MARK FARRINGTON

Part One | Chapter One

Grown now and alone, Manion reaches for this one childhood memory: Eleven-years-old, trudging up a muddy mountain road on an afternoon of false spring, his feet sucking and slapping through the caramel mess, his unbuttoned coat flung open like a gunfighter clearing side arms. Ahead waits a big pink puffy ball on the grassy slope in front of their trailer. His mother’s blonde hair is tied in pigtails, the way she wears it sometimes between men when she doesn’t care to look glamorous, just wants it out of her face. Her pink rubber boots are splattered with chocolate, it seems; pink tights show the whiteness of her thighs through the stretched nylon; oversized, pink-lensed sunglasses make her seem like a movie star, or a cartoon.

She’s been washing their blue Chevette, sending soapy water bubbling down the gully edging their driveway, which held up this winter because she persuaded her last-summer man to lay pebbles over the dirt before he left. The driveway, still uneven, lacks the chasms that forced her to park along the road in previous springs.

Spotting Manion, she takes a Rocky Balboa stance and pumps her fists. “Woo hoo!” she cries, hopping lazy jumping jacks.

“Woo hoo!” she cries again, and he starts running, his flat-soled shoes slipping in the muck. At the edge of the lawn he stomps both feet into a bank of snow and steps out, leaving mud-lined footprints behind. When his mother opens her arms, he leaps into them. She is so lightand small, already he outweighs her, yet he feels captured and safe with his face pushed into the puffy cloud of her coat, the powdery smell reminding him of dropping his head into his pillow at night. He can barely feel her inside all that jacket.

Parting, she takes his hands and begins skipping to her left. He mirrors her, and soon they dance round and round, her face clean and full of joy, gaunt as always, her cheeks red, her eyes big and bright for a change; she hasn’t used anything for a while. She sings, her breath coming in spasms, and he catches only one gasped phrase repeated: “Mulberry bush.” They are locked only by their fingertips, and when that grip begins to slip, her face flashes surprise as pure as a toddler’s as her feet go out from under her and she lands with a thud on her rump, mud splashing, the bottom of her pink coat soaked in it; and laughing still, her eyes closed and her face gone blissfully blank, her whole pink back soaking into the dirty sponge of the lawn.

He stands over her, giggly and afraid. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” she says. Her eyes pin him. “I hope you know this is fucking cold.”

When she raises her arms he steps forward to help her. He isn’t expecting the sudden jerk, and he’s helpless to do anything but drop, heading straight for the big pink puffy mat below.

At the last instant he plants his palm into the ground and flips clear of her. He settles on his back beside her. “Now you know for sure how cold it is,” she says.

“It’s wet,” he says.

“It’s glorious, isn’t it?” Her voice pleading: you must agree. Her gritty hand clasps his and they lie like that, on their backs, as clouds sail around the sun.

The cleanup is not so joyous, but they have no regrets. She showers and washes her hair and puts on jeans and a pink tee shirt. All their dirty clothes she piles together in one basket for a late-week trip to the laundromat, but their scrubbed-clean coats hang drying in the bathtub. They’ll need those coats tomorrow, when the temperature will tumble back into the teens.

Hearing that forecast she shouts, “Dairy Queen,” and she and her son head for the soon- to-be-clean-no-longer Chevette, the two of them bundled in sweaters and sweatshirts. Reaching the car, she flashes that same impish grin, and raises the keys.

“Can I?” he begs. “Please?”

“Just as far as the highway.”

His foot hitting the slick driveway almost causes another fall but he clutches the door handle to keep upright. “Check the mirror, fix the seat,” she instructs. “Wait,” she says as he leans forward to insert the key. She grabs the pillow off the back seat and makes him sit on it, despite the tightness in his jaw, the shame in his cheeks. He hates this pillow but he will not sacrifice opportunity to avoid shame.

He gets two-point-seven miles of mud, downhill mostly, before he stops and slides into the opposite seat, while she climbs over him to end up behind the wheel. She gets pavement for her five-point-four mile trip into Skowhegan, where they stop at the Dairy Queen and have hot dogs and fries for supper, hot fudge sundaes for dessert.

Nothing special, this. No big event, no revelations. Just an explosion of joy at being alive on a spring day, false or not, sixty degrees with sunshine and the promise that sometime, maybe not tomorrow but soon, the real spring will come, and following that the summer days of lying outside on lawn chairs, nights sleeping on a mat beneath stars. There may have been a whiff of love, too; she tended to have good luck with men in summer. But mostly it was his mother happy, and he the lucky beneficiary.

