Chapter 5

Two things mattered to Stacy when he was ten: if his little league team, The Bulldogs, won their baseball game and whether Rick was mad at him because he didn’t play “up to his potential”.

It took years for Stacy to learn that other things in life were more important. By then, his shelves already held trophies for regional and state championships in baseball, medals for swimming and plaques that had three dimensional footballs and basketballs on them. He had a letter jacket by the end of his freshman year of high school and Rick promised him that if he added enough letters to it, he’d buy him a Mustang for his 16th birthday.

Stacy asked for a red one.

The ten year old who worried about missing an outfield catch vanished and grew up into a ferocious competitor on the playing field. But at home it was the mistakes he made during games that Rick spoke about. The baskets he didn’t make, the extra training he didn’t do, and the fact that he was too small for this sport or not lean enough for another. His mother told Stacy that Rick meant well, that he only wanted his son to be the best, and when Stacy slammed the door of his room one night in his senior year of high school, emerged with three boxes of sports awards and tossed them into the family garbage can, Rick had the nerve to stand there with a dumbfounded look on his face, surprised by his son’s anger.

“You’re never going to get anywhere in life being thin-skinned!” Rick yelled after Stacy’s back as he locked his bedroom door. Five minutes later Stacy tossed his letter jacket into the hallway and turned up his stereo. He enlisted in the Marines the next day.

Stacy saw the posters for the elementary school basketball game at 6 p.m. on the town’s main street after he finished chowing down the second of the sandwiches Velma gave him around 5 p.m. Stacy wasn’t sure if he was walking in the right direction to the elementary school until he asked a surly looking kid pumping gas at the Hess station. The kid nodded, then said “My little brother’s playing. Number 5 in the blue uniform. Give him a cheer, will ya?”

Stacy nodded and continued hiking down the street. He arrived at the auditorium a half hour early and watched as the teams warmed up, standing near the bleachers where the parent-spectators watched the players.

Number 5 in the blue uniform was the scrawniest, shortest kid he’d ever seen in a basketball uniform. He looked as if he wasn’t old enough to play with the others. When he reached for a ball, his pants inevitably started to fall down. Two of the kids on his own team laughed and pointed. Stacy recognized the pack mentality behavior from his own youth, remembering how he joined in. He felt ashamed of himself when number 5 left the court and sat by himself off on the sideline in the middle of warmups, having to be coaxed back onto the field by one of the coaches.

“I wish the kids would stop teasing him,” a man in the stands said.

“I know, it makes it so hard. But Nelson has to learn to hang in there. He’s not going to get much taller, dear,” a woman replied.

Stacy looked over at the kid again. He was a dwarf. Number 5 was not just a short, skinny undersized kid, but was named Nelson. He glanced up at the stands and saw the couple – a man who was about five foot ten sitting next to a woman who was about three and a half feet tall. Number 5’s parents. The kid in the gas station – his parents too.

His leg began to ache, so Stacy sat in the front row of the stands. The game began and the teams took to the court. Nelson sat on the bench, swinging his legs, chewing gum and watching the others play. He waved over to his parents a few times, but he didn’t get on the court to play at any point.

Not until the final five minutes, when the team was behind by fifteen points. The coach walked up and down the bench and pointed at Number 5. “What the heck,” he said.

Slowly, Nelson dropped onto the floor from the bench, his feet landing solidly, and walked out onto the court, replacing a tow headed boy whose red face showed he was done running for the night. Stacy watched as the other team players saw Nelson come on the court and they glanced over at the coach desperately, as if to note this was the final death knell for the game. The other team’s coach took out his starters, replacing them with younger, less talented kids. All of them were taller than Number 5.

Stacy leaned forward, watching Nelson run up and down the court, keeping pace with the other players, making a few good defensive plays, using his shorter stature to surprise the other team, whose players were just as spent. Number 5 darted in and out of plays, grabbed the ball and passed it to teammates, making moves that were not in any play book, but effective.

“Attaboy Nelson!” Stacy cheered. The score board evened out a bit. The blue team only trailed by five points when there were two minutes left. A minute can be a long time in a basketball game, he knew.

Oblivious to the fact that they could lose, the coach on the other team didn’t change his strategy. He did look up at the scoreboard a few times over the next minute, as Number 5 stole the ball twice, had several assists and the blue team went ahead by a point with under thirty seconds left. Only then did he call a time out and get his starters back in. With a minute to go, Nelson faced the starting team down and tried a few of his moves on them.

Apparently the starters weren’t paying attention to the game from the bench, because the unorthodox plays by Nelson worked on them too. The blue team won by five points.

In a movie, Stacy thought, the team would carry Number 5 off the court. Instead, the players on his team clapped each other on the back and headed toward the locker room, congratulating each other. Nelson quietly picked up his towel and waved at his parents.

“Good game,” Stacy said to him as he walked by.

“Thanks.”

“Excellent moves. I used to play varsity basketball.”

“You did?” Nelson asked. He stopped, looked at Stacy, his cane. “You got hurt?’

“Injured. In the war.”

“Will it get better?”

“It is better,” Stacy heard himself say, “than it was.”

The kid looked at him and nodded. He started to walk.

Stacy wanted to say more to Nelson. It wasn’t enough. “Wait a minute. I saw your brother – at the gas station.”

“Lee? You know Lee?”

Stacy shrugged. “He told me to cheer for you. But I would have cheered anyway because you were the best player out there tonight, Nelson.”

Later, as he limped out into the night air, Stacy remembered the smile Nelson gave him as he ran toward the locker room. The words Stacy had never heard from Rick that he wanted to hear now echoed in his ears: You were the best player. Other people told him that. They gave him awards, they invited him to banquets, they toasted him at tailgate parties. But, unlike Nelson, he never seemed to hear it.

Stacy looked up at the sky, where the moon hung suspended over the parking lot full of excited youngsters and their parents leaving the game. He listened to the sounds until the lot was empty, balancing himself carefully against a bench, wondering when he would figure out what was important to hear.

Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan