We didn't think much of Coach Ash when we first saw him. For the first few days, he sat in a folding chair at the edge of the court, writing in a notebook and saying nothing. We played pick-up games instead of practicing and he sat quiet. We thought he might be retarded or that maybe he was a chemistry teacher that didn't care at all about basketball.
         He was a bald man with a face the red of ripe raspberries. Gray fuzz crawled up the back of his neck and peeked out from the top of his shirt. He wore pillow-white shorts so short that when he sat down we could see his saggy balls.
         Between plays, Ramanatha (who we just called Ram) was bent over, tugging on the legs of his shorts and trying to catch his breath.
         "The new coach is an Aussie. Did you hear that?" he said in a mock Australian accent.
         We hadn't. We hadn't heard him say a word.
         Our team got a steal and bolted down the court. I've always been the smallest guy on the team, but I made up for it in speed. On the fast break, the ball and I were blurs. I threw it up for Ram who finger rolled it in. I saw Dante plodding along behind us, his sweat coming down in sheets. Coach Ash wrote something in his book.
         Dante was a good defender, a rabid rebounder and a hell of a friend. But he was fat and slow. When we got back on defense, he wiped his sweaty forehead off with his jersey.
         "Guys, can we slow this thing down so you don't make me look like Sabonis over here?" he said.
         We got comfortable. Eventually we forgot that the new coach was perched in his chair watching us. It would be the most fun we had for a long time. Ram hit three after three. Dante hustled for loose balls. And GT forced us into convulsive laughter every time he touched the ball. When GT dribbled the basketball, he looked like a crab; low to the ground, with his legs skittering along the court. He couldn't shoot worth a damn and couldn't jump over a salt shaker. But last year we brought him in games because he was a shot of adrenaline. He ran all over the court like a dog that's been locked in a closet for days.
         Several days went by like this. Coach wouldn't instruct us and wouldn't speak to us. And we played the game we loved. Then on a Thursday, while we argued about who touched the ball last, Coach Ash blew on his silver whistle. The sound of it forced us to tighten our backs and close our eyes. It was loud, unrelenting and ominous. Coach motioned for us to stand around him. His voice was a wreck. We'd find out soon that this was from years of smoking and drinking and yelling at adolescent boys until the veins in his neck looked like eels.
         "I'm looking for lions. I see a lot of pussycats here, but I'm looking for lions," he snarled.
         Circling around to point his scabby finger at all of our chests, he went on about how he hated losing and how we were a bunch of losers. He rattled off his credentials loud enough that I wondered if the whole school could hear.
         "I've won over 500 games, state championships, games against teams with twice as much talent. I played in the '64 Olympics and we would have finished a lot better than ninth place if it wasn't for this shrapnel in my leg." He pointed to his right knee, which looked like a mishandled clay project. Then he spat on the gym floor.
         He told us who he "wanted to go to war with." Reading from his notebook, he named his starting five.
         Ipchek.
         Thompson.
         Sensanec.
         Brown.
         Bright.
         "Coach," I stuttered, "I led the team in scoring last year."
         I had been the starting point guard since I was a freshman. This was my senior year, my chance to impress some small school on the coast and get a scholarship.
         He looked sickened by what I had said.
         "If you're name is not on this list, then I don't think you're good enough. I don't care what you did last year. Last year, this team was shit. You want to start, you show me you're a lion."
         I felt tears slipping out of my eyes and I had to hold tight to them. My throat burned and I wish I could have opened it and breathed fire. I looked down at my laces.
         Ram wasn't on the list. Neither was Dante or GT. None of them started normally, so they weren't as hurt as me. But as the season started they realized their minutes would all shrink down to nothing. In the preseason, they sat right next to me for most of every game. Coach didn't think I was big enough. He thought Dante was too big. Ram once tugged on the coach's jacket sleeve, begging to get in the game.
         Coach Ash said to him without turning his head, "You're too soft. My teams do not get pushed around."