---

If he could have made that day his only past, he might have been a different Manion. But he could not re-create himself selectively; unlocking one memory forced him to run the gauntlet of them all.

Throughout his childhood, his mother entertained a succession of men. Most stayed only a short time but one seemed ready to stay forever. Carl was a big man with bushy eyebrows, a beard, and a thick carpet of gray across his back. Manion secretly called him, “Grizzly Man.”

Carl had a motorcycle, and sometimes, he rode off for a week or two at a time. Without him, Manion’s mother stumbled around, her eyes funny, the pupils small, and when she put on her bikini to lie in the sun he counted the ribs between the two pieces of suit. Eventually she came out of her funk and took to cleaning and washing and cooking, things she didn’t do when Carl was there. Nine-year-old Gerry Manion helped out, lugging a full trash bag out to the can in back, running to grab a new roll of paper towels when the one she was using to clean behind the toilet ran out. In his eagerness to be helpful, he got in the way sometimes, and she had to shout “Move it!” over the roar of the vacuum, and later, as she grew tired, “Come on, Gerry. Jesus.”

For him, those days she was a pool of water in the middle of a desert and he a wanderer dying of thirst. He wavered between wanting to gulp every last drop right away, and cautioning himself to drink slowly to make it last. She seemed to mostly like being alone with him; she made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and they ate waffles and ice cream for dinner, the waffles store bought and frozen, but who cared when they were blanketed with a thick layer of softening chocolate ice cream? They went to the store together, to the laundromat; she took him to a movie. At night they snuggled on the couch together to watch TV. And later sometimes, when he got scared, she let him crawl into her bed.

As their days alone together lengthened, Manion secretly wished Grizzly Man would not return. But as he grew happier and more confident in the constancy of his mother’s attention, she grew languid and morose. She started drinking earlier in the day, smoked that glass-bottle contraption where the water bubbled. She slept late, often not getting out of bed until noon, and when he asked if they could do something together, she moaned about a headache.

He tried to tell himself she just needed rest. But each day she grew more listless, and less tolerant of his tireless attempts to help her in all the ways he tried to imagine. “Gerald, you’re becoming a huge pain in the ass,” she groaned, or, “Gerald, just leave me the fuck alone.”

He didn’t believe she was sick – sick to him was when you woke up with a stomachache or a sore throat – but he thought of dead animals he had seen, squirrels in the road or birds dropped from trees, and how day after day there seemed to be less and less of these animals present, until one day all that remained was a spot of blackened blood, or a single feather. He feared his mother too might be wasting away.

So he prayed for Carl to return, even though when he did, Manion lost his mother all over again.

Then one night came an explosion, curses shouted, hurled things breaking against walls. Carl’s motorcycle starting up like a shotgun blast, the air ballooning with the smells of gasoline and exhaust. Then silence outside, while inside a woman’s curses alternately hissed and roared, as if Carl weren’t already miles away, safely deaf within the cocoon of his roaring engine. She stalked around the trailer, going out of her way to find things to smash, while pressed up close to the wall, her ten-year-old son peeked around a corner, watching and wondering why she could be either happy or his, never both.

---

In the years after Carl left, most of her men came and went the same night. Manion stayed away from home as much as possible, hanging around town or wandering along the river. At school he got into fights, got suspended a few times. He started shoplifting, smoking cigarettes. His mother seemed to have a lot of cash these days, and he sometimes stole from her pocketbook.

By thirteen, he’d taken to staying in town late at night. He got a job at the bowling alley, cleaning up, watching the desk when the regular manager went out for a drink and a smoke. After midnight, he’d hitchhike back to where Rattlesnake Hill emptied onto the main highway, then walk up the long dirt road to his trailer, hoping it was late enough his mother would have taken her man to bed. If they were hanging around the living room, he’d have to climb through his bedroom window to avoid them.

One night, a few hours after he’d snuck into bed, he was wakened by banging. His sleep- clouded mind imagined a bear attacking the trailer. He leapt from bed and ran into the hallway. The noise came from his mother’s room, a crack of flesh, a thud, something breaking. “Fucking bitch!” a man snarled. “Fucking cunt.”

When flesh struck flesh, how could one seem so much harder?

A man appeared in the entrance to his mother’s bedroom. Manion saw a balding head and bristly face, the red and white checks of a plaid shirt. Heard an unfamiliar voice: “Get out of my way, you little shit.” Then a tornado hit and hurled him back against the wall. The back of his head cracked.

