupid thing matters, every little chance, it counts, it changes everything, but what I didn’t realize is that it would.

  Mostly I was worrying, should I shoot it underhand, which everybody’s going to make fun of me for, while the line got smaller in front of me. About half the kids missed and went home; the rest circled back. In my small scared heart I wanted all of them to miss.

  Marcus Hayes stood in front of me and reached down nervously to rub his hands against his socks. Then someone passed him the ball and he stepped up to the line and made his shot; I saw him clench his fist. Then he passed me the ball. I leaned over and touched it to the floor, bent my legs quickly like a frog about to jump, and flipped it underhand into the air.

  Somebody said, “Granny style! He’s doing it granny style,” and kids started falling over, laughing the way kids do, trying to laugh, forcing it, so they could join in the joke, as the ball slipped through the net.

  Coach Caukwell shook his head, and I went around to the back of the line behind Marcus Hayes.

  In the end, it was just the two of us, Marcus and me. He made five or six in a row, but it didn’t matter, eventually he missed—and walked away without looking back. Then it was just me, and a few other kids who had stuck around to watch, and Coach Caukwell.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” he asked.

  “From my dad. He says the free throw is the most important shot in basketball, because people make free throws more than they make any other shot.” Then I said, “How long do you want me to keep going for? I can keep doing this all day.”

  He stood under the basket, feeding me the ball.

  “Keep going,” he said. But then I missed and the ball bounced away into a corner and the whole thing was over. For a second, I thought, somebody must have taken my backpack, but there it was, sitting by itself against the wall, and I was almost too tired to bend down and pick it up. When I walked outside, the heat had risen again and the sun going down was shawled in dark cloud—super vivid, and Dad pulled up at the curb and pushed open the door. Sometimes when he worked at home he stayed in pajamas all day and just pulled on pants when he walked out of the house. It embarrassed me, seeing him like that; but nobody else noticed, we were in the car. He turned his headlights on as the first fat drops of rain hit the windshield.

  “How’d it go?” he said.

  2

  Mel Caukwell died a couple of days ago; he was sixty-six years old. ESPN flew me down to Austin because my editor thought Marcus Hayes might show up to the funeral, and maybe there was a story there.

  I hadn’t been back since my sister’s wedding. When my mother passed in 2007, my dad started living with me in Hartford. But he never sold the house in Hyde Park, and then when my sister needed another bedroom (after Troy was born), she moved back in. Anyway, they were still living there, so I had a couch to sleep on. My bosses would have paid for a hotel but I prefer couches.

  Various things emerged about Coach Caukwell that I didn’t know. He was born in Homewood, outside Birmingham, where his father worked for equipment services at Samford University. As a kid, Mel used to shoot around at the Pete Hanna Center while his dad mopped the floors. Later he played defensive back for Alabama. He got his degree in physical education then spent five seasons on the Dallas Cowboys practice squad, playing special teams, too, before tearing his ACL. Football teams are big organizations, they carry an extensive payroll, and guys at the periphery, like Caukwell, drift in and out. These are basically the kind of assets you use up. Their knees go, their mental health breaks down, they have problems with money or the law or pain medication, and after a few years you replace them.

  For Caukwell, it was only his knee. After retiring, he worked in security, sometimes as a bouncer at the Red Zone in Dallas, a bar and gentleman’s club, where some of the Cowboys like to hang out. That can’t have been fun for him, not just the contrast but the kind of place it was. He started a teacher prep program at Denton and passed the state exams. Later he moved to Austin, where his sister lived, and eventually got the job at Burleson, teaching Health classes and coaching basketball, because Burleson already had a football coach.

  Another injury (he took a helmet to the nuts at Alabama) left him infertile, which maybe explains why he never got married. The Statesman obituary described him as a “long-time bachelor”—funny they still use that word. But he “was a father figure” to a lot of his players, especially his nephew Lamont, who I used to play with.

  Caukwell’s death got picked up by the AP, just two lines. The only thing he’s famous for now is being the coach that cut Marcus Hayes from the varsity sophomore year.

  *

  His funeral was at the Corinth Baptist Church in East Austin, near Oakwood Cemetery. I caught the early flight out of Logan and drove there straight from the airport.

  My plane was late and I worried I might miss the service. Traffic thickened as we crossed I-35, and then there was nowhere to park. The curb was lined with cars, including a Hummer and several SUVS with tinted windows. A security van blocked the entrance to the parking lot. Come on! I thought, give me a break, when a man in a black suit with one of those curly cords reaching around to his ear waved me along.

  The first space I found was three blocks away, outside a coffee shop. One of those mushrooms of eastside gentrification. Beards and babies. So, I got out and ran, or jogged and then walked and then ran. It was February, but in Austin you could feel the spring coming. Possum haw berries along the chain-link fence, which stretched north and south on either side of the cemetery, showed like spots of blood against the yellow-white grass. I could taste blood in my mouth by the time I reached the church.

