Blind Your Ponies Page 15

  “I’d like to speak to Olaf for a minute, if it’s okay.”

  Olaf looked perplexed, as if he expected another improbable assault from his former coach. Sam caught the mixed aroma of wet gravel and creosote.

  “You two go right ahead. We need a break,” the rancher said. “If I had the brains I was born with I’d have hauled these in my dumpbed, wouldn’t have had to manhandle ’em.”

  Sam noticed a gamesmanship among these people where they would put themselves down, a casual banter depreciating themselves, either as a true reflection of their own lack of self-worth or as a subtle way to beat anyone to the punch who might find fault with them. Mervin, without the brains he was born with, nodded at Sam and footslogged toward the house, his unlatched overshoe buckles clicking rhythmically.

  Sam paused and regarded his former player. Olaf patted his gloves together nervously and shifted his weight from foot to foot, avoiding any eye contact.

  “Olaf, I’ve come out here to apologize to you. I had no right to call you a quitter. You agreed to try basketball and if it didn’t work out to let it go. That was the deal, and you stuck to it.” Sam tried to find Olaf’s eyes, hidden behind the visor of his cap, his head turned to the ground. “I was mad at myself and the team—no, not the team—the losing, the sorry-ass losing, but I took my anger out on you. That was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “It is good … okay. The team I am helping by not playing. Without me last night good they are doing.”

  “Anyway,” Sam said, “thanks for giving it a try. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  Sam offered his hand. Olaf took it in the creosote-stained glove and they shook hands. With a glance, Sam found sorrow drifting down from the boy’s face like house dust in a shaft of sunlight.

  “How do you like working on the ranch?” Sam said as he stepped back a pace, wanting to soothe Olaf’s grief but feeling helpless.

  “Working? Oh, adventure sometimes it is. The tractor I am driving and the bales loading when the cattle we are feeding.”

  Sam smiled up at the overgrown kid, his straw-colored hair splayed from under the ear-flapped cap, his boyish blue eyes peering from his perplexed face, a stranger in their land making his way the best he knew how, and Sam let him go. He climbed off the young Norwegian’s shoulders and climbed into his car. Without looking back he drove away, a weight of sadness in his chest. Out on the highway he found creosote stuck on his hand.

  He drove west with no destination in mind and tried to hold off the memory that visited him mercilessly whenever he suffered a loss. He’d attempted to erase it from his brain cells since he was a kid but it had been indelibly imprinted, and without his permission, at the worst of times, it reared its horned head.

  Since he was a boy he believed that somehow he got off on the wrong foot in life and could never quite get back in step. And it always seemed to be epitomized by that fateful day in August when he was ten, as though it were the gods’ way of foretelling him what to expect down the pike, a landmark event that colors all that follows, an undeniable motif in the pantomime that his life had become.

  They were at the state fair, and after tagging along behind his parents for what seemed like hours through machinery displays, food and craft exhibits, and 4-H stock, Sam had to pee with great urgency. He’d been well trained to never use the word “pee,” nothing that crass allowed in the Pickett family household, although “urinate” seemed to be acceptable with a minor frown. Sam let them know he had to “go to the bathroom” in a hurry. In the midst of long rows of gaming booths and food tents, they spotted several of those temporary green fiberglass outhouses sitting in the blazing sun.

  “Don’t use those filthy things,” his mother said. “Wait until we get to the Horticulture Building where they have decent bathrooms.”

  But Sam insisted he couldn’t wait and with his father’s support was given permission to relieve himself. He always wondered why he chose the one he did, as if at that point he still had some free will over his destiny. With his bladder about to burst, he stepped into the first one available, latched the door, and unzipped his pants. It was ten or fifteen degrees hotter inside and the foul odor swarmed up and all but strangled him with its humid, suffocating reek. The cesspool was nearly full and that disgusting deposit starkly visible. He held his breath and, with the pressure of a young horse, finished in seconds. He shook off his penis and was tucking it in when the world tipped over!

