How 'Bout Them Apples? by Lee Jenkins

KEVIN DURANT KNOWS HIS PLACE IN THE GAME, AND HOWEVER HALLOWED IT MIGHT BE, HE'S NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT. HERE'S HOW THE GAME'S MOST LETHAL SCORER FOUND HIS MEAN STREAK—AND A TASTE FOR METAPHOR

 On the day after the Heat won their 27th game in a row, Kevin Durant sat in a leather terminal chair next to a practice court and pointed toward the 90-degree angle at the upper-right corner of the key that represents the elbow. "See that spot," Durant said. "I used to shoot 38, 39 percent from there off the catch coming around pin-down screens." He paused for emphasis. "I'm up to 45, 46 percent now." Durant wore the satisfied expression of an MIT undergrad solving a partial differential equation. You could find dozens of basic or advanced statistics that attest to Durant's brilliance this season—starting with the obvious, that he became only the seventh player ever to exceed 50% shooting from the field, 40% from three-point range and 90% from the free throw line—but his preferred metric is far simpler. He wants what Miami has, and he's going to seize it one meticulously selected elbow jumper at a time.
The NBA's analytical revolution has been confined mainly to front offices. Numbers are dispensed to coaches, but rarely do they trickle down to players. Not many are interested, and of those who are, few can apply what they've learned mid-possession. Even the most stat-conscious general manager wouldn't want a point guard elevating for an open jumper on the left wing and thinking, Oh no, I only shoot 38% here. But Durant has hired his own analytics expert. He tailors workouts to remedy numerical imbalances. He harps on efficiency more than a Prius dealer. To Durant, basketball is an orchard, and every shot an apple. "Let's say you've got 40 apples on your tree," Durant explains. "I could eat about 30 of them, but I've begun limiting myself to 15 or 16. Let's take the wide-open three and the post-up at the nail. Those are good apples. Let's throw out the pull-up three in transition and the step-back fadeaway. Those are rotten apples. The three at the top of the circle—that's an in-between apple. We only want the very best on the tree."
The Thunder did not win 27 straight games. They did not compile the best record. Durant will not capture the MVP award. All he and his teammates did was amass a season that defies comparison as well as arithmetic. They scored more points per game than last season even though they traded James Harden, who finished the season fifth in the NBA in scoring, five days before the opener. They led the league in free throws even though Harden gets to the line more than anybody. They posted the top point differential since the 2007--08 Celtics, improving in virtually every relevant category, including winning percentage. Their uptick makes no sense unless Durant was afforded more shots in Harden's absence, but the opposite occurred. He attempted the fewest field goals per 36 minutes of his career. He didn't even take the most shots on his team, trailing point guard Russell Westbrook, and he seemed almost proud that his 28.1 points per game weren't enough to earn the scoring title for the fourth consecutive year. "He knows he can score," says Thunder coach Scott Brooks. "He's trying to score smarter."
Durant is lifting Oklahoma City as never before, with pocket passes instead of pull-ups, crossovers instead of fadeaways. He remains the most prolific marksman alive, unfurling his impossibly long arms to heights no perimeter defender can reach, but he has become more than a gunner. He set career marks in efficiency rating, assists and every newfangled form of shooting percentage. "Now he's helping the whole team," says 76ers point guard Royal Ivey, who spent the past two seasons with the Thunder. "Now he's a complete player." The Thunder are better because Durant is better. Of course, the Heat will be favored to repeat as champions, and deservedly so. But Oklahoma City has been undercutting conventional wisdom for six months.
NBA history is littered with stars who languish in another's shadow, notably Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and Reggie Miller through the Michael Jordan reign. Oklahoma City lost to Miami in the Finals last June, and Durant will surely be runner-up to LeBron James in the MVP balloting again. Durant is only 24 and is as respectful of James as a rival can be, but he's nobody's bridesmaid. "I've been second my whole life," Durant says. "I was the second-best player in high school. I was the second pick in the draft. I've been second in the MVP voting three times. I came in second in the Finals. I'm tired of being second. I'm not going to settle for that. I'm done with it."
Justin Zormelo doesn't have a formal title. He is part personal trainer and part shot doctor, part video analyst and part advance scout. "He's a stat geek," Durant says, expanding the job description. Zormelo sits in section 104 of Oklahoma City's Chesapeake Energy Arena, with an iPad that tells him in real time what percentage Durant is shooting from the left corner and how many points per possession he is generating on post-ups. After games, he takes the iPad to Durant's house or hotel room and they watch clips of every play. Zormelo loads the footage onto Durant's computer in case he wants to see it again. "If I miss a lot of corner threes, that's what I work on the next morning before practice," Durant says. "If I'm not effective from the elbow in the post, I work on that." Zormelo keeps a journal of their sessions and has already filled two notebooks this season. Last year Zormelo noticed that Durant was more accurate from the left side of the court than the right, and they addressed the inconsistency. "Now he's actually weaker on the left," Zormelo says, "but we'll get that straightened out by the playoffs."
Zormelo, 29, was a student manager at Georgetown when Durant was a freshman at Texas, and they met during a predraft workout at Maryland that included Hoyas star Brandon Bowman. Durant embarked on his pro career and so did Zormelo, landing an internship with the Heat and a film-room job with the Bulls before launching a company called Best Ball Analytics in 2010 that has counted nearly 30 NBA players as clients. Zormelo kept in touch with Durant, occasionally e-mailing him cutups of shots. They bonded because Zormelo idolizes Larry Bird and Durant does, too.
Durant left a potential championship on the table in 2011, when Oklahoma City fell to Dallas in the Western Conference finals. About two weeks after the series, Durant scheduled his first workout with Zormelo in Washington, D.C. "I didn't sleep the night before," Zormelo remembers. "I was up until 4 a.m. asking myself, What am I going to tell the best scorer in the league that he doesn't already know?" They met at Yates Field House, where Georgetown practices, and Zormelo told Durant, "You're really good. But I think you can be the best player ever." Durant looked up. "Not the best scorer," Zormelo clarified. "The best player." It was a crucial distinction, considering Durant had just led the league in scoring for the second year in a row yet posted his lowest shooting percentage, three-point percentage and assist average since he was a rookie. He was only 22, so there was no public rebuke, but he could not stand to give away another title.
"He was getting double- and triple-teamed, and in order to win a championship, he needed to make better decisions with the ball," says former Thunder point guard Kevin Ollie, now the head coach at Connecticut. "He needed to find other things he could do besides force up shots. That was the incentive to change his pattern." Over several weeks Zormelo and Durant formulated a written plan focusing on ballhandling, passing and shot selection. They were transforming a sniper into a playmaker. Growing up, Durant dribbled down the street outside his grandmother's house in Capitol Heights, Md. He played point guard as a freshman at National Christian Academy in Fort Washington. He watched And1 DVDs to study the art of the crossover. "Where I'm from, you got to have the ball," Durant says. "That's how we do it. We streetball." But he sprouted five inches as a sophomore, from 6'3" to 6' 8," and suddenly he was a forward. Though his stroke didn't suffer, his handle did. "I still had the moves," Durant insists, "but I dribbled way too high."
He could compensate in high school, and even during his one season at Texas, but the NBA was changing to a league where the transcendent are freed from traditional positions and boundaries. When Portland was deciding between Durant and Ohio State center Greg Oden before the 2007 draft, Texas coach Rick Barnes copped a line that Bobby Knight used when the Blazers were debating between Jordan and center Sam Bowie in 1984. "He can be the best guard or he can be the best center," Barnes told G.M.'s. "It doesn't matter. Whatever you need, he'll do." The Trail Blazers selected Oden and Durant was taken second by Seattle, where coach P.J. Carlesimo started him at shooting guard. "Kevin could be all things," Carlesimo says, but back then he was too gangly to hold his spot or protect his dribble. Brooks replaced Carlesimo shortly after the franchise relocated to Oklahoma City the following season and wisely returned him to forward.