Through blurry eyes he saw the man’s plaid shirt stop at the front door. He bent forward and thrust one foot into the work boot he held in both hands. He pulled on the other, grabbed his jacket, and stormed outside, not bothering to tie the laces. Manion dragged himself to his knees.

A tender egg swelled in the back of his head. Although the man had slammed the door, the latch didn’t catch and now it swung open and closed, open and closed, while the wind blew a powdery snow inside.

Outside a car engine tried to turn over. Manion imagined lying in wait as the man returned, smashing his kneecaps with a baseball bat, battering his bald head until it shattered. But he muttered a prayer as the engine cranked: Please start. In answer, the engine turned over. A heavy foot revved the gas. The car squeaked, its tires scrunching packed snow, and headlights sliced through the kitchen window.

Manion hurled himself against the door and slammed the bolt. His sock-covered feet stepped in snow that felt like needles. When he dared draw back the curtain and peek outside, the car was gone.

His mother knelt in a corner, twisted into it as if being punished. He looked for a robe or towel to cover her nakedness. Her body quivered and a hissing, bubbly breath squeezed out of her.

When he brought the towel toward her shoulders, she flinched and jerked, a startled cry popping out. There was a puffiness in one cheek, and her lip had burst like the tender flesh of a grape.

“It’s all right,” he promised. “He’s gone.”

---

She stopped having men over after that. When spring came, she took to her bed. She started getting checks from the government, he wasn’t sure why, but they allowed her to buy a new color TV for her bedroom, which seemed to be turned on all the time.

Lately Manion had been attending school regularly because he liked Mr. Worthington, the new eighth grade History teacher, who was sarcastic and rebellious, and who had, for some crazy reason, taken a liking to short pudgy young Gerry Manion.

“Get me a new pack of cigs, will you?” his mother asked when he came in during a break from doing homework. A game show was on TV, three people standing in a line requesting letters in the alphabet. A tall glass one-third full of amber liquid, no ice, sat at her bedside. He’d noticed when she didn’t put ice in her drink, it took longer to wake her up in the mornings.

After he delivered the cigarettes she patted the bed. She wore a flannel nightgown with a sweatshirt over that, and thick pink socks. “Come sit with your ma and watch.”

He hadn’t changed from his school clothes yet. He slipped off his loafers and climbed in. He kept space between them, until she leaned over and drew his stiff body close. “My little man,” she said, which made him think of all her other men, Grizzly Man and even Plaid Shirt who beat her.

The show had too much stupid talking, and the prizes were cheap. He looked at the puzzle, four words with most of the letters blank, and made up his own answer: “Fuck This Stupid Show.” He felt a twang of disappointment when they uncovered a letter that proved the puzzle couldn’t say that.

He smelled her burning cigarette. She had scrunched down and laid the ash tray on her belly. “How was school today?” she asked when the commercial came on.

“Okay.”

“You still like that teacher, what’s his name? Mr. Whatthefuck?”

“Mr. Worthington,” he said, trying to sound matter of fact. Around his mother he tried not to make too much of Mr. Worthington, but sometimes he dreamed of Mr. Worthington becoming one of her lovers, becoming his dad.

Eyes closed, his mother’s head lolled to the side. She still held the half-burning cigarette. He didn’t understand how she could lie in bed fifteen hours a day and be so tired. He didn’t want to consider what she might be tired of.

“Ma,” he said, giving her a nudge. She jerked awake in time to fleck the long ash into the ash tray. She took a final drag before crushing the cigarette out. She picked up the remote – she was proud of that remote, her first ever – and muted the sound, then stretched on her side, facing him, and closed her eyes.

His body made a subtle shift, preparing to crawl off the bed as soon as she fell asleep. He had homework to finish and a box of macaroni and cheese to make for dinner. They still had the old black and white TV in the living room, and Mr. Worthington had told them to watch the news one night this week and write down what every story was about and how long it lasted. Even though it was only Tuesday and he rarely did homework early, he thought tonight might be a good night.

His mother sighed. He felt the mattress prepare to give up his weight. Then a hand touched him.

“Don’t go,” she said, her hand raising the quilt as if she expected him to burrow beneath it.

He resettled, and she wriggled closer. “Here,” she said, “like this,” and she coaxed him onto his side, his back to her, and snuggled up tight against him. “Just let me rest like this for a minute,” she said. “It’s so hard for your mother sometimes. Everything hurts.”

