Blind Your Ponies (64 page)

At first the cheerleaders were overwhelmed, trying to get the crowd to follow their particular cheers, realizing that this ocean of people didn’t know the words nor could they follow their lead. By the second quarter they had whittled it down to basics and appeared thunderstruck at the noise they orchestrated.

“Go, Broncs, go! Go, Broncs, go! Go, Broncs, go!”

The earth shook and all neutral fans were swinging to Willow Creek’s side. The crowd followed the cheerleaders’ fist thrusts into the air and created more noise than the poor girls had ever imagined. Sam could see the team coming together, shaking off the awe of being on the floor before thousands of people, becoming totally focused on the game. Though the half ended with Willow Creek only up by three, 39–36, Sam sensed they could take Wibaux. Tom had played fiercely and had seventeen points.

In the third quarter, Willow Creek turned on the bear. Finally realizing it was Stonebreaker who was ransacking their team, Wibaux tried to play a more balanced defense, concentrating less on Olaf. It was a fatal mistake. Sam turned Olaf lose. His fake passes to Tom were taken seriously, leaving Olaf with one defender between him and the basket, and Wibaux quickly discovered that one wasn’t enough. With a swooping pivot one way or the other, Olaf stuffed the ball, making a soft turnaround, or banking a shot from the side. When he missed, Tom was often there to put it back. With Olaf’s intimidating defense inside, Wibaux’s outside shooting was all that kept them in the game. But Rob and Pete, with quickness and resolve, disrupted the shooters, making them hurry, making them miss, making them mad.

Wibaux, in frustration and confusion, took bad shots, turned the ball over, and found themselves falling behind. Steve Nelson, their hard-nosed little guard, wouldn’t quit, and their lanky 6'4" big man, Andy Adams, wouldn’t admit the tide was turning. But it was, and Willow Creek hit its stride as the quarter ended.

Willow Creek 49, Wibaux 40.

“Don’t let up,” Sam said. “You’re playing great. Work for the good shot, be patient, don’t let up on defense.”

They started the fourth quarter in the manner they had finished the third. They foiled Wibaux’s zone press by using “volleyball” with Olaf to bring the ball up. Rob hit two remarkable shots, one a three, and they were on a 9–1 run. Sam held his breath. Once when everyone was covered, Olaf dribbled the ball into the front court himself and dribbled behind his back once before catching the ball and passing off. The crowd cheered with delight and Sam saw it not as hotdogging so much as the intense Norwegian having fun under these pressure-filled conditions.

Wibaux wouldn’t quit. They were trying desperately to get back into it when Pete slashed out and batted a pass away. Curtis dashed after the ball, leaped into the air, and batted it back into play before crashing over the Wibaux bench and players. Rob, racing downcourt, found the ball coming to him like a lonesome dog. He dribbled once, went high and dunked it, bringing a roar from the audience. The six-foot senior who had lost for three insufferable years had finally dunked the ball in a game, a triumphal statement and emotional release.

“Stuff it!” Diana shouted.

Curtis got to his feet and returned to the floor. Wibaux hurried the ball upcourt, and Sam notice a pained expression on Curtis’s face. But the lean-fleshed sophomore got into his defensive position and seemed to move all right. Steve Nelson, their fiery little guard, let go with a three-point shot and missed. Tom snatched the rebound and the Broncs broke for the front court. Curtis was holding his right wrist. Sam shouted to Pete, who was dribbling out of a trap as he crossed midcourt. Pete called time out.

Curtis came to the bench, and Diana sat him down and looked at the wrist. Scott handed her an ice wrap out of the cooler. She glanced at Sam and then told Dean to take off his sweats and report to the scorer’s table. With terror in his face, Dean passed his cap to Curtis and fumbled off his warmup jacket.

“Don’t let up,” Sam said. “It’s not over, don’t let them get anything going.”

“Have you looked at the score, Coach?” Tom asked.

“Forget the score!” Sam said. “Play hard every minute you’re out there. When Curtis is ready, I’m going to pull Olaf to rest that ankle, then maybe Tom. Have fun, and learn something.”

They huddled, shouted their team cheer, and stepped back onto the court with a bounce of confidence in their manner. Diana leaned close to Sam.

“I don’t think you’ll be resting Olaf. Curtis is hurting.”

