Blind Your Ponies (8 page)

One of the relics Axel and Vera inherited with the place was the aging bicycle built for two that sat on the front porch throughout the year. Diana had found that the locals were protective of the old bike’s history and it was often difficult for a stranger to get an answer regarding the bike’s origins. The peculiar bike had become almost sacred in the eyes of the townsfolk, a trademark of the town, leaning there against the wall on the porch of the Blue Willow Inn, to be borrowed by whoever would like to take a turn around the town.

The story went that one day, many years ago, a happy young couple rode the tandem bicycle from Bozeman on an all-day outing, and stopped at the Blue Willow for lunch. Local people were touched by their affection, by the look of their gentle faces as they gazed across the table and held hands.

Then, something came up between them.

One of them revealed something—people who tell the story are uncertain here—and the young man, it was said, stood up abruptly, knocking over plates and spilling water all over the tablecloth and onto the dining room floor. He stomped out of the inn, and soon afterward the lovely young woman quietly followed. In their anguish and hurt, they both ran off and left the bicycle leaning on the porch. For days people hoped the couple would make up and then, back together again, would remember that neither had taken the bicycle. Weeks went by, summer became fall, and finally, when the winter snow dusted the seats of the bike, the townspeople began losing hope.

That was over twenty-five years ago and still the bike rested there as
though the community expected that the couple would forgive each other and come back for it. Successive owners of the inn kept its tires inflated and replaced as needed and all parts in working order. Since neither of the lovers ever returned for it, the common sentiment was they never got back together, coloring the local legend with the bittersweet shades of a tragic love story. But Diana figured that tourists who noticed the timeworn bicycle would just assume it was decoration, like the many antiques inside the inn.

She’d lost her appetite and gently pushed her half-eaten salad away. Just when she felt determined enough to dare the drive home, Sam Pickett walked in, wearing his running outfit. On his way to the back counter he nodded and smiled.

She settled back in her chair and thought about how she’d see him running out the gravel road that curved past the graveyard, how she always got the impression he wasn’t jogging for fitness but trying to outrun something. She had tried running but it gave her too much time to think, so she preferred her excursions into the woods and river bottoms where she could lose herself tracking and observing.

Sam came to her table and held a can of Mountain Dew.

“Have a good run?” she asked.

“Yeah, I got five miles in.” He wiped the arm of his sweatshirt across his sweating face.

“Would you like to sit down?”

“Oh, no thanks. I’m dripping and the aroma might kill your appetite.” He backed a step away.

“Well maybe some other time,” she said, and clearly felt his reluctance to get too chummy on any social level.

“I better get out of here before Axel comes with a deodorant spray.” He laughed and she sensed a warmth in his smile she’d never noticed before.

“I hear you’re going to coach another year.”

“Yeah, thanks for your input.”

“Input?” she asked, baffled.

“About coaching, and what a once-in-a-lifetime it is to have a seven-footer.”

She laughed. “I guess I got caught up in that rush of excitement over Olaf. I didn’t mean to stick my nose in.”

“No, I needed another perspective. And I really need something to do around here all winter.” He gulped the soda down.

“Maybe it was bad advice. It looks like you won’t have a seven-footer after all.”

“I know,” he said, then quickly frowned. “But we’ll have to make do with what we have, as usual.”

He backed another step from the table and she felt a strange sensation shiver through her. Something in his expression leaked the smallest hint of something else, something she couldn’t name but had an inkling of joy; it made her want to smile.

Sam glanced at a man exiting the bar and staggering to the front door. All the warmth drained from his face. George Stonebreaker stopped in his tracks when he spotted Sam.

“Hey, Pickett, you gonna coach that bunch of losers again?”

The voice of the huge, unshaven man in bib overalls, a denim work shirt, and a sweat-stained cowboy hat boomed for everyone in the Blue Willow to hear. Diana suspected he’d been at the bar four or five beers too long.

Sam nodded and faced Stonebreaker across an unoccupied table.

“Well, my boy ain’t playing, that’s for sure. He’s wasted enough time stumbling around with those other pansies. He show up, you tell him he ain’t playing this year.”

