And One by Azia Armstead
Cousin Vic and I dragged the basketball hoop down the sloped driveway into the paved road, lining it up in front of the gutter to create a makeshift half-court between Grandma’s brick house and the neighbors directly across the street. Grandma’s neighborhood, spaced out by wide lawns and punctuated by towering Dogwood trees, was made up of mostly older folks who stayed home during the weekend, so there wasn’t much traffic that Saturday morning to interrupt our game.
“We can’t play without a fourth person,” Cousin Vic said with a confused long face that matched his lankiness, like the mental math strained him. “You don’t have a teammate, Uncle Tim.”
Pops dismissed him coldly, turning his back to us. “Nah. I’m good,” he said. “I don’t need one.” He scowled as he gripped the surface of the basketball with one hand.
I can tell he forgets he’s not a young man anymore by the quick and heedless way he tries to guard me. When Pops went away, he mostly lifted weights. He ain’t read the Bible and find Jesus or the Quran and become a Muslim like Uncle Bernard. He channeled all that anger and hatred, or at least he tried, in the only way he knew how: physical strength.
Everybody gets old, Grandma always says. Everybody withers. Over the years, the blows Pops throws at me have stung less and less, leaving him to hurt only himself.
I played against Pops like the time I needed to shoot the game point for my school team in the finals. It was anybody’s game until St. Peter’s was up two points in the fourth quarter with only a minute and a half remaining.
We’re counting on you, son! Coach Brown had said, pressing his hand into my shoulder, putting me in the game.
We had home-court advantage, but I would've smoked them on their own lawn, too. Our opponents – rich white boys from Northside– all seemed to have hit their growth spurts the previous summer and ran fancy plays with their fancy gear, but none of it mattered. I floated past them all, dribbling between my legs and crossing those fools like pure music. Everybody was on their feet cheering me on from the stands, including Destiny, who wore bright red cherry lip gloss. After the game, I’d finally asked her to be my girlfriend.
Pops never knew I could play like that. He’d never made it to any of the games.
Our seemingly friendly though uneven game of two-on-one quickly became a full-on street brawl when Pops realized that Cousin Vic and I weren’t going out like two punks. We all played as if we didn’t know each other from anywhere, like there was money on the line—someone’s last dollar at that. When it was Pops’s ball, he led with his shoulders, knocking me out of the way and slamming the ball into the hole and releasing a sonorous roar.
Grandma was in the backyard picking weeds behind the house, so she couldn’t hear all the grunting and hollering. My little sister, Zariah, was playing in the front yard making mud pies out of wet dirt as if nothing was wrong. She has a tendency to do that: pretend like she isn’t uncomfortable when she is. Pops and Cousin Vic were locked into the game so only I noticed her. Although she’s the baby of the family, she can always discern when and when not to speak—which is why she rarely ever got beat. I caught her looking over at me with that concerned face, lowered eyes, furrowed brows—her whole face disgruntled. You okay? her eyes asked, checking on me in our silent language.
“Check up!” Pops yelled.
I gripped the basketball close to my chest before dribbling, my stance wide while my sweat leaked onto the concrete. After a few long breaths, I attempted to force my way back into the imaginary paint. For a minute, I forgot Cousin Vic was even playing; he was more like a referee on the sidelines. Someone no one really hears or respects.
This was between me and Pops now. I never paid attention during Sunday services with Grandma. I was never really moved by the whole experience of people crying, catching the Holy Ghost, and falling out underneath a giant portrait of white Jesus. I didn’t choose my faith and wasn’t all that convinced by any of it, but this moment called for prayer. If God were real, He’d give me the strength to destroy my enemy.
A shot clock blared in my head. I threw the ball so high in the sky that it eclipsed the sun. The darkness cast a looming shadow over Pops’s face. For a moment I was David and he was Goliath—eyeing me like he could knock my head clean off my scrawny shoulders. After releasing the ball, I leaned back into a trust fall with nothing but the ground to catch me. My elbows glided across the hot asphalt as we all watched the ball debate going into the hoop, bouncing in slow motion from one edge of the rim to the other . . . then, finally, it went in.
“AND ONEEEE!!!!!” I screamed out to Cousin Vic. He held his jaw while running in circles up the street, cheering like we’d just won a war.
I didn’t notice Pops’s glasses lying shattered on the asphalt. But then I remembered when I went to take the shot, he’d reached up to block it and somehow my arm connected with his frames. Those glasses were loose as shit anyway, but I knew he would blame me for their destruction. He’s sensitive about people touching his face, deliberately or inadvertently, ever since some dude left him with a gash when he was away—a gash that looked a lot like Mom’s C-section scars that both Zariah and I caused.
Pops snatched up the remains of his glasses like they were an extension of himself, a part that should never be seen undone. I knew he was embarrassed. Not only because of the broken glasses, but because I had shot the winning shot in his face despite our height difference.
He stormed after Cousin Vic first, who only barely escaped his grip. “Get your shit! I’m taking you home!” Within seconds Pops’s car ripped around the corner, disappearing up the hill, leaving me to wait for my punishment when he returned.
Azia Armstead is a writer from Richmond, Virginia. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University where she received the Goldwater Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, The Quarry, Obsidian, Rattle, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
