Blind Your Ponies (34 page)

“Well, the men think the cook’s gone crazy. But clinging to the weather ladder with numb, frozen hands, he made his way toward the galley with the waves crashing over the deck. Before he went out of sight, he shouted at them again. ‘As long as she swims, I will cook!’ ”

“What did he mean ‘As long as she swims?’ ” Pete said.

“As long as the ship stayed afloat.”

She pulled her hat snug as if she were in the typhoon.

“Well, the other sailors think it was a brave thing to do but didn’t ever expect to see the cook again, betting that he was washed overboard. Hours pass. Nothing. Then in the middle of the howling cold of night there were voices, shouting, unclear, until each man, one by one, heard the good news. There was Coffee coming. It came out of the dark in a large pot and it was
hot.
They drank right from the pot. It was a miracle. In a galley that was half underwater, with the stove flipped over on its side, with the ship pitching and lurching like a bobber, the cook had managed to do his job. He’d made hot coffee.”

Peter slowed as they came into Three Forks, a town that seemed to some to be watching Willow Creek from a limb with a vulture’s eye, waiting impatiently to gobble up their high school students for openers.

“We have to stop for groceries on the way back if we have time,” Grandma said. “Don’t want you eatin’ supper too close to game time.”

Peter guided Trilobite through the three blocks of downtown and headed north for the interstate.

“So you say you’re cookin’ like the cook on the ship?” Pete said.

“You got it. The ship eventually survived after three days and nights of that murderous storm, and the men remembered what the cook had done. He became a bloody hero to that crew and whenever they were tempted to give up while doing some tough job or back down from the hard way, they would show their grit and backbone by shouting, ‘As long as she swims, I will cook!’ And that’s what I do. No matter how bad things seem to be, when I think I’ll never get through the next day, I say to myself, As long as she swims, I will cook. As long as this old body is still kickin’, I will do what I’m here to do.”

Pete pulled out onto the freeway and slipped Trilobite’s stick shift into fourth gear. He glanced at his unpredictable grandmother.

“What do you think you’re here
to do?
”

She paused a moment, gazing out the rattling side window at the distant mountains.

“To help people along the way,” she said, “to bring them hot Coffee when they’re cold and scared to death and hangin’ on for dear life.”

Peter pushed the truck a little over sixty. He didn’t speak for a few minutes, thinking. An eighteen-wheeler shook the VW bus with a shock wave as it rippled past. Peter gripped the steering wheel.

“Grandma, do you believe in God?”

“Who do you think built the ship?”

“How come you hardly ever go to church?”

“There are churches and there are churches. There’s the church that wouldn’t bury your grandfather because he committed suicide. And there’s the church who’s always talking about a God of love on the one hand who will incinerate you like barbecued chicken if you don’t live up to his expectations on the other.”

She turned her crinkled face to regard him. “I guess I work undercover, and I suspect God works mostly undercover, too.”

The ’65 bus sailed along the interstate on their way to get him some decent sweat socks so he could help knock the socks off Reedpoint that night. He was glad this woman was his grandmother and he thought he wouldn’t trade her for any human being on earth.

On their way home, winter’s darkness caught them as they drove through Three Forks. On the edge of town there was a homegrown motel with the only indication of life a glowing red neon vacancy sign.

“What’s the deal with that place?” Pete said, nodding. “I’ve never seen a car there since I’ve been in Montana.”

“Don’t know,” Grandma said, “but you’re right. I’ve never seen a car there either. Maybe they went south and forgot to shut off the sign.”

Pete aimed the VW bus down the narrow blacktop.

“Keep an eye peeled for Black Angus, boy, they won’t show up in the dark until too late.”

“I feel like I have a vacancy sign on me,” Pete said without looking over at her.

“I know the feeling. But one of these days you’ll hang out a no vacancy sign because you’ll realize what a unique and wonderful young man lives there.”

Peter didn’t respond until they were almost to Willow Creek.

“What if I never find someone to love?” he said softly.

“I’ll tell you something you can bet on. Us gals are peculiar in this way. It’s when we see a no vacancy sign hanging out there that we try to break the door down.”

“But what if I never
do
find someone?” he said.

“Then you just keep on cookin’.”

