Blind Your Ponies (23 page)

Pete retied the rope and realized that one of these times it
would
be George Stonebreaker!

They painted with a fury, aware that time was running out. They lowered Tom and readjusted the rope over the roof twice. But the monument to their triumph was taking shape.

OW CREEK 81
             IMA 79

Pete turned with a start and found a woman standing behind them in a long coat and overshoes, staring up at the barn wall.

“Oh, ah … Tom,” Pete said,
“Tom.”

Tom gazed down and regarded the woman for a moment, who was hardly visible in the oblique illumination from the distant yard light. Grandma and Olaf froze in place.

“It’s okay,” Tom called softly, “it’s okay.”

Tom went back to painting, followed by Olaf. Then, at the sight of this lunatic spectacle before her, the woman began clapping, hardly audible in the friendly wind. Just stood there clapping. When she stopped, Peter glanced over his shoulder again. Tom’s mother was gone.

The next pair of headlights, twenty minutes later, turned in at the mailbox, and all hell broke loose around the barn. Olaf came off the ladder in two strides and Grandma shoved it bouncing onto the ground. Pete raced through the old manure and untied the rope, lowering Tom as quickly as he dared without breaking his teammate’s legs. Around to the other side of the barn, all of them cowered behind the corral fence as the pickup rattled into the barnyard and skidded to a stop near the house. Skipper barked and circled the truck.

“Will your mother tell him?” Grandma asked.

“No. If she dared, she’d be out helping us paint.”

Pete had one foot pointed south across the stubble toward Trilobite. Tom’s father turned off the truck lights. They could no longer see him, barely able to make out the outline of the pickup in the faint light. In the wind all they could hear was the creaking ship beside them. Had he seen the white lettering on the barn in the headlights?

“Where is he?” Pete whispered.

Then, soundlessly, the hulking form of George Stonebreaker came toward them. His silhouette grew as the four of them cowered in the dry manure of the corral.

It was time to run like hell!

“I’m glad I got my Reeboks on,” Grandma whispered.

She held Peter’s arm in an iron grip and he could tell she was plenty scared, too. The expanding shadow of the man moved past them to their left and into the large half-opened door of the barn. Pete felt all of them begin breathing again.

“What’s he doing?” Grandma asked.

“Sometimes he goes to the barn to sleep it off,” Tom whispered. “Won’t admit to my mom that he gets drunk. He has blankets on some straw bales. In the morning he’ll act as though he got up early to feed.”

“Let’s get outta here,” Pete said.

“We’re not finished,” Tom said.

“You mean we’re going to keep painting with your dad
in the barn
?” Pete said.

“Gotta get ’er finished,” Tom said. “Otherwise he’ll be right, we’ll be quitters.”

Oh, Jeez. How could they be scrambling around on the barn with George Stonebreaker right on the other side of the wall? Pete wondered. Thank God
he
wasn’t the one hanging up there in the tire with no place to run or hide.

“Pete,” Tom said, “you finish the top and I’ll keep an eye on my dad.”

O
LAF HAD FINISHED
the bottom line. Pete hung high above the ground in the old truck tire and worked feverishly to complete the top. Tom had sent Olaf and Grandma tiptoeing for the bus and had lugged the ladder back to wherever he’d found it. This left Peter alone, hanging on for dear life while trying to fashion the final letter—the largest in the English alphabet. Why couldn’t Grandma have lived in a town with a name like Lima or Roy or Belt?

He pushed off with his legs and reached high to whiten the peak of the huge “W.” The Sherwin-Williams was running low and it was hard to get much paint in the bristles. In a sweat, he slopped the brush against the rough barn boards and kept one eye on the ground below. Had Tom been waylaid and wasn’t ever coming back? Then, as the wind abated for a moment, he heard something and looked down. Someone was standing directly under him. About to whisper Tom’s name, he realized it wasn’t Tom.

George Stonebreaker was twenty feet below him, peeing like a draft horse. Pete held his breath. His body tightened. He clung to the tire as if it could hide him. All Stonebreaker had to do was look up. The man must have consumed five gallons of beer the way he stood there pissing. The wind gently swayed Peter as he hung in the tire, and he kept his toes against the wall in hopes of remaining motionless and quiet. He carefully placed the knuckles of his brush hand against the barn to steady himself but in doing so he inadvertently tipped the can to one side. It was nearly empty, but the small amount of paint that had collected in the groove around the top began dripping to the ground.

