I heard it. I knew where it was coming down. It was coming down over Brent's left shoulder, high, falling, exactly into the patch of the world that he couldn't see. All I had to do was step around him to the left and wait, and the ball would land in my hands, and he'd stand there looking at nothing while everybody watched, the same way he'd made me sit against the bleachers. Petey was right. I could do it every single day. I could do it on the second shot of every set until Dombrowski wondered out loud what was wrong with his star.
I stepped left. I had my hands up.
And then I said, not loud, just enough for him to hear, "Left. High."
Brent's head came around. Not all the way, the way I'd seen him do it, but a little, a little up, and he found the ball against the lights and went up and pulled it down with both hands, and landed, and turned, and stared at me.
Nobody else heard. Leon maybe. Dombrowski was already throwing the next shot. Brent stood there holding the ball for a second too long, and Dombrowski said, "Callahan, it's a drill, not a still life," and Brent flipped him the ball, and the drill went on. Brent's group won, five to three. I ran the suicide with my two teammates, who weren't happy about it, and when I got back to the baseline Brent was standing in the doorway to the locker room, watching me with an expression I'd never seen on his face. Like a man reading a letter in a language he'd studied once in school and mostly forgotten.
* * *
He came to the alley that Friday night. I don't know how he found it. Later he told me his mother had told him the Kerwin's boy was the laundromat boy, and that he'd driven up and down Second Avenue in his father's demo Camaro until he saw the Suds-O-Rama sign with the second S burned out, and then he'd parked at the curb for twenty minutes trying to make himself get out.
I was under the crate. It was cold, low twenties, and the yellow bulb over the back door made a cone of light with the alley dark at both ends. I'd shoveled out a square of slush around the telephone pole. I heard footsteps on the gravel and turned, and Brent Callahan came walking out of the dark with his hands jammed in the pockets of his varsity jacket and his shoulders up around his ears.