Blind Your Ponies (26 page)

“We’ve heard about your Norwegian totem pole,” Sandy Hill said. “We’ll saw him down and split him up for fire wood.”

“One hundred dollars,” Mervin said, no longer smiling at his brother.

“I don’t want to take advantage of you,” Carl said, blowing smoke in Mervin’s direction.

“You’re not afraid of little ol’ Willow Croak are you?” Mervin said.

Carl’s face flushed as he studied his little brother’s swagger, a demeanor he hadn’t seen in Mervin.

“All right, by God, it’s a bet!” Carl said. “I’ll have to write a check.”

He snuffed his cigarette in an ashtray.

Per tradition, Lute Jackson held the money. Then every Monday after the game, Lute would ceremoniously present the winnings to Carl in Mervin’s presence, usually two five-dollar bills, while the three and whoever else was in the cafe would roast the Willow Creek team.

With that semi-annual ritual taken care of—the teams played each other
twice during the season—the four men settled into their usual discussion of less important matters such as foreign trade policies, the prime rate, and organic farming. But the two brothers remained preoccupied. Mervin wanted to get the hell out of there so Friday night would come quicker. Carl was restless, baffled by this uncharacteristic confidence in his little brother, and all of it revolved around that beanpole kid from the fjords.

“How’s Maggie doing?” Sandy asked Carl, and Mervin tensed, attempting to keep his face expressionless.

“Not good …not good.”

“It’s a shame,” Lute said, then shook his head.

When Mervin first heard Maggie had cancer, he wanted to drive straight to their farm, throw open her door, and beg for her forgiveness. But he knew he was too late, thirty years too late.

On his way home, Mervin knew things were all tangled up, but he was glad he’d suckered that sonofabitch into the hundred-dollar bet and he knew that the bet had to do with a whole lot more than the basketball game.

M
ONDAY AFTERNOON THE
team practiced, and Sam still hoped Diana would show up at the last minute for New Year’s Eve. She had to be back soon, school would resume on Wednesday. That morning, Hazel had followed him to the Ford dealer’s body shop in Bozeman to drop off his car for a week. Riding home in the ’76 Caprice, Sam was assailed by the odors of a chicken coop that had been sprayed with a nauseous sweet perfume. He tried to crack the window a bit but there was no handle. Though Hazel didn’t mention it, the word was that she and Mavis Powers went in to Bozeman Saturday night to see a traveling bunch of the Chippendale dancers, beautiful young men in G-strings. Hazel reportedly sat in the front row, jamming five-dollar bills in G-strings and handling the goods she found there. Sam bet she was giggling and wondered if Mavis took the curlers out of her hair for such an ostentatious event.

Sam had ramrodded the boys all week, and with the taste of victory on their palates, they responded with fire and a willing zeal, doing all that he asked and beyond. Tom didn’t mention his father and Sam let it lie. Hazel, Axel, and Grandma had continued their lend-lease program, donating their bodies to whatever purpose Sam dictated on the court to the raised
eyebrows of many in the community, particularly Truly Osborn. But with Andrew Wainwright and Ray Collins on the school board, Sam no longer had to concern himself with that flank.

Not only did he keep the team stretching as if Diana were there, but he began working on the floor with the boys, suddenly feeling hamstrings he didn’t know he had. He arrived decked out in his new multicolored nylon sweat outfit and black low-top coaching shoes, something he’d been wanting for a long time and finally found the courage not only to buy but to show up in at practice. The boys whistled when they first witnessed their low-key mentor decked out like a high-salaried NBA coach, and Olaf attempted to compliment him by saying, “You are looking cold.”

Thanks to Grandma Chapman’s luck and generosity, they scrimmaged three on three in their new white game shoes, to break them in, though Olaf’s hadn’t arrived yet. Meanwhile, Scott worked the transmitter on the Norwegian’s paint prompter. They played for almost ten minutes the first time Olaf, already dripping wet, overstayed his welcome in the paint. Scott zapped him.

“Hiiiyyyyiiihh!” he shouted, leaping as if he’d been decked by a ghost.

