One on one, p.51
ONE ON ONE, page 51
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
“They’re friendly,” Sam advises Rick as they circle together.
Rick laughs. “Fuck’m. They’ll like us even better then.”
One thing Sam guessed right; Barry stinks. Everybody does, of course, with nerves and then with the physical effort, but this guy—oh my fuckness, Sam gasps, turning his face away from Number 11’s pits, full in his face as Barry tries to block him. Feinting, Sam waits until Barry comes to ground again and then pumps it casually over his thick head of hair. He whips back his elbow as hard as he can into Sam’s gut. As the ball drops through, Sam looks to the ref but the guy just sucks the whistle and stares at Sam’s raised eyebrows. Nor does he seem to hear Coach’s scream of outrage.
From the close study of game tapes, Greenspark knows that St. Gabriel’s plays physically, fouling to the max. St. Gabe’s coach regards a game in which four out of five of his starters are not in foul trouble in the last quarter as a halfhearted effort, it’s said. Whether the rumors are true or not, it is clear St. Gabe’s players regard fouling as an opportunity to inflict permanent injury on an opponent. They use their elbows, their knees, their toes, their fingers, their heads, every chance they get. They use the goddamn ball, shoving it into faces and guts. Sam himself subscribes to the belief if you are going to foul, by accident or design, you should make sure your opponent feels it—purely as a matter of creating respect—but he prefers finesse to thuggery.
Rick exits hobbling in the first quarter, his left ankle tramped by the younger of the Barry brothers. Though he returns in the second quarter to play the rest of the game—pissed off and nearly as nasty as the Archangels—his momentary absence sends a wobble through the offense. Rank is shy, not stupid. Having seen what happened to Rick, he’s understandably nervous.
At the half, the good guys have the bandits down by seven points and Sam is still holding himself back, saving something for the stretch. Near the end of the third quarter, he succeeds in forcing Scott Barry to foul him twice within a minute, both times in scrambles at the post. The second time, Barry is so enraged, he jerks his knee into Sam’s crotch, an act that even the whistlesuckers see. Sam curls up quietly on the floor and throws up on the official’s black shoes, thinking sourly that the jokers who are always saying sometimes you gotta take one for the team ought to try it. Number 11 takes a technical foul and is ejected from the game. Sam repairs to the bench to contemplate the constancy of human frailty.
After Gramolini shoots the technical with his usual competence, play resumes with Skouros trying to replace Sam in the middle. Both teams seem to lose their control and the remainder of the third quarter is a clumsy mess all around. The Archangels close the score to a point.
Sam returns to the game as the fourth quarter begins. He still feels weak and the ache in his testicles flares with every movement. He falters and Rick takes his arm and demands to know if he is all right. He shakes him off and lopes into position.
Sam is at the post when the Archangels’ centurion point drives past Billy and Todd. It’s a crazy move, with the wall of Sam waiting for him and a ref ready to call a charging foul but he keeps on coming. Sam declines the seemingly inevitable collision. He slides to the side and the point man starts past him, his hands coming up with the ball to lay it up. On Sam’s right the younger Barry leans into him. Sam goes up. Barry staggers, forward. Just as air is visible between the point’s fingers and the ball as he tries for the lay-up, Sam’s hand collects the orange neatly and sends it back out on a long arc toward Rick, backpedaling toward the other end of the court.
The gears grind and shift as Rick’s quick jump begins Greenspark’s fourth-quarter drive. All at once the Archangels find themselves in a new game. They get rougher. It costs them in short order the younger Barry and two other starters. Looking their way from the huddle around Coach during the last time-out, Sam meets Scott Barry’s furious stare, the icy blue eyes pitted darkly with the knowledge of defeat. Sam gives nothing back. Scott Barry’s history.
Rick makes a shot from outside that earns them a last three and the final score is Greenspark, 75; St. Gabriel’s, 62.
As the boys pass each other to shake hands, Sam pauses to tug his crotch and then offers that particular hand to Scott Barry, along with a huge moronic grin.
“Good game!” he says, crushing Barry’s hand as hard as he can.
