Blind Your Ponies Read online

  The boy glanced at his playmate with a shrug and walked hesitantly toward the English teacher.

  “Hi, Dean. I’m coaching the basketball team again this year and I hope you’ll be coming out.”

  Relief spread across the freshman’s face, as though the teacher hadn’t found out what he’d done. And then, just as quickly, he bunched up his face. “I’m no good,” he said in a high-pitched voice known throughout the community.

  “We’re going to need you, Dean. We’ll practice a lot and you can learn.”

  “I stink.” The boy squirreled up his nose as if he could actually smell his inability.

  “Do you think you’d like to play, if you learned how?”

  “I can’t dribble or nothing. Scott’s better than me.”

  “I’ve seen you running around school. You run pretty fast. If you practice hard every day, you’d be surprised how quickly you can learn.”

  “Would I have a uniform?”

  “Yes, of course. And you’ll get out of classes.”

  Sam fished, wondering what bait would be needed to convince this country boy to lay his self-esteem on the line and step onto the varnished hard-wood. He knew how disgrace was still a stark reality for any kid who dared put on the Willow Creek jersey.

  “We’ll travel to other towns and eat at restaurants.”

  “McDonald’s!”

  “Yes.”

  “Bodacious!”

  Sam caught his breath. He’d pulled the correct dry fly from his fishing vest.

  “When we go to Bozeman, Mom always says we can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s.”

  Sam noted the boy’s patched jeans and faded flannel shirt.

  “Do you think you’d like to give it a try?”

  “I stink.”

  “Listen, Dean. Why don’t you come out for a few practices. See how it feels.” He ought to say, See how it smells. “If you don’t like it, you can let it go.”

  “Think we’ll win a game this year?” Dean asked.

  “I know we will, if you come and help us. What do you say?”

  Sam regarded the athletically-challenged schoolboy. Dean screwed up his face and tugged at his hat.

  “Okay. I’ll try, but I stink.”

  “Great. I’ll let you know when we’ll have our first practice. Thanks, Dean.”

  The bowlegged boy dashed back to his friends while Sam found his bearings and caught his breath. He hurried through the town toward the Blue Willow in hopes of being distracted and lost in conversation for the remainder of his free period. He knew he would have to find something that Dean could do well and build on that. Dean Cutter was definitely not a boy with great self-confidence when it came to basketball, but after all, look where he grew up.

  PETE STRONG SHUFFLED into the front room, having slept in until ten. He found his grandmother doing aerobics along with the Bodies in Motion gang on TV. The parrot hunched on the bar from its hanging cage and Tripod gazed from one eye while curled beneath the coffee table.

  “Glad … to see … you’re still … alive,” she said. “I’ll … whip up … some breakfast … in about … fifteen minutes.”

  “Up your ass,” the parrot squawked.

  “Grandma, did you hear that?” Pete said.

  “What a gas … what a gas,” Grandma said as she kicked to the left, then kicked to the right.

  By the time Pete had washed in the makeshift bathtub shower and dressed, Grandma was flipping pancakes in the kitchen with Tripod at her feet. Pete crossed the living room and the parrot cackled.

  “Piss your pants.”

  “Hear that?” Peter said.

  “Certainly, he said, ‘Miss the dance.’ ”

  “Grandma, I think you’re hearing is shot.”

  Pete pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

  “Nonsense. I can hear a meadowlark down on Cooper Road.” She flopped a pancake on his plate.

  Shaking his head, Pete poured maple syrup over the first pancake. After chewing a heaping forkful, he spit it back onto his plate.

  “Yhaaaacck! What’s in the pancakes?”

  She doubled over with laughter. “Should’ve seen the look on your face!”

  “What’s in these?” Pete wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It tastes like soap.”

  “Just a little Joy. Thought you needed a little in your life,” she said, taking the plate and giving him a clean one.

  “Hairy old bitch,” the parrot said.

  “Merry old witch,” Grandma said. “His favorite name for me, merry old witch. Here’s a real pancake, now that you’ve had your morning Joy.”

