Blind Your Ponies (18 page)

Grandma didn’t hear Peter speak for more than ten minutes and figured he’d hung up or been hung up on. Finally she heard him move, pushing back a kitchen chair. When she stepped into the kitchen, she found her grandson fumbling on a jacket halfway out the back door with a basketball under one arm.

“Going out?”

“Yeah … I’m going to run.”

She knew what was asked of her: to wrap her arms around him and rock him with all the love she had until dawn healed them both, but she couldn’t make her legs move; she couldn’t cross the worn black-and-white linoleum, and she despised her cowardly words of negligence. “Don’t catch cold.”

Peter ran into the grinding teeth of his inconsolable grief and Grandma hurried to the door and hollered.

“You’re a tough, brave kid, Peter Strong!”

He had already gone too far and the wind hurled her words back in her face, unheeded.

F
RIDAY NIGHT, WITHOUT
Olaf in the lineup, Sam watched the team warmup for their first home game against Sheridan. At first Olaf
wasn’t even going to go to the game but the Painters, in their calm and comforting manner, convinced him there wouldn’t be many there other than the students anyway, and they were right. You could throw a brick into the stands and not hit anyone.

Besides a smattering of local fans and the students, several carloads had come from Sheridan, a picturesque mountain town south of them where most of the boys came off well-established cattle ranches. And come they did. With an enrollment of around a hundred, the Panthers filled both their varsity and JV’s with a full squad. Most of these schools suited up twenty to twenty-four boys between their varsity and JV’s, and they had mixed feelings when they saw Willow Creek come up on their schedule. Though it meant an easy win, it also meant there would be no JV game for the younger boys.

Hazel Brown ran the scoreboard and clock and Mavis Powers, with her hair in curlers, kept the official game book.

Without Olaf dominating the paint, Sheridan employed a straight man for-man defense, often double-teaming Rob and Pete and allowing Dean to run free once they assessed the freshman’s inability. Pete played as though they had killed his dog. It wasn’t that the other boys weren’t going hard, but Peter was trying to beat them single-handedly. Sam was puzzled because he didn’t regard Pete as a kid who was out for personal glory.

“C’mon, we gotta beat these guys,” Pete shouted during a timeout.

“Work a play out there,” Sam said and looked into Pete’s dripping face. “I haven’t seen one good pick, one good screen. Don’t forget what we’ve practiced, and have some fun out there.”

At halftime, Rob played the drums and Curtis the trumpet as the band entertained the spectators with a peppy march and the Willow Creek fight song, to which no one sang along. Sam had cringed when the band—comprised of more grade school kids than high school—played the National Anthem before the game, out of key, faltering, pausing at times as though someone had run off with their music.

The way the band played turned out to be an omen of how the game would go. At times it seemed as though the Willow Creek fans had been hit with an epidemic of narcolepsy. The cheerleaders tried to create noise by example, urging the team on with straining vocal cords and youthful enthusiasm, making more racket than all the spectators combined. There
wasn’t what you could call crowd noise but rather sporadic bursts, singular eruptions of support and encouragement, recognizable voices over the nominal noise of the game, though at times they got together on a bad call. When your team’s been losing there are lots of bad calls.

“Get your cataracts removed!” Rip shouted.

Axel Anderson, who had managed to slip out of the inn for the second half, rooted on his adopted boys with a cannonlike voice along with the Johnsons and the somewhat inhibited Painters. Amos Flowers had appeared, and he hung from his Tom Mix hat in the stands with a confused expression, as if all that talk about a giant Norwegian had been a cock-and-bull story.

Truly Osborn, who felt it his duty to appear at home games to monitor the behavior of his faculty and students but deemed it a waste of his valuable time to travel to the remote mountain towns to witness the slaughter, remained properly reserved in the bleachers, considering it uncultivated to shout and cheer and make a spectacle of himself. Andrew Wainwright, both proper and cultivated in his designer jeans and sports jacket, shouted and cheered loudly without making a spectacle of himself, personally identifying with the team as much as any of them.

In the fourth quarter, after Dean fouled out, Peter picked up his fifth foul, and Willow Creek finished this game of attrition three against five, saddled with their ninety-sixth consecutive loss.