         So while the people of Grey, Texas were frothing with excitement about our winning team, we sat seething on the bench. In the last three years, we had won a total of seven games. In Coach Ash's first season, we started 9-0. Actually we didn't do shit. We watched Coach's handpicked team pump their fists up at the gym ceiling after every game.
         Coach was an asshole, but he knew his basketball. Before he got here, the team was unorganized and inconsistent. We were mainly a jump-shooting team that went on hot and cold streaks every few possessions. Under Coach Ash's guidance, we led the state in rebounding. Grey High also led the state in personal fouls. Part of Coach's strategy was to intimidate the opposing team. That meant body-checking under the basket, hard fouls that often split lips and when guarding someone he told us to whisper things in our opponents' ears that would make a mother cringe.
         It wasn't like Dante, GT, Ram and I weren't willing to do those things. We just weren't as good at it as the guys who ended up playing. And it wasn't like we didn't work hard in practice. We ran up and down the court, with at least one of us usually vomiting in the trashcan by the bleachers. We felt Coach's presence when walking to class and our shins would buzz with pain. We felt it when we lay rigid on our beds and fell hard into coma-like sleep. We hated Coach Ash because he never let us play and because he overworked us, but we hated him more because he was an asshole.

         Once during practice, I threw a hard chest-pass at Dante. He was open near the basket and I guess he wasn't expecting the ball. He didn't get to shoot much. The ball went right through his hands.
         Coach Ash stood up from his chair, grabbed one of its metal legs and flung it down the baseline. The cuss words he spat out were trampled by the sound of the chair banging into the bleachers. We stood still as he stomped towards us. We knew by then that no mistake was left unscolded. Coach Ash peered into Dante's eyes.
         "You don't like the ball? He threw it right at you," he grumbled.
         Dante squirmed in his stance, but didn't say anything.
         "How about you pretend it's a cheeseburger. You might be inclined to go after it then."
         Some of the team giggled. Last year, Dante was called Workhorse. He was Cheeseburger from then on.
         Coach Ash had names for all of us. Coach Ash stumbled over Ram's last name (Bhattacharya) and decided instead to call him Abdul. Every time he called him that, Ram would mutter some dirty Bengali words. Coach said that GT looked like Deniro in Taxi Driver, so he started calling him Travis Bickle. He thought it was fantastically clever and cracked himself up every time he said it. I used to be known as Dollar Bill because my name is Bill and someone once thought it was funny to put the word 'dollar' in front of it. But after about a week, Coach had everyone but my friends calling me Squat.
         During our winning season, Dante never played. Literally. I got back-up duty, coming in to give A.J. Ipchek a breather. I'd have about enough time to get off one shot and throw one pass and I'd look over and see A.J.'s tall, toned body standing by the scorer's table waiting to come back in. The first time that happened, I got so frazzled I dribbled the ball off my shin.
        I was always scared of Coach Ash. I was scared of making him angry. I was so scared of messing up in front of him that I'd play below my level, turning the ball over or shooting air balls that the scorers thought were bad passes. Of course Coach played Ipchek more. The boys who ended up playing all the time were scared of Coach too. It was just that the fear made them play better.
        Ram and GT played only when we were ridiculously ahead and there was less than a minute to play. But Dante didn't step on the court after pre-game warm-ups. It was about halfway through the season when GT joined him as a fixture at the end of the bench.
        We were 12-1 at the time, getting ready to play Lanford when Coach Ash decided we needed an extra-long practice.
         "Those fuckers at Lanford are better than you pussies," Coach explained, "So the only thing we got on them is preparation."
         He prowled around the gym, his whistle tight in his grip. We were ran lay-up drills. We stood in line and when it was our turn we dribbled the ball toward the basket and rolled it off the backboard. Pretty simple. We just had to run it until our shoulders were constricted messes. GT bounced the ball in his usual haphazard way and instead of jumping and scoring smoothly like the rest of us, he jerked his arm toward the basket. More like a spasm than a shot. The ball spun high into the air and came down through the net. Ram was next and took two steps forward before the whistle blew. Coach kept the whistle dangling from his mouth as he ran at GT.
