The Duration Read Free

I was engaging these days. And better for it.
    Chick and I had been toddlers on the same short street, only children, quickly inseparable, classmates at Cameron Elementary and altar boys at St. Barney’s from nine until twelve, when that stuff with Bill Trivette came out. Unsie and Jimmer didn’t come along until later, probably around 1995, when we started playing Catholic Youth Council ball. Our coach was a lunatic named George Harvey. He used to wear these cutoff sweatpants that must’ve been twenty years old. He had that big old gut and a big ass and he’d hike those bad boys up so tight that when he’d crouch to bark at us in the drills his nuts would press through the thin fabric of his sweats, right in our faces, like a tennis ball that hangs in your garage to tell you where to stop the car. It was hard for us to focus on what he was saying with his nutsack hung out like that, so we fucked up the drills, which infuriated him, and then we had to run sprints. All because he couldn’t buy a pair of pants that fit. He was old school. One day after practice, Jimmer suggested we just find a way to snip that shit off, free George Harvey from the tether of his nutsack. Solution! He’d be less angry and we’d be less tired. We were still getting to know Jimmer at the time, and weren’t sure if this idea was genius or sociopathic.
    But yeah, George Harvey. He kept sticking me at power forward because I was already tall at the time, and I was like yeah I’m tall but I can handle the ball, I’m like Magic Johnson, put me at the point, but he wouldn’t because his godson played point. You know Jim Flake? Yeah, he was okay but he wasn’t going to get any quicker.
    Chickie was our shooter. He had a stroke that was like half poetry and half automation, a grace note practiced ten thousand times. When he got older, in high school, if we could get him the ball in the right spot, I didn’t even look for a rebound, I just ran back on defense as soon as he rose up. Chick used to let out a little whoop when he shot, until Coach Harvey made him stop, but he wasn’t doing it to be a jerk. It seemed involuntary. Sometimes he whooped whether the ball went in or not. Unsie was our big man until he quit to ski and Jimmer eventually took over the point. Man, we rolled kids. They could not hang. We even rolled the Golacks, up at laconic Misconic. Colonic Misconic. One summer we were playing rec league there and as we’re walking into the gym, the Golacks are outside just glaring at us. Ronnie, Robbie, and their little brother Tim-Rick, who was so nice they named him twice, except he wasn’t nice at all, he was the meanest fucker we’d ever met. And they didn’t like getting whipped. But we whipped them anyway, and then while we were still in the gym, they tried to push our car down an embankment.
    I hadn’t seen Chick in the eight years since my father’s funeral. After high school, my decade had gone college, Dad’s heart attack, law school, semi-engagement. Chick, I gathered, had done a couple of different junior colleges, drifting across the Southwest, then two stints with an international aid and education outfit called SmartSeeds. First one was in Guatemala, digging wells and building schools for Guatemalan kids. I got one postcard. Then the South Pacific, some island kingdom near the nuclear testing atolls where everyone glowed and the babies had twelve fingers. Just about as far away from Gable as it was possible to get. Somewhere in there he’d made it back to stand beside me at the wake. Then he was gone again. I hadn’t really given him more than a passing thought in years. Just knew he was out there somewhere, doing his Chickie things. Everyone was doing their things. Figured we’d get together someday, reconnect, wouldn’t really miss a beat.
    Which seemed to be what was happening.
    I stood on the corner and looked for him, trying to pick him out of the stragglers on Council Street. I wondered if I was sure I’d