One on one, p.15
ONE ON ONE, page 15
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
Then he hurries to lobby the cafeteria boss, Mrs. Hobart, to hold the job open. He makes a powerful argument: everyone knows how valuable the Mutant is to the girls’ team. She really needs the job. The fattening up. If she needed to eat before, coming back from pneumonia, it could be crucial.
Mrs. Hobart’s a soft touch for a sob story, especially if it comes from a growing boy. They’re all puppies to her, hanging around the kitchen wagging their tails for crumbs and handouts. Teasing him about his ponytail, she tucks a couple of brownies into Sam’s shirt pocket.
“Take care of that cold yourself,” she admonishes him. “You kids.”
Everything short of redemption, promises the label on the liquid cold medicine Sam slips out to the pharmacy to pick up after school. What matters is it won’t make him drowsy. The dosage chart doesn’t cover his size so he doubles the high end. Tastes—yuck—like it should turn him into a frog. Though he feels weirdly light-headed, the potion gets him through the two hours of drills, patterns and scrimmage in real time instead of slow motion.
All of the distaff Indians except, of course, the absent Mutant, are hanging out after their practice to watch the boys. Not cheering, not flirting anymore. Scouting. It makes him grin inside.
While the truck warms up, he gulps another double shot of old Froggie’s glug. The nasty taste makes him decide he’s definitely mutating into a frog. A two-hundred-thirty-five-pound (thereabouts) six-foot-ten-inch (start of the season) frog, with his mouth and throat all glassy with this fermented-fly-flavored muck. Skin cold and damp, he sure feels green inside and out.
He runs his tongue out and flicks it around at an imaginary insect. Froggie went a courtin’, he did go, Unh Huh, unh huh. Time to hop down the road to Center Slime, back to the old Pond, the old lily pad. Hope he doesn’t get squished by an eighteen-wheeler. Already he feels very flat, oozing and leaking onto the pavement, an attractive treadmark ironed down his leathery back. The right tape comes easily to hand; the Buzzcocks croak and thump from his speakers.
The road seems strangely empty without the Mutant. He feels like he’s forgetting something, not picking her up. Abruptly it strikes him he doesn’t know how she gets to school in the mornings. Four miles between Depot Street and the high school at the edge of town. The buses don’t roll early enough for her to make the early session in the gym, of course. Sometimes she gets out of Chapin’s Sunbird, sometimes out of Shasta’s rolling wreck of a Chevelle, but the morning she was outdoors on the court so early, she was all by herself and he doesn’t recall either of those vehicles being in the lot. She must walk, at least some of the time.
He should go see her. Make sure she’s all right, or as all right as she can be, with pneumonia. Bring her a box of dead flies. There are things he really has to say to her. But let it go today. Let her rest and get better. Go home and take care of his own cold. He’ll go see her tomorrow. The hell with her mother’s boyfriend. The way Sam feels, the thought of thumping some asshole’s head into a wall has considerable appeal.
Next day brings a home with Chamberlain.
The Chamberlain girls—the Lady Colonels—blitz Greenspark in the first quarter. Without the Mutant, the girls seem unfocused. At the half, the Indians are trailing significantly. When Melissa Jandreau takes a tumble, her sister, coach and assistant coach bend over her anxiously.
Sam wedges himself in behind the girls’ bench and leans on Nat and Billie.
“You’re letting them get to you,” he tells the two girls. “Gauthier’s gonna be out awhile. You gonna have to do it without her. Get your shit together. Billie, get your head up. Where was your concentration when Mellissa made that pass? You acted like you never saw a ball before and you got stripped, didn’t you? Why aren’t you setting screens? Now calm down, tighten up, and tell the babes you lose this game and tomorrow morning I’m gonna shave your heads and put rings in your noses.”
Nat and Billie laugh and they give him high fives and take his threat to the team huddle.
Among his own team, Sam thumps up some bleacher support. It helps that the guys are feeling restless and frustrated at the way the game is going for the girls. It’s child’s play to kick-start the kind of rowdy obstreperous mood they had the night of the Ravenswood wins.
When the girls go to the floor again on a wave of manic enthusiasm from the boys, the girls’ coach crooks a finger at Sam.