In the summer of 2011, as the NBA and its union were trying to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, Durant created an endless loop of YouTube videos with his preposterous scoring binges at East Coast pickup games. What the cameras didn't show were the drills he did during daily 6 a.m. workouts at Bryant Alternative High School in Alexandria, Va., with Zormelo pushing down on his shoulders to lower his dribble. Durant even tried to rebuild his crossover, but when the ball kicked off his high tops, he hurled it away in frustration. "I'm never really going to use this!" he hollered.
But at all those pickup games, he asked to play point guard, and in downtime he watched tapes of oversized creators like Bird and Magic Johnson. "Opponents are going to do anything to get the ball out of your hands," Zormelo told him. "They're going to make you drive and pass." Durant could typically beat double teams simply by raising his arms. Even though he is listed at 6'9", he is more like 6'11", with a 7'5" wingspan and a release point over his head. The only defenders long enough to challenge his jumper aren't normally allowed outside the paint. "Most guys can't shoot over the contested hand," says Brooks. "Not only can Kevin shoot over it, he uses it as a target. If anything, it lines him up." Durant didn't distinguish between good and bad shots, because through his eyes there was no such thing as a bad one. Every look was clean. "I had to tell him, 'If you have a good shot and I have a good shot, I want you to take it,' " Brooks says. " 'But if you have a good shot and I have a great shot, you have to give it to me.' "
Ballhandling drills begat passing drills. Durant saw what the Thunder could accomplish if he took two hard dribbles and found an abandoned man in the corner. With Zormelo's research as a guide, Durant identified his sweetest spots at both elbows, both corners and the top of the key. From those happy places, he is doing the Thunder a disservice if he doesn't let fly, but outside of them he prefers to probe. He moves a half step slower so he can better see the floor.
This season Durant is averaging two fewer field goals and nearly two more assists than he did in 2011, and he has practically discarded two-point shots outside 17 feet. Brooks tells him on a near nightly basis, "KD, it's time. I need you to shoot now." Says Brooks, "To extend the apple metaphor, I'm now able to put him all over and get fruit." He isolates Durant at the three-point line, posts him up and uses him as the trigger man in the pick-and-roll. When defenders creep too close, Durant freezes them with a crossover at his ankles or deploys a rip move that former Thunder forward Desmond Mason taught him four years ago to pick up fouls.
"Remember when tall guys would come into the league and people would say, 'They handle like a guard!' but they never actually did handle like a guard?" says Thunder forward Nick Collison. "Kevin really does handle like a guard." Durant has become both facilitator and finisher, shuttling between the perimeter and the paint, stretching the limits of what we believe a human being with his build can do. If his progression reminds you of someone else's, well, that's probably not an accident.
Durant was 17 when LeBron James invited him into the Cavaliers' locker room at Washington's Verizon Center after a playoff game against the Wizards. "That's my guy," Durant says. "I looked up to him, and now I battle him." In a sense, the 2011 lockout was a boon for the NBA because it allowed the premier performers to explore new boundaries. James fortified his dribble, and so did Durant. James developed his post skills, and so did Durant. James studied his shot charts, vowing to eliminate inefficiencies, and so did Durant. James already passed like Magic, but Durant started to pass like Bird. They hopped on parallel evolutionary tracks, advancing in the same manner at the same time. When a quote from James is relayed—"He's my inspiration. We're driving one another"—Durant nods in approval. It's as if the finest poets in the world are also each other's muses.
"I don't watch a lot of other basketball away from the gym," Durant says. "But I do look at LeBron's box score. I want to see how many points, rebounds and assists he had, and how he shot from the field. If he had 30 points, nine rebounds and eight assists, I can tell you exactly how he did it, what type of shots he made and who he passed to." Durant and James take flak for their friendship, but it is based on a mutual appreciation of the craft. They aren't hanging out at the club. They are feverishly one-upping each other from afar. "People see two young black basketball players at the top of their game and think we should clash," Durant says. "They want the conflict. They want the hate. They forget Bird cried for Magic. A friend was getting on me about this recently, and I said, 'Calm down. I'm not taking it easy on him. Don't you know I'm trying to destroy the guy every time I go on the court?' "
Oklahoma City beat Miami in Game 1 of last year's Finals and trailed by only two points with 10 seconds left in Game 2. Durant spun to the baseline and James appeared to hook his right arm, but no foul was called and Durant's shot bounced out. The Thunder did not win again, but Durant stood arm-in-arm with Westbrook and Harden at the end of the series, a tableau of defeat but also of a boundless future. Not one was over 23. Durant and Westbrook had already signed long-term contract extensions, and Harden was still a year from restricted free agency. But on Oct. 27, Oklahoma City had not agreed to an extension with Harden and sent him to Houston in a trade that threatened the very culture Durant built. For a player who attended four high schools, spent one year at Texas and one in Seattle, the Thunder signified the stability he lacked. "People tell you it's a business, but it's a brotherhood here," Durant says. "We draft guys and we grow together. We build a bond. When James left, we had to turn the family switch off."
In the first meeting after the deal, Brooks told his players, "We're not taking a step back." But everywhere else they heard otherwise. "My cousin texted me, 'I'm a Heat fan now, but I still hope you make it to the Finals,' " Durant recalls. "That's my family! That's my cousin!" He shakes his head at a small but lingering act of betrayal. "A lot of friends from home were talking about other teams, and I thought they were on our side. I don't want to be angry or bitter, but it started to build up, and I took it out on my teammates." Previously, if power forward Serge Ibaka blew a box-out, Durant would tell him, "It's O.K. You're going to get it next time." But the stakes had risen. "You want to get to the Finals again, and you think everything should be perfect, and it's not," Durant says. "So I'd scream at him and pump my fist."
Durant has picked up 12 technical fouls this season, more than twice as many as his previous career high, and he was ejected for the first time, in January, after arguing with referee Danny Crawford. "I'm rubbing off on him," says Thunder center Kendrick Perkins, who keeps a standing 2 a.m. phone call with Durant every night to discuss the state of the team. "He's getting a little edge on." The techs dovetailed neatly with Nike's "KD is Not Nice" marketing campaign, but they still don't fit the recipient. Even after the ejection, Durant stopped to high-five kids sitting over the tunnel. "People get it confused and think you have to be a jerk to win," he says. "But we all feed off positive energy. I'm a nice guy. I enjoy making people happy and brightening their day. If someone asks me for an autograph on the street, I don't want to wave him off and tell him, 'Hell, no.' That's not me. The last few months I've calmed down and had more fun. We can still get on each other, but there's another way."
Without Harden, Oklahoma City needed a new playmaker, and Durant had spent more than a year preparing for the role. He just didn't realize it at the time. "They were looking for somebody else to move the defense and handle the ball in pick-and-roll," says a scout. "It turned out to be him." When Durant was 20, the Thunder asked him to act 25, and now that he is nearly 25, the plan for his prime has come to fruition. He is the NBA's best and perhaps only answer for James. "I've given up trying to figure out how to stop him," said Celtics coach Doc Rivers. "And I'm not kidding."
On Nov. 24, four weeks after Harden left, the Thunder were a respectable but unremarkable 9--4 and nursing a five-point lead with one minute left in overtime at Philadelphia. Durant posted up on the right wing, bent at the waist, a step inside the perimeter. Dorell Wright, the unfortunate 76er assigned to him, planted one hand on Durant's rib cage and another on his back. "What do I tell a guy in that position?" asks an NBA assistant coach. "I shake his hand and say, 'Good luck.' "
Durant faced up against Wright, tucked the ball by his left hip and swung his right foot behind the arc, toe-tapping the floor like a sprinter searching for the starting block. Durant had scored 35 points, but on the previous possession he fed Westbrook for a three, and on the possession before that he set up a three by Kevin Martin, who had arrived from Houston in the Harden trade. It was time for the Durant dagger, but before he shimmied his shoulders and unfurled his arms he spotted guard Thabo Sefolosha, ignored in the left corner. Sefolosha was 1 for 6, and in the previous timeout Durant had told him, "You're going to make the next shot." Durant could have easily fired over Wright and finished the Sixers, but he let his mind wander to the ultimate destination, seven months away. I'm going to need all these guys to get to the Finals, he thought.
Durant took one dribble to his left, and center Lavoy Allen rushed up to double him at the free throw line. He dribbled twice more, to the left edge of the key, and two other Sixers slid over. Surrounded by four defenders, Durant finally shoveled to Sefolosha, so open that he feared he might hesitate. He didn't. Durant jabbed him in the chest as the ball slipped through the net.
How about them apples?

The City Game, by Sam Anderson

N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped. Michael Jordan, when he wasn’t busy scoring, was busy punching a teammate in the face and gambling away small fortunes. Allen Iverson, in his spare time, recorded an aesthetically and morally terrible rap album and gave an iconic speech denigrating the very notion of practice. Kobe Bryant is and shall forever be Kobe Bryant. Wilt, Shaq, Pistol Pete, Dominique, McGrady, McAdoo, Rick Barry — it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later than age 15.

Instead, Durant has a reputation roughly on par with Gandhi. He seems to be — not just for a scoring champion, but for anyone — almost inhumanly humble. His motto, which he intones constantly, is “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” His pregame ritual involves kissing his mother, as does his postgame ritual. Once, in college, during probably the greatest freshman season of all time, a reporter asked Durant if he realized that he had just single-handedly outscored the entire opposing team in the second half of a game. Durant answered, with absolute sincerity, “Who, me?” When I asked the Thunder coach, Scott Brooks, to tell me about his superstar, he laughed. “Whatever you say nice, you can print it out and I’ll just say I said it,” he said. “Because it’s true.”

Durant could be forgiven for wanting to brag a little. He is currently the second-best basketball player in the world — a category in which he trails only LeBron James, who is four years older, and whose Miami Heat beat the Thunder last year in the finals. The budding rivalry between KD and LBJ (off the court they’re friends, Olympic teammates and sometimes, controversially, workout partners) is the kind of thing the N.B.A. has been fantasizing about for decades, a yin and yang as tightly balanced as any since Magic and Bird.

LeBron and Durant are, conveniently for storytelling purposes, opposites. LeBron looks like something out of a Marvel comic: a sentient pile of muscles. Durant looks like something from a Pixar movie — a humanoid praying mantis. He is 6 feet 9 inches tall and almost disturbingly skinny, with disproportionately long arms. Sportswriters, struggling to describe him, have compared him to capellini and a pterodactyl. His body looks almost like an engineering mistake, and early in his career it seemed as if it might actually be one: before the 2007 draft, there was a minor kerfuffle when it was discovered that Durant couldn’t bench-press 185 pounds, the standard predraft litmus test, even a single time. (The next pick in the draft, Al Horford, lifted it 20 times.) LeBron entered the league as a teenager and promptly knocked around all of the grown men who tried to guard him. As a 19-year-old rookie, Durant drifted around, shooting jumpers and trying to avoid contact, and still spent much of his time picking himself up off the floor. Although he won Rookie of the Year, he wasn’t particularly efficient in doing so, and his team was horrible.

