Blind Your Ponies Page 9

  “That was the toughest practice we’ve had in four years,” Rob shouted.

  “That would just be a warmup at Highland,” Pete said.

  “Who’s got a towel?” Tom hollered.

  “I do,” Dean said.

  Tom took one look at the tattered towel and hooted. “That’s not a towel, Dean, that’s a rag. That wouldn’t absorb snot.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to get any easier,” Rob said. “Mr. Pickett has changed. He has a look in his eye.”

  “It’s about time someone had a look in his eye around here,” Tom said. “We practice our balls off but never win.”

  “You did good today,” Rob said and slapped Olaf on the back.

  “Dying I am thinking,” Olaf said, drooping on a bench.

  Tom pulled on his J. Chisholm boots and looked at Pete. “How big is the school you go to?”

  “Around twenty-one hundred.”

  “Kids?” Tom said.

  “No, ninja turtles.”

  “Shit, that’s bigger than Three Forks,” Tom said.

  “Would you have started on the varsity this year?” Rob said.

  “I don’t know. When I go home after Christmas I’ll find out.”

  “You can’t go home now, dude,” Tom said as he nudged Pete aside by the small mirror. “We need you, man.”

  “You got that right,” Rob said.

  The other boys chimed in.

  Pete combed his hair and enjoyed the unexpected affection he felt from being wanted.

  “You don’t have to look pretty,” Tom said. “Your girl’s in Minnesota.”

  “Yeah, but I want to look nice for all the cows and sheep and horses I’ll meet walking home on Main Street.”

  Tom laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t forget to say howdy to the pigs.”

  AS ALWAYS, SAM checked the gym before leaving, making sure the school was locked up. When he finished checking the boys’ locker room, he noticed a sliver of light draining from the girls’ locker room. He knocked on the door and asked if anyone was there. Hearing no response, Sam stepped in, reached for the light switch, and was struck dumb by a vision he couldn’t immediately comprehend. Diana stood, naked and with her eyes closed, toweling her wet hair.

  For a moment he couldn’t move or speak, couldn’t take his eyes off her firm athletic body. She bent forward and vigorously dried her long, almond colored hair. Her body consumed him like fire, sucking the air out of him.

  When she opened her eyes and saw him, she gasped. Their eyes met for a second. Then, she whipped the towel around her torso and Sam turned around.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, gazing at the scuff-marked concrete floor. “I didn’t know anyone … I was just … I saw the light and … I’m really sorry.”

  He darted out the door without another glance.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, after all the boys—except Tom—had come and gone, Sam tried to diagram plays on a notepad, but frustration plagued him in every attempt to concentrate. That accidental vision of Diana had so routed him from his path that he found himself addled and disoriented.

  He’d been celibate in the five years following Amy’s murder, but after witnessing Diana he was hopelessly overcome. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t erase her from his energized mind. Her image was a like grass stain he couldn’t wash out.

  The following night, after a tortuous practice, when he had lingered in his classroom an appropriate length of time, he made his way back to the gym to lock up. With rampaging anticipation, he had dreaded finding a seductive light beckoning from the girls’ locker room, terrified that she might be nakedly awaiting his return, yet at the same time, agonizing to catch another glimpse of her, a whiff of her soapy dampness. There had been no light.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sam was running, puffing, and breaking a sweat, pushing himself past the Blue Willow Inn and onto the gravel road. Dawn blushed bleakly in the gray overcast. Awake early, he was driven from his bed by a new drive, desperate to change the direction of his life before it was too late.

  Gasping and hurting, he fell back into a slow walk. The landscape came into focus with the arrival of daylight, and Sam told himself he was doing this for the team. But he knew he was lying. Somehow he suspected that this sudden drive to run harder and farther had something to do with Diana.

  He crossed the old single-lane bridge over Jefferson River, where the turkey vultures nested west of town. Though the birds were rare in Montana, they chose the town of Willow Creek to haunt as though they were on to something. Sam checked his watch and turned back, hoping to go a little farther next morning. Halfway back he came upon Ray Collins, the unvarnished propane man and member of the school board, standing by his pickup with his yellow Lab. Wearing his dark green gabardine uniform and cap, he greeted Sam with more enthusiasm than usual.

