Jump (8 page)

Richie understood something else along the same lines, dealing with how hard-ass Ellis could get when he had to: Guys didn’t get out of Booker T. just because they were some asshole who could jump.

Most white guys, sportswriters especially, made that mistake all the time with black ballplayers. Ellis explained it to Richie one time when they were both still in high school, and Richie never forgot it. Ellis told him there were a lot of guys who could play, play just about as well as him, but who never got out of the projects or off the corner. Never got off the playground. Ellis had said, “I call them Idas.”

Richie had said to him, “Now what the fuck is an Ida?”

Ellis smiled and said, “Idas are the bitches always telling you what
they
coulda
been if they’d just applied themselves. ‘If Ida done this, I could have made the NBA.’ ‘If Ida done that, I’d be the one making three million dollars a year.’ Idas, Rich. Those bitches are on every street corner in Jersey City.”

In the front seat now, Richie said, “If Ida done somethin’ wrong, I’d listen to you. But we didn’t do anything, we’re not going to act guilty. And if you don’t show at practice today, that’s what these little TV cocksuckers are going to say, that Fresh was afraid to show, maybe he’s got something to hide.”

He was driving through campus now a little slower than he usually did, like he was buying time, trying to settle Ellis down.

“Wasn’t talking about guilty or innocent,” Ellis said, “just about not being able to deal with this shit yet.”

“Listen to me,” Richie said. They were passing the registrar’s building, coming up alongside the quad, all green in the sun. “It’s like I told you yesterday. We don’t even
address
any of this shit.”

Gary Lenz had fucked the reporters yesterday, giving Ellis and Richie the day off, even though it was the first week of camp. But then Donnie Fuchs, their agent, had thrown a shit fit, saying he didn’t want it to look like they were hiding. So now here they were, Ellis more upset than Richie that they were being chased to practice by a goddamn posse.

Richie took a right after the quad, going down the tree-lined street with some of the frat houses on it. He’d lost the reporters, now there was just this one Taurus behind him, making the same turns he was making.

“You just let me do all the talking when we get to the gym. Look at me, Fresh.” Richie talked sharp to him sometimes, cracked the whip, never doing it unless it was something important and he needed for Ellis to listen up. “Just say something like, ‘If you want to talk about anything except basketball, talk to Mr. Collins.’ Don’t smile or act like what the woman’s saying is just jive because that’ll piss off women. Don’t come across like some smiley-boy homey. Just give them that smile of yours and a little shrug, like you wish you could say more.” Richie said, “I’ll take it from there.”

“What does that mean, ‘take it from there’? You know what Donnie said.”

Fuchs had come up from Washington last night and laid it all out for them, the way only Donnie could. Ellis had started to explain about that night, saying it wasn’t anything like it was coming out in the papers. Donnie had cut him off, “Ellis,
listen
to me: I don’t give a shit.” Ellis said, “Don’t you want to know what really happened?” and Donnie had said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t. What happened isn’t relevant. What’s relevant is how we handle it from here.” This was one of those times that Donnie said the D.C. after Washington stood for Damage Control.

“I heard what Donnie said,” Richie said. “And I’m going to do what he said. I’m going to tell them I can’t talk about this, and I’m not going to talk about this, but as soon as there’s a time when I can, they won’t be able to shut me up.” Richie pulled over and let the Jeep idle for a minute in front of a red-barn-looking house with a porch in front. “We just got to make sure we don’t act fucked-up about this, Fresh. We can’t come off cockylike, but we can’t go hide under the bed either, ’cause we didn’t do anything.”

Ellis said, “But—” and Richie said, “We didn’t do anything
criminal.
” Ellis, edgy, not sitting still, turned around again. The Taurus had passed when he pulled over, now it was coming back the other way. There was a guy in a blue suit behind the wheel, acting like he was lost, staring at some of the houses on the other side of the street.

“Trust me,” Richie said.

“You think this bitch is setting us up?”

“Donnie does. Donnie thinks the phone will ring any day now, and it’ll be the bitch’s lawyer, expecting some money to change hands.”

Ellis said, “Then what do we do?”