Despite their discrepancy in visible muscle tone, Durant has strengths that LeBron will probably never have. LeBron’s jump shot, for instance, is funky-looking, jerky, angular and streaky. Durant’s is natural, pure, quick and stunningly accurate — somehow, his ridiculous arms manage not to get in the way but to amplify his power, so it looks as if he’s shooting with zero effort even from 30 feet away.

Durant’s real advantage over LeBron, however, is civic. LeBron infamously held a prime-time TV special in the summer of 2010 to announce that he was abandoning Cleveland for the glamour of Miami — a P.R. debacle known as the Decision. When he arrived in Miami, he took part in a histrionic rally at which he promised, on a stage surrounded by a W.W.E. -style light show and smoke machines, that his new team was so good it was going to dominate the rest of the league without even trying.

It’s impossible to imagine that kind of behavior from Durant. In the middle of the overheated summer of 2010, the day before LeBron’s Decision, Durant announced quietly, on Twitter, that he had just signed a contract to stay in Oklahoma — the third-smallest market in the league, a place devoid of beaches and celebrities and night life — for another five years. You got the feeling he would have committed to the Thunder for the rest of his life if only the Players’ Union would have allowed it.

Durant, in other words, seems to have been invented in a laboratory beneath the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to serve as the international face of Oklahoma — a state known for its citizens’ kindness, levelheadedness, work ethic, community spirit and, above all, humility. (The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything.) Led by Durant, the Thunder has become one of the N.B.A.’s best and youngest and most popular teams, an international icon of brotherhood and good will that has helped to usher in golden ages in both Oklahoma City and the N.B.A., an electric blue Trojan horse inside of which Oklahoma has managed to smuggle its ethos to the rest of the world: good folksy folks humbly helping other folksy folks stay humble and helpful.

Oklahoma sits right in the middle of the country: it’s not the cultured East or the wild West or the frigid North or the humid South but exactly where all those things meet. The mountains touch the prairies, which touch the plains. This has created, over the millenniums, crazy animals and crazy weather and crazy 25-car pileups of culture. In 1889, the almost unbelievable land run sent tens of thousands of ragtag settlers from all over the country literally racing to claim tracts of practically uninhabitable land. Oklahoma, in other words, is the Hadron supercollider of states: it slams disparate things together, over and over, producing endless crises of cohesion. Even tornadoes, the region’s defining devil winds, are a result of a meteorological collision: a convergence of three different weather systems that happens with freakish regularity in Oklahoma and its immediate environs. Meteorologists in Oklahoma are basically rock stars.

Professional athletes, on the other hand, have rarely had much of a presence here. That began to change in 2006, when a consortium of wealthy Oklahomans, led by the financier Clay Bennett, bought the Seattle SuperSonics — a once-proud franchise that had been stuck for years in the drain-swirl of mediocrity. Most people assumed, cynically, that Bennett was buying the team in order to move it, as quickly as possible, to Oklahoma City, his hometown. He had pledged to make a good-faith effort to keep the team in Seattle — an effort that came into suspicion shortly after the sale, when the new owner demanded that Seattle come up with nearly $300 million to build a new arena. Seattle refused, at which point the ownership group announced, regretfully, that it was going to have to move the Sonics to a city with a suitable arena — a city that also happened to be Oklahoma City. The fallout was intense: lawsuits, protests, scandal. Even Oklahomans who love the team admit that they were uncomfortable with the way it was acquired. The sportswriter Bill Simmons, in solidarity with the people of Seattle, referred to the Thunder exclusively in his columns as the Zombie Sonics.

One of the miracles of the modern Thunder — and there are several — is how quickly they’ve made people forget the stain of their origin. The re-branding of the franchise has been quick and efficient: the team is now widely perceived as principled, well run and — above all — thoroughly Oklahoman. ESPN recently named it the No. 1 sports franchise in America. This fall, it seemed like a step toward closure when the Seattle City Council approved a plan to build a new basketball arena there. Simmons announced, just a few weeks ago, that he was officially retiring the phrase Zombie Sonics. In almost no time at all, the Oklahoma City Thunder had achieved escape velocity.

Much of the credit for this turnaround goes to Sam Presti, the Thunder’s general manager. Presti took over the team the year before they left Seattle. He was 29, the youngest G.M. in league history. His first move was to draft Kevin Durant, which anyone would have done. His second, less obvious decision was to strip the roster of all the veterans and big contracts that would have prevented him from rebuilding from scratch. When the team moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City, Presti found himself in charge of not only the worst team in the league but also one of the worst in the history of professional basketball. The Oklahoma City Thunder won 3 games out of their first 32. This record, 3-29, is now a kind of touchstone in the organization — almost everyone I talked to invoked it at some point, and many of them even exaggerated it to 3-30.

Most G.M.’s would have panicked, but that isn’t Presti’s way: he moved patiently, methodically. He overhauled not only the roster of the team but also the culture of the organization. This involved rethinking everything, no matter how small, from meeting times to media policy to the decorations on the practice-facility walls. Everyone soon became familiar with the Presti buzzwords: process, system, patience, sustainability. He made a habit of promoting people within the organization so that, from top to bottom, the Thunder became very young and tightly knit. He stressed community outreach to an unusual degree. He devoted extra resources to the development of the young Thunder players and, on the marketing side, refused to call attention to any single player apart from his teammates, even Durant, who was quickly becoming an international superstar. Meanwhile, Presti used high draft picks to surround Durant with other promising young players — Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, James Harden — all of whom overachieved, relative to the rest of their draft classes, to an almost amazing degree.

The Presti rebuild, a meticulously rational plan, now looks a lot like a fairy tale. The Thunder has improved, year by year, exactly on schedule: they made the playoffs in their second season, the Western Conference finals in their third and the Finals last year. If the Thunder doesn’t win the title this year, it will seem almost unfair — a violation of the basic laws of narrative. Among basketball fans, Presti has become a mythic braniac legend, the managerial equivalent of Kevin Durant: young, focused, dominant and improbably humble.

I met Presti two weeks before the start of training camp at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a site that commemorates, powerfully, the city’s defining tragedy: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Presti shook my hand in the lobby, quickly and firmly, and then proceeded to say nothing for many minutes. The museum’s director was giving us a tour, and Presti seemed relieved to cede the floor completely to her. He wore a polo shirt, casual pants, fashionable glasses and hip sneakers. He was very slim — no excess — and was fidgeting a lot, bouncing rhythmically at the knees.

We were at the memorial because, as Presti told me later, “This place is part of our existence.” Presti sits on the memorial’s board, and he makes sure that every player who joins the Thunder visits the site before he ever plays a game. The idea is to teach them the character of the citizenry they’ve just joined, to help them recognize, as Tom Brokaw put it on the night of the bombing, Oklahomans’ “essential sense of goodness, community and compassion.”

After our tour, Presti and I talked for a while outside. He struck me as one of the most cautious people I’ve ever met, constantly stopping and rephrasing, weighing and reweighing his words, openly worried that I was going to misinterpret the team’s relationship to the memorial as a P.R. grab, or that I was going to focus my article on him at the expense of others. He ascribed most of the Thunder’s success to either luck or his colleagues. The most revealing thing Presti said to me that day had to do with the grounds of the memorial, which were impressively tidy. Despite a suffocatingly hot run of late-summer days, the grass was thick and lush and perfectly mowed, with perfect circles around the perfect trees. Presti pointed out how much work it takes to keep everything looking like that, how much deliberate organization, but also how important it is.

At the Thunder’s training center, after a practice in early October, Kevin Durant and I sat on folding chairs at the edge of the gym. He was wearing a black tank top, black shorts and ridiculously colorful shoes. (Loud footwear is one of his few obvious vices.) Practice that day, according to everyone involved, had been “chippy” — Durant’s team had lost a couple of early scrimmages to a team full of rookies and backups, and this had sent everyone, especially Durant and Westbrook, into competitive overdrive.

Sitting with Durant a few minutes later, though, I could detect none of that aggressive energy. He was placid, polite, obliging. He said pretty much everything you would expect him to say, in exactly the way you would expect him to say it. He took every opportunity to gush about his teammates, singling out Westbrook and Harden — the team’s two other big scorers — as “killers” and insisting that, despite the media’s constant attempts to create controversy among them, there was no tension on the team about sharing the ball. It would be ridiculous, he said, to “put those guys on a leash just so I can get two or three more shots up a game.” He praised his teammates’ unselfishness and said he had learned to play the same way. He said that, although he’d known almost nothing about Oklahoma City before the team moved there, now he couldn’t imagine playing anywhere else.

I told Durant that, all over town, people were giving me spontaneous speeches about what a nice guy he was. His response was, naturally, impeccably nice. “I’m just being me, man,” he said. “I’m just enjoying this all. I can’t complain. I mean, I wasn’t raised to be a jerk to anybody. You know what I mean? My mama wouldn’t like that, so that’s just all I know. Just being nice to people and enjoying what I do.”

But how is it possible, I asked, to be as competitive as he must be while also being so nice? Don’t those impulses conflict?

He answered with a story.

Growing up, Durant told me, he was a sore loser. That all changed one day when he was 11, after he got destroyed by his father in a game of one on one in the driveway. “Of course I knew I was gonna lose,” he said. “He was so much bigger and stronger than me. He was backing me down, dunking, pushing me. He was screaming, talking trash. I scored like one point.” Little Kevin was so upset by the loss (and, presumably, by the bullying) that he burst into tears, ran into the house, locked the door and refused to let his father in. The intensity of his own crying surprised him and, after a while, inspired some self-reflection. “I sat back and thought about it and was like, What am I so mad at?” Durant told me, and in that moment, he said, he made a decision. “It’s good to be passionate, it’s good to hate losing — but I’ve got to channel it the right way,” he said. “You know what I mean? And after a while I just started to learn to leave it where it’s at, get rid of it. Once you’re done and you’re off the court or out of the venue or whatever, go back to being you.”

Durant’s story touched on something I’ve thought about often while watching him play. If there’s been one consistent criticism of him, it’s that he’s not aggressive enough — that he fails to use his unearthly skills, as Jordan or Charles Barkley or Kobe would have done, to destroy everybody in his path. There are times, during games, when he seems almost removed from the action, simultaneously there and not there. I always figured that this detachment was just a byproduct of his smoothness: it looks so easy for him, when he strokes four consecutive 3-pointers or tosses in a little half-hook over two defenders, that it’s tempting to imagine he’s thinking about other things the whole time — that the real Kevin Durant is watching from a little viewing platform deep inside his own head, reading a magazine and clipping his nails, ready to re-engage fully when things get intense. But now I suspect that that uncanny stillness, that sense of remove, is the outward manifestation of Durant’s internal control, a sign of his fluency in moving between worlds: aggressive and relaxed, nasty and nice.

Occasionally you can see Durant moving between those worlds, and the transition is jarring. There are moments, for instance, when he dunks and in his excitement begins to stare down his opponent, showboat-style, and you think, No, no, no, no, Kevin Durant, so much of my worldview depends on you not being the type of person who stares people down after dunks. And then, inevitably, a second or so later, he seems to catch himself and jogs back down the court to give all the credit to his teammates. You can see the impulse and the correction — the (to get Freudian for a second) ego and the superego.

This turns out to be a useful way to think about the Thunder. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud argues that humans are ruled by two warring impulses: love, which seeks to bind people into larger and larger groups, and aggression, which seeks to tear them apart. For civilization to work, on even the most basic level, each of us has to find an acceptable outlet for that antisocial aggression. Back in the driveway, Durant’s father directed his aggression toward him. Freud argues that most of us, however, learn to turn our aggression inward, where it morphs into what he calls the superego — the policeman of the psyche, watching us constantly to ensure (with its billy club of guilt) that we make choices for the benefit of the group, not just for our own egos. That psychic self-surveillance, Freud says, is one of the big prices we pay for civilization — a kind of voluntary tax we levy against ourselves for the privilege of living with others.

Kevin Durant oozes superego. Even as we talked on our folding chairs after practice, I sensed a duality. He was simultaneously genuine and polished, open and guarded. This seems to be an inevitable consequence of living the life of a superstar, especially in a place like Oklahoma City. Last summer there was public outrage, in some quarters, when it was discovered that Durant’s torso — the skin under his jersey, which by design is publicly hidden — is covered with tattoos.

One evening I went to the mall to observe one of Durant’s public events. He was at a GameStop, signing copies of a new video game that featured him on its cover. I arrived to find the OKC equivalent of Beatlemania: a line of people, decked out in Thunder gear, stretching out the door and wrapping around the neighboring stores. As I approached the scene, a policeman was dragging a young man who apparently tried to get too close down an escalator. Just then a huge cheer broke out from the crowd. Durant had arrived, through a back entrance, along with a small entourage. I squeezed past the line, stood at the side of the room and watched him throughout the session. He was wearing his signature “KD” gear: hat, T-shirt, sweats. He seemed friendly but also not totally present. Between signatures and photos, he would occasionally grab his phone and sneak a text message under the table. He bantered, here and there, with a couple of kids, but mostly he was quiet and dutiful. His smile seemed automatic. I got the sense that Kevin Durant, the actual 24-year-old guy with the secret tattoos, was hardly even there that night: he was just an avatar for his own fame — this abstract thing that doesn’t actually exist but is millions of times bigger than he is. Not that that was his fault, of course. Even if Durant wanted to genuinely connect with people that night, the sheer scale made it impossible. There was too much inflow for a single person’s outflow. I got a sense of how insane it must be to live that kind of life, in which things are like that every day, everywhere. Is it even possible to be a good, thoughtful, civic-minded person under that kind of pressure? Suddenly all of those sociopathic scoring champions made sense to me. Radical detachment seemed, in a strange and sad way, almost like the proper response.

Toward the end of our post-practice conversation, Durant leaned over and started unlacing his shoes. I took this as a signal that he was ready to leave. He was tired, no doubt, and had other things to do. I wrapped up our interview and thanked him for his time. He popped immediately out of his seat and walked away. After a few steps, he seemed to catch himself. He turned around, walked back and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

The full name of Oklahoma City is the City of Oklahoma City. The police chief of the City of Oklahoma City is named — I’m not joking — Bill Citty. (“Citty” is pronounced exactly like “city.”) Chief Citty, hearing that I was in town to write about his city, offered to give me a tour. He drove me around in his sedan, neighborhood by neighborhood, casually ignoring traffic laws, occasionally being honked at, for more than three hours. The last hour or so we spent at the Oklahoma State Fair, where he drove me around in a golf cart.

Chief Citty’s tour was my introduction to the civic paradox that is modern OKC: a city that, over the last 15 years, has managed to reinvent itself while other cities have melted down, a conservative town that happily submitted to a series of voluntary taxes, a place where the oxymoron “corporate citizen” almost begins to make some kind of sense.

Citty grew up in Oklahoma City, so he has seen, firsthand, the major phases of the last 60 years. He was born during the postwar boom, in 1953, when everything was awash in federal money. (It is one of the many paradoxes of Oklahoma that, despite all its rhetoric of rugged individualism and free markets, the economy has been heavily depending on the federal government for decades.) Citty’s mother worked for a gas company downtown, in an office in the First National Center, one of the defining masterpieces of the city’s skyline — a 33-story Art Deco tower with elaborate aluminum decorations based on King Tut’s tomb. As a teenager in the 1960s, Citty watched as the new malls and highways started sucking all of downtown’s energy out into the suburbs, leaving behind the usual inner-city decay. In the 1970s, after some years of hippyish drifting, he decided to cut his hair, shave off his beard and join the City of Oklahoma City Police Department.

It was 1977. Citty was assigned to patrol a downtown neighborhood called the Deep Deuce, an African-American community that had once been home to world-famous jazz clubs but had declined, by then, into a hub for drugs and gambling and prostitution. (Just before Citty joined the force, a serial killer dumped the body of a prostitute in the basement of a nearby church.) From his beat downtown, Citty watched the city’s economy boom with oil money. New houses sprouted everywhere. Then, in 1982, he watched it all go bust: banks, farms, oil — everything. People lost their new homes; thriving businesses closed. “What happened to us in the early ’80s,” Citty told me, “is what happened to the U.S. economy in ’08.”

Things were still bad in 1993, when the mayor of Oklahoma City, Ron Norick, persuaded his constituents to do something improbable: to voluntarily tax themselves in order to rebuild the city. The program was called Metro Area Projects, or Maps — a one-cent sales tax that raised more than $350 million. Over the next two decades, Maps and its sequels (the city is currently on Maps 3) would change almost every neighborhood in the city, especially downtown. It built a canal and a minor-league baseball stadium and a new library; it turned an endless stretch of empty warehouses into a vital shopping district; it overhauled the schools; it put water back in the river, which had been so dry that, for decades, the city had to mow it. And of course Maps built a basketball stadium, which would come spectacularly into play many years later.

In 1995, just as Maps was getting rolling, life in the city suddenly came to a stop. On an otherwise ordinary April morning, a 26-year-old terrorist drove a moving truck full of fertilizer and other chemicals into the heart of downtown and parked in front of the nine-story Federal Building. The explosion, at 9:02 a.m., killed 168 people and injured 684. Five blocks west, at Police Headquarters, the tile shook so hard and so many windows broke that Bill Citty assumed the bomb had gone off inside. He figured out its real source only when he saw that the paper raining down everywhere had come from offices inside the Federal Building. He made it there within 20 minutes and stayed for the next month. At that point, Citty was the department’s public information officer, which meant he had to wrangle the media, a suddenly gargantuan task. He became, in a sense, the link between Oklahoma City and the rest of the world.

As part of our tour, Citty drove me down to the Deep Deuce, which was now full of bright new brick apartment complexes. He drove me past the State Capitol, the only one in the nation with an oil rig in front of it. He drove me through Automobile Alley, a revitalized hipster pocket. He pointed out the public bike-rental program, Spokies, that opened over the summer. Half of the city seemed to be under construction. Near the basketball arena, an old elevated highway was being torn down: it was now just a lattice of concrete, with on- and offramps that ended in midair. The highway will soon be replaced by a grand boulevard — the Champs-Élysées of OKC — leading right to the Thunder’s home.

This public rebuilding helped bring in private investment, which in turn brought in more revenue for public works, which brought in more private investment — and these cycles eventually combined to make Oklahoma City a plausible home for N.B.A. basketball. When it arrived, the growth and the basketball amplified each other. “We’d have a lot of good things happening now even if we didn’t get the Thunder,” Citty told me. “But we got the Thunder because good things were going on, and now even better things are going on.” As an example, he drove me past the Devon Energy Center, the city’s new skyscraper, a 50-story steel-and-glass tube that dwarfs every other building in sight.

This, then, is part of the city’s love affair with the Thunder. It’s more than just a basketball team: it’s the culmination of 20 years of civic reinvention, and the promise of more to come. Over the last five years, the city and its team have undergone a perfect mind meld, so at this point it’s impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. After all of that sacrifice — the grind of municipal meetings and penny taxes and planning boards, the dust and noise and uncertainty of construction, the horror of 1995 — the little city in the middle of No Man’s Land has finally arrived on the world stage. While it’s there, it fully intends to put on a good performance.