Barry pales and attempts to withdraw his hand. Sam keeps right on pumping it.
“Fuck you,” Barry mutters.
“Not a chance,” Sam returns with a wink, “but I’m sure you’ll find someone.”
The joyful noise his teammates raise, the horseplay in the showers and the locker room are at once familiar and strange. It will never be just this way again. It isn’t just his own high school career whispering past with the speed of tape whipping by a tapehead but the team itself is also in its terminal days.
Rick slaps his shoulders. “We did it! What do you think of that, Sambo!”
Sam tugs his shirt across his chest and gropes for a button. “ ‘Vanity,’” he says, with a smile, “ ‘all is vanity.’”
Rick shakes his head. “So? I don’t give a shit. Why do you?”
“I’ll never forget these theological discussions of ours,” Sam assures Rick.
“Right,” Rick answers. “Blow me.”
Sam grins. “I’ve already got a date but I can fix you up with Scott Barry.”
Rick blows him a mocking kiss.
Exiting the lockers, Sam climbs the stands to shake hands with his father and kiss Pearl and Indy, before he joins Deanie in the seats the kids from Greenspark have taken over to watch the next game. Kinsale beats South Portland by a free throw in the last ten seconds and by then it’s going for eleven and they won’t reach Greenspark until one, nevermind home.
The boys’ game flickers from the monitor at the front of the bus. Sam’s unauthorized workout prior to the game, caught by the idling television crews, is used as a lead-in. It provides an opportunity for the commentators to recap his high school career and speculate upon his and Greenspark’s expected performance in the tournament. Since his freshman year, Sam has been one of a handful of state-wide stars. This year’s acquisition of an earring—exchanged for a stud at game time—not only increases the visibility that size and talent and his ponytail give him but reassuringly confirms he is merely another teenager with the same need for tribal signals as any other. He could be anybody’s kid—and is, of course.
Everyone groans when Barry knees him. Sam shrugs off the chorus of rude commentary that follows to concentrate on the game itself. Only when it is over, in the break while the tape of the girls’ game is being loaded into the machine, does he allow himself to think ahead.
The Greenspark teams have passed the first round. There are still two more games between each team and a regional championship, and if they make it, a third to settle the state title. The boys have a week to prepare to meet the Kinsale Trojans. Deanie and the girls will meet St. Mary’s Crusaders on Thursday. Until then, there’ll be practice and more practice. The next one will be a waste for most of them if the party plans he’s hearing come off.
The old longing to be part of it burbles up. He wonders briefly if he could take Deanie to a party and count on her resisting temptation. No, he decides, and he doesn’t need to tempt himself either. Immediately he plunges into gloom. She’s going to be ripped at him when he tells her they’re going home to bed.
But she never asks about partying. She gets into the truck and cuddles up to him and goes to sleep without a word and doesn’t even wake up when he carries her into the house.
41
Big yellow piglets in a double row, the buses all park together outside the Portland Civic Center. From her window, the Mutant spots Sam’s truck across the parking lot, nosing for a slot. Ignoring the faces raised to stare at her as spectators plod their way past the bus toward the auditorium, she ties off her headrag decisively and scoots between the seats to find the dub that skittered away during the ride.
Once she had been afraid the kids at school would make sport of her and ‘god. And they did and still do, though not perhaps with the same viciousness—people can get used to anything, as they have her face. It all feels false, another reflection in a mirror. The real Deanie is invisible, as if her body with its scars and tattoos and chains and plastic mask is a kind of hologram of herself. Sometimes it makes her feel safe. Sometimes it just makes her want to feel and see if she is still there or has finally disappeared entirely. She’s not sure she wants to know what they might do to her if miraculously they suddenly saw.
The other girls troop toward the auditorium. The bus is empty, the driver outside talking to another driver. Shoving the cassette into her duffel, she stays crouched between the seats, gathering herself to face the stares, and beyond that, to center herself for the game. The bus shifts and she feels ‘god walking down the aisle—deaf and blind she would know his presence by means she cannot entirely enumerate, subliminal perceptions of the dimensions of space he takes up, the way he blocks a draft and vibrates a floor with his weight.
