Joe Kraus

They should’ve beat Riverside in the playoffs, but Phil couldn’t get a shot off with the two wings rotating on him. He’d had someone face-guarding him the whole game while Kelly sat in street clothes watching from the bleachers. They’d been a two-man offense all season and come through league play with just the one loss, but Phil couldn’t carry the load without Kelly, and they went down by double digits.

One F, one goddam F on an assignment that was bullshit to start with – who needed to know the difference between ventricles and atriums and whatever the fuck arteriosclerosis was – and Mr. Cargill declared Kelly ineligible. Ballgame over. Season over. High school over as soon as they ticked off eight more weeks of showing up and sleeping through the first two periods in the back row.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” they’d learned when they talked through that Poe story in English with Mr. Price, the student teacher. When they walked out of Cargill’s class that Monday, Kelly said – and Phil knew he was going to say it before he spoke – “After graduation, Philly boy, we got some cooking to do.”

That first weekend in June, when the dealers opened the big outdoor fireworks tents, they drove to the state line. They asked the guy in the orange shirt for the most powerful explosives he had, and he grinned. “You boys gotta be 21 before you can get a license for the really big stuff.” But, he implied, nothing was stopping them from lighting off three or four bricks of 50 thundersticks at a time. “That’s a lot of noise.” He smiled as he rang them up.

Cargill’s address wasn’t hard to find. Google told them he was 67 years old, voted Democrat, and lived in Northeast on Willard in a red brick house on a tiny lot.

They were sitting on the lower bunk in Phil’s room, working off the laptop with the broken M-key that his folks had told him wasn’t worth replacing unless he changed his mind about community college. Phil got serious for a minute, even though he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. “You really wanna do this? He’s just a fuckin’ old man now, and we don’t have to go back to that school ever again.”

Kelly simmered. “You were in the game. You got to play. I sat there and watched six years of dreaming about senior states go down. Hell, yeah. That old man’s got to pay.”

That night, they waited until 2 a.m. They parked across the street for ten minutes in case their headlights had caught someone’s attention. Then Kelly, leaving the car door open, slipped two bricks into Cargill’s mailbox, lit the fuse, closed the box, and dove back for the car. They were already moving when the explosion came.

From the rear-view mirror, they saw the front door swing open, and a pajamaed old man with tousled hair look out. He held the collar of a dog straining to run away.

They waited an extra day before swinging by to check out the damage. They drove slowly without stopping. The front of the mailbox was blown off, and the flag dangled upside down.

Phil laughed, “Looks like we got him good.”

Kelly said, “Maybe not good enough.”

Summer started, and Phil got a job on the register at the Giant Eagle on Market. Kelly caught on with his cousin’s pool cleaning service, and the guys watched clocks that seemed to move more slowly the later in the day it got.

No matter how tired they were, they got together every night for pick-up on the courts behind the middle school unless they heard about a game across town or somewhere in Akron or Canton. Sometimes they got split up to even the sides, but they stayed together whenever they could. And they kicked ass.

“Special” wasn’t a word Phil heard often about himself, but the more they played, the more he confirmed that he and Kelly had something special on the basketball court. Neither had found it with anyone else, a way of moving without the ball right to where the other guy knew he’d be.

Phil had a sweet-arc midrange that he released so high it would take someone 6′ 8″ or taller to block. And Kelly worked a crossover that broke defenders’ ankles. Both could drive to the hoop, and they’d drilled all the summer before from three-point. On defense, they didn’t even have to call switches. It was intuitive; one would pick up the other’s man even before he got screened off.

The rest of the week, in their separate go-nowhere jobs, not so much. Kelly couldn’t get rid of the chlorine smell no matter how long he showered, and Phil got tired of telling old ladies their coupons had expired.

Worse, it dawned on Phil that, for the first time, summer wasn’t going to end. Sure, the weather would change, but when school started up again in the fall, they’d keep doing what they were doing, or something just like it. No more school meant no more basketball – at least not the kind anyone would go to watch.

