Blind Your Ponies (42 page)

Diana sat at a table in the Blue Willow, feeling down, something dark she couldn’t name, a mood that moved in unannounced during the Afternoon. She never knew where they came from, stealing in silently like low-rolling fog, but she figured it didn’t help that she had heard talk about Maggie Painter’s funeral. She wouldn’t let the memory of Jessica’s funeral elbow its way into her head, and she nervously scrutinized the sports page to ward it off while awaiting Sam’s arrival for a late supper.

The boys had practiced hard Monday and Tuesday and today Sam had tapered off, going over their game plan and walking through offensive plays, hoping to rest the boys and have them strong for the coming storm tomorrow, going against Twin Bridges again, the top seed in the tournament. After surviving a normal run of slight sprains, jammed fingers, and head colds, they were all healthy and ready, focused on the tournament that would test their conditioning and endurance. As usual, Axel, Hazel, and Grandma Chapman had helped out when Sam asked. Hazel, of all people, had become addicted to the game.

“Can we come in here and shoot when the season’s over?” she had asked, and Diana assured her they could.

All three days they worked on Operation Jelly Fish, a name Sam had concocted for Olaf’s benefit, which the boy called Yelly Fish. They knew that the other teams’ strategy was to attack the Willow Creek center with offensive thrusts and bring Olaf down under the burden of five fouls. In the last three or four games, the opposing coaches each attempted a variation on that theme, though only Fred Sooner actually pulled it off with the inadvertent aid of bush-league officiating. The opposition couldn’t do much about the swift, blitzkrieg strikes of the excellent Willow Creek guards. They were far too mobile. But Willow Creek’s thunderous, more stationary cannon was also the vulnerable point of their arsenal. Without Olaf in the paint, the Broncs were utterly exposed.

For three days, Sam had the boys attack Olaf with the ball. After entrenching him in the paint, Sam instructed the others to drive into him, literally, and try to put up a shot. He used the image of a jelly fish with Olaf, a pliant creature that gave way but still had its long tentacles extended. When the boys would drive into Olaf, Sam had him back off, in a receding posture, but with his arms high overhead, unmoving, forcing the smaller players to alter their shot.

In his passion for blocking shots, Olaf found it a difficult discipline to move backward a step and stand motionless. Sam had him practicing turning his back once the shooter had left the floor, positioning the big center for the rebound and dramatically reducing the chance that he would be whistled for a foul.

Sam came through the door and Diana’s heart did a little flip.

“Been waiting long?” he asked.

He pulled out a chair and slid into it, laying his clipboard on the table and squeezing her hand.

“Are you hungry?” Diana said.

He had a way of making the turmoil in her life vanish like darkness at the first sweet noise of dawn. He melted her depression away with the warmth of his smile. They ordered and shared excitement over the tournament. He was holding a voluntary session at his house that night, going over plays on the videotapes with the team.

“What do you think of the paper?” she said.

“I’m glad they’re not even mentioning us. Twin Bridges and Christian should be favorites.”

“If we lose to Twin Bridges, we’re out of it, aren’t we?” Diana said wistfully.

“Not quite.”

“What do you mean?” She tilted her head.

“There’s always the outside chance of a challenge,” Sam said.

“I keep hearing that word. What does it mean?”

“In Montana tournaments, if the team that finishes second hasn’t played the team that finishes third, that third-place team can ‘challenge’ the second-place team. And if the third-place boys win,
they
advance.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“It makes sense. To take third place, a team has to win three games, even though moving up through the losers’ bracket. The second-place team has only won two. It leaves a little bit of hope for all the teams who lose one, and the game on Monday night can be deadly. I’ve seen a lot of good teams get bushwhacked in a challenge game.”

“So even though the first-and second-place teams move up to Divisional,” she said, “second place isn’t very safe.”

“Right, except, as often as not, the second-place team has already beaten the third-place. Then there can be no challenge.”

“How do you think our boy is picking up on Yelly Fish?” she asked.

They laughed.

