Blind Your Ponies Page 30

  “Did you see Mervin Painter?” Diana said.

  Wearing her crimson matador hat slightly tilted over one eye, she seductively sucked cranapple juice through a straw. Sam gazed from his hamburger and grinned.

  “He looked like he couldn’t decide what to do,” Sam said. “Laugh or cry.”

  “He put down his wife and picked up Olaf as if he were a lollipop. I’ve never seen anyone so ecstatic.”

  “I think he’s becoming awfully attached to Olaf, like the son he never had.”

  Hazel approached their table. “I can’t take anymore of those overtimes, Mr. Pickett,” she said. “I thought my heart would stop before those three minutes would ever run off the clock.”

  “Well, I’ll tell the boys that,” Sam said. “Win in regulation time. Oh… and thanks for the extra time to catch our breath.”

  “That was that nutty scoreboard, I had nothing to do with that.” She winked and giggled.

  “Well, thanks anyway,” Sam said.

  “This is the best I’ve felt in years,” Hazel said. “Think of it. We beat Christian.”

  “Yes, and you had a hand in it,” Diana told her, “with all your help at practice.”

  Sam nodded his agreement.

  “Go get ’em tomorrow night,” Hazel said, giggling, and then hauled herself toward the dining room with childlike glee.

  Diana rolled her eyes. “Sometimes her giggling drives me nuts.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Sam said. “But I tell myself that if I’d been raised the way Hazel was and if I’d gone through what she’s gone through, I’d probably giggle a whole lot more than she does.”

  “Great game, coach!” Ray Collins called as he herded his family toward the front door.

  “Thanks,” Sam said and threw a little wave.

  He regarded Diana.

  “They’re jelling as a team,” Sam said. “They’re coming together. You can’t coach that. They’re anticipating each other, running plays, playing hard-nosed defense, and more important, they’ve got spirit and heart. You deserve as much credit as anyone. Did you see them out there tonight?”

  “Yes, I saw them,” she said. “They were splendid. They’ll beat Twin Bridges.”

  Sam caught Andrew Wainwright watching Diana from a table in the dining room. Sam put down his hamburger and looked into her eyes.

  “I thought of Amy out there, right in the middle of the game. Do you—”

  “All the time,” she said with a shadow in her unadorned face. “When I least expect it I see Jessica’s little face and her big brown eyes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said.

  “No, don’t be sorry, I think she’s trying to tell me that she’s all right, that I shouldn’t worry about her or feel sad.”

  Sam felt that tightness coming on, that sense of falling. He glanced around at the crowd. The inn hummed. He picked up his hamburger.

  Diana leaned toward him. “I don’t know if you can see him, but Andrew is staring at us,” she half whispered, peeking around Sam.

  “Probably not us but you. He’s a healthy single man.” Sam took a mouthful of his hamburger.

  “Well, he’s too good looking for me. I’d never trust him.”

  “Oh, that’s why you hang out with me? I’m ugly enough,” Sam said with his mouth full and wiped his lips with a paper napkin.

  “You’re honest.”

  If she only knew, Sam thought. More and more he was aware of how often he lied about his feelings, covering up, hiding out.

  “Was your ex… Greg, ugly?”

  “No.”

  “If he wanted you back, would you go?”

  Diana regarded him, her face grave. Sam pushed his plate away. “If he called and said he was over it, that he wanted me back, that he could forgive me, I think I would run back to him.”

  “I’m glad that you said that. It’s always better to get involved with a married woman.” Sam smiled. “Good sex, no responsibility.”

  “Is that what you want, good sex and no responsibility?”

  “I’d hate to lose what we have together,” he said and then took a swig from his Mountain Dew can.

  She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. They had tears in their eyes.

  “Music box tonight?” he said quietly.

  A delightful smirk lit up her face. “You told the boys we all need a good night’s sleep.”

  “Right,” he said. “Concentrate on the game.”

  “Excuse me,” Andrew said as he stopped by their table. “Don’t mean to intrude, but I wanted to congratulate both of you.”

  Sam noticed the man casually placed a hand on Diana’s shoulder.

  “Wow!” Andrew said, “I’m still flying. It was fantastic.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said.

  “I couldn’t help watching you two from the dining room. Pardon me for saying this, but you look very happy. Makes me feel good to see you together.”

  “Oh, well…” Sam faltered.

  “We’re enjoying the celebration,” Diana said.

  “Excuse me for butting in. Sam, they’ll be here next week for sure. They promised they’d be here ten days ago. I called and leaned on them. Much longer and it’ll be too late. I hope they arrive before Friday.”

  “Good, that’ll be something,” Sam said. “Thanks a million.”

  “You two have a nice night,” he said and wormed his way through the crowded inn.

  “What’s that all about?” she said.

  “A surprise. For you, for everyone. Wainwright has gone out of his way to back the team.”

  “Did you notice the look in his eye when he told us to have a nice night?”

  “No.”

  She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she said tamely, but her eyes whispered salacious promises.

  Later, After Sam kissed her beside the Volvo, he noticed Andrew watching from his parked white Lincoln Town Car. Sam thought about it on the walk home. Could the talc plant executive be interested in Diana? No, he must be at least twenty years older than she.

