The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Read Online Free PDF Page B

Armstrong walked on the moon—presumably with the good of all mankind as his purpose—that my family arrived in Seattle. My father, his elbow slung out the Bel Air’s windowframe, gave the rest of us a running commentary. “Space Needle,” he said perfunctorily. “Site of the ’62 World’s Fair … Husky Stadium over there … Green Lake off to the left somewhere.” He fumbled his way off the interstate, our trailer pitching along behind. For a while we rambled along a wide boulevard, then over narrower, newer streets through rows of placid ranch houses, finally past a claustrophobic, overpaved city park. “See that basketball court?” said our father, proudly. “The lights come on at night out there. The net’s made out of chain links. And it’s just three blocks from your new house.”
    Harold and I both looked at it; or rather, I spied on Haroldwhile he looked through the window at the basketball court our father had pointed out.
    “Looks pretty good,” he observed.
    The winter before, in Seaside, we’d stood on the concrete at the elementary school and took turns shooting thousands of free throws together, steam spewing from our mouths. My brother began his shot from the center of his belly, his mouth hung open, his elbows tucked in, utterly dependent on some physical inner rhythm that would allow him, at the right moment, to release the ball. It was a thing of beauty, I see now. With the snow shoveled aside so that a lane to the basket was cleared, and icicles plunging from the school-house eaves, he made ninety-six in a row one afternoon, his eyes glassy and still in his face, his fingers numb, saying nothing. His rhythm was exacting, impeccable, but anxious. These minutes of shooting a basketball in the cold were fraught with a deep dread of missing. On that afternoon I stopped shooting my own shots and became his personal rebounder. I felt his rhythm right from the beginning and fed it with a precision no one else could quite get . There was an unspoken agreement between us on this: I would sense how he needed the ball in his hands, and when it should arrive, and how gently it must assert itself; he, for his part, would put the ball in the basket.
    In this manner—together—we progressed to the 1969 Oregon Free Throw Tournament. My brother’s name appeared in the Portland papers: twenty-five out of twenty-five in the semifinal round: steely perfection at fifteen , wrote a reporter for The Oregonian . In the finals, at halftime of a U. of Portland game, he missed one only because I threw it to him wrong: it was his final attempt after twenty-four in a rowhad slipped through the cords impeccably. The ball caromed off the back of the rim, bounced straight up and disappeared behind the backboard—crazily, embarrassingly, extracting a groan from the gathered crowd. He won anyway, and his trophy stood on a bookcase in our family’s house for many years to come.
    Watching him scrutinize the court near our new home I wondered if he would shoot free throws there in the same manner; if everything, in short, would be the same here. Perhaps Oregon had not been enough for him; perhaps he would need Washington State, too.
    When we turned onto our new block finally two boys were in the street, tossing a baseball back and forth. The neighborhood, with all its half-built homes, had the chaotic aspect of a war zone. Shirtless men shingled the roof of one house while a cement truck churned, pouring concrete across the way. The dirt had a scabbed and ravaged appearance—you had the feeling that the earth was being remade on an impossibly titanic scale. Bulldozers had gouged our street out of blackberry riots to make room for exactly eighteen homes. In the end all would come to look egregiously similar; fronted by squares of immaculate lawn, guarded by yard lamps that blinked on at twilight, the split-level facades of our neighborhood were like sad, gaping and embarrassed faces set in the sill of the earth. In