One on one, p.31
ONE ON ONE, page 31
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
She linked up all the iron hoops,
She smoked up all the rope,
She tried to eat the basketball
But it wouldn’t go down her throat.
He sits up abruptly, wide awake. The bus is warm with bodies but the window next to him is a plane of chilly damp. He shivers.
“It wouldn’t go down her throat,” he mutters groggily.
“I bet,” Rick says. “Be a brave wench to even try.”
Sam stretches and rolls his head and then slumps against the window again, fingertips to the cold condensate beading there. “The basketball,” he says. “The basketball.”
“Well”—Rick grins—“if we’re talking about the Mutant, you had the right idea.”
Under the lights her bald head gleams disconcertingly among the frizzies and curls and satiny bouncy heads of hair of the other girls. She looks like a baby buzzard, with her thin neck and the bulbous curve of her skull and her dark fierce eyes. Her mascara and eyeliner run as she sweats, in dirty tears and streaks. She uses the bottom of her tunic to wipe her face and smears the dirt around until it is a faded war paint. At the foul line, she sinks a little, then rises from flexed knees to take the shot and even as he notes her form, his knowledge of her body disturbs Sam in the most distracting way.
“Relax,” Rick murmurs, nudging him. “The babes’ll pull it out.”
The foul shot bounces off the glass and falls away. She spins away, going for the rebound, and shoots another air ball. It is a relief to have the action reverse toward Mount Grace’s goal.
“Come on, Bigger,” Rick urges, “time to change.”
In the locker room, they hear the buzzer and the outburst from the Greenspark fans. Sam grins and Rick describes triumphant circles with a closed fist.
As the girls pass the boys on the way to their locker room, Sam offers Deanie a high five. She looks right through him. They have barely spoken since Tuesday night. Though he’s continued to chauffeur her, he keeps the volume up on the music and conversation is no more than the barest exchange of necessary information. Loping onto the floor with his teammates, it hits him with a jolt that what’s going on between him and Deanie is eerily like the tight-lipped tension he recalls between his parents back when they were married.
Their baggy red uniforms flapping around their skinny white legs, the Demons look woefully boyish. This team is very young and green. Sam sits out much of the game, watching Greenspark’s juniors and sophomores try out what they have been learning. Joey Skouros, at big forward, looks better and better to him. On the bus ride home, he will suggest to Coach that Joey has the makings of a center. Though Pete Fosse is supposed to replace Sam at that position when Sam graduates, it wouldn’t hurt to have Joey ready to back up and eventually replace Pete. Among the sophomores, there are two other candidates for big forward so the bench would be deep at all positions.
On the bus, after successfully bending Coach’s ear, he takes his seat next to Rick.
Rick stretches comfortably. “Sarah rented a couple vids, Sambo. Why don’t you come over and watch them with us? My dad’s got the late shift and Mom’ll go to bed by eleven so we don’t have to cover our eyes during the gushy kissing scenes and we can OD on popcorn.”
“Sure you and Sarah wouldn’t rather be alone?”
“Of course we would. You’re the next best thing, doofus. For some weird reason, my mother is under the impression Sarah and me won’t do anything to offend your boyish modesty.”
“So if it looks like Sarah’s going to try to jump you, I should throw myself bodily between the two of you?”
“Nothing that heroic, bud. Just keep your eyes on the tube and if we’re a long time in the kitchen, just assume we’re popping a shitload of corn.”
Sam frowns. “You know how many people die choking on popcorn every year?”
Rick wraps his hands around Sam’s throat and pretends to throttle him while Sam shows the whites of his eyes and sticks out his tongue.
“Maybe,” Sam finally accedes.
As the bus backs into the parking slot behind Greenspark Academy, Sarah calls and waves from the window of Rick’s car.
“Ain’t that nice,” Rick smirks. “Baby’s got it all warmed up for me.”