All play stopped in animated suspension. The boys howled and regarded their smirking manager with suspicion. Sam checked the device and found it turned up to the maximum shocking power. He turned it down to an acceptable tickle, catching a mischievous grin infecting Tom and Pete in greater dimensions than the others. But accident or not, it apparently worked miracles. Olaf danced in and out of the paint without violating the three-second rule once during the rest of the practice. Scott lost interest when he could no longer jolt him, and Olaf ended the scrimmage by making several smooth turnaround hook shots. Only trouble was that he traveled.

After more than twenty minutes of wind sprints in which Tom didn’t participate, Sam gathered the breathless boys around him. He shoved the glasses up on his nose.

“Friday we travel to Manhattan Christian. Saturday we play Twin Bridges at home. We’ve come a long way since our first game and I’ve seen giant steps of improvement.”

Sam glanced into Olaf’s eager, sweating face.

“Now we know something we didn’t know then: We know we can win. These are the big boys, as some of you well know, excellent teams that have completely outclassed us in the past. Now we have the chance to see if we can run with them.”

Sam caught Tom’s eyes and found a hint of doubt.

“When we started, I asked you to do your best and you have all done that. But now I’m asking you to reach deep inside and extend beyond your best. There’s a word for it that I want you to memorize, to breathe, to carve on your heart.
To transcend.
If your best is to run for ten minutes, run for eleven. If your maximum is to elevate three feet, go an inch higher. When your body and mind are screaming at you to quit, go five seconds more. That’s what it will take, from all of us, if we’re going to go to the next level.”

“Do you think we can beat Christian?” Rob asked with a note of awe in his voice, as though speaking those words aloud was so incredible it verged on blasphemy.

“We can go as far as our hearts will lead. You boys are composing your own music, you are writing the lyrics of your life, and I want it to be a song you’ll come back to over and over again, smile with pride in the warm glow of memory.”

“I can’t sing,” Dean said in a squeaking voice.

“Yes, you can, Dean,” Sam said, smiling at the freshman. “You make magnificent music, as if you are singing, when you play basketball.”

Completely bewildered, Dean looked at his teammates to see if they knew what in a rat’s ass their coach was talking about. Dean knew he couldn’t sing a note and he couldn’t play basketball worth a chicken turd. The coach was always talking funny like that and he wanted to pretend he knew what the coach was saying. Maybe if he practiced harder he’d understand, and he was willing to try this
trans end
stuff, but what bothered him most was that the other boys seemed to know exactly what the coach was talking about.

That night there was constant traffic at Sam’s door, though not the traffic he’d hoped for. First, Tom showed up around nine with an uncharacteristic look on his face. Sam was halfheartedly studying basketball on the VCR and he invited Tom to join him. Sam thought he caught a whiff of beer on Tom’s breath as the cowboy settled on the sofa. It had always confused Sam why the self-confident cowboy image was so intertwined with alcohol when the last thing a drinking man had was self-confidence.

“I’m sorry about my dad chasing you,” Tom said, glancing quickly into Sam’s eyes.

Taken by surprise, Sam’s anger rose in his throat.

“Your dad tried to kill me.”

“He’s in jail for thirty days,” Tom said.

“A man like that needs to be locked away from a sane society.”

“It’s the damn alcohol,” Tom said. “I hate him when he drinks, the things he does. I’m glad he’s in jail.”

“I know it must be hellish for you and your mom.”

“Yeah … at least he doesn’t hit her.”

“How about you?” Sam said.

Tom looked away and shrugged.

“Maybe the jail time will turn him around,” Sam said.

“That’ll be the day.”

Sam fought off the intense sadness in the room. “You want a Pepsi?”

Tom ignored the offer and went on as if he didn’t want to leave it at that.

“I saved my money for three years, bought a beautiful buckskin gelding—two year old. I brought him along, trained him, worked with him for hours every day. Called him Horse. He followed me around like he thought I was
his daddy or something. The summer he was five my dad wanted to take him to Three Forks and ride him in the rodeo parade. Finest looking horse we’d ever had. I told him No. I knew he’d be drinking. I was only thirteen. I was down in Ennis that day baling hay with the Donaldsons. My dad took Horse to the rodeo.

“We baled until after dark and I didn’t get home until around eleven. Horse was gone and I knew my dad had taken him. I took our old Chevy and drove for Three Forks. When I got to Willow Creek, there was a patrol car sitting off the blacktop just past the elevator. Its lights were twirling and there were a few people standing around. It felt like I had a horseshoe in my stomach. I thought of my dad immediately. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet but I pulled over and got out.

