Kameleon Man. Kim Barry Brunhuber

      The court at St. Anthony’s always seems hot, even in October. It’s small, roughly paved, between the church parking lot and a small field where people from the apartment buildings surrounding the church walk their dogs when the weather’s nice. Both basket rims are bent, and only the one by the parking lot has mesh. The steel mesh gleams like barbed wire if it’s hot enough. Last week Willie, a tall Haitian, ripped two of his fingers badly and needed stitches after he tried to dunk.

      The lines on the court might have been yellow once, and there’s a free throw line at each end that no one can see anymore. The asphalt is pitted like an asteroid. Apparently one of the bigger craters snapped a boy’s ankle the previous summer. The players complained to the people who run the church. They listened and nodded gravely, but the holes were never fixed. Recently they replaced the nylon mesh with steel and raised the rims an extra foot after the poor kids from the apartment buildings started playing there, fought with the Sunday School children, and ripped down the mesh and bent the rims. But the higher rims and the steel mesh don’t seem to help. The kids who can jump and are tall enough still dunk, and one mesh is still missing and both rims are still bent. Augustus, who goes to St. Anthony’s, says the church officials are always talking about tearing up the court and turning it into a parking lot, but they can never quite justify the cost of having the baskets taken out and the court repaved just to add ten parking spaces or so, though the vote’s always close.

      It’s still early—the white kids are the only ones here, shooting jump shots and practising free throws at one end. They’re always here first, despite strict warnings from their parents who usually live in the big houses with pools across from the Pavilion. The richer kids are very white, except when they get red, and always seem to wear Boston Celtics or Indiana Pacers or sometimes Detroit Pistons shirts and shorts, and are usually good shooters, and are always picked last. I still can’t figure out why they come to St. Anthony’s to play—they all have expensive metal hoops mounted in their driveways. Most of the poor kids around here have no choice.

      “Yo, pass the pumpkin,” Crispen says, swizzling a toothpick. Augustus tosses him the ball, and the three of them start knocking down shots on the one rim with mesh. It swishes like a metal skirt. I try a few halfhearted lay-ups, but after working out, lifting the ball is like lifting the sun.

      Four Haitians are shooting at the far rim, which has no mesh at all. It’s hard to tell if anyone’s hitting a shot; the only giveaway is an occasional ”Merde!” after an air ball.

      Soon the Jamaicans trickle in, still yawning and talking about the night before. The Jamaicans own the court after school. They drift in from the apartments at about five o’clock and call, “I got gyeme!” Usually everyone eventually lets them have the first game, except other Jamaicans or some of the feistier Haitians, and sometimes there are fights. Most of the Jamaicans know one another and rarely scrap among themselves, except the short, stocky one, who battles everyone.

      Now the Jamaicans have their track pants off, their beepers and cell phones stored in knapsacks or handed to girlfriends on the sidelines, and one of them shouts, “We got five. ’Oos runnin’?”

      “We have four,” Crispen says, counting us off. “Me, Breff, Biggs. Stace, you in?”

      “You need me?”

      “With you we have four.” He turns to the Jamaicans. “We have four. Let’s go four-on-four.”

      The tall one shakes his head. “We got five. We called game. Get one more.”

      Crispen turns to the four Haitians, who are changing on the sidelines by the picnic table. “Yo, we need one. We have four.”

      “We have four. You can run wit’ us.”

      Crispen shakes his head, still chewing his toothpick, and walks back. “What about that guy?” he asks, pointing to a black teenager shooting by himself at the other end.

      The teenager’s black, but different from the rest of us: bushy hair, flat face, purplish lips. A Somalian—a distant cousin of the Africans I see every Sunday morning on the famine relief shows. He’s wearing baggy knee-length shorts, and a wrinkled Chicago Bulls T-shirt that fits him like plastic wrap. It reminds me of the shirt that was always crumpled at the bottom of the lost-and-found box in elementary school, the shirt that never belonged to anyone.

      “The Somalian?” Augustus asks, pronouncing the word Smellian. “ You think he can play?”

      I’ve seen Somalians play soccer before in the park, their black tent-pole legs thumping the ball to and fro with surprising force, while their families sit on brightly coloured blankets and feed pigeons. But I’ve never seen one play ball before.

      “Doesn’t matter,” Crispen says. “He’s here and we need one more. Stace, go ask.”