  It was a modest brick building, like a barn, with a few square windows blanked out by office blinds. The big double doors were shut, but the handle turned—and as soon as I opened them … felt the concentration of people. Plush red carpeting like cheap red wine stained the floor, the walls were bare, except for a few scattered crosses, but the pews were full, and the heat and noise were like the heat and noise of a basketball gym on a Friday night. Strip lights overhead, cavernous echoes, and the pastor, a tall black man in a bow tie, stood in the glare with a microphone in hand. A casket lay on a trestle table beside him, raised up on the stage.

  I hadn’t really thought about anything all day. Just wake up and get to the airport, remember your ticket, remember your wallet. Sitting on the plane, I finished a piece and filed it. Then it was just … sign for the rental car, hit the highway, find a place to park. But Coach Caukwell was dead and lying in a box, I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, and in that time the muscle mass had probably declined, the bones had decalcified, the vertebrae shrunk, otherwise you couldn’t fit him in that box. Only when I caught my breath, standing and blinking at the back of the church, feeling the burn in my chest,
the heat in my armpits, the sweat on my neck, did I remember why I’d come.

  *

  The pastor’s forehead shone under the lights. He looked like an ex-basketball player, they have a certain stiff grace. When he walked around the stage you could see all his joints in operation.

  His voiced sounded overeducated, a little finicky. There was some call-and-response but not much singing. The passage he chose was Romans 6:4: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

  Now my dad is a Passover-Hanukkah-Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur kind of Jew. At New Year in Hartford, I buy a Golden Delicious from the ShopRite, we cut it up in the kitchen and smear it in a plate of honey, and say L’shana tovah. But synagogue is only for Yom Kippur, and sometimes I come along with him and sometimes I don’t. It depends on the state of our relations. When we’re fighting, I come. Afterward he always complains about the rabbi. These days they sound like Christians, you can’t tell the difference. I don’t even know what that means. This is the kind of argument we get into.

  So now I know. Pastor Rencher (that was his name—you could see it pasted all over the church, tacked to the brick wall, and next to the double doors, like the headline act on a nightclub flyer) liked to walk and talk. “All of us dream about getting a new car,” he said, striding front stage. “But mostly we end up with somebody’s cast-off, some secondhand lemon, where you have to close your eyes just to drive it out of the lot, you have to have faith … But sometimes, sometimes, you step into a new car, and it has that smell, right, that new car smell …”

  I wondered how well this guy actually knew Caukwell and decided, not well. Maybe this was his sister’s church. Coach sometimes talked about his sister. But I also remembered a Sunday practice in March, a week before the first round of the playoffs. It was a mild sunny winter morning, a little like today. Coach made us run and afterward he treated anyone who could stick around to lunch. It was the first time I’d hung out with a black man on the weekend in what you might call an out-of-school situation. Caukwell took us to Popeyes, and I got a chicken sandwich to go and a soda and fries. Then we sat on a curb in the parking lot in the sunshine.

  Coach didn’t like to talk much about his life but sometimes offered glimpses of a private personality. “Preciate y’all’s coming out here on a Sunday,” he said. “Giving up your time. When you could be in church.”

  A few of the kids laughed, and Caukwell said, “Instead you got to play ball with me.” Nobody talked much when he was in this kind of mood; you just waited, and eventually he went on: “My sister sometimes says to me, come on out to … wherever. Always trying somewhere new. We got some good church. Only one thing I give my money to. And his name is three letters long. ‘I. R. S.’” He wiped his hands on his knees and stood up. We squeezed into his car, an old Buick LeSabre with a bench front seat, and he drove us back to school, where my dad picked me up.

  “What is that new car smell? Why does it smell so good?” Pastor Rencher kept circling and hovering. “Because nobody else has messed it up. Not even you. Not even you have messed it up. Eating those potato chips when you drive. They’re good—I know they’re good. I eat ’em, too. Leaving old letters in the car. Bills. Receipts from the drive-thru. I’ll deal with that later. That’s what you tell yourself. I’ll deal with it later. One of these days … one of these days … I’m gonna get cleaned up. Smell like new. Like that new car.”

  He stopped and looked at us. He stopped fidgeting. “And you ask yourself what it means to walk in newness of life.” And then angrily, in wonder: “You ask yourself what it means. You know what it means. You know.”

  I lowered my head and saw: grease prints on my tie, a spare tire, old shoes, beaten up by too many Northeastern winters. Salt stains on the black leather, a gap in the seams, you could see my sports socks sticking out. There was a call-and-response thing going on, and every time Rencher said, Newness of life, we had to repeat it. So I called out with everybody else, Newness of life, and thought, I need new socks.

  “When you die, you start over,” he said. “Everybody gets a clean slate. Everybody gets that new car.”

