Make It, Take It by Rus Bradburd

Author:Rus Bradburd [Rus Bradburd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935955443
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press

THE JESUS OF COOL

My January project was the reenforcement of our old windows, so a sea of plastic covered the kitchen floor of the old adobe rental house. The desert gets colder than people think, and my December heating bill had convinced me to take action. I had to cut the roll of almost-clear insulation wrap with a straight razor and affix it over the single pane glass with heavy tape, then repeat the process a dozen times. Since the semester hadn’t yet started, I wasn’t hurrying around campus to make sure our players were in class. State had floundered through the first half of the season and there wasn’t much reason to be optimistic.

Astrid walked right through the mess into the kitchen, a towel wrapped around her head. “Ernie, sealing windows on a property that’s not yours is a bad investment,” she said after she’d nearly tripped on a roll of plastic. She puttered around the kitchen, humming softly to herself, then paused to read the obituary I had taped to the refrigerator.

“Who was this Booker Robinson?” she asked.

I followed her back to the bedroom and explained that Booker Robinson had been both a great ballplayer and my roommate in college. Although it was dark while she dressed, I could see her creamy skin, which had a spooky luminescence. Astrid was into ballet, not basketball. She didn’t ask any more about Booker; she wasn’t the inquisitive type, didn’t know much about my past. I trailed her from bedroom to bathroom, back to the kitchen, and recalled some of the old stories. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t ask many questions. That was her way, and I didn’t mind.

For me, it’s important to ask questions, be a student of something. As an assistant coach at a state university, I learned more than I taught, that was certain. I read a dozen newspapers online, and not just the sports section. That’s how I came across Booker Robinson’s obituary. Ten years had passed since Booker and I roomed together. He had been playing professionally in Amsterdam, where an incident occurred that involved a Dutch policeman. But the story was inconclusive—all you could take away was that Booker had died under mysterious circumstances.

After Astrid left, I exhumed my old photo album and picked out an action shot—Booker, with a serene expression as he ascended over a desperately-reaching white guy from St. Mary’s College for an easy basket. I taped the photo of Booker next to his obituary.

Astrid had danced in the Chicago City Ballet, but put her career on hold to pursue a degree in Classical Dance. She was a bit older than your typical undergrad. Her goal was to be selected some day for the Joffrey Ballet, to make it big. Astrid didn’t have to go to practice—she called it rehearsal—until the afternoon, but she liked to get out of the house early to get a coffee and run errands. Although we were still on holiday break, the dancers continued to practice, just like the basketball team.

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