as slowly as the ball suspended in the air. Suddenly, one man broke the spell and moved more quickly than the rest. He took off his hat, dropped it on the ground, stomped his foot firmly on top of it and walked off the court to talk to the three sitting against the wall. He gestured easily and slapped the hand of the young man with the beard and the deep-set eyes she’d seen on the street. She thought, “They all move like Sunday morning.” Easy like her uncle Lucky’s voice sounded when he drove her around in his loping ninety-eight, like she remembered watching the trees move from the front porch down in Greenville on a thick summer night full of her great-uncle Clem’s music and the electrified skeletal glow from thunderstorms in the distance. The South. Everyone in the alley laughed at something the woman sitting on the ground said and the basketball player bowed to her and ceremoniously removed the hat he didn’t have on down to his waist and back to his head as he straightened up.
“Jesus,” Ndiya thought, “they’re all high? All of them? Always were? Lucky, Clem, those splayed-out pecan trees too? Southern thunder is high? Even the ball’s high?” Normally, stopping to look at anything in an unfamiliar neighborhood like this was out of the question. The trick was to stare twenty miles off and always, always, look like you had somewhere to go and not quite enough time to get there. At the same time, you never made a rushed or sudden move. Ndiya realized she’d just broken all the rules at once. She was soaking wet up to her knees, in high heels, starstruck still and staring, blind to everything else, at the slow-motion scene down the alley, a scene no one else on the block seemed to think noteworthy at all. “Here I am,” she thought, “an easy mark, an open wound.”
The player went back to the game. He slowed down as he returned to the court, making exaggerated motions with his arms and hips so that it looked like he was wading out into deepening water when he crossed under the lights at the court’s perimeter line. He waded back to his hat and the player dancing in place behind it. He picked up the hat, put it on, and resumed his movements with what, just then, looked like his dance partner in the area just to the right of the hoop.
As she watched the other players, Ndiya wished she’d paid closer attention to basketball once or twice so she could judge what was going on here. They clapped their soundless hands, rubbed them together and held them out, palms up, at arm’s length so that they looked, from the waist up at least, like they were about to meditate. One knelt down low as if to pray, then untied and retied both his shoestrings. One swayed back and forth, holding on to the pole beneath the hoop. Ndiya thought she saw one kiss the neck of the player in front of him. Another, off to the far left by himself, stood in place watching the ball while his right hand worked its way into his back jeans pocket. He removed a pack of cigarettes while his left hand produced a lighter. The decidedly unathletic gesture made her notice that none of them had on gym clothes of any kind, though a few at least wore sneakers. Then she checked quick to make sure the gym shoes weren’t all the same like the black Nikes of those crazy Comet Hale-Bopp folks who’d followed that comet up out of here a few years ago. Nope.
The smoking player held both arms extended straight out to either side. His lighted lighter in one hand, glowing cigarette pointed upward and pivoting to follow the movement of the ball in the other. Obscured by her angle of view, Ndiya saw the flame and the glow from the tip of his cigarette while the rapt, stationary player traced the flight of the shot as it moved beyond the apex and began to pick up speed. It looked as if something impeding the ball’s progress had been removed from in front and placed behind to push it on its way toward the rim of the hoop which, Nydia now noticed, had a long net of tinsel stars and sequins hanging down from it. She’d seen basketball courts. She’d never seen one with the net hanging down almost halfway to the ground. This hoop looked more like one of those West African crowns worn by kings to obscure their human faces while they performed supposedly divine duties.
Most of the courts she remembered in Chicago either had chain nets or no nets at all. Her brothers had always had their own nets that they took with them and brought home when they were done. Just then it dawned on her that the net-thing had something to do with the question of touch. Her brothers had always discussed “touch” like it was some mystical attribute possessed only by gurus. She didn’t know what that was about, but she knew her brothers sometimes had to fight in order to leave the park and take their nets with them. For a few summers, they and their friends had talked about it ceaselessly, as if it was an issue they should submit to the UN. Finally, she asked them what they needed nets for anyway and they all turned to her at once and froze. Six boys with exactly the same look on their faces, and no one moved and no one said anything. She turned and walked away, at which point the cursing and revenge plotting resumed.
■
Ndiya stood there revising what she knew about the physics of basketball and thinking how none of this strangeness boded well for her evening. One of the old men on the picnic table turned around and yelled, apparently at her,
–Miss, would you mind and please tell Mrs. Clara to tell Melvin that a shot’s about to go in?
Exactly then the other old man interjected,
–No it’s not!
He didn’t take his eyes off the nearly stationary ball. The first man turned to him:
–Yes it is!
Then he turned back to her:
–Would you mind and see does the boy want to come and watch?
And she did. She minded. It seemed like it’d been two lifetimes since she’d minded someone. She minded him back up the block feeling like she was moving on a sidewalk that was itself moving almost fast enough to get back to where she came from if she kept on minding. She hadn’t even thought about which way to go or to make sure she knew who Mrs. Clara and Melvin were. She was just minding.
When she reached the old woman and the tsunami boy, they were packing up the yarn and needles and boats. Ndiya mustered,
–Ma’am, Mrs. Clara, ma’am, the gentleman down the, er, down the alley, I mean in the park?, a gentleman down there would like to know does little Melvin here want to come and see the, ah, the shot go in, or, or not?
Mrs. Clara looked up at Ndiya as if they’d known each other for life:
–You hear that, Melvin? Now go on. This nice young lady, what’s your name honey?
–Ndiya, my name’s Ndiya, ma’am.
–Yes, yes, I see. Well, Melvin, you go on with Miss Kneed-in-the … you just go on and see does the shot make it in the net tonight or doesn’t it, OK?
Mrs. Clara handed Ndiya a small backpack. Melvin moved his goggles up to stick above his eyebrows, this pushed down his brow and seemed to make his whole face frown.
–OK, Nana.
Then he raised up his hand and, taking Ndiya’s:
–Let’s go!
Ndiya turned, holding little Melvin’s hand. She heard Mrs. Clara charge,
–You mind now, Melvin, you hear?
And so, Melvin minding Mrs. Clara to mind Ndiya minding an old man on a picnic table, the both of them sloshed and squashed back to the opening of the alley and up to where the two old men sat concentrating on the shot.
–You all just made it, won’t be a minute—
At which point the other old man said,
–Bet it will!
And
