Blind Your Ponies (17 page)

“I thought it would be … different, and I wanted to see the West.”

Sam had long ago come to the conclusion that all of them had stepped out of the mainstream, into the calm, quiet backwaters of Willow Creek, to find refuge and healing, to lick their wounds and find some peace, to hide from life’s capricious whims, to save their souls. But he kept it to himself.

“Ever been married?” she said.

“Once, a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“I know about that,” she said.

“You been married?”

“Yes …” She paused. “For six years.”

“Any children?”

“We had a girl.” She picked at a fingernail.

Sam sensed he’d touched a nerve but pushed on. “Is she with her father?”

“She died when she was four.”

“Oh, God … I’m sorry …”

Diana cleared her throat. “Do you think there’s some way we can get it into Olaf’s head about the free-throw lane. I’ve looked at the stats and if we eliminated sixty or seventy per cent of his turnovers, we’d have won both games.”

Glad she changed the subject, Sam said, “You’re right, I’ve thought about that all weekend, his walking with the ball, three seconds in the paint—”

“And fouling,” she said. “If he caught on to those three, he’d be some player. Right now he’s a liability.”

“That’s it,” Sam said. “How do we get it into his head in just a few days or weeks?”

“Brain implant,” she said and he sensed she’d fended off a darkness.

He had the impulse to reach over and take her in his arms, to hold her closely and protect her from some self-inflicted wound he sensed she continued perpetrating in her mind. At the door she took him by surprise once more and leaned against him, zeroing in with dark liquid eyes.

“I’ve enjoyed being with you, you’re different, I like you.”

Sam swallowed hard and attempted to find something to say in the dizzy motion of his mind. Tentatively he put his arms around her waist. She brought her warm pouty lips to his. He pulled her close for a moment, feeling her breath in his mouth, her belly and breasts against him. Then, as the fierceness threatened to break loose within him, he stepped back as though some unseen hand had tapped him on the shoulder, warning him of three seconds in the paint.

“Thanks,” he said. “I better go.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Sensing they had traded lies, Sam made his getaway, an owl gliding into the night who understood that the birds were the only living descendants of the dinosaurs. He lay in his bed that night, scared, muddled, confused, frightened to death that he could become deeply in love with this woman, the way he was with Amy. So deeply in love that he’d be utterly destroyed if he ever lost her.

Monday morning Grandma Chapman felt the defeats seep into the daily routines of the townspeople like arctic drafts through worn-out weather stripping, bringing a chill to the bones, frost to the heart.

The hard-core pessimists of Willow Creek, those who had steeled themselves against any expectation of victory, accepted the weekend losses as part of nature’s unremitting cycle, where winter winds eat snow, blow away topsoil, and bury dreams; where short bleak days and long lightless nights suck heat from the body, joy from the spirit; and where—as a part of this ceaseless tide—the basketball team limps through its foreordained itinerary of loss. These defectors dismissed the teams’s failure with a few snide remarks about the games, and Olaf, the Norwegian oaf, and then summarily moved on to more significant matters such as government subsidies, subsoil moisture, and the price of heating oil.

But those townsfolk who had willingly or unconsciously allowed themselves a glimmer of hope caught themselves hurting again, having dared to believe: children standing along the siding, waiting for the circus train, hearing that it had been rerouted another way because of a washout and wouldn’t be stopping here after all, the earned coins languishing in their pockets. Already tasting cotton candy, smelling roasting peanuts, and following elephants along the street in their minds, they had to turn for home and try to swallow the dried saliva of their expectations.

At the Blue Willow, Hazel strutted her prophecy to Grandma Chapman with I-told-you-so’s, but after the ponderous woman had worked so hard at the scrimmages and personally identified with the team—misplacing over twenty pounds somewhere in the modest gym—Grandma Chapman recognized the note of hurt in Hazel’s braggart voice and the disappointment in her nearly hidden hazel eyes. Leaning against the pie counter and bending Axel’s ear, John English, who raised his ireful voice at obviously appropriate
times, let all eavesdroppers know that if the school board had listened to him they wouldn’t be going through the torture of another humiliating winter.

