You and Me and the Devil Makes Three Read Online Free PDF Page A

features two big men—brothers if Cole had to guess—six-five lumbering hunks of middle-aged side fat and back hair who normally would have their way with the Foaming Forties, but who are quickly neutralized by the strong Rodrigo in the post. He pushes, he battles, he scores, he rebounds, and in the first quarter, he plays the two Shaky Ray’s big men to a draw.
    But Rodrigo is in even worse shape than they thought. He lumbers up and down the court and has to take himself out every few minutes. Still, as the Forties hoped, with him wrestling the Shaky Ray’s brutes in the key, at least they have a chance. In fact, at halftime they trail only by one—34–33—Rodrigo responsible for a third of the Foaming Forties’ points.
    The guys can barely contain their glee. Eck actually wants to start drawing up plays—something they haven’t done in a decade. Van Goose says something about the playoffs. At one point, Hoss attempts an ill-advised leaping chest bump with Rodrigo, only to hit him in the balls with his shoulder.
    The entire team is in high spirits—that is, all but Cole. The Foaming Forties’ career leader in every statistical category, he has only three points at halftime. And it’s not just that Rodrigo is taking so many shots. Cole just doesn’t feel right out there. Every time he runs, he recalls the cold hands of that prick cardiologist and he thinks, Sudden Death Syndrome .
    Then, early in the second half, Cole dribbles off his leg and he stands there at half court, looking around as if this gym has just materialized around him.
    “Are you okay, man?” Eck asks.
    Cole wasn’t able to tell Andrea about his condition; he hasn’t told his teammates; in fact he hasn’t told anyone. He keeps thinking the phrase time bomb . “I’m just tired, I guess,” he tells Eck. He pulls himself out of the game and sits on the bench next to Hadel, the adjunct community-college instructor, and the closest thing to an intellectual on the Foaming Forties.
    “Amazing how one player makes such a difference,” Hadel says. “Rodrigo’s game is sublime.”
    Cole hates that word, sublime , hates the way his friend Hadel overuses it. The first time he ever heard it, Cole assumed it was something bad, not something soaring and transcendent. It was likely that prefix sub that threw him. Below-lime ? Just as with people, you can get a bad first impression from words.
    Cole sighs deeply. Like a lot of old athletes, he’s always imagined life as a series of seasons. Not just fall, winter, spring, not just football, basketball, and baseball—but a whole life built of seasons, of growing periods and fallow times, ebbs and flows. It’s true with women, and with work, with friends and with happiness. This has been the key to his easygoing nature, knowing intuitively what every good baseball player knows, that even in a slump, the hits will come again; that if a shooter just keeps shooting the basketball, eventually the shots will fall. But now Cole sees there is an end to seasons, too, an end to sex and to drinking, an end to these friendships, end to basketball, end to everything that has defined him. An end to him.
    “Hey, are you okay?” Hadel asks him.
    “Yeah,” Cole says. But he is not.
    Earlier that day, he went to see his unemployment counselor, who said that Cole wasn’t eligible for the various programs that help defray medical costs for unemployed people like him. He could try buying into a COBRA insurance program, of course, but since his heart condition would be considered preexisting, and since Cole can treat it by simply adjusting his lifestyle, he’d likely have to pay for the procedure himself anyway.
    “I mean, is it really worth risking your life,” his counselor asked, “just to keep playing rec-league basketball?”
    Cole ponders that very question as he watches his teammates labor up and down the court. God, he wonders, when did we get old? From the bench, he sees that even Rodrigo—despite the