Andrew was at the game Friday night. Reedpoint showed up, too, but Dean was in bed with the flu and its accompanying 103ºF fever. Dean wasn’t the only one missing when seven o’clock approached and a blizzard moved in over the Tobacco Roots. Tom hadn’t arrived and no one knew where he was. Sam had dared to call the ranch, planning to hang up if George answered, out of jail only a day ago. Tom’s mother answered and with an evasive tone said she wasn’t sure where Tom was. When it came time to jump ball, Willow Creek had four players on the floor. If a team loses a player with five fouls, they can legally continue with less than five, but a game cannot start unless both teams have five players alive and standing. The referee had warned Sam twice: Come up with your missing player or forfeit the game. It was seven thirty-five and the Reed-point players and fans were milling around like depositors at the door of a failed bank.

Caught between the dilemma of forfeiting the game or embarrassing his valiant manager, Sam scooted Scott into the dressing room.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Sam said. “It’s only a game.”

“No, it’s all right,” Scott said with a wavering voice.

Sam decked him out in the best fitting uniform he could patch together: an extra-large jersey, a pair of trunks from bygone days, Scott’s own brown socks and black Adidas shoes. The coach and his draggle-tailed manager trotted out of the locker room to the murmurs and snickers of the visitors and to the whoops and cheers of the hometown crowd, which was a modest increase after their unexpected victory over Shields Valley.

The referees gave Sam a quizzical look but said nothing as Scott, slightly knock-kneed, stood on the floor for the jump ball. Coach Joe Decker made no protest, undoubtedly recording an easy win in his mind. The Reedpoint boys smiled and licked their chops, and though rumor had spilled down the
interstate that Willow Creek was vacating its long-occupied tomb, the Pirates swaggered confidently into town, having beaten the Broncs in December. Now, with a chubby, far-from-athletic Scott at one forward and Curtis Jenkins—who appeared as though he could hang glide with his ears—at the other, the Pirates were ready to board ship.

Olaf easily controlled the tip and batted the ball to Rob. Although Scott had helped in practice, as he trotted downcourt with the other boys he was an alien fallen on a strange planet. Sam dreaded the possibility of humiliating the ungainly boy.

“Time out! Time out!” Sam hollered, forming his hands in the familiar figure of a
T.

When they came to the bench, Sam put an arm around the freshman manager.

“Thanks, Scott, we couldn’t have played this game without you. Go in and get dressed now.”

With obvious relief, the pudgy boy in an ill-fitting uniform dashed for the locker room as the Willow Creek crowd cheered.

“Four-man zone,” Sam said. “Give ’em the outside stuff, but nothing inside. No second shots. Make ’em beat us from eighteen feet. Let’s go! Have fun and learn something.”

The team huddled for its cheer, but the fans drowned them out with their own.

“Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf!”

The four boys moved onto the floor but Sam didn’t expect the corresponding gesture of sportsmanship from Reedpoint. The Broncs had a plausible chance to win, and that so-called sportsmanship had limited applications and was much easier to flaunt by an opposing coach when he knew he would thrash you anyway. It would be four against five.

W
HEN
T
OM WAS
leaving their hardscrabble ranch for the game, his father, in one of his fitful moods, refused to let Tom take a vehicle to town. Finally, George removed the distributor cap from the old GMC pickup Tom drove.

“You can take the pickup,” George said, “when you paint over that bullshit you put on the side of the barn.”

“I’ll miss the game.”

“Then miss the goddamn game! Who cares! You’d only lose again.”

Tom hurried to the pasture and called Patch, his Appaloosa. Out of the dark the gelding had come straight away, nosing for the oat bucket. A few flakes were swirling when Tom had Patch saddled and bridled. He tied on his duffel and swung into the saddle, heading out the nearly eight miles to town.

The blizzard caught him in the open with less than two miles to go and swept over him, immediately obliterating all sense of direction. He could no longer see fence lines or make out the road bed. In the murky darkness of January, the landscape had lost all contour and delineation, all human sign had been erased in one swoop of nature’s brush. He tied his hat on with his bull rag, folding the brim down over his ears. He put on his leather gloves and he hunkered down in his full-length duster against the stinging snow.