He hadn’t thought of her being in pain and wondered if she should go to the clinic. “I get so lonely,” she said. “Let me lie here, and then I’ll get up and fix us both a nice dinner. You’re such a big young man.” She pinched the muscle in his arm. “So strong. And I’m so tired.”

Although she was tight against him, he couldn’t feel much except her bulky clothing. Still, the warmth of her made him perspire. He drew the quilt clear and gulped cool air. The darkness had settled completely now, except for the flashing colored lights of the muted television. He knew this show: Jeopardy. If he twisted his head he could read the answers but with the sound turned off he could never find out what the questions were.

She nudged him onto his back and laid her cheek on his chest. After a while he felt a spot of wet on his shirt. Her breathing was regular, although every once in a while a little moan escaped her and she shifted, burrowing into him more tightly. He read the final jeopardy answer but nobody got the question right, and he couldn’t hear Alex tell them what they should have written down.

The news came on. If he could have seen the clock, he could have timed the stories. Maybe he’d be able to guess what they were about even without sound.

The arm his mother lay on grew numb. When he tried to move, she moved too, and then he found himself moving in a different way. “Baby,” his mother said. She slid off his arm, which tingled with relief, and then she was on her back and drawing him close. She kissed him and guided him and squeezed him hard, and he remembered how Carl had once taught him to throw a baseball by wrapping Manion’s hand around the ball and then wrapping his own hand around Manion’s. Then he was hovering above her, not moving so much as being directed, held no longer by a hand but a body.

His lungs hurt, but it was hard to distinguish what he felt because there was so much to feel, and all of it was new, and meanwhile, another Manion now sat high above the bed, and he had a crazy thought that if only he could convince this other floating Manion to look at the television, he might still be able to catch the news.

Afterwards, he felt like he was lying on a raft adrift in the ocean. “Goodnight, baby,” his mother whispered, curled up on her side, and went to sleep.

At school he slacked off homework, skipped when he felt like it. When the manager of the bowling alley got drunk and cussed him out one night, he got pissed and quit. He stood like a stone statue when Mr. Worthington questioned him, encouraged him, berated him, and finally, like all the rest, gave up on him.

Through his first years of high school, a heaviness festered in his stomach whenever he neared home, and he’d slow his steps, even in cold or rain. Sometimes he imagined a catastrophe had occurred, the trailer had burned down or been carried away in a flood, and all that remained was their little blue Chevette and his mother, bundled in her pink winter clothes, her face joyous and rosy as she awaited his return.

Some days he’d enter to find his mother fully dressed, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, a cigarette dangling between her lips. On those days she’d often fix a meal or order pizza, which they’d eat in her bedroom in front of her color TV. She liked soap operas and game shows and police dramas, but her favorite show was Country Doctor, about a big-city doctor who moved to a small town with his three daughters after the death of his wife. His mother seemed peaceful watching that show, and Manion wondered if she dreamed of being his wife, or maybe, one of his daughters.

But there were other days he’d find no sign of her, no lights on, no smells in the kitchen, no dishes in the sink. Only the noise of the television blasting from her bedroom proved she hadn’t left for good. On those days, he’d stop in front of her door, collect himself, and go in.

She’d be in her pajamas, or in the summer, just her tee-shirt and underwear. She’d sit up and rub the smudged tear tracks from her face, then sniff and smile, her lips closed tight, and he’d accept the spot on the bed she created for him, and she’d ask about his day and he’d tell her empty words that she’d accept, and finally, she would rest her head on his shoulder and sigh that she was tired and only needed a little rest; later, she vowed, she’d make a nice meal. Often, her body was so hot he wondered if she had a fever, but when he placed one palm on her forehead and the other on his own, he didn’t know what to make of the comparison.

And then slowly, her fingertips would crawl across his chest, undo the buttons of his shirt. Her suddenly confident hand solved the puzzle of his belt buckle and jeans. He tensed, then exhaling, he gave in.

Afterwards she slept more peacefully than she would have without him. He decided he could handle whatever effect it was having on him.

But sometimes he found himself exaggerating the upset in his stomach to escape her. When he was young he used to fake stomach pain so she’d let him stay home from school. He could recite as if from a script the way their conversation went:

“My stomach hurts.” “Where?”

“My stomach.”

“How does it hurt?”

“It just hurts.”

“When did you go to the bathroom?”

“I went.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Do you need to go now?”

“No.”

“But your stomach hurts?”

“It hurts,” he whined, until she gave up.

“All right, but you’d better stay in bed all day, even if you feel better later.”

