Blind Your Ponies (46 page)

F
OR
P
ETER, THE
next morning was a muddled blur and it caught him off guard. Wake early, dress, breakfast, then the short drive to the civic center before the sun came over the mountains. It was going too fast and he was scared. They were counting on him, these people who had taken him in, people who cared about him. It worried him that they might lose here and it would all be over. He wanted to win for them more than anything in the world, and he prayed he wouldn’t let them down.

Mr. Painter caught him after the game yesterday, said Maggie Painter told him to say hello to Peter. She had died. Peter didn’t know what he thought about dead people—did they still know what was going on here? She was a Willow Creek girl and now all her chances were gone. As he dressed in the chilly locker room, he told himself there was no way he would let them lose, but he was afraid he would.

And then the game was on top of him.

He pushed his legs and body but it seemed so unnatural this time of the morning. He had butterflies, no, lead in his stomach. He was off balance, and he couldn’t find his legs. He was winded, couldn’t catch his breath. It made him mad; he knew he was in good shape.

Willow Creek started cold, they couldn’t hit the toilet bowl with a shotgun. Shields Valley had found their shooting eyes quickly and they were pulling ahead.

He thought of Grandma and his mother. He wanted to make them proud. These games were hard on Grandma and he wanted to give her a lopsided win. He missed his first three shots; he was pressing, aiming the ball. He tried to get the ball into Olaf and had two turnovers. He was screwing up! What was he doing? He had to quit pressing and let his game come to him.

Work hard on defense, move your feet, hit the boards.

The sweat was flowing, and with it he felt his balance coming back. He blew by his man with a cross dribble and made the layup. He was back in the flow.

They were staying even but they couldn’t make up the seven points they had fallen behind earlier. Shields Valley was playing nine guys and coming at them hard, running the floor. By the middle of the third quarter he’d focused, forgetting about the mechanics and allowing his head and body to go with his instincts. He hit two shots in a row from the outside and he felt it all coming together, that natural rhythm he didn’t have to think about. Shields Valley couldn’t handle Olaf in close and Tom was starting to hurt them from the side. Rob picked up his fourth foul near the end of the third quarter and he promised Coach Pickett, who was about to put Dean in the game, that he’d not pick up the fifth.

Shields Valley was up by six with four minutes to go and Rob got his fifth foul, a bogus call by the ref. When Rob turned for the bench he looked into Pete’s eyes with desperation, pleading with him not to let it end here in this crappy morning game. Pete looked back as if to say, No way! He would not let them lose. In that brief moment he saw Denise Cutter in the stands, Grandma, Maggie Painter, all the Willow Creek fans from the past six years. He turned back to the game.

Up the court fast, he drew the defense in to him and lobbed a high pass to Olaf. The Norwegian jammed it. Shields Valley missed an outside shot. Tom got the ball to Pete on the side and he lifted a three-pointer. Nothing but net. Exhaustion swarmed over him as he sprinted back on defense. He fought it off. Cutting into the passing lane, he stole the ball, raced down the sidelines,
and pulled up behind the three-point arc. He buried it. He couldn’t miss. Shields Valley missed an outside shot. Tom rebounded the ball and fired a down-and-out to Pete. He took it to the arc, stopped when he could have gone in for the layup against only one defender, and nailed it. He scored nine points in the final two minutes and Willow Creek won by eleven.

Pete leaped into Rob’s arms with his last bit of energy. The team and a small group of Willow Creek fans swarmed down onto the floor. Tom wrapped his arm around Pete and held him up.

“You played a hell of a game, kid,” Tom said.

“You were super sweet yourself.”

“And we’re still standing,” Tom said.

“Barely,” Pete said.

Then the happy Willow Creekians, shouting and laughing, embraced everyone within reach.

Tom was watching TV in the motel room, lounging on the bed with an ice bag on his knee. The others had scattered in all directions, and Coach Pickett and Miss Murphy had taken the girls to the mall. Scott burst into the room.

“Tom, Tom, they’re beatin’ up Curtis and Dean!”

Tom sprang up, pulling on his diamondback boots.

“Where? Who?”

“I don’t know, some guys from Butte.”

Tom grabbed his duster and black hat and ran after Scott.

“W
HO GAVE YOU
permission to walk on our sidewalk?” a tall, narrow-faced kid said. He wore a large silver cross dangling from one ear.

“No one,” Curtis said, trying to hang on to his courage.