  “I hear the big Norwegian is going to play.”

  After several minutes of exuberant speculation regarding the upcoming season, something that Sam tried to avoid early in the conversation, Ray explained that he was training his dog to stay away from livestock with a shock collar. His teddy-bearlike fat strained his uniform and his shirttail hung out the back.

  “I run him near the cattle and horses. If he takes after ’em, I zing him with this doodad.” He displayed the remote-control transmitter he held in his hand.

  “Watch.” He grabbed a stuffed canvas training dummy from the bed of his blue Chevy pickup. He wound up and heaved it as far as he could toward several white Simmental bulls that grazed on the far side of the pasture. The dog sat at heel, every nerve and muscle straining, aching for Ray’s command.

  “Fetch,” Ray said.

  The Lab exploded from the road, leaped the barbed-wire fence, and sprinted across the browning pasture. When he noticed the massive animals, he veered toward them at a run. Ray called. “Poke! Come, Poke!”

  The retriever didn’t heed his master’s voice until a second later when Ray pushed a button on the transmitter and shouted. “Poke! Come!”

  The Lab instantly swerved from his course and dashed back toward the men. The Lab’s tongue hung from one side of its mouth like fresh liver and he sat obediently at Ray’s feet, panting. The collar had a round four-inch cylinder attached and two prongs that touched the Lab’s neck.

  “I don’t want him messing with any animals. Could get himself shot.”

  “What if the shock doesn’t turn him?” Sam said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Then you just turn this little doodad up.” Ray pointed at a small dial on the transmitter. “All the way up and it’ll just about knock him down.”

  Ray sent the dog out again for the scented decoy. “So how come you stuck with the coaching job? The board wanted to give you a break.”

  “I need something to do all winter. I thought it would be better this year.”

  The Lab glanced at the massive bulls as he sniffed for the decoy, but he made no move toward them.

  Ray squinted at Sam. “Do you really believe we’ll win a game this year?”

  “I think we have a good chance to win a few.”

  Poke came up to Ray and sat eagerly at heel with the canvas dummy in his mouth.

  “Good dog, good dog,” Ray said.

  “That really works,” Sam said. “Amazing.”

  Thankful for the excuse to rest, Sam pushed off toward town for another day of school and practice. He would continue to duck any face-to-face encounter with Diana. After a shower, he gazed in his bathroom mirror to see if his run had diminished his stomach by any stretch of the imagination. Even then, all he could visualize was the white outline of a bikini on Diana’s flat belly.

  OPTIMISM SOARED AT the Blue Willow. Word spread like weeds, and stories of the foreign exchange student’s abilities grew to outlandish heights. Rumor had it—amid doughnuts, coffee, and sticky sweet rolls—that he had played on an international all-star team in Europe and could dunk the ball with either hand. The
few true witnesses to the unveiling of the Norwegian phenom spread their gospel efficiently until the burdens of hope and promise and potential victories were hefted on Olaf Gustafson’s young back.

  Sam tried to simmer down these starry-eyed proclamations of Olaf’s talent whenever the opportunity arose, but for a handful of diehards, the fire was already lit. And for the first time in years, a growing number of townspeople were actually looking forward to the basketball season. But knowing better than to dismiss the hardened skepticism standing guard at the entrance to their hearts after years of emotional pain and disappointment, they were looking forward cautiously, daring only to allow hope onto the back porch in its muddy shoes.

  One patriot who was trying to avoid being sucked into the anguish and punishment that loyalty to the Willow Creek basketball team exacted was the balding, barrel-chested St. Bernard who piloted the Blue Willow Inn. That night, Sam ate a late dinner alone, wavering between the hope that Diana would show up and fearing that she might. He also feared George Stonebreaker would show up; Sam stared at the Inn’s front window just to make sure. He imagined a terrifying scene over and over: Stonebreaker pulling a shotgun from out of a long coat and depopulating Willow Creek. Twice that day, at totally unexpected moments, he’d heard Amy’s voice.