The teams formed their customary lines and walked past each other, shaking hands in a display of sportsmanship in what had become the final effigy of disparagement for the Willow Creek boys. Sam hurt more than he would have expected, again politely accepting the winning coach’s
Nice going, your boys played hard.

In the locker room Sam slapped the boys’ sweaty backs and assured each of them they had done their best. As luck would have it, on his way out, he met Olaf near the doorway to the locker room, the overgrown foreign student gathering poise to say something to the team.

“Did you see them out there!” Sam said. “Those boys aren’t afraid of making mistakes.”

A primitive anger arose from his belly and found its voice.

“You know, Olaf, it’s far better to try and end up looking like a fool, than
it is to sit on your ass in the bleachers. Do you know
how long
some of those boys have been trying? Can’t you see the floor burns on their hearts? Don’t you see, it’s when you quit trying that you become the oaf. I’m proud of those boys.
They
never quit.”

“Ya, good they are doing.” Self-reproach clouded Olaf’s pale face as he gazed silently out of troubled blue eyes.

Sam stomped away feeling the heat in his nostrils. It felt good, and he suddenly experienced a renewed pride in his boys. With only five players and with Dean and Curtis starting, they made a game of it for a while against a good Sheridan team. But, like the famous Dutch boy, Dean had to hold his finger in the dike all night long and it was asking too much of him, the water pressure too great, and finally the sea came, washing them away, only a Norwegian arm’s length from dry ground.

T
HE LAST TO
leave the school, Tom, Pete, and Sam dragged up the middle of Main Street through the slumbering town like warriors leaving a field of battle where their army had been soundly thrashed, their horses killed, their weapons lost, bearing the wounds and defeat of the day. They slogged the four blocks to the Blue Willow with vague hopes that they might find balm for their bruised spirits and a word of cheer at the inn. Sam had tried to put the menacing threat of George Stonebreaker out of his mind, but he caught himself keeping one eye peeled for the brutish man’s pickup.

Inside the teenagers gravitated to a table where Rob and Mary sat glumly with Carter and Louella. Sam made a quick check of the half-filled watering hole in hopes he’d find Diana, but she wasn’t there. Just as well. After condolences from a few of the faithful, he found a small table on the tavern side and sagged into a chair.

Damn! They were right where they were last year, and the many years before, 0–3.

He considered having a beer, but he didn’t like it that much and he wanted to respect the training rules of his underdogs, so he had a Mountain Dew on the rocks. He’d drink alone.

John English stood at the bar with a few men who hadn’t been at the game. “Who won the game?” the middle-aged rancher called over to Sam.

Sam regarded him calmly and didn’t answer.
Screw you.

John knew who won the game. Just because he’s on the school board Sam didn’t have to take his crap. What could he do, fire him?

“Sheridan,” Axel said from behind the bar, picking up on John’s sarcasm, “in a damn close game that we almost won with only three players.”

“Is that our motto this year, ‘Damn Close’? Last year it was ‘Almost’ and the year before it was ‘We’re Toast.’ ”

The gang at the bar laughed and Sam looked away, into the dining room where three of his boys were licking their wounds. He didn’t notice Grandma coming up on his blind side. She leaned close to him with one arm propped on his table, one around his shoulder, and her eminent chin close to his ear.

“Don’t pay those turncoats any mind,” she said. “I want to thank you for keeping the faith with these boys. I have a message for you.”

Like a lover she clandestinely shoved a folded piece of paper into his hand. Then she stood, throwing out her chicken-bone chest.

“Axel, how do you stand the sewer gas building up around that bar?”

She pulled the brim down on her hat and swaggered back to the dining room. The men at the bar rumbled and muttered unintelligible responses. Sam wasn’t sure if he should reveal the secretive note in the presence of others. He left his coat and drink and stepped out onto the front porch where the bicycle built for two rested against the wall in the shadows. Unfolding the cheap tablet paper and holding it out to catch the light, he read the pencil-scrawled note aloud.

