Blind Your Ponies (43 page)

“In anger I went into the army, got sent to Nam, stayed alive for two years to get back to her, and when I came back I couldn’t find her. No leads. She had lost her parents when she was young. None of her old friends or acquaintances knew where she’d gone. I spent almost two years trying to find her, but everything turned into a blind alley. Then, a few years later I got married, had two nice kids, did my best to make it work, stuck it out until the kids were pretty well grown up, and got divorced from a nice lady who knew I’d never had my heart in it from the beginning.”

“Why Willow Creek?” Sam asked.

“It was a hair in the wind but it was all I had. It was the last place on this earth where I had been with her. I figured she might come back here, some day, if she were looking for me the way I was looking for her. It was our only common point of reference. When I saw that bicycle still on the porch, waiting after all those years, I couldn’t believe it. I examined it, it was the very Rollfast Columbia we rode out here. I asked myself, Why would people keep something like that for so long? How could that happen? The tires had been replaced and were hard with air as if expecting our return. That was what convinced me. I knew it was meant to be, that she’d eventually come back as I had. So I stayed.”

“Do you really believe she’ll come back here?” Sam said.

“Yes.”

Andrew gazed up the street. “Do you believe in soul mates?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Andrew leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs, examining his hands in the scattered light as if he might find a clue in them. Then he spoke so softly Sam could hardly make out the words.

“You know, sometimes when I’m riding in the night like this I can catch the aroma of her perfume. Am I crazy?”

“Oh, no,” Sam said and gripped the porch stair.

Andrew stood stiffly and stepped into the street. “I’d better get to bed. God, I hope the boys can win, it would help me believe in miracles again.”

Sam stood and stepped down beside him. “I hope you find her.”

For a moment they leaned precariously close to an embrace, close to sharing their sorrow and hope. But neither could cross that infinitesimal space, and Andrew walked off, under the streetlight, into the night, alone, as if he never doubted that Sarah would come back to him in Willow Creek.

By a little after ten in the morning they were loaded in the sawed-off bus: team and cheerleaders, coaches and manager. Sam took the shortcut through the Jefferson’s massive limestone gorge to catch the interstate at Cardwell. To look more the part of a tournament team, Sam, Diana, and Scott had coordinated their outfits under Miss Murphy’s tutelage, bearing the school’s colors with matching navy-blue slacks she found at the JC Penney in Bozeman and gold sweatshirts she found at the Sports Shack in the mall. Each person on that bus carried their own fears and apprehensions for a team that had not won a tournament game since flip-top cans were invented.

Though there were minor outbursts of frivolity and horseplay, the team spent the sixty-mile trip in intense silence. While Sam drove, Diana reached over the back of his seat and massaged the tension out of Sam’s neck with her soothing touch. He accepted her unanticipated offering of affection and felt as tightly wound as a golf ball.

“Oh, Miss Murphy,” Tom said. “My neck is a little stiff.”

The team broke out in laughter.

“Yeah, my back is kinda sore,” Pete said.

“I only do the driver,” Diana said, continuing on Sam’s shoulders and neck.

“Can I drive?” Rob said, then was immediately pummeled by Mary.

The girls pulled out several books and began grilling Dean, who was precariously close to ineligibility again, but Sam figured it wouldn’t matter. After this weekend, their basketball season would likely be over.

“All right, Dean,” Carter said, reading out of his English grammar book. “The student said, ‘Can/May I go to the bathroom?’ ”

“Can I go,” Dean said in his screechy voice.

“Wrong. It should be ‘May I go.’ ”

“I always say ‘Can I go’ and the teacher lets me.”

Those who were eavesdropping laughed with Carter.

“Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” Carter told him. “If you say ‘Can I go?’ it means do you know
how
to go.”

“Well, that’s stupid. Everyone knows
how
to go,” Dean said.

The chubby little bus struggled up through the rocky pass, until finally the city appeared below them.

Butte was a town renowned for its long history of mining activity, inescapably caught in the predictable boom-to-bust itinerary of all such endeavors. Sam saw it as a city that had had its copper heart carved out, and now that gaping wound—the Berkeley Pit, visible for miles—was referred to by some as the armpit of Montana. Deservedly or not, it was a community that had fallen into disrepute. Groundwater was rapidly filling the hundreds of miles of underground shafts and tunnels left by the massive extraction, threatening to overflow and gush down the city’s streets and alleys like a vicious baptism.