  A beer truck backed a foot too far, felling the fiberglass privy like a tenpin. In an instant Sam was flung backward onto the door, which was now flat on the ground, and onto him, as though in slow motion, came sloshing a great tidal wave from some vile sea of human excrement, washing over him and clinging to him with its nauseous stinking slime.

  Terrified, he began spitting and gasping, trying to get up but slipping and sliding on the human filth that drenched him from head to foot. He kicked and pounded on the side of that putrid coffin in which he was sure he would die. In the eerie green light the sun projected through the fiberglass, he pulled off whatever was sticking over one eye, a bloodied gauzelike thing he didn’t recognize as anything more than the gore of the human race.

  Bystanders finally rolled the tomb on its side and Sam flopped out, kicking and retching like a rotting fish, a Lazarus who had spoiled. He sprang to his feet with toilet paper and all manner of filth clinging to his clothes and skin and he couldn’t stop throwing up.

  He’d never forget the loathing horror in the eyes of the people around him, their hands over their mouths and noses, the voice of the teenage girl who kept shrieking, “Oh, gross! Oh, gross!” as they backed away. Nor would he ever forget the humiliation hurled on him by those who joked and laughed.

  His mother stepped toward him to help and at once backed away with her hands held up in front of her in fluttering indecision.

  “Oh, Samuel, you’ve gotten it all over yourself.”

  His father took his hand and, with the Hamm’s Beer truck driver—from the land of sky blue waters—led him across the street, away from the nauseous crowd. The driver found a hose behind one of the fair booths, and with Sam standing over a sewer grate beside the curb, shivering, the two of them hosed him down, the cold water washing the world’s shit out of his hair and ears and pockets, back into the world’s cesspool.

  “I’m really sorry, kid, I’m really sorry,” the delivery man kept saying. “I have an accident-free record, I don’t know what the hell happened.”

  Sam felt at fault somehow, standing there being publicly cleansed, as though he’d done something wrong, as though he should have picked a different outhouse or waited as his mother had urged, silently chastising himself that there was something he could have done to prevent this. He lived his childhood like that—when he hadn’t done anything wrong, still afraid his parents would find out, ever vigilant, always on guard. To this day he realized there was a kid in him who still accused and denounced him for being so stupid.

  All of it didn’t wash off that day, down the sewer. Something stuck to him and he carried it with him still, though he could never quite identify what. As he grew up he would catch himself, when something went wrong in his life, thinking, If only I hadn’t gone in that goddamn shithouse. From that day on, he became a boy who—like primitive homo sapiens listening for a snapping twig—always kept one ear cocked for the howling transmission of a backing beer truck. He remembered wondering as a boy, Who had sent that truck? and he didn’t mean someone from Hamm’s Brewing Company.

  A few days after he lost Amy, the memory of the fair came crashing in on him late one night. From then on his nightmares were not only occupied by maniacs with shotguns, but, in those insane shrouded scripts, vile and tipping outhouses.

  With the detachment time brings, Sam tried to remember the whole incident with humor, to defuse its curse. What the hell, so he was in a latrine when it got knocked over, big deal. Most people would respond to his story with laughter, what a joke, hooray for the truck d
river!

  But sometimes, like now, driving through the Jefferson canyon, when he tried to regain his balance after a setback or dared to entertain dreams, he could subtly smell the obscenity of that August afternoon, vaguely sense a beer truck backing.

  They had two games coming up fast, with Christmas vacation beginning Friday. Tuesday they played at Harrison, a small town twelve miles south that also depended on far-flung ranch sites for the survival of their school and team. Thursday they took on the Lima Bears at Willow Creek. He would knuckle down and do everything he could to prepare his five players. With hard work and a lot of luck, they might win a game yet.

  He attempted to let it go, feeling better about the whole incident with Olaf Gustafson, yet wishing he had never talked him into trying, never seen the towering boy dunk a basketball, never allowed himself to get his hopes up and dare to dream such lofty thoughts, but he couldn’t prevent those images of the young gangling giant from lapping up against the shore of his memory, couldn’t wash the creosote off his heart.