Stooping over her, he massages the back of her neck, the span of his palm and fingers engulfing the narrow stalk, the protuberant bones like a tightwoven string of bulbs.
She arches her neck against his hand.
“Worried?” he asks.
Her eyes crinkle with amusement. “Not about this bunch of pussies.”
Her coach climbs the bus steps and squints up the aisle.
“What are you waiting on, Gauthier, a printed invitation?”
“Be right along, Coach,” Sam answers for her.
He straightens up and looks down at her, hand extended to take hers and help her up. Staring up at him, she touches him on impulse and he starts.
“Jesus, Deanie.”
Grasping his hipbones, she drags herself up the length of his legs until she is on her feet, her face in his sternum. She presses her thigh between his knees.
“Easy,” he murmurs. “Coach’ll be back here with a switch, looking for you. Come on, it’s going to be all right.”
The multiple drums of the Greenspark band advise misleadingly that “The Lion Sleeps.” St. Mary’s Crusaders, in blue and silver, mesmerized from the tip, are still wide-eyed and dazed as the female aborigines from Greenspark make martyrs of them. Greenspark Indians, a walkaway 60 to St. Mary’s Crusaders’ 41—crunch, crunch, yum yum.
Sam breathes a sigh of relief.
Rocketing up for the tip, he feels he is the soul of reason. Ball to Rick, Rick to basket. Up and in. Hello, Trojans. Soul of reason, he telepaths to the wide boy in his face, On the roll of the season. No reaction. The boy isn’t tuned in. Possibly it’s his haircut. Shaved close to the crown, where the wide boy’s had the barber—sheepshearer—leave an uneven clump of dirty-blond that looks like dead, frozen grass that someone’s been sliding on at the tag end of February. Boonie-ramp.
The wide boy has a partner, a lean senior with a goatee and no-color eyes. Defending, they double-team Sam, making him work for it enough for him to enjoy outwitting them. On offense, it is the wide boy who is the real threat once he gets in close. The senior likes the outside and shoots threes with depressing regularity. The pair of them will have to be neutralized. Fortunately, the wide boy is slow; they can run him into the floor. Watching Todd swipe the ball from the senior with the goatee, Sam confirms a weakness he saw in the game tapes: Billy Goat Gruff has a balloon for an ego—big, hollow, too easily pricked. Gruff has to stop and beat himself up over the turnover as if there weren’t another three quarters to decide this game. His anger will be his downfall.
One by one, Sam’s starters flash him signals that confirm the original strategy and they begin to dismantle the Trojans. Sam guns steadily until a few minutes into the third, when the Trojans collapse. He comes out for a rest and Skouros does well enough to leave him in until the buzzer. Greenspark Indians, 85, Kinsale Trojans, 62.
On the way to the lockers Sam evades the media but they are waiting for his exit, wanting comment on the fact both Greenspark teams have now advanced to the regional finals tomorrow. Cooperation with the media is part of his job but this year the coaches have consented to his silence, and to Deanie’s. It would be too easy for her to become a focus, with her mask and her scar and her outrageous bald head, and leave the rest of her team feeling ignored. He shakes his head and shoulders his way through them. Winning is statement enough. Let some other kids have some spotlight.
In the stands, he finds Deanie with the other girls. The rest of his team settles around them, filling the rows with the green of their letter jackets. They stay to watch Castle Rock narrowly defeat Fremont. Above them, the Castle Rock banners are disorienting, the wrong colors to be under, and they are aware of being surrounded by Castle Rock fans. Who are aware of them in their Greenspark letter jackets. It takes some effort on Sam’s part to keep the inevitable ribbing back and forth good-natured.
Good copy: both Greenspark teams are one win away from the regional title and in the boys’ division, the struggle will be with traditional rival Castle Rock. The defending state and regional champ Greenspark boys will smite the Rock, the sports commentators predict, but Bricker has the edge against the distaff Indians. While the girls in green and silver have Gauthier, Bricker has a no-loss record, three six-footers and an awesome senior point guard named Merrilee Constantine. She is built like a fireplug, is cuter than an Olympic gymnast, and is supposed to be the best floor leader in the state.