The girls’ bus pulls in behind them. Sam lopes to his truck to start it, get the heater going. As he shivers behind the wheel, the Mutant cuts past his truck, headed for the main road. How could she miss him? The truck hasn’t moved since she got out of it in the morning. He toots the horn at her and she fails to respond, so he does it again, more urgently, but she doesn’t even look his way. All at once he is certain she is shanking him so she can meet Chapin somewhere and go partying.
He pulls up next to her and rolls down the truck’s window. “Come on, Deanie.”
She answers him with a rigid middle digit.
Spinning the truck into a swooping turn in front of her, he leaps out in her path as she swerves to go around it.
“Get in the truck!” He tries to sound amused but it comes out faked and edgy.
Gritting her teeth, she zigzags. He makes a wall of himself. She loses her grip on her gear as she struggles to evade him and immediately they are a tangle of feet and canvas, grappling at each other to stay upright.
“Get in the goddamn truck!” he commands.
Laughter and catcalls reverberate around them from exuberant students in the process of departure. Sarah and Rick are distracted from their necking in the front seat of his car to watch.
The knowledge that they have a large avid audience does nothing for Sam’s equanimity. Seizing her gear, he heaves it into the cab of the truck. When she spins to stalk away, he catches her by the arm and waist and yanks her into her own momentum, so she falls back against him.
“Slug her one, Sambot!” one of the Jandreau twins yells and raises a supporting chorus, Nat among them.
Her eyes go blank and she stiffens in his arms. He is stricken for her, furious with whichever bitch-twin set it off and the others too for participating and enraged with himself for not just leaving her be. He boosts her bodily into the truck. Jumping in behind her, he slams his own door and stretches over her to lock the right-hand door. She crawls away from him, slipping to the floor of the cab.
“Stop it! I’m not going to hit you. I’d never hit you.” Tightening his grip on the wheel convulsively, he stares over it and mutters, “Might kill you, though.” He glances at her. “I don’t mean that, it’s a joke.”
She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Crawling onto the seat, she puddles there like a discarded rag.
“What is this shit? You’ll get sick again. I don’t mind taking you home.”
“Don’t put yourself out,” she spits at him. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”
Tight-lipped, Sam puts the truck in gear and turns it for the road.
Her body rigid with fury, she screams at him, “How would you like to be yelled at and pushed around and have those assholes screaming at somebody to beat you up?”
“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen. I’m sorry. They didn’t mean it either. They’re blowing off, that’s all. I just want you to be sensible and let me take you home so you won’t get sick again. Jesus, Deanie, you got nothing on your feet but those shitty sneakers and there’s three, four inches of wet slush on the sides of the road.”
She answers with a sullen thump of her sneakers to his dashboard. After a long silence, she shivers and reaches for his lunch bucket. “Right. I forgot you’re a frigging saint.”
For a moment she concentrates on stuffing half a sandwich. She slurps some tea that must be at best lukewarm from his Thermos, and then starts peeling a banana. She sniffs. “Think they’ll use any game footage on the news tonight?”
The smell of banana brings saliva to Sam’s dry mouth and he gestures to her to share.
“Maybe. You did good.” He stops himself from bringing up the errors he noticed. She is already sore at him and she takes criticism unpredictably. Better hold it until practice.
Walking on her knees, she crosses the seat to put a lump of banana into his mouth. His stomach lurches at the touch of her fingers on his mouth. She stays there, feeding herself, then him, fingertips gooey and sweet, pushing the chunks of fruit between his lips. Her chains ripple under streetlight against her cheek and the lower ones sway with the slight movement of her body as she balances against the motion of the truck. The slick glob of banana clogs his throat and he nearly strangles getting it down. Her hand falls to his thigh and she leans against him, breast against his jacketed arm.
The wet black road is streaked watery red from taillights ahead of him. He feels blinkered, unable to see anywhere but straight ahead. The road just goes on and on, a meaningless slick ribbon through the night. Her touch, her proximity confuses him, panicking him with the knowledge of his susceptibility. The turn comes quickly and he takes the truck to the secluded parking spot he has used on previous trysts.
