One on one, p.27
ONE ON ONE, page 27
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
At the offensive end of the court, the other starters play passaround with the ball, refusing to complete the plays that would bring it inside to Sammy. The only consistency is their willingness to turn over the ball to Dyer’s Mills rather than feed it to him.
Intrigued, Reuben leans forward. How will Sammy handle his team falling apart? He sees the tensing of his son’s jaw, the narrowing of Sammy’s eyes, and then Sammy breaks out, stripping an intimidated Weaver guard of the ball to pump in a twelve-footer. As it drops through the net, he is on the move again, to the relieved outcry of the Greenspark fans. The Weavers’ big forward has possession for a fraction of a second before Sam relieves him of it again. Kiss the floor, pivot, hook it in and then he’s in the middle of traffic, most of it Weavers. The other Indian starters lollygag their way toward the Dyer’s Mills goal.
Coach calls the first time-out. Though he is bent to the circled players, Reuben can hear the rise and fall of his fury, and read in his vehement gestures the riot act he is delivering to hanging heads and sulky faces. He sits down the four laggards and sends Sammy back in with Rank, Michaud, Skouros and an inexperienced sophomore guard, Shane McCleary.
Billy Rank promptly founders in flop-sweat and cramps. Coach replaces him with Woods, who seems to have undergone a bench conversion to the ways of righteousness. Rick resumes his longtime partnership with Sammy and the Indians open a second-quarter comeback in which Sammy shoots three consecutive three-pointers.
The Greenspark fans come alive with the team. In Reuben’s lap, Indy is so stimulated by the rising decibels that she pumps her way to her feet and begins to bounce on his thighs. To protect himself from her enthusiasm—she has exhibited a talent for kicking her father in the worst place—Reuben lifts her to his shoulders. Her heels drum on his chest and she squeals with delight at the improved view. When the cheerleaders take the floor at the half, she quiets and Reuben slides her back into his lap. Pearl returns from the concession stand and swaps him a paper cup of Coca-Cola for the baby.
Whatever ass-torching Coach gave the boys in the locker room, it is immediately apparent when play resumes that it has only gotten the boys’ backs up. It begins to look like a replay of the first quarter. Sammy gives a signal that he wants to come out and Coach assents and sends in Fosse. The team begins to cohere, setting a screen against Dyer’s Mills that denies a score. Then Woods steals the ball. But the Weavers block out Fosse under the post and keep Greenspark from scoring in return. The Greenspark rally stalls.
Coach calls another time and replaces all five men with the end-of-the-second-quarter lineup. The signs of rout excite the Weavers. Though Dyer’s Mills cannot control him and Sammy scores steadily, the bench players are hampered by effective blocking and their own erratic shooting. Sammy and the Skouros kid succeed in controlling the Weavers at the post but the Weavers’ forward shoots consistently from the edge of the paint over the Greenspark defense, racking three-pointers to maintain the margin gained in the first.
Again Coach calls time and when play resumes, Sammy moves from the post to screen the Weavers’ long shooter. The change is effective; tall as he is, the Dyer’s Mills forward cannot get over or around him or even pass it consistently to other Weavers. This long-shooting Weaver is tiring, clearly just trying to hang on until the end and there is no one to replace him of comparable talent on his bench. With a minute on the clock, the Indians have stopped the Weavers with the score at 64–58, in the Weavers’ favor.
The seconds tick away while Skouros struggles for possession with a heavyset opponent, lays it up and then stands open-mouthed underneath the bucket, watching his nervous shot wobble agonizingly around the rim and then stagger off. Sammy blocks the Weavers trying for the rebound to let Skouros take it back himself, only to see the gangly sophomore fumble it and squirt it directly into the eager hands of the Weavers’ center. Somehow Skouros trips—over his own feet, apparently—and Sammy instinctively rises over him, leaving a shaken Skouros on the floor behind him.
It’s too late, Reuben knows, with a glance at the clock. There’s no way to close the gap.