“I can’t do that.” Sam spoke so quietly, Diana thought his voice had a quiver in it. “You’ll have to tell him,” Sam said.

“He don’t pay me no mind anymore, got his nose up his ass. You tell him.”

Stonebreaker pointed a meaty finger at Sam and he squinted. Diana could feel the tension in the hushed restaurant.

“If he plays with those geldings you’ll answer to me, ya hear.” Stone-breaker slammed a fist on the table, rattling silverware and salt and pepper shakers. “To me!”

Axel came from the kitchen in his white apron and rolled up sleeves. “You get on home now, George. Let these folks enjoy their meal.”

Stonebreaker glanced at Axel and then turned back to Sam.

“I don’t want him playin’, Pickett.”

Axel stood next to Sam. “That’s enough, George,” Axel said in a soothing voice. “You head on home.”

Stonebreaker abruptly stomped out and banged the screen door behind him. Only then did Diana see the baseball bat Axel held at his side under the long apron.

The Blue Willow immediately went into a buzz and Axel, wiping sweat from his bald head with a hanky, apologized to the customers. Then he turned to Diana and Sam. “I’m not letting that man drink in here anymore. He’s a mean bastard and a sorry excuse for a human being. He can go do his drinking somewhere else.”

When Axel headed for the kitchen, Sam set the can of Mountain Dew on the table.

“Who said things were dull in Willow Creek?” he said and flashed a thin smile.

Diana saw how the soda can shook in Sam’s hand. “Can’t somebody do something about him?” she asked.

“I feel sorry for Tom,” Sam said.

“Will Tom play?”

He peered out into the darkness. “I don’t know.”

It came after Sam that morning.

Was it his confrontation with George Stonebreaker that had unearthed it? Was it because of that terrifying moment when he teetered between cowering under a table or ripping the man’s throat out with his bare hands? This feeling somehow always manifested, just when he thought he was doing well. He gobbled breakfast and hurried to school, but no matter how hard he concentrated on the students and lesson, it stalked him in his classroom, staring out from unoccupied corners, rising in the shadows, sucking the breath from his lungs.

He force-fed his mind with pointless details and jabbered to his class like a nervous wreck. And when his mid-morning free period arrived, he fled from the building to the school yard, where a fresh, balmy southwesterly wind gushed across the mountain flanks and barnstormed through town.

Sam spotted Dean Cutter chasing Helen Bates during recess. For years Sam had thought of Dean as a frisky grade schooler who, peering out of his thick lenses and habitually wearing a dog-eared maroon Kamp Implement cap, seemed to regard life in a happy-go-lucky way. Now the squat kid was a freshman and played an integral role in the expectations Sam was guardedly inventing. He didn’t know much about the family; Dean was the only Cutter in attendance. He had an older sister, but she had been born with cerebral palsy and didn’t come to school. In his class that fall, Dean had shown little interest in academics but exuded a rough-and-tumble zest for life.

Sam spotted Diana on the far edge of the playground like a homesteader’s wife. He waved and she waved back, as though they conspired to display warm affection for each other from a safe distance, and at close quarters had to be on guard, polite, and restrained.

A United Parcel truck pulled up and the young suntanned driver hollered toward Sam. “You know where the Skogan place is?”

“Yeah!” Sam shouted. “You have to go back to the fork north of town and go west until you hit 287, then southwest about four miles.”

“Thanks!” the driver waved a hand as he roared off.

On the wrong road, Sam thought, maybe his first day.

Oh, God. It avalanched over him and he couldn’t hold it off. The lunatic had been
lost.
The outraged husband went to the
wrong
Burger King. His estranged wife worked at a Burger King four miles east on the same street. With the shotgun hidden under a long coat, he demanded to see his wife and when they told him she wasn’t there he went berserk and started shooting. It should never have happened, not there. It was a
mistake,
all a mistake.

Sam tried to rid his brain of that voice. He clapped his hands over his ears and bent forward. Sweat immediately soaked him and he fought for breath. He had to escape, knowing his sanity hung in the balance, how he hung in the balance, entertaining the thought to just blind his pony.

