Tilt - Alan Cumyn [1]
Then he limped over to the spot on the fence where the girl had disappeared just minutes before. He pulled himself up the chain link. There was even a space in the rusty barbed wire that he could see would be almost easy to slither through. He peered into the darkness through the leaves.
She had just arrived late last year. It must have been hard for her coming into the school knowing nobody. Especially with a name like Igwash.
He was gazing across a backyard. Janine’s? A light snapped on in an upstairs bedroom. Someone’s shadow against the curtains. Spiky hair. Maybe she was about to undress, her silhouette black against the white screen. It was hard to see through the leaves, but it sure looked like she was tugging at her shirt.
He climbed down. His knee felt better. He snapped a few high kicks without the broom handle, then punched the air six times rapid-fire, a quick exhalation with each strike. Then he retrieved the basketball again and let loose a turnaround jumper without looking, entirely by feel. The ball hit the back of the rim, then the front, then the back, then spun out and bounced, the sound echoing down the dark alley.
The perfect jump shot begins in the soles of the feet. It moves like a wave through the calves and the thighs up to the hips and along the spine to the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand and out the fingertips, a natural stroke as at ease in the universe as an ocean wave that curls and falls. Easier than breathing. Truer than thought.
Stan liked that. Truer than thought. He bounced the ball seven more times, pounding a single word into his brain — starter, starter, starter — then glanced again through the darkness at what he thought might be Janine Igwash’s bedroom window.
—
Home in darkness. Stan turned on the porch light as he slid past the squeaky screen door.
“Mom?” He kicked off his sneakers, left them with his basketball and broomstick in the hall closet. The kitchen was dark, too. “Mom?”
She was sitting in the den with three remotes on her lap and a glass of wine on the telephone table. The TV was dark. As soon as he entered, she thrust the remotes aside and picked up her wine glass. A binder lay open at her feet and the room smelled like work — like the worry of it.
She snapped it shut, as if she didn’t want him to see something.
Budget Contingencies, the binder said.
“These two,” Stan said, picking up the gray remote and the fat black one, “you never need to touch. Just leave them in the cabinet. Maybe I should label them?”
“How was your day, sweetie?” The red wine left a small line on top of her lipstick that he wished she would wipe off.
“The only one you need to use is this one.” He held the skinny gray remote in front of her eyes at a reasonable focal distance. “And the only button you need to press is this one.” He showed her the AUX button. Then he pressed it. Nothing. “Unless somebody has been hitting buttons randomly. Then you have to press the Satellite button.”
She pretended to be watching. “Did you get something to eat?”
“I had the chicken salad, and I fed Lily, too. This button here. It says ‘satellite.’ We only have to press that once in our lives, then never again. The remote remembers.”
His mother picked up the binder and began to flip through densely printed pages.
“The remote remembers,” he said again, in case it might make a difference. He pressed the Auxiliary button and the TV sprang to life. A couple danced frantically in feathered spandex.
“There’s nothing on anyway,” she said. “I was just waiting for Gary.”
Gary, Gary, Gary. Stan turned off the dancers. He picked up the two extra remotes and put them in the back of the TV cabinet.
“Is he coming over or something?” It was hard to keep the curdle from his voice.
“He said he was going to call. I’m not going out. I have an eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” Stan’s mother finished her wine and sat in her very still way, as if inviting the mossy green of the sofa to slowly take her over. Her hand remained on the binder, but her eyes were glassy with fatigue.
Stan walked into the kitchen and performed