She offers the last piece of banana and he opens his mouth for it and she pushes it between his lips, rolling her fingers against his mouth and into it and he sucks at the gummy sweetness and she takes them out and her mouth is on his, her tongue and his mashing the soft sweet lump of fruit. It breaks up into a cloying stickiness and he tears his face away from her and pushes her off him.
She shrugs. “I’m going to the Mill anyway. Tony worked the day shift this week so they’ll be wasted by now. I don’t want to go home until they’re under the table.”
While it’s a relief to hear her say she wasn’t going out partying, the matter-of-factness of her plan chills him. He feels stupid for seeing their use of the Mill as a kind of vandalism when the place is her refuge. With the jeering in the school parking lot hardly faded from his ears, he finds the thought of her spending the rest of the night alone in the ruined Mill by herself horrible. But if he goes with her, they will have sex again, or try to, yes they will.
He comes to an abrupt decision. They can go to Rick’s house later.
Dragging her gear behind her, she slips out of the cab without another word and picks her way through the brush to the path through the dark woods. He closes his eyes for a second and when he opens them, she’s gone. Hastily, he kills the ignition and yanks a flashlight from the glovebox.
Blundering through punky snow into the trunks of trees and tangles of brush, he feels as if he is fighting his way through a wall of thorns. A frozen stick cracks loudly under his foot and he realizes he’s sweating as violently as if he were in a losing overtime.
As before, she has chosen her candles over the electric light and there is a glow from the watchman’s cubby. When he fills up the doorway, she looks up, unsurprised, from unlacing her ties. He clicks off the flashlight and sets it on the counter. When he turns to her, she holds out her hands. He moves toward her, drawing her close. He gasps at the pressure of her chains rolling over him. For once, her urgency is as great as his.
“Do it,” he begs her and she gasps and claws at him.
Momentarily he’s lost in the shellburst of his own orgasm. She still struggles in its lee and he tries to help, continuing to move in her, but soon they concede to the recession, the ebbing of arousal. Her head rests against his chest as his heart slows again to a mundane rhythm. If he could take her there—he doesn’t know what would happen but surely something would change, something fundamental.
“I have to work a double shift tomorrow. You want to try to meet here Sunday afternoon? Work on your foul shot? I’ll buy us a take-out lunch and we’ll picnic.”
Her eyes shine. He likes that. If it weren’t so late, he’d take her to Rick’s. Next time he gets the chance. No big deal. Just Deanie’s with him—sometimes. A friend of his, whatever else happens between them, and so he expects any other friend to treat her decently. Those assholes in the parking lot will just have to eat it and smile to his face.
At the edge of the supermarket parking lot, Sergeant Woods smokes a no-count cigarette in his cruiser. He waggles a flipper at Sam as the truck passes—maybe he’s only encouraging smoke out the open window.
The baby’s crying leaks down the back stairs to the kitchen as Sam lets himself into the house. His stepmother’s bare feet pad the polished hardwood floor of the upstairs hall and then the baby gurgles and hiccups to her shushing.
He urinates in the downstairs bathroom and is surprised by a hot stinging. Wincing, he glances at his cock resting on his forefinger. Red and chafed. The stinging’s hard use, he assures himself. Just like when he first began masturbating to orgasm, he did it so often he had some water trouble too. Scared himself silly, thinking he’d broken something.
But she tricks with Chapin, Chapin takes it where he can get it, from Karen among others—or so the creep claims and it’s at least possible—which brings up the grotesque potential of a daisy chain of infection connecting brother and sister. How could he be so stupid? I’m on the Pill, she tells him, and that’s all he pays any mind to, as if knocking her up is the only thing to fret.
Suddenly he wants to shower, as if it would make any difference if she’s given him the clap or something. In any case, the baby’s just settling down and the racket of the water in the tin shower stall might disturb her. He draws warm water into the basin and gives himself a GI bath, wincing at the burn of soap lather in minute abrasions on his skin. No problem, no big deal, nothing but fucking his brains out. Please.
