We looked for places to put our eyes, but the sound of Ox’s crying, softer now than it was, kept pulling us back to him. I caught Paul’s eyes for a moment, and we both looked away from each other quickly. The whole thing was too close to us, too real, and too intimidating to let on that we even knew about it.

“Must have been a junkie,” Paul said.

“A junkie ain’t got the time to be doing all this,” I said. “Whoever was here took his damn time. He wanted to hurt us.”

“Why he want to hurt us?” Walter was pushing through the stuff with his foot.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But for some simple dudes like us there’s sure a lot of stuff going on.”

“Like what?” Paul asked.

I didn’t answer. I leaned against the wall and watched as Ox put Sparrow in a box. Some of the other guys started to clean up a little and then just said, “The hell with it.” It wasn’t worth it. Breeze got all his cassettes together even though they were broken. That was cool, and I started to get my stuff up, but then I didn’t feel like it.

Finally I told them that I had been up to O’Donnel’s place and how he had said that he didn’t want Cal to be the coach because he didn’t dig Cal. Everybody said, “Later,” for O’Donnel. I left it at that.

We played five games in three days against the other teams in our tournament. We won all five, too. The team wasn’t playing that together, but we were still kicking rump. When we played the last game, Cal told us to imagine that we were twenty points behind from the get-go and that we had to make a comeback. We won by six points, and Cal chewed us out. He said it was a raggedy game. Most of us knew it was, but we had won. That was the important thing.

Mary-Ann was coming to the games, but she was being different. I couldn’t say nothing to her that she wanted to hear. Still, I wanted her to be around.

Cal started us back into the practice thing again, which didn’t go down too cool. Everybody said we would really get down to business when the Tournament of Champions started. Cal was pushing a little too hard. Everybody wanted to win, but he was acting like he was going to be playing instead of us. Ox told him that, too.

“You guys ain’t men enough to play with me,” he said. He laid it down like he meant it, too. A couple of cats caught attitudes behind that, and the practices tailed off again.

I was getting too many things on my mind. Everywhere I turned there was something to worry about. I kept on telling myself to cool out, but it wasn’t happening. I rapped a little to Mary-Ann about it and that helped some, and I dug on how much I was getting out of being with her and telling her what was on my mind. I hadn’t told her about Cal getting into trouble before. I guess I didn’t want her to think anything bad about the dude, but finally it came out. I had taken her to a flick, and we were waiting for the train at Forty-deuce.