One on one, p.9
ONE ON ONE, page 9
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
The girls are out in force but are uneasy, struggling between theory and blood. Overnight has brought the first arguments with their boyfriends. The girls have been shocked to discover that what seemed a minor reinterpretation of their rights is perceived by many as a radical and extremist departure.
Sam deposits a couple of gallons of apple cider on a bleacher and opens two boxes of muffins he has promoted from his stepmother. The Mutant appears instantly at his side and helps herself. She’s in a new getup today. Over her spandex unitard and cutoff Levis, she has hung a series of interconnected chains around her waist and hips. One passes through her legs from back to front. She doesn’t speak to him.
“You’re welcome,” he teases.
She ignores him. Not even a thank-you finger.
The muffins and cider succeed in breaking a little ice among the others. In a few moments, the atmosphere is much looser. The holdout is the Mutant, hastily unchained, who grabs a ball while her mouth is still full and takes it to the floor to do ballhandling drills by herself.
Later, loosened up and feeling good, Sam takes himself to the sidelines to watch. He is not alone. Both coaches are there along with the assistant coaches. What he sees pleases him; the girls have left their doubts off court and are working their hearts out. He is reminded again these girls nearly won a state championship last season and it wasn’t all the Mutant’s doing. No fault to her today, though. Even as the boys repeatedly deny her the bucket and overreach her to score at their own, she never falters. Her doggedness infects the others. In the most recalcitrant of the boys, disbelief gives way to a grudging respect.
The Mutant rotates out to allow Billie Figueroa to take her place. In a kneeling crouch, she watches the unequal struggle. Outrun, outreached, outgunned, the girls score only when the boys make an error. The only strategy they have is to play smart, exploiting every mistake and accident and making opportunities for more.
One of the M & M’s—Melanie—falls out and collapses next to her. “This is insane,” Melanie gasps.
“Right. Basketball-fu, candypants.”
Melanie gives her a look of total disbelief. “You been smoking booberry already this morning?”
The Mutant starts to wipe her nose on the back of her hand and winces. She has forgotten the Band-Aid over the burn there.
“We even come close to shutting the door on these jackoffs, we can beat anybody,” the Mutant tells Melanie.
“You keep saying that,” Melanie complains.
The Mutant barely hears. She begins to hook herself into her chains, blessing the beauty and elegance of the pelican clasp, which makes life a lot easier in roundball season. When she stops playing ball, she’s going to make several of her chains permanent.
Her coach hustles over for a word. “Good workout, Gauthier. What’s wrong with the hand?”
“Cat scratch.”
Frowning, Coach warns her not to let it get infected.
Not a chance, the Mutant reflects, Judy fucking cauterized every hapless germ under her lit cigarette.
Toward the end of the second period in the weight room, Sam is spotting Rick when Chapin approaches. J.C. is pumped from his workout. His shirt issues a universal invitation: Sit On A Happy Face.
“Samson!” He grins. “That was real thoughtful of you, giving the Mutant a ride to my house the other night. You could make a business of it, delivering take-out pussy. I feel like I owe you a tip.”
At the word pussy, conversation around them quiets and ears prick up. On the bench, Rick exhales as he lowers the bar.
Sam reacts with an agreeable but slow and confused smile. “Come again, Chapin?”
“Once was enough,” Chapin quips.
The other guys laugh and Rick makes a strange noise in his throat.
Sam only seems more confused. A beat after Rick’s strangled snort, he manages a chuckle as if he has finally gotten the joke. Then he frowns in fierce concentration.
“Mutant—did you say Mutant?” Snaps his fingers. “Oh. You mean Gauthier? Right! I did give her a lift the other night. That was your house?”
Chapin laughs. “Yeah.”
Sam nods as if relieved to have a significant mystery cleared up. For an instant, he is pleased with himself but then his brow wrinkles again.
