Cruise Control (10 page)

Suddenly I feel a rush of fear and a sick sensation in my gut. I look at Dad as we sit quietly, but inside I feel scared and shaky; there's one thing left that needs to be done, one terrible secret that
I
need to talk about—not with my dad, but with my brother.

Dad has gone and I'm alone now with Shawn in his regular spot by the window. Mom's upstairs and can't hear me. Cindy's not home from school yet.

I say, “Hey, bro, listen, I have to tell you something....” The words just come out. I feel scared for a second, but I shake the fear away—it's now or never—I have to do this.

Without planning how I'm going to start, I just begin. “That time, Shawn, when those two bullies were picking on you, the Bic lighter, them hurting you; what you couldn't see that day, what no one saw, was …”

I hesitate. I don't know if Shawn understands me or not, but I need to tell him this anyway, I need to tell him the truth, the part I never imagined I'd tell anyone....

“There's something more,” I say, staring into Shawn's eyes.

My throat is tight. “I … I …” I stutter and start to lose my nerve.

Shawn suddenly makes his “ahhhhhhh” sound, like he's trying to answer me. Like he's trying to say, “It's okay, bro, just let it out....”

I stare into his eyes, take one more deep breath, and finally speak. “I saw what they were doing, Shawn, and I wanted them to do it.”

Shawn stares off into space.

For the first time ever, hopefully for the
last
time ever, I say these horrible words that I've been too afraid to ever say, even to myself. “I saw those two guys before they even came into the yard that day. I heard them teasing you and I knew they were going to mess with you. I saw them walk up and I wasn't afraid of them, but I just stood at the corner of the house watching. I saw that one kid get out the cigarette lighter and put it under your chin. And I just stood there. I thought it could be over at last—I wouldn't be the guy with the broken brother....”

I pause a second and try to catch a breath. My hands are shaking and my stomach feels terrible. I'm afraid to look into Shawn's eyes, so I stare at the floor. “When he held that lighter under your chin, and you started moving all around, trying to escape, I said inside my head, ‘Go ahead and do it! Just kill him and let this all be over.' I wanted them to kill you, Shawn. I wanted you … gone!”

I burst into sobs and can't say more. But there's nothing more to say. My brother, if he knows anything, if he understands words at all, knows the truth about me now; that I'm nothing, less than nothing, a coward and a selfish jerk, too afraid to even love him.

Tears stream down my cheeks. I feel dizzy and sick. I bury my face in my hands and try to breathe. I collapse onto the floor next to Shawn's wheelchair and just sit there, crying.

Through my sobs I manage to spit out, “I'm so ashamed....”

I'm crying too hard to say more; I can hardly breathe.

I cry for a long, long time, sitting there on the floor, alone with my brother.

I finally stop crying. I begin to breathe evenly again. My ribs and chest ache from all my sobbing, but a strange kind of peacefulness starts to fill me.

Finally I say, “I'm sorry, Shawn. I am. I'll never let anyone hurt you, bro, and
I'll
never pretend again that I don't know you. You're my brother, Shawn, and I'm yours. That's the way it is.”

We sit silently. Something has changed in me. I don't know how to describe it, but something has happened between us. I watch Shawn sitting in his wheelchair, staring out at the world—does he understand anything about what I just told him? Does he get how much I care about him? Maybe not.

But at least
I
finally get it.

I
t's Thursday afternoon and I'm wearing my travel clothes for the trip to Spokane: slacks, blazer, shirt, and a stupid baby-blue tie. In the last few days everything has changed; everything I thought before, everything I've worried about for years, feels different. Plus there's a million new thoughts slamming through my brain.

For instance, I keep wondering, What if it's partly, maybe mainly,
because
of Shawn that I am who I am? What if God couldn't help Shawn be normal, so the next best thing he could do was give me everything, all of Shawn's talents and all of my own too?

I walk over to where Shawn is sitting and I look down at him. He's drooling pretty heavily and there's a giant wet spot on the front of his coveralls and T-shirt. We're alone.

I pat his head softly. I kiss his forehead and feel this huge love for him. I tell him what I've never been able to say since that day the bullies were hurting him. “I love you, bro.”

Shawn says “ahhhhhh” back at me, almost like he understands, almost like he's answering.

I smile and kiss his forehead again and say, “See you in a few days.” I'm going to miss him; it's weird, but I really am.

T
here's one last thing I need to do before I catch the bus for the tournament. Cindy rides with me to pick up Tim from the courthouse.

Tim has to go to his mom's, where he'll have to stay until his court date. His stepdad is getting better, but he's still in the hospital. Earlier, when Tim called for a ride, he told Cindy that he's being charged with second-degree assault, a felony. His lawyer says they'll get it knocked down to a misdemeanor, but that it's going to take some time. So Tim can't leave King County; hell, he can't even leave his house! Even though he's out of jail, there's no tournament for him.

I spot him walking down the sidewalk and across the parking strip. He looks worried. But when he sees us waiting, he smiles.

Cindy jumps out of the car and runs to greet him, giving him a hug. He looks at me, over her shoulder, for a second or two, then closes his eyes and hugs her back. They just stand there holding each other. I look away, out the front of the car, trying to give them a little privacy. It feels good to me that they have each other.

They both start to climb into the backseat until Tim realizes what he's doing. He opens the door for Cindy, closes it, then he sits up front so I won't look like a chauffeur. Cindy, sitting right behind him, scoots up close so that she can hold his hand. We take off.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I guess,” Tim answers.

“Any place special you wanna go?”

“Yeah,” Tim says. “
Not
back there.” He nods his head in the direction of the jail. He was in three nights and four days.