“I will,” he promised, although they both knew that by mid-afternoon he’d be lying on the couch watching TV. Now that he was older, the lie didn’t change, only the reason for it. She didn’t question him anymore, either. “Why don’t you go to your room and lie down?” she’d say right off. “Come out when you feel better.”

He never blamed her. She needed comfort only he could give. All his life he’d wanted to make her happy, and this, if not quite happiness, allowed a temporary absence of the opposite. If he had been a better son, he thought, he might have been able to give more.

---

The sickness, when identified on X-rays, may have surprised the doctors, but it did not surprise them, the mother who had confessed to her son after a few drinks on her last birthday, “I never thought I’d live past thirty”; the son who realized his error was thinking she’d be eaten away on the outside, instead of devoured from within.

The result: a breezeless summer night, his mother propped on pillows, the sheet beneath her wrinkled and damp with her sweat and tears. A mound of balled-up tissues cluttered her bedside table; he tried to think of them as flowers but they looked obscene. He waited by her bed, holding an empty grocery bag into which he’d stuff those tissues once she fell asleep.

When her eyelids closed he scooped the tissues into the bag. They felt slimy and he was surprised how much noise a plastic bag could make. Through the window he could see the washed-out watercolor sky, the heat so strong it blanched all color from the world. He’d set up a fan for her, on a chair at the foot of the bed, but she claimed the pressure of the moving air hurt her skin too much.

Everything hurt her now. Her body had no flesh. Even though her chest and face were bloated, like someone had stuck in a needle and inflated her. Her hair all gone but for the few tufts scattered about her scalp like tumbleweeds across a desert. The soft pink cap – the only color left – wedged beneath a pillow. She wore it because she saw how he ached, remembering her hair.

He spent every day and night caring for her. Money was tight, but he couldn’t pick up more than piecemeal work, because he couldn’t leave her alone for long. The school, which had already kept him back one year, promised to let him graduate if he wrote a few papers. He hadn’t started them.

While she slept, he sat in front of the open kitchen window and listened to the crickets, to the rare gravelly crunch of a car passing their patch of land, coming down Rattlesnake Hill or going up, teenagers probably looking for a place to park. Sometimes he remembered the bald man in the plaid shirt who beat his mother. He pictured the man showing up at their door, awkwardly bathed and sweet smelling, holding flowers maybe. Hungry and apologetic.

In his imagination, the bald man knelt on the steps as Manion whipped his foot in steel-toed boots with bone-crushing satisfaction. He told the bald man, “You gotta bleed to come in here.”

He remembered, too, the times she used to pick him up at school, parking her little Chevette along the street and getting out to stand beside the car, wearing her impossibly tight short shorts, big sunglasses, scarf over her hair, a man’s shirt open in front to reveal her lacy bra. And little pink sandals, her toenails also pink. He was the envy of every male in school, and as he reached her, sometimes she’d hug him and lift him up and twirl him, and he would laugh at all the adolescent boy mouths drooling over her as she turned her back on them and sashayed her hips, pushing her butt back just a smidgeon to make sure that as long as they lived, those boys would not forget the sight.

He washed dishes, poured a whiskey, lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t smoke in her presence because all the smoke she’d inhaled all those years had caused her sickness. Even so, when she was sharp she could smell it on him, and sometimes she asked him to give her one. He gave in once, figuring, Why not? But the coughing it brought on raked her raw.

He finished the whiskey, turned off the kitchen light, walked into his mother’s room. On her side, she’d managed to leave space for him to crawl in behind her. He got in slowly, careful not to jostle the mattress. He could not touch her; even his fingertips cut like knife blades to her. So resting his head on one arm, he gently stroked the air above her head, her shoulder, her hip, as moisture clouded his eyes, because she was dying, yes, but even more, because she was his mother, and everything hurt.

There was a time the boy stood beside his father. Eight years old, ankle-deep in fresh- fallen snow, on the wide concrete step outside the back door of the high school gymnasium. A few straggling snowflakes flitter from an oatmeal sky. The boy’s father takes off one glove, pins it in his armpit, and searches the brass key ring attached to his belt, isolating each key and holding it up to the diffused light of the street lamp behind them, because the light above the back door isn’t working. “Have to fix that, too,” the boy’s father says about the bulb. “I’ll catch hell from the coach if they have to tromp through here in the dark.

A laugh pops out of him in a cloud of cold air. The same laugh, nervous and childlike, that irritates the boy’s mother so. You won’t think it’s so funny, he hears her say, when you wake up some morning and find me gone.