         "Hey Bickle," he roared, "What the fuck was that?"
         GT was jogging toward the end of the line. He turned his head.
         "A lay-up, coach."
         "That was not a fucking lay-up. That was a piece of shit."
         Every bouncing ball in the gym halted. GT looked down at his shoes. His body clenched like he was about to be whipped.
         "But it went in, Coach," he muttered.
         Coach Ash ripped the whistle off his neck and threw it on the floor. He snatched the basketball out of Ram's hand and chucked it at the wall. The sound of it boomed throughout the gym.
         "It went in?" Coach said, "It went in? Fucking Christ. If I take a ball and bounce it off my dick and it miraculously goes in the damn basket that doesn't make it a lay-up. That makes it a fucking lucky shot. And this is a lay-up drill, not a drill to see if you dickwads can throw in a circus shot."
         GT stumbled trying to respond.
         "What, what is it?" Coach said. Before he had a chance to say anything, Coach grabbed him by his jersey and shook him. He yelled in his face and told him he should take up cooking or knitting instead of basketball.
         The season was riddled with abuse. He once called us "failed abortions." He motivated us with fear and spittle-filled screaming bouts. If we screwed up, we had to duck out of the way of him pelting the ball at our heads. The parents and the school didn't care how he treated us. They didn't care if he yelled or if he threw a chair at our feet every once in a while. He pushed us to the edge and then held us over it by the nape of our necks. But we were winning and for that he was a hero.

         There was one incident that drove us over the edge.
         We had just lost to West Texas High. In that game, we had been outrebounded by 12. The next practice we didn't do anything but box-out drills. He told us that rebounding wasn't about size or talent, it was about asserting your will. We worked the drills until we felt woozy. Our jerseys were saturated with sweat, but it wasn't enough. Somebody wouldn't do it right and Coach would yell in their face and tell us all to start over.
         After we failed to "rebound like lions" enough times, Coach walked away shaking his head. We continued the drills, thinking that this was some kind of trick. Maybe he'd watch us from a hidden room or maybe he had a spy. So we jostled under the basket, shoving each other and going after the ball like sharks to a bloody corpse.
         After about forty minutes, Coach Ash shouted as he stomped back into the gym. "I'm tired of this. Just stop, stop."
         We set down the basketballs at our feet. We stood at attention, trying not to visibly shake. Coach carried a plastic grocery bag in his left hand as he glared at us. He reached in the bag and pulled out a cluster of tampons. They looked like soft, white bullets. We didn't know what they were until Coach Ash threw them in our faces. We stood like good soldiers as he pelted us with them.
         "If you want to play like girls, that's fine. I'm going to have treat you like little girls then."
         Ram muttered some Bengali cussing behind his teeth. Dante cried. We were burning with hate. We were set on fire with anger that Coach wanted us to use in the game. He had won State Championships in Oklahoma and Kansas. He must have done this before, igniting a metamorphosis from boys to championship-winning lions.
         But basketball was the last thing we could think about. The tampons scattered at our feet like sprinkled snow. All we could think about was war.

         That weekend, Dante's parents went out of town. The four of us stayed at their place. We raided Dante's dad's beer fridge and watched kung-fu movies until empty beer cans circled our feet.
         "Coach Ash is a prick," GT said.
         We laughed. We agreed and talked about how we should get him back. I suggested quitting the team, and was shut down right away.
         "He wouldn't even notice," they said.
         Slurred ideas were thrown out and received either a collective groan or fervent cheer. GT thought of covering Coach's house with toilet paper, of lighting a bag of shit on fire at his door, of pushing his car into the river. We got riled up like monkeys getting hit with sticks. We grabbed armfuls of toilet paper and the rest of the beer and shoved it all into Dante's mom's car.
         Dante told us to be extremely careful.