Freezing the picture on Constantine’s exultant face, Deanie gives her a Bronx cheer and clicks off the game tape of the Bricker win over Oxford Hills.
“Relax,” Sam tells her, “you got something she ain’t got.”
Deanie takes his hands out from under her shirt. “Right. My own plastic faceguard and a busted face to wear it over. That’s a big edge.”
“I meant me.”
“And I’m supposed to sneak you onto the floor? Who are you going to play this game as? Billie? You’ll need a nose stud, a buzz cut and more mustache.”
Sam picks up the clicker and zaps on the TV. He rewinds the tape a couple of frames and replays it, freezing it again on Constantine. Seizing Deanie by the shoulders, he holds her head between his flattened palms and directs her gaze at the screen.
“Pay attention now,” he tells her. “Take a good look at this girl. I will tell you three things about her that will win your game for you.”
“Right,” Deanie says. “I’m all ears.”
“No you aren’t, thank the living Jesus.” Sam rewinds the tape. “Watch. She’s gonna pass the ball left, move up court, and take it back, then she’s gonna feint passing it, drive inside, and pass it right then, to her big guard, Number 10. She pulls it five times in this game. By the fifth time, Oxford Hills is starting to doubt that fake pass but they never got on top of it. You break that pass the first time she tries it and it’ll break her confidence.”
“Promise?” Deanie teases.
“Yup. Anybody can be beaten if they lose their nerve. One reason you work hard to be the best is so the people you’re up against see right away you are. You make’m believe they can’t beat you, and they can’t.”
“Right on, Coach. What’s the second tip?”
“She pronates her left ankle, the taped one, when she pivots. If you move on her just as she pivots, you can catch her off balance. Make her hold the ball low and you can take it away underneath while she’s trying to get on top of that ankle.”
“Nasty guy,” Deanie says admiringly. “You don’t have some way of figuring out when she’s got PMS, do you? What’s the third secret?”
Sam grins. “She’s never had an orgasm in her life.” Deanie whacks him with a cushion but he gets his hands up in time.
The white flare of a television strobe paints the Mutant’s mask and for an instant, it’s as if the flesh were stripped to the bone of her face. There is a fluid darkness at the lower edge that makes Sam sick to his stomach. The illusion passes and he registers the bite of his own nails in his palms. She rolls her head and her coach, crouched over her, speaks to her.
Deanie’s fingers fumble toward the mask, trail along the edge. The crowd in the auditorium buzzes quietly, waiting to find out how bad it is.
Merrilee Constantine hovers near Deanie. She looks to be near tears.
“I’m going down there,” Sam mutters.
“Fuck you are,” Rick says, hand on Sam’s forearm.
Sam is still trying to absorb what has happened. A couple of minutes into the second quarter, the Mutant dove under Constantine to steal the ball, carried it to the floor in a scramble with Constantine and one of those six-foot Bricker guards and took Constantine’s elbow in the face. She was flat faster than the big soft tires on a Corvette.
She sits up slowly, with her coach supporting her, holding something to her nose. A bloody rag. It’s her nose she’s bumped, just her nose, Sam thinks. Not her face. The wound didn’t open. The faceguard worked. She leaves the floor, to the customary hand given the injured, and slumps in a chair with an ice pack on her face. Her mask is up on her skull and her tunic is splattered with dark blotches. Constantine stares after her, wringing her hands.
The Mutant lifts the ice pack and her eyes find Sam. She grins and then disappears behind the ice again. The AC stoops over her to stuff her nose with cotton balls.
She has succeeded in frustrating Constantine repeatedly in her favored fake-out and trapping her into two turnovers before the Bricker star adjusted her balance. Since then, it’s been a slugfest between the two girls’ teams, point answered by point, brilliant play on both sides that has kept them trading the lead the whole game.
It’s no surprise to see the Mutant yanking her mask down, going back into the game after the half. Sam groans. Watching is almost more than he can bear. He’s close enough to make out her swollen nose, with cotton visible in the nostrils. Her eye sockets are beginning to look bruised. He wishes they would swell up and close entirely so she could be taken out of the game.