Three of them, leather-upholstered and in black bikers’ boots, had Dean and Curtis backed into a littered alley between two vacant brick buildings. Curtis could feel the hatred in them, the tall, the fat, and the ugly.

“You think you hayseeds can just walk into our town and go where you please?” the fat, sullen-looking boy said from his black, chrome-studded clothes. He must have weighed way over two hundred pounds, and his bare stomach bulged out between his pants and shabby leather jacket. Curtis couldn’t look into his deeply pockmarked face and beady pale eyes.

“What about you, dimpleshit? What haystack did you crawl out from under?” the ugly guy said, jabbing a finger into Dean’s chest. The bully had long, oily hair stringing out from under a red bandanna.

“ ‘We’re just walking around,” Dean said. “We didn’t mean to make you mad.”

“ ‘We didn’t mean to make you mad,’ ” Ugly Bandanna said in a falsetto voice, snatching the Kamp Implement cap from Dean’s head.

“Gimme my cap!”

“What would you want with a piece of shit like this?” Ugly Bandanna pulled out a cigarette lighter. “I think I’ll rid the world of this diseased rag.”

“No-o-o-o, please,” Dean said.

Fat traced the lettering on Curtis’s Future Farmers of America jacket with a stubby finger.

“What in hell is a Willow Creek?”

“It’s over by Three Forks,” Curtis said.

“What in hell is a Three Forks?” Bandanna said.

“Why don’t you let us go?” Curtis said.

“Because, dipshit, you pissed us off,” Fat said. “We can’t just let you cow pies come slopping all over our ground. Jesus Christ, look at the ears on this shithead.”

He flicked his hand at Curtis’s ear.

“He’s a walking satellite dish. We could plug a TV into him and get programs from stinkin’ China.”

Fat stepped nose to nose with Curtis, assailing him with putrid breath. “Can you get programs from China, cow pie?”

The porky goon, who wore metal-studded leather wrist bands, slapped Curtis across the mouth. Stunned, Curtis flinched and stepped back quickly. Dean backpedaled beside him. They were inching deeper into the deserted alley.

“I’ll call the sheriff,” Curtis said, wiping a trickle of blood from his lip.

“He’ll call the sheriff,” Tall Earring said. “We ain’t got no sheriff, shit brain.”

“I think we oughta torch this farmer’s jacket, too,” the fat thug said, and he slapped Curtis across the mouth again, harder.

“Hit me, chicken shit,” Fat said.

Curtis spotted Scott and Tom out on the sidewalk. Tom glanced down the alley and saw them. He came down the alley, fast. Bandanna lit his cigarette lighter and held it up to Dean’s cap.

“What are you smiling at, dipshit!” Fat shouted at Curtis. “Why don’t you hit me?”

“Because
he’s
going to,” Curtis said.

The fat one turned, too late. Tom’s fist caught him on the side of the skull, a thudding blow that sounded like a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt. With a
grunt he dropped to his knees and then flopped face first to the alley floor, his beady eyes wide with shocked surprise.

“Bodacious!” Dean yelled.

“Get ’em, Tom!” Curtis said.

Startled by Tom’s sudden appearance, the other two turned and clenched their fists.

“Who the fuck are you?” Ugly Bandanna said.

Then, as though they’d done this a lot, they were on him like alley cats, swarming, tackling, pinning his jabbing arms. Amid the grunts and curses and broken bottles, Tom was losing ground. Every time he zeroed in on one of them, the other would punch him from his blind side. Held in a strangling hold from behind, Tom threw a crunching elbow to Bandanna’s gut. Bandanna lost his grip and sagged to the ground. Dean and Curtis cowered from the violence.

The fat one staggered to his feet, still unsteady. Then he drop-kicked Tom in the groin with his heavy boot. Tom’s knees buckled, he sucked for air, his eyes bulged. He doubled up on the crumbling asphalt. In a burst Curtis broke from his petrified state and leaped on the fat guy’s back, his arms around that pulpy neck. Fat turned around and around and then slammed backward into the brick wall of the building, knocking the wind out of Curtis and forcing him to give up his stranglehold. Curtis slid to the ground, slumped against the wall, thinking he would die if he didn’t find a breath of air immediately.

“Kill ’im, Hank, kill ’im,” Bandanna said with a sleazy grin.

Curtis couldn’t breathe.