  Pete, learning fast, cut a small portion from the pancake and slipped it to Tripod. The cat gobbled it down and Pete noted the absence of bubbles drifting from Tripod’s nostrils and mouth. Satisfied that the pancake was safe, Pete covered it with maple syrup and began again to chow down.

  “Well, the Montana Education Association left you with a few days on your hands, huh?” she said, pouring another pancake onto the large iron skillet.

  “Yeah, no school till Monday.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Carter’s dad is putting a new floor in their machine shed. We’re all going out and watch the concrete set.”

  “You getting to know the kids?”

  “I know every kid in the high school,” he said with his mouth full.

  “Sounds like you and Trilobite are getting along. You’re not grinding second gear anymore.” She slid another pancake on his plate.

  “That’s an awesome bus. I had the whole senior, junior and sophomore class in it the other night. I wish I had it at home.”

  “You lonesome for home, boy?”

  “Yeah. For Kathy and my friends.” He covered the pancake with syrup.

  “Real bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, the kids here are cool, it’s just … so different. They’d roll up the sidewalk at eight-thirty if they had one. Where does everybody go?”

  “To bed, I guess.”

  “I started my letter to Kathy yesterday with ‘Greetings from the end of the universe.’ ”

  She flipped another pancake onto his plate. “How many more for the bottomless pit?”

  “A few.” Pete grinned. He was continually surprised at how well she managed with only one hand.

  “Going to Billings for a couple days next week to see a dear friend, Jean Mack. You be all right here alone?”

  “Yeah. I’ll play basketball. Mr. Pickett said I could use the gym whenever I wanted.”

  “Stay off that phone. Don’t want to find a twenty-three-page bill from US West in my post office box next month. A half hour Sunday night, right?”

  “Right.”

  He finished a pancake and washed it down with milk.

  “Mom never told me how you lost your hand.”

  “Well, one day I just lost the circulation in it. Nothing they could do but lop it off.” Her voice softened.

  “You do so good with your …” Pete said and came up short.

  “Stub? Yep, the fastest stub in the West.”

  “Do you miss Grandpa?”

  “Nope. Never could be myself around that man. Don’t miss him for a minute, though sometimes he shows up like one of Willow Creek’s ghosts.”

  “Up your ass,” the parrot said.

  “What a gas is right. I’ve had a gas ever since he died.”

  She glanced at Pete and he caught a pained look on her face.

  “You’re old enough to know how it was and you deserve to know how it was.” She sighed and delivered another pancake. “When I married your grandfather he had another lover, a mistress he’d carried on with for years.”

  She glanced into his face and he felt awkward, didn’t know what to say, talking about that kind of stuff.

  “Her perfume betrayed him. I could smell her on his breath, on his clothes. I think he tried to stop but she’d always seduce him back.”

  She slid the sizzling iron frying
pan into the dishwater.

  “Your grandpa started as a connoisseur of liquors and then, in his passionate love affair, became a rummy and a lush. It was like living with a demon of a thousand faces and never knowing which one you were dealing with.”

  Numbed by this picture of a grandfather he never knew, Pete fumbled for words but couldn’t find any.

  “Your mom ever tell you?”

  “No … she never said anything about him.”

  “Your mother never had a father, and that probably has something to do with you ending up without one.”

  “You’re full of shit,” the parrot said.

  “You pull a ship?” Grandma said. “Your grandpa used to be in the Navy. Always asking the parrot if he pulled a ship.”

  “Did you have the parrot then?”

  “It was his parrot. Called him Pistol. That’s why I just call him Parrot, I don’t want to remember those times. Bird must be sixty years old, refuses to die.” She whispered, as if the bird could understand her, “Tempted to give him rat poison more than once.”

  She gazed toward the front room and the bird.

  “You finish up now, and we’ll run to Bozeman. Got some shopping to do.”

  Pete took stock of his peculiar grandmother with that crazy brown hat atop her gray head like a chef in a city flophouse.

  “Where’d you get that hat?” Pete said.

  “Don’t you like my hat?”

