Hero (3 page)

Meanwhile, I looked over at Goran, who was doing his best to hide an expression—excruciating agony. He was crouched in a fetal position clutching his knee. He heaved deep, labored breaths through clenched teeth, but he was determined not to cry. If an accident this painful didn't make him cry like a baby, I figured the guy didn't have tear ducts or nerves or something, because when I looked down at the injury, I saw bone.

A portion of his tibia had poked its head out of the skin under his knee. The crowd had cleared away to give him plenty of breathing room. A few kids were yelling and pointing. Most of the parents couldn't even look. One of the mothers—his?— was screaming to call an ambulance. The trainer was one of the only people who hadn't turned away, but he was next to useless. Other than giving Goran a few towels to wipe up the gore, he was practically as helpless as the rest of them. He could tape a sprain, sure, but a mangled leg was a little out of his depth.

I can't explain why I did what I did next. I guess I was thinking about Goran and his full-time job and how he would support his family if he lost his leg. I guess I was thinking how his eyes, still deeply guarded, still opaque, didn't betray the weakness of the rest of his body. I was propelled by a force deep within me that I didn't understand. I knelt down beside him.

"Let me see," I said.

He couldn't speak, he was so racked with pain. I reached out my hand. He looked at me, startled and curious. I hesitated for a moment. Then I grabbed his leg firmly by the ankle.

"Don't touch it!" The trainer winced.

Goran eyes locked on mine. I held on to his ankle and my hands began to move up his leg. I reached the wound and cov¬ered it with my palms, bone and bloody bits and all.

His eyes never lowered their gaze.

My hands suddenly felt scalding hot, and all I wanted to do was pull them away and stick them in a pile of snow, but I held on for as long as I could. I felt dizzy, and my eyelids grew heavy. Something was guiding my hands, something I couldn't see or understand, like a Ouija board that actually works.

Finally the whistle blew, and the ref asked us all to return to our respective benches. An ambulance had arrived, and I saw two technicians wheeling out a stretcher for Goran. His breath¬ing had finally relaxed, his face suddenly expressionless again.

He never broke eye contact with me, even when I turned around to head back to the bench with the rest of my team. Bewildered at my own actions, I stopped to catch my breath and spotted my father carefully observing me from the bleach¬ers. He had a peculiar look on his face and held up his hands and pointed them at me. I looked at my hands and saw that I had blood on my palms. Not as much as you'd expect, but blood nevertheless. I saw the new parents notice my Dad standing with both hands out of his pockets. I wiped the blood off on my jersey and crouched down to huddle with the rest of my team.

Clayton earned his first ejection from a game, and after the Trojans  sank two  free  throws  from  the  technical foul,  we resumed play. We were losing only by a narrow five-point margin, but I didn't really give a shit about winning anymore.

That is, until that little punk-ass Gary Coleman look-alike clipped me as he drove for the basket. I didn't bother to foul him—if he wanted to score that bad, he could knock himself out, as far as I was concerned. But it was what he said after he clipped me that made all the difference.

After the ball went through the hoop, he looked at me with a prune face and said, "Faggot."

That made me want to win more than I've ever wanted to win any game in my life. I glared at the scoreboard and wiped the crusted saliva from the corners of my mouth. Only two min¬utes left. I sped past him to the basket. I got the ball at the top of the paint and fake-pumped a pass in his face before driving to the basket for another two.

We stayed down under the basket for a full-court press, man-to-man. Sticking on a single opposing player, shadowing his every move, is the most exhausting form of defense there is. You can't keep it up for more than a few minutes without drop¬ping, but adrenaline fueled me. I wasn't going to let their center get the ball under any circumstance. My arms stretched into the air, blocking any clear path from the ball to his hands. My feet bounced and danced around him. Wherever he went, I was there. The Gary Coleman point guard had trouble getting past midcourt with our press, so with no other option, he lobbed it to their center. I leaped up in the air and snatched it.

