Blind Your Ponies (3 page)

“You’ll be as popular as all get-out around here come basketball season,” she said, while trying to throw the ball from outside the circle.

Peter retrieved her errant shot. “Do they have a good team?”

“Nope, haven’t won a game in five years. But, lordy, I think that’s gonna change.”

“Five years!” He swished a long shot. “That’s diseased. Think I can make the team?”

His grandmother cocked her head as if he were putting her on. “All you have to do is show up. Everyone with balls makes the team, and by that I don’t mean the family jewels. I mean guts, I mean backbone, I mean heart.”

Peter blushed slightly at her reference to the family jewels, and when she said she had to get home and work on the dinner, he was glad to stay and shoot for a while. The few vehicles that had drifted by showed no surprise at this seventy-four-year-old, one-handed woman out banging a basketball off the backboard.

T
HE ROAD FROM
Three Forks made a gentle curve into Willow Creek and became Main Street, the only pavement in that end-of-the-road village. Peter could see snow-tipped mountains in almost any direction, and they looked huge. As for Willow Creek, it was hard to tell where the fields and cow pastures ended and the town began. There just wasn’t anything there.

Peter tried to be positive, but he was pissed and confused and scared. He began practicing with a vengeance because he didn’t know what else to do:
long shot, rebound, lay-up, over and over, breaking a sweat, trying to dunk the rebound and coming close, there on the outdoor court of a school where by some fluke of fate he would have to spend his junior year. His life had blown up on him, and he had been hurled to this godforsaken place.

As if in a dream he sent the ball on its graceful arc, and the swish of the net blended with the sounds of lowing cattle and distant children’s voices drifting in the dry mountain air. He looked around him, already plotting his escape.

With only a few days before school was to start, Sam Pickett labored at his desk over lesson plans. In the background, the soundtrack from
Rocky
reverberated from the stereo in the corner of the classroom, prodding him with its beat.

He felt the floor tremble and glanced up to see Hazel Brown as she blustered into his classroom.

“Mr. Pickett, there’s something you’ve
got
to see.”

She wore a sheen of sweat on her face and labored to catch her breath, which wasn’t unusual for Hazel. Sam wouldn’t call Hazel obese, though he figured she was twice the size God intended. He’d call her
big.

“What is it?” he said, wanting to finish what he was doing before going home, and anxious not to be interrupted.

“Something out in front.” She giggled. “It won’t take long, Mr. Pickett.”

For years he had explained that she didn’t have to call him mister, but she refused to pay attention. As the school cook, Hazel sometimes helped out with custodial chores, and Sam figured she always heard the students call him Mr. Pickett and felt obliged to follow suit.

“Can it wait until I leave? I’ll only be another twenty minutes,” he said with an intended irritation in his voice.

“It may be gone by then, Mr. Pickett. It won’t take but a minute.”

She stood there in enormous jeans and tentlike sweatshirt with her head slightly tilted, holding her chubby hands together in a supplicating pose.

“Oh, all right,” he said and tossed his ballpoint down on his desk. He pushed his chair back and followed Hazel out of the room, urged on by the
Rocky
soundtrack. As he walked behind her down the stairs he couldn’t help but wonder where she found jeans that size. When he first met Hazel, he held back, expecting some unpleasant body odor because of her enormous bulk, but instead he whiffed a sweet cosmetics-counter aroma that
became as much a part of her in his mind as her heavy tread. He walked down the stairs, following the wake of that pungent fragrance, and realized that if he had to he could track Hazel in the pitch dark.

She didn’t go out the school’s front door but instead led him around through the gym and into the small lunchroom where they could peer out at the asphalt basketball court without being seen.

“There,” she said, giggling and pointing to the court. Sam slid up beside her and gazed through the lunchroom window. Outside, a boy he’d never seen before assaulted the rim and backboard with a basketball, going at it as if his life depended on it.

“Watch this,” Hazel said. The boy dashed toward the backboard, grabbed the bouncing ball and nearly dunked it. “Grandma Chapman made me promise I’d introduce you. He’s her grandson from Saint Paul.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy … maybe I can meet him some other time,” Sam said, anxious to get back to work but unable to turn away as the boy hit shot after shot from the far side of the court.

“Oh, c’mon, Mr. Pickett,” Hazel said, and she hauled her body out the lunchroom door toward the asphalt court.

Sam hesitated a moment and then gave in to his curiosity.

“Peter!” Hazel shouted.

The boy stopped dribbling and turned toward the approaching couple.

“Peter, this is Mr. Pickett.” She turned to Sam. “Mr. Pickett, this is Peter Strong, Elizabeth Chapman’s grandson.”

Sam moved up beside Hazel and extended his hand. “Hello, Peter.”

“Hi.”

With his chest heaving and his T-shirt soaked, the boy took Sam’s hand in a sweaty grip. Sam guessed him to be about six foot even.

“Mr. Pickett’s our basketball coach,” Hazel said, as if it were some unheard of honor instead of an ungodly indictment.

“No … no longer. Mr. Grant will coach the team this year,” Sam said.

“Since when?” Hazel frowned, obviously hurt not to be up to the minute on what was going on around the school.

“What do you think of Willow Creek?” Sam said, ignoring Hazel’s question.

“I don’t know, I mean … there’s nothing here. I never knew a town could
die and people would keep on living there.” He wiped sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand and dried it on his jeans.

“Kind of like ghosts, huh?” Sam said, and laughed. “Are you going to be here long?”