  “Yeah, sure, it rocks. All the kids think its cool.”

  “Got it last summer in Billings. Saw it in the window of some swanky men’s store. Should’ve seen the look on the salesman’s face when I put it on and walked out. His mouth opened like a sardine can. Think he figured I was buying it for my husband.”

  “Why did you buy it?”

  “Was an important day for me, maybe the most important of my life.”

  “What happened?” Pete said.

  “I decided to be me.”

  Pete didn’t understand. “Who were you before?”

  “Someone I was expected to be. Since then I haven’t given a fiddler’s fart about what people think. It’s wonderful. Wish I could’ve done that a long time ago.”

  It sounded good, but how did you find out who you are? He didn’t dare ask.

  CHAPTER 11

  With the word out that the gigantic Norwegian wasn’t going to play after all, the familiar pessimism loomed again in Willow Creek. Grandma Chapman polished off a hearty lunch at the Blue Willow and felt it was her duty to shore up the eroding optimism for the coming basketball season for Peter’s sake, if for nothing else.

  Though basketball seemed of little consequence to many, Grandma had come to realize that for these small Montana towns in the grip of winter, when nights are long, when wind chills are deadly, when ranch work has slowed to a standstill, basketball was their heartbeat. It was their lifeblood, something to unite them and uphold them and get them through till spring. They lived it, they breathed it. Residents could tell you the score of the last game they won six or seven years ago, how many seconds were on the clock when the winning shot fell, and the name of the boy who made it. No matter how desolate or disheartening things were, when the water line to the stock tank froze, when snowdrift s closed the road, and when the battery in the pickup went dead, there was always a Friday night game to look forward to. And nothing warmed their hearts and took the chill out of their bones like a win by their basketball team.

  If your team lost, or worse, lost consistently, winter became unbearable. In Willow Creek, the winters had become interminably bleak and unending.

  After finishing their lunch and their daily dose of Paul Harvey’s golden-voiced state of the world—during which time the high-ceilinged dining room hushed like a cathedral and Vera, the perpetually hustling waitress, tiptoed around the tables—the subdued locals sipped coffee and tried to think of something no one else in town had heard when deliveryman Bobby Butcher swung in the front door with Pepsi and Mountain Dew canisters.

  Rip Van Winkle would have been on the front porch in the wicker rocking chair to greet Bobby, but the cutting north wind had driven his brittle ninety-two-year-old bones closer to the fire.

  “Hey, Rip. You folks planning to scrape up a basketball team this year?” the lanky Pepsi man shouted.

  “Damn tootin’, by God, an’ we’ll kick the shit out of Christian,” Rip said, his voice rattling in his hollow rib cage.

  “It’s a miracle Willow Creek still has one fan left standing,” Bobby said.

  “What’re you mumbling about, boy? I’m a fan,” Grandma Chapman said. She sat beside Mavis Powers, who was still wearing her curlers in her peach-colored hair. “And so is Hazel.”

  Hazel Brown, in an Orange Crush sweatshirt and enormous jeans, moved through the front door like a sumo wrestler. She had just finished her shift as cook for the school lunch program, first grade through senior at eleven-forty every school day. She slumped next to Grandma, who caught a whiff of Hazel’s cheap perfume.

  “I’m a fan, but I’m not blind,” Hazel said. “They won’t win a game this year either.”

  With short, curly black hair and small green eyes peering over her chubby cheeks, Hazel had doubled in size since she’d come to Willow Creek, so much so that one chair could scarcely shore up her proliferating body. She confessed to Grandma once that she didn’t know for sure but she thinks she got fat to keep her mother’s boyfriends from going after her after her one and only legitimate boyfriend ran off with her savings.

  “I don’t know why we even have a team,” Axel said, busying himself around the red and white checkerboard tablecloths. “They’ve never won a game since I’ve lived here.”

  “Well, I can remember beating the bejesus out of Christian, Sonny,” Rip said, smacking his toothless gums. “In seventy-one the Gilman kid had twenty-seven points and we licked ’em in their own backyard fifty-eight to forty-one.”