  Axel pulled up a chair and flopped his hands onto Sam’s table as if he were a fortune teller. A perpetual bead of perspiration glistened on his forehead above his pug nose. Sam had wanted to ask Axel how he got that disfigured ear and gruesome scar on his neck, but figured everyone had old wounds they wanted to forget, even the ones that didn’t show. In Axel’s warm, wide-set eyes, he revealed something like the vulnerability of a child who wanted to know once and for all if there was a Santa Claus. He leaned close and spoke confidentially, though there weren’t a half dozen people in the place.

  “Are we going to win a game, Sam?”

  Sam paused and considered an answer but Axel went on without him.

  “I don’t think I can take anymore of this. I get too involved for my own good. Even when you’re down by twenty you get more and more pissed, what with the other fans yelling against your boys and the ref screwing them. Soon you’re pulling for little victories, you know what I mean, Sam? When the only thing you can cheer about is a good play, a shot made, a steal, something you can thumb your nose at the other team with because they’re beating the crap out of you and you start taking it personally.”

  He wiped his glistening forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Hell, when they’re ahead by thirty they keep calling for blood, wanting to run the score up like a goddamn feeding frenzy, trying to rip the flesh off your heart, and you start praying that the boys will hold it at thirty—”

  “Or keep them from scoring a hundred,” Sam said, hearing Axel evoke the agony Sam thought was his alone.

  “And they drop passes, kick the ball,” Axel said, “step out of bounds, try to dribble through two guys, and your heart just gets beat to hell. I decided during the summer that I wasn’t going to let myself get emotionally involved this year. I can’t take it anymore. But now with the Norwegian kid and all, I get to thinking maybe it’s our turn. Maybe old Willow Creek is going to kick some ass this year, and I feel myself getting sucked in again.”

  “I decided last summer that I wouldn’t coach another year.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Mental illness. Dementia. Lunacy, you name it.”

  Axel’s face brightened like a Coleman lantern. “Why do you think we get so wrapped up in it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “I’ve wondered about that a lot.”

  Sam felt an affinity with the thickset man, knowing that, win or lose, like it or not, Axel was already in the susceptible soup.

  “I guess it’s just wanting to win at something,” Axel said and Sam detected a note of defeat in his voice.

  “How’s it going with this place?” Sam said. “You making out okay?”

  Axel leaned closer and spoke in a hushed tone.

  “I don’t think we’ll make it, Sam. I had high hopes when we came here, but … well. The last place I tried, a gas station outside Boise, went under. Before that, a convenience store, and we were doing fine until an Albertson’s supermarket went up two blocks away.”

  Amos Flowers walked in and Axel nodded at him.

  “I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know what I keep doing wrong. My life has been one long string of losses.”

  It was as though a curtain had been pulled aside for an instant and Sam caught a glimpse into Axel’s soul.

  “The wife and I thought it would be different here, but I don’t know how long we can hang on. We’re eating up our savings …” His voice trailed off and he sat in silence for a moment, gazing at the checkerboard tablecloth. Then he stood and squeezed Sam’s shoulder. “Thanks for your ear, but please keep this under your hat.”

  Axel tugged at his suspenders, put on his everything’s-just-great face, and headed for the corner table where Amos Flowers had settled. Sam recognized his own hiddenness in Axel’s, and he couldn’t answer the question of why he was getting wrapped up in this again, but he desperately cautioned his heart against it.

  Amos Flowers was a wizened loner of unknown age who came from the foothills of the Tobacco Roots and had adopted Willow Creek as his social center, which meant the townspeople saw him once or twice a month. Rumor had it that though he had a bundle, he never paid taxes, had no mailing address, and was a fugitive from the IRS, which made him somewhat of a local folk hero. More than one person had confided to Sam that Amos kept his money in the Sealy Posturepedic Savings & Loan. Sometimes he’d ride his horse into town and tie it up in front of the inn, a big gray gelding whose color matched Amos’s handlebar mustache.