One night in late July, watching the sun go down in their sweaty shirts and splitting a six-pack at a picnic table, Phil owned up to it. “So, I registered at the community college yesterday. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Not from the job. Not from my folks.”

Kelly shook his head.

“Worse,” Phil confessed. “It’s night classes. I can still play on weekends, but, you know, not so much.”

Instead of speaking, Kelly took their ball and dribbled to the court. He pulled up from the three-point line and drained a shot. The ball bounced back at him from the net, and he took another. And another. He hit seven of ten.

Then, still without a word, he rolled the ball back to Phil and walked to his car.

Two nights later, at the same picnic table, Phil listened as Kelly told him he’d been reading about pipe bombs on the internet. You could make one, he said, by cutting up the “candy ass” firecrackers they’d bought from the dealer. Stuff them in a 4-inch length of PVC, drill a wick, cement the end caps on, and you were good to go. With Cargill’s mailbox 80 feet from his front door, no one would get hurt. Just scared.

“Just one more time,” he said. “Let’s run the play one more time.”

Phil had known something like that was coming, had known from the moment he let his folks talk him into enrolling.  If there was one thing he knew he could do, it was read Kelly.

Phil didn’t want anything to do with making the bomb, though. “I heard about a kid blew off his thumb messing with that shit,” he said, but a week later, he drove up to Kelly’s house in the middle of the night, and he brought what was left of his own stash of fireworks. He waited a few minutes by himself, the car idling and listening to ’QMX on low.

He tried thinking of things he might say when Kelly got to the car. He didn’t want to go to college, but he had no clue what else to do. They’d made them sit through all those years of school – made them listen to people like Cargill until they heard his voice in their sleep – but no one ever seemed to listen to them.

He remembered sixth grade, that first time the school had brought them together as a team and issued uniforms. They’d been pretty good from the start – he and Kelly in particular – but that had mattered less than the way they’d felt part of something.

One night, late in that kid-season, the high school varsity coach arranged for them to play a five-minute scrimmage at halftime in the big gym. There’d been 200 or so people there to cheer on the varsity, and Phil let himself look around.

He felt like those people were waiting on him, waiting for him to be one of those seniors they could believe in, and he felt the echo of that glimpse for the next six years. He and Kelly were supposed to do something for the town. Everyone recognized that, but no one named it.

And he and Kelly had heard that message. No one watched when they practiced their shots until it got too dark to see. No one knew how late they stayed, forcing themselves to drive to the basket over and over. They pushed past exhaustion, refusing to go home until, with the ball so heavy that it hurt to lift it, they each hit five straight free throws.

No one watched, but they imagined them watching. They practiced for themselves, but they dreamed of the recognition, of what it would mean when they got their chance to shine. It had all come together senior year with depth from their class and a promising sophomore center, and they’d been the top seeds in the district tournament.

Then it was over. All of it. Maybe they’d have advanced in states if they’d had Kelly, maybe not. Maybe it was Cargill’s fault, maybe not. But it felt unfinished. The world had told them they had something important to do, and then it hadn’t let them do it.

“Game time,” Kelly said when he slid into the car. Then he shut the door, quietly, to avoid waking anyone up.

Phil parked two houses down from Cargill’s, but he left the engine running as Kelly, wearing black with his ball cap pulled low, slipped out. He left the window down in case Kelly’d have to dive through for a quick getaway.

Kelly had to click the lighter several times, and then it wasn’t clear whether the wick had caught. Then Phil thought he saw a spark, and Kelly threw the bomb into the mailbox. Kelly ran most of the way back to the car but stopped short, waiting, it seemed, for an explosion that hadn’t come.

Phil pulled out his own lighter and reached for the brick of fireworks in the car next to him. Maybe, he thought, they’d have to switch to Plan B.

Kelly took a few steps back toward the mailbox.

For an instant, nothing.

Then, thunder.

Phil felt the sound even more than he heard it. It hit him like running into a pick he hadn’t seen the other player set, that concussive force that started in the chest and traveled up the neck. His head bounced off the headrest.

The mailbox swallowed whatever flash there might have been, but after that it shrapneled in all directions. A piece shaped like a bat’s wing struck the windshield.

