Blind Your Ponies (61 page)

“Rob, if they don’t fall for it, if they don’t guard you, throw the ball to Olaf. Olaf, catch and shoot, catch and shoot.”

They huddled up and shouted, “Win! Win! Win! Win! Win!”

Diana prayed that they would put a man on Rob and that the ref would have the moxie to call it. The Willow Creek followers stood, ashen, unable to breathe, bracing themselves.

The Broncs took their positions on the floor. Rob was at the far end with
a referee, standing out of bounds to the left of the basket. Pete loitered nonchalantly around the free throw circle. Obviously in pain, Olaf planted himself on the free-throw line at the opposite end. Tom in one corner, Curtis in the other. The Falcons surrounded Olaf except for Travis Neely, who trotted to the other end of the court to guard Rob, ready to harass him when he tried to inbound the ball. Diana felt a tingle of hope—they were falling for it! The official blew his whistle and handed Rob the ball. Rob whacked the ball with his right hand, starting the play. Just inbounds, crowding Rob, Neely waved his arms in the air.

Fear grabbed Diana by the throat. Pete moved swiftly up to the baseline to Neely’s right. Coach Long, seeing the play, stood screaming at Neely, but in the volcanic roar the boy never heard his coach’s warning, focusing tenaciously on Rob. Rob took a quick step to his right. Neely reacted, taking a quick step to his left to stay in front of Rob, his arms waving in the air. Then Rob took off running to his left along the baseline, still out of bounds. Neely instantly sprinted after Rob. He never saw Pete, who stood just inbounds with his feet slightly spread, facing the Falcon defender. Neely smacked into Peter like a stampeding bull hitting a wire fence, flattening Peter and crashing on top of him.

The referee hesitated, caught off guard.

Call it, call it, have the guts!

Then a whistle, the arm signal, the foul called.

The bewildered Willow Creek fans broke out of their despair with an escalating uproar. Sam leaped from his crouch with a fist in the air.

“Yes! Yes!”

Travis Neely picked himself off the floor with an expression of utter shock. The Twin Bridges section went deathly silent. Without taking a second off the clock, Willow Creek was shooting a one-and-one.

The Falcons called time out. At the bench, neither Diana nor Sam could look Pete in the eye. They realized what unbearable expectations they had placed on their splendid guard—the overwhelming pressure that singled out Peter Strong. No one could help him now. He was absolutely alone. They would win, tie, or lose by how he stared back into the callous, unforgiving face of that pressure.

“After the free throws,” Sam said, as calmly as he could, “everyone fall
back quickly into a tight zone. They’ll have to pitch it from the outhouse. Don’t foul. No matter what,
don’t foul.
”

Pete toed the line and took his time. He went through his ritual and silently mouthed several words. Then he flipped the ball into the hope-drenched atmosphere. It fell as faithful as moonlight. 75 to 75.

The Willow Creek crowd enjoyed a moment of pandemonium and then quickly hushed as Pete got set for the back end of the one-and-one. The Twin Bridges fans, in total shell shock, tried ineffectually to muster a disrupting noise. Pete turned and glanced to the other end of the court. It would appear he was conscientiously checking to see that Rob and Curtis were back, guarding the house. But Diana discerned that he was gazing into the face of Denise Cutter. With Tom and Olaf crouched along the lane, Pete took a deep breath, exhaled, moved his lips as if he were talking to himself, and turned the ball loose. It rotated unflinchingly through the noise and hopes and dread of those watching, disdaining the iron rim and nesting in the nylon arms awaiting perfection.

Willow Creek 76, Twin Bridges 75.

Diana erupted from the bench. “We did it! We did it!”

The unexpended three seconds still languished on the clock. With panic in his face, Corky Miller heaved a rainbow toward Harkin and Stone. Olaf slid in front of the two Falcons. The ball descended and he outreached them for it, having caught fifty similar passes every day at practice. Olaf held it high and the buzzer blared. The Willow Creek bench and fans broke into a frenzied celebration. Diana stood dumbfounded for a moment, until the outpouring crowd swept her away.

C
RAIG
S
TONE STOOD
in the paint, stunned, his face pale. Olaf turned to him.

“You could beat us, you turkeys were thinking?” Olaf shoved the ball into Stone’s hands. “
This
is a basketball!”

