[Events below take place approximately August 26, 2014.]

The city of Eldorado resembled from above the skeleton of a giant anaconda. Seba had thought so ever since, heady on the stories of Horacio Quiroga, he first saw a map of the place. The anaconda, he had explained to a friend once while they both bent over a map, had its head dipped in the Parana River, its tail vanishing 15 kilometers into the jungle, and its narrow midsection bisected by Ruta 12. The anaconda had been roadkill, he explained. Development had scoured away the canopy—its scaled skin—and revealed the brilliant, blood-colored soil that ran in the hilly streets during summer rains.

All cities, Seba later learned, were built at intersections of some sort or another. But here, in this place, were his intersections: Europe and the Americas, his parents, himself and basketball.

And he was here again for the first time in eight years. After an early bus ride from Posadas, he had stopped by the local athletic club to meet the sprightly young athletes there. Many of them had watched the Combine Challenge the previous week in large part because he—el dicho rey de Eldorado—had been on the television. In his presence they were transfixed, and Seba did his best to reassure them that he had no mystical powers, that he was just like them, that they could do what he did if they wanted. And, he added, that whatever they decided to do, it was great; after all, he himself had prepared to go to medical school had basketball not worked out. After a couple pictures and a Club Eldorado jersey as a gift, he waved farewell, watching as their awestruck eyes followed him out the door.

He had one more place to go. And were he frank with himself, he would have realized that this was, perhaps, the primary reason to stop by Eldorado, especially since he no longer had family there. It was no Itatí or Luján or—que Dios tenga misericordia—Mercedes, but it was a shadow of a pilgrimage. Coincidentally, though, Seba chuckled to himself, it was to a church.

Leaving Danny at a café downtown, Seba boarded a bus that took him kilometers west, toward the river. One disadvantage of being an uncommon species with an undisguisable feature—toucan beaks were impossible to hide—was that despite pulling his purple Alado hoodie over his head, he could not escape the attention of the public. Over his college career he had grown accustomed to strangers recognizing him, but since declaring for the FBA Draft the number of strangers who knew who he was had exploded. Subconsciously he had suspected greater anonymity in Argentina, but the opposite turned out to be true. Had he reflected for more than a second, he would have recalled the general enthusiasm whenever an hijo patrio attained international attention. The basketball now wedged under his arm only made identification inevitable. Wanting a modicum of privacy, he simply turned away from the prying eyes and watched the scenery pass by.

Gradually, the buildings of centro and industry gave way to homes, which diminished in size and density until, Seba knew, they were approaching Avenida Bertoni. Rising from his seat, Seba pressed the button to signal a stop and descended from the back of the bus.

He had been a tall child, but even so the neighborhood looked smaller than he remembered it. The kiosko on the corner had a new paint job and, he remembered with some bemusement, had provided his first nickname among the neighborhood children. Ah, the joys of a Polish surname: confused furs had rendered it Kiosko or Couscous, the latter coined by T. Matt Latrans during the coverage of the Combine Challenge and an instant hit among reporters. While he purchased an alfajor from the kiosko’s attendant—a nostalgic splurge—he decided he preferred Couscous.

In no rush, he walked down the street munching the thick chocolate-and-dulce de leche confection. The houses and pavement bore the red-stained facades characteristic of buildings exposed to the Misiones weather and left unscrubbed, the same stain that colored his feet every day of his youth. There was his childhood home, now obviously occupied by others and painted a different color; stopping in would might have be welcomed, but he wasn’t quite in the mood for company at the moment. Besides, it was no longer a part of his world. His family lived elsewhere, and it was the people, more than the place, that were important in that regard.

No, was he came for was ahead: behind a tall black metal fence (gate, as always, locked) and beside a long, low, peak-roofed rectangle of a building sat an expanse of cracked, iron-tinted concrete. On either end of the concrete stood a black pole, a beaten backboard, and a netless hoop. There had never been nets, but there had never really been a need. In the years before he enrolled at Club Eldorado, Seba had only ever played with a handful of other furs here. Most of his peers just went for fútbol in the empty lot down the street.

Looking a little more closely, he now saw that the church was a Mormon one. Jaja, Danny would be amused at that. The Mormons got me into basketball.

After peering at the small court through the fence’s bars for a moment or two, Seba tossed his ball over the top and, not waiting for it to bounce to a halt, reached up and pulled himself over the fence. Being two meters tall made that quite a bit easier. Landing in the grass on the other side, he was about to run over to retrieve the runaway ball when a new memory, one in the flood that had assaulted him, rushed back: he had never played on this court with shoes on. In fact, much of his young life had been spent barefoot, his only shoes preserved clean for use at school.

Sitting down, he bent forward and unlaced his shoes, leaving them and his socks by the wall of the church. The grass and the soil were hard and scratched against his feet, but it was deeply familiar. The trouble with sight, he later thought, was that there was too much of it in one’s memory; it was hard for a sight to stand out. But something like touch—not by the hands—had the potential to recall moods and emotions. For now Seba did not feel like the FBA draft candidate, brain stuffed with plays and muscles tuned by years of drills, but the ten-year-old with an oversized, overworn basketball shooting hoops in the afternoon sun.