Sam watched his team win the first round at the State Tournament with a clutch of dread hatching in his gut. Dean got his feet wet running the field house floor and he tickled the house when he took Nelson, the startled Wibaux guard, into the bleachers behind the basket coming pell-mell too late. The greater part of the huge crowd stood and cheered as the last few seconds blinked off the scoreboard clock. Willow Creek 69, Wibaux 54.

They followed all the proper rituals after the game, congratulated the Wibaux boys on a hard-fought game, iced the damaged body parts, and planned to eat with some of the Willow Creek parents and fans at J.B.’s Restaurant. Diana and Axel took Curtis to the hospital for X-rays. Sam and the boys ordered food, but he couldn’t muster an appetite. He had taken one tasteless bite out of his clubhouse sandwich when Curtis came toward him past the salad bar.

His arm was in a cast!

Sam almost swallowed the mouthful whole. He heard Diana’s words from weeks ago,
If no one goes down.
He glanced over a booth, where the Dutch Boy jabbered with the team, his frazzled Kamp Implement cap pulled tight, unaware that he had just been thrown into the North Sea.

N
EWS OF CURTIS’S
broken wrist spread from table to table like food poisoning. Curtis was heartsick; he would no longer be able to help them fight their way to the castle. Sam went over to the booth where Curtis’s parents sat with Alice and Ben Johnson and Sally and Denise Cutter. The Jenkins were Grant Wood caricatures, quiet, reticent, withdrawing, molded out of the silent seasons and rhythms of the land, polite, respectful, undemanding, expecting nothing.

“I’m sorry about his wrist,” Sam said. “I hope it will heal all right.”

“That won’t amount to nuthin’,” Albert Jenkins said, his narrow, weathered face carrying no anxiety in its leathered lines.

“I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” Sam said, riding an ambivalent merry-go-round of joy and shock.

“We want to thank you for what you’ve done for our boy,” scrawny little Elsie Jenkins spoke up, a rarity for her. “He was so shy, didn’t have any friends, thought of himself as a lop-eared no-account. You made him feel important, Mr. Pickett. He’d never go anywhere, just hang around the place. Now he isn’t afraid to go out and do things and meet people. Why, there isn’t anything that boy doesn’t think he can do.”

“He’s a great kid,” Sam said.

“I’ll never know how you got him to work so hard. He got an old backboard at Hazel Brown’s garage sale and put it up in our hay shed. After supper he’d go out there night after night, no matter what, and shoot that basketball for an hour or more. I came out one night when it was bitter cold and he was shooting that old ball with mittens on.”

Sam felt his throat constricting.

“I don’t know how you do it either,” Sally Cutter said. “I never can get Dean to do anything. But every morning he gets up a little early, and before the bus gets there, he runs full throttle between the corral and the pump house, back and forth like his pants are on fire, rain or shine, snow, cold, doesn’t matter. Said you told him he was a good runner.”

No wonder Dean was always sweating, Sam thought.

“They’re right,” Alice Johnson told him. “I don’t know how you get the boys to be so dedicated. Rob got himself one of those dumbbells—”

“Barbells,” Ben said.

“Barbells, and he hoists that thing over his shoulders and then does knee bends, squats he calls them. It weighs a ton. He must do fifty or sixty every day no matter how tired he is. I never saw a kid work so hard. Sometimes, when he’s come home dog-tired, I’ve sent him to bed early and told him to forget the exercising. You know, I could hear that thing rattling from his dark bedroom.”

Sam tried to find a response. Claire Painter, eavesdropping from the next booth, leaned in to add her amazement.

“I don’t know how you do it either, Mr. Pickett. Olaf says he’s going for a walk. But I see him circle back to the barn. He’d go up in the loft and shoot the ball, over and over and over. I’d sneak out to the barn sometimes. If he
heard us coming, he’d go out the high side of the barn and come back from his walk and we’d never say a word. That sweet Carter would call and call and he’d rather be practicing basketball.”

“Haw!” Grandma said, sitting next to Claire. “My grandson dribbles the ball up stairs, down steps, behind his back, between his legs. He sleeps with the ball. He talks to it like it’s alive, and sometimes, when I see what it will do for him, I believe it.”