Recently, the boy has realized he and his father share the same curly dark hair and green eyes. They both like Abbott and Costello, who the boy’s mother calls, Idiots. A pair of clowns.

“I don’t think this is it,” the boy’s father says about one key, then forces it anyway. “I already tried this one, I think,” he says about another. But this one turns, making the lock click free. “Eureka, Watson!” he cries. When he jerks open the door, the warm air pouring out stings the boy’s tight cold cheeks. Even his eyebrows feel stiff.

“At least the furnace is working tonight,” his father says. The boy follows him upstairs, imagining the horror of an ice-cold gym. “Here we are.” The door closes, trapping them in the immense dark.

Lights pop on, a row of them, then another, and the formless dark gives way to a high ceiling and walls, and a floor of pure magic. To the boy it’s as gloriously breathtaking as a baseball diamond; more so, because it is a floor and it’s been painted – black lines around the edge and more in front of each basket, and in the center a big blue circle with a white “S” in the middle. Superman, the boy thinks, although he knows it stands for Stanton, the high school’s name.

“We don’t want to cross that line.” His father points to the black border, and the boy steps back as if at the edge of a lake during spring thaw. “Not with our boots on, we don’t.” He laughs. “It’s the law.”

He unlocks a door in the corner that opens to a closet large as a garage. Inside are rolled- up mats, a folded trampoline. He drops the paper bag he’s been carrying onto a card table in front, next to a rack of basketballs, and sits on a folding chair to yank off his boots. The boy tugs his off, too, and when his father picks them up they leave a little puddle of melted snow on the concrete floor.

“You have to wear sneakers to be allowed on the court,” his father explains as they put theirs on. Their boots are lined up on top of the newspaper, the large boots and the small boots matching the way the boy and his father would look if they, too, stood side by side.

“Socks would be okay. They used to have sock hops. That’s a dance. The kids took off their shoes and danced around the floor in their socks.”

He grabs a long-handled dust mop. “You want to shoot baskets?” The boy shakes his head. His father removes his shirt, leaving him in a white tee bunched up in back, where the blue band of his boxer shorts sticks out above the waist of his pants.

As he pushes the dust mop, the floor that already shines, glows even brighter in his wake. There are wide empty lanes on either side of the court, then a single row of bleachers, eight feet high, against each wall. The boy is wondering how people will climb up there when his father puts a key into a hole in the cement-block wall, then grabs the bottom slat and begins to walk backwards, toward the court. The bleachers follow, opening like an accordion, one row and then another, and another above that.

When people start arriving, the boy finds a place on the stage behind one basket, where his father has lined up two rows of chairs. He sits on the end, next to the big red curtain that smells of mildew and dust. His father calls him over to meet the coach. “This is my son, Jay,” his father says. “Jay, this is Coach Morelli.”

The coach is taller than the boy’s father, and muscular, with a weathered face beneath crewcut white hair. His huge calloused hand swallows the boy’s.

“Pleased to meet you, Jay.” He has a deep voice and a face that seems unable to smile even when he wants to. The boy cannot bring himself to speak.

“I guess we’ve had enough snow to carry us through the whole winter,” the boy’s father says.

Suddenly the floor begins to tremble. There’s a sound like stampeding horses, and the doors to the locker room burst open and a dozen enormous bodies pour forth, all dressed in blue and white.

All the players seem like giants. The boy has heard of professional players standing seven feet tall, but on television they all look small.

During warm-ups the boy moves to the balcony above the far basket. He likes the perspective of looking down over everything. Beyond where the players shoot lay-ups stands his father, arms folded, chatting to anyone who passes by. The buzzer sounds in the gym now bloated with heat and noise, and the boy races downstairs, hoping to make it back to the stage before the game begins

Halfway there, he hears the announcer say, “Will everyone please rise for our national anthem.” The crowd rises in a single whoosh, and the boy freezes, backing into the people crowding around him, and placing his hand over his heart as a scratching sound fills the air, then the anthem explodes from the loudspeakers. The moment it ends the boy races for the stage. People clap and stamp their feet. Passing the corner where his father has been standing, the boy spots him in the storage closet, bending over an old record player.

He looks up and laughs. “Just call me Harry Phillip Sousa.

The game is close throughout the first half. Stanton’s best player is Nate Williamson, the only black player on either team, a guard who darts around swiping the ball and racing away like a speedy little kid taunting bullies. The boy favors Tommy Bishop, a muscular forward who always seems to get the rebound. Big for his age and chubby, the boy can easily pretend to be Tommy, who has short dark hair neatly trimmed and a stoic expression whether he’s just scored a basket or been called for a foul he didn’t commit.

