Blind Your Ponies Page 2

  A dusty red pickup rattled to the curb and stopped a short distance from them.

  “Oh, Peter, come here,” his grandmother said.

  She walked to the passenger side of the truck. He followed and found a girl with wide blue eyes sitting beside the somber woman driver.

  “Hello, Sally. Want you to meet my grandson, Peter,” his grandmother said through the open window. “Peter, this is Sally Cutter.” She nodded at the driver. “And this is her girl, Denise. How are you, honey?”

  “Hello,” the woman said without turning her eyes on Peter. He regarded the girl for a moment. Her lively eyes seemed to pick up on everything, even though her head teetered gently and a string of drool hung from the corner of her mouth. Strapped into the pickup with some special kind of seat belt, she made a guttural sound.

  “Hello,” Peter said and smiled. He sensed the mother was embarrassed by her girl.

  Feeling uneasy, he picked up his suitcase and duffel and tossed them into the VW bus. A road-worn bumper sticker clung to the back bumper: “DO IT IN WILLOW CREEK, MONTANA,” it read. Feeling ill at ease, he climbed into the passenger seat and waited while the women visited. In a minute his grandmother pulled herself up behind the wheel and turned the key. Nothing happened.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” she said, grabbing a screwdriver out of the glove box.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing I can’t fix.”

  In moments she was out the door, around behind the bus and out of sight. Peter climbed out and found her lying in the street on her back, only her jeans and tennis shoes sticking out from under the bumper. He knelt to peer under the bus when suddenly the engine kicked over and started. She slid out, stood up, and brushed herself off.

  “Happens now and then.”

  They climbed in and roared down the main drag, the engine sounding as if they were doing eighty, although he knew they couldn’t be doing more than twenty-five.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Jumped it, like a hot-wire.”

  He had no idea what that meant, but he didn’t let on, didn’t want her thinking he was a stupid city kid.

  “Two of Willow Creek’s heroes,” she said, by which, Peter finally realized, she was referring to the mother and daughter he had just met.

  “They live in Willow Creek?”

  “Few miles south of town, in the hills where the soil is pretty thin.”

  His loneliness slid up into his throat; the mother and daughter rattled him. “Why heroes?”

  “ ’Cause they keep playin’ with the hand they were dealt, not like some people I know.”

  “How old is she, the girl?”

  “Sixteen, seventeen, about your age.”

  He wanted to tell her it scared the hell out of him to see someone his age like that, knowing it could be him, but he’d learned from painful experience not to share such things with anyone.

  “Got a driver’s license?” his grandmother asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever drive a stick shift?”

  “No, we have automatic.”

  “Trilobite is nearly automatic,” she said while laying her right hand atop the stick shift.

  “Trilobite?”

  “A fossil they find in rocks. As vehicles go, she’s about as much a fossil as I am, so we respect each other. She’s a sixty-five, twenty-five years old, so I’ll expect you to drive her with respect.”

  “Dad says only hippies drive VW buses,” he said.

  “That so … what else does your dad say?”

  “He thinks you’re kind of a screwball, says you’re a ‘refried hippie.’”

  “Well, coming from my distant son-in-law I’ll take that as a compliment.” They laughed.

  His grandma’s faded white-frame house sat on Main Street, halfway between the Blue Willow Inn and the school, where—Grandma explained—the teachers attempted to enlighten kindergarten through senior high students, and the school board annually took its stand against the inevitable, like fighting gravity, hanging onto the high school for one more year.

  She introduced him to her family: a motley green parrot named Parrot—whose cage she quickly covered before he could speak—and her three-legged cat, Tripod.

  “Found him in the backyard a year ago, a stray no one’d claim. Sick and dying, his right front leg shredded by some beast or machine or steel-jawed trap. Nursed him back to life after the vet amputated his bum leg. Ever since he sticks to me like panty hose.” She led him into the cozy and cluttered kitchen. “You can call him One Chance if you like.”

  “Why One Chance?”