When he got up and turned around, Diana was there, close, looking into his eyes.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

“Oh … no. I was …” He tried to laugh, to hold her off.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked with a tenderness in her voice.

“No, thanks. I actually came out to talk to Dean.”

He turned abruptly, then hurried toward the children. He retreated from the reflection in her eyes. He fled from the currents threatening to drown his soul.

“Dean!” he shouted.

The scruffy, nearsighted boy skidded to a stop and regarded Sam.

“Could I talk to you a minute, Dean?” Sam wiped his face with a handkerchief.

The boy glanced at his playmate with a shrug and walked hesitantly toward the English teacher.

“Hi, Dean. I’m coaching the basketball team again this year and I hope you’ll be coming out.”

Relief spread across the freshman’s face, as though the teacher hadn’t found out what he’d done. And then, just as quickly, he bunched up his face. “I’m no good,” he said in a high-pitched voice known throughout the community.

“We’re going to need you, Dean. We’ll practice a lot and you can learn.”

“I stink.” The boy squirreled up his nose as if he could actually smell his inability.

“Do you think you’d like to play, if you learned how?”

“I can’t dribble or nothing. Scott’s better than me.”

“I’ve seen you running around school. You run pretty fast. If you practice hard every day, you’d be surprised how quickly you can learn.”

“Would I have a uniform?”

“Yes, of course. And you’ll get out of classes.”

Sam fished, wondering what bait would be needed to convince this country boy to lay his self-esteem on the line and step onto the varnished hard-wood. He knew how disgrace was still a stark reality for any kid who dared put on the Willow Creek jersey.

“We’ll travel to other towns and eat at restaurants.”

“McDonald’s!”

“Yes.”

“Bodacious!”

Sam caught his breath. He’d pulled the correct dry fly from his fishing vest.

“When we go to Bozeman, Mom always says we can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s.”

Sam noted the boy’s patched jeans and faded flannel shirt.

“Do you think you’d like to give it a try?”

“I stink.”

“Listen, Dean. Why don’t you come out for a few practices. See how it feels.” He ought to say, See how it smells. “If you don’t like it, you can let it go.”

“Think we’ll win a game this year?” Dean asked.

“I know we will, if you come and help us. What do you say?”

Sam regarded the athletically-challenged schoolboy. Dean screwed up his face and tugged at his hat.

“Okay. I’ll try, but I stink.”

“Great. I’ll let you know when we’ll have our first practice. Thanks, Dean.”

The bowlegged boy dashed back to his friends while Sam found his
bearings and caught his breath. He hurried through the town toward the Blue Willow in hopes of being distracted and lost in conversation for the remainder of his free period. He knew he would have to find something that Dean could do well and build on that. Dean Cutter was definitely not a boy with great self-confidence when it came to basketball, but after all, look where he grew up.

P
ETE STRONG SHUFFLED
into the front room, having slept in until ten. He found his grandmother doing aerobics along with the
Bodies in Motion
gang on TV. The parrot hunched on the bar from its hanging cage and Tripod gazed from one eye while curled beneath the coffee table.

“Glad … to see … you’re still … alive,” she said. “I’ll … whip up … some breakfast … in about … fifteen minutes.”

“Up your ass,” the parrot squawked.

“Grandma, did you
hear
that?” Pete said.

“What a gas … what a gas,” Grandma said as she kicked to the left, then kicked to the right.

By the time Pete had washed in the makeshift bathtub shower and dressed, Grandma was flipping pancakes in the kitchen with Tripod at her feet. Pete crossed the living room and the parrot cackled.

“Piss your pants.”

“Hear that?” Peter said.

“Certainly, he said, ‘Miss the dance.’ ”

“Grandma, I think you’re hearing is shot.”

Pete pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

“Nonsense. I can hear a meadowlark down on Cooper Road.” She flopped a pancake on his plate.

Shaking his head, Pete poured maple syrup over the first pancake. After chewing a heaping forkful, he spit it back onto his plate.

“Yhaaaacck! What’s in the pancakes?”

She doubled over with laughter. “Should’ve seen the look on your face!”

“What’s in these?” Pete wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It tastes like soap.”