One on one, p.40
ONE ON ONE, page 40
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
J.C. drops her wrist hastily and springs to his feet.
“Chill out, baby.”
“Get out of here, you chickenshit,” she spits, her voice rising. “Now!”
Scooping up his books, he’s gone. She huddles under the blanket and listens to the rapid squeak of his expensive high-tops propelling him down the corridor.
With no reason to trust the law to protect her from Tony’s vengefulness, any more than it ever protected her from his abuse, she is only too aware of how much she needs ‘god’s muscle between her and Tony. She hates the way J.C. makes it seem calculating. It’s survival. It’s about as calculating as grabbing a life ring in heavy seas. J.C. Over the surface of the bandage, her fingers trace the line of her wound. Mouth trembling, she feels her eyes leaking.
The magazine flops open in Deanie’s hand to the right page. Dr. Spellman peers at the photograph. She looks up and smiles. “You’re very determined.”
The girl smiles crookedly.
“This fellow, what’s-his-face, he’s a professional athlete. This is his living, his career. You’re just sixteen, playing a high school sport.” Before she finishes the observation, the doctor’s tone slides into frustrated resignation. She sighs and asks Sam to wait outside.
He wanders back to the reception area and finds a corner to slump in. Helping Deanie fill out the form on the clipboard the receptionist handed them when they arrived was a jolt; this was going to cost more money. Again he printed his own name on the line for the financially responsible person.
“I’ll pay you back,” Deanie whispered as his pen twitched over the paper.
“It’s all right. I got in a full day’s work yesterday.”
He doesn’t add he’s already signed his name to a cock-knocking hospital bill and paying it will keep him too poor to insure his bike for months. He watches the clock, anxious not only to escape a place where every minute seems to drag him further into debt but to get back to school—luckily they are playing the return game with Mount Grace at home—girls first.
The doctor crooks a finger at him.
In her small inner office she gestures toward a chair and drops into her own, behind her desk, to scrawl notes. “I’m going to contact the sports medicine team in North Conway to see if they can help us with a protective mask for Deanie. I don’t want her on the court until she has one—and not before another week is up, anyway.”
Sam paces the office. From the window, the Mill is visible. He rubs a circle of condensation from the glass to see it more clearly.
“Maybe you could persuade her to let me do a complete physical,” Spellman says. “If she’s going to take oral contraceptives, she must have the appropriate checks. And the two of you shouldn’t be having unprotected intercourse.”
Blushing furiously, he mutters, “We’re not doing anything now.”
“She might not want to for a long time. You’ll have to be careful. She could be afraid of an inadvertent injury to her face. She may not be feeling very sexy. Maybe she’ll want to be cuddled and comforted more than she’ll want to have sex. It would be a good idea for both of you to get some counseling—her especially, but you too. Something like this usually takes time and professional help to get over.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay for any of this,” Sam blurts. “She hasn’t got the price of a pack of gum herself.”
“Once she’s in state care, she’ll have Medicaid,” the doctor tells him. “We’ll work it out.”
Leaving unasked the question of whether the state will pick up the bills that already exist, he follows her to the cubicle down the hall, where Deanie sits cross-legged on the examining table, reading the Sports Illustrated.
“All set, Deanie,” the doctor tells her. “Call me tomorrow and I should know something about the mask.”
Deanie grins crookedly and offers Sam a high five.
32
The Mutant teeters on the catwalk under the roof of the gym in her imagination, the contest with Mount Grace wheeling beneath her. With very little effort she could be onto the walk from the top bleacher. She wipes sweating palms on her thighs. Excitement churns the pit of her stomach. She can’t help flying herself mentally to the court and going through the motions with her team.
“You okay?” Sam asks. “I have to go change.”
“Sure, sure,” she responds, grumpy at being distracted from the game.
In the last quarter, ‘god’s old man arrives with Stepmom and the Brat in tow. To her surprise, they survey the bleachers as if they are looking for someone, wave at her, and then they come and sit down next to her, where they inquire how she feels and how the game is going. It makes her feel extremely weird, almost panicky.