A basketball team is a kind of miniature society, and the Thunder’s is a strange one. Most great N.B.A. teams are built on a rational distribution of talents: two or three elite players whose skills complement, rather than overlap with, one another’s, supported by a small army of role players. The classic example is the 1986 Celtics, in which Larry Bird’s all-around game and outside shooting were supplemented perfectly by the under-the-basket play of Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. The Thunder, however, were built around three big stars — Durant, Westbrook and Harden — who all have essentially the same talent. Each one is an elite perimeter scorer, and each one needs the ball to be effective. Each could easily be the focus of an offense all by himself. (Harden, who was recently traded after a contract dispute, will now put this theory to the test with the Houston Rockets.) As a result, when the Thunder offense is good, it’s organized chaos — an embarrassment of riches. When it’s bad, which it is less and less frequently, it’s just chaos: stagnation, wild shots, wasted possessions.

Scott Brooks, the Thunder’s head coach, told me that he fell in love with basketball in seventh grade, in a small town in Northern California, at a free clinic taught by a local coach. What he loved, immediately, was exactly the problem of this Thunder lineup: the way the game forced you to braid together individual achievement and teamwork, the singular and the collective. Brooks loved that he could go to the gym and work on his game, all by himself, whenever he felt like it, and then, the next day or week, see that work play out in the context of a team. Brooks’s mastery of the individual-collective balance allowed him to become a star in high school and college and then — against all the athletic odds, as a 5-foot-11 nonleaper — to patch together a 10-year N.B.A career playing with seven different teams, including the 1994 champion Houston Rockets. Although Brooks had been a scorer in college, as a pro he accepted the job of the old-school N.B.A. point guard: to get the ball to his various teams’ stars — Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon — and then get out of the way.

This made Brooks the opposite of the Thunder’s point guard, Russell Westbrook. Westbrook is often referred to as the most explosive athlete in the league — his physique is so cartoonishly chiseled that one of his teammates recently compared him to a He-Man doll — and he uses those superpowers to do things Brooks never could have dreamed of: to turn a defensive rebound, in just a few reckless seconds, into a dunk at the other end, or to get his jump shot off over two defenders when everyone in the arena knows it’s coming. This skill set makes him unorthodox as a point guard, to say the least. The Thunder’s horrific start as a franchise in 2008 — that legendary 3-29 — was in part a result of Westbrook’s wildness. He led the league in turnovers for his first season. Early on, there were murmurs that Westbrook couldn’t play point guard, especially next to a scoring superstar like Durant — someone who, many thought, would have benefited more from a Scott Brooks type, a teammate who would get him the ball and get out of the way. Even as the Thunder improved, there were rumors that Westbrook and Durant resented each other, that they couldn’t coexist, that the ecosystem of the team might be beyond repair.

Throughout the losing and the turnovers and the rumors, however, Brooks not only kept playing Westbrook but also encouraged his recklessness. That confidence paid off. Westbrook is now a superstar in his own right — if Durant is the second-best player in the world, Westbrook is probably in the Top 10. He’s still wild, and he still occasionally makes high-profile mistakes, and TV analysts still love to question his shot selection — but he has improved in all of those areas enough that his net effect on the team is overwhelmingly positive. It’s impossible, at this point, to disentangle the bad from the good. In Game 4 of the Finals, Westbrook kept taking wild, flying, contested midrange jumpers — one of the least efficient shots in the sport — and making nearly all of them. He scored 43 points and almost single-handedly kept the Thunder in the game. (They ended up losing, after some LeBron heroics, by 6.)

I asked Brooks if he ever had trouble maintaining a balance between chaos and order, crazy Westbrook and sane Westbrook.

He laughed. “Trust me, there are times where my hair is almost out,” he said.

But he defended his point guard. “Is he a natural John Stockton type? No, but he never will be. Those guys are done. Those guys are over. You’re not seeing those guys coming back. Russell is a dynamic offensive player. I would be a foolish coach if I said, ‘Russell, I don’t want you to go to the basket and draw fouls and score and put pressure on the defense.’ We need that.”

He also dismissed the idea of a rift between Westbrook and Durant.

“I’m with them every day. Did they have some competitive moments? Absolutely. But that’s how we work here. We challenge each other. It gets chippy. James and Kevin, Serge and Russell, me and Perk, Thabo and Russell — all of us. If it ever gets on the wrong side of being competitive, I’ll step in. But not once have I had to step in, in five years. If Russell and Kevin have problems, then I didn’t get along with any of my teammates.”

One symptom of a small sports market is a lack of celebrity fans. Among N.B.A. teams, the Lakers are famous for their fame: they have Jack and Penny and Denzel and a whole human gallery of plastic-surgery glamour; the Knicks have Spike and Woody and Chris Rock and a rotating roster of Broadway stars. The Thunder has Wayne Coyne, the singer of the alternative-rock band the Flaming Lips. Coyne is famous for floating over crowds in a giant bubble at concerts and generally behaving like a psychedelic space cadet around town. He was raised in Oklahoma and, unusually — even as his creative peers poured out toward the coasts — he never left. Over the last 15 years, as the Flaming Lips have gained worldwide fame, and as Oklahoma City has begun to rebrand itself as a vital place for young, artsy energy, the city has embraced Coyne, now 51, as a kind of elder statesman. This has turned out to be, for both sides, a rather complicated transaction. Three years ago, the Flaming Lips song “Do You Realize??” was named the official rock song of Oklahoma, but only over the strenuous objections of several state politicians. Coyne’s latest OKC adventure, much blogged about in the city, is a spectacularly ill-advised art gallery called the Womb — a drab old warehouse, in the heart of downtown, that he bought and repainted in explosive rainbow colors, complete with cartoonish naked women and a giant abstract vagina on the front door. After Coyne told the local paper that he was going to have a huge New Year’s party there, at which teenagers might be able to drop acid with Yoko Ono, the fire marshal showed up and shut the gallery down.

As OKC’s reigning celebrity, Coyne sometimes attends Thunder games, where he sits courtside. Although he seems genuinely fond of the team, he’s not what you would call a sports aficionado. When I asked him if he followed basketball before the Thunder came to town, he had to think for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “I mean, I liked, like, the Harlem Globetrotters. Or some mythical figure like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar” — and he pronounced “Jabbar” in the most amazing way, with an exotically soft “j” and several extra vowels, as if it were the name of a genie that had come drifting one morning out of his bong.

Coyne admits that at Thunder games, he doesn’t always understand what’s going on. “It’s not like a Steven Spielberg-scripted event when you’re there,” he told me. “You’re like, Well, did we win? I’m confused. Did they win? And then you look up and you’re like, Well, is the game over?”

He said he has been yelled at by other fans for cheering for Kobe Bryant. (“That was wicked! Who is that?” he shouted the first time he saw Kobe score. The crowd told him that it was Kobe and suggested, forcefully, that he stop cheering for him. “But that was wicked!” Coyne responded.)

Coyne and I spoke, late one night, sitting in his Prius, which was parked in front of the Blue Note Lounge, a smoky bar at which the Flaming Lips played their first show 30 years ago. He was wearing a gray suit (he’d just come from a wedding), and his gray hair poured out in a big curly plume from his head. His fingernails were painted gold, and his face was lightly dusted with glitter.

Coyne believes that the Thunder transcend the limits of their confusing sport — that they channel the energy of the whole community in a way that resonates across the world. Using a variety of accents, he told me stories about people in Germany and Switzerland and Sweden — places where he never used to hear about his hometown — all of a sudden talking to him about how much they love the Thunder. “I think people like the idea that, whether you’re a weirdo rock dude or a basketball player, we all have this spirit of the city,” he said. “Which I don’t think really exists. But I think the Thunder has probably pulled it together more than anything else.”

Thunder crowds are notoriously loud and supportive. Visiting players often say it feels more like a college crowd than an N.B.A. crowd. Fans wear color-coordinated shirts for big games, and even when the team was horrible, they never booed. “Sometimes I would think to myself, Do these people realize that we’re down 20 with 3 minutes to go?” Scott Brooks told me, remembering the early days. “We’d be walking through the tunnel and I’d think: O.K., this is the night that I get heckled. This is the night I get popcorn thrown on me. Nothing. Every single game, it was: ‘Hang in there coach. Players, we love you guys.’ ”

Coyne sees an analogy between basketball games and rock concerts. Playing a song for the thousandth time, he told me, is just as meaningless as putting a ball through a hoop. Under the right circumstances, however, those things take on great collective meaning. “It’s that idea of everybody being focused on the same thing at the same time and being together in the bigger experience,” he said. “It’s silliness, but all things are like that.”

The Thunder has become a surprisingly integral part of hipster life in OKC. Coyne lives in a residential neighborhood called the Plaza District, the main drag of which has been — like so much of the city — radically transformed over the last five years. These days there’s a vintage shop, a tattoo parlor where people come to get Thunder tattoos and, in a building that used to be known as a brothel, a new restaurant devoted to gourmet grilled-cheese sandwiches. I went into an artsy shop called DNA Galleries, across from the grilled-cheese-sandwich restaurant, and it turned out to be full of Thunder gear: local artists had designed, often very cleverly, their own T-shirts, beer cozies, stickers and onesies. Most businesses around town let their employees dress in Thunder gear on game days, which has created a big market for Thunder clothes: many Oklahomans have entirely separate game-day wardrobes. The store’s owner told me that the Thunder changed her life. Saleswise, she said, basketball season is like eight months of Christmas.