I could have passed it off to anyone else on my team; they were all closer to the basket than I was. But I broke into a sprint and took it myself at full speed the entire length of the court, right past Gary Coleman to the basket for an easy layup. I smacked my palm against the glass backboard for emphasis, and the sound echoed throughout the gym. I looked in the stands and saw my father jumping and shouting for me, and the cacophony of the crowd drowned out his voice. I saw that my hand had left a plum-colored smear on the backboard, a combi¬nation of my sweat and Goran's blood.

Then my finger began to twitch. This may seem like a pretty harmless detail, nothing more than a little side effect of all that adrenaline and testosterone, or maybe I'd smacked the glass too hard, but for me it's one of the worst things that can happen. The twitching only starts with the finger. It rarely stops there.

Suddenly I started to feel like I was hearing things under water, like I was walking through Jell-O. My tongue secreted a metallic, acrid taste, as if I were sucking on a rusty nail, or drinking water from a tin bucket. I swallowed and tried to ignore it, but the warning signs were always the same.

The spotlights hanging from the rafters cast a halo around everything. Then the world around me grew dim. It reminded me of looking through an old View-Master, and the dark outlines around the edge of the picture slowly grew and grew until the entire picture became dark, too.

I put my hands on my knees and heaved and huffed as I tried to catch my breath.

"Cosmic Boy . . . Lightning Lad. . . Chemical King ..."

On rare occasions, I'd been able to stave off the seizure if I caught it early. I practiced some good old-fashioned rhythmic breathing I'd learned in swim class, and I recited to myself the roster of The Legion of Super heroes, my favorite comic book when I was a kid. Back before Dad banned all superhero comics from our house, back before the books detailing my father's adventures had been canceled, all old issues removed from the shelves and discarded. This was how I struggled to regain my composure, to ward off the full throes of the seizure.

". . . Invisible Kid. . . Colossal Boy . . . Phantom Girl. . , Element Lad..."

The world began to tilt, and I felt like I was about to spin off into orbit. Like you felt as a kid when you were rolling down a hill, only this hill had no end. I struggled to hold all my atoms together as the world around me grew dark. My feet became numb, and the twitching had traveled up my arm to the side of my face.

Even as far away as he was, my father saw the right side of my mouth quiver. He pushed past the young couple new to town, his ruined hand planted on the wife's shoulder for balance, and jumped over the side of the bleacher to rush to me.

I closed my eyes and took three more quick, sharp breaths.

"Saturn Girl. . . Shadow Lass . . . Ultra Boy ..."

I looked up, and my vision returned in time to see the basketball sailing for my head. I reached out and grabbed it with my twitching hand. I struggled to hold on to the ball. My fingers sputtered and spasmed like they'd been plugged into a light socket.

The world stopped. I could hear bits of conversations echo off the cinder block walls. The paramedics argued over where to put the dressing on Goran's leg. They could no longer find the spot where the bone had punctured the skin.

My dad raced toward me. I saw there were three seconds left on the clock, I heard my team, the coach, the stands yell, "Shoot it!"

". . . Chameleon Boy, Dream Girl, WILDFIRE!"

I bit my lip to stop it from shaking, and with all the energy I could muster I jumped into the air and pushed the ball forward. The basketball quelled the twitching as it rolled off my fingertips. The ball sailed through the air at an impossibly low angle. It hit the backboard—loud and hard—and bricked straight back through the hoop with a graceful swish.

The crowd erupted with cheers. The buzzer sounded the end of the game, and I stood there looking at the scoreboard in disbelief. I saw my dad standing in front of me on the court.

"You okay?" he mouthed over the din of the crowd, a skep¬tical look on his face.

I nodded, and then my teammates pounced on me. My dad took a step back behind the bleachers, and my team picked me up in the air. As I rode on top of sweaty, eager hands, I watched the paramedics wheel Goran out the door, around the side of the gym. It was hard to tell, jostled around up in the air like that, but I could have sworn I saw that same expressionless stare fixed on me as he disappeared around the corner.