“Who made you assistant coach?” she growls but she’s got a twinkle in her eye.
It gets brighter as Greenspark rallies.
Frogged out on cold medicine, Sam croaks and stamps in the bleachers.
From the locker room as the boys change for their game, they hear the uproar as the clock counts down the final few seconds on the end of the girls’ contest: someone has pulled Greenspark ahead at last. Then the cheers of triumph falter and flutter away. The team manager slams into the locker room and kicks a locker in frustration.
“I don’t friggin’ believe it!” he screams. “Chamberlain scored on a wild throw from the side with five seconds to go! One goddamn point!”
Sam is as stunned at the reaction of his own team as he is at the heartbreaker. They go berserk, as if it were their loss. What has he wrought? The explosion of anger is phenomenal. Even more startling is its object.
“That fucking Mutant!” Pete Fosse curses. “You know what the bitch did this weekend! Partied her whorin’ ass off!”
Rick Woods drop-kicks a sneaker over the rank of lockers. “Freakin’ little burn. They should kick her off for letting her team down.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Sam objects. “She’s sick. She’s got pneumonia. I checked on it myself.”
Kevin Bither crouches like a gargoyle on the bench.
“Bullshit,” he snarls. “What world you livin’ in, Sambot? You think she’s gonna admit she was at Dickie Bouchard’s with Chapin? Everybody knows she was, everybody knows she got so wasted, she fucking passed out.”
“Everybody knows shit,” Sam answered. “Anybody else here go to Bouchard’s, actually witness any of this famous partying?”
In the subsequent silence, Gramolini tosses Rick his high-flying sneaker.
Hauling it on, Rick leans close to Sam. “Saturday night at the dance, Slammer. You weren’t there on account of you had that Bible reading to do? Chapin was bragging on how bad they got fragged Friday night.”
“Chapin likes to talk. Everybody likes to talk. It’s a frigging shame the girls lost tonight. Maybe they would have anyway.”
His team is distressingly sullen. Their faces, their shoulders, all say they think otherwise.
“An average game, she’s a twenty-point shooter, Sambot,” Bither says. “Get fucking real. That’s twenty points the girls didn’t have tonight. It could have been a nineteen-point win.”
“Hey, bud, all right,” Sam soothes. “That game’s over. We gotta play our own now.”
In the bleachers, Reuben glances at Pearl. Indy is quiet in her lap, concentrating on her fob of plastic keys. Pearl looks up at him with an encouraging smile.
He’d be a liar to pretend that how the girls do means as much to him, though Gauthier makes their games interesting. They don’t seem to have be able to do it without her—though to be fair, they all look tougher than they did last season. He could swear they have picked up some moves from the boys.
With their faces tight, the Greenspark boys take the floor. All tensed up, except for Sammy. As always, Reuben is struck with the change in his son that occurs when the kid steps onto a basketball court. His very frame seems to enlarge and he moves differently. His face changes. Though it is more masculine, more adult in its planes and shadows, there is an eerie transparency to it that evokes the six-year-old Sammy, with an angelic tranquility to his features.
Right from the tip, though, Sammy seems a little off. A tick slow, and widening his eyes and blinking every once in a while. Probably his damned head cold getting to him. Rick Woods comes on strong. Gramolini’s hot, able to take the ball whenever Rick and Sam can get it to him, to do the necessary. A minute and a half into it, Kasten twists an ankle and Coach replaces him with that goofy kid, Skouros. He looks like some particularly stupid moose mistook his mother for a cow, but shows instinct and guts in the big guard position. Bither at small forward flubs a couple of free throws after being fouled.
While the Colonels double-team Sammy, the other four Greenspark starters outplay their trio of Chamberlain defenders. Sammy amuses himself playing to his guards, faking them out with an exhibition of tripping on his own feet. They are under the Greenspark post, players weaving among each other, when Gramolini dishes off to Rick, Rick rises from the floor to bop the ball in midair toward Sammy, and Sammy’s there, one enormous hand thrust casually overhead as he pistons upward, his guards falling away like rocket boosters. Their faces are caricatures of surprise. Gently he taps the ball and it drops through the hole.