The driving Weaver center reaches the paint at the other end of the court, dips to pump into his shot. Suddenly, with only four seconds remaining, Sammy is rising with him, his hands closing around the ball in the shooter’s hand. Heart in his throat, Reuben is on his feet without conscious volition. The stunned Weaver is suddenly empty-handed. Swiveling as he descends, Sammy hurls the ball toward the other end of the court. It cannot change the outcome of the game but he makes the shot anyway.
Reuben sees in Sammy’s face the knowledge that the shot is true. For an instant it sounds as if it is shrieking, and then Reuben realizes it is a girl—Gauthier, the razorhead—pealing with Amazon glee. Her voice blends into the buzzer and the heart-in-its-mouth roar of the crowd. The game is over at 64—61, and the Dyer’s Mills fans are on their feet, laughing and applauding Sammy. For them it has been the sweetest of victories, the defeat of a much more powerful team in the face of the extraordinary performance of the best of the opponents.
On the floor, Sammy stands alone, eyes searching the bleachers. Smiling, Reuben thrusts a clenched fist and Sammy tips his chin slightly in acknowledgment. Then Skouros lopes up to shake Sammy’s hand and pound his back, and after him, the other three who were on the floor. Coach comes from the bench to pat his jaw affectionately. Rick rises from the bench, hangdog and silent, along with the other miscreants.
“What happened?” Pearl asks Reuben. “I’ve never seen them play like that.”
“I’m not sure.” He takes the baby from her. “There’s been some squabbling. Sometimes winning spoils a team. Maybe this will wake them up and get them working together again.”
She is already fixed on Indy, cooing to her, snapping her into her snowsuit.
These things happen, Reuben assures himself. They’re all just kids. At least Sammy did his best. He’ll still be bummed about it; he won’t be able to help it. A sudden fierce welling of his love for his son surprises him. That shot! And those dinks—Rick, for heaven’s sake, who’s supposed to be Sammy’s best friend!—let Sammy down after all he’s done for them. And there’s nothing he can do but hope that his son is now strong enough to withstand the betrayal.
Windows blind with freezing condensate, the bus is running when Sam, the last player out of the showers and Dyer’s Mills High School, lopes through the cold night and pounds on the closed door for entry. The doors fold inward and Sam dives on board.
Coach rises to his feet.
“Think about it, boys,” he says, catching the back of the nearest seat as the bus lurches into motion, “think about it good and hard and make up your mind how bad you want to wear this uniform.”
Like his subdued teammates, Sam retreats to his headphones to consider the question. For once, it’s an easy one. Though he is consciously preparing himself to give it up in a few weeks, he still wants to wear the Greenspark uniform. The more fundamental question for him is, if he continues to wear it, will the final weeks be more of tonight?
How long will it be before Coach winkles out what the real source of trouble is between the team and him? What happens if—maybe when is the right word—someone in authority gets even a hint of the New Year’s Eve’s follies? If Rick’s heard, then doubtless there are rumors all over school—exaggerating Deanie Gauthier’s participation, unless she’s lying to him about it, which is more than likely. The thought nauseates him. The whole business is like a vulture circling overhead, sniffing for rancid meat. He has ominous feelings—aside from what suspicion and resentment and anger about it are doing to his team—but maybe it’s just a conversion of his own guilt about her.
Rubbing a little frost from the bus window, he tries to see the girls’ bus just ahead of them. The glow of the one taillight he can see is a red coal in the dark. Like a distant cigarette. Little spark.
The Mutant is waiting, crouched, shivering, beside his truck in the parking lot after the buses unload. The truck’s cab seems chillier than the out-of-doors, as if sitting in the parking lot all day it had stored up cold like an electrical charge. Drawing up the collar around her ears, she hunches inside her coat until only her eyes and the little cross-stitch of frown between the delicate arches of her eyebrows are visible underneath her headrag. Her teeth are gritted against the cold.
“That was an awesome shot. I know you’re not speaking to me but I have to say something about it, you know?”
