Free 14 Degrees Below Zero by Quinton Skinner Page A

interest in the ball, it was duly passed to him. And here it was, orange and pimpled, requiring a dismaying amount of arm strength to keep it bouncing.
    He was being guarded by Francis, a second-year kid from Brown who went to great pains to convince people how unguarded and guileless he was. Stephen bounced the ball and tried to keep his eyes in focus. Francis was giving him plenty of space, not poking at the ball, for which Stephen was both grateful and abstractly irritated. He took a couple of lateral steps, and Francis followed a step behind. Surely he wasn’t going to lay off so much—Stephen was only thirty-two, after all. Did they have him placed in another generation?
    Looking around, trying to remember which players were on his team—Tim Rappel? King? That cipher from Urban Planning?—Stephen felt a spasm somewhere in his midsection and half-coughed, half-belched up something that tasted like . . . like . . .
last night’s three whiskey and sodas.
He kept the ball bouncing and tried not to think about it. From the waist down he was all pain. Above that was an entire mountain range of trouble, peaks of nausea and valleys of abdominal insubordination. Breaking into a run seemed out of the question.
    But it appeared he had to do something. He had been dribbling the ball for a long time. Someone said something about Gary Payton that may or may not have been directed at him. He was too flustered and spent to try passing the ball, so he put his head down and stepped past Francis, who stared in surprise and made little attempt to stop him. A couple of opponents closed in on him now, but moving forward with perhaps the final reserves of his legs and heart, he burst to within about eight feet of the basket and let loose a one-handed floater.
    Stephen’s momentum carried him into the Urban Planning guy, who shunted him aside torero-style. As he tumbled to the floor, already adoring the sweet relief of lying down, he watched the ball reach the altitude of the basket like a wounded bird.
God,
what an embarrassing shot—he had sort of pitched it up there, like an end-of-the-bench sub in a high-school girls’ game. Now, improbably, almost apologetically, it sort of
slid
into the net with barely enough force to make it through. It landed on the floor with an exhausted thud, right next to him.
    “Nice one,” said Francis, who was going to be attending one of Stephen’s critical theory seminars next semester.
    “That was George Gervin shit,” said the Urban Planning guy in the requisite pseudo-insulting manner in which they all felt compelled to communicate.
    “Thank . . . you,” Stephen gasped. He glanced at his watch as he peeled himself off the floor, leaving a big sweat stain where he had fallen. They’d been playing for half an hour. But
full-court,
he reminded himself. “And now . . . that I’ve taken you all
to school
. . . ahg . . . so to speak . . . I have to make . . . a phone call.”
    Stephen staggered across midcourt to the bench at the other end. There were protests about him leaving his team shorthanded, but finally the younger men allowed him to salvage some dignity. His chest burned and his guts growled, but he thought he might be able to ride it out. He fought off an overpowering urge to go outside and curl up in the grass, knowing it was too damn cold for that.
    He had said something about making a call. To save face as the game resumed, he rooted around in his jacket for his phone. He dialed Jay’s apartment out of reflex. There really wasn’t anyone else for him to call, anyway. She answered with a tone of tired self-defense.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “At the gym,” he said in an approximation of his usual speaking voice. “Playing basketball with a bunch of students. Trying not to drop dead.”
    Jay laughed. “Yeah, you’re such an old man.”
    “All evidence points in that direction,” Stephen said. “I think I almost passed out.”
    “Then we may have a problem. I’m not