We won the game, but it brought us back to earth. We were so tired afterwards we couldn’t even get off the benches in the locker room. But we had won, by one point.

“If I wasn’t so tired,” Ox said, “I’d roll over and die.”

Cal said that we had played well, that the team we had played against was really good and played much better team ball than we had.

“That cat I was playing was pretty good,” I said.

“Pretty good?” Cal laughed. “He’s as good as you are, man. You got to learn to play with cats as good as you are and some better. You did okay against him.”

Joe Hare, the guy who keeps score at the gym where we play, came over and told me that the white cat had come over to the scoring table after the game and asked what my name was and what school I went to.

“You give him my name?” I asked.

“Sure did,” Joe said. “Said you weren’t sure what college you were going to, but you were leaning towards the Big Ten.”

I grinned a little, I guess. I was glad he had come over and asked about me.

Me and Walter were the last ones out of the locker room. We ran into some of the guys from the other team. They said they didn’t know the games were going to be that tough. I just shrugged, and Walter said something about the game not being that tough. That made them feel bad. I was a little sorry for them but still glad that it wasn’t me feeling bad.

“Which way you going, coach?” I said to Cal, who was standing outside on the corner.

“I’m waiting for a guy who’s supposed to pick me up,” Cal said. “Why don’t you guys go on? You know we got practice in the morning.”

Just as we were going off, a car pulled up at the curb.

We went on down the street, still talking about the game. We just couldn’t get enough of it. Walter started to say something about how nervous he had been, but he looked back and suddenly stopped talking.

I looked back, too, and saw two guys standing on the corner in front of Cal. They looked like they were arguing, but I couldn’t be sure. Then one of them got into a car. The other one opened the back door of the car for Cal, and he got in. He had put his hand on Cal when he was getting in, and I couldn’t tell from where I was standing if he had pushed him or not. The car started up, and I stood near the edge of the sidewalk so I could look into it. When it went by me, Cal held up his hand as if everything was all right. Maybe it was.

I went on over to my moms’s house, but she wasn’t there. I saw one of the neighbors, a skinny chick named Karen who must have been about fifty but who looked like she was thirty, and she said that she had seen my moms in the Spotlite on One-two-five Street. Later for that, I thought, and went over to the Grant. When I got over there, Mary-Ann was sitting in the lobby reading Ebony.