Starting the truck, Sam does his own jaw-clenching against the cold. Once the engine turns over, he idles down and gropes for the windshield scraper under the seat. It takes a couple of minutes to debride the windows of the thin skin of ice that has formed. Respiration fogs the interior, blotting the Mutant into a vague deformed human shape within.
Behind the wheel again, Sam wipes his nose and hunches forward. The vents trip open and the fog on the windshield begins to shrink magically away. He helps the process along, rubbing himself a larger viewing port with the hem of his jacket sleeve.
“It won’t help anything. They’re more pissed at me than ever,” he says, picking up where she left off.
“What were you supposed to do? You played the best game you could. If they looked bad, it was their own frigging fault.”
He changes the subject. “You blew those babes away, you girls. You were great.”
“I heard somebody put a rat in your gym locker.”
“Yeah.”
“Heard it stank something wicked.”
He wrinkles his nose. “Did.”
“What’s gonna happen? With you and the team?”
“Dunno. I guess they don’t want to win quite so bad as they want to screw up.”
“Must cheese you off.”
“Hell yes,” he admits. “Nevermind. It’s just a game. I’m all done with it in another six weeks anyway. I still want you girls to get your title but I’m starting to give shit one whether we take another one. It might be better if I did quit.”
“Right, genius. That’s so dumb you had to have thunk it up yourself.”
“You know it’s around school about New Year’s Eve?” he asks.
“So? You think any of the suits who run the show will do anything? It’s a dead rat in a baggie to them. They don’t want the stink.”
She makes cartoons in the condensate on the window; he keeps his eyes on the road.
They are closing on the village before he speaks again, huskily. “Let’s go to the Mill.”
He glances away from the road at her. She pokes playfully at the basketball on the floor with her toe. Then worms herself into a straighter posture, her eyes gone darker, and sly as the night sky.
“Okay.”
The constriction in his chest lets go and he breathes again, and the air is warm and Mutant-smelling.
Instead of the parking lot at the Playground, he approaches the Mill from the opposite direction and finds an access road to the park near the end of Mill Street, where a strip of woods backs the abandoned structure. Outside the reach of streetlight, once he kills the truck’s lights, it blends into the darkness. Of course she knows the quickest way through the woods to the Mill. At the door, he takes the key from her.
“Stay behind me,” he tells her with a grin and she laughs.
As he opens it, she stays his reach for the light switch.
“Don’t. Somebody might see the lights leaking from those broken windows way up. Candles are safer.”
She stoops just inside the door to dig a stone from the wall. Behind it is a battered tin cookie box presently housing candle stubs, a box of kitchen matches and some E-Z Wider rolling papers.
“My old ladies never throw shit out. They had a shoebox full of candle stubs out in their shed, been there since nineteen-ought-who-gives-a-fuck. I kifed it. They’ll never miss’m.” As she lights one, she smiles with pleasure. The uncertain flicker over her face is unearthly and melting, as if she herself is an illusion of the flame. “I like the way they smell. Real beeswax. Sometimes I boost one of those fancy scented candles but these are the ones I mostly use.”
Handing him the burning stub, she closes the box and rises. For a moment, they look at each other and then she turns toward the cubby. Hesitantly, he follows the flicker of the candle into the vast darkness of the Mill.
Her eyes mirror the flame as she applies a match to the first stub, as if there were, deep inside her, a pair of tiny fires. Impassive as her face is, the effect is to make her less human than ever. If her eyes suddenly glowed fluorescent green, she could not look more unearthly to him.
While the coils of the space heater redden, she lights the candles and sets them around the closet-sized room. She unlaces and yanks off her high-tops. He goes so far himself and then they furl themselves on the mattress, waiting for the cubby to warm up. The smell of the melting beeswax is clean and churchy, with a tinge of burning wick. The tremulous candleflame gilds her skin and ripples on her chains like the setting sun on the wrinkled skin of the lake in summer. It throws tiger stripes of liquid honey and shadows dancing onto the walls.
“Good it’s cold,” he murmurs as much to himself as to her.