  Sam had greeted him on occasion and Amos had only nodded distantly, as though Sam were a treasury agent or worse. How did a person end up like that in life, so estranged and solitary? With a rush of fear, Sam realized that on his current path, he might well find out.

  Worldly matters never seemed to interest Amos much, and he was never one to notice a basketball score, but the newborn enthusiasm among the Blue Willow bunch dry-gulched him. He listened to the mushrooming reputation of the unproved exchange student from under his oil-treated duster and his oversized roan-colored Tom Mix hat that rested on his eyebrows and large ears.

  It always appeared as though Amos had been born in and grown down out of his hat, like a snail out of its shell. The seasoned, sweat-stained wide-brim with a Montana crease seemed to have a life of its own and the thin, gnarled, tobacco-colored cowboy simply lived in it. No one had ever seen him without his trademark and no one could ever remember hearing Amos say, until now, that he thought he’d come over some night to see the boys play.

  And as winter poked around the edges of the valley, Sam felt an expectation thickening the air like pollen, and he saw how people found it easier to smile.

  CHAPTER 15

  Diana realized it wasn’t by chance that she hadn’t crossed paths with Sam since he stumbled upon her stark naked in the girls’ locker room, but she wasn’t sure why he was avoiding her. In a school that size he had to be a magician to have pulled it off that long. She admitted she liked the man; there was something warm and inviting about him in spite of his obvious unwillingness to get better acquainted. Did he have a girlfriend somewhere? Was he attracted to women? It was just as well … but she was confused and she warned herself to keep her distance; she didn’t want to stockpile any more freight in the storehouse of unbearable sorrow.

  Because it was a small school and because she was trying to keep one eye on Olaf and see that he was adjusting well to his new environment, she had stumbled on another drama, being acted out among some of her favorite kids.

  Carter Walker and Rob Johnson had been friends since they were in diapers, their family ranches sharing fence lines, hay baling, and branding parties before Carter and Rob could walk. Carter and Louella
Straight, being good old country girls, had fallen on the common subject that had been tickling their curiosity for weeks—having grown up amid the magnificent thrusting bulls and obliging heifers in heat.

  Daring, finally, to share it as girlfriends, it got them no closer to the truth and only seemed to compound their frustration and feed their fantasies. Carter approached Rob with their riddle, and Rob listened with a mask of serious concern. What the girls had been wondering since day one was—and Carter found it difficult to confide in Rob—were all of Olaf’s parts that enormous? With a frown of dedication on his face, Rob promised he would find out.

  A few days later, when Olaf, Carter and Louella were eating in the lunch-room and visiting with Diana, Rob hollered over the bustle and din from a table away. “Hey, Olaf! Carter and Louella want to know how l-o-n-g …”

  The two girls sprang from the table, scattering their half-eaten lunch, and almost maimed each other dashing through the door as Rob continued.

  “… the nights are in Norway.”

  From then on, when least expected, as the three of them might be walking in the halls, Rob would amble up behind and inquire with full voice, “Olaf, Carter and Louella were wondering how b-i-g your …” at which time the girls would shriek to cover “… hometown is?”

  It was usually the most exciting thing that happened all day for the two girls, and as abashed as they were to think that Olaf might figure out they actually wondered about such things, he seemed oblivious to what was going on, laughing at their fickle flight and always answering Rob’s questions with seriously considered facts and figures. Unintentionally, Rob was learning a whole lot about Norway, but unfortunately the often-embarrassed girls were learning nothing new and startling about Olaf. And Olaf had his own questions about life in the United States on the order of, Why did so many Americans sell their garages? or How did they manage to sell their yards?

  FRIDAY NIGHT, SAM studied basketball videos with a vengeance. His recurring dream had startled him and driven him from his sweat-soaked sheets. He turned on every light in the house and paced from room to room, choking back the sobs and trying to breathe. To drive all memory from his brain, he turned on a basketball video, with the volume so loud it sounded as though the game were taking place in his living room. He hoped the neighbors wouldn’t be awakened.