The Greenspark girls pull steadily ahead. Then it’s over, another W. The girls form a gauntlet for the boys to run, applauding them onto the floor before going to their locker room. When they emerge again near the end of the first quarter of the boys’ game, they fill up the bleachers the boys emptied. Quietly Deanie slips down to join them. Coach grins at her and accepts a congratulatory high five but mostly her teammates ignore her. Fuck’m. Unknown to them, at this moment she is wearing a pair of Samgod’s socks. She hugs her secrets to herself.
The boys appear to have recovered their purpose. All at once they are exuberant again, playing as if they were having fun.
On the way to the locker room at the end of the second quarter, Sam calls up to Deanie, asking her how she is doing. Okay, she signals, but she looks wiped out to him. Maybe he should have taken her home right after she saw Dr. Spellman. Some of the elation at being back on the court drains away. Being involved with someone, he reflects, is as complicating as he always feared it would be.
The atmosphere in the locker room is a happy, confident one, though Coach is sweating Rick’s stamina. In practice Billy Rank has shown no signs of recovery from his slump and no one, Billy least of all, wants to have to depend on him. Tim Kasten’s ankle is still bothering him. At least Fosse is taking care of business—not, Sam suspects, because of the asskicking Sam has given him, but because Pete could hardly miss Sam taking Joey Skouros to school during practice, under Coach’s approving eye.
Despite a six-minute run by the Red Demons in the fourth quarter, Coach risks sending in Billy. Sam is out too, giving Pete more minutes. Next to him, Rick mutters and curses as Billy thrashes like a drowning victim and their comfortable edge shrinks. By the time Coach hooks Billy and Rick re-enters the game, Rick is in a thoroughly ugly mood. In three minutes he picks up two fouls, going into the last quarter with a total of four—one more and he’s out of the game. He gives the already miserable Billy an evil look; Coach catches it and chokes Rick’s leash.
“Woods,” Coach snarls at him, “take a Midol and cut the shit.”
While Rick gropes for his focus, Sam tightens the defense, rejecting the first three Red Demon lobs. The frustrated Demons fail to notice Rick falling back past center court steadily until he is only a stride from the Greenspark goal. Sam makes the long pass to him. Rick goes up, reaching, as the ball arrives and directs it gently through the hoop. The belated Mount Grace defense skids into the paint with Todd Gramolini in their midst. He strips their small forward of the ball and hurtles it overhead, back out to Sam, loping across the center line. Sam leaps up to catch it, shoots it from midair and it drops, for three. For the rest of the quarter, the Big Machine runs smokingly hot and the Red Demons reel.
With bills to pay, Sam goes to work after the game, eating his supper on the job, and stays to close up with his father. The household is settled for the night when he and Reuben let themselves in—Deanie asleep on the sunporch, Indy asleep at her mother’s breast upstairs. After the ritual of locking the house, they say goodnight to each other and go directly to bed. Tired as he is, Sam lies taut and sleepless for an hour and then slips downstairs and under the quilts with Deanie.
The Mutant wakes, shivering, before dawn. There is a thread of long blond hair on her pillow. She remembers him flinching away from her, disentangling his legs from hers, rolling hastily from the daybed. Dazed with sleep, she can’t get her mouth to work, to make him understand she knows he can’t help it; it happens to men in their sleep. It would happen to him if she weren’t there. She doesn’t mind, anymore than she would mind a puppy creeping into bed with them and tucking his snout in the nearest warm spot.
She focuses on the narrow strips of painted wood that form the ceiling of the sunporch. The downstairs rooms feel larger in their emptiness. The furniture stands like sleeping horses in a field, shadowy hulks separated by space and an altered state of consciousness. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hums faintly. Banked coals in the woodstove suddenly snap. She can smell the odor of their combustion. The world is full of forgotten smells since she quit smoking.
This particular room, the sunporch, smells distinctly of long-ago dead cigars, though no one in the present household smokes. There are bars in the bathroom, the kind people use to grope their way around when they’re unsteady on their pins, so presumably some previous resident grew sick or feeble in this house.
