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

extravagant admiration of the Forties—is just another out-of-shape ex-jock. Cole looks all around this middle school gym. Other than the players, the seventy-year-old ref, and the bored woman running the scoreboard, no one is here watching this game.
    So this is the end of basketball. This is what it looks like.
    He and Eck formed this team twenty years ago, a few years after college. Andrea used to come to his games—a lot of the wives did. As they aged, he didn’t want Andrea to see him out here—not like this, not like those teams of old guys they used to destroy fifteen years ago—balding men in gray sweats chunking and wheezing and falling over, their shirts soaked, knees creaking. Who wants to watch this? It’s like the sex tapes of old people. ( Dude , Eck said to him once, if I ever look like that on the court, you’ll shoot me, right? )
    And yet, here they are, at the end. And there are only two choices. Quit. Or play.
    That’s when Cole recalls his grandfather, his dad’s dad—Papa-Stu, a dockworker and crane operator in Everett. A big man broken by Parkinson’s, face in a permanent scowl, his big hands swollen like two catcher’s mitts. And his eyes—that’s what Cole remembers—and even then, Cole knew what those eyes were asking: How the fuck did this happen to me?
    Grandpa Cole takes a deep breath. He pulls the neoprene brace up over his knee. He reties his shoes. He leans over to Hadel, and just before checking himself back into the game, Cole Griffith says, “Sunsets are sublime, Hadel. And threesomes. That”—he points to Rodrigo, huffing up the court—“is just some old Portuguese ball hog.”
    I T IS AN EPIC celebration at the Red Lion, a six-point victory over the number-two team in the Double-C Division. The Foaming Forties are back in the hunt. They giddily toast Rodrigo, who, frankly, lost wind as the game progressed, but still managed to contribute sixteen points and to hold the two Shaky Ray’s big men to six each. Old Forties also lifted their games tonight, Eck tossing in twelve points, Hoss ten, and Van Goose eight. But it was Cole Griffith who was the undisputed late-game hero, sparking a second-half rally when he reentered and played with the abandon of his twenty-five-year-old self, finishing with fifteen points, including a late three-pointer to ice it.
    In the glow of victory, Cole feels magnanimous, bighearted. He loves this game; he loves his teammates; he loves this precarious life. He will go on playing until he can’t play anymore and if his heart gives out, let it be while he’s getting a hummer from some trampy waitress, let it be while fighting for a rebound, let him die in exuberance and not in fear in some nursing home. He’s so full of love now—for his teammates, for life—he even loves that old ball hog Rodrigo. In fact, if this is the man meant to give Cole’s daughters away at their weddings, then so be it. And so Cole happily participates with the rest of the Forties in the ritual nicknaming of their new teammate— Hot Rod quickly dismissed as being too obvious, Rodney King potentially offensive, Rod the Bod sort of gay, the Rod Squad just plain stupid, until eventually they settle on Inigo , a reference to the swashbuckling Spaniard in the movie The Princess Bride . (“You keeled my father,” Eck says. “Prepare to be dunked on.”)
    Inigo seems happy with his new nickname. He stands up, high-fiving his new teammates, and walks over to Cole, who has risen to buy another pitcher.
    “What wonderful friends you have, Cole,” Inigo says, and he puts his arm around Cole’s shoulder in that drunken way common to all cultures. “What a fine team!” His voice rises above the din of the bar. “Thank you for asking me to play.”
    “Our pleasure,” Cole says, and he pats the big man on his expansive back. “We probably wouldn’t have won without you.”
    They separate and Inigo considers Cole carefully. “You are a good player,” he says, and