“And he burned all the checks?”

“Yeah.”

“Why you think he doing this for you, man?” I asked.

“I think because he likes Mary-Ann.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Say, look, don’t tell nobody nothing about this,” Paul said. “All I want to do for the rest of the summer is to play some ball and forget what happened.”

“Yeah.”

After we rapped a little more, I went back over to the Grant. It was a heavy trip, what it was. I could get next to what Paul was saying about his pops because I felt the same way. I didn’t think about it all the time, but I did think about it some of the time. In another way I had even thought about trying to be like Lenny and Joni, but every time I saw a black cat acting like that, it made me disgusted. In a way they were always out for coffee.

Paul didn’t know that Tyrone hadn’t burned the checks, and I didn’t tell him. I called Mary-Ann, listened to her mouth about why I hadn’t met her before when I said I would, and then told her not to talk to Paul about what we had done. I told her it was important that she didn’t, and she asked me why. I told her what Paul had said and that we’d better try to get all the pieces together before we did any more talking. She said cool on that. Funny that she should be Paul’s younger sister because she seemed a lot older in the head than he did.

I went down and got a pint of wine and went back up to my room and drank it. Then I fell asleep and had this dream. I was playing ball for all these scouts. They were all white, and they weren’t sitting in stands or anything, but they were sitting around the edges of the court. And each one had two la-di-da niggers sitting with them, drinking champagne out of these little plastic champagne glasses. I was playing against about ten other guys, and we were all breaking our butts. Nobody was on teams. It was every man for himself. Whatever basket you took a rebound from, you had to go shoot at the other basket, and everybody was trying to stop you. And all the while we were playing, we kept looking on the sidelines to see if the scouts were digging us, and the la-di-da niggers kept getting up in the faces of the white scouts and smiling and carrying on so they couldn’t see us.

When everybody that was playing saw that the scouts couldn’t see us, they started carrying the ball and elbowing, and it really got to be a free-for-all. Guys were punching and trying to thumb cats in the eye and stuff like that. Every time a cat would fall down, everybody would come over to where he had fallen and stomp on him and chant until he was wasted and then go on with the game. Then there was just two players left, me and Snakeskin. I didn’t even know Snakeskin had been in the game. It had just seemed that there were people without faces, just black arms and black legs and the brown ball. Now it was me and Snakeskin, and the score was tied. I brought the ball down, dribbling through the piles of bodies, and Snakeskin was on my case. I was almost trapped between Snakeskin and a pile of bodies when suddenly I remembered the move that Cal had shown me. Down the right side, around the bodies, and then up in the air off the dribble for the slam!