“The patrolman was trying to get the story straight. Several people had reported a pickup and trailer dragging a horse down the blacktop. I felt sick, I couldn’t breathe. The patrolman turned his flashlight on the pavement. There was a bloody smear trailing off onto the gravel. No one had been able to get a license plate number or recognize the pickup and they couldn’t find the carcass. I knew instantly it was my father.”

“Oh, God, Tom, how awful, how horrible.”

“My dad hid out until noon the next day when the alcohol would be out of his blood. Then he showed up, said it had been a terrible accident. Said he’d gotten something to eat after the rodeo and then got in the pickup and drove for home. He forgot he’d tied Horse to the back of the trailer rather than loaded him. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, running along in my mind behind that trailer with Horse, through Three Forks at a trot, then speeding up out of town, trying his damnedest to keep up at a full run and, finally, falling, hitting the blacktop with his hide, screaming, forty-five, fifty miles an hour, burning the hide off him, the incredible pain, the shock, wondering why this man was doing this to him.”

Sam felt his throat go dry, his heart race, the perspiration breaking out all over his body. It was the madness.

“I couldn’t sleep for weeks,” Tom said, “reliving Horse’s last minutes being dragged to death, praying he died quickly before his organs were spilling out on the highway. There was a bloody smear from just outside Three Forks, all the way into Willow Creek. I wish I’d never seen what was left
of him. My dad showed the sheriff the ditch where he’d dragged him that night. I wish I’d never seen his frozen brown eye still screaming from his slaughtered head.

“The sheriff couldn’t prove squat. It passed for a terrible accident. But I knew my dad was drunk. I knew he came out of some bar and drove away drunk. I hate him and his goddamn alcohol. He can rot in jail for the rest of his life for all I care. Lock him up and mail the key to the moon and the world will be a better place!”

Tom wiped at his eyes and stared into the TV. They sat there in an utter silence despite the noise from the basketball game.

Someone knocked at the door and Sam was thankful, momentarily, off the hook. His heart was fluttering on the way to the door, but he attempted to keep the disappointment off his face as Carter, Louella, Olaf, and Pete bounded into the house a little after ten, back from a movie and hamburgers in Bozeman and looking for other ways to bring in the New Year.

“Having a big night?” Sam said.

“Oh, yeah,” Pete said. “We’ve been down at the river listening to the ice crack.”

“Great,” Tom said, seeming to have thrown back the horror. “Now we can go out to my place and play cow pie.”

“Cow pie?” Pete said.

“Yeah. We each put a buck in the pot and pick a cow. The one whose cow shits first wins.”

They talked Sam into turning off basketball and finding
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3
at which they could hoot and shriek. Sam found two frozen pizzas in his freezer, and Pete scrambled back to his grandmother’s to scrounge what pop he could. Louella insisted on going along, in case he couldn’t carry it all.

The new year approached and they found pots and pans and other objects with which to make noise. Another knock at the door convinced Sam that Diana had made it back from California in time. After rushing to the door, his disappointment exposed itself when he found Rob and Mary on the dark front porch.

“Saw Carter’s truck. Didn’t know you were having a party,” Rob said as he and Mary bustled in.

“I didn’t either,” Sam said, closing the door and trying to keep the heartache at bay.

They brought in 1991 together, and Sam attempted to hide his loneliness and find comfort in their company.

“Olaf,” Rob called from the kitchen, “Carter and Louella want to know how
hard…
”

Louella and Carter sprang off the sofa where they flanked Olaf and ran into the kitchen screaming.

“… the
tundra
is in Norway,” Rob shouted before the girls got to him. They played poker, sang the school fight song—sounding like Notre Dame alumni—ate everything that wasn’t locked away, and the party broke up shortly after two in the morning.

When he was finally in bed, Sam could hear the wind that had eaten the Christmas snow and had left Willow Creek bare and dry. Sam shivered under his blankets. He kept seeing the bloody smear on the blacktop all the way from Three Forks, kept trying to evade the image of George Stone-breaker attacking him with his truck. Could he ever forgive the violent rancher, the Hamm’s Beer truck driver, the monster with a shotgun?