Blind Your Ponies
BLIND YOUR POINES
Also by Stanley Gordon West
Sweet Shattered Dreams
Growing an Inch
Amos: To Ride a Dead Horse
Until They Bring the Streetcars Back
Finding Laura Buggs
BLIND YOUR PONIES
a novel by
STANLEY GORDON WEST
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2011 by Stanley Gordon West.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Quotations from Man of La Mancha used with permission of Dale Wasserman © 1966.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
West, Stanley Gordon, [date]
Blind your ponies: a novel / by Stanley Gordon West.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56512-984-91.
Basketball coaches—Fiction. 2. High school boys—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Montana—Fiction. 4. Willow Creek (Mont.)—Fiction. 5. Basketball stories. I. Title.
PS3573.E8255B58 2011
813'.54—dc22 2010038087
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For my father and mother
How did they keep a fire going
with the few scraps of wood they were given?
ALDONZA: You spoke of a dream. And about the Quest!
DON QUIXOTE: Quest?
ALDONZA: How you must fight and it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose if only you follow the Quest!
DON QUIXOTE: The words. Tell me the words!
ALDONZA: (speaking to music)
“To dream the impossible dream …”
But they’re your own words!
—from Man of La Mancha
BLIND YOUR POINES
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
Looking back, Sam Pickett knew the trouble began that day at the state fair, when the madness winked at him. Even as a ten-year-old, he had a sneaking suspicion that, somewhere in that shrouded realm where fates are sealed, his life had been irrevocably jinxed.
ON A LATE AUGUST afternoon, while students still enjoyed summer vacation, Sam hunched over his desk, polishing details on a lesson plan for November.
Use movie version of Man of La Mancha for section on Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote … first half of movie this period with time for discussion. Assignment: Read first 18 pages on life of Cervantes. Introduce theme: The problem of appearance and reality.
Sam glanced up from his dog-eared lesson plans. The sun had worked its way around and sunlight slanted in through the large, west-facing windows of his classroom, signaling the passing of another day. He was still surprised at the strangeness of his life, teaching high school in the fly-over town of Willow Creek, Montana.
A rattletrap farm truck hauling hay bales backfired as it chugged past the school, startling him. That damned muffled discharge! The feeling came over him with a choking sensation, and he fought for breath. He stared at the blackboard where the sun, coming through cottonwood leaves, left a dappled pattern.
He thought back to that day, to that Friday afternoon. He’d picked up Amy at the school where she taught. They were both high-spirited and happy, looking forward to the weekend together.
He pulled into the long line waiting for drive-up service. Amy said she could get the French fries faster at the counter, so she blew him a kiss and hurried into the building. It was a race to see who’d get the food first, and he hoped she’d win just so he could see the enchanting expression on her face and be rewarded by her childlike laughter. He felt a rush of happiness when he thought of the games they often played, like hide-and-seek in their apartment, in the dark, naked.
From the car, he heard the muffled sound, and then it came again, and again. A backfire? Not inside a building! He ran from the car and collided with terrified people stampeding out the door, fleeing the Burger King. Inside, it was bedlam, a madhouse in which people screamed, crawled under tables, and dove over counters. He frantically searched for her face, and then he saw her. With the bag of French fries still clutched in one hand, she had been hurled onto the tile floor, but not all of her. Parts of her were spattered on the wall, shrapnel from her head, small bits of brain and bone, skin and hair, sailing down the stainless steel on a sea of gore.
He knelt beside her and gently pulled her long black hair over the mutilation, as if that might heal her shattered skull. He took her hand in his, the hand that clung to the French fries she had playfully insisted on getting for him. Amid the chaos a white-haired man knelt beside him.
“She didn’t appear to be afraid,” the man said, slowly shaking his head. “She looked right at him and said, ‘No, please.’ Then he pulled the trigger.”
Sam looked into the man’s watery blue eyes as if asking for understanding.
“Was she your wife?” the man kneeling in her blood said.
Sam nodded. He couldn’t breathe, the room was spinning. Five minutes ago his life was full of joy and anticipation. “Oh God, oh God,” he moaned.
The man put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“Why did I turn on Elliot? We could have gone another way, stopped some place else.”
It was as if Amy had been drawn to the shotgun blast by some irresistible fate, and he had been helpless to prevent it. He stared at the grisly scene, the blood, the bits of flesh and bone.
The chaos continued, but he stayed beside her on the floor. He felt no fear, hoping the maniac would return and with one more pull of the trigger send him off to be with her. He heard the words from somewhere deep inside, The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Was it God who nudged him to take a different route home? Was it God who stoked Sam’s impatience with the heavy traffic? If God had any hand in this, then life was a slaughterhouse.