I pause a second, trying to think what to say next. Finally I ask, “Do you feel that you benefited all you could from the institution?”

Tim smiles, recognizing this from
Raising Arizona
, one of our favorite videos. He answers, “I released myself on my own recognizance.” He pauses a moment, then jumps to a different scene from that movie—“Life is strange, huh? They oughtta sell tickets.”

I take my cue. “I'd buy a couple.”

We both laugh.

But something feels different; something feels unsaid. For all the times I fought and hurt people, if anybody deserved to go to jail, it's me. This hangs over us and weighs on me.

I say, “This shouldn't have happened to you, Tim-bo. I'm sorry.”

My apology doesn't make any sense, and Tim knows it doesn't. He quickly says, “It's not your fault, Paul. It's my mistake, period.”

“I don't know, man,” I say. “If anybody deserves …” I hesitate. “I mean, with all the fighting I've done, you know, I could have killed somebody.”

Tim smiles and says, “You didn't, though.”

I say, “Neither did you.”

Tim looks out the window and I notice him squeezing Cindy's hand. “Nope, I didn't. But I sure wanted to.”

We ride along in silence for a few blocks; then I look over at Tim again and notice that he's looking back at Cindy. His words echo in my mind, as I think about all the times I wanted to kill the whole world.

I don't feel that way anymore. A chill runs down my spine at how close I came to messing up my whole life. If somebody was looking out for me, they did a good job. But now it's up to me.

The ride to Spokane on the chartered bus is long. There's not a lot to do on bus rides like this. Some of the guys talk together, some sleep, half are wearing headphones, chilling to tunes.

John-Boy Reich is sitting next to me, on the seat where Tim-bo should be.

Neither of us says much as the bus cruises down I-90, past empty brown fields with little blue signs on the fence lines:
ALFALFA, CORN, POTATOES
.

I glance around the bus, looking at all my teammates. The Hankster is snoring about as loud as you'd expect. Wille Anderson and Carl Restov are playing cards, hearts I think. I look at all these guys: Johnny, Jesse, Antwon, George, Lewis, Brian, Terrel, Matt, Philip, all of them. Right now, after I've seen Tim, they
all
feel like family to me; each and every one of them is like a brother as we're going into battle this one last time together.

I look back over at John-Boy and he's staring out the window. I wonder if he's thinking what I'm thinking as he sits in Tim-bo's seat: that I'm so incredibly lucky to be here, what a miracle it is that I'm not going through what's happening to Tim Gunther.

I hope Tim'll be okay. He's always been the brother to me that Shawn couldn't be, the one I could do stuff with, but somehow, now, all my teammates are my brothers too. I wish Tim were here with us—he deserves to be. Then again, maybe “deserves” doesn't have much to do with it. Maybe in life you get what you get, and you just have to learn to deal with it.

After almost three hundred miles and five hours, we finally reach a stand of scrubby pine trees, a couple tiny “lakes,” and then, half an hour later, we start down a steep hill into Spokane.

We're staying at the Davenport Hotel. It's really a beautiful place, but I'm not sure any of us has even noticed. My bros and I have got some unfinished business to take care of.

T
onight's game, the final for the state championship, will be my last in any sport as a high school player. I'm graduating in April, so no baseball this year. My high school jock career has all come down to this night.

We're in our locker room at the Spokane Arena. The building is fairly new and seats fourteen thousand plus. For our earlier games, the qualifying rounds to see who would play in tonight's final, the floor of the arena was divided into two courts by a huge fabric screen, so that two games were played at the same time. Tonight the screen is gone. This last game, for the state championship, is the only one in town.

Our opponent is an old foe—Kennedy High School. As runner-up to the Seattle league title, they were top-seeded in the Blue bracket, which they won. We won the Red bracket.

The crowd is huge, a sellout. Earlier we got to peek out and watch them pour into the building. Now, as we sit in this locker room on shiny wooden benches, the crowd sounds like a big animal pawing right above our heads.

Coach gathers us around to make his final speech. We sit quietly; there's a lot of intensity in this small corner of the concrete room.

Coach says, “Do you all remember that day when Paul McDaniel couldn't miss during shoot-around?”

Everybody glances at me and I feel myself blush.

“Well, gentlemen, tonight shares with that moment one thing and one thing only....”

Coach pauses for a second until he's sure that we're all looking at him—his face is a little bit red and his forehead is sweating.

“In basketball, in all sports, the best part is the possibility that something miraculous might happen. The possibility of a miracle is always right at your fingertips if you have the courage to feel it.

“That day when Paul was throwing up shots and made that last one, even though I think he peeked”—Coach glances over at me and winks—“that day we glimpsed the miraculous on a small, individual scale. Today the miracle could be here again, only this time it really means something; this time it counts.”

Coach pauses and takes a deep breath. “You guys have one job to do, one last job—go out and believe in the miraculous—believe in yourselves and one another. Think, play together, but most of all feel the possibility of the miracle. I promise that if you do that, when this game is over, you'll understand what I'm talking about. Do any of you have anything you'd like to say?”

Everybody is quiet for a few seconds. Maybe everyone is thinking about this being our last game, maybe they're worried that they might screw up in front of fourteen thousand screaming fans, maybe they're not thinking at all.

Finally John-Boy Reich says, “I'd like to dedicate this game to Tim Gunther.” He glances over at me and gives a little smile.

Dedicating our game is something some of the guys always do. But tonight we're doing it for the last time ever, so it means something special. I think about all the times Tim and I played hoops in my driveway, about the million videos we've watched, about that day he held Cindy while Shawn was seizing. And now I think about Shawn, too, back home with Vonda. He's probably in bed already: Sleeping? Dreaming?