Dean, wide-eyed with terror, leaped at the heavyweight and tried to tackle him. But the brawler, whose senses seemed to be returning to him, kneed Dean in the head and sent him and his glasses sprawling.

Tom forced himself up onto his knees, wobbly. Then Curtis, gasping for breath, saw Rob, Pete, and Olaf sprinting down the alley, with Scott trailing behind. The thugs heard their running footsteps and turned to see the fury in their approaching faces.

“These maggots think they can beat up on our teammates!” Tom shouted.

Dean scrambled to pick up his glasses. “Get ’em, Pete! Get ’em, Rob!” he said.

Peter Strong never broke stride, as though driving for a layup. Before Bandanna could gather himself, Pete was wailing away on his head and body as though Bandanna had insulted Pete’s mother or something. Sprinting just behind Pete, Rob threw a cross-body block into Tall Earring, hurtling him backward into the dirt and rolling over him. Dean, on his hands and knees, picked up a brick and cracked it against Fat’s kneecap. The jerk yowled and grabbed his knee in both hands, hopping on one leg.

Tom sprang to his feet, bringing a haymaker to the spongy, unprotected face of the fat guy. The slob dropped like he’d been shot. Olaf had a fist made up and was windmilling toward Earring as the tall one scrambled to his feet. One glance at the towering Norwegian and he took off down the alley. Never able to gather his defenses against Peter’s fury of quick, solid punches, Ugly Bandanna turned and hightailed it, too, his bloodied nose coloring his filthy Levi jacket.

“Run, greaser, run for your life!” Pete yelled.

Tom lifted the blubbering heavyweight onto his feet and propped him against the brick wall.

“You want me to hit you again, you tub of lard?”

Fat shook his head, the left side of his face already swelling and coloring.

“If you ever so much as look at one of my teammates again, I’ll shove your head so far up your ass you’ll need a flashlight to find your way out!”

Tom shoved the jerk down the alley.

“Go find the hole you maggots crawled out of!”

The leader of the gang stumbled after the others, weaving, off balance.

“Run, you chicken shit!” Curtis yelled.

“Yeah, you chicken shit!” Dean said, pulling on his recovered cap, “you have bad breath.”

“How are you?” Rob said, turning to Tom.

“I’m sore.” Tom looked at his bruised right hand. “I think I broke my hand.”

“You should have seen Tom
punch
that kid!” Dean shouted.

Peter shook his hands and grimaced. “I think I broke both of mine.”

Curtis bent to pick up something in the alley that caught his eye. “Look!”

They all examined the upper front tooth speckled with blood. Tom felt his jaw and checked his teeth.

“You knocked his tooth out,” Dean said to Tom.

“Or Pete did,” Tom said. “It’ll give them something to remember us by.”

With Tom’s arm around his shoulder, Rob helped him limp toward the street. Pete got under Tom’s other arm and they took most of his weight.

“We saw you running down the street,” Rob said. “We knew something was wrong. You’re supposed to stay off your knee all day. Sorry we didn’t get here sooner.”

“It was soon enough,” Tom said and smiled. “We kicked ass, didn’t we?”

He rubbed Dean’s and Curtis’s heads as they flanked the three of them.

“You guys all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“You done good,” Tom said. “You done real good.”

“Wow, did you ever smack him,” Scott said to Pete.

“You’re a madman,” Rob said, looking over at Pete. “What were you doin’?”

“Cookin’,” Pete said, examining his skinned right knuckles. “What did they want anyway?”

“They wanted to show they were tough shit against Dean and Curtis,” Tom said. “Well, they found out no one messes with our team, right?”

“Yeeaaahhhh!” they shouted. They had gone in alone and scared. They were sore, bruised and bloody, but together. Curtis sensed that they all felt the same, that as long as they were together no one could beat them.

“Crap, we’d better get you back to the motel,” Rob said. “Coach will swallow his whistle if he finds out you’ve been running around on your knee.”

Olaf and Curtis each picked up one of Tom’s legs. They carried him down the sidewalk as though they had just won the tournament, elated, happy, on fire.

“I wish
I’d
punched him,” Dean said.

“Next time,” Tom told him. “You’ll nail him next time.”

They were a team. They couldn’t wait to play the consolation game that night. None of them dared mention the possibility of playing the challenge game on Monday. Who could beat them when they stuck together?

Curtis felt proud, felt good about himself. Next time he went into Three Forks, he’d see if they had a Clark Gable movie at the video store.