Blind Your Ponies Page 14

  “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.

  THE 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’.”

  CHAPTER 23

  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.

  Grandma didn’t hear Peter speak for more than ten minutes and figured he’d hung up or been hung up on. Finally she heard him move, pushing back a kitchen chair. When she stepped into the kitchen, she found her grandson fumbling on a jacket halfway out the back door with a basketball under one arm.

  “Going out?”

  “Yeah … I’m going to run.”

  She knew what was asked of her: to wrap her arms around him and rock him with all the love she had until dawn healed them both, but she couldn’t make her legs move; she couldn’t cross the worn black-and-white linoleum, and she despised her cowardly words of negligence. “Don’t catch cold.”

  Peter ran into the grinding teeth of his inconsolable grief and Grandma hurried to the door and hollered.

  “You’re a tough, brave kid, Peter Strong!”

  He had already gone too far and the wind hurled her words back in her face, unheeded.

  FRIDAY NIGHT, WITHOUT Olaf in the lineup, Sam watched the team warmup for their first home game against Sheridan. At first Olaf wasn’t even going to go to the game but the Painters, in their calm and comforting manner, convinced him there wouldn’t be many there other than the students anyway, and they were right. You could throw a brick into the stands and not hit anyone.

  Besides a smattering of local fans and the students, several carloads
had come from Sheridan, a picturesque mountain town south of them where most of the boys came off well-established cattle ranches. And come they did. With an enrollment of around a hundred, the Panthers filled both their varsity and JV’s with a full squad. Most of these schools suited up twenty to twenty-four boys between their varsity and JV’s, and they had mixed feelings when they saw Willow Creek come up on their schedule. Though it meant an easy win, it also meant there would be no JV game for the younger boys.

  Hazel Brown ran the scoreboard and clock and Mavis Powers, with her hair in curlers, kept the official game book.

  Without Olaf dominating the paint, Sheridan employed a straight man for-man defense, often double-teaming Rob and Pete and allowing Dean to run free once they assessed the freshman’s inability. Pete played as though they had killed his dog. It wasn’t that the other boys weren’t going hard, but Peter was trying to beat them single-handedly. Sam was puzzled because he didn’t regard Pete as a kid who was out for personal glory.

  “C’mon, we gotta beat these guys,” Pete shouted during a timeout.

  “Work a play out there,” Sam said and looked into Pete’s dripping face. “I haven’t seen one good pick, one good screen. Don’t forget what we’ve practiced, and have some fun out there.”

  At halftime, Rob played the drums and Curtis the trumpet as the band entertained the spectators with a peppy march and the Willow Creek fight song, to which no one sang along. Sam had cringed when the band—comprised of more grade school kids than high school—played the National Anthem before the game, out of key, faltering, pausing at times as though someone had run off with their music.

  The way the band played turned out to be an omen of how the game would go. At times it seemed as though the Willow Creek fans had been hit with an epidemic of narcolepsy. The cheerleaders tried to create noise by example, urging the team on with straining vocal cords and youthful enthusiasm, making more racket than all the spectators combined. There wasn’t what you could call crowd noise but rather sporadic bursts, singular eruptions of support and encouragement, recognizable voices over the nominal noise of the game, though at times they got together on a bad call. When your team’s been losing there are lots of bad calls.

  “Get your cataracts removed!” Rip shouted.

  Axel Anderson, who had managed to slip out of the inn for the second half, rooted on his adopted boys with a cannonlike voice along with the Johnsons and the somewhat inhibited Painters. Amos Flowers had appeared, and he hung from his Tom Mix hat in the stands with a confused expression, as if all that talk about a giant Norwegian had been a cock-and-bull story.

  Truly Osborn, who felt it his duty to appear at home games to monitor the behavior of his faculty and students but deemed it a waste of his valuable time to travel to the remote mountain towns to witness the slaughter, remained properly reserved in the bleachers, considering it uncultivated to shout and cheer and make a spectacle of himself. Andrew Wainwright, both proper and cultivated in his designer jeans and sports jacket, shouted and cheered loudly without making a spectacle of himself, personally identifying with the team as much as any of them.

  In the fourth quarter, after Dean fouled out, Peter picked up his fifth foul, and Willow Creek finished this game of attrition three against five, saddled with their ninety-sixth consecutive loss.

  The teams formed their customary lines and walked past each other, shaking hands in a display of sportsmanship in what had become the final effigy of disparagement for the Willow Creek boys. Sam hurt more than he would have expected, again politely accepting the winning coach’s Nice going, your boys played hard.

  In the locker room Sam slapped the boys’ sweaty backs and assured each of them they had done their best. As luck would have it, on his way out, he met Olaf near the doorway to the locker room, the overgrown foreign student gathering poise to say something to the team.

  “Did you see them out there!” Sam said. “Those boys aren’t afraid of making mistakes.”

  A primitive anger arose from his belly and found its voice.

  “You know, Olaf, it’s far better to try and end up looking like a fool, than it is to sit on your ass in the bleachers. Do you know how long some of those boys have been trying? Can’t you see the floor burns on their hearts? Don’t you see, it’s when you quit trying that you become the oaf. I’m proud of those boys. They never quit.”

