He stopped at the edge of the light. He looked up at the crate. He looked at the Hollister wall behind it, with its bellies and its patches and its rusted bracket. He looked at me.
"That's it?" he said. "That's what you practice on?"
"That's it."
"It's a milk crate."
"It's a Stewart's crate. Orange. Dombrowski asked the same thing."
He made a noise that might have been a laugh. Then he held out his hands, and I tossed him the ball, and he looked at it, a scabby old Spalding I'd been using since my Voit died, and then he looked up at the crate and shot. It was a good-looking shot. It would have gone in at Lansing Hill. It hit the cracked low front corner of the crate with a buzz and dropped dead, straight down, and I was standing exactly where it dropped, and I caught it, and threw it back to him.
He shot again. It clipped the bowed left side and kicked hard right. I was waiting by the dumpster. I threw it back.
He shot six times. He made none. I caught all six. On the seventh, the ball hit the roofing nail and spun off sideways like a bird, left, high, and came toward him from exactly the wrong place, and he turned his head too far, and I said, "Left," and he ducked, and it went past him and hit the Hollister wall and came back to me on two hops.
He stood there breathing. The steam came out of him in a long white plume.
"My mom told you," he said.
"She told me not to tell anybody. I haven't."
"Not even the nerd? The kid with the clipboard?"
"His name is Petey. And he figured it out himself. He's not going to tell."
Brent nodded at the ground. He took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his face with them, and then he said, "Okay," and then he told me.
He'd been fourteen. It was the driveway, the same drill. His father had started it when Brent was nine, after Brent cried in a Biddy Basketball game in Cohoes because a bigger kid elbowed him. Every night, a rack of balls. You catch them or they hit you. It's how you learn to have hands. That was how Gil Callahan had learned, from his own father, on a dirt court behind a gas station in Watervliet, and Gil had gone on to start three years at