Upstairs, bedsprings shift and the floorboards object to ‘god’s old man’s weight as he gets out of bed. Stepmom speaks, a sleepy question, and is answered tersely but with audible affection before the man goes down the hall to the upstairs bathroom. Stepmom’s bare feet follow him and pass the door to the bathroom and into the baby’s room. The Brat greets her mother with a slurry of meaningless syllables and rakes her plastic keyring noisily against the bars of her crib. Stepmom laughs softly and coos to her.
She slides out from under the quilts. The floorboards between the braided rugs are cold, even through the socks she wears, and the downstairs bathroom is even colder. She turns on the space heater.
Picking up the cake of Dove, she sniffs at it. It’s still a little damp from last night. Her toothbrush leans against the lip of a jelly glass on the shelf above the basin. She tips it out and rinses the glass and uses some mouthwash. Looks into the mirror. Turns her face to look at the left side. The black and blue is mottled with yellow and maroon. The wound bisects the muddied colors like a shiny string. Though puffy and torn at the lobe, her ear is almost normal again, and her left eye is fully open, though heavily shadowed with bruise-coarsened skin so it looks desperately weary. Raising her hand, she covers the left side as much as she can. Her jaw works and she drops the hand and pivots away.
The pipes clank and the water clatters in the tin shower stall of the downstairs bathroom just as Sam reaches the bottom step. He raps urgently on the bathroom door but over the noisy shower, Deanie must not be able to hear him. Upstairs, his father is shaving. Not alone. Pearl is just out of the shower and is drying herself and the baby. The pisser is, Sam thinks resentfully, it’s Saturday, a day Deanie could shower later. He grabs his jacket, unlocks the back door, steps through the shed and onto the porch and leans over the rail to piss into the bare branches of the lilac. Numbed, he can’t get it started right away and he rocks from foot to foot, muttering curses.
Encountering his father as he comes back into the kitchen, he is still adjusting his fly. Reuben raises an eyebrow but refrains from observing that it’s decidedly frigid for pissing out of doors. Sam shrugs and hangs up his jacket. He washes his hands at the sink and reaches for his razor on the windowsill over it.
He is rinsing it off when Deanie drifts into the kitchen, head already scarfed, high-tops gripped in one hand. She drops into a chair and hauls on her sneakers. He fills two mugs of coffee and sits down next to her.
“Can I go to work with you? I won’t get in the way. Maybe I could pump gas for you?”
He looks at his father, who shrugs.
“I’m not going straight to work,” Sam tells her reluctantly. “I’m going to the meetinghouse.”
“For what?”
“Pickup game,” Sam mutters.
Deanie brightens. “Yeah? Can I go?”
“You can’t play,” he points out.
“That’s okay. I’ll watch. Who’s playing?”
“Some of the guys.”
She grins. “Great.”
She’s at his elbow as he unlocks the side door at the meetinghouse. It feels a little like sneaking into the Mill together but he’s embarrassed too, because she’s about to see that the place where he practices on the weekends is a palace next to the improvisation of the Mill. She steps into the pale gold silence of the high-ceilinged hall and her eyes widen.
“My dad built this court years ago. Promoted the money from a summer resident. This guy likes to hack himself when he’s around. Can’t shoot straight but he’s wicked fast. Sometime I’ll show you his house on the lake. My dad’s his caretaker. Anyway, anytime the hall isn’t being used for something else, it’s available. Just wear sneakers and bring a ball. Most Sundays, there’s a regular pickup game. Dad usually makes that one. Pearl’s started playing recently. She’s somebody who can shoot straight.”
“No shit?” Deanie spins the ball on her fingertips, twitches her hips at him, and then dribbles it down the court and hooks it in.
“Hey!” he objects. “You’re benched, twink.”
Passing the ball behind her, she flips him a digit and sticks her tongue out.
“Twink yourself, Godzilla!”