  Inexplicably, even in the face of the Norwegian’s desertion, Sam heard a faint refrain of promise somewhere in his head. Hope, like a creditor, held him by the lapels of his soul and wouldn’t let go.

  CHAPTER 25

  Olaf picked at his food and only spoke in response. He ate Sunday dinner with the Painters in the neatly cluttered dining room amid the knickknacks, frillery, and fine bone china that Mrs. Painter obviously hadn’t found at a flea market or one of Hazel Brown’s yard sales. Pieces with the names Lenox, Pickard, and Royal Albert overran their home, causing him to wend his way cautiously through the front rooms, narrowly avoiding catastrophic probabilities.

  Olaf enjoyed amazing the female-producing couple with the quantity of food he packed into his tall, narrow frame, but today, with a seasonal chinook—a warm snow-eating wind—humming overhead, he had no appetite and the Painters eyed him with concern.

  “You mustn’t let basketball get you down,” Mrs. Painter said. “We’re used to losing around here and everyone will soon forget all about it.”

  “To me, says my father: A thing do not be doing if excellent you cannot be. Expecting the top grades, one hundred per cent.”

  He glanced into Mrs. Painter’s soft, motherly face.

  “My father I am not telling the basketball I am playing. Am I winning he would be wanting to know.”

  “I think the boys around here want to play for the fun of it,” Mrs. Painter said in her melodious voice as she subtly nudged the gravy toward Olaf. “Goodness knows they don’t do very well, but we’ve all accepted that. We want them to win, but we know they won’t, and life goes on just the same.”

  “The quitter I am not wishing to be, but making them to be losing the game I am.”

  “Don’t you fret about it,” Mrs. Painter said. “In a few weeks they’ll forget you ever tried. You get back to enjoying your time here. Have some more potatoes.”

  But Mr. Painter wouldn’t leave it lying there on the dining room table.

  “I have an older brother who ranches over by Churchill. We get together every Monday at a cafe in Manhattan with some other ranchers and when the basketball season comes, my brother always suckers me into betting on the games between Manhattan Christian and Willow Creek. I don’t want to but I always do, praying for a miracle. Then, the next Monday, after we’ve gotten the stuffing kicked out of us, everyone in the café laughs and makes fun of Willow Creek.”

  Mr. Painter paused and Olaf caught a glimpse of pain in the rancher’s weathered face.

  “I have to sit there and take it. I pretend not to care, but it gravels me, especially when my big brother jabs his finger in my face like he used to when we were kids. I just sit there and try to smile, but I hate it!”

  Mr. Painter snatched the linen napkin out of his lap and threw it down on the table.

  “I sit there and pray that somehow, some day, Willow Creek will stand up and beat the shit out of Christian.”

  “Mervin!” Mrs. Painter held a hand over her mouth.

  “Beat the shit out?” Olaf said. “Oh … ya.” He couldn’t prevent a smile from elbowing into his gloomy mood.

  A knock on the kitchen door startled the three of them. With the constant drone of the wind they hadn’t heard the crunch of gravel under tires in the driveway. Mrs. Painter dropped her napkin on the table and scurried out of the dining room. After a minute she came back beaming.

  “Olaf, there’s someone to see you.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Who is coming?” he asked, figuring it might be Louella or Carter or both.

  “I guess you’ll just have to come and see,” Mrs. Painter said with a giddy grin.

  Reluctantly Olaf unfolded himself from his chair and ducked through the doorjamb on his way to the kitchen. Immediately he started, stumbling back on his heels and nearly wiping out a shelf crammed with china cups and saucers. He had been partially right: Carter and Louella stood in the large white kitchen wearing happy smiles, but along with them was the entire student body of the high school, eighteen strong, including Susan Bradley, who had the flu, out of her bed to make it happen. Beholding the sea of laughing eyes and animated faces, Olaf, astonished and bewildered, lost his tongue in either language.

  Rob stood in the front line as their spokesman, his curly black hair tousled from the wind. “We want you back, Olaf, we need you, we can’t do it without you,” he said, and then everyone chimed in: “Yeah, we miss you, we want you on the team!” “Yeah, please come back!” “We don’t care how good you play!”