Tom’s father was fumbling with his fly when he suddenly cursed.

“Son of a bitch! Goddamn pigeons!”

He stepped back from the stone wall and started to peer up toward the eaves when Tom came around the barn from the front.

“Can’t find the house?” Tom said.

“Huh … oh, Mother of God … you scared the shit outta me.”

The inebriated rancher forgot the pigeon and ambled toward Tom at the corner of the barn.

“Sleepin’ it off?” Tom said.

“Don’t get smart-ass with me or I’ll—”

“Or you’ll fall on your face.”

“You got that Cardwell girl in the loft?”

“No.”

“You go screwing around and you’ll be punished. I’m tellin’ you, boy, God’ll punish you sure as hell.”

“I’m not screwing around.”

“Then what’re you doin’ out here?”

“I’m painting the barn,” Tom said, and Peter all but fell out of the tire.

“Huh, paintin’ the barn. That’ll be the day,” Stonebreaker said.

They moved out of earshot around to the front of the barn and Peter realized he wasn’t breathing. Would he be hanging there come morning for the whole county to see? he wondered. What the hell, he might as well finish it. After a long moment, he dipped his brush into the paint can and slopped away, completing the final letter in the message that would broadcast their victory to everyone who passed. Pete understood why Tom had to do this, and he hoped that somehow, across the sky, his father would see the barn as well.

He had barely enough paint, wiping the bottom of the can dry with his brush, but the “W” was finished. As though he’d been silently watched over by guardian angels, Peter was lowered gently to the ground the moment he was done. Tom hurried from behind the barn.

“Where’s your dad?” Pete whispered.

“Sleeping in the barn.”

They stepped back and gazed at the dark wall; the large white letters and numbers seemed to glow with their own light.

WILLOW CREEK 81
                    LIMA 79

When the tire and ropes had been stashed, Tom and Pete ran across the field. Tom would sleep at Pete’s and stay clear of home for a while. They hooted and laughed as they ran, and Olaf and Grandma greeted them with high fives and clamorous glee. Peter and Tom filled them in on the hairraising climax and they all nearly fell down laughing.

“… and he was taking a leak right under me,” Pete said, “and I was dripping paint on him.”

“And he thought it was pigeons!” Tom roared.

“And he asked Tom what he was doing,” Pete said, “and Tom said he was
painting the barn!
”

The boys had the evidence of their mischief on their jeans, on their hands and faces, on their Levi jackets, even in their hair.

“We’ll throw all of you in the wash machine when we get to the house,” Grandma said. “Good thing paint’s latex.”

As Pete jostled the VW bus across the pasture, he wished he could have written
PETE LOVES KATHY
on the side of the barn for the whole world to see. But Kathy didn’t love Pete. While his heart thought she had promised with an oil-base, her promise had been written in latex, and it was washing away in the rain.

If he hurried back to St. Paul, maybe he could stop the rain.

Friday morning, the beginning of Christmas vacation, Sam settled into a comfortable pace, rounding the curve out past the cemetery with the gravel crunching rhythmically under his running shoes. Under the cloudless sky and low-flying December sun, he tried to sort out his jumbled feelings. One part of him wanted more, wished Diana wasn’t gone for almost two weeks. Another more prudent side applauded the space, time to cool off, glad she was gone for a while so he could come to his senses, realize he was playing with fire, how unwittingly he could be drawn over the edge and lost.

After a night of utter bliss, Sam was reminded of how late he slept when Ray Collins rattled by in his pickup with his yellow Lab, Poke, sitting beside him, close as a sweetheart.

On waking, Sam set off on his morning run with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. His legs possessed an unexpected strength and he found energy he didn’t recognize, stretching out into a run through the mild winter day as though last night’s unexpected adventures had jump-started an unknown engine in him. When he hesitantly mentioned birth control to Diana, she informed him that she started taking the pill again the day he saw her naked in the girls’ locker room. He smiled easily at the thought of it.

Sam slowed his pace as he crossed the one-lane bridge and searched for the vultures in the lofty, leafless cottonwoods where they habitually hung out. Those wily scavengers had given up on Willow Creek too soon this year. Their victory was big news. The implausible win had even been reported in
USA Today
as the breaking of an astounding ninety-seven game losing streak.