Stone slammed the ball on the floor and formed a fist as Tom limped up beside Olaf.

“Try it, dipstick!”

“I could whip both of your asses,” Stone said.

“That’ll be the day,” Tom said, curling his own fist.

Then, quickly the cascading throngs washed Stone aside, and the bull rider embraced his limping teammate and shouted, “I love you, you big crazy Norwegian!”

In an instant, the team was swept away in an unending flow of the euphoric and redeemed denizens who claimed allegiance to the flag of Willow Creek, Montana.

On the journey home, Olaf rested his leg up, across the bus aisle, with his ankle wrapped in ice. A seat up, Tom’s knee was receiving the same treatment. Fans, diehards old and new, piled in their cars and trucks and followed the little carrot-colored bus.

They were going to the State Tournament!

In some strange way he’d known it all along and yet now, when it was fact, he found it hard to grasp. The incredible win over Twin Bridges tempted him to believe that—though he knew he’d be credited with brilliance under fire—they were on a course guided by some mysteriously benevolent hand. But, by all indications, Olaf’s sprain was severe. It blew up when they removed the shoe and tape, even though they immediately iced it. He couldn’t put weight on his right foot and Andrew had rounded up crutches, the tallest he could find. Still, Olaf had to bow toward the earth to make them fit.

At the Blue Willow Inn, Axel carefully set the second-place Divisional trophy on a high shelf above the glass pastry counter where everyone could see the shining brass basketball player, like an Oscar, holding a basketball high in one hand. It outshone the many dull and tarnished antiques displayed throughout the inn. Sam observed the celebrating people. They couldn’t squeeze one more body in the building, and yet the grateful fans made ample room for Olaf and Tom to keep their painfully strained limbs up on chairs and properly iced.

The Willow Creekians couldn’t get over the extraordinary win. They reminded Sam incessantly that he had clearly outcoached Jeff Long—there never should have been a Twin Bridges defender anywhere near where he could potentially foul.

He was praising Peter again for his two flawless free throws when Grandma fought her way through the mob. “I wanted to ask you what you said just before you shot the free throws?” she asked Peter.

“ ‘As long as she swims, I will cook,’” he said.

“What a sweetheart. Well, you were sure cookin’, Grandson. I never saw two prettier shots in all my born days. I don’t know how you did it with all the people and noise—”

“And hurricane sea?” Peter said. He paused and glanced at Sam. “I owed them hot coffee after Friday night.”

Sam had no idea what they were talking about, but sensed it might be something to do with her illness, and he didn’t dare remain longer to find out. With a nod at them both he escaped into the swelling assemblage of delirious camp followers.

Diana checked the ice packs from time to time, removing them at intervals. She wormed through the crush and settled in Sam’s lap for a few minutes, as though announcing to the community what they already knew. Sam thought he would burst like a balloon with sunshine.

The Painters sat near Olaf and were as proud of “their boy.” Sam heard talk that Mervin Painter was trying to convince Olaf to go to college at Montana State University in Bozeman and continue living with them. Sam watched the kid in a giant’s body, at the center of Willow Creek’s universe and taking it all in. He had become the fearsome offensive weapon that Sam always believed he could become. The unpretentious school boy had undressed Craig Stone, had poured thirty-five points down Stone’s throat like cod liver oil. Sam only hoped that someone on the opposing teams at State would stick an elbow in Olaf’s ribs or worse, if in fact Olaf could play with that ankle. But if this was his last game, he had done it in bronze.

Amos sat beside Tom for a spell, one arm around the back of the bull rider’s chair, listening to Tom and Rob and Pete exuberantly relive the game with expressive faces and excited voices. Then, by chance, Sam caught the roan Tom Mix hat ducking out the kitchen. Sam pushed his way through the boisterous crowd and met Axel by the serving counter.

“Did you talk to Amos?” Sam asked.

“No, no.” Beads of perspiration glistened on his balding head. “Never got a chance.”

Sam hurried through the narrow kitchen and out the back door. The darkness blinded him. He stood a moment, peering across the field behind the inn. After a moment he could vaguely distinguish a distant figure moving west toward the tracks.

“Amos!” he called. “Amos!”