Waiting for the heater to bring the chill to something bearable, they have to go slow. He wants to go real slow, make it last. She hides her face in his jacket, her hands slipping under his layers of shirts, fingertips whispering over his nipples. They drift into a flurry of clumsy kisses. He forgets about going slow and makes a sudden assault, his tongue feeling enormous to him ramming past hers, making her gasp. Undoing the buttons of her coat, he cups her breasts inside her T-shirt and rocks against her thigh. For too many long moments, they are tangled in their clothing. By the time his jeans are around his ankles and she is wearing only chains, they are sweating with exertion. Her strong fingers close around his cock and draw him down between her legs again. He pushes the head of it against her and meets a maddening resistant heat. A second shove makes her cry out and yank his hair.
Impatiently she rolls up and goes down on him, mouthing his cock. She doesn’t suck him, just wets him thoroughly and flops back again. He grasps, with embarrassment, that she is still dry and this will take care of it. When she lies back, he uses his fingers first to make sure of his route. There is still resistance but it is less and he can’t stop anyway, is on the verge of emission, and the hard edge of her chains between them is exquisite. This is worth any amount of awkwardness and blushing. What a sweet machine, sweet machine is all he can think as he spurts what feels like his brains into her. And then her fingers are burrowed in his hair, lightly stroking the base of his skull. “It’s all right. No big deal.”
The words that irritated him before bring him an unexpected relief. Suckered to her with sweat, he shivers. He doesn’t need to ask if she made it, not after that performance. When he tries to apologize, she stops his mouth with quick fingertips.
“I’ll get better,” he promises. “We’ll get better.”
She pays no attention. “You know how long it’s been since I had a cigarette?”
From the sweet taste of her mouth, not this day, but of course it’s a rhetorical question.
“I miss it most after sex. In fact, it’s the best thing about it.”
His rueful laugh brings her eyes to his face.
“Oh Jesus, here we go again,” she says.
He clamps a hand over her mouth. “Please, don’t let’s start bitching on each other.”
She peels his hand off her mouth. “I’ll say what I want.”
For a quiet moment he just looks at her. Then he walks his fingers from her flank up over her hipbone to her stomach and begins to tickle her. Shrieking, she tries to wriggle away but he is still inside her. He pins her casually with his body and fills her mouth with his tongue to still her whooping. Her gasping into his mouth is as stimulating as her squirming body. When he stops tickling her, she continues to laugh, swept along with his foolishness, getting a kick out of his being turned on again by a childish bout of wrestling. The giggling fades except for an occasional shudder as they begin to move together again.
When he looks in her eyes, the widening pool of her pupils pleases him. The candleflames are gone; her eyes reflect him. He tugs at her headrag until her stubbled skull is cupped in his hands and he lays his cheek against it, listening to the shortening rhythm of her breathing, feeling the royal-blue pulse at her naked temple under his thumb. She surrenders suddenly with a strangled sound and begins to shudder. Burying himself deeply, he lets the churning rush take him.
“Did you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I guess I was close. It went away.”
“That’s good, then,” he encourages her. “Next time, maybe. Soon anyway.”
She might as well be wearing an ivory mask for all the reaction her face shows. He doesn’t want to let go of her. Her body feels rounder and sleeker to him, more female. He dips the tip of his tongue into the cleavage between her breasts. Go all night, he thinks. Working this sweet machine. By morning they’d be a puddle of sweat and come. Melted tigers. Bottle it up and sell it as an aphrodisiac.
“Meet me here tomorrow night? I’ll be out of work by ten.”
She shrugs. “Okay.”
As they tromp through the woods to the truck, she pelts him with a snowball, a challenge he cannot resist. She jumps him from behind, puts a handful of the cold wet stuff down the back of his neck and they tumble into the snow. She straddles him while they scrub each other’s faces with it. He begins to lick the trickle of melt down her face and they are in the midst of another make-out session.
“Oooo, Samgod, ‘it’s too frigging cold for this shit.’” She shivers violently against him.
“ ‘Come on, it feels good,’” he teases.
He helps her to her feet, then sweeps her off them and carries her, kicking and giggling, to the truck.