  “When I took him to the vet he said the cat had one chance in a million and maybe we should just put him to sleep. I told him no, that if he had one chance, let’s go for it.”

  Peter sat in a chair by the kitchen table, and the apricot-and-white cat came to him as if with some instinctual understanding that they were orphaned kin. His grandmother slipped larger eyeglasses over the pair she wore, and stuck a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in place in the half-finished depiction of a sailing ship that sprawled across part of the table.

  “I play bingo on Tuesdays and Thursdays, go bowling Wednesday afternoons, do aerobics most mornings in front of the TV, hit the garage sales on Saturday mornings with Hazel Brown, have coffee at the Blue Willow once or twice a day—that was the joint we passed comin’ into town—watch The Waltons reruns, and we get up a game of hearts or whist whenever we’ve a mind to, but generally I’m just hanging around.”

  She found another puzzle piece that fit and thumbed it into place. “Landsakes.” She looked at him. “What’s the matter with me? You must be starving.”

  She pulled off the top pair of glasses.

  “Oh, darn, forgot again.” She opened a prescription bottle near the sink and popped a capsule in her mouth, washing it down with a glass of water. “I have to keep gettin’ a new doc,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “They keep dyin’ on me.”

  His grandmother laughed and fetched a carton of milk from the refrigerator. He noticed a small hand-lettered poster on the wall: “AS LONG AS SHE SWIMS I WILL COOK.” It made no sense to Peter.

  She poured a glass and set it in front of him. “What kind of milk do you like?”

  “Two percent,” he said. “Are you sick?”

  “Landsakes, no. This doc keeps wanting me to come in for checkups. Fussy old fool. Thinks my blood pressure is high.” She hooted. “Just never seen a seventy-four-year-old who’s still alive.”

  They hadn’t been in the house a half hour—enough time to stuff him with milk and uncounted Oreos—when his grandmother challenged him to a game of Horse.

  “What do you mean?” Peter asked, startled.

  “A game of Horse. You play Horse in Saint Paul, don’t you?”

  “Yeah … but—”

  “Then quit your stammering and get on your playing shoes.” She opened a closet and produced a shiny new basketball, firing a snappy pass that he caught more with reflex than skill.

  Somewhat astonished, he followed silently as they walked the two blocks up Main Street to the school grounds. Looking about, he realized it appeared to be the only street.

  “Where’s the rest of the town?” he said.

  “You’re lookin’ at it.”

  “We have shopping malls bigger than this.”

  “Minus the Tobacco Roots,” she said, waving a hand at the massive mountain range to the west, “and clean air and cutthroat trout.” Attached to an old three-story brick building—which Pete at first thought must be the grade school—stood a more recently built gymnasium with HOME OF THE BRONCS AND THE BLUE PONIES lettered in weather-beaten blue on its east wall.

  “Who are the Blue Ponies?” he asked.

  “Girls’ basketball … haven’t had enough players for a team the past few years, though. You might say the Blue Ponies are temporarily, if not permanently, out to pasture.” She nodded at the gym. “See
ing as the boys’ nickname is the Broncs, some of the nasty folks around here refer to this as the glue factory.”

  In front of the school there was an asphalt basketball court with four baskets. His grandmother promptly made a free throw and tossed the ball at Pete. He tried a shot and missed, and she hooted with delight.

  “ ‘H’! You got an ‘H,’ boy!”

  His grandmother actually won the first game by methodically throwing a spastic sort of hook shot, but when Peter got his bearings, he began hitting baskets, and eventually had to hold back, feeling guilty for beating her so badly.

  “You’ll be as popular as all get-out around here come basketball season,” she said, while trying to throw the ball from outside the circle.

  Peter retrieved her errant shot. “Do they have a good team?”

  “Nope, haven’t won a game in five years. But, lordy, I think that’s gonna change.”

  “Five years!” He swished a long shot. “That’s diseased. Think I can make the team?”

  His grandmother cocked her head as if he were putting her on. “All you have to do is show up. Everyone with balls makes the team, and by that I don’t mean the family jewels. I mean guts, I mean backbone, I mean heart.”