Even youths shall faint and be weary,
   and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall
   renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

Sam folded the note and tucked it into his pants pocket, gazing down the deserted blacktop toward the school. What did that mean, how do you wait for the Lord?

Wasn’t ninety-six losses in a row waiting enough?

Sam woke with a bad taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with the failure of his Crest toothpaste or last night’s loss to Sheridan. It originated from the knowledge that he—like most of the Willow Creek community—had laid the blame for that defeat, as well as the first two, at the feet of the polite, unassuming visitor from across the Atlantic.

He fumbled with his razor and removed the night’s silent increment, but he couldn’t remove the nagging truth that reflected back at him from the water-spattered mirror. He had used the exchange student, or attempted to, in pursuit of his unspoken yearning to turn his life around, the coinage to buy a pittance of satisfaction and triumph. He pulled on his sorry running shoes and knew he had to right the wrong, to make amends. In the snow-sodden gravel he ran almost two miles before gasping to a walk across the rusting iron bridge, rehearsing his contrition both going and coming.

S
AM PARKED IN
the farm yard. On his way to the house, he spotted Olaf and Mervin out behind a machine shed and he turned toward them through the trace of snow. They were unloading railroad ties from a flatbed and stacking them against the shed, their yellow cotton gloves blackening with creosote. Olaf was a caricature of a homeless refugee, appearing gaunt in a bulky, oversized brown canvas coat, its sleeves halfway up to his elbows, a brown wool cap with ear flaps flopping, high-water overalls shrunk halfway up his calf, and huge mud-and manure-caked galoshes. Mervin, in his usual garb, noticed Sam first and paused with their work.

“Mr. Pickett, what brings you out this way?” Mervin said, removing his right glove and shaking Sam’s hand.

“I’d like to speak to Olaf for a minute, if it’s okay.”

Olaf looked perplexed, as if he expected another improbable assault from his former coach. Sam caught the mixed aroma of wet gravel and creosote.

“You two go right ahead. We need a break,” the rancher said. “If I had the brains I was born with I’d have hauled these in my dumpbed, wouldn’t have had to manhandle ’em.”

Sam noticed a gamesmanship among these people where they would put themselves down, a casual banter depreciating themselves, either as a true reflection of their own lack of self-worth or as a subtle way to beat anyone to the punch who might find fault with them. Mervin, without the brains he was born with, nodded at Sam and footslogged toward the house, his unlatched overshoe buckles clicking rhythmically.

Sam paused and regarded his former player. Olaf patted his gloves together nervously and shifted his weight from foot to foot, avoiding any eye contact.

“Olaf, I’ve come out here to apologize to you. I had no right to call you a quitter. You agreed to try basketball and if it didn’t work out to let it go. That was the deal, and you stuck to it.” Sam tried to find Olaf’s eyes, hidden behind the visor of his cap, his head turned to the ground. “I was mad at myself and the team—no, not the team—the
losing,
the sorry-ass losing, but I took my anger out on you. That was wrong. I’m sorry.”

“It is good … okay. The team I am helping by not playing. Without me last night good they are doing.”

“Anyway,” Sam said, “thanks for giving it a try. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

Sam offered his hand. Olaf took it in the creosote-stained glove and they shook hands. With a glance, Sam found sorrow drifting down from the boy’s face like house dust in a shaft of sunlight.

“How do you like working on the ranch?” Sam said as he stepped back a pace, wanting to soothe Olaf’s grief but feeling helpless.

“Working? Oh, adventure sometimes it is. The tractor I am driving and the bales loading when the cattle we are feeding.”

Sam smiled up at the overgrown kid, his straw-colored hair splayed from under the ear-flapped cap, his boyish blue eyes peering from his perplexed face, a stranger in their land making his way the best he knew how, and Sam let him go. He climbed off the young Norwegian’s shoulders and climbed into his car. Without looking back he drove away, a weight of sadness in his chest. Out on the highway he found creosote stuck on his hand.

He drove west with no destination in mind and tried to hold off the
memory that visited him mercilessly whenever he suffered a loss. He’d attempted to erase it from his brain cells since he was a kid but it had been indelibly imprinted, and without his permission, at the worst of times, it reared its horned head.