At halftime, his father buys the boy an ice cream sandwich that melts fast in the heat, coating his hands with chocolate and sticky cream. “You’d better go to the men’s room and wash up,” his father advises, leading him along the narrow trail between the court’s black line and the first row of bleachers, saying hello to a half-dozen people along the way. A line stretches out through the propped-open bathroom door. Although relieved when his father leaves him, the boy feels lost in the forest of men.

When he comes out his father is pushing the big dust mop up and down the floor again. He decides to watch the second half from the balcony. Above and behind the basket, he has a clear view of Tommy Bishop muscling rebounds. The game is tense, the other team leading by three points as the fourth quarter begins. The movement and colors and noise and heat all merge together, and leaning over the balcony rail, the boy becomes Tommy Bishop grabbing a rebound, tapping it against the backboard so softly it drops through the hoop, bringing his team within one point with thirty seconds to play. The crowd leaps to its feet, then settles into rhythmic clapping as the other team calls time out.

When play resumes the other team plays keep-away to run out the clock, forcing Nate Williamson to foul their best shooter, a guard.

The lights on the scoreboard above where the boy’s father stands read :09. The score is 54-53. The guard has one-and-one, getting the second shot only if he makes the first. Making both will put his team up by three, and there is no three-point shot.

A rumbling rises from every corner of the gym, crescendoing as the guard walks to the free throw line. “Miss it!” the boy screams

The ball hits the rim, bounces once, and falls off into the sure hands of Tommy Bishop. He whips a pass to Nate Williamson, who slices between two opposing players racing down the court, stops at his favorite spot at the top of the key and goes straight into the air. The boy is perfectly positioned to watch the orange ball rise out of those two black hands, pause at its highest point as if it is a balloon about to float away, then drop through the hoop as the buzzer sounds and the crowd erupts.

The boy jumps up and down. On the court, players and fans mob Nate Williamson.

Later, after the gym has emptied, the boy’s father removes his shirt again, lifts the bottom of the lowest bleacher and pushes until that row folds into the one above it, then both into the one above that, until all the bleachers again look like a single bench against the wall, eight feet high. Dust and trash coat the floor the bleachers covered. Exhausted, the boy sits on the floor by the stage, wishing the players downstairs would finish dressing and leave so his father could take him home.

His father picks up something off the floor. “What do you know?” he says. “A quarter.” He holds out his hand. “Here, you have it.”

The quarter seems large compared to the nickels and dimes the boy is used to. “Sometimes I make out pretty good going through here,” his father says, gesturing toward the trash. “The change falls out of people’s pockets. One time I found a five-dollar bill.”

This wakes the boy up. “I have to put the bleachers up on the other side,” his father says. “If you want to look around here while I’m doing that, you can keep whatever you find.”His words transform the trash heap into a treasure trove the boy searches methodically, unearthing another quarter, two dimes, and seven pennies.

“Now try the other side,” his father instructs. “That side’s where the visiting team’s fans sit, so usually there are more adults.” He laughs. “Adults have more money to lose than kids.”

The dollar bill the boy finds folded up beneath a cup proves his father’s words true. The boy will be a father himself, his own father gone, before he considers that his father might have planted it.

That night, he clutches the money in his sweaty palm, dreaming of baseball cards, midget race cars, Pez. Overcome by fatigue once again, he pushes the money carefully into his pants pocket and sits in the chair his father has taken down off the stage. “It won’t be long now,” his father says.

When the door opens, the boy jerks out of the sleep he’s been tumbling into. Not five feet away, his shiny dark hair slicked back, a gym bag slung over one shoulder, stands Tommy Bishop. He wears a blue and white letterman’s jacket with a football on the front, and snow boots nearly to his knees.

Nate Williamson follows him, wearing a gray rain coat that doesn’t look warm enough for the winter, gray dress pants, and shiny black shoes.

“Drained that sucker, stopped on a dime.” Nate’s voice has a lilt like poetry.

The boy’s father, scraping some gum stuck to the floor beneath the bleachers, calls, “Hey, boys.”

“Hey, Skinner,” Nate replies. The boy does not know what the nickname means, but it does not sound complimentary

“Good game tonight, boys.”

Tommy Bishop grabs a ball off the rack and flips it to Nate. “Show us the touch.”

As Nate drops his bag and bounces the ball, the boy’s father calls good-naturedly, “No shoes on the court, boys.”

Nate ignores him. “You get under the basket,” he tells Tommy. “Snatch that rebound and feed me the outlet pass.”