“I don’t know, I think he’s catching on. I think he likes the challenge of giving ground and still swatting the ball away with his reach. The way he demolished some of those yesterday I should have called it Operation Lutefisk.”

“What got into Tom and Pete today? They didn’t take anything you said seriously.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re scared.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You know, I’ve never seen you lose your temper with the boys.”

“Oh, well… I do, I do,” he said, a little off guard.

“No, you don’t.”

“For a lot of years I stored my anger like a battery.”

“You can’t store it forever.”

“I think I bleed a little of it off every time Rob hits a three, or Pete steals the ball, or Olaf jams one.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever figure you out,” she said, flipping her hair out of her face.

“That makes two of us.”

A
T HIS HOUSE
, a voice kept muttering in Sam’s head that he’d forgotten something in preparing the team, some glaring oversight that would find them out, on the floor in front of thousands.

When the boys left after watching basketball videos and talking over the game—Tom never showed up—Sam found himself rattling around in his
house for several hours. After unsuccessfully searching for sleep in his solitary bed, he turned on the radio. On the oldies’ station in Bozeman, Sinatra was singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” It was one of his and Amy’s favorites when they’d dance naked by candlelight. He could smell her perfume, taste her on his lips and tongue, hear her singing the words with Sinatra, turning and turning, until he could bear it no longer. He snapped off the radio, turned on the lights, pulled on his clothes and took to the street. He hurried as though he were trying to outrun his memories.

Eventually, he slowed his pace and caught his breath. The moonless night sighed a southwesterly that calmed his spirit. It reminded him of a boyhood wherein, After bedtime, he’d sneak into the backyard on a summer night and sit with his back to a great maple tree, listening to the nocturnal creatures and secretly wanting to join them.

He strolled up Main Street toward school, finding a soothing tranquility in the constancy of night.

Tomorrow Rozinante would carry them to Butte and the district tournament, where they would either win or die, his time with this uncommon bunch of boys over. It pained him to know that. That somewhere down the line, probably in a couple days at best, this inimitable journey would have run its course and he was powerless to stop it.

In Butte, eight teams would scramble for two seeds to the divisional tournament the following weekend in Helena. The districts were constantly being realigned as familiar schools no longer appeared on the pairings roster. The missing schools were recent prey of consolidation—that hungry shark that Willow Creek was dog-paddling upstream to avoid. In those communities, stripped of their allegiance to a team, the townsfolk had no one to cheer and no way to win in their daily experience, and winter settled in their hearts as a freighted melancholia.

Sam strolled along the deserted blacktop. Then, for an instant, a shadow caught his eye, a movement over on Broadway, the gravel road to the east that paralleled the main drag. When he turned to catch a glimpse, it was gone in the darkness. No light, no sound, yet leaving a gliding image in his mind of something sailing south. His curiosity enticed him to cut over the dirt side street past Grandma Chapman’s and onto Broadway. Along the unlit street he could distinguish nothing. He let it go as pretournament jitters.

They had drawn Twin Bridges as their first opponent, and Sam recognized how difficult it would be to play them again. Sam attempted to get into the Twin Bridges coach’s head and imagine what innovative pitfalls he would fashion around the paint, what ambushes he would spring from the baseline.

Sam turned his head as though struck with premonition. It passed again, over on Main Street. He wasn’t seeing things, though it had been like a shadow floating through his imagination. He ran the block back to Main. Several blocks north, almost to the Blue Willow Inn, he caught a glimpse of a figure gliding through the circle of illumination under a streetlight. From the way it moved it had to be either a ghosting apparition or a person on a bike—at two in the morning?

Sam followed his curiosity toward the restaurant. The warm chinook winds had eaten most of the snow in town, and a little covey of dried leaves jitterbugged along the street beside him. At the Blue Willow he settled in Rip’s rocking chair on the porch, hidden in the shadows of the totally darkened building. He waited.

After nearly ten minutes, the figure came scudding with the wind down Main again, having made a loop up Broadway several blocks and then back north past the school and toward the inn. Sam slouched into the shadows, barely breathing, as the figure skimmed closer and swooshed by within a few feet of the porch. In a dark ski cap and jacket, it was Andrew Wainwright riding the bicycle built for two.

