The Park
I HAD TO make my last shot.
Like a lot of basketball players, and jocks in general, I'm superstitious. Leaving with a miss was setting a bad precedent, like letting a guy know you liked him before you were sure he liked you, which my best friend Bailey says is a no-no. She's always had a boyfriend, so she'd know better than me.
So, I couldn't just put in a layup or a short jumper to finish the practice session. My final shots all came from outside of twenty feet.
Now in a gym setting, I could hit three out of four from long range. But I was about half that good on my outdoor court. The wind off the river made sure of that.
The court is actually not mine – it's not on my family's property or anything. We don't live on what you'd call normal property, like in a suburban neighborhood. We live on the water.
It's just me and Dad, aboard a houseboat floating on a slough off the Columbia River. The big waters of the river are only a quarter mile away, on the other side of Caterpillar Island.
Anyway, my basketball court is a mile away at a Frenchman's Bar Park. Sort of a famous park, and not because a Frenchman named Paul Haury jumped ship up north and bought the land here in 1915. No, some money from probably the most famous robbery in history was found in Frenchman's Bar. I've probably spent more time in the park than anyone, including the folks who search for cash. It makes me laugh when I see the occasional idiot haul a metal detector out of a car and head to the woods. I mean, it was a hijack-robbery! D.B. Cooper had paper bills, not coins!
Now that the season's only a few weeks away, I was working hard on my game. I felt ready for my star turn. Five seniors graduated from the team last year, and this year only one senior – Marilyn Regent – would be going out. Marilyn's pretty good, but I was the only returning starter.
I was excited and scared. Last year was weird because of the pandemic. We only played fourteen regular season games because teams had to cancel when someone tested positive. And while the mask didn’t bother me much when we went back to school in the spring, playing with it was really annoying.
I knew Coach Roybal was expecting a lot from me. We made State last year, but weren't expected to this year, not after the mass senior exodus. So far I'd handled pressure pretty well. Not that I had a lot applied to me. I knew that would be different in a few weeks.
I looked over the river to the beaches on the Oregon side. I've always liked the scenery here, though it does distract me sometimes. The park is about nine miles from downtown Vancouver, at the point where the Columbia curves north after its long westward journey through the Cascades. Freighters anchor here for some reason. Talk about a hazard to navigation. They travel from Russia, China, Korea and other foreign countries. Seems like a long way to come to park in a river.
Even though they're huge, the crews are pretty small on those things, from what I've heard. And some of these crewmen have definitely been at sea too long. More than a few times when I've been shooting around, I've spotted the wink of binoculars from a pilot house. I don't think those dudes are checking out my spin dribble and killer jumper. I guess it's sort of flattering, and I play better with an audience, even if it is a horny Russian.
I drained a shot from the corner, then worked on shooting off the dribble. Like most shooters I'm better off the pass. It's not really a problem, at least against high school competition. But coach says I'll need to get better off the dribble to compete on the Division One level.
It's either a hoops scholarship or junior college for me, because my Dad doesn't have a lot of money. I guess looking at it that way, I already had some pressure on me.
I launched my last shot from the top of the key, and intentionally put a little more oomph on it to compensate for the wind in my face. The ball swished through the basket.
I ran back home, dribbling along the shoulder in the shadow of cedars and cottonwoods that line the west side of the road. There was never much traffic on Lower River Road, which went around the big lake and along the Columbia and led…nowhere. It just ended a few of miles up. There wasn't much out our way, just a few small farms and a marshy, undeveloped area between the river and the lake, maybe two miles across and seven miles long, where hunters stalked deer, coyotes, grouse – pretty much anything that moved.
Every few years that included humans. The hunters always blamed the victims for not wearing orange clothes. Dad would shake his head when he read the news. "Orange or not," he'd say, "you have to be a drunken idiot to mistake a person for an animal."
Dad caught me running along a path in the marsh in the fall when I was twelve and grounded me for a week. He was really shaken up about it, and I promised I wouldn't run or otherwise go there again.
It's been a hard promise to keep. In the fall the trees are all shades of orange, yellow and red, just really gorgeous, and I'd like to walk the trails, sketch the landscapes and take photos. But of course fall is also hunting season, and Dad is right, some idiot hunter might take me out. I could see the headlines: Hoops Star Mistaken for Beast.
Not that I'm beastly to look at. I get a lot of compliments on my wavy auburn hair and dimply smile. Some mean kids at school ignore those features and call me Issy the Barbarian, because I'm six-two and a hundred and seventy pounds. The biggest girl in school...Well, the tallest anyway.
I checked the mail outside the office, then looked at it while walking down the dock. Our houseboat is pretty small, just two bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom, kitchen and living room downstairs. Nautical Dad insists on calling the kitchen the galley and the bathroom the head.
I didn't realize that it was an unusual place to live until about third grade, when I started going over to friends' houses. At first I thought it was weird that none of them lived on houseboats. Eventually it dawned on me that I was the one with the unusual home.
Now I can't imagine living in a regular house. How boring is that?
I spotted our two cats, Tigger and Roo, looking at me out the kitchen window. Loyalty and affection? Or just hungry for dinner? Maybe a combo-meal. I unlocked and they swarmed my legs, circling and purring.
"You two are so transparent," I said as I opened a can of that foul-smelling food they enjoy.
I flopped onto the couch. Watched the dark water drift past, bearing colorful leaves. I love our floating home, but Houseboat Alley, as our neighborhood is known, is considered a ghetto by Oak Bluff standards. Oak Bluff has million dollar homes sprinkled across the hillsides, and even the regular neighborhoods aren't so regular. The houses are still big, much larger than you see in the average neighborhood in Vancouver or Portland.
It's a rich town. And the richer the town, the more mean kids it has.
I came up with that little correlation when I was supposed to be doing Remedial Algebra last year. I thought the teacher should've given me an A for the semester based on that brilliant deduction. But alas, no, I ended up with a D.
I suck at math. On the PSAT I scored in the ninety-eighth percentile for verbal skills and the twenty-sixth percentile for math skills, a differential that my guidance counselor thought might be a national record. I just don't understand numbers and try to avoid them. Even basketball statistics don't interest me much, although of course I like to rack up large digits in points and rebounds.
But it's not about points per game or margin of victory or any kind of number. Basketball is about the way you play the game.