He trusted Patch to feel his way, but several times they stumbled into the barrow pit, ran into fence lines, turned back and lost their bearings. He slid off the Appaloosa and slogged through the accumulating snow in his diamondback boots, leading Patch across open ground. Eventually he ran into a poorly kept barbed-wire fence and followed it. The temperature plunged. It hadn’t been lost on Tom that people froze to death like this only ten yards from their back door. It was as though the weather was on his dad’s side.

I
N THE COZY
, noisy gym, where most were unaware of the sudden blizzard descending outside, the four-man home team was holding its own. Sam kept one eye on the game and one on the door, where Diana stood, going out into the raging storm from time to time. Sam tried to give his under-manned team time to catch their breath by judicially using their time outs. By rotating substitutions of fresh troops, the opposing coach was methodically wearing down the outnumbered Broncs, and they were falling behind, 39 to 31.

“G
O TO TOWN
!” Tom kept shouting to his Appaloosa in the shrieking storm. Though he knew his gelding might more easily find his way home, Tom figured they were within a mile or less of town and that they’d never make it back to the ranch. His survival instincts told him to
find shelter, drowning out his uncompromising resolve to get to the game. Several times he managed to cut their way through barbed wire with his trusty wire cutter when a fence line impeded the direction the Appaloosa was heading.

After what seemed like hours of stumbling on foot and hobbling on horseback into the blinding whirlwind, Patch lurched up an embankment and his shoe clanked on metal. Tom rolled off with numb hands and feet. He kicked at the snow-covered ground and struck steel track with the toe of his boot. They had hit the line that carried the talc train along the west edge of town. It ran north and south and passed only a few hundred feet behind the school. They were close, if they hadn’t wandered too far south. Tom knew they hadn’t climbed, and that left them on the old flood plain between the foothills to the south and the Jefferson River to the north. For the first time since the blizzard closed in on him, he had some idea of where he was. In one way or another, the horse had led him east.

Tom’s intuition told him they were south of town. He led Patch on foot. They moved north along the track, into the teeth of the storm’s violence. Tom kept squinting into the howling darkness to his right in hopes of finding some glimmer of light from town. Repeatedly he went down off the right-of-way to check what bordered the track, searching for any recognizable landmark. Doubt and indecision wedged their way into his head as the terrifying cold and numbness hammered their way into his bones. Had he come too far north? Was the town actually south? He climbed on Patch and gave him free rein.

“Go to town!” he shouted into the horse’s ear. Patch turned his rump into the assailing wind and stood, with snow caked in his mane and tail. In an escalating desperation, Tom slid off the horse and, leading the Appaloosa, continued feeling his way north along the talc line.

Like an apparition from an arctic hell, a familiar silhouette leading a horse out of the snow blast nearly passed Tom going the opposite direction along the track. It was the hat that brought Tom out of his mental stupor or he might have let them pass as the hallucination of a numbing brain. Amos Flowers, on his way to town for the basketball game, head down, never noticed Tom and the Appaloosa, though they passed within four feet of one
another. Tom grabbed the startled man, who seemed to know exactly where he was. His handlebar mustache drooped with icicles and his big gray gelding loomed like the ghost of all horses killed by winter storm.

Screaming into each other’s ear, Amos convinced Tom that Willow Creek was south. Hanging onto the tail of Amos’s horse, Tom led Patch, trailing down the railroad bed through the swirling wind, following the strange man in his Tom Mix hat, wondering what held the damn thing on his head in this inferno and remembering with surprise that for the last half hour or more he’d been muttering a prayer that God would send help.

M
ISS
M
URPHY SAW
the pair leading their horses through the tempest and she rushed out to embrace Tom. Amos took the Appaloosa, promising he would tie the horse on the lee side of the building.

It was halftime. The spectators let out a whoop as Tom, with nearly frozen feet and hands, stumbled toward the locker room like a survivor from Shackleton’s failed Antarctic expedition. In the locker room, the team exploded in a burst of happiness at the sight of him, huddling around him in a warm, sweating embrace. Coach Pickett helped him peel off his snow-caked duster and settle onto a bench. Diana kneeled and pulled off the diamond-back boots. When she gently massaged Tom’s brittle feet and toes, Tom winced and jerked his feet away.