  “Don’t forget the night the Kilmer boy made two free throws after time had run out and we won by a point,” Mervin Painter said from a corner table, where he ate with his wife, Claire.

  “And we’ll do it again,” Rip said.

  “Yeah,” Grandma Chapman said, “and my grandson, who is a crackerjack player, will help them do it.”

  Amos Flowers, wearing a mountain-marinated Tom Mix hat, drifted in and glided to the far end of the bar, acknowledging no one, always appearing as though he’d just driven a herd up from Texas.

  “There are some of us who support our boys no matter what,” Vera said. Her red nose looked as though she’d had a sneezing fit.

  She’d been plum amazed at the things some of the tourists asked when traveling through this back country. Her all-time favorite was the spiff y-dressed lady from New York City who ate lunch with her distinguished-looking husband. A few miles up the interstate there was a sign designating a state monument, madison buffalo jump. These New Yorkers had seen the sign and were somewhat interested.

  “What time do the buffalo jump?” the lady asked in her Northeastern dialect.

  “Gee, Hon,” Vera had said, “I think the last time was about two hundred years ago.”

  Finished with his delivery, Bobby picked up two empty canisters and headed for the door. “Well, your grandson will need a lot of help. We have a better team this year than last, and if I remember correctly, we walloped you twice last year by about a hundred points.” The Manhattan Christian enthusiast laughed his way to his truck.

  “Smart-ass,” Rip said, his weather-beaten wide-brimmed hat sagged around his ears.

  No one knew where Rip had come from. Some twenty-odd years ago, he bought a small house in town and became a popular figure on the front porch of the inn. When he’d fall asleep there, strangers, stopping for a meal or a beer, took him for one of those carved figures once popular a hundred years or so ago. The chiseled features of Rip’s face and hands kept locals from laughing at these tourists; he very well could have been carved from cedar or cottonwood.

/>   The most popular story about his origins concerned a Dutch family who fleeced him out of his holdings, leaving the old man to drift into town. Rip would never say, and after a while it didn’t matter. He cashed two government checks monthly, one from the Veteran’s Administration, one from Social Security, the total of which could hardly feed a medium-sized dog.

  “I heard the big Norwegian boy is going to play,” Axel said.

  “Rutabagas! Have you seen him walk? Of course he can’t play,” Hazel said, dumping sugar in a cup of coffee. “Couldn’t catch a basketball in a washtub.”

  Mervin Painter sat upright, raised a hand and started to open his mouth as though to disagree when his wife put her hand on his arm and he settled back.

  “We ought to stand behind the boys no matter what,” Mervin said, and Grandma saw something hopeful in his eyes. Mervin wasn’t a diehard fan. He didn’t show up at every game and grumble with the rest, but she’d noticed how he never missed a game with Christian.

  “Elizabeth, I’ll bet you here and now we don’t come within twenty points of another team,” Hazel said.

  “Bet you!” Grandma said, tugging at the brim of her brown fedora as she always did when her dander was up. “I don’t want to take your money so easily. I’ll bet you we win a game.”

  Hazel laughed and jiggled like a bucket of Jell-O. “Let’s make it ten bucks.”

  “Done!” Grandma shouted. She tipped her hat back and finished her coffee. “With my grandson and Rob Johnson, we have two dandies, and then there’s Tom Stonebreaker who’s no daffodil on the basketball court.”

  “Not playing this year,” Hazel said with a thick smugness, up to date on all school scuttlebutt from the serving counter.

  “Not playing?”

  “Hurt his knee riding a Brahma in Ennis,” Hazel said.

  “Isn’t he a little young for that?” Mavis Powers said, keeping one eye peeled on her post office door across the street.

  “You mean there’s a sane age for climbing on the back of an enraged bull?” Vera said.

  “He’s probably just tired of losing,” Mavis said.

  Axel grunted. “Tired of being embarrassed.”

  “Speaking of being embarrassed,” Mavis said, “is Mr. Pickett going to coach again this year?”