Page 147 of The Locker Room
keeping it to himself. He wasn"t going to smack poor Malloy down for
loving the same thing that had given him Chris in the first place.
“You really want to see the win, don"t you?” he asked quietly—but
he felt the question, deep down in his heart.
“Boy….” Malloy straightened up and looked away. “See, I was in
my thirties when this team came to town. I was trying to finish nursing
school, because they didn"t have a sports medicine degree or a
physician"s assistant degree then. There was just two-year nurse and
four-year nurse, and I was going for four years because, dammit, I
wanted to be on thefloor.I"d blown off my college education for this
game, and I"d do it again, and now I just wanted a chance for it again.
But this town? This is a weird sort of place, man. About twenty miles up
the road you"ve got rich white people living on converted farmland.
Down here, you"ve got a mix of people, and out here, with the Arena?
Twenty years ago, this was a coyote"s toilet. So you"ve got all these
people, all these different people, and it"s like they"ve got the worst of
being poor—they"ve got the ghetto poor and the redneck poor, and a
town full of dirty politicians. About the one thing they"ve got that holds
them all together is this goddamned basketball team.”
“I remember,” Xander said, swallowing hard. He remembered
being a kid, living in that shitty apartment, and living and dying with the
Sacramento Kings. He remembered the night they"d lost the playoffs to
the Lakers—not in truth, but in spirit—the whole night had been cursed
between the terrible calls and the freak three-point shot by Robert Horry.
The Locker Room 127
Jesus… Chris had been in tears. Xander had needed to take him out to
the hoop in front of the garage and play one-on-one, just to make him
feel better. It had been before their first breathless kiss, and the only
thing between them had been their desperate need to make the ball sweep
through the net, and their joy of moving their bodies, sweating in the late