  He had a bounce in his step and he felt shamelessly happy—a feeling he attributed to his blossoming intimacy with Diana. Playing Twin Bridges on the road would tell them exactly where they were on their destined path as a team and Sam felt a strange optimism. As he walked he noticed the world around him, something else he did much more often since his day in the field with the goddess disguised as a biology teacher. He gazed at the waning moon, the delicate herringbone clouds with moonlight embroidered edges. There were no broken hearts sailing through. He whistled a tune from Man of La Mancha. They had beaten one of the best teams in the conference and though they were outmanned, they were not outplayed.

  CHAPTER 50

  In the cottony shimmer of a lavender-scented candle, in the rumpled softness of Diana’s large brass bed, Sam made love with desperate urgency, as though to beat back the long litany of loss in his life. With her own frenzied abandon, Diana joined him in a feverish attempt to hold off some dark destruction threatening to wash over her. They had forgetfully relaxed their defenses, exposing their hearts to the world. Now they staggered and faltered from the shattering blow that—finding their unspoken longings unprotected—maimed without mercy.

  Like wounded partisans on a battlefield where they had no chance to win, for a moment dragging themselves to a hidden place under the rubble, they plunged headlong to clutch what comfort and safety they might find in the other, some tourniquet to stop the bleeding at their center, some pleasure to hold off the terrible truth.

  When they finally collapsed beside each other in the damp bedding, trembling and gasping for air, he rolled away and pulled the sheet over him like a mummy.

  “Do you want to talk?” she said, lying on her back and staring at the shadow-dappled ceiling.

  “I can’t.”

  “They played so well,” she said. “They deserved to win.”

  Sam lay silent.
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  “It hurts when they play their guts out and come so close,” she said. “I was so damn proud of them. How many times will that Miller kid hit a three-pointer from twenty-five feet? God!” Her voice elevated with anger. “And it went off the backboard! Everyone knew it was garbage. He never once used the backboard all night! Stupid luck. When we were up by seven in the third quarter I knew we would win,” she said. “I felt it.”

  They lay quietly for a long time, then she broke the silence.

  “A twenty-five-footer with two seconds on the clock… and it went off the backboard. Do you think things like this are all decided ahead of time, like, no matter what we did, we’d lose in the end?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said from his cotton cocoon. “No, I have to believe we could have won, it wasn’t decided.”

  “What are you doing under there?”

  “I just remembered. I used to do this when I was a kid, whenever I wanted to hide.”

  “Did it work?”

  “It gave me the illusion it did,” he said softly. “I must have been very young. I think I figured if it couldn’t see me, it couldn’t hurt me.”

  “What’s it?”

  Sam pulled the sheet off his head and sat up. “I’ve never been able to find out, but it’s real.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed with his back to her.

  “Whatever it is, it had its beastly hand in it at Twin Bridges tonight. God, did you see Tom and Olaf bang it out on the boards with Stone and Harkin and whoever else they threw against them.”

  “The refs didn’t let Stone get away with much,” she said.

  “And the way Tom went nose to nose with Stone in the third quarter after Tom put him on the floor blocking his layup.”

  “I was sure Tom was going to punch him out and get thrown out of the game again.”

  “I almost wish he had,” Sam said. “He just smiled at Stone.”

  “What a smile.”

  “And the way Curtis rode his man all night,” Sam said. “He wore that kid out.” Sam chuckled. “He was concentrating so hard he covered him one time when the kid was going out of the game for a substitution. I thought Curtis was going to sit on the bench with him.”

  “You told him to stay in the kid’s shorts.”

  “I was exaggerating.”

  “You’d better be careful how you exaggerate. I think these boys would walk naked and blindfolded into the Jefferson River if you told them to.”

  She rolled onto her side, propping her head on her elbow.

  “You made me cry, you know.”

  “I did?” Sam half turned toward her in the flickering light.

  “Yes. What you said to them.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes you do, Sam Pickett, because I know how deeply you believe it. You told them they might never have this kind of friendship again and how very special it was. You told them that maybe it was the last time in their lives they’d battle as a team for something, that for the rest of their lives they’d be out there fighting alone.”

  “I said that?”

  “And when you broke the huddle after the game and reminded them, win or lose, we’re coming off the floor together. You said, I would rather be coming off the floor with you and those boys after losing than any other team in the world after winning.”

  “God it hurts to see them lose,” Sam said. “I think I could hear their hearts breaking.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was so goddamn presumptuous of me. I never learn. I actually expected to win—Willow Creek, Montana.”

  “It hurts to see how much you take it all on yourself,” she said.

  “You didn’t lose. And neither did they. They played better than they know how.”

  Sam stood, seemingly unmindful of his nakedness in the shadow-dancing room. He shuffled to the window and stared out into the blackness.

  “I like you without your glasses. Ever try contacts?”

  “Never thought about it. Glasses were always a part of my disguise, something to hide behind.”

  “Do you have good friends?” she asked.

  He thought a moment.

  “You know, I think the best friend I ever had was a dog.”

  “A dog?”