Utterly speechless, Sam held up a hand, signaling that he would be right back. He shoved himself through the bustling restaurant and out into the crisp night air. It was the last moments of February; at midnight March arrived. He gazed down the blurring strip of blazing signs, beckoning the traveler into motels, filling stations and fast-food places. He felt the flood of tears coming like a great tidal wave from deep inside.

All his life it had seemed he hadn’t noticeably influenced any of his students, and now this: this extraordinary affirmation and effusive gratitude toward him as a person. The unexpected praise from these parents and the unimaginable loyalty of these boys overwhelmed him utterly, redeemed him, healed him with tears of joy. He stood for a moment as the traffic thinned along Main Street. He would have to go back in and face them, face these people he had unknowingly come to love. But not just yet. He shuddered and allowed a sob to fall, wiping his eyes and nose with his handkerchief. Someone came up behind him. It was Diana. She put her arm around his waist. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah… I’m okay.”

“Can we do it?”

“Yes,” he said, without doubt in his voice. “Let’s go in.”

They walked back into the restaurant, staggered but undaunted, to take their
five
-man team into the semifinals.

Sam ran out the old road into the March morning. A sharpness in the air brought him fully awake. He couldn’t sleep past six and he didn’t know what to do with himself. The tumultuous experience of the previous night—not only playing in the State Tournament, but
winning
—had left him drained, which was compounded by the incalculable loss of Curtis. With little Dean starting and with a bench impoverished of any support, Sam had severe doubts about their chances to advance any further. Add to that the frightening fact that tonight they went up against Rocky Boy, the fire-engine team from the reservation, and doubt seemed all that was left to the sane.

The reservation was an uncompromising parcel of wind-swept land portioned out to the Chippewa-Cree as well as a mixture of other tribes and nations. They were boys caught in an environment where drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, and hopelessness stalked them with the cold perseverance of a wolf pack, and through the long, wind-borne winter the only game in town was throwing a round ball through a hoop on the wall of the school gymnasium. Needless to say, some of them could do it blindfolded, in their sleep, with one hand tied behind them.

It occurred to Sam that maybe Rocky Boy needed to win more than Willow Creek, but he quickly recycled that sentimentality when he stopped to realize that Rocky Boy had a proud winning tradition that needed no charity, asked no quarter, was consistently on top year after year with many Divisional Championships and regular appearances in the State Tournament. From an enrollment of eighty or more, they never had a lack of boys who wanted to play, supporting a twelve-man varsity, a JV squad, a “C” squad and a freshman team, talented boys whose basketball careers, lamentably, ended with high school. Though many of them would be welcome additions to college and university teams, Sam had learned that seldom did any of these boys go on with the white man’s institutional notion of education.

Sam found himself running hard across the old iron bridge as he envisioned the trial to come. Rocky Boy would attempt to consume Willow Creek in the twin furnaces of their trapping defense and their unrelenting run-and-gun offense, to run them and run them and run them, and finally, fry them in their own exhaustion. He wished there was some way he could go out on the court and take his stand with the boys.

A
T THE BLUE
Willow, dozens of excited fans were waiting in their vehicles when Axel opened the doors, as if the inn were serving underdog dreams for breakfast. Emphasizing words for dramatic effect, Grandma read the
Billings Gazette
aloud as though it were news from the front.

WILLOW, WHITTLED TO FIVE, ADVANCES
With an answer for everything Wibaux threw at them, the dogged
Willow Creek Broncs made believers out of many in the state.

A cheer arose from the breakfast tables.

Tom Stonebreaker, their husky 6'4" forward, led the charge in the first half, nearly unstoppable inside. When the Longhorns made adjustments to stop him, the other Broncs took over, led by their towering 6'11" center, Olaf Gustafson, and their two excellent guards, Peter Strong and Rob Johnson.

More cheering and clapping.

At the end, Willow Creek had outclassed and outshot the courageous Longhorns but lost their starting forward, 6'2" Curtis Jenkins, midway through the fourth quarter with a broken wrist, leaving the Broncs without a bench. With only five players left standing, their chances against the firestorm basketball of Rocky Boy seem dismal. But don’t count them out. We’ve made that mistake all season. Their bench won’t be empty tonight in the Brick Breeden Field House. It will be occupied by Courage and Character and Iron Resolve, and by a masterful coach who has brought his six boys through the District and Divisional trenches and has them well prepared for the tournament wars.