“Because you got to make a decision,” Cal said. “That’s why I brought you along. I sort of thought that would be the story.”

“I already made my decision,” I told him. “You coach.”

I went over to the center to tell the other guys. I found them arguing on the corner about if Superman could fly or was he just jumping around.

“Dig it,” Ox was saying, “they say he can leap tall buildings with a single bound. They didn’t say nothing about him flying no tall buildings!”

“Ox, where do you keep your brain, man?” Paul said.

“They say, ‘Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman!’ Now do they say that or do they not say that?”

“Yeah, they said it,” Ox said, “but they didn’t say how he got up in the sky.”

“They put him with a bird and a plane, man!” Paul said. “You ever see a bird leap? You ever see a plane leap? No, they’re flying and Superman is flying, too! That is why he wears that cape, to help him keep himself stabilized!”

“He wears that cape because that’s the cape his daddy gave him to wear,” Ox said. “Didn’t you see the picture?”

“How come he got to wear an S on his chest, man?” Jo-Jo asked.

“In case he forget his name?”

“We got to have a meeting,” I said. “Let’s go into the office and rap.”

“About Superman?”

I ignored Paul, and we went on into the center. Ox had the keys out, but he saw the door was open.

“Oh, man!” Ox stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh, no!”

I pushed by Ox and looked in. The place was a shambles. Everything that had been standing had been thrown over. The pictures we had on the wall were torn down. The record player was broken, and the records were all over the floor. You could see the heel marks on the records that weren’t broken. All the drawers had been taken out of the old desk we had and thrown on the floor. Ox, standing next to me, pushed out one foot and lifted a torn record cover. Under it was Sparrow, his parakeet.

“Oh, man … oh, man …” Ox knelt on the pile of records and gently lifted the dead bird. He held it in his two hands and looked down at it like he didn’t believe what he saw. “Oh, man … I ain’t never had nothing living before. I ain’t even had a plant or nothing that really lived …”

In Ox’s huge black hands the dead bird looked like a child’s feather toy. The tears were running down his face, and his mouth was open as if there were things to say he just couldn’t get out. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time I was wondering how it was that a guy as big as Ox had something so fragile to hold onto. I was sorry for the dude, and ashamed of the way he just broke down.