And that was what he did now. At first cringing from the heat of the concrete, he took his place in front of the hoop, aimed, and tossed the ball upward. An expert follow-through plunked the ball into the metal ring and a couple paces gave him the rebound. So he continued, unaware of the world, landing nearly every basket he attempted—a feat that he knew would have left little Seba jealous.

Then behind him he heard the unmistakable sound of bouncing rubber and, turning, saw a ball pass by him and come to a halt at the edge of the court. It had not come from the fence, but the brick wall that ringed three-quarters of the church’s property. Picking up his own ball and standing, he inspected the top of the wall. Surely enough, as he watched he saw a little hooved hand reach up and over to grip the brickwork. A second longer revealed the large-eyed face of a young deer clambering over. Another second and those eyes widened, having noticed Seba there. The fawn froze, obviously trying to assess the situation and decide whether it would be better to abandon his ball and run or to finish scaling the wall in full view of someone who, for all he (or she? the fawn had no antlers) knew, could get him in trouble.

Seba tried to defuse the tension with a smile and a wave, asking, “So, that is your ball?” The face above the wall nodded silently, eyes still wide. “Bien, come and get it! Maybe I could show you a few things.” Weighing the situation a moment more, the deer strained to lift himself over the edge but achieved it, spinning and deftly dropping onto the lawn below. Seba walked over to the youngster’s ball and tossed it over. “Catch!”

A brief fumble later, the fawn caught the ball. Seba asked his name and with the reply—Luz—found his suspicions disconfirmed: she was a little doe, not a buck. Her family had recently moved here from San Vicente, she said, and she found the basketball court here though she didn’t know who owned it. After establishing that he was not there to report her, Seba began demonstrating to her the fundamentals of the game—dribbling, shooting, ball control—and having her practice them. Her awkwardness reminds Seba of those first times he had come down here with a ball he had borrowed. He could not help but smile.

But throughout the impromptu teaching session, Luz continued to look at Seba strangely, but only when she thought he was distracted. It registered marginally in Seba’s mind that she was doing this, but he attributed it to interaction between strangers and his own proven social stiffness. When he knelt down beside her to guide her in making a shot, however, she let it out: “Sos el Cuscús, no?” [“You are Couscous, no?]

The question caught Seba off-guard. His private reverie on the court had washed away all sense of celebrity that had accumulated over the past months, and to be reminded of his fame—especially with such a recent nickname—was jarring. “Yes, I suppose they call me that,” he responded.

The shock was legible in her face, but quickly turned into a smile. “Ah! We watched you on TV last week! What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be playing in the FBA now?”

Seba laughed and explained that he wasn’t in the FBA yet, and that he was from here… and that he had begun playing basketball on this very court. “Así que, don’t underestimate yourself. Just keep playing!”

Little Luz nodded vigorously, hugging her ball with arms that barely reached around its circumference. With that, Seba noticed the place of the sun in the sky and realized he should be heading back. He and Danny had a bus to catch that evening for Puerto Iguazu.

He bade farewell to the little fawn but watched for half a minute while she missed basket after basket. Positioning herself right under the basket, she shot upward. Seeing where it was going, Seba leapt forward and, with one winged arm and a single flap, grabbed the ball and plunge it into the hoop.

“They call that an alley-oop!” he told her with a smile, snatching the ball before it escaped and handing it back to her. On an impulse, he pulled out his own basketball. “Here. Have another one. You will wear out many in order to improve!”

Luz seemed overjoyed and immediately set to shooting baskets again, this time with his ball. He said goodbye again and lifted himself over the fence. Halfway down the street he could still hear the telltale sound of ball on pavement, ball on backboard, and—once or twice—ball through hoopless rim.

He boarded the bus and smiled all the way back to where he would meet up with Danny again. There were a couple times when he heard his name spoken. This time, he waved in acknowledgement.

When he got off the bus, Danny examined him quizzically. “Well, you look happy.”

Seba sighed. “It was nice to get some time to myself, that’s all. Visit a couple places, shoot a couple hoops.”

“Looks like whatever it was, it knocked your socks off.”

Seba was confused until he followed Danny’s line of sight toward his own feet, where he saw blue scales and black talons. What was unusual about this struck Seba too late: he had forgotten his shoes back at the church’s court! He started for a moment, recalling how much those shoes had cost, but just as quickly realized that he and Danny had no time for him to return to Avenida Bertoni for a pair of shoes. They were lost, and they weren’t coming back. He sat down at the café table, worry written on his face.

Feelings of guilt began to well up within him. Replacing expensive things was always his nightmare, a symptom of growing up with little. But this time, it was as if they melted and flowed away in an instant when a thought dawned on him: why did he need shoes to play basketball? Plenty of fellow ballers played barefoot. Descalzo. Furthermore, as a child he never had worn them. To leave his basketball shoes on that court here in Eldorado would be a fitting tribute to his younger self.

“Yeah,” he laughed at his cousin. “I suppose they did. For good. Now, let’s catch that bus.”