  The church smelled of overdressed people. The heating system was running, it was a mid-sixties February day, and the human animals gave off a lot of heat, too. I pulled at my tie and loosened the knot.

  “But what happens to that old car, that old car you leave behind?” he said. “People get attached to those old cars. They keep the license plates. I’ve got on the wall of my study the license plate of the first car I ever bought, a 1972 Datsun Bluebird … in Georgetown, when I was in seminary. People get attached to those old cars, they don’t want to give them up. You bring ’em to the dealer, because you want a part exchange, am I right? You want to get something for that old car. Maybe you drove your kids to school in that car, or baseball practice, and those kids are grown up now, they have their own kids. But that old car is your life. And you know what the dealer says, right? He walks around it and he kicks the tires. He tells you to turn the key in the ignition, he listens to the noise the engine makes. He’s got that look on his face, like he smells something bad. And you know what he tells you, right? It’s not worth anything but scrap money, I’ll have to break it up for parts. But I tell you what, because I’m a nice guy I’ll give you fifty dollars. I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it. Ten years of your life. That’s what he gives you for it.”

  Then he lowered his chin to the mic, he lowered his voice. “But not this dealer. You know who I’m talking about. Not this dealer.”

  I couldn’t help it, there was a lump in my throat. The woman sitting next to me had short hair and pearls around her neck; maybe she was fifty years old, her chest sloped away from her like a baby she had to hold in her arms. She was moving from side to side and kept bumping into me, so I bumped back. We had been going like this for five or ten minutes.

  “Every man’s life is touched on by greatness,” the pastor said, in a rising voice, “because every man’s life is touched by Jesus. But Coach Caukwell was more blessed than most … he spent his life as a shepherd of young men, but among his flock was the GOAT. Stand up and be counted, Brother Hayes!”

  Cameras flashed and a tall black man, filling out his dark suit (he’d gotten fatter since retiring), half-raised himself and lifted a long-fingered hand. His high forehead glittered in the lights, with the cornrows pulled back tight, and then something strange happened, people were already standing up, but they started to clap. There was a feeling of blessing, just his presence blessed us, raised the occasion, and we blessed him back by applauding. I put my hands together, too, and felt the sweat on my palms. I hadn’t seen him in three years, not since his last championship parade.

  Afterward, we filed out into the sunshine. Marcus Hayes was surrounded by people, I couldn’t get near him. Just to make the journey from the church and across the road and along the central avenue of Oakwood Cemetery, he got in a car—a black Lexus sedan—and the security van trailed him through the cemetery to the graveside. I walked with everybody else. It was three o’clock, and the sun had dropped a quadrant and sent level rays in our direction. You had to blink and squint, and the procession proceeded in a kind of thin glitter toward the heart of the afternoon, as if somehow we were heading into the bright past.

  To transport the coffin the last few yards, six men gathered by the hearse. Marcus was one of them. Lamont, Coach Caukwell’s nephew, was another—I recognized him because he looked like Coach. They lowered their heads to accept the burden and marched in step as well as they could.

  It’s a tricky business, and sometimes they looked like rowers who had caught a crab. In his playing days, Caukwell weighed two hundred and sixty-five pounds, but the old man must have been lighter. There was also the weight of the box. Around the grave, three or four Astroturf mats had been laid down, in case of rain, but the ground was hard. The pallbearers walk
ed on either side of the hole, staring frontward, then they shifted the weight from their shoulders to their hands, turning a little, and setting the box down gently into a hydraulic lift. Someone pressed a button; it made a sound like an old refrigerator. By inches and degrees, Caukwell approached his destination.

  In practice, Coach sometimes lined us up against the wall. If we were wasting time, fucking around. He lined us up against the wall and picked up a basketball and stood looking at us. The first person to fidget or speak or blink or whatever, and Caukwell cocked his arm and threw a fastball at the kid’s head. He never hit anybody—it’s not hard to duck, but the ball went Boom! against the bricks. After that, we’d go back to work.

  Well, we were all lined up now.

  3

  My dad dropped me at school early so I could get to the gym and check the list. He wanted to come in but I wouldn’t let him.

  Another clear-skied Austin September day. Still cool outside, but the air-conditioning was already turned on, and you could hear it humming, because the corridors were empty. Empty schools are funny places to be; everything shines, everything echoes.

  All night I had dreamed about showing up at the gym’s double doors and seeing my name at the top of the list, and thinking, I can’t believe it, I made the team. But the dream kept recurring in slightly different forms, and inside each version I could remember the previous dreams, and I knew they were dreams and not real, and part of what I felt each time was: This is really happening now. This one counts.

  I could see the gym at the end of the corridor. Two glass panels glowed with the light behind them, but when I walked up to the doors, there was nothing on them—they were blank. No sheet of paper fluttered under a piece of tape. I stood there for a minute, staring at the paint, then switched my backpack, which had forty pounds of books inside, from one shoulder to the other and headed to class.