The tally is not two but three. A Chamberlain guard has fouled Sammy in trying to block him. The ref calls a free shot and Sammy makes it. Chagrined and desperate, Chamberlain goes to triple-teaming Sammy and he settles down to making sure they foul him repeatedly. He makes most of his next quarter’s points at the free-throw line. While the Chamberlain guards rack up fouls, the only real gain for them is exchanging an occasional three-pointer for Sam for two at the line.
Toward the end of the quarter, Rick goes out for a rest. Coming in for him, Billy Rank makes two turnovers out of sheer nerves. Gramolini goes nuts on the second one, hotly dressing down Billy right there. A hastily called time-out to cool out Gramolini and steady Billy down gives Chamberlain a chance to regroup too.
After halftime, Sammy comes out of the locker room with a loopy grin on his face. He just squirts from between his guards whenever he wants. With every pass and shot, his tongue seems to flicker after the ball. Making a baseline jump, when his feet touch the floor again, he takes a couple of hops. The last huck he takes is at the post, and his thighs piston, driving him up and up and up, until he reaches out and drops the ball into the hopper. When he comes down, he grabs the rim with both hands and hangs there, a goofy ecstasy spreading over his features. A wild speculation lights his eyes and he rolls his eyes back in his head as if he is trying to see the backboard—contemplating swinging up and over to kick off it and into a backflip to land neatly on all fours at center court. Instead he chins himself a couple of times and drops to the floor.
Amid the crowd roar, Reuben’s own laughter fades and he glances at Pearl. She cocks her head at him, squinches up her features quizzically.
On the bench, Sammy buries his face in a towel while a Chamberlain player shoots the technical Sammy has earned for hanging on when it wasn’t necessary to avoid injury. It has no effect on the outcome of the game. At the buzzer, Chamberlain is down seventeen points. And Sammy seems to reel through the ritual courtesies to Chamberlain before bolting for the locker room.
Hugging his cramping guts, Sam vomits horror-movie green bile violently into a John. There is a weird tickle in his nose and when he sneezes, projectiles of vile mucous gout simultaneously from mouth and nose and the pressure behind his eyes is instantly gone.
Staggering to his feet, he finds Coach and the AC and his teammates standing there, staring at him. Hot-eyed, but otherwise cold and clammy to his bones, he grins.
“It isn’t easy being green,” he croaks.
Coach pats his shoulder and nudges him toward the showers.
“Better stay with him,” Coach tells Rick. “Don’t let him faint in there.”
While Rick strips hastily, Sam wanders fully dressed into the showers. Rick yanks him out and makes him take his high-tops off. Uniform covered in lurid glory and still in his socks, Sam drifts under the nozzle again. He raises his face and opens his mouth to the sweet water that sluices away the coat of slimy nastiness that seems to go all the way down his throat and all the way up into his nasal passages. Ten minutes later, Rick pushes him gently out from under the showerhead.
Sam confides in Rick. “Froggie went a courtin’, unh hah.”
Rick flings a towel over Sam’s head. “Get a grip on it, Sambo. You’ll be pissing in a bottle, you don’t calm down.”
“Just a horny toad,” Sam mumbles.
His friend shakes his head. “Man, oh man. Come on, you don’t need a chill on top of that cold.”
By the time he’s dressed, Sam can assure Coach he is fine. He is. He feels much better, gut empty, clearheaded. A little tired. He’s purged the poison. He just needs to go home and sleep about ten hours.
Outside, Nat Linscott’s little Honda is next to the truck. She rolls down the window. “Are you really gonna shave heads tomorrow?”
“No. Not over one wild shot.”
She giggles with relief, waves, and whips up the window.
Rick nudges him. “I think she’s warm for you, dude. What’s this shit, shaving heads?”
Rick’s teasing but Sam nevertheless experiences a certain slimy shiver at the thought of Nat being warm for him. Distracted, he admits the threat.
“You’re a very sick man,” Rick says. “You developing a fetish for bald chicks? We got one too many around here, you ask me. I never thought I’d hear you defending some druggie burn. Not you. She let her team down, Sambo.”