With her peach-colored hair in curlers that resembled the jet engines on a 747, Mavis Powers, who kept one eye on the post office through the front window, got in her two cents worth.

“One of these years we’ll have a bunch of boys coming up through the grades.”

“We should live so long,” Hazel said.

“One of these years cows will fly,” John said loudly.

Amos Flowers, who had furtively roosted in a corner of the bar, glided toward the front door under his inseparable Tom Mix hat.

“Well, the boys are getting good exercise,” Mildred Thompson, a retired teacher, said in her sophisticated manner, as everyone casually noted Amos’s passing, “and they’re staying out of trouble.”

“If we don’t win this year,” Grandma said, “we never will, with them about to shanghai our kids off to the Three Forks High School.”

She watched as Amos momentarily hesitated by the door, squinting out into the street. Then he shuffled back through the dining room and said something to Axel, who nodded toward the kitchen. Behind the serving counter Grandma could see Amos’s hat drifting through the kitchen until it went out of sight, apparently out the back door. Grandma turned and gazed out the front window. Nothing unusual. Only a green four-door sedan she didn’t recognize across the street. She shrugged.

“This is the year, by God,” Rip said with his toothless mouth.

“This is the year of lunatics,” John English said from his leathery, suntanned face.

He cast an accusing glance at Rip and Grandma. Then he stomped out in his black going-to-town Tony Lama boots.

E
VEN THOUGH THE
losses were treated like relatives in the penitentiary, the stink of defeat drifted through the school hallways, contaminating any attempt at frivolity and lightheartedness. Sam bumped into Dean as the boy rushed up the stairs to the second floor before first bell.

“Good morning, Dean.”

“Hi,” he said.

His face glistened with sweat and damp ovals spread from the armpits of his faded flannel shirt. Sam couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what the exuberant freshman was referring to when Sam talked him into playing basketball, when the boy insisted that he stunk. Maybe it was glandular. It wasn’t glandular that Olaf hung around after English class, and when they were alone, approached Sam with a pensive face.

“The basketball I am not playing,” Olaf said firmly.

“Oh, I think you’re doing well; you’ve come a long way. Those two losses don’t mean much, we’ll start winning.”

“No, the basketball I am not playing.”

“What do you mean?” Sam said, gazing up into the boy’s remorseful expression. His blue eyes pooled with disillusionment.

“Myself a fool I am making; many mistakes I am making. Angry my father would be.”

“That’s no reason to quit, all the boys make mistakes. I made some lulues during the game. Heck, that’s part of playing.”

“In my country the word ‘oaf ’ we are having.”

“Okay.” Sam paused. “Why don’t you make them eat that word by the way you play.”

“Making the fool I am not liking; I am, how you say, disgrace. The oaf I am at playing the basketball. Finished I am with it.”

Sam slumped in his chair, dumbfounded, as Olaf ducked out of the room.

It was all coming unraveled, the vision he had seen, the hope he was tentatively considering to embrace, and his disappointment seemed bottomless. Had he misinterpreted the wink in destiny’s eye, made too much of his quiet inklings, the silent whispers within? Had he been tricked into hoping again by the darkness?

In three short days this venture onto the high road had detoured hell-bent-for-leather into a bog. Sam’s daring leap in the dark was slowly sinking into that familiar quagmire where losers try to spit the mud from between their teeth. His stomach felt like it had the time his stump-fingered neighbor started describing in vivid detail how he got his hand caught in the garbage disposal.

How would he face the team? Would Tom follow Olaf’s desertion in light of Sam’s bargain with him? He shuddered to think what would happen when the word leaked out—the Norwegian exchange student had given up his number 99 and wouldn’t be suiting up for the Broncs, leaving the paint unguarded, exposed to enemy penetration and despoilment. Sam wanted to cry but he didn’t dare open the head gate to that seething reservoir, and he had no outlet for the grief and sadness that washed over his heart. Without the Scandinavian hammer, his impossible dream turned into lutefisk.