And now it is time to talk about James Harden’s beard.

The fate of Harden was the first serious test of the Thunder’s utopian culture — the first stubborn wrinkle in Sam Presti’s enlightened basketball collective.

Harden was the first draft pick ever made by the Thunder: they chose him third in 2009. (Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka all joined when the team was still the Seattle SuperSonics.) His beard, at the time, was modest and closely cropped, the kind of thing you could wear to a business meeting without raising any eyebrows. Harden was a 19-year-old shooting guard with an old man’s game, full of the kinds of tricks you might see at your local Y.M.C.A.: quick shots, misdirections, shifts in speed, counterintuitive arm motions designed to bait defenders into fouls. He wasn’t overwhelmingly athletic, though, and many experts thought the Thunder had selected him too high. During his rookie year, he did little to convince anyone otherwise. As Harden’s beard grew, however, so did his mojo. As it started to hang from his face, his tricks started, improbably, to work in the N.B.A. The beard grew thicker and more unruly, and Harden began to exceed everyone’s expectations. By last season, he had become one of the most effective scorers the N.B.A. has ever seen.

By the time the Thunder reached the finals, Harden’s beard was a full-on Rip Van Winkle, and it had become something of an unofficial team mascot. Photos flew around the Internet: a James Harden cake from an OKC bakery, with a huge mess of black icing extending off its cake chin; an Oklahoma City building with a giant beard hanging from its facade; a James Harden tattoo on some anonymous superfan’s arm. The most popular item at the official Thunder retail store, its manager told me, was a Harden-style fake black beard, which fans would wear at home games. Harden’s beard was gratuitous, quirky and improbable — the same set of attributes that made Oklahoma City basketball different than Miami or Los Angeles or New York.

Harden’s rise was great for the Thunder — not many third bananas get that good, that fast — but it was also a threat. He had always been a complicated figure in Presti’s scheme. He was an elite scorer willing to come off the bench — a citizen willing to pay a serious tax (in minutes, shots and star potential) to be a part of the Thunder society. The group, in turn, offered Harden some harder-to-measure benefits: As a sixth man, he got to play against the other team’s bench players, which made him look even better than he was. When he shared the floor with Durant and Westbrook, he benefited from the other team’s obsessive attention to them.

But Harden got a little too good. The cost-benefit balance tipped out of whack. He wanted a maximum contract and, by league standards, probably deserved one. The Thunder — having already committed max contracts to Durant and Westbrook, and having just signed Ibaka to a near-max — wanted to pay him less. Near the climactic point of the Harden contract crisis, several people in Oklahoma City joked to me that they would be perfectly willing to pass another Maps tax to help pay for him to stay. Then they made it clear that, actually, they weren’t joking; the people of Oklahoma City would seriously do this. One city official I spoke with thought a penny tax would be too much — maybe an eighth, he suggested, with a quarter of that going to improve the city.

Presti’s goal is to build a sustainably excellent organization, which means one that transcends its players. No individual, no matter how important or loved, can ever be allowed to trump the group. At 8:28 on the night of Oct. 27, Kevin Durant tweeted the word “Wow.” Over the next few hours, that message was retweeted more than 10,000 times. The Thunder had traded James Harden, just three days before the start of the season.

For the Thunder, this trade marked a passage from innocence (youth, ideals, plenitude) to experience (age, cash, loss). The fairy-tale part of their story, in which they’re magically immune from the muddiness of N.B.A. success, is over. The team will still be good — Presti got a reasonable return for Harden, and of course they still have Westbrook and Durant — but it feels as if they’ll never be the same. Unless, of course, all that collective energy is strong enough to somehow conjure, like a phoenix rising from Harden’s beard, another great individual.

True Grit, by Khalid Salaam

The Boston Celtics are the class of the Eastern Conference and—at press time, winning at an .833 percent clip—arguably the best team in the entire League. All of their players are playing at 2010 Playoffs peak levels; a couple are even hovering above that. It’s impressive and certainly feasible that they will get four players into the All-Star Game. Where is this closing window we keep hearing about? It’s supposed to be shutting soon, but right now this team is savaging its opponents. Both Ray Allen and Paul Pierce are having career-best shooting years (PDouble is hitting 50 percent of his shots from the field and Allen 49 percent); Kevin Garnett has overcome his recent injures and is playing with ’07-level athleticism; Glen Davis is in the early running for the Sixth Man of the Year award; and Shaquille O’Neal is proving that there’s more left in his tank after all. So who’s responsible for this upkeep?

The Celtics are on national TV seemingly every week, and their highlights are always prominently shown. Sometimes highlights lie—don’t tell the whole story of how impactful a player is during an entire game. But when you catch what Rajon Rondo is doing, it’s evident that his play is what makes this thing go. This is the best pick-and-roll defending team in the L, the best help-defense in the League and the best one-on-one defensive team, too. Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen are all tremendous, but Rondo is the most essential player on the team, and arguably the best point guard in the game.

“For this team, I’m the best for this role,” explains Rondo, days before he sprained an ankle that cost him a few games. “Obviously, they don’t need me to score the ball, even though I can make shots. Other point guards take shots because that’s their job. My job is to get guys open looks, make it easy for guys and run this system.”

To understand Rondo’s defensive approach, think of him as an NFL free safety who has specific duties but also the ability to freelance. He hovers near his man but is always moving, making himself available for help when needed. It’s a cerebral style of play that allows Rondo to, at times, dominate entire games.

“I’ve played with some really good PGs,” says Allen. “Terrell Brandon was one of the best guards in the League at the time, Sam Cassell was a great player, an All-Star. The difference is those two guys are scorers. Rondo’s not a scorer. He’s a playmaker. He’s a better athlete than either of those guys. He affects the game more all-around then any guard I’ve ever played with.”

It’s unique, a style of PG play that didn’t exist before. Rondo is the Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the NBA—there is no father to his style. It’s not smooth, and you won’t hear words like “effortless” describing Rondo. It’s not really flashy, nor is it pedestrian. It’s something else. Surgical almost. He plays with speed and balance, a cunning style that works in both fast break and half-court situations. He’s a throwback without having an old-school game. At press time, his 13.8 assists per game leads the League, and he’s already had five games this season where he posted 17 or more assists. Meanwhile, his per-game scoring average is a relatively modest 11.2, albeit on 53 percent shooting from the field and accompanied by 4.5 rpg and 2.4 spg. Free throws are a different story.

Remember, we’re in the era of de facto combo guards. All of the top PGs—Rose, Westbrook, Paul, Williams—are deft scorers capable of 30-plus on a good night. After Rondo, Steve Nash is the only player averaging at least 10 assists, and he’s over three assists back from Rondo’s pace. The John Stockton pom-pom shorts era, where four or five guys routinely averaged double-digit assists, seems as much a relic as two-parent homes.

“Things have changed a lot. When I came into the League, it was all about the pass-first point guard, and that’s why I had so many problems with Rick Pitino, because I was a scorer,” says Nuggets point man Chauncey Billups. “These days, guys who don’t score are rare. Everybody is a scoring guard now, and they affect the game by getting buckets. You look around and those are the best guys out there. Except for Rondo, he’s the exception to the rule. He does so many things that you can’t just play him one way, he’s just a special player.”

None of this is to say he came out of nowhere. Rondo did his thing at Eastern HS in Louisville for three years, then went on to prep power Oak Hill Academy and the University of Kentucky. Playing at a high-visibility program like UK gave him confidence, but it was playing well for the US in the 2005 FIBA U-21 World Championship that gave him the boost he needed to apply for the NBA Draft. After a nondescript rookie season in ’06-07, Rondo went primetime the next season when the Big Three was assembled.

You know the rest of the story—a pup on a team of alpha dogs who comes through and helps them win a ring. Improves every year, enough to make the All-Star Game last year and grab a couple of triple-doubles in the Playoffs. Now he’s easily one of the all-around best players in the League. “It’s a complete change from ’08,” Rondo says. “I’m a more serious student of the game, and my overall player development is improved. I have to give credit to a lot of guys who helped me mature.”

Chief among those he credits is head coach Doc Rivers, whose “man’s man” coaching style stresses intelligence. As a former floor leader himself, Rivers didn’t take any short cuts when it came to Rondo’s learning curve.

“Coach played 12, 13 years and he’s been coaching almost as long, and with all the experience he has to offer, I almost don’t have a choice but to listen to him,” Rondo says. “He’s been an All-Star in his career and he’s a great X-and-O coach. He draws up a lot of plays out of time-outs and we do a great job of executing them. Obviously, because he was a point guard, that’s why he was so hard on me. It was a little bit of everything. There wasn’t any one thing in particular that he focused on, but there was always something. No matter how good I played, he stayed on me to keep me humble and keep me consistent.”

During the Celtics championship run in ’08, KG was the defensive catalyst, but now he shares that distinction with Rondo. As soon as an opponent lets go of the ball and it gets near the other player—BOOM! Rondo steps in front. Or if an opponent does get the rock in the post or the elbow, he comes from his blind side and strips him. He’ll also harass man-to-man. It doesn’t seem to matter to him.

“The first thing I look at is what play the other point guard is calling. (Assistant) Coach (Lawrence) Frank does a great job of going over scouting reports, so I pretty much know what the other players are doing. There’s only a few plays the teams in the NBA run differently, pretty much it’s the same sets,” he explains. “So I do a great job picking out the plays and knowing how to get into the passing lanes. I try to call out plays so my teammates can have an advantage and we can make plays and get stops on the defensive end. It depends on the match-up—if a point guard has a high-scoring wing man, then he’s not gonna take many shots. He’ll defer to that guy so I’ll gamble more. But you gotta respect your opponent, so I pick and choose the right times, because if I miss, then I’ll hear it from Coach. So it’s a thin line.”