Sam ran cautiously through the dried weeds and grass, nearly tripping over an old car engine, but Amos had disappeared. He stopped and scanned the back side of town. There was the abandoned concrete one-room jail off to the south, and then Harrington’s house on its own gravel road down a block. But north and west there was only open ground to the tracks and beyond, except for the cemetery with its rows of evergreen sentinels. Sam continued west.

“Amos, it’s Sam,” he called. “I need to talk to you.”

When he hit the railroad bed, he stopped.

“Here,” Sam heard to his right.

He turned to find Amos standing beside the tracks.

“Oh, good, I thought I’d missed you.”

Sam scrambled up the slight embankment.

“Axel wanted me to warn you. There’s been a man asking about you, or someone like you, a Granville Hamilton. Axel thinks he’s a detective or something.”

Amos sighed. “Only a matter of time.”

“Who is he? Is he looking for you?”

Amos squatted wearily and sat on the rail. Sam settled beside him.

“Do I have to worry about the money… I mean… the things you left for Tom?”

“Did ya have yerself a little peek?”

Sam’s natural tendency was to lie, to deny any wrongdoing, but Amos’s question had none of the guilt-laden righteousness Sam had been used to. He went for honesty.

“Yes, I did, is the money… stolen or anything?”

“Don’t have to worry ’bout it. It’s clean.”

“Who’s after you, Amos? Or is it Granville?”

“It’s the feds, the Internal
Rev-e-nue
Service.”

Holy cats! Under my bed.

“Been gone a month ago if it weren’t fer Tom. Be worth it if the boys’d take all the marbles over in Bozeman. God, I’d love ta see that, go quietly if I could see
that.
”

“Why are they after you?”

“Quit payin’ taxes.”

Amos said no more, or Granville, as though it were enough of an explanation. You don’t pay your taxes they come and get you.

“Why?”

“Had a nice spread in Wyoming, then my wife ran off with a trucker. Had one boy, he and me was workin’ the spread by ourselves and gittin’ by jest fine. One day they tell him he has to go in the army. Tell him the government of this here country needed him to defend itself against comm-u-nists in some country we didn’t even know where it was. He believed ’em. They sent what was left a him home in a shoe box.”

Amos fell silent.

“That must have been terrible.”

“Buried him out on the place. Resta him still scattered somewhere over there—he called it ‘The Nam.’ After I buried him I got a letter from him, slow in coming, was kinda spooky. Had a picture, said it was of one of them comm-u-nists, a picture of a little slanteyed kid sitting in my boy’s arms, like he’s carrying a pumpkin. My boy was smiling, had a good smile. When I pitched the last shovelful of dirt on his grave, I promised on my soul I’d never give the government another dime to send boys away to die.”

“That’s when they came after you?”

“When I quit sending in ma taxes, they sent me letters and notices and finally a dude comes out and tells me I’m being investigated, even reads me ma rights and all.” Amos spat. “So, sold everything I had, the spread, cattle, everything. Turned it all into cash and vamoosed.”

Amos picked up a chunk of crushed rock from the railroad bed.

“Where did you go?”

“Tied up around Smiths Ferry, Idaho, fer a spell, Greenhorn, Oregon, a few years, Pagosa Springs, Colorado, After that and then Willa Creek, always moving on when I feel the hackles on the back a ma neck setting up.”

Amos tossed the rock into the ditch.

“Felt ’em a month ago but didn’t want ta leave. They’ll put me in jail fer a spell, but they’ll never git a
dime
outta me.”

“Well, I—”

“Don’t you worry none ’bout it, Pickett. That money is money hard earned. I jest never paid no taxes on it and I’ll rot in jail ’fore I’d give ’em
another cent. Don’t tell ’em about the money, Pickett, please. They’ll jest use it to blow young boys to smithereens.”

Sam felt dumbfounded and angry and sad. All this time he thought he knew something about Amos Flowers. God—he didn’t know
anyone!
And now Amos was risking his freedom and would probably spend time in jail because he wanted to see Tom win.

“Is that your whole wad?” Sam asked.

“Nope. Got money hid out in other places.”

“I’ll see to it that Tom gets the suitcase,” Sam said. “No one else will ever know about it, I promise.”

“Thank ya.”

Amos nodded and spat into the ditch. Then he rose with a grunt and searched the dark horizons. The Blue Willow lay off across open ground to the east, where a gilded light and the faint sounds of rejoicing were still splintering from its cracks.

“Better mosey on outta here fer now.”