Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan Read Free Book Online

deserved—they’d become fundamental to my aspiration. She herself was a person and not a symbol, but the relics of her childhood, her Italian swimwear catalogs and her damp upper lip, those belonged to everyone who grew up in a nowhere junction town dreaming our erotic, limited, and endless American dreams.
    In the half-light of the dining room, she stood silent with the phone at her ear, a fading amusement on her face. When she saw me, she dropped the phone an inch or two and looked at me with her expression suspended halfway into apology. She had seen what was on my face and it had made her wary.
    I stood near and she did not step back and I took her upheld wrist and moved it away. I put my hand through her hair, around her ear where the flower was. Her eyes were very large, she was frightened, and I kissed her. Her mouth was so small a careless man could miss it. I tested the pull of her lips; they were not so loose as I had thought. She did not respond, nor pull away, and after what must have been at most five seconds I leaned back and took the flower slowly from her ear.
    She hadn’t put down the phone, and as she felt the flower go she resumed the conversation as though she’d been pulled away from it only a moment by some trifling necessity.
    â€œYou’re kidding,” she said into the phone. “What?” She looked slightly shaken, but she smiled at me a little, chidingly. Then she turned away.
    I was on my way out when I heard him dribbling. I knew he’d been around somewhere. It was a low, flat sound, and when the ball struck there was a finality to it, like each time was the last time it would ever land. I stopped in the hall and waited to hear the sound again.
    When it came, I took my cup out across the patio and onto the narrow paved path toward the court. One half of the court was bright with floodlights, but the lit key stood empty. At first I thought he was chasing an errant ball into the murk, but I heard the ball go through the far net twice and he didn’t appear. He was playing on the dark half.
    I laid down the cup and crept around the spill of light to the near corner. I crouched a moment with my fingers resting in the mesh of the fence. He must have been so focused inward I needn’t have bothered being afraid he’d see me. Even before I could see him, I knew he was trying to figure something out about himself, testing his first step—I could hear the asphalt grind as he pivoted and then tried to explode. He always took one dribble, and it was the loudest sound. He’d lay up and then catch the ball out of the net and walk back slowly and go again. The calm of this walk unsettled me—it was like he was taking his time to get feedback from all his sinews and nerves.
    After a couple dozen drives, he stopped and I heard the ball slam down with what seemed a satisfied sound. I could see him dimly then, the ball under his foot, and he raised his arms and detached something from himself and it sailed toward me and fluttered to the ground. I caught the smell of sweat then, and it threw me. I’d never smelled his sweat before. It smelled the same as mine, and this offended me. Until they get televisions that smell, ballers are people who have pure water running off them as a byproduct of their elegance, and sweat is the thing the rest of us make as we feel ourselves fall short. Sweat was what came off our slick freckly skin and hung in our ugly socks as we breathed hard in endless games of three-on-three in decrepit gyms while our women looked sadly on as our layups rolled off. Calyph smelled harsh as a wet woman does, to shame the hopes of small men who wish for a perfect world where everything good is fragrant.
    With his shirt off, he rippled and glistened in the moon, and I began to feel uneasy. He broke from the rigidity of his drills, and just shot around, and I saw the contour of him, and tried to make out his tattoos. Really it’s white people