Rondo still doesn’t have a legit jumper, so teams occasionally slump off him to focus on other players. He compensates by getting to the paint, where his skill-set amplifies to include a bunch of trick plays. Rondo’s definitely athletic, but he’s not a freak-level athlete, so his game is mostly mental. While discussing the particulars of his offensive game, we both come to the comical conclusion that other players just aren’t watching enough tape of him.

“Yeah, its all the same moves. I know that one move in particular (the fake-one-way-scoop-lay-up-the-other-way), I don’t know why they fall for it each time,” he says. “I don’t know if I do a great job of selling it, but they should know by now that when I get down there on the baseline, I’ma do the same things. I created all these crazy shots on my own. In college I could play with the bigs, but here in the League, every guy has a 40-inch vertical and is 6-10 so I have to use trick shots.”

The system the Celtics run doesn’t have an iconic name like the Triangle Offense, but that shouldn’t make it any less memorable. It’s based on passing—interior and perimeter—and focuses not only on getting guys open shots but on getting preferred location open shots. You rarely see the Celtics players taking forced shots from uncomfortable spots on the floor. The ability to differentiate who gets the ball and when they get it is what separates Rondo from other point guards.

Says Rajon happily, “No matter what I’m going with, who’s open and what shot is available, Ray can pretty much shoot from anywhere. Paul likes to get his feet set but he can shoot from anywhere, too. He probably has more confidence shooting the three now then ever. I also look for Kevin and Shaq in the post. The most exciting part of this is when guys have it going and I can just sit back and watch them. When KG is catching lobs and guys are shooting threes, its fun.”

Swagger is the most overused word in sports today. Sportswriters have made that word impotent by using it to describe every guy who has an interesting haircut. The Celtics, however, have swagger for days. Four first-ballot Hall of Famers, plus known guys like Nate Robinson and Kendrick Perkins (though injured, he is still very much a part of this team) give Boston a high level of confidence. They talk smack amongst themselves, take bows on opposing teams’ courts and still remind people that their starting five has still never lost a Playoff series. If you’re going to be the point guard on this team, you’re going to have to tell some high-minded men “no,” and often. Rondo is just as competitive but much more reserved, and his Teddy Roosevelt-like Big Stick mentality is crucial to running a team like this.

“I want those guys to have fun playing with me and feel relaxed. I want to add a couple of years to their careers so they don’t have to take 29 shots in a game and can focus on being more efficient,” he says. “People think it’s hard deciding who to throw it to, but what helps me is that everybody is so unselfish. If they were selfish guys, then it would be much more challenging. Guys make sacrifices and, for the most part, they never complain. Obviously all the guys want the ball in crunch time and, really, any great player wants the ball then. But it’s up to me to figure it out.”

These are magnificent days for late-night conversations about NBA point guards. So at the end of the interview, I drop the best PG in the League question on him. To his credit, he accepts the challenge. In fact, he gets excited.

“If you need someone to run the show, then I’m the best in the League,” he says. “There are a lot of good point guards in this League and there might be other guys who can play with this team, I don’t know. But if you ask the guys here who they want to play with, I’m sure they’ll say me. If you ask Kevin, Ray…Look, I don’t want to put words in guys’ mouths, but I’m sure they’ll say me.”

Time-Honored: Why Some Fans of a New Gizmo Are Eager to Misuse It, by Rob Walker

Last September, at one of those periodic events where Apple offers up a new product with much fanfare, Steve Jobs invited the audience to join him in admiring the latest iteration of the iPod Nano. With the touch-screen interface associated with the iPhone and the iPad, the music player had shrunk to a square, weighing less than an ounce and almost comically wee. Some observers took it for a joke when Jobs said an Apple board member intended to sport the thing as a watch. Others didn't laugh; they sprang into action.
Plenty used the gizmo's clip to simply attach it to a sturdy watchband, and a few began devising brand-new bands specifically meant to accommodate a Nano. Soon the gadget blogs were pointing readers to wristband sources and offering reviews of the device not as a music player but as a time-teller. Today you can buy several wristbands manufactured by the companies iWatchz and Griffin Technology directly from Apple's online store, each about $25. (The Nano itself is $150 or more, depending on memory capacity.) And most recently, a Chicago design firm set off a frenzy with its Nano-watch product proposal, hitting a new record on the Kickstarter, where creative types can solicit donations to underwrite new projects.
The Nano-watch fad merges two well-established developments of the gizmo era. The first is that Apple's various handheld devices have spawned ecosystems of spinoff and add-on products and accessories, from function-adding attachments to style-focused cases and covers. The second is that no matter how many devices we carry around that happen to have clocks built into them, the idea of the wristwatch soldiers on. And Apple seems to have anticipated - maybe even hoped - that its unnamed board member wouldn't be the only person to use the thing as a watch: as an item on The Huffington Post noted at the time, the device came with "clock functionality" preinstalled. ("Clock functionality" seems to refer not only to the fact that the thing tells time but also that one of the choices for the default screen mimics an analog watch face.) Still, it's curious to witness a sophisticated piece of technology wholly reimagined for use for as a mere timepiece.
The case is best made by Minimal, a design firm based in Chicago that set the fund-raising record on Kickstarter, setting out to drum up $15,000 and instead attracting an astonishing $941,718. (Many of the donations amounted to preorders - any pledge of $25 or more entailed receiving at least one of the products as a "premium.") In a promotional video, Scott Wilson, a designer who founded Minimal, directly acknowledges the declining need for wristwatches, which "have been reduced to a status symbol and a fashion accessory," as he puts it. But, he continues, watch designers have long "chased" the notion of a "multitouch watch," and the Nano's interface and petite size almost accidentally resolve that quest.
And so Minimal offers two wrist-wearable bands. With the TikTok (preselling for $35 in January), you snap your Nano into a reinforced plastic case attached to a "high-grade silicone rubber" strap. (You can pop it out via an empty space on the back that happens to be the right size to reveal the Apple logo, and is referred to the promo video as the "brand hole.) The LunaTik has a two piece, bolt-together compartment fashioned from "aerospace-grade aluminum" and is meant for someone less concerned with removing the Nano for nonwatch uses; it's preselling for $70.
Despite the exciting sound of a "multitouch watch," the truth is that the Nano's functions are limited. It has a stopwatch and a timer, and the built-in pedometer syncs with the Nikeplus tracking system for runners. The clock face can be black or white. It's true that the thing holds gigabytes of music, but this incidental fact is completely ignored in the Minimal video. And honestly, even in this stylishly done promotional piece, it's distracting when the LunaTik appears on an actual wrist: it's a little too big and a little too weird, and looking a lot more hyperprop than hyperpractical.
Although in fairness, it could also send another signal - that its wearer is tech-forward and inventive, the sort who embraces not only what's new but also the latest way of using the new for something other than its stated purpose. The slightly off-kilter, blatant geekiness of the result underscores this message. Yes, the watchified-Nano wearer silently declares, I do think I'm Dick Tracy.
Adding a gizmo to the wristwatch formula doesn't avoid the idea of the watch as status symbol or fashion accessory - it squares it. If there's one business that matches fashion in its relentless efforts to make this year's model fashions in its relentless efforts to make this year's model seem dated and in need of prompt replacement, it's technology; before long there will be another batch of gadgets, unveiled by Apple or some rival, that will no doubt render Nanos-repurposed-as-watches obsolete. But for the moment it's a highly noticeable, and vaguely fun, tech-fashion statement. And it does add something new to the history of wearable clock functionality - an idea, that, surprisingly, really has stood the test of time.

Ray Allen, by Tzvi Twersky

There are a handful of excellent shooters in the NBA. And then there's Ray Allen. Excellent shooters can make shots even when lanky defenders with slinky arms obstruct their view of the basket. Ray Allen will make shots regardless of the condition. Excellent shooters are Matt Bonner, Anthony Morrow, Kyle Korver, and their role-playing brethren. Ray Allen is a future Hall of Famer.

It's late in the third act of an unexpectedly close game between the visiting Boston Celtics and the New Jersey Nets, and the Prudential Center in Newark is chilly. Not as temperate as extreme as the old Boston Garden was said to be have had back in Larry Bird's day, but chilly enough that I have to zip up my oversized LRG hoody. The players don't seem to mind, though, as sweat drips down their faces and on to their jerseys.

With a shade over 2:50 left in the third, New Jersey big man Brook Lopez tips in a Travis Outlaw miss to give his team a 58-56 lead. As Boston inbounds the ball and advances upcourt, it's obvious from my perch 20 feet directly behind the Celtics' basket that they're setting up one of their most basic - and effective - sets. Rajon Rondo, dribbling the ball with his right hand, guiding traffic with his left, patiently waits near the top of the key for the play to develop.

As the shot clock ticks toward 18, Glen "Big Baby" Davis, the widest player on the court, takes up position on the left side of the baseline, about 19 feet from the basket. Mirroring his movements, center Troy Murphy sets up in the same location on the right baseline. Jeff Green sits just behind the three-point line on the right wing. Ray Allen, blanketed by Sundiata Gaines, occupies the same position as Green except on the opposite side, near Davis.

17. All five Celtics hold their position.

16. Rajon Rondo takes one last dribble in place, and everything begins to simultaneously unfold. Ray Allen feigns a dive to the corner and Gaines follows his lead, not giving up an inch. In mid-step, though, Allen reverses course and makes a move toward the rim, where Davis lies in wait. Unable to avoid the imposing Baby, Gaines runs smack into him as Allen continues along the baseline. Unflustered by the momentary setback, Gaines gains on Allen, catching up to him under the basket.