Kelly, standing in front of the car, fell backward across the hood and then slid to the sidewalk.

There was a silence, loud almost in the wake of the bomb’s blast. Then Kelly groaned and started to pull himself up.

Phil checked his impulse to get out of the car to help him. They had to roll as fast as possible, so he waited for Kelly to make his move. He clicked his lighter to hurry time.

Before Kelly could get back to his feet, Cargill’s front door flew open. With the light from the house shining behind him, the old man looked more like a shadow than a person.

He yelled out. “I’m calling the cops, buddy. And don’t think I don’t know who you are.” He fumbled with a cell phone, maybe to turn on the flashlight and maybe to make the call.

“It’s you, Coughlin. Right?”

At that moment, the dog bolted past him into the yard. Phil couldn’t tell whether it was running in terror from the noise or coming for them. Either way, it forced Kelly into a defensive crouch. Not quite thinking, Phil picked up the brick of fireworks.

Cargill ran after the dog, sprinting faster than was healthy for an old man who’d been sleeping two minutes before. He was steps away when Kelly managed to slam the car door.

Phil thought for a second Cargill might jump into the road to try to block them. He clicked his lighter, this time with purpose, and touched it to the wick of the brick he’d been holding. In the same instant, he started the car forward.

He handed the lit fireworks over, knowing Kelly would hurl them out the window. He knew because he and Kelly always had that something special, that way of anticipating the pass to get open for the shot.

And Kelly took the shot, tossing the fireworks as they pulled away, just as Cargill swiped pointlessly at the car moving past him.

A brick of 50 thundersticks doesn’t go off all at once. The pops build on each other, cracking like gunshots.

As they pulled away, they looked back and saw Cargill. First, he stood up straight, spinning and bewildered, trying to make sense of the car’s movement, the dog’s terror, and the machine-gun quality of the fireworks.

Then he brought his arm in, clasping his chest. He went down to one knee and spilled to the grass on his neighbor’s yard. The last they could see of him, he lay flat and motionless.

The newspaper called it a heart attack. A surviving sister said he’d had a bypass a year earlier. She also said they’d put together a GoFundMe to raise money for a reward for information on who’d terrorized him. “He was looking forward to one, maybe two more years of teaching,” the paper quoted her. “After that, he’d saved up to move to Florida.”

The cops never solved the case, of course. They didn’t have much to go on, and no one had seen anything. Mischief gone too far, tragically far, they decided.

Phil drove home that night with the controlled adrenaline rush of a slim lead going into the final minutes of a game. He hadn’t known then that Cargill would die, but he suspected it from the way the man had fallen.

The next few weeks were all about defensive intensity. He didn’t let on that anything was different, and he knew he could trust Kelly the same way. When they met each night for basketball, they said more to each other with a wordless high-five than either said to anyone else all week.

Phil found himself thinking about Cargill less and less often. He’d had a nightmare or two early – seeing the man spin and then fall – but those stopped. In their place, he found a sense of having completed something. It was like a giant checkmark next to the unfinished business of growing up and answering what the town had been asking of him.

He didn’t think anyone had urged him and Kelly toward murder. For that matter, he found he didn’t think of it as murder, just an accident that he and Kelly both knew they had to keep their names away from. Rather, he sensed those people in the bleachers had wanted them to do something memorable with that special connection of theirs.

And they had done something special, Phil felt. Maybe no one else knew it, but he did. And Kelly knew what he knew. Because that’s who they always were.

Bio

Joe Kraus teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Scranton. He is the author of The Kosher Capones (Northern Illinois UP, 2019) and co-author of An Accidental Anarchist, (Chicago Review Press, 2004) which served as a basis for Aleksandar Hemon’s National Book Award finalist The Lazarus Project. He’s had his creative work published, among other places, in The American Scholar, Oleander Review, Riverteeth, and Baltimore Review. He has also won a 2004 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial poetry prize, the 2008 Moment Magazine/Karma Foundation Prize for short fiction, and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2010 by Southern Humanities Review and in 2019 by Under the Sun.