“He told me about the trouble,” I said.

“He didn’t tell you about the trouble,” Aggie said. “He can tell you what happened, but he can’t tell you about the real trouble because he ain’t got that many words in him. What did he tell you about? The basketball part?”

“There was more?”

“The basketball part wasn’t nothing. He let some people talk a hole in him. You see all these professional ballplayers and they got women doing everything for them except sneezing; they got this cat nipping at them and they got that cat nipping at them, and they don’t know what to do. Then they listen to somebody, and they make a mistake. Then they gone. It’s all over. But that’s just the basketball part. That wasn’t nothing because he ended up right back where we all start out, empty-handed.

“The thing is, most black people don’t even realize they ain’t got nothing. They stand on the corner popping their fingers to some music and figure that’s what it’s all about. They figure they ain’t supposed to have nothing. But Cal saw what he could have had. He saw that he had one thing going for him, and that was his basketball, and when they cut that off, they might as well have cut off his manhood right along with it.

“He couldn’t do nothing when it was all over. Only thing he knew a bed was good for was to lay in with his eyes open all night. Got so he couldn’t stand me. He would look at me and turn away. That’s when I gave up.

“He had put all them dreams together, and that was what he had got himself to be, them dreams. When they died, he was dead, too. He kept his body moving around, filling it up with alcohol and laying it around here and there. But it had killed him. He was so damn busy mourning for himself that he didn’t even notice what was happening to me. Not until our baby died. You want another beer?”

“Okay.”

“You must have caught him just right,” she said. “When he told me he was thinking about getting back into the game again, I was really surprised. When he told me that Jack had contacted him, I just held my breath.

“Who’s Jack?”

“Punk. When he got into that trouble in Chicago, there was this slick dude who went around giving out money, talking about how he had so many games in the bag, that kind of thing.” Aggie took off her heels and put on a pair of low dark shoes. She had nice legs, and she caught me looking at them. I looked away. “Anyway, this punk had about five or six guys working for him. One of them was this cat called Jack. He was trying to be what the white boy was without the white boy’s money.”

“He’s in New York?” I asked.

“Somewhere,” she said. “Cal was over the other night and said that this guy called him and told him things that he figured he had to be connected with what went down in Chicago. He said he was there, so it had to be Jack.”