Tom has laughed at that sort of thinking in the past, and knows James will be angry for the names, and so Tom uses them anyway, trying purposefully to shock his friend, the recipient of those high, arcing passes that led to all those stuffs and happy screams and TV time.
James turns away from Tom and walks over to the window that is to the left of the sliding glass doors. It will be sunset in another two hours. Whistle will come then, just before the Sun goes down.
Whistle will come and then the two of them will watch the orange sky and Whistle will talk of home. The Sun will seem to flatten a bit as it enters the water, and then it will quickly sink. If they are lucky, very lucky, they will see a quick bright flash of green. And then it will be gone. And then they will leave, the chauffeured floater taking them out to the rigs where they’ll board, lift off, and leave. Whistle said it would only take about an hour. Sunset will be about 8:30. By 10:00 James figures he will be on his way. Gone forever.
James turns from the window and shakes his head.
“You’ve got to go, Tommy. Whistle will be here soon. You know she doesn’t like you.”
“I know, I know,” says Tom, smiling. He walks over to his best friend, James, and reaches up to touch his shoulder. Tom nods his head a bit, shakes it ruefully, squeezes the broad, hard collarbone, and says, “I just had to come by and say something, all right? I just had to say it. You mean too much to me, you know. You understand? You mean too much to me.”
Tom leaves.
James cries, gets over it, gets back to packing; the
He stops that nonsense. He rises and looks down at the bag. Quite full.
If he can only get the air out of the ball, he reasons, he can collapse it and take it along. He knows they’ve got air where he’s going, the Pashi breathe it. He can always build a rim and fix up some sort of net. He can always find ten feet high.
He gets the needle in and ten-year-old air hisses out. He looks at the ball as it whistles out the air from ten years back. Tom’s signature is right there where he’s looking, right under James’s own name and the scrawl that says “Kennedy Hawks, State Champs, 1989.”
The ball doesn’t flatten the way James hoped it would. Funny, but then he’d never deflated a basketball before. Seems odd, but he hadn’t.
He pushes, squeezes, even stands on the ball, but it doesn’t seem to help much. The ball clearly won’t fit into the bag unless he takes out a lot of the books, and he can’t do that.
Finally, he takes the obstinate ball and places it on top of the bag, hoping that Whistle will let him bring it along anyway. Surely when he tells her what it means to him she’ll let him bring that one extra thing. Surely.
But, later, she doesn’t. She insists, and he leaves it behind, leaves it on the coffee table, partially collapsed, so that it seems to flatten against the glass tabletop the way the Sun did for them as it set. Under the flattened part, hard against the glass, are the two signatures.
The Bendaii arrived the next day. About noon.