“Maybe you could tell me, Chapin, I always wondered—what does that mean—Mutant? Does she have one of those inherited diseases that makes her bald? I notice she’s wicked skinny and pale so I wondered, maybe she was sick and had to have, like chemo or radiation or some shit like that?”
Chapin confides genially, “Samson, she shaves her head.”
“Sure.”
“She does,” he insists.
Slow puzzlement dawns across Sam’s face. “Why?”
Nobody is this shit-numb, J.C. tells himself. This is a put-on. But he has to say something. “She’s a freak. Get it?”
Contemplatively, Sam nods. “Wicked sweet hook shot, though.”
Chapin forces a polite chuckle. “That’s only one of her talents. You ought to have a bald chick go down on you.”
Blinking in momentary confusion, Sam is amazed. “Go down? You mean, like—?” He looks down at his crotch as if he cannot quite visualize the act.
J.C. cups his hands in front of himself and pops his hips at them and winks. “Talk about giving head.”
Suddenly J.C. is aware of Rick Woods staring up at him from the bench with an expression of disbelief. Belatedly he hears the locker room braggart in his own words. It stings to realize Rick Woods finds him uncool. J.C. is no great fan of the local jocks but Woods is by definition cool. There is nothing more cool than a black jock.
“Oh.” Sam studies the floor for a moment, lashes fluttering with the unaccustomed effort of heavy thought. At last he shakes his head. “Don’t get it,” he confesses solemnly. “Maybe you could blow me, Chapin, show me how it’s done.”
Around them, the other guys break up and Rick is making strangled noises again.
J.C. makes a huge effort, smiling to cover his fury at having been had.
“You’re cute but not that cute, asshole,” he says.
Smiling innocently, Sam shrugs off his disappointment.
Chapin backs away, smile fading with him, to make a hearty pretense of socializing with the other guys.
Rick heaves the bar into its cradle and sits up. “Goddamn. You were awesome, Sambo. I was getting hot, all that talk about oral sex.”
“I’m sort of relieved he didn’t take me up on it,” Sam tells him. “He’s such a romantic guy, he’d probably think it meant we were going steady.”
Rick coughs violently and Sam pounds his back helpfully.
They change places, Rick spotting Sam while he lifts.
“Tell you what, I could not get it up for that freaky bald chick.” Rick shudders eloquently. “No shit, Sambo.”
Sam exhales.
“I was wondering how she can stand making it with a douchebag like Chapin.”
“Hey, dude, you know it ain’t romance. It’s capitalism. She’s closing her eyes and pretending his tiny white worm’s the doobie she’s earning. I don’t know what he’s pretending and I don’t want to think about it either, or it’ll make me a sexual cripple. Like you.”
“What do you mean? Sarah seems to like my corncob collection—”
“Shut up, Sambo,” Rick interrupts.
“Yessir,” Sam says humbly.
On his way to lunch, Sam spots the Mutant going upstream against the flood and heads after her. The Mutant’s hand is on the pushbar of the exit, on her way to the smoking area, when he calls to her to wait up.
Leaning against a locker, her hand tucked behind her, she stares up at him. “Make it fast.”
“Be nice if somebody else brought some music in the morning. I thought maybe you’d like to bring in a mix.”
“Hey, genius, if I could dub from a yardsale clock-radio to a Walkman, I could break into the Pentagon’s mainframe with a pencil and start World War Three.”
She has the pleasure of seeing the face of ‘god nonplussed.
“Oh.” He blinks. “I didn’t know. Maybe one of the other girls could do one.”
With her head back against the locker, she grants him a disdainful smile.
“I’ll ask. Don’t blame me if it’s some shitkicking country twang and I have to puke on the court. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get out there and suck in some passive smoke before I die.”
“You mean so you will,” he twits.
Sardonically she shows him a double bird as she backs toward the door.
“You do that better than anyone I know,” he mocks her. “It’s the kinda skill a person can really use in life, too. What happened to your hand?”