Sam stood and was about to call out when he caught himself, hesitating to intrude on the man’s solitude. Andrew disappeared around the corner past the elevator. Sam hadn’t noticed that the bicycle had been missing from the porch. Sensing a drowsiness creeping up on him, Sam figured he’d hike back home and see if he could fall asleep, leaving Andrew to the serenity of the town and his own quirky pleasures.

But something pulled at Sam, coaxing him to remain, and finally, he slid back into the rocker. While the talc executive pedaled another round, Sam remained concealed. All at once he understood that it had been there in plain sight from the beginning, as obvious as the alphabet and as inconspicuous as migrating bats. It was as though he had always known it, and swiftly a heavy sorrow burrowed itself into his chest.

On his next round, Andrew drew up alongside the porch and slid off the bike, catching Sam off guard.

“Hello,” Sam said softly, realizing it was too late to avoid startling the man.

Andrew jumped back a step, almost falling over the cumbersome bike. “Who the—”

“I’m sorry. I should have let you see me,” Sam said.

He pushed himself out of the rocker and moved into the meager light.

“Oh, Jeez. I didn’t expect anyone around this time of the morning.”

“Yeah, I know. Couldn’t sleep, the game tomorrow.”

Andrew quietly rolled the tandem bike up onto the porch and leaned it against the wall. “I’ve been thinking about it myself,” he said. “I hope the boys can win one or two. They sure deserve it.”

Andrew sat on the top step and Sam settled beside him. Not another creature stirred along the street. He spoke in hushed tones as though not wanting to wake Axel and Vera who slept upstairs above the inn.

“Has George Stonebreaker given you any more trouble?”

“No,” Sam said, unwilling to admit that only yesterday he drove over to Manhattan to buy groceries when he noticed Stonebreaker’s pickup parked near the D & D in Three Forks. “I sure hope he doesn’t give Tom a hard time during the tournaments. I’ve told Tom he can stay with me.”

“You’ve done everything possible to get them ready,” Andrew said.

“Well, they’ll
look
like a tournament team in those new uniforms. Were you the anonymous giver?” Sam said in the intimacy of the hour.

“No, it wasn’t me. But I can tell you it was given in moldy cash, all in fives and tens, bills that hadn’t seen daylight for a while.”

Sam laughed and visualized Amos Flowers keeping some of his money in the Sealy Posturepedic Savings & Loan.

He glanced at Andrew. “You do this often?”

“No, no… I don’t know what got into me tonight, just couldn’t sleep.”

“I think I’ve heard you. I sleep with my window open,” Sam said, glancing sideways at the school board member.

“Heard me?”

“A swishing sound, at two or three in the morning. I never could figure it out—bike tires on the blacktop.”

“Do you think the team has a chance?” Andrew said, staring across at Mavis Powers’s darkened apartment building and post office.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Sam said.

“What do you mean?”

“It was
you
who rode that bike out here with your girlfriend a long time ago, it’s
you
who everybody hopes will somehow find his lost sweetheart.”

Andrew didn’t reply. They sat a moment silently and Sam wished he’d kept his speculation to himself, fearing he was ripping scabs off irreparable wounds.

“What makes you think that?” Andrew said calmly.

“Oh, nothing. It was just a crazy thought.”

“No, really. Why would you think such a thing?”

“Oh, simple mathematics. A guy like you hanging around this end-of the-world town. I’d guess you could make your way anywhere. What’s this place got to offer a capable single guy like you?”

“I like the clean air and wide-open country.”

“I’d believe you more if you told me you were in a witness-protection program.”

Sam laughed weakly and his voice was swallowed in an all-absorbing silence. He held his breath. Andrew didn’t speak and Sam broke the tension.

“I would take it with me to my grave.”

Andrew regarded Sam.

“I came here with Sarah twenty-six years ago in June. When I ran off that day I was out of my skull with anger and jealousy about something that was over and done with. I can’t bear to talk about the smallness of heart and soul that caused me to lose the love of my life.”

Andrew paused and took a breath.