Only one burr rubbed under Sam’s saddle. Olaf showed no improvement in his ingrained habit of turning the ball over by loitering in the paint for more than three seconds. They had won a game, playing better every outing, but Sam allowed himself no illusions. This had been the soft part of
their schedule, light skirmishes, a time to learn. Starting in January they would come up against the heavyweights of the conference, teams who actually cut players to get down to twelve, teams with six or seven real athletes. Willow Creek wouldn’t survive giving away the ball fifteen to twenty times to these boys.

He turned around at the two-mile mark—the rusted body of a half-buried Model T in a creek bank—and headed back toward town. Olaf’s repetitive blunders continued to irritate Sam, rubbing a mental blister that he couldn’t soothe or ignore. The boy was intelligent enough, but like patting the top of your head with one hand and rubbing your belly with the other, the kid’s mental coordination just couldn’t keep tabs on the three seconds while he so intensely focused on catching the ball and scoring. Sam so far had been unsuccessful in reprogramming Olaf. With his towering presence in the paint, every coach in the conference would be screaming at the referees: Three seconds! Three seconds!

He jogged east into the brightening sun, his happiness clouded by this nagging frustration. The lethargic Simmental bulls Ray Collins had used to test his dog grazed near the fence. He was visualizing the handsome yellow Lab sprinting across the pasture like the lilting motif in an enchanting symphony, when an idea hit him like a particle from the sun at the speed of light.

The dog collar!

Ray Collins’s beautiful Lightning Commander remote-control shock collar: fashioned around Olaf’s waist, under his trunks, it could turn Olaf away from the bulls also. Someone, maybe Scott, could sit in the stands with the remote-control transmitter. When Olaf stepped into the painted area under the basket, the freshman manager would count, and if the Norwegian was still in there three seconds later, Scott could shock him—not a painful charge, but just enough to remind him. After hours of that, Olaf would do it instinctively, wouldn’t he? If not, well … they could always turn up the charge a little.

Sam sprinted past the cemetery like Ray Collins’ Lab, unable to quench his excitement, and as he panted by the Blue Willow, Rip—already in his chair on the porch—called out.

“Where’s the fire?”

Sam couldn’t find enough breath to reply, and he threw a wave. But after showering and calling around, he located Ray Collins out at the Avery place, filling their propane tank. Ray listened to Sam’s scheme and thought it was a great idea. He not only donated his Lightning Commander but promised not to mention it to a soul, which Sam figured was like asking a child to walk around puddles. Before the team’s practice, Sam had fashioned a makeshift belt that would be comfortable as well as effective and, under Olaf’s huge, loose-fitting jersey, inconspicuous to boot.

At the two o’clock practice, Sam heard from Tom how he and unnamed
others
had painted the score of the Lima game on the side of his father’s barn. Sam shuddered to think of the mood that would put George Stone-breaker in, but he couldn’t help but laugh at their audacity.

“What did your father do when he saw it?” Sam said.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’m staying clear of there for a few days.”

Then, Sam explained the device and took several shocks on his hands to demonstrate there was no pain involved, that the faint tingle would only remind Olaf to step quickly out of the paint. The somewhat skeptical boy held the shocking device in his hand, and Sam, using the transmitter, tickled him several times, causing the lanky center to smile at the ingenuity of the thing. They fastened it on his skinny frame under his
PARTY ANIMAL
sweatshirt and were ready to try it out.

“Awesomely sweet,” Pete said.

“Let me crank that thing,” Rob said. “I’ll give him an instant Afro.”

“Ought to put it in his jock strap,” Tom said, “then he’d remember.”

“What if it electrocutes him?” Dean asked.

“Then we’ll have to bury him,” Scott said, revealing a sense of humor Sam hadn’t seen before in the boy.

Hazel, Grandma, and Axel showed up, and Sam joined them playing makeshift defense. While moving through offensive patterns, every time Olaf stood planted in the paint too long, Scott zapped him. The Scandinavian danced out of the paint as if someone had whispered in his ear, and Scott sat with a wide grin on his face, using batteries to control this basketball giant much like a little boy running his remote-control toy car. But it worked! Olaf concentrated on scoring and Poke’s dog collar took care of the paint.