  They paused, and the jammed kitchen fell silent. Tears streamed down Olaf’s cheeks and he quickly attempted to wipe them away.

  “Wanting me you would be when I am losing the games?”

  “Yeah!” they hollered in chorus. “We want you back.”

  “Stick it in their ear!” Tom shouted.

  “You don’t lose the games,” Rob said. “We’re a team.”

  A silence wedged itself between Olaf and the students for an awkward moment. Then Carter ventured into the emotional vortex. “We love you even if you play like an oaf,” she said, tears in her puppy-dog eyes.

  They stood facing each other for a long, uncomfortable pause, Carter’s words hanging in the air. Mr. and Mrs. Painter fretted mutely beside him as Olaf glanced into the expectant faces of his classmates. He realized that they cared about him for more than what he could contribute to the team. They were inviting him to be a part of their lives. They knew he played very badly and they didn’t care. That was something brand new for him, something fresh and bright. He struggled to swallow the sentiment clogging his throat, and forced the words out into the utterly silent kitchen.

  “At the basketball then I could be playing.”

  “Does that mean you’ll play?” Rob asked.

  “Translate, translate, you crazy Norwegian,” Pete said.

  “Ya, I be playing.”

  “Yeeaaahhh!” the students erupted, jumping up and down, hugging one another and trading high fives. The team members started it, but the other students caught on quickly, and the chant went up through the kitchen ceiling, out through the cedar shake roof, carried by the mountain winds across the valley and beyond, warning all who would pay attention that their flag had been unfurled and was rippling in the winter gusts once again.

  “Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf! Oaf!”

  Olaf felt the warmth of their acceptance and affection, and he raised a fist high into the air, knocking a figurine of a man on a horse crashing to the floor.

  “Oh, so sorry,” he said and he stooped to pick it up.

  Having a shorter distance to go, Mrs. Painter beat him to it and retrieved the broken porcelain, now in two pieces. The rider had lost his horse.

  “It doesn’t matter, it’s a dime-store piece,” she said, carefully placing her broken Royal Doulton on the counter. “How would you all like a dish of ice cream?”

  THE WHOLE SCHOOL—EXCEPT Susan Bradley, who
went out and threw up in Carter’s pickup—ate ice cream at the Painters’ Sunday afternoon, demolishing a three-gallon tub of butterbrickle. Mervin examined the horseless rider and thought it was a sign: the Norwegian hammer would knock others from their horses. Mervin grinned and thought of his brother.

  SAM SHOVED FROZEN Tombstone pizzas in the oven and made a perfunctory effort to straighten the front room in anticipation of the arriving team. He had called a voluntary session, determined to do everything in his power to prepare them for their next combat with the hope that they could still win a game or two during the season.

  He was glad when Tom arrived first because he’d been anxious to ask him about his father ever since their confrontation in Three Forks. When they had settled in the cluttered front room, Sam leaped into the momentary silence.

  “Ran into your dad Saturday…. Seemed pretty steamed about your playing basketball.”

  “He’s usually steamed about something. He’d have booted me long ago if he didn’t need me to get the crop in this spring.”

  “Does he make it hard for you at home?”

  “Sometimes. You can never tell what mood he’ll be in. I avoid him most of the time. If I see his truck, I don’t go home. He’s out drinkin’ a lot. Don’t worry about him. I’m really on my own and there’s no way he can stop me from playin’.”

  Sam’s imagination ran wild when he thought about what George Stone-breaker might be capable of doing. In some measure Tom was playing in defiance of his volatile father, and it had little to do with Sam’s attempts to motivate him with lofty visions of what the team might accomplish.

  The other four boys arrived together, extremely cheerful and boisterous, causing Sam to wonder if they didn’t care that they had lost their first three games—not to mention all realistic expectations of winning any others—and had succumbed to the infection of failure. He served up pizza and Pepsi, and pick-and-rolls on the television screen, sensing a preoccupation with the boys, a lack of concentration, as though they watched halfheartedly when he pointed out individual moves for each of them.