Richie smiled. “It’s like Donnie said. We tell her she should’ve asked for money that night, I would’ve given her a hundred.”

Donnie thought everybody was like him. Richie’d fix Donnie up with strange sometimes, and it made them laugh, he couldn’t even enjoy the hand on his dick because he was worrying about the other hand maybe ending up on his wallet.

Richie said, “That’s Donnie. The thing that bothers me is, she waits a year. What is that? I understand, maybe she looks at Anita Hill—”

Ellis Adair stopped him right there.

“Anita who?”

Richie just nodded, like it was an obvious question, Anita who?

“You remember her. When they were trying to get that brother nominated for the Supreme Court, then this bitch comes forward and testifies about pubic hairs and that porno movie
Long Dong Silver
? I made you watch on television.”

Richie did this, drew pictures for him.

Richie said, “Anyway, this Anita Hill, she goes on to become the queen of the man-haters, even though the brother made the court. Donnie says she makes like ten thousand bucks a pop now, going around giving speeches about women rising up, kicking the shit out of men. The women all cheer, then she goes on to the next city, gets another ten thousand.”

“I remember her now,” Ellis said. “You think that judge really did it?”

“That’s just the point I’m trying to make here. All this time later, people still wonder if he tried to jump her or not. We got to play this better than he did, so when this is all over, people aren’t saying, ‘You think Ellis Adair gang-banged her?’ ”

Putting it all on me, Ellis thought. He didn’t say anything, not out loud, but to himself he repeated,
Ellis Adair gang-banged her.

“People didn’t know shit about Clarence Thomas. The judge. They know you, though, Fresh. They want to believe you’re innocent. They don’t want to buy into some woman waited a year to yell rape.” Richie put the Jeep into gear and pulled away from the red-barn-looking house.

“You’re saying a girl can come out of this the bad guy?” Ellis said.

Richie Collins smiled. “Now you’re paying attention,” he said.

DiMaggio hated car phones usually, but you could rent them right along with your car now, and he had found that they saved him a lot of time. He called Frank Crittendon, the Knicks’ general manager, and told him they needed to talk. Crittendon said come ahead, the team didn’t practice until six on Thursdays.

Now DiMaggio was standing there in the back parking lot with everybody else to see Adair and Collins make their entrance for
twenty-two television cameras—DiMaggio had counted—and three times that many other people, TV reporters, print reporters, and photographers. If something else happened in the tristate area—something minor like a nuclear attack—all the stations were going to be screwed because the cameras that weren’t in Fulton were still back at the Vertical.

DiMaggio wondered how Adair and Collins would play it. He had followed them through the campus for a while until Adair pulled over and then Collins really gave it to Ellis Adair, doing most of the talking, pointing a finger at him sometimes. Looking very much in charge.

When the Jeep pulled in, everybody swarmed it, both sides, barely leaving space for the two Knicks to open the doors. Adair got out first, smiling but acting shy, putting his hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot. DiMaggio couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he couldn’t have said very much because right away Adair was moving toward the door of the gym. Most of the crowd moved with him. All DiMaggio could see, over all of them, was Ellis Adair shaking his head no, then disappearing. Collins was still there, smiling, looking small compared to Adair but bigger than most of the media people, coming across the way he did the few times DiMaggio had watched him play, like this cute gym rat.

Collins didn’t last much longer than Adair. They cleared a path for him, and he started for the gym door and would have made it as easily as Adair just had, except that here came this big, handsome blond guy out of the pack, jogging casually after Collins, catching up to him right before the door. DiMaggio was about twenty feet away from the door, leaning against the wall. He didn’t read what was happening right away. But there was something about the blond guy, speeding up now as Collins reached for the door. Now DiMaggio moved, started for the door himself, just as the blond guy’s right hand came out of the side pocket of his windbreaker and DiMaggio heard him say to Richie Collins, “This is for what you did to my sister, asshole.”

