“Me and Cal went up to see one of the tournament directors last week,” I said. “He was trying to give Cal some static about something he did a long time ago.”

“What he do?” she asked.

“He got accused of shaving points,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound so bad.

“Is that cheating?” she asked.

“What you mean, ‘cheating’?” I asked.

“You don’t know what cheating means?”

“Yeah, he was cheating,” I said. “Anyway, some dude named Russia or Rassha or something like that called this whitey and told him.”

“Rashid?” She looked at me sideways. “He called?”

“Yeah, you know him?”

The train came and we got on. It was crowded, and we got separated. We had to wait until 125th Street before the train emptied enough so we could get back together.

“That’s Juno’s last name. Or the name he goes by anyway,” she said. “Juno Rashid. First his name was Juno Brown. Then he changed it to Abdul Rashid. But everybody kept calling him Juno, so then he just called himself Juno Rashid.”

“He know Cal?” I asked.

“How I know who he knows?” Mary-Ann said.

I took Mary-Ann home and then called Cal’s place, and he didn’t answer. Sometimes he had been staying over with Aggie. I figured they were getting back together again or something. I looked in the telephone book under “A. Jones,” but I couldn’t find her number. Information said she had a number, but it wasn’t listed.

“I want to run through a series of plays today,” Cal was saying when I got to the gym. “So that we can change from one play into the next without bringing the ball back outside to the top of the key. The first play will be from the top, and then the second will be from the corner.”

I asked Cal if I could speak to him about something for a minute, and he said I could when we took a break. That ticked me off, and I gave him a look so he would know I had something important to run down. He still didn’t seem to dig it, so I went on with the plays. The plays were boss, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought we were never going to take a break, but we finally did. Soon as he said, “Break,” everybody slumped to the floor except me. I went over to Cal.

“Now, what was his name first?” he asked when I told him about what Mary-Ann had said.

“First it was Juno Brown,” I said. “Then he switched it to Abdul Rashid and then Juno Rashid.”

“How do you know this is the guy that called O’Donnel?”

“How I know?” I looked at him. “I don’t know that this is the guy, but how many guys out here you know named Rashid and know anything about our team?”

“How he know about the team?” Cal asked.

I started to tell him that, and he held me up and said we would get together after practice. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t call the practice off and get on the case. He didn’t, though, and we worked the rest of the morning on plays.