         "Don't leave any evidence that you've been in the car, if you don't want me to get killed," he warned.
         We were giggling and talking shit during the whole drive down Picknell Road.
         "He stole my chance," I said. "I could have played at Texas State or Permian... No one recruits off the bench. He stole it."
         "Probably now you'll have to play in Saudi Arabia. I hear the weather's nice," GT said as we all laughed hard at his stupid joke.
         Coach Ash lived out past the river and down a farm road that was spotted with rocky cavities. Dante's mom's car wasn't built for galloping along this type of road. So as the cheap beer smoldered in our guts and our brains swam in cloudiness, the car rocked like a boat in a choppy sea.
         As we neared the house, owls poked out from behind night-darkened trees. Their huge eyes seemed to want to warn us. GT stuck his head out of the window and barked at the owls.
         "I want to make you all into burgers," he shouted.
        GT was like that.
         Coach's house was covered in chipped, baby-blue paint. It was small and old and the porch was cluttered with broken wicker furniture. We turned off the headlights and rolled up to the house's flat, dirt tongue.
         Dante said, "You think he's jerking off in there?"
         "I'll bet you want to see it," GT snickered, slapping Dante on the back.
         We struggled to keep from exploding into giggling fits. We were drunk and keyed up with the thought of mischief. I asked if we should wipe our asses with the toilet paper before TPing his house with it. This set off ripples of laughter among us. We sat in the car, covering our tittering mouths. A wooden wind chime above Coach's front door swayed and jingled.
         GT opened the car door and slipped out. He dashed toward the house without any rolls of TP.
         "What the hell are you doing?" we whispered.
         He tip-toed to Coach's front door while we hissed for him to come back. He turned his head to grin at us. Then GT pantomimed knocking on the front door, balling up his fist and swinging his arm around like some cartoon baseball pitcher. GT pretended to piss all over Coach's porch, ghost urine sprayed over overturned chairs and smatterings of a brown, wicker footstool. We laughed.
         We thought it was close to over. Maybe we'd actually go through with draping toilet paper along this man's gutter and around his pecan trees. Maybe we'd sit in the car for another hour, talking about it and drive home. GT had his own set of ideas. Instead of running back into the car and having a good laugh as we sped away, he grabbed a rock. The moonlight flickered off of it. He snuck over to Coach's Explorer. At first he pretended to scratch the passenger door. Then the sound of rock digging into metal pulsed through the night.
         We stopped laughing.
         "GT, what are you crazy?"
         He wasn't grinning anymore. His face was hot with anger. He sliced into the car door and I ran out to stop him.
         "Let's go!" I said.
         "I'm not done!"
         He drew primitive stripes along the car's torso. I told him we should leave. He agreed. That's when he threw the rock through the side window.
         Dante cursed at him from the car. I grabbed GT by his elbow and pulled him toward the car with a fearful urgency.
         "That fucker. 'Failed abortions'," GT mumbled.
         Lights went on in Coach Ash's house. Dante started his mom's car, slapping the steering wheel with his left hand in a panic. GT and I ran. Our shoes kicked up dirt that hung up in the night air.
         Coach Ash kicked open his door. He cocked his shotgun angrily before swinging it wildly at us.
         "Who the hell..." he barked.
         His eyes looked like they had been set on fire; bright and dangerous. He was wearing only yellow and brown plaid boxers. He was barefoot and disheveled. Coach Ash kept the barrels aimed at us as he stepped off his porch.
         We closed our eyes, perhaps trying to become invisible. GT and I had our hands on the door handles. We couldn't move.
         When he realized who we were, his snarling wolf face slid into a smile. Coach's shoulders softened and he eased the gun down.
         He walked slowly to me and pressed the cold gun to my cheek. Coach whispered over the crickets that he had every right to shoot us. He said we were pussies and asked us if any of the boys had ever tried to fuck us. A laugh skidded out from his open mouth.
         "You should go home," he said.