When the sadness erupted over his happy life, the abyss opened beneath him and he fell. In this headlong plunge he instinctively reached out and grabbed hold of something, he didn’t know who or what. He hung there, trying to catch his breath, trying to restore his heartbeat, dangling over the darkness.
The city he loved turned gray: green trees, the waterfront, his classroom, friends, the concerts and plays, the lovely boulevards and buildings, all gray. The sadness overwhelmed him. He left everything and fled.
At present, he was hanging on, but he knew he had to identify what it was he clung to, and he knew he had to find some reason to continue to hang on or he would give in to it, let go, and fall into the great dark void and be lost.
“Pickett!”
The voice startled him, jolting him from the trance. Truly Osborn stood in the doorway. Sam caught his breath.
“Hard at it I see,” Truly said, as he stepped smartly to Sam’s desk.
“Yes,” Sam responded, standing, slightly unbalanced.
“I wish a few of the other teachers were as conscientious. When I was running the school in Great Falls, well, things were different, I’ll tell you.”
Truly glanced at the walls Sam had cluttered with quotations and posters depicting films and books and musical plays.
“Had seventy-six teachers unde
r me, seventy-six. Could account for every paper clip. Can’t expect discipline in this outpost.”
He twitched his nose as was his habit.
“Is all this necessary?” he said, waving a hand at the wall. “It’s so … unorganized.”
Without allowing a moment for a response, he turned his gaze on Sam, who had settled back into his chair, his heart still racing. He swallowed and tried to pay attention to his superintendent.
“Now then, the other night the school board nearly did away with the basketball program. John English expressed the frustration and embarrassment we all feel because of the team, but due to the persistence of that foolhardy Wainwright and his lackey Ray Collins, they decided to go one more year. Can you imagine?”
Sam glanced down at his lesson plan and his eyes focused on The problem of appearance and reality. He was lost. Somehow, Amy’s voice came softly and calmly.
Truly continued to talk, and finally his words penetrated.
“… However, they realize how hard it has been for you to coach these past five years, the time and travel for what, heaven knows, is little extra money. We’re prepared to assign the task to Mr. Grant, our new math teacher. Hopefully it will only be for one more year. Might as well pass the misery around.”
Sam wanted to protest, wanted to volunteer for another year. If nothing else, the basketball program filled many hours during the winter months, and he didn’t know how he’d handle that much unscheduled time.
“Oh, and the board asked me to convey their gratitude for the way you’ve stuck to it, even though you never did manage to win a game.”
Sam caught the not-so-subtle sarcasm. The superintendent twitched his nose like a rabbit.
“They appreciate your … fortitude. Mr. Grant can carry on the ridiculous comedy with the boys.”
He slung a hand toward the classroom wall.
“See if you can’t neaten this up a bit.”
Then he turned and scurried from the room.
Pompous ass, Sam thought.
He stood, teetering slightly, still finding it hard to breathe. He pulled the shade, darkening the room. Truly’s cruel reference to the team’s efforts as “comic” had made him wince, and he admitted that deep inside he had wanted to win just one game, for the boys, for the town. Though the furthest he’d gone with basketball was playing on his high school team, Sam believed he was a capable English teacher. As a basketball coach he was 0–87. Wasn’t that some kind of a world’s record, a Guiness Book oddity? And even better, the team was 0–93, having lost its last six the season before Sam arrived. It would be exceedingly difficult to lose ninety-three in a row without some law of nature kicking in to bring the odds back into balance, something like an entire opposing team coming down with trichinosis in the middle of the third quarter or their eyes going crossed for all of the second half.
What Truly viewed as a ridiculous comedy actually had taught Sam something about heroism. Heroism wasn’t playing hard with a chance to win, a chance to receive the acclaim and praise of victory. True heroism was refusing to quit when there was no chance to win. True heroism was giving your all in the face of absolute defeat. He thought that these boys, who were pitied by some, were learning life’s lesson sooner than most, learning that life is a series of losses.
Sam gathered several folders off his desk and worried about how he would fill this new block of free time. He regarded the lesson plans for a moment, then dropped them on the desktop. He picked up his tattered copy of Don Quixote and left the room. He’d read the eight hundred and some pages again; that should occupy him for several days at least.
He raced down the hall and a flight of stairs, then ducked out the front door. The basketball court in front of the school stood empty in the late afternoon heat. The mountains shimmered to the west and the sweet aroma of freshly-cut alfalfa filled his nostrils as he headed toward his rental house. The town stretched along the road for about eight blocks, with the school situated on the south end, and Sam’s one-story home—for which he paid two hundred dollars a month in rent—in the middle.
Rip, the oldest resident in Willow Creek, shuffled along the street toward Sam. The skeletal-looking man’s suspenders appeared to be pulling him further and further down into his pants.
“Hello, Rip,” Sam said, slowing as they passed.
