Fisher Cat and Other Stories by Seth Harwood

Author:Seth Harwood [Harwood, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies, Short Stories, Parenting & Relationships, Parenting, Teenagers, Single Authors
Amazon: B00NI4YGAK
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Prison Game

Charlie Dorsey was a skinny white kid from Wisconsin, but he could dunk. I mean that kid could bang! Any way you wanted it—360, reverse, tomahawk—he could put it down. He weighed only a buck sixty and was probably a virgin, but get him out on the court and he was the worst thing in your imagination.

The first time I met Dorsey was down at the row like the first week I got to St. Louis. He had on a thick flannel even though it was August—I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts—and he had on straight-leg jeans, down as straight as you could ever imagine, clear to his ankles. Wranglers, probably. He wasn’t that tall, maybe 6’3”, and what legs he had were nothing but pipes. Straight up and down. Pipes. He was holding a can of Old Milwaukee in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other because he had a dip in and he needed somewhere to spit. Even though he was standing outside, Dorsey was too clean-cut to spit in front of ladies; he could hardly bring himself to speak around them.

I hadn’t seen him play yet, so I blew him off like I blew off the rest of that place, the 6’8” redhead wonder boy who looked like he’d never seen the court for bringing his nose out of a book, the southern black kids with the slow accents, the thick farm boys from Indiana and Illinois, even the talker from LA who told us he held the California State scoring title. I was laughing the whole time. Charlie Dorsey even had a hat on with the mesh backing around it and one of those foam-fronted placards, with whatever-the-hell it said. This, way before they were cool and called “Trucker Hats.”

Then I went to workouts. That was what they called them. Really what it was was just pickup games in the fieldhouse where the team played its games. And they were games. Chuck D, as he was called on the basketball court, dunking on breaks like a madman, putting it on people and hanging in the air on turnarounds, whatever. Turns out the book boy, Coyle his name was, could fly.

Coyle had tape of a high-school game where he took off from the dotted circle and hit a defender in the face with his crotch, dunked two-handed and hung on the rim looking down at the kid, watching him roll away as the ref signaled a blocking foul. This in high school, at an all-boys’ Catholic in Kansas City.

Coyle’s father had passed when Coyle was ten, leaving him to fill the role of man of the house for his mother and his brother and sister. What he did was, he and his brother filled their backyard with two tons of sand and proceeded to shoot around on that for six years, until his calves were iron and he had more get-up than a ladder.

And on the court sometimes, he brought a fury beyond

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