  Peter blushed slightly at her reference to the family jewels, and when she said she had to get home and work on the dinner, he was glad to stay and shoot for a while. The few vehicles that had drifted by showed no surprise at this seventy-four-year-old, one-handed woman out banging a basketball off the backboard.

  THE ROAD FROM Three Forks made a gentle curve into Willow Creek and became Main Street, the only pavement in that end-of-the-road village. Peter could see snow-tipped mountains in almost any direction, and they looked huge. As for Willow Creek, it was hard to tell where the fields and cow pastures ended and the town began. There just wasn’t anything there.

  Peter tried to be positive, but he was pissed and confused and scared. He began practicing with a vengeance because he didn’t know what else to do: long shot, rebound, lay-up, over and over, breaking a sweat, trying to dunk the rebound and coming close, there on the outdoor court of a school where by some fluke of fate he would have to spend his junior year. His life had blown up on him, and he had been hurled to this godforsaken place.

  As if in a dream he sent the ball on its graceful arc, and the swish of the net blended with the sounds of lowing cattle and distant children’s voices drifting in the dry mountain air. He looked around him, already plotting his escape.

  CHAPTER 3

  With only a few days before school was to start, Sam Pickett labored at his desk over lesson plans. In the background, the soundtrack from Rocky reverberated from the stereo in the corner of the classroom, prodding him with its beat.

  He felt the floor tremble and glanced up to see Hazel Brown as she blustered into his classroom.

  “Mr. Pickett, there’s something you’ve got to see.”

  She wore a sheen of sweat on her face and labored to catch her breath, which wasn’t unusual for Hazel. Sam wouldn’t call Hazel obese, though he figured she was twice the size God intended. He’d call her big.

  “What is it?” he said, wanting to finish what he was doing before going home, and anxious not to be interrupted.

  “Something out in front.” She giggled. “It won’t take long, Mr. Pickett.”

  For years he had explained that she didn’t have to call him mister, but she refused to pay attention. As the school cook, Hazel sometimes helped out with custodial chores, and Sam figured she always heard the students call him Mr. Pickett and felt obliged to follow suit.

  “Can it wait until I leave? I’ll only be another twenty minutes,” he said with an intended irritation in his voice.

  “It may be gone by then, Mr. Pickett. It won’t take but a minute.”

  She stood there in enormous jeans and tentlike sweatshirt with her head slightly tilted, holding her chubby hands together in a supplicating pose.

  “Oh, all right,” he said and tossed his ballpoint down on his desk. He pushed his chair back and followed Hazel out of the room, urged on by the Rocky soundtrack. As he walked behind her down the stairs he couldn’t help but wonder where she found jeans that size. When he first met Hazel, he held back, expecting some unpleasant body odor because of her enormous bulk, but instead he whiffed a sweet cosmetics-counter aroma that became as much a part of her in his mind as her heavy tread. He walked down the stairs, following the wake of that pungent fragrance, and realized that if he had to he could track Hazel in the pitch dark.

  She didn’t go out the school’s front door but instead led him around through the gym and into the small lunchroom where they could peer out at the asphalt basketball court without being seen.

  “There,” she said, giggling and pointing to the court. Sam slid up beside her and gazed through the lunchroom window. Outside, a boy he’d never seen before assaulted the rim and backboard with a basketball, going at it as if his life depended on it.

  “Watch this,” Hazel said. The boy dashed toward the backboard, grabbed the bouncing ball and nearly dunked it. “Grandma Chapman made me promise I’d introduce you. He’s her grandson from Saint Paul.”

  “Well, I’m pretty busy … maybe I can meet him some other time,” Sam said, anxious to get back to work but unable to turn away as the boy hit shot after shot from the far side of the court.

  “Oh, c’mon, Mr. Pickett,” Hazel said, and she hauled her body out the lunchroom door toward the asphalt court.

  Sam hesitated a moment and then gave in to his curiosity.

  “Peter!” Hazel shouted.

  The boy stopped dribbling and turned toward the approaching couple.

