Anyway, Cal didn’t go for it, and that was that. I dug him pulling Matt Lee over to the side and talking to him, and then Lee took the newspaper guy out. When everybody was leaving, I asked Cal if he wanted to see another play I had worked out, and he said okay. I did have another play, but that was really just an excuse to talk to him. We went out in the bright afternoon light carrying our bags, and some Puerto Rican kids asked us if we were basketball players. I said yeah, we were.

“Can I have your autograph?” the kid asked, pushing a comic book toward me.

“I ain’t really nobody famous,” I said.

“You going to be somebody famous?” he asked.

“He sure is,” Cal said.

“Then give me your autograph, and I’ll save it for later,” he said. I signed the edge of the comic book, and then I had to sign another autograph for another little Puerto Rican girl with eyes that were just about ready to break some dude’s heart.

“Kids are something else,” Cal said.

“How come you never had kids?” I asked.

“I had a child,” he said.

I stopped in my tracks. This guy was getting to be like a hole in the ground that you couldn’t see the bottom of. The deeper you reached, the deeper the dude went. He walked on a few steps ahead of me and then turned around.

“You coming, or you going to spend the rest of the afternoon standing there posing on the sidewalk?”

“Where’s your kid?” I asked. “I know it’s got to be a girl. That’s why you don’t want her around me, afraid I might take advantage of her, right?”

“No, a boy, Jeffrey,” Cal said. “He’d be younger than you now.”

The way he said that I knew the kid was dead. I really felt bad about it, too. Looked like wherever I reached into the man I came out with a handful of pain.

“Sorry, man,” I said. I figured I would say that and then shut up unless he wanted to talk about it.

“You know, I got a call from this guy O’Donnel who’s sponsoring the tournament,” Cal said. “He said he wants to see me about something tomorrow. The tournament’s a little bigger than some people thought it would be. They picked up some commercial sponsors, soft drink people, a tire company.”

“That’s good, ain’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah, real good, in a way,” Cal said. “You want to stop for a soda?”

I said yes and we stopped in Whelan’s on Eighth Avenue. I ordered a chicken salad on toast and a milk shake, and Cal ordered a Coke. I was pretty sure the waitress had eyes for me. I mentioned it to Cal.

“People see in you what they need,” he said. “You got to be what you need.”

“She’s still fine,” I said.

“That’s ’cause you got more nature than taste,” he said, smiling. It was the first time that he had smiled since we left the school. I could tell something was on his mind, but I didn’t know what.