“Your fault, asshole.” She rips the Band-Aid off it and thrusts it in his face. “I was kiting a butt from my mother and she put out the one she was smoking on me. All right? You happy now? If you’d minded your own fucking business, I’d have been smoking my own.”
Sam flinches. He reaches for her wrist and she allows him, briefly, to turn the hand to look at the wound before jerking it away and stuffing it into the sleeve of her coat. She flings herself against the pushbar and stumbles out of doors.
For some reason the lights glow a little more strongly, not so much as if there has been a surge on the line but more as if Sam himself has faded, from a loose plug, a bad connection. His stomach cramps. Without haste, he turns down the hall toward the cafeteria and enters the lavatory near it. It’s crowded, lines at the urinals, all the stall doors closed. For a fraction of a second he stands still, as if he doesn’t remember just why he came in here.
The wound on the back of her hand had looked like a nail hole. The pale skin had been red where she tore off the Band-Aid.
“Shit,” he mutters.
For a fraction of a second he wavers, his head nodding weakly as if he were fighting nausea. Then his whole oversized body seems to contract like a spring. All the tension releases at once as he goes straight up to drive his fist through a ceiling panel. It descends in a rain of fibrous shards. Spinning on his heel, he kicks up into the mirror over the nearest handbasin, twisting away from the explosion of glass and staggering against the adjoining wall.
At the urinals, cursing boys hunch to protect themselves from flying glass. There is an immediate general exodus.
Breathing hard, Sam slides into a crouch against the wall, with his head bowed. For some moments, the only sounds are his breathing as it settles, and the sigh of the door. It creaks suddenly.
“Jesus,” Rick says, peeking in. “Rock ‘n roll, Sammy. I hear you’re taking the place apart. They weren’t kidding. You okay?”
Disgusted with himself, Sam shrugs. “Stupid.”
Rick shuffles his feet through glass and broken ceiling panel. “You got that right. What the fuck happened?”
“Nothing.”
Rick snorts. “Looks to me like a classic case of hopeless sexual frustration. You get your rocks off—”
The door slaps back and the vice-principal, Mr. Liggott, is standing there.
Rick hastens to offer a hand up to Sam, who gestures it away and hauls sheepishly to his feet. Rick smiles glassily.
“I just lost it, Mr. Liggott,” Sam says quickly. “I’ll clean it up.”
“I guess you will,” the VP responds. “See me in my office as soon as you finish. Woods, you can keep everybody out until Sam gets this cleaned up.”
Liggott isn’t alone in his office when Sam gets there. Laliberte and Coach are there too. In similar stances, arms crossed and chins gravely tucked, the three men circle the VP’s desk. Their faces are stamped identically with the cast of a hanging jury.
Liggott clears his throat. Discipline is supposed to be his particular jurisdiction, so he goes first. “What’s this about, Sam?”
Realizing he will have to look his father in the eye later, Sam decides he had better get some practice and lifts his gaze to meet theirs. He knows he’s looking at an immediate suspension—meaning out of the game tomorrow. And Romney’s exam this afternoon. He won’t be allowed to make up an exam missed while suspended and if he misses this one, he’ll blow his hard-won B.
“I—I lost my temper. I’m sorry. It was stupid.”
The three men exchange glances.
“Why’d you lose your temper?” Laliberte asks.
“Somebody make some kind of remark to you?” Liggott prods. “Something offensive?”
Sam drops his gaze to the splits in the toecaps of his high-tops. His hand aches. Probably not as much as her hand hurts, though. The words are lodged in his throat: Deanie Gauthier’s mother put a cigarette out on her hand.
If he tells them, they will have to report it to the child welfare people. Almost certainly, nothing much would happen except Gauthier would be in deeper shit with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend for telling. Sam knows how these things work. When it comes to child endangerment, the system is pious but limpdick.
Sam shakes his head. “No sir.”
The VP sighs in exasperation. “You’ll be d.c.’d Monday afternoon. You know, if you were anybody else, you’d have been suspended already and on your way home. Think about it. Don’t expect the Disciplinary Committee to do you any favors on Monday if you won’t be candid with us.”
