The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks Page A

all of a sudden he would stop and check out his hands and feet and ask Is my back straight? Well, what the heck did it matter? Everybody stopped talking natural for a while. And they stopped listening natural, too. You would be chatting away telling something and someone would be nodding at you and then say some weird response. You’d say What are you talking about and they’d tell you they were replying to your body language. Something you said with your eyelid or angle of the torso. What a pile of doody.
    As I said, this was the worst case of white man’s genius I saw. Make something out of nothing and turn everybody very nervous. It was only one class, though. Still, I didn’t like to think about what other foolishness they might get behind.

13 .
    You probably wonder why the first thing I did wasn’t check out the basketball tryouts. Well, I knew that at Parker hoops tryouts did not start until football season was over, which is to say about late November. But then one day after school, when I had stayed after with Madame Dupont in French to get my reflexive verb action down just right, I was walking to my locker and I felt it in the soles of my feet: bammata bammata bammata. Somewhere down that hallway, someone was dribbling basketballs.
    Naturally I wanted to go check it out. It is in your body when you love ball. Your hands start to curve and spread, your wrists feel like oiled metal, your feet want to kick up off the ground and you just know you are light and trim and can get up in that sky and stay there. Man, I love it and I was very excited all of a sudden that day.
    Lucky, I had worn my high blacks to school instead of my loafers, which I usually do until it’s too cold out for canvas which lets the wind whistle through. I had on a pretty old pair of corduroys, getting a little snug, but floppy down atthe feet which was bad, and a sweater with a T-shirt underneath. Usually I hate T-shirts and do not wear them under shirts, but with sweaters you got to have something to keep the wool off your skin. Very quickly I thought out what I could do to get in playing shape with my clothes, and then I went quietly down to the place where the dribbling came from and saw, sure enough, that it was the gym. There were two double doors. There was something else too:
    Thumbtacked up on the left-hand door was a manila folder opened up and written in crayon BOYS’ BASKETBALL TRYOUTS WEDNESDAY THURSDAY. This was Wednesday. I was right on time, baby.
    Very fast now, because I heard somebody blow a whistle inside, I ran back to my locker, shucked off my sweater, tightened my laces, and ran into the first classroom I could find.
    Sitting behind the desk was old Egglestobbs.
    He looked up at me, and smiled one of those smiles that people give you when they think they know just exactly what kind of foolishness you are up to, and you don’t know it is foolish yet, being dumber than they.
    Scissors, I said. He pretended not to hear me, and leaned back and put his fingertips together under his chin and pooched out his lips, which I guess was his way of studying someone, but to me looked like a pretty weird bunch of body signals.
    High excitement, he said, as if he were talking to some great scientist standing beside him. Haste. A great hastiness—notice the angle of the torso.
    Notice the fact that I ran in here panting, I said. Any scissors in that desk, Mr. E.?
    The spread of the feet is revealing too, he said, nodding slowly and dropping his eyebrows. They enclose an acute,rather than an obtuse, fan of degrees. This of course denotes physical anxiety and not a little emotional disconfidence. He raised his brows and put on this fakey smile which I knew meant he was going to include me in the conversation now. Feeling a little inadequate, are we? Though probably, he said back to his ghost scientist, primarily in a physical sense.
    Feeling very late for basketball tryouts, I said, trying not to get sassy,