He lopes after her and tries to take it away from her. Giggling, she teases him with the ball but won’t let him get a hand on it. He’s tentative, intensely aware of her unprotected face, but she moves fearlessly. Suddenly he stops dead, raises his palms and backs to the sidelines.
“Oh come on!” she pleads.
Crossing his arms, he shakes his head no.
Her mouth turns down and she spins away and drives the ball down court with a furious rhythm. She shoots around for a while and then she trots back and stands in front of him. The ball pops up off the floor and she rolls it over the edge of her palm and holds it like a globe.
“Chickenshit,” she taunts.
Sam extends his palm and she tips the ball into it. She slumps disconsolately next to the boombox. What is he supposed to do? She can’t play.
The others come horsing in, pausing at the sight of Deanie, and shooting Sam looks that he ignores, and then shrugging her presence off.
Woven through the chatter and clatter of the diner, the speculation among his teammates continues about whether the draft will be revived and how each of them will answer it. Few of them have any deep interest in politics or could find Kuwait or Iraq on an unmarked map but that doesn’t change the obvious: they are all prime cannon fodder. Sam sits there with his ears open, working his way once again through the arguments and thinking of Frankie. Deanie listens closely, once muttering “Bullshit” at some bit of macho posturing.
At the garage, he walks her through turning on the gas pumps and locking down the triggers on the nozzles and then the use of the cash register and making out credit slips. Soon she is ensconced at the desk with her textbooks to fill the down time and the volume on the radio cranked. She doesn’t try to talk to him while he’s working, earning her points not only with him but his father as well.
In the early afternoon they make the trip to North Conway to see about the mask. Once they are in the sports medicine clinic, the familiarity of the staff is a little embarrassing—Sam’s doctor pops out of his office and wants to talk basketball and not incidentally weigh and measure him. Grown another half inch since the preseason but no more weight—typically running on high and burning calories by the short ton—not that he needs scales and tapes to know that the seemingly ceaseless alteration of his fabric continues.
Deanie hangs back, in her cautious, watchful mode. She is relieved by the matter-of-fact treatment of the staff. The origin of her injury might as well be just another athletic accident as far as these efficient enthusiasts are concerned. Though her still-swollen face is prodded and pressured in the course of examination and the making of the mask, the way they take it for granted she will do whatever she had to do to play again straightens her spine and lightens her mood.
The mask is clear rigid plastic, molded to her face. It does not fit flush to her face but sits upon a perforate footing of cushioning foam that allows for the passage of air over her skin. It is asymmetrical, curving close under her eye socket over the cheekbone, up against the side of her nose and cutting down past the left side of her mouth to the jawline and back to her ear. Held in place by the side of her nose and a piratically cocked y-shaped strap around her head, it is immediately painful. She is assured that when the swelling subsides, all she will feel is a sensation of light pressure.
Though she seems faded by the time they leave the clinic, she doesn’t want to go home and rest. A little aspirin and she’ll be fine, she insists. Back at work, she displays the mask for Reuben. He examines it critically and then gives it back to her with a laugh and a shake of his head. Delighted for her, he gives her a casual, spontaneous hug. Much to his surprise, she stiffens instantaneously and flails into a backward stumble out of his embrace. Face reddening with chagrin, Reuben tries to apologize to her. Like a headlight-stunned animal, she stays fixed in her panic, her mask clutched tightly to her chest.
Reuben in distress retreats to the far side of the garage. Still hangdog, he takes his leave shortly—headed for the farmhouse to punch up drywall.
Hearing the crunch of tires and the beat of an engine outside, Sam slides out from under a sedan in time to see the door slap behind Deanie. He crosses the garage to look out at her. Sonny Lunt is at the pumps, waving her off to wait on himself. She pivots and Sam opens the door for her.
“Where’s your frigging coat? Are you out of your head?”
Ducking under his arm, she drops into the chair behind the desk.
“You want to get sick? You like the bench that much?”
She kicks back and thuds her high-tops on the desk. “Oh Christ! Don’t start on me!”