         He lunged at me with the shotgun and broke my nose. He did it again, this time forcing blood to splatter out of my nostrils and all over my mouth. On the third try, I grabbed the gun with both hands and pushed it away.
         He pushed me to the ground. My head banged on his dirt driveway. He punched at me again with his weapon. I put my hands up and the metal bruised my palms. GT tackled Coach Ash from behind. Coach would not let go of his gun. Then it was all of us, Dante and Ram too, flopping around in the dust. We whirled around and around, dizziness rising up to our heads like bubbles.
         Coach Ash crashed against the brick base of his porch. The cracking of his skull echoed out into the trees and rang along the metal skin of the cars. Coach fell. His head tipped over like he had just fallen asleep drunk.
         We tried to cuss and scream but only the sound of our beating hearts came out. Ram threw up on the hood of Dante's mom's car. Dante didn't say a word about it.
         We stared at each other, all of us waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Or maybe we were waiting for one of us to wake up, and call us to retell the horrible nightmare. Our fingers went dead. Our eyes couldn't close tight enough to keep Coach's limp neck out.
         GT wandered into Coach's house to make sure there was no one else in there. The house was empty except for a parakeet in a cage that was sleeping upright. We stood around the body, tearful and afraid.
         GT was the first to say anything. He said he didn't know what to do.
         "We have to hide him," Ram said with his voice cracking. "We have to. It's the only thing we can do."
         It didn't seem real. The other boys started moving before me. I kept turning my head to Coach's body, praying to see him get up. Even when I found a pair of shovels in a shed in the back and handed one to GT, it felt like something someone else was writing. We dug behind Coach's house until our backs went numb and there was a big enough hole for a body. The black night breathed on our necks as it watched us work. We dragged Coach to edge of the hole, each of us holding an arm or a leg. GT kicked Coach's ribs until he fell in. Ram dry-heaved on all fours. We covered the vomit and the man with dirt.
         "Should we say a few words?" Dante asked.
         I said through my tears, "We should never say anything."
         On the way back we didn't drink another beer or make a sound other than the clicking of seat belts and we could barely breathe around the lumps in our throats. I held an unopened beer to my nose to act as an icepack, but it was too warm. I put it down by the floor mat and it rolled between my feet.

         I had nightmares every night from then on.. I would find out later that we all had them. I had one where Coach's arm thrusted up through the ground. It reached out to me for help. It had been pierced up and down with a staple gun. GT would never tell us what his were like, but seeing his drained, pale face every morning, we knew that they were terrible.
         Once in Biology, he fell asleep during a film about microorganisms. The lights were off and hundreds of little, grey worms wiggled on the screen. GT sat next to me. His head was burrowed under his crossed arms on his desk. I couldn't focus on the movie. I couldn't focus on anything lately. The town held nightly vigils for Coach and sent out search parties into the woods with blazing torches. It dominated the news. It was the only thing anybody ever talked about.
         My grades were freefalling. I banged into lockers. I rarely ate. I couldn't get away from it.
         GT mumbled something in his sleep. I thought he was talking to me, so I leaned in to ask him to repeat it. He screamed and his head snapped back. He toppled out of his chair. His desk crashed to the ground and pencils spit out of it. GT was sent to detention.
         We hardly ever saw GT those days. And even in practice, he never said anything to us.
         We practiced just as hard without Coach Ash there. Coach Ash's assistant, David ran the practices. He never had to say much. The rest of the Mustangs were so stirred up, he'd just hand them a ball and they'd charge onto the court. They vowed to win every game for him. There were rumors that he had been kidnapped. Some of the team thought that he was still watching us from a secret place.
         When it was obvious that Coach hadn't just gone on a drinking binge or gotten the flu, David officially took over the team. He was a quiet guy with slicked-back hair. He used Coach's 'disappearance' to inspire us. He rehashed Coach's lion bit, and that's pretty much all he had. For the rest of the team, it worked. They stormed into the state playoffs.
