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tension, the both of us seized up, intractable. He held the ball cradled between his hip and forearm, he ducked low, laying his shoulder against my chest. I could feel the spring coiling in him, and when he dipped away from me I followed forward brutally, going with his weight. Harold kept falling back, the ball looping over us and against the sky, far short of its mark, an airball, happily, and then that ligament in his knee buckled and snapped and his face darkened, a shadow formed in the pupil of his eye. I wasstanding over him and Harold was on the concrete, his knee braced in both hands, his face contorted in soundless pain. He seemed naked, exposed and utterly helpless while I stood over him, observing.
    The evening astronauts first walked on the moon Harold was at the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. I went there too, and sat beside him with a transistor radio, and we heard Neil Armstrong tell the world that his was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind . For some time we pondered the meaning of this; it seemed to Harold that Armstrong had left a word out. Didn’t he mean a man had taken one small step toward peace for all of mankind? Yet my father, from the foot of the bed, insisted that either way Neil Armstrong was a phony—that the experience should have been beautiful, but that Armstrong was there so that one day, if necessary, we could knock the stuffing out of the Russians from the surface of the age-old moon.
    We sat there in that hospital room and listened to men speak to us from the Sea of Tranquillity; Armstrong called it a “magnificent desolation”; then a broadcaster reported that a Russian probe, “bent on reconnaissance during the mission,” was preparing, soon, to land in lunar soil. My father laughed at this, at which point my brother asked grimly for a dose of painkiller and I bolted through the door to find his nurse, thankful to have this convenient task to do for Harold just then.
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    My father never found a job in Seattle. For two weeks in August he labored at a flour mill on Harbor Island, a paid trainee who in the end would not be hired permanently. Each evening he came home with a film of flour dust against his skin and clothes, dressed in work whites and Converse tennis shoes, the smell of beer on his breath. Then it was over. My mother, using a yellow highlighting pen, marked those classified advertisements she felt in her heart he ought to give his attention to. She packed him a sack lunch and sent him off in the Bel Air to spend his days filling out forms. But to no avail, really. Whether it was self-willed, or the times, or both together, my father found no work in the city. Sometimes on fall evenings he would sit on the patio and smoke cigarette after cigarette in a shroud of silence, his head hung between his knees. This went on throughout that autumn until my mother’s inheritance was depleted. Then my father took out a small business loan and bought up a parking lot in downtown Seattle, where he spent his days drinking coffee and reading magazines in a drafty and cold plywood hut.
    My mother cleaned houses and the offices of dentists for many years in Seattle. It was what she knew how to do, and she was much in demand among the ladies of the North End, who found in her a methodical, reliable worker. With her hair tucked up under a scarf and not a speck of makeup to conceal her real face she looked downtrodden, weary. She died when she was forty-eight; the day before I had tried feeding her applesauce through a straw but my mother could not keep it down.
    My brother stopped playing basketball. After his knee went he was through with sports, not because he had to bebut because he wanted it that way. When I came home from practice he’d be wearing a sweater and looking at bugs through his microscope. On certain occasions he would look up at me as if mystified by what he beheld in my face; then his eye would travel to the lens again, leaving me out of its