Hannah was exhausted when she got back to Jimmy’s apartment. She tried to take a nap but couldn’t and put on the television instead, one of the eight thousand movie channels you got with Manhattan Cable if you were willing to pay. They were showing some movie with Mary Stuart Masterson, who had become Hannah’s spunky favorite after she saw her in
Fried Green Tomatoes
a few years ago. Hannah didn’t know the name of this one. Mary Stuart was a teenager and in love with some guy who thought he was in love with somebody else. Hannah stayed with it until she was sure the guy would come to his senses, which he did.

How come life never worked out that way?

Hannah was positive she was going to be a great actress. Jimmy used to joke that they were going to be the new Barrymores. He sat her down one night and made her watch this old newspaper movie,
Deadline U.S.A.
, with Humphrey Bogart and Ethel playing the woman who owned the paper Bogart was trying to save. Hannah thought Ethel Barrymore looked like she was ninety.

“I’m not so sure I want to be Ethel,” Hannah said.

She gave it five years, though. Five hard years. When it was all over, she had made a little over four thousand dollars, total. She had done walk-ons in soap operas, including Jimmy’s. After what Hannah used to joke was her retirement from show business, she figured out that she had been in restaurant scenes on all three networks. The two stars would be having some earnest conversation and there, behind them, acting like she was talking to some guy, looking a lot more animated than she ever felt, was Hannah. Twice she played a dead body in one of those simulated murders on
Inside Edition.
She was in the toy store in
Home Alone 2
the first time little Kevin went in there to shop. She was an extra in Scorsese movies. She actually got two lines of dialogue in a
Kate & Allie
; she was an admitting room nurse and Susan Saint James—for the life of her, Hannah still couldn’t remember whether she was Kate or Allie—had gotten sick on her way to some formal dance.

But it wasn’t the shit work that made her give it up finally, even as Jimmy kept going. Jimmy used to tell her to hang in there, he had enough confidence for both of them. Only they both knew that was a lie. What little Hannah had, what little her mother had left her with, was completely gone at the end. She would go to these miniature casting theaters, reading for television movies. The casting people would be there, the director, sometimes the writer. They would hand her the page and she would read what she was supposed to read, and there would always be that moment she dreaded when she was through, when she’d look up at them, see the awkward smiles, and feel like some dog outside the back door, begging.

God, she hated that.

It was one of the things she hated most about the night in Fulton, the way she ended up begging …

The movie with Mary Stuart went to six o’clock. Hannah turned to the news. Wednesday night, she had gone crazy with the switcher watching the eleven o’clock news, like Jimmy watching football games on Sunday afternoons. She’d gone from channel to channel to see how they handled Marty Perez’s first story.

Hannah didn’t even know what channel she had now, but there
was Jimmy Carey rolling around in some parking lot with Richie Collins, then being pulled off by DiMaggio, who looked bigger than he had in the backseat of the car, big enough to throw Jimmy inside a door and drag Collins in there, too.

What was Jimmy doing in Fulton?

She hit the display button for the set. It was Channel 2. She didn’t recognize the anchorwoman in the studio. There was just a split screen, and the woman was talking to a reporter in the field, and underneath the reporter in the field it said, “Live, Fulton, Connecticut.”

The reporter in the field, a kid with a lot of hair, said, “Bryne, one minute we were trying to get a comment from Collins, Ellis Adair having already gone inside, then the accuser’s brother seemed to appear out of nowhere. We thought he was trying to get an autograph. Then the other man jumped in.”

The kid with the hair said the Knicks were going to make some kind of official statement. Then the anchorwoman said they, meaning the media, were in an awkward position because identifying the attacker would be another way of violating the victim’s right to privacy.

The kid with the hair smirked and said, “Accuser, not victim, Bryne.”

Hannah said “Screw you” to the television now, wondering what the kid with the hair would think about rape, what any man would think, if it ever happened to them.

The phone rang. Hannah hadn’t been answering it when she was in Jimmy’s apartment alone, just letting his machine pick up.

Hannah grabbed for it, thinking it might be Jimmy.

“Hannah, is that you?”

Mother.

Without waiting, she said, “My God, it’s you, isn’t it? The rape? You couldn’t even tell your own mother, all this time? Where is your brother, disgracing me on television that way in front of the whole world.”