But he just looked at me. And then a corner of his mouth went up, and he said, in his father's flat low voice, but he was doing it on purpose now, I could tell, it was a bit, it was the first time I'd ever seen him make fun of it:
"What, 'cause you think you're tough?"
"No," I said. "'Cause I'm the guy who gets the ball back. That's all I am. I see where it's going and I go there. And I can see where you're going, and it's bad."
He didn't answer. After a while he held out his hands again, and I passed him the ball, and he shot at the crate eleven more times, and on the eleventh it went in. Swished through the sawed-off bottom and dropped to the gravel and rolled to my feet.
"How many does that take you," he said, "usually?"
"About one."
"Liar."
"About three," I said, and he laughed, a real laugh, the first one I'd ever heard from him that wasn't at somebody.
* * *
He didn't go to the retina man that week. He played Shaker.
I wasn't going to tell you that part, because it doesn't make him look good, but it's true, and leaving it out would make him look like a saint, which he wasn't, and which would be a worse lie. He played Shaker on the nineteenth of December in front of eleven hundred people and a man from Siena in a camel overcoat sitting in the third row behind our bench next to Gil Callahan, who wore the red blazer and shook hands with everybody who walked by. My mother couldn't come. She'd traded for the Shaker game twice and it had fallen through twice.
Brent scored twenty-two in the first half. He was beautiful. In the third quarter Shaker's center went up for a rebound on the left side and came down with his elbow out, the way centers do, and it caught Brent high on the left side of the face, and Brent went down on the baseline and lay there with both hands over his eye.
The gym got that quiet again. The dish-breaking quiet.
I was off the bench before I knew I was standing. Dombrowski grabbed my jacket. The trainer, a student from Hudson Valley Community College named Kim, ran out with her kit. And from the third row I heard Gil Callahan's voice, louder than everybody, not frightened, not angry, worse than either: cheerful. The voice from the commercials.
"He's fine! He's fine. Shake it off, bud. He's a tough kid."