“Hey, Coach,” Rip said, flashing a toothless smile. “We’re gonna do it this year, by golly, ain’t we?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sam said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
It still amazed Sam that Willow Creek—with an entire high school enrollment of eighteen or nineteen students, and with a senior class last year consisting of three—somehow managed to maintain a basketball team and compete in the state-sanctioned conference. The school, whose greatest athletic achievement was fielding five standing, breathing boys, hadn’t won a basketball game in over five years, spreading a pall over the lives of those who identified with the community and its team. It was a virtual blood-letting, sanctioned by the Montana High School Association.
He turned in at the walkway to his house, mentally planning the evening ahead: run and walk the loop over the Jefferson River bridge, shower, supper, an hour of television, read until he fell asleep. He stepped onto the creaking porch, shoved the ill-fitting door open, and prayed he could hold off the afternoon’s vision until he escaped into the murky shadows of sleep.
Though he hated to admit it to himself, he was afraid to go to sleep, and he dreaded waking up in the morning to the memory of his relentless dreams. Somewhere in his mind, Amy’s voice played back at random times throughout the day and night.
He was also haunted by the Indian legend he first heard when he came to Montana. Members of the Crow tribe were camped along the Yellowstone River near present-day Billings. Warriors, returning from a long hunting trip, found the camp decimated by smallpox. Their wives, mothers, children, were all dead. So overcome with grief, sure they would join their loved ones in another world, they blinded their ponies and rode them off a sixty-foot cliff.
Five years after losing Amy, Sam still identified with those Crow warriors who couldn’t bear life without their loved ones. He would never admit to anyone that, on a daily basis, he entertained the thought of blinding his pony and riding off the cliff to be with her.
CHAPTER 2
Peter Strong waited for his Grandma Chapman in front of the café that doubled as the bus depot in Three Forks, Montana. The family-shattering detonation of his parents’ divorce had been followed by the anguish of leaving his girlfriend and the comfort zone he knew in St. Paul, Minnesota, and heading by Greyhound to eastern Montana, where he’d spend one dreaded school year in Willow Creek.
“Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Peter said as he watched his mother’s mother amble toward him from her faded green VW bus.
“I’m cookin’, sweetheart, I’m cookin’.”
Having already noticed the comfortable temperature, without a touch of Midwest humidity, he figured she wasn’t referring to the weather and that it must be some kind of Western-speak. She hugged him and then held him at arm’s length, eyeing him like she might a newborn pup, checking to see if it had all its parts. He hadn’t seen his grandmother in several years and was taken aback by her appearance and bluster. She had no left hand, but he already knew that. No, it was the clothes. Dressed in Levis, and wearing a white sweatshirt with black lettering, beat-up Reeboks, red-framed glasses, and a man’s brown felt hat perched on her snow-gray hair, she reminded him of the street people he saw in Saint Paul, and he couldn’t decide if he should laugh or hand her a dollar.
“Welcome to Montana!” she half shouted.
“Welcome to the end of the world,” he said under his breath, glancing at the three blocks that made up Three Forks’ depressed business district. “Willow Creek is bigger, right?” he asked.
“Smaller.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, trying to swallow a sudden rush of panic and loneliness.
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“You’ve gone and growed up,” she said, hugging him and then stepping back to look at his hair. “That how the young lions wear their mane in the big city?”
“Yeah, some.”
She rubbed her hand over his blond hair, cut short along the sides, long on top and back. “Looks like the barber got started and you ran out of cash. Reminds me of the bushmen in National Geographic.”
She smiled—sadly he thought—and her face took on the look of a worn leather glove. Her figureless body slumped toward the middle: no hips, no curves, just legs and arms and a head sprouting from a slightly bent and twisted trunk. Her sweatshirt read:
This package is sold by weight, not volume.
Some settling of contents may have occurred
during shipment and handling.
“Sure got your mother’s eyes; the gals’ll be fluttering over you.”
“I have a girlfriend.”
“So I’ve heard. Well, better pull the shades on those gorgeous blue peepers, then. I don’t want you breaking any hearts.”
With the dull ache in his chest he’d carried all the way from Saint Paul, he picked up his suitcase and duffel. At least there was one good thing, he thought: he liked his kooky grandmother.
“How’s your mom doing?” she asked as they walked toward her bus.
“I don’t know.” He wanted her to ask how he was doing. He was the one who got shipped out! “Divorce sucks.”
“Don’t suppose it’s a picnic for you,” she said.
“Some people wait until their kids are grown up—why can’t they?”
“Got no answer for that.”
“I can take care of myself when Mom has to travel. She’s only gone for a week at a time. She thinks I’m a baby or something.”
“Wants you to get the care you deserve.”
“They just don’t want a snot-nosed kid around anymore.”
“Well, that’s my good fortune then, because I’ll love having you around.”