When he comes out of the bathroom, he is surprised by his father, standing in his pajama pants in the middle of the living room with the TV clicker in his hand, evidently on a mission to catch the late news. Still buttoning his jeans, Sam is taken with a violent guilty blush that worsens with the sudden quirk in his father’s smile.
“You had a good game.”
“Yeah.” He grabs the newel post and pivots around it.
“Sammy,” Reuben says.
He stops, not looking back. Can’t show his face to his father’s X-ray vision again.
Reuben sighs. “Nevermind. Goodnight.”
Muttering a goodnight he is certain his father does not hear, Sam takes himself upstairs.
25
Gathered at the meetinghouse in the early morning, there is the continuing sense of reservation, of waiting on something, even though they pulled together for the previous night’s game. Rick arrives a little late, with Billy Rank. Fosse, Gramolini and Bither turn penetrating disdainful glares on Billy and he falters. Rick’s hand, casual and reassuring, cups his substitute’s elbow.
“Hey Bigger,” Pete says, “I see you slugging the Mutant around the parking lot, I wondered maybe she put that scratch on your nose last week?”
“Come on, Peteybird,” Gramolini chides, “she never fought it in her life.”
Pete squints at Sam. “Yeah—but you forget they’re into S & M. Looks like a bite mark to me. She must a tried to bite off his nose when they were working each other up sometime.”
“How is she?” Bither demands. “Tell us about it, Sambot.”
Sam flat-palms the ball into Bither’s chest. “Hear you talking, all you studs, I got the idea you wrote the book on her.”
They laugh but it has a nervous edge. “Hey,” Rick says, “I gotta be at work by eleven. Can we get started?”
Relieved, they fall to the work at hand.
When they all repair to the diner to fuel up, Rick and Sam find stools next to each other, at the corner of the counter. This breakfast is the first food Sam has had since sharing the banana with Deanie after the game and missing his supper to take her to the Mill. Like the first snowflakes in November, the first mouthfuls increase the sense of emptiness with the realization of how much it will take to fill the void. He concentrates on chowing down.
Swallowing the last of his toast, Rick asks if Sam has gotten a date from the DMV for his bike license test. With a mournful shake of his head, Sam allows the DMV is still being coy.
“Frigging shame,” Rick commiserates. “Gorgeous machine like that just sitting idle.”
“Weather sucks for bike-riding anyway,” Sam points out.
Rick lowers his voice. “Thought you were coming to my house last night.”
Contemplatively Sam wipes toast through egg yolk. “Didn’t think you and Sarah needed me.”
“We didn’t.” Rick toys with a fork, stabs suddenly into Sam’s sausage links and boots one. “So what happened with you and Gauthier after the knock-down drag-out in the parking lot? You take her somewhere and kill her, or dick her, or what?”
Sam lifts an eyebrow. “That’s some choice.”
“Come on.” Rick belches gently. “See a couple who fight as much as you and Gauthier do and they keep on hanging around each other, it’s gotta be a turn-on.”
Wiping his mouth, Sam folds his napkin neatly next to his clean plate. “Slick, get a life of your own, will ya?”
Bringing in the mail, Reuben frisbees the envelope with the DMV return address across the garage to Sam, who drops a wrench on the floor to catch it.
When Sam rips it open, he groans. “Look at the date!”
Glancing at it, Reuben laughs. “Tournament week. Have to reschedule.”
Nothing to get shook about, considering there are long cold nasty weeks to hump through to spring, itself basically more long cold nastiness with mud instead of snow and ice. Before May, won’t be more than one or two good bike days like found coins on a wet sidewalk. It doesn’t stop Sam sitting right down to make out the form for a new date, though it won’t go out in the mail until Monday.
Just before closing, Sam steps into the lavatory, props himself one-armed against the wall over the bowl and makes a pass at voiding. With his eyes closed prayerfully, he produces a painless stream and breaks into a weak grin.