The Butte Civic Center was located off the hill on busy Harrison Avenue. Sam settled Rozinante in the parking lot where a trickle of cars and spectators arrived for the first game. The Willow Creek players and cheerleaders straggled into the looming concrete building with visible trepidation. It was high noon and Sam immediately caught the implication. It wasn’t only the game with Twin Bridges, it was also coming here to the tournaments, and the throttling that lay ahead, in that spacious arena with its overhead cat-walks, glimmering lights, and bright colored lines meticulously painted on the glossy hardwood.

A large, dark-haired man in a suit and tie met them in the lobby and led them down a narrow, concrete hallway to their dressing room. It had benches along opposite walls with overhead shelves and hooks for clothing, but no lockers where Tom could safely secure his diamondback boots. They stashed their gear and went to find seats in the stands. Sam figured they ought to watch the first half of the opening game between Harrison and Manhattan Christian. He well knew that if Willow Creek beat Twin Bridges, they would be playing Christian tomorrow. He sat beside Diana, who seemed quite serene and confident.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Everything except my stomach.”

She regarded him with a smile. “I like you without your glasses. But then, I liked you with your glasses. You look like a confident winning coach without them.”

“What do I look like without my clothes on?”

“Shh, the kids will hear you.”

I
N THE LOCKER
room, after their preliminary warmups and stretching out on the court, Sam gathered the team.

“All right. We’ve lost to Twin Bridges twice this year—”

“Every year,” Tom said.

“Yes, well, I want you to wipe that off your brain pan. Totally erase it. This is a different world up here. These Afternoon games have a leveling effect, they’re jinxed, they’re booby-trapped. A lot of top seeds are upset on Thursday Afternoon at tournaments. So let’s take a shot at it.”

Sam glanced at Diana.

“I want to thank you for all your hard work,” he said. “You’re a great bunch of boys. We’ve had a good season, anything more will be the frosting.”

Sam paused and glanced into their faces. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, Coach,” Dean said. “What’s a brain pan?”

“It’s another way of saying memory, Dean.”

“Gosh, I never knew I had a brain pan.”

They all laughed a nervous, uptight laughter.

When they linked hands and raised their cheer, it echoed against the stoic concrete and rattled out the door ahead of them. With a trembling eagerness, they scrambled down the long corridor for the court, basketballs thudding and reverberating along the runway to the arena. Diana and Scott followed. Sam stood alone for a moment, took a deep breath, and glanced in the smudged wall mirror. He didn’t see a confident winning coach looking back at him. What he saw was the ghost of a man who had given in to loss.

In the sparsely occupied civic center—which could seat up to fifty-six hundred—where sound was sucked up by the yawning empty spaces, Sam groaned as the game got off to an inauspicious beginning. Both Twin Bridges and Willow Creek were trying too hard, a common thing to see in the first games at the tournament. Every boy on the floor—many of whom were awestruck by the immense building—had turned it up a notch, and the
effect manifested in leaden muscles, and wobbly legs where uptight athletes dropped balls they’d normally catch, miss shots they’d usually make, and throw passes into the stands.

By using Dean, Sam took each of the starters out for a minute to give each a new perspective of the game from the sideline. This tactic seemed to work, and as each of the regulars reentered the game, religiously passing Dean’s cap to the teammate he replaced, he had settled down to something closer to his normal performance. Sam instructed Dean to shoot whenever he had a shot, and the rattled freshman managed to shoot twice: one shot hit a referee in the head and did a one-bouncer onto a prostrate tuba of the Twin Bridges band, and the second hit high on the backboard and swished down through the net, making Dean the most surprised human being in North America.

At first, the Willow Creek followers appeared lost in the cavernous arena. Truly Osborn had driven a load of students and teachers, while Andrew had arranged a car pool out of the Blue Willow for anyone who wanted to come, tactfully seeing to it that Dean’s sister and mother rode with him and had tickets for all the games. Under the prompting of the three cheerleaders, the Bronc boosters were doing their best to generate enthusiasm and encourage the boys, and Sam had heard Axel’s “You betcha!” boom through a lull in the crowd noise.

