Asshole
“Wanna play Asshole?”
“What’s Asshole?” Casper looks up at the older boy, who is picking at the long stem of a flower, peeling away layers and dropping bits on the ground.
“It’s like Horse, only it’s Asshole.”
“Oh.” Casper looks down at his hands, brown with dirt. The two had earlier dug a hole near the back fence where Casper’s mom couldn’t see. David had dared Casper he couldn’t fill it back in with his hands, then pushed him in from behind. “Yeah, sure.”
David springs to his feet, dropping the twisted stem on the ground.
Casper looks down at it, sad and mangled. It’s one of his mom’s peonies. He stands. David is already around the corner of the house. Casper can hear him bouncing a basketball, the faded orange one that had been his father’s. He follows the sound.
David is shooting, bouncing, dribbling. David is running, back and forth and back and forth, calling his own shots.
“Three points. At the buzzer. Oh!”
Casper stands at the side of the driveway, watching his cousin run to retrieve the ball. David shoots again. This time, the ball misses the net and backboard, leaving a black spot on the white paint of the garage.
“Dickens goes for the lay-up and – oh, he was robbed!”
Casper watches this for a moment more, then heads toward the house’s back door. As he approaches, he cranes his neck to look around the side of the garage, into the backyard. There, on a ladder, is Jamie, David’s older brother. Casper stops and watches him. Jamie is sixteen and shirtless. He has broad shoulders and a shiny brown back. Casper watches sweat drip into Jamie’s armpit as he reaches up with a paintbrush, swiping it along one of the house’s eaves.
Jamie is listening to his New Kids on the Block tapes on a paint-spattered boom box. Casper can’t stand the New Kids on the Block.
“Hey,” he says, walking over to Jamie. “I like this music.”
Jamie looks down, smiles, shakes his head. He dips his brush in the can at the top of the ladder, reaches up again. A splotch of white paint hits his shoulder. Jamie wipes sweat from his brow, drops the brush into the paint can, and reaches into his pocket. He pulls out and lights a cigarette, sucking shallowly. He looks down at Casper and extends it out.
“No thanks. I don’t smoke.”
Jamie laughs.
“Maybe I will, though. Not now.”
Jamie takes a drag, wipes his forehead again. He’s looking up at the eave, inspecting his work. Casper looks up, too, sees Jamie’s progress, broad strokes of fresh white from one side of the eave up into the middle, just above where Jamie’s standing.
David and Jamie have been staying with Casper and his mom for the past week. She is paying Jamie to repaint the house. White. Just white. Casper doesn’t know why she wouldn’t paint it something fun. Blue. Or green. Something to show the world how happy they were, the two of them. He had even offered to paint it himself one morning. He ate his cereal. She drank her coffee. He could do it. He’d just need a tall ladder. His mom had smiled at him, sweet and disarming, then looked out the window.
Casper hears a crack and fizz and looks up to see Jamie drinking from a can of Pabst. He wonders where it came from.
“Hey, where’d you get that?”
Jamie just chuckles. The fingers that hold the Pabst are white with paint.
“You can’t drink.”
Jamie flicks his cigarette into the lawn towards Casper, who shakes his head and heads back to the driveway.
David is still shooting, still narrating his own plays. He notices Casper standing at the edge of the asphalt and tosses the ball to him. Casper misses it and has to retrieve it from his mom’s plants along the side of the house. He walks the back to the driveway, wiping clumps of mud from it.
“Okay, you can go first,” David says. “Because you’re little.”
Casper doesn’t respond, just searches the blacktop for the perfect spot, scanning with his eyes. He finds it, a leaf stomped on the ground, mashed into a smear of green on the pavement by energetic Keds. It’s perfect. Casper goes to it and faces the net.
“You can’t make that. You’re way too far away. You should move in closer.”
Casper ignores him. He dribbles the ball, once, twice, awkward, then heaves it toward the net. It misses the hoop by a full two feet, smashing into the aluminum garage door with a loud crash. The door rattles on its track. Casper hears David laughing, but doesn’t look. He goes to the bushes, retrieves the ball, bounces it across the driveway to his cousin.
“David!” It’s Casper’s mom, calling from an upstairs window. The two boys look up. She is leaning, has her face pressed against the screen. Beyond her, the room is dark. “Please don’t step in my flowers. Thank you.”
Casper smiles up at her. She smiles back, winks, mouths Hi Sweetie, then pulls her face from the screen and is gone. Casper’s smile lingers a moment and he stands there, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Please don’t step in my flowers, meh,” David says in his best old lady voice.
“Well, you were.”
“Well, you were, meh.” David steps to the center of the driveway and fires the ball. It bangs off the backboard and through the net, bouncing clean and straight on the pavement beneath. David easily catches it, then throws it – too hard – at Casper. “Make that.”
Casper catches the ball this time. He steps to where David was, looks at his cousin. David shakes his head. Casper steps back another step. David nods, smiling. Casper bounces the ball once, then sets his sights on the backboard. Easy shot. Dead on. Straight and true. He throws the ball. It bounces off the rim, then the driveway, then the side of the house. Casper cringes, expecting his mom to shout down again.
“Ha! That’s A!” David is clapping, bouncing, running in circles, fists in the air.
Casper walks across the driveway, over to the house, where the basketball lies amidst his mom’s peonies. One of the flowers is driven into the dirt, its petals broken, its stem cracked. Casper frowns, trying to straighten it again.
“Come on, pussy. I ain’t got all day.”
Casper picks up the ball, wipes off the mud and flower petals, and tosses it to his cousin, who is jumping up and down in the driveway, pounding his fists against his chest.
Alien Buddha Press 