The principal uncrosses his arms and leans on the VP’s desk. “Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome on Monday, you’d better make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He smiles faintly. “The plant can’t take it.”
“You need to work off temper,” Coach interjects, “there’s a bag in the weight room. Just remember to use gloves. How’s the hand? You get that looked at right away.”
“That cover it?” Laliberte asks Liggott.
The VP nods. “That’s all, Sam,” he says, dismissing him.
Rick is already in shop. He has enough credits in his college prep courses to take motor shop for fun.
“How’s your hand?”
“Bruised it a little, tore some skin off it. Nothing, really.”
Rick shakes his head. “What bit your ass, man?”
Sam grins. “It was just an attack of raging adolescent hormones.”
The two of them snicker.
“You gents like to share the joke?” the shop teacher inquires genially.
“It’s not that funny,” Rick admits.
“Too bad you’re wasting your time with it then. You two gonna do anything today besides whisper pee pee and poo poo to each other and giggle? You got a—what is it?—Bulgarian limo you’re supposed to be putting back on the road, you can find the cow pats to run it on. I trust you on that one, Styles.”
“God, I love this class,” Rick murmurs. “This town.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You shitting on us rubes, slick?” Sam asks, tugging at the hood of the little subcompact import.
The whole vehicle lifts slightly but the catch is sticky or jammed and the little car settles again, unopened. Sam gives the Yugo’s hood an impatient yank. There is a screech of shearing metal and the hood dangles from his hand. Around him, the class convulses hysterically.
7
Sparks of snow fall out of the darkness into the neadlights of the truck. So far the accumulation is minor—frosting the road surface, smudging the edges, blurring the darkness—but it means slow going. Sam feeds himself onehanded from the lunch bucket next to him. Along the roadside a quarter mile from the high school, the Mutant trudges like a tinker with her burden of backpack and duffel. Giving a lick to his fingers, wiping them on his pants leg, Sam pulls over reluctantly.
Against the farther door, she curls up, shaking, inside her coat.
He’d just as soon not have any conversation at all with her but out of politeness, turns down the volume of his Gear Daddies tape.
The Mutant snuffles, nose running as usual.
Groping for a hankie, he hands it to her. “You need a ride, just ask. I have to go through town to go home anyway. It’s no big deal.”
She clears her nose wetly. The blower erupts with her, blasting heat into the cab. With a moan of “Oh god,” she spreads her fingers over the vent.
Sam swings back onto the road. “Deanie.” He hesitates, then plunges into it. “I’m really sorry about your hand.”
She makes no immediate response beyond snuffling and shivering. When he glances back at her, silent tears gloss her waxy cheeks, running channels of mascara to her chains.
“Hey,” he says, reaching out impulsively to pull her up against him and in the process, knocking his lunch bucket to the floor.
Her chain belt and the ones between her legs click faintly in her brief passage across the seat. Her face is buried against his jacketed shoulder; her shoulders shake but she makes no sound. He can feel the chains on her face through his jacket. Hand on the back of her neck, he is intensely aware of its odd, scratchy fragility. His fingers follow the channel of the indented stalk of her neck up over the bulge of her skull, in an instinctive soothing gesture. The skin is cold and pallid, prickly with stubble the color of black pepper. Blue veins pulse visibly in a schemata that reminds him of his baby sister’s skull when she was a newborn. But then as suddenly as she has dissolved in tears, the Mutant scoots back across the seat, where she blots her face and blows her nose again. She clears her throat and stares out the window with embarrassment.
“You okay? Want me to stop for some cocoa again?”
She shakes her head negatively and then gestures toward his overturned lunch bucket on the floor. “Hey, ‘god, you done with that?”
“Go ahead. I missed lunch today. I was just spoiling my supper when I saw you. You know, you really ought to bulk up some. It would help with your stamina. And lay off the butts. You play ten minutes straight, you’re winded.”