         Before every game, we huddled together and said that this was for Coach, wherever he was. When the four of us had to say those words, the muscles in our backs went frozen. We thought we might faint, vomit or have our faces disintegrate into a puddle of tears.
         We spent the greatest season in Mustang history holding a throbbing secret in the lining of our chests. We spent the days grappling with migraines and what felt like the onset of ulcers. We spent our nights praying in a desperate tone.

         On the night of the State Championship, our parents, teachers and friends shoved themselves inside the sweltering gym. They were giddy. They pounded their feet on the wooden bleachers. They didn't sit down for a moment. But we did.
         Coach David had given us a chance to play more during the season, but we were terrible. Our bodies seized up on the court and our minds strayed from 2-3 zone defense to Coach's dead body laying in the hole we made. Coach David was smart to stick us on the bench for the entire championship game.
         Our opponents were comprised of guys recruited by UT, Tech and LSU. They were known for pushing teams around. They strolled in, cracking their knuckles. They taunted us with throat slashes when nobody was looking. I watched in pain as the game unfolded without me. I would have loved to contribute. I would have loved to drop thirty on those cocky bastards and stare down their bench after a big shot. But we sat still and had trouble focusing on a game that everybody told us later was incredible.
         The Grey High Mustangs played like Coach Ash would have wanted. They played with ferocity, without fear and with their teeth bared. It was a tie game with two minutes left. A.J. Ipchek traded baskets with their best player, a lanky guy with a flat top named, Wily. A.J. hit a baseline jumper and then beat his chest with his right hand. Wily countered by driving to the basket and dunking it. The crowd clapped and cheered and took photos. We never saw the final seconds of the game. We heard the crowd gasp and then explode in a celebratory cry.
         "Grey High! Grey High! Grey High!" they chanted.
         We had won. No, they had won. The end of the championship game meant the end of the season, which was near the end of the school year. If we made it that far, we could run to a place far enough that Coach Ash's ghosts didn't tug at our ankles before we went to sleep.
         The team threw their arms up. The crowd ran from the bleachers to the court and a bouncing, breathing wave of people swarmed in on us.
         GT wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear, "I can't take it anymore."
         His face was dead. He didn't blink.
         "You have to," I told him.
         He nodded.
         A few days later Coach David hung medals around our necks. When they lined us up to take photos, the click of the camera reminded me of the sound of Coach Ash's neck breaking. I flinched every time. Dante held the medal limply in his hands and stared at it. The red and white ribbon around his neck was wet with tears.

         We never wanted to go back on that court. But we were dragged there for a dedication to Coach a week after the game. A picture of Coach framed in white lilies hung from the rafters in center court. We sat together and sweated through every speech. The school cried for a man who would shout at you for crying. Well-thought out speeches of remembrance left out the swearing and the death threats that had scratched us down to the spine.
         We turned to each other, hoping that one of us could drain out our guilt. We looked in each other's eyes for understanding. GT tugged on our shirts.
         "It's all over," he said.
         He talked about how we can never escape our punishment. He talked about things like God and judgment. We begged him to rethink things. We squeezed our hands around his wrists and urged him to stay strong.
         "I've already told them," he said.
         So while a school mourned together, praying and remembering, the police ordered a tractor to dig up the dirt behind Coach Ash's house. They found his decomposing body just as GT had told them they would.
         I pushed GT and his head smacked against the gym floor. I grabbed him around his neck and asked him why. Why had he betrayed us, we had he given up, and why was he the one who got to be released from the prison we had all built? Everyone turned around with their hands over their mouths. Only we knew why I was punching him in the jaw. It took several teachers to pull me off of him.
         Grey High eventually became Ash High. Coach was honored with a banner that hung next to our first ever State Championship banner. Behind his name and career win total was the silhouette of a lion.
         We were never lions, we were only boys. We were fools. We were brothers and sons who pulled a blanket of shame over a whole town.
         When the police walked in, many people thought it was for the fight. They were stunned when all of us, me, Dante, Ram and GT held out our arms in long-awaited surrender.