“Come on, boys.” His father has risen to his feet. “We don’t want to damage the floor.” When Tommy tries to flip the ball off the rim, it goes through the hoop instead.

“You got to miss, man. You got to miss so I can make my shot.”

“Come on, boys,” the boy’s father says again.

Tommy shoots and misses, but the ball skirts from his grasp and dribbles toward the boy’s feet. He bends down and picks it up.

This next the boy will remember all his life. Tommy has taken several steps in his direction. Hands extended, he nods for the ball. Beneath his still-damp hair, there’s a squareness to his jaw and the promise of something simple and honest in his brown eyes. In the distance beyond Tommy’s shoulder stands the boy’s father. His baggy pants sag beneath the bulge of his belly. Pale bony shoulders, weak red face. The stick of the mop he holds rises taller than he is.

The boy will be unable to recall the emotion in his father’s face. Understanding? Gentle forgiveness? His father was that kind of man. Or did he feel it like a knife the boy’s hands pushed forward, instead of the ball that curled into the air, pausing at its highest point as if it were a balloon about to float away, before settling into the hands of Tommy Bishop, who spins and whips a pass to the already running Nate Williamson?

Nate catches the ball like a wide receiver, dribbles once to gain his balance, and rises into the air. The ball soars from his hand, clanks the rim, and drops harmlessly to one side.

“Shit,” Nate hisses. Landing, his heel gashes a long black streak in the floor.

“That’s all right,” Tommy consoles. “You hit that shot when it counted.”

“You got that right.”

Nate grabs his bag. They button up their coats in preparation for the cold. “Take it easy, Skinner,” Nate calls. “Little Skinner, too.”

Cold air rushes in when they open the door. The boy’s father laughs. “They’re pretty excited about the game.” He walks to the top of the key to inspect the damage done by Nate’s shoes.

The boy waits in silence, thoughts turned to his mother sitting glumly in front of the television at home, while his father on hands and knees scrubs those marks with steel wool.

This is an exercise in structure. It can work with any type of writing, but the example below is from a personal narrative essay I wrote a few years back.

Here is how the exercise works:

Choose any piece of writing for which you’d like to explore the structure, order, and movement. Divide your story into sections. A section could be a paragraph, a scene, or a portion with a single focus. See if you can come up with at least five but not more than ten or twelve sections.

Each section shouldn’t be too long (most will be less than a page).

Number the sections according to the order they appear in the writing. Then try to summarize in one sentence what happens in each section, what the main focus is, or what each section is about. Write those sentences down in the order that they follow in the story.

Take a look at the list of sentences as representing the structure of your piece the way you initially wrote it. What do you notice about this structure?

Now cut up these sentences so that the sentence describing each section is on its own piece of paper. Then play with the structure by moving some of the sections around and see what happens. (Note: while you could do this on the computer, I find that it has a greater impact if you actually print out the sentences and cut them up, so that you were working with actual pieces of paper you can physically move around.)

See if you can move some sections around, and what the effect might be. Perhaps some of the sections could be combined or cut? Maybe you’ve noticed something that needs to be added? Consider even dramatic changes, such as moving the last section to the beginning.

There are two goals to this exercise. The first is to examine the structure of your piece to see if there might be changes you could make in the order of the telling that might improve the writing. But the second goal is to simply play with structure: to see what happens to the effect of the piece overall when sections of it are moved around.

Below are sentences describing the nine sections of the personal narrative essay I wrote. It’s about how my mother had an irrational fear of snakes, and an incident that happened when I was five or six.

Print the page with the nine sentences, cut them up, and play with the structure. See what you can come up with, and most importantly, consider how the piece might change if you change the structure.

• 1. This part tells how my mother had an irrational fear of snakes.
• 2. This part tells how my mother reacted when she saw a snake.
• 3. This part tells what I, as a child, thought about my mother’s fear of snakes.
• 4. This part tells about the day my mother almost touched a snake she thought was a stick, that then slithered underneath the front steps of our house.
• 5. This part tells about how my father and grandfather decided to tear apart those steps to look for that snake.
• 6. This part tells how my father and grandfather tore apart those steps, and I, although too young to help, got to watch.
• 7. This part tells how my father and grandfather found a whole nest of snakes under the steps and killed them all.
• 8. This part tells how I loaded some bloody bits of snake onto my plastic shovel to carry in to the house and show my mother all the snakes were dead.
• 9. This part tells how my mother reacted when I brought her the shovel full of snake bits.