15. Eyeing the movement, Green moves along the free-throw line, taking his defender away from the incoming shooting guard, and toward the wing Allen vacated a second prior. Meanwhile, now running at full speed, Allen maintains his course along the baseline, where he rubs off Murphy and makes a V-cut to the opposite wing.

14. Sundiata Gaines cannot get around the screening Murphy. Travis Outlaw, Murphy's defender, is slow running out to the three-point line to pick up the open Allen.

13. Rajon Rondo delivers a perfect chest pass to Allen, who sets his feet, squares his shoulders,
spreads his fingers, and pops his wrist.

12. The ball rotates high in the air, and before the shot reaches its destination, I look away. I look away because, having watched Ray Allen play for almost 15 NBA seasons now, I know what the result is likely going to be. I look away because Allen told me, "I'm only surprised when I miss. When it doesn't go in I'm like, How did that happen?! I don't get it. And truly I mean that. I only question the misses. Even if I shoot a halfcourt shot, I feel like I've got a great chance of making it."

11. Swish. Boston has reclaimed the lead, 59-58. Ray has hit his 2,593rd career three. All is momentarily right in an otherwise topsy-turvy world.

Ray Allen's jumpshot is sweeter than high fructose corn syrup and just as deadly. The question is, Why? Why is his shot greater than all other shots? And, what's the secret behind his success?

"That's an excellent question," says Karl Hobbs, George Washington University's current head coach and the man Ray Allen credits for helping him polish his stroke while at UConn. "I really think it's all in his wrist and the extension he gets on his shot. And he's always relaxed on his shot. He never really rushes his shot."

While Allen certainly doesn't disagree with the man who had him study Hersey Hawkins game tape throughout his stay in Storrs, CT, he thinks his career shooting percentage of 45 (40 from behind the three-point line) has more to do with his legs. " The lower body is the most important," says the 10-time All-Star. "The upper body is kind of like non-existent if your lower body is doing what it's supposed to do. If you've got great legs on your shot, it's always going to have a shot to go in."

While there may be a slight difference of opinion when it comes to dissecting the physical reasons behind his shooting prowess, the leg on which Ray Allen's greatness stands is as evident as the CITGO sign looming over Fenway Park: It's his work ethic.

Everyone knows about Ray Allen's extremely regimented game day routine. They know about his post-nap meal of chicken and rice; they know about his early arrival to the gym; they know about his exhaustive shooting routine. What everyone may not know about is Allen's equally outrageous practice habits.

According to Boston coach Doc Rivers, even on the day after a game where he played 40-plus minutes, Allen will hit the Celtics' facility in Waltham, MA hours prior to the start of practice. After carefully changing into his ball gear - if Allen had a hair on his head, it would never be out of place; his nature is that meticulous - he begins his workout by running on the treadmill for 60 minutes. He then makes his ways down to the court, where he matriculates from location to location, taking 300 or more shots. Then his teammates arrive and practice begins.

"It's just his warm-up, and for most people that's their practice," says Rivers reverentially during a quiet moment before the March game in Newark. "That is why he is who he is."

Who is Ray Allen exactly? He's 15 seasons of 20 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 threes a game. He is, according to many NBA players past and present, one of the greatest shooters to ever lay hands on a Spalding. He is according to the stats, the greatest three-point shooter of all time. He is the perfect citizen, the epitome of cool and the very definition of consistent greatness.
Yet, at 35 years of age, he still practices like the scrawny freshmen at UConn, he was half a lifetime ago. And that is not-so-secret ingredient behind his jumper's serenity and his career's longevity.

"I don't take credit or praise for being able to shoot the basketball, because I do it so much," says Allen. "Pat me on the back. Tell me I'm great. But get in the gym with me and you'll be like, "I've watched him work out, so I really expect that to go in."

Coach Hobbs, observer of almost two decades of Ray Allen hoops, says that you can never tell what kind of game Allen is having based on his ever-neutral facial expression.

Consider February 10, 2011 the exception. After three days and two nights sitting on the precipice of Reggie Miller's record for all-time three-pointers made (2,560), three days and two nights of answering an abundance of questions about it, Allen arrived at TD Banknorth Garden one three short of tying and two short of breaking the record. He'd accomplish both in the first quarter, showing a hint of emotion after No. 2,560 and a full array after the record-breaker.

Backpedaling down the court after draining N0. 2561 over Derek Fisher, Allen pumped his fists - seemingly still trying to keep his emotions in check. He followed that by clapping emphatically. With the crowd noise rising to an NBA Finals-esque crescendo, Allen gave the masses a thumbs-up. Then he exhaled...and started cheesin' from cheek to cheek. Finally, Allen went over to Reggie Miller, who was on the sidelines calling the game for TNT, and gave him a handshake and an awkward but obviously heartfelt hug.

Moments later, after re-adjusting his headset, Miller would note on national TV: “I’m so happy for him, because this is one of the best guys. He is so humble. He’s so giving. He’s a great family man.”

What Reggie Miller was trying to say, and what Ray Allen’s hug attests to, is that Allen is nothing if not gracious. Coach Hobbs knows this from his days working him out on the practice floor at UConn, where a young Allen would always make sure to say, “Thanks, Coach,” before heading to the locker room. I know this from how giving he was with his time—be it on an off-day phone call or after a tough, late-season loss in Newark.

That 88-79 loss to the Nets did irk Allen, though. Because if there’s one thing he cares about almost as much as people, it’s winning.

“A lot of guys in the NBA talk about wanting to win, but they don’t want to win on the team’s terms—they want to win on their own terms,” says Allen. “People talk about it, but they don’t really know what it means to really go about winning. It’s just talk. I’ve been fortunate to meet up with some players and an organization that really wants to win.”

Not satiated with the title he won in 2008, after re-upping for two more years with the Celtics this past summer, Allen spent copious amounts of time in the gym, preparing for another run at the championship.

The work paid off. The 35-year-old had one of his finest season since coming over to Boston in ’07. He’s averaging 16.5 points, shot career-bests of 49 percent from the field and 44 percent from downtown. More importantly, the Celtics finished third in the Eastern Conference.

“He’s gotten better with age,” says Hobbs, who watches the Celtics on TV frequently. “That’s a tribute to how he keeps his body and mind in great condition.”

Though he’d only been a Celtic for four games, Carlos Arroyo thinks he knows the root of Allen’s continued production at an age when most jump shooters are relegated to the bench or the YMCA. “We want to drink some of that water,” says Arroyo of the fountain of youth Allen seems to have discovered. “Whatever he’s drinking, we want some.”

Arroyo’s just finding out what most people already know.

There are excellent shooters. And then there’s Ray Allen.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."

The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.

"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.

"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.

"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.

"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we go."

"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just re- member that the next time you want me to curl your hair."

June Star said her hair was naturally curly.

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of her gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.

The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother and gone back to sleep.

"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.

"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."

"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state too."

"You said it," June Star said.

"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved

"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.

"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little riggers in the country don't have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.

The children exchanged comic books.

The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or fix graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation."

"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.

"Gone With the Wind" said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."

When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.

The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T. ! This story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentle man and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.

They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sand- wiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!

Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward him.

Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took their order. The children's mother put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz," and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she could tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.

"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come be my little girl?"

"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!" and she ran back to the table.

"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.

"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.

Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people's order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"

"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.

"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"

"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.

"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.

His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.

"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attack this place right here," said the woman. "If he hears about it being here, I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in the cash register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."

"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.

"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.

They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. "There was a secret:-panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found . . ."

"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"

"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"

"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty minutes."

Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.

The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.

"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere."

"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.

"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time."

"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother directed. "I marked it when we passed."

"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.

After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.

"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."

"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window," John Wesley suggested.

"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said.

They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.

"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."

The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.

"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.

The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.

As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.

Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.

"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shaking.

"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.

"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered her. Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.

The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearselike automobile. There were three men in it.

It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head and muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.

The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.

"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.

The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little spill."

"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.

"Once", he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.

"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"

"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there where you're at."

"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.

Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their mother.

"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."

The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!"

"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, "but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."

Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.

"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon he meant to talk to you thataway."

"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.

The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. "I would hate to have to," he said.

"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!"

"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold," he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee," he said. "You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky," he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud neither."

"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call yourself The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."

"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.

"I pre-chate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.

"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.

"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you," The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he said to Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?"

"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is," and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly still.

The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby I,ee followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!"

"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.

"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she said desperately. "You're not a bit common!"

"Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second ah if he had considered her statement carefully, "but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!"' He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. "I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before you ladies," he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we're just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we met," he explained.

"That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his suitcase."

"I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.

"Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.

"Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."

"You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time."

The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it. "Yestm, somebody is always after you," he murmured.

The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. "Do you every pray?" she asked.

He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. "Nome," he said.

There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady's head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.

"I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the arm service both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet," and he looked up at the children's mother and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces white and their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.

"Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ."

I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, "but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.

"That's when you should have started to pray," she said. "What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?"

"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."

"Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.

"Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."

"You must have stolen something," she said.

The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself."

"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."

"That's right," The Misfit said.

"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.

"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."

Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.

"Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt reminded her of. "No, lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."

The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath. "Lady," he asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?"

"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."

"I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."

The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her mother.

Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.

"Yes'm, The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."

There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?"

"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've got!"

"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip."

There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.

"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children !" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.

Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. "Take her off and thow her where you thown the others," he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.

"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."