  “Ya, good they are doing.” Self-reproach clouded Olaf’s pale face as he gazed silently out of troubled blue eyes.

  Sam stomped away feeling the heat in his nostrils. It felt good, and he suddenly experienced a renewed pride in his boys. With only five players and with Dean and Curtis starting, they made a game of it for a while against a good Sheridan team. But, like the famous Dutch boy, Dean had to hold his finger in the dike all night long and it was asking too much of him, the water pressure too great, and finally the sea came, washing them away, only a Norwegian arm’s length from dry ground.

  THE LAST TO leave the school, Tom, Pete, and Sam dragged up the middle of Main Street through the slumbering town like warriors leaving a field of battle where their army had been soundly thrashed, their horses killed, their weapons lost, bearing the wounds and defeat of the day. They slogged the four blocks to the Blue Willow with vague hopes that they might find balm for their bruised spirits and a word of cheer at the inn. Sam had tried to put the menacing threat of George Stonebreaker out of his mind, but he caught himself keeping one eye peeled for the brutish man’s pickup.

  Inside the teenagers gravitated to a table where Rob and Mary sat glumly with Carter and Louella. Sam made a quick check of the half-filled watering hole in hopes he’d find Diana, but she wasn’t there. Just as well. After condolences from a few of the faithful, he found a small table on the tavern side and sagged into a chair.

  Damn! They were right where they were last year, and the many years before, 0–3.

  He considered having a beer, but he didn’t like it that much and he wanted to respect the training rules of his underdogs, so he had a Mountain Dew on the rocks. He’d drink alone.

  John English stood at the bar with a few men who hadn’t been at the game. “Who won the game?” the middle-aged rancher called over to Sam.

  Sam regarded him calmly and didn’t answer. Screw you.

  John knew who won the game. Just because he’s on the school board Sam didn’t have to take his crap. What could he do, fire him?

  “Sheridan,” Axel said from behind the bar, picking up on John’s sarcasm, “in a damn close game that we almost won with only three players.”

  “Is that our motto this year, ‘Damn Close’? Last year it was ‘Almost’ and the year before it was ‘We’re Toast.’ ”

  The gang at the bar laughed and Sam looked away, into the dining room where three of his boys were licking their wounds. He didn’t notice Grandma coming up on his blind side. She leaned close to him with one arm propped on his table, one around his shoulder, and her eminent chin close to his ear.

  “Don’t pay those turncoats any mind,” she said. “I want to thank you for keeping the faith with these boys. I have a message for you.”

  Like a lover she clandestinely shoved a folded piece of paper into his hand. Then she stood, throwing out her chicken-bone chest.

  “Axel, how do you stand the sewer gas building up around that bar?”

  She pulled the brim down on her hat and swaggered back to the dining room. The men at the bar rumbled and muttered unintelligible responses. Sam wasn’t sure if he should reveal the secretive note in the presence of others. He left his coat and drink and stepped out onto the front porch where the bicycle built for two rested against the wall in the shadows. Unfolding the cheap tablet paper and holding it out to catch the light, he read the pencil-scrawled note aloud.

  Even youths shall faint and be weary,

  and young men shall fall exhausted;

  but they who wait for the Lord shall

  renew their strength,

  they shall m
ount up with wings like eagles,

  they shall run and not be weary,

  they shall walk and not faint.

  Sam folded the note and tucked it into his pants pocket, gazing down the deserted blacktop toward the school. What did that mean, how do you wait for the Lord?

  Wasn’t ninety-six losses in a row waiting enough?

  CHAPTER 24

  Sam woke with a bad taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with the failure of his Crest toothpaste or last night’s loss to Sheridan. It originated from the knowledge that he—like most of the Willow Creek community—had laid the blame for that defeat, as well as the first two, at the feet of the polite, unassuming visitor from across the Atlantic.

  He fumbled with his razor and removed the night’s silent increment, but he couldn’t remove the nagging truth that reflected back at him from the water-spattered mirror. He had used the exchange student, or attempted to, in pursuit of his unspoken yearning to turn his life around, the coinage to buy a pittance of satisfaction and triumph. He pulled on his sorry running shoes and knew he had to right the wrong, to make amends. In the snow-sodden gravel he ran almost two miles before gasping to a walk across the rusting iron bridge, rehearsing his contrition both going and coming.

  SAM PARKED IN the farm yard. On his way to the house, he spotted Olaf and Mervin out behind a machine shed and he turned toward them through the trace of snow. They were unloading railroad ties from a flatbed and stacking them against the shed, their yellow cotton gloves blackening with creosote. Olaf was a caricature of a homeless refugee, appearing gaunt in a bulky, oversized brown canvas coat, its sleeves halfway up to his elbows, a brown wool cap with ear flaps flopping, high-water overalls shrunk halfway up his calf, and huge mud-and manure-caked galoshes. Mervin, in his usual garb, noticed Sam first and paused with their work.

  “Mr. Pickett, what brings you out this way?” Mervin said, removing his right glove and shaking Sam’s hand.