  “Peter, this is Mr. Pickett.” She turned to Sam. “Mr. Pickett, this is Peter Strong, Elizabeth Chapman’s grandson.”

  Sam moved up beside Hazel and extended his hand. “Hello, Peter.”

  “Hi.”

  With his chest heaving and his T-shirt soaked, the boy took Sam’s hand in a sweaty grip. Sam guessed him to be about six foot even.

  “Mr. Pickett’s our basketball coach,” Hazel said, as if it were some unheard of honor instead of an ungodly indictment.

  “No … no longer. Mr. Grant will coach the team this year,” Sam said.

  “Since when?” Hazel frowned, obviously hurt not to be up to the minute on what was going on around the school.

  “What do you think of Willow Creek?” Sam said, ignoring Hazel’s question.

  “I don’t know, I mean … there’s nothing here. I never knew a town could die and people would keep on living there.” He wiped sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand and dried it on his jeans.

  “Kind of like ghosts, huh?” Sam said, and laughed. “Are you going to be here long?”

  “I sure hope not, my family’s just getting things worked out. I plan to be home by Christmas.”

  “That’s not what your grandma says,” Hazel said with a defensive tone. “She said you’d be one more student for the high school this year.”

  “How many kids are there?” Peter asked.

  “Seventeen,” Sam said.

  “Seventeen?”

  “Eighteen,” Hazel said. “We’re getting an exchange student, a boy from Norway.”

  “Huh. Back home I have over four hundred kids in just my class.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “it was nice meeting you. Be careful you don’t turn into a ghost while you’re here.” Sam smiled and headed back toward the school.

  “See you later, Peter,” Hazel said, following Sam. She caught him halfway up the second floor stairs.

  “What do you think, Mr. Pickett?” she said, panting.

  Sam stopped at the landing.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About Grandma Chapman’s grandson. He sure has an attitude about him.”

  “Remember the first time you saw Willow Creek?” Sam said.

  “She says he’s going to be here for the whole school year. Do you think
he’ll make a difference?”

  Sam climbed another step and stopped. “Do you mean will he help Willow Creek win a game? No, probably not.”

  “That’s what I told Elizabeth. Heavens to Betsy, it’ll take more than that kid. Magic Johnson couldn’t win a game here.”

  “Oh, he looks like a player,” he said. “Was he on his high school team in Saint Paul?”

  “To hear Grandma Chapman talk you’d think he was going into the NBA next week.”

  “Well, it doesn’t sound like he’ll be here for the basketball season anyway.” “I don’t blame you for quitting coaching, Mr. Pickett.” She glanced into his eyes for a moment and then looked away.

  “I don’t know how you stood it so long.”

  “Yeah, well, it was something to do.”

  Sam turned and climbed the stairs. He knew he wasn’t in the main loop of village gossip, in fact he purposely avoided it. But after eating so many meals at the Blue Willow, the hive of town scuttlebutt, he couldn’t help but gain a certain level of knowledge about everyone in town. The word was that Hazel grew up in St. Louis with her unwed mother, never married, bounced around the West waiting tables and cooking for twenty years, and then she showed up in Willow Creek ten or twelve years ago and anchored her forty-two-foot aluminum trailer as if she were making her stand. She sent out her need for approval like cottonwood seed and it stuck to everyone.

  At the end of the hall he hurried into his classroom, where the Rocky soundtrack continued to urge him on. Ten minutes later he was up to speed, revising, polishing, and adding new material, trying to recapture the excitement he once felt in introducing students to words and language and the wonder of their magic in great writing.

  But no matter how he tried to ignore it, something stuck at the back of his mind, and he couldn’t shake it. Was he annoyed at Hazel Brown for interrupting him? No, that wasn’t it. Was it what Peter Strong had said? Had the boy seen through the appearance of Willow Creek to its reality? If the kid stayed, Mr. Grant—with senior Rob Johnson—would have two good basketball players to work with. Even so, that was no longer Sam’s worry, and he tried to shove it out of his mind and keep at his lesson plans.