  “Yeah, Barkley. From before I could remember until I was eleven when he died. I still knew how to cry then. I cried for a month. My mother, After that first day, told me to quit that nonsense over a dog, to grow up. So I’d fake it until I could be alone and then I’d cry. God, I missed that dog.”

  “I’m glad you had Barkley.”

  “Yeah. He helped me through.”

  “Did you have any close human friends?”

  “A few, from school days, scattered around the country. I haven’t been very good about keeping in touch since Amy’s death.”

  “How about now?”

  “I’ve tried, with men, but we can’t do it very well. We keep bumping into invisible barriers, passageways we mortared tight as we grew up to save ourselves from the beasts that stalked us. Now, when we want to break them down, we don’t know how.”

  “What do you do?”

  “We do the best we can. But we finally surrender to the fact that we can’t handle being close, not really close, as though it were contrary to something in our genes. The fortifications are too thick and too well in place. Now and then we approach it, we knock out a stone or a brick and whisper to the other side, but I’ve never been close to anyone in the way I was with friends at school. It’s as though I lost my childlike ability to trust.”

  “I’ve made a few friends since I left San Diego, but we gals are not as different from you guys as you might be led to believe.”

  He turned from the window.

  “Would you prefer I went home to sleep?” he asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “To sleep here, with you.”

  She lifted the sheet and he slid in beside her, as if seeking shelter from the gale in the lee of her love. They cuddled into a twinning fetal position beside the dancing night light, two children afraid of the dark, longing to sail over the Spanish Peaks on one of God’s safe skipping stones.

  “Good night, Jessica,” she whispered. “Mommy loves you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Like a bridegroom overcome with joy on his wedding night only to discover that his bride has run off with the best man, Elizabeth Chapman, and the Willow Creek community, was rocked by the traumatic weekend: the stunning victory over Manhattan Christian Friday followed by the crushing loss to Twin Bridges on Saturday. But there was no relapse into the habitual pessimism that once inhabited their neighborhoods and haunted their spirits. Seeing their boys standing toe to toe with one of the state’s best and putting up a courageous fight sent their pride and expectations soaring, though a few outbursts of fatalism did erupt here and there.

  There were only two more games in the season: two more chances for another rip-roaring win. Then on to the dreaded tournaments where their season always ended swiftly if not mercifully, and with the sour memories of defeat lingering in their subconscious, they’d try desperately to lay them aside and start to think about spring planting.

  “That boy couldn’t make that shot again in a hundred tries,” Grandma Chapman said at morning Coffee in the Blue Willow.

  “It’s like we’re doomed,” Hazel Brown said, her drooping clothes stark evidence of the weight she’d lost somewhere in undusted corners of the school gymnasium.

  Axel puttered behind the pie counter.

  “Maybe we can beat Gardiner or Shields Valley,” he said.

  “Fat chance,” Hazel said. She gingerly stretched her right arm over her shoulder. “I think I have bone cancer.”

  “If you had one percent of everything you imagined,” Grandma said, “why, you’d have been dead thirty years ago.”

  Rip unloaded the first volley at Bobby Butcher, the lanky Pepsi man, as he hauled two canisters in the front door. The loss to Twin Br
idges took some of the joy out of it, but the handful in the inn blistered the former Christian player with gusto, possessing the insight that it might be an opportunity that comes once in a lifetime. Bobby simply nodded and kept a polite smile plastered on his face. Before he left, he had the maturity and good sportsmanship to stop at Grandma Chapman’s table.

  “You lied to me, Grandma.” Bobby frowned, waiting.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You told me your grandson was good.”

  “Well, he is! Damn good.”

  “That boy is all-world,” Bobby said. “You have no idea how good he is.”

  Bobby winked and hustled out, catching another burst of flack from Rip on the porch. Grandma thought her chest would burst with pride, and she felt so elated she picked up the tab for everyone in the place.

  ANOTHER WILLOW CREEK diehard would pick up the tab for coffee that morning. Mervin Painter caught himself speeding toward Manhattan, something he never did. His hands trembled on the steering wheel and his throat went dry. Would his brother try to squirm out of their bet the way he always did when they were boys? How could he and save face when his cronies and everyone in the café—hell, nearly everyone in the valley—knew about the bet?

  When he approached the Garden Café, he scanned the area for the tractor. It wasn’t in sight. He parked his pickup at the curb and hoofed it for the down-home restaurant. He could feel his heart thumping under his wool-lined canvas jacket. There was no way Carl could worm out of this one. But he’d thought that many times before and Carl always found a way.

  The café, pungent with the aroma of Coffee and bakery goods, was more crowded than usual for a midmorning Monday, and Mervin felt every eye trace his passage to the locally renowned booth where Carl and his cronies cowered.

  “Good morning,” Mervin said, trying to keep his voice normal and failing. He slid into the vacant space that the losers undoubtedly hoped would remain unoccupied that morning.

  “I didn’t think you were here yet,” Mervin said and cleared his throat. He regarded Carl, who sat stone-faced. “I didn’t see the ‘D’ out front.”

  “It’s in the back,” Carl said in a lowered voice.