“She’s sick.”
“Yeah, yeah. Made herself sick—if she really is.”
Leaning against the side of the truck, Sam closes his eyes in weariness. It feels so weird, knowing for sure it’s no con because he was with her when she was prancing around half-naked in the cold. Be a miracle if she hadn’t gotten pneumonia right then, nevermind whatever partying she did later. He isn’t up to debating with Rick. It isn’t just a matter of protecting himself from embarrassment or declining anything that sounded like braggadocio. What had happened was between them; she owned it as much as he did.
“Hey, get your ass on home,” Rick advises, as he heads for his car, where Sarah is checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror. “Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah.”
He recognizes the bleary-eyed woman at the door as the chainsmoking clerk from the convenience store. Before she can organize herself to ask his business, a man shoulders her aside.
Tony. Shas had called him Tony. Mr. Buttcheese. Sam lets his mind drift, the way Romney taught him to do when he finds himself unable to remember something. Unplugging himself adds to the perception he is slow and of course at this moment his mouth is open so he can breathe, but the method works. He pulls the rest of Tony’s name from nowhere. Tony Lord.
“What d’y want?”
Lord is beefy, muscle going to fat but plenty of power left in his veined forearm. The man is freshly shaven and his work pants are clean, suggesting he is on a night shift. Headed to work or not, his breath is beery; he has a can in his right hand.
On the verge of extending his hand and introducing himself, Sam realizes civility is a futile effort. “Stopped to check on Deanie.”
Lord thrusts his square, dented chin out at him. “You’re a big bastid. Styles’ boy, aren’t you? No doubt about it, I’d say. Went to school with your old man. He’s a big bastid too.”
“Right,” Sam agrees.
He has been hearing much the same commentary since he can remember. Even as a little boy, he had been the biggest little boy in the county.
“How’s Deanie?”
“She’s sick. I had a dog sounded like her, I’d put a slug in its head.”
Lord turns toward the woman, who has drifted back to the couch and stares at the tube. “Turn that fucking box down, Jude! How’m I s’posed to be able to think with that faggot screeching?”
The woman quickly points a clicker at the television and shoots down the volume.
“Where was I? You wanna beer?” The offer is automatic, distracted.
“No thanks.” Still standing in the doorway, Sam peers past the man into the small house. It’s poorly lit and there’s little to see. Woman in front of the tube, a dinette and kitchen appliances on the other side of the room, a rickety stairway, a couple of doors, to a bathroom, to the cellar, to a shed maybe. The place smells like a party the morning after, stale cigarettes and booze—the man’s beer, the hard stuff the woman’s knocking back, and the odor of stale empties from a trash bag slumped on the kitchen floor like an alcoholic Santa’s forgotten sack. There’s another smell, the one underneath all the others, far worse than any of the fetid odors in the dark corners of the Mill. He can’t put a name to it but he’s smelled it before and it makes his already queasy stomach reel.
“I’m on my way home. Just stopped for a minute.”
The man empties the can in his grip and crushes it. He looks at it thoughtfully. “Yeah, well. Waste a your time, buck.”
The creak of a hinge draws Sam’s eye to the wall under the stairway. The Mutant huddles in the crack of the door, her hand tight on the knob as if the door were a shield. She’s smaller and thinner, in a pair of boy’s flannel pajamas printed with cowboys and Indians on a faded red ground. She hasn’t shaved her head in several days and her skull’s covered with a dark fuzz, like a newborn’s. Eyes huge with fever, she is chainless and barefoot.
Any worry of an embarrassing surge of lust for her is ludicrous. It seems impossible he ever felt an instant’s horniness for this sick waif, let alone ever touched her intimately.
She snuffles. “Whatcha want?”
A beer, Sam thinks. A case of it. A tall hot redhead. A smile. Jesus, anything but to be here.
“How are you?”
Shuffling her feet, she shrugs. “How’d it go?”
Sam hesitates. “Girls lost by one point.”
Her pale face tightens. “Oh.”
“Guys won.”
“The goddamn door’s open,” Lord says. “We’re heating the fucking outadoors here, buck.”
Sam steps inside and closes the door.