At the half it was still close: Twin Bridges 41, Willow Creek 38. The boys were hitting their stride, but so was Twin Bridges. Sam couldn’t shake the knot of dread in his stomach. He attempted to convey a face of confidence to the team and keep the halftime locker room in a light mood. Diana checked Tom’s knee, which seemed to be holding its own.

Well into the third quarter the boys played heroically, beyond their talent and ability, and it tormented Sam that in his heart he’d given up, no longer believing they could win. Twin Bridges attacked Olaf with a frenzy, but it wasn’t Olaf’s third foul that alarmed the Willow Creek fans. Tom had picked up two quick fouls and was playing with four. Sam couldn’t make up his mind. They were staying with Twin Bridges and were three points ahead. If he took Tom out, it would save him for later in the game, but if they fell very far behind without him, which they undoubtedly would, it might be too late. He gambled and left Tom in the game.

It looked like a good move. Late in the third quarter Willow Creek was up by five. Then Tom went to the boards with Craig Stone, fighting for a rebound, and Tom was called for his fifth foul.

Tom came to the bench a raging bull. Sam had guessed wrong. The five boys tried to hold Twin Bridges off, but it was over when Tom went to the bench. The fourth quarter was a massacre and Twin Bridges had the reinforcements to overcome Willow Creek’s gutsy stand.

In the locker room, the boys were devastated and each blamed himself personally for the loss, as though a turnover, a missed shot, a failure at the free-throw line had alone determined the outcome. Tom stomped to the far end of the large dressing room and kicked his traveling bag against the wall. He picked up one of his J. Chisholm boots and threw it into the shower room.

“Goddamnit!” he shouted. “Goddamnit!”

He picked up the other boot and fired it into the lavatory where it splashed into a toilet. He paced from the lavatory to the shower room like a caged and crazed animal.

“I knew I had four fouls, why didn’t I let the rebound go? Why didn’t I play it cool? I blew it, and I can never go back. We could have beaten them!
Goddamnit!
” he shouted and he slammed himself down at the far end of the bench. He pulled off a Twilight Zone Pump and slammed it against the wall. He wanted to smash something, someone. He let that son of a bitch Stone beat them
three
times. Three times! And he’d never get another chance. Never get to play them again. He could hear his father, laughing at him, ridiculing him. For the rest of his life his goddamn father would stick it to him! He could never go home, never look his teammates in the eye.

Miss Murphy came into the locker room and told the other boys they’d done well, played hard.

God, he felt like he was drowning. He hated his father and he hated his knee that quit on him and he hated Twin Bridges.

Miss Murphy put her hand on his shoulder. “You did—”

“No!” he shouted and stood, jerking her hand away from him with such a fury that she backed up a step. He looked at all of them, scattered in the large room.

“I lost it. I let you all down and I’ll never be able to change that!” he
shouted. “So don’t give me any of that ‘You played well’ crap. I lost the game for all of you, for Willow Creek, and I can’t go back and do it over and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my goddamn life! So, please. No bullshit. Please …”

He sat back on the bench and pulled off his other shoe and threw it into a large plastic trash can. “Oh, God,” he said and he put his face in his hands. His knee hurt bad, it had been for weeks. He should have listened to the doctor. He could have avoided this neverending torture and humiliation. He could see the sneer on Craig Stone’s face when the ref whistled him for his fifth foul. Stone had won, again, and they both knew it.

He unwrapped his knee. It was swollen. It was throbbing and the pain ran up into his thigh. He dropped the elastic wrap on the floor. The boys were talking in hushed voices and avoiding him. They all knew he’d lost it. He had to stay in the game and he hadn’t. And how could he ever face his father? How could he bear that snarling laugh, mocking him and the team?

He pulled off his damp jersey and threw it into the corner. Coach Pickett came into the locker room. He walked straight to Tom and put his hand on his shoulder. Tom felt so bad, so terrible he couldn’t stand it. After all they’d done together, After all the hours of practice, he’d let them down. He buried his face in his hands. Miss Murphy knelt in front of him and gently held an ice pack on his knee.