Later, fresh and showered, we met our parents in front of the gym. I pushed open the door and savored the moist promise of spring in the evening air. The sun was setting later and later each day, summer would be here soon, and everything would be okay. I rubbed my hand through my wet hair and spotted Dad waiting under the streetlight in the far corner of their parking lot. The New Parents sidestepped my father to get to their parking space. I saw the mother lean over and whisper a private word with her husband as she pointed at my dad, a sharp look on her face. Dad put his bad hand in his pocket and jingled his keys. This was the gesture he made whenever he pretended not to notice.

"Good game, kiddo. You really took it to those knuckleheads," my dad congratulated me.

My teammates surrounded me, with some of their parents. The coach even shook my father's good hand.

"Quite a kid you got there, Hal," he said. "Listen, I'm taking the boys out for pizza, before they go off and do what boys do after they win a game like this. Why don't you come along?"

I must have really been a hero that night, because it was the first time anyone at school had invited my dad anywhere.

Before he could answer, a sonic boom roared through the air and threatened to burst our eardrums. We all looked up into the sky at the source of the thundering noise. A group of objects flew across the stratosphere in a perfect pattern.

To no one's surprise, it was a flying formation of people, not jets. It was the League. I spotted Uberman's cape. I always looked for his bright yellow cape first; it stood out best compared to the other heroes in the sky.

"Wonder who they're off to save tonight?" my coach said.

The entire parking lot of spectators craned our necks and watched the colorful saviors streak across the sky. I watched the wonder light across everyone's face, and then I caught my dad looking down at a crack in the pavement. He jingled the keys in his pocket.

After the heroes had disappeared into the horizon, Dad looked up and saw the New Parents standing in front of him.

"I thought it was you," she said, eyeing the mangled hand in his pocket.

He knew what usually came next, but he didn't betray a hint of shame. It was bad enough that it would happen in front of his son. Dad stood his ground.

The mother raised her hand and smacked him on the side of his face with all her might. You could hear the slap echo off the brick gymnasium wall. It made my whole team turn around.

"My father worked in the Wilson Tower," she hissed, her face streaked with tears. Her husband quickly pulled her away and moved her to their car.

"We'll catch up with you at the restaurant," I told my coach and team. I always tried to cover up the awkward silence that ensued after these encounters. I walked over to Dad. I knew everyone was watching. The sound of the slap still rang in my ears.

"Throw me the keys, Dad," I said, like nothing had just happened. "My turn to drive."

I could never have predicted what would happen next. I was too busy trying to save my father's dignity.

The Trojans sauntered past us toward their bus. The Gary Coleman point guard pointed at me and announced to his buddy, in the three seconds it took for him to pass us, something that changed everything.

"Oh, that's the gay guy."

He didn't say it with venom. He didn't need to. He said it loud enough so we could hear it, like it was just so obvious. You don't make an accusation that the sky is blue; it's simply a matter of fact. The coach's smile dropped, my teammates looked uncomfortably in other directions and tried to pretend they didn't hear what they all had obviously heard.

My father stared forward, a fixed expression on his face. I think he was afraid to look at me. Afraid of what his look would do to me. I heard the keys jingle against the change in his pocket again.

"See you guys later." My voice wavered on the word "later." The slight rattle in my voice betrayed me. It was a sign of shaken confidence, proof that what that little punk said was true.

I saw Dad's eyes widen just a fraction when he heard my voice catch. He glanced at me but quickly turned away. He didn't want me to see his reaction, but I did, and I'll never forget it. In that brief glimpse, I could see what he was thinking behind that fixed stare. There would be no grandkids, there would be no more Creed family bloodline, nothing else to look forward to. From that point on I'd become the last, most devastating disappointment in what he thought his life had added up to—one overwhelming failure.

I looked over to him, a little boy just wanting his dad to look back on him with approval. I wanted him to make some joke about what a loser that other kid was, about how I'd really kicked ass tonight, about how he'd never seen a high score like that. I wanted him to muss my hair and take me home and pop some popcorn so we could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. I wanted him to tell me everything would be okay.

"We should get going," Dad said, and shook hands with the coach. He couldn't bring himself to look at me. I felt a tiny spasm in my pinky finger as a tremor slowly rippled up my hand.