God's Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Page B

Commoners referred to the Academy gym as the fishbowl. Opponents called it the snake pit. Jim Kinneson, who covered the Common’s home basketball games for the Monitor, sometimes referred to the gym in his articles as the “Coliseum.”
    For home games, Prof allowed the kids at the Academy to carry the pole from which the skeleton of Pliny Templeton was suspended from the science room down to the gym and stand it beside the scorer’s table in the east balcony. Opposing players found the bones disconcerting. In this respect the former headmaster’s yellowing old skeleton gave the Academy team one additional edge. Prof himself had once told the students during a pep rally that all was fair in love, war, and cross-county basketball rivalries.
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    â€œDunk, dunk, dunk!” one hundred Academy kids yelled in unison.
    It was the opening game of the season, with the Common hosting the Landing. The gym was already packed to overflowing as Jim’s cousin Philmore “Crazy” Kinneson led his team onto the court. Jim, now a junior at the Academy, sat next to the scorer’s table in the east balcony. He knew that Crazy wouldn’t dunk the ball. Not just for show in the pregame warm-ups, anyway. Whatever else Crazy might be, he was no show-off.
    Crazy’s parents had died when he was a small boy, and he lived with his uncle, Punk Kinneson, the local dumpkeeper. About him at all times hung the acrid whiff of the dump fires that burned day and night year-round. Some of his classmates called him Smoky. At away games, fans taunted him with the name Goldilocks because of his bright yellow hair, which he wore long and tied back in a ponytail during the games. Most Commoners called him Crazy.
    Not unusually skillful at other sports, with a basketball in his hands Jim’s cousin was a magician. At five eleven he was rarely the tallest player on the court, but he had the build of a lumberjack and could leap like a catamount. Though his hands were as large and callused as a farmer’s, Crazy had the softest shooting touch Jim had ever seen. His gently spinning jump shot fell through the net like a bird in flight settling into its nest.
    On the court Crazy seemed to have a sixth sense. When an errant shot went up, he instantly divined the precise angle of the rebound. On defense his powers of anticipation were unequaled. You’d swear he knew where opponents intended to pass before they did. He’d spring out of nowhere to intercept the ball, then it was off to the races as he led the Academy’s fast break down the floor, his golden ponytail flying.
    A year ago the Harlem Globetrotters had come to Kingdom Common on their barnstorming tour. The Globetrotters had played an exhibition game against the local men’s town team and the townies had recruited Crazy to play for them. Early on in the game Crazy’d begun to mimic the moves of the Trotters’ star, Goose Tatum. If Goose bounced in a shot off the floor from fifteen feet away from the basket, so did Crazy. Goose shot free throws blindfolded and over his shoulder, passed the ball behind his back to himself off the clanging tin backboards. Crazy followed suit. Jim had gotten his best newspaper story to date out of the evening.
    At the same time, some Commoners were a little afraid of Jim’s cousin. He liked to walk through the village cemetery late at night; no one knew why. He referred to himself in the third person and was something of a gadfly. “Crazy wonders when you’re going to start writing real stories, Jim,” he said when Jim’s Globetrotter piece appeared in the paper. He braced adults, as well. After Jim’s father wrote an editorial excoriating both the Common and the Landing for voting down the bond issue for a much-needed new central school, Crazy buttonholed the editor on the sidewalk outside the Monitor . “Ah, Cousin Charles, my good man,” he said.