T
HE BOYS STRAGGLED
into the gym after school and, as was their routine, began shooting free throws until practice formally began. Grandma, Hazel, and Axel weren’t due for another hour. Olaf’s absence wasn’t immediately felt, and when Diana appeared in the drab, untailored sweats that camouflaged her sweet but deadly arsenal, Sam gathered the team at midcourt, their expectations soggy yet still afloat.

“Olaf has decided to quit basketball.”

Their startled faces and disbelieving eyes wounded Sam and he had to look toward the varnished bleachers for cover. Recouping slowly from the unforeseen blow to their sense of mission and team unity, they blurted their incomprehension.

“Why?”

“What happened?”

“How come?”

Sam glanced into Diana’s face and found his own hurt and confusion reflected there.

“He doesn’t seem to be able to handle the failure,” Sam said, “making mistakes that are so glaringly obvious. He’s much more sensitive than I realized. He’s a stranger here among us and he’s trying very hard to fit in, do his best. He just can’t handle being laughed at or blamed for our losing. He heard someone call him an oaf.”

“Screw those people,” Tom said. “We want him on the team.”

“We need him,” Rob said with confusion gathering in his face.

“You might tell him that when you see him,” Sam said. “Try not to be upset with him.”

“Without him, we’re toast,” Tom said.

“You got that right,” Rob said.

Sam pushed the glasses up on his nose and regarded Tom, whose anger and disappointment paraded nakedly in his face.

“I know you decided to play because of Olaf. We’ll understand if you decide to give it up now.”

The brawny senior held Sam’s gaze for a moment. Then he glanced at his teammates. His chest heaved with a deep sigh and his eyes smoldered when he turned back and looked down into Sam’s face. “I’m stickin’.”

That night Grandma Chapman steered clear of the kitchen while her tortured grandson suffered through the unbearable fires of young love. From her ripened vantage point she could write it off as puppy love, most likely one of many to come, but she understood that from his adolescent stance he faced the howling void of eternity alone. It was all she could do to keep from rushing headlong to his side and encompassing him in her scrawny arms, begging him to let go, to let it all go in this flow of life where we are altogether powerless to dictate outcomes.

She stared at the television and attempted to block out his impassioned pleas, his hanging on with shredded, bleeding hands, his heart laid out on the kitchen table as an offering, a sail left too long in hurricane winds. She could hear his desperate attempts to anchor himself to something shifting and fluid, unable or unwilling to give up his last fleeting connection with love and tenderness on the vessel that was his life where someone had given the order for all hands to abandon ship.

“If I come back for the second half?” Pete said. “That’s just a month away.”

He was quiet for a long stretch in the utter silence of rejection in which his girl undoubtedly gave reasons and explanations for the uncharted and illogical courses of the heart. Grandma felt the burning ache in her chest as though she were being forsaken, calling up buried apparitions of her own passage as a castaway.

“But I
can,
I can talk to Mom,” Pete said.

A cold emptiness enveloped the kitchen as though the planet were hurtling out of orbit away from the sun and all living things were turning to ice. She leaned toward the kitchen with an ear that hated the human race at that moment, and she heard the last beseeching words.

“Please, Kathy …
please
.”

That wrenching appeal cut Elizabeth with the edge of a razor, a million
million voices supplicating in a swelling chorus down the thoroughfares of desertion, where the stench of burnt clothing and flesh arose as numbed fingers clutched at the rear bumpers of fleeing lovers over the blacktopped fields of love. It was the howling emptiness she remembered from her youth, when she loved Josh Kowalski more than life itself.

Josh was a year older in high school, played on the Brainerd football team, and she had loved him for a year before he ever asked her out. They went out twice. He never called her again, though she saw to it that she ran into him at school as often as possible. If he acknowledged her with a “Hi” she had enough to go on for another week. Then word leaked out that Josh had gotten Doris Wilson pregnant, and as horrible and disgraceful as that was back then, she’d never admitted to anyone how she wished it had been her he’d gotten pregnant, cried bitterly that it hadn’t been her. Josh took off, leaving the school, Doris, and the town in the lurch. It took Elizabeth over a year to get over him. The only rumor she ever heard was that he’d been killed in Italy during World War II.