“I sure hope not, my family’s just getting things worked out. I plan to be home by Christmas.”

“That’s not what your grandma says,” Hazel said with a defensive tone. “She said you’d be one more student for the high school this year.”

“How many kids are there?” Peter asked.

“Seventeen,” Sam said.

“Seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” Hazel said. “We’re getting an exchange student, a boy from Norway.”

“Huh. Back home I have over four hundred kids in just my class.”

“Well,” Sam said, “it was nice meeting you. Be careful you don’t turn into a ghost while you’re here.” Sam smiled and headed back toward the school.

“See you later, Peter,” Hazel said, following Sam. She caught him halfway up the second floor stairs.

“What do you think, Mr. Pickett?” she said, panting.

Sam stopped at the landing.

“What do I think about what?”

“About Grandma Chapman’s grandson. He sure has an attitude about him.”

“Remember the first time
you
saw Willow Creek?” Sam said.

“She says he’s going to be here for the whole school year. Do you think he’ll make a difference?”

Sam climbed another step and stopped. “Do you mean will he help Willow Creek win a game? No, probably not.”

“That’s what I told Elizabeth. Heavens to Betsy, it’ll take more than that kid. Magic Johnson couldn’t win a game here.”

“Oh, he looks like a player,” he said. “Was he on his high school team in Saint Paul?”

“To hear Grandma Chapman talk you’d think he was going into the NBA next week.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound like he’ll be here for the basketball season anyway.” “I don’t blame you for quitting coaching, Mr. Pickett.” She glanced into his eyes for a moment and then looked away.

“I don’t know how you stood it so long.”

“Yeah, well, it was something to do.”

Sam turned and climbed the stairs. He knew he wasn’t in the main loop of village gossip, in fact he purposely avoided it. But after eating so many meals at the Blue Willow, the hive of town scuttlebutt, he couldn’t help but gain a certain level of knowledge about everyone in town. The word was that Hazel grew up in St. Louis with her unwed mother, never married, bounced around the West waiting tables and cooking for twenty years, and then she showed up in Willow Creek ten or twelve years ago and anchored her forty-two-foot aluminum trailer as if she were making her stand. She sent out her need for approval like cottonwood seed and it stuck to everyone.

At the end of the hall he hurried into his classroom, where the
Rocky
soundtrack continued to urge him on. Ten minutes later he was up to speed, revising, polishing, and adding new material, trying to recapture the excitement he once felt in introducing students to words and language and the wonder of their magic in great writing.

But no matter how he tried to ignore it, something stuck at the back of his mind, and he couldn’t shake it. Was he annoyed at Hazel Brown for interrupting him? No, that wasn’t it. Was it what Peter Strong had said? Had the boy seen through the appearance of Willow Creek to its reality? If the kid stayed, Mr. Grant—with senior Rob Johnson—would have two good basketball players to work with. Even so, that was no longer Sam’s worry, and he tried to shove it out of his mind and keep at his lesson plans.

It didn’t work; he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t prevent himself from crossing the hall and peering from the window, down to the asphalt basketball court where the unsettled boy raged against the basket as though he were fighting to stay alive, as though he were afraid he, too, would turn into a Willow Creek ghost. Sam walked away from the window, suddenly agitated, considering the possibility that’s what had happened to him. Had Sam turned into a ghost?

Later that night, as he lay in his sleepless bed, having read Cervantes until nearly two in the morning, he played tricks with his mind, trying to hold
off the haunting that circled his bed like silent moths. Out of the shadows of his memory he could hear his mother’s voice:
You get on that elephant!

That elephant, that little gray elephant thumped its way into his mind on the familiar memory of his mother’s voice.
You get on that elephant, I paid good money.

It had been at a fly-by-night carnival in some ragtag town in Indiana, and Sam was six or seven. When they first saw the exotic creature, circling in a small roped-off area with gleeful children on its back and parents snapping photos, Sam wanted to ride. His mother bought a ticket. Sam waited in line and eventually climbed a step or two of the platform they used for children to mount the animal. The kids just ahead of him were getting on, and Sam found himself at eye level with the unfamiliar beast. He noticed its long eyelashes and thought it must be a girl elephant. All at once the creature gazed at him, opening its eyelid slowly, suddenly presenting him with a porthole into the heart of creation itself. Startled, Sam looked into the elephant’s dark watery eye.

As young as he was, he immediately recognized a sadness that matched something within him, a grief so excruciating it overwhelmed him. This wasn’t a happy time with laughing children and waving parents. The elephant was heartsick! They were stealing its life! It would never be free to run across the grass, play with other elephants, wade into a lake and splash and frolic. It had been taken hostage, confined to this dreary little circle, day after day, year after year, going in endless circles so that its owner could make money. Sam suddenly sensed the great freighted sorrow of all those creatures of the earth whose lives were pillaged for human gain and satisfaction. He had seen the awful woe in the elephant’s eye, and he had to turn away.

“I don’t want to ride!” he called to his mother with an escalating panic. “I don’t want to ride!”

“You get up there and ride, I paid good money for that ticket.”

The attendant waited impatiently to help him on.

“I’ll pay you back with my allowance,” Sam said, near tears now.

“You’ll be all right,” his mother said. “The elephant won’t hurt you.”

“I don’t—”

“The nice elephant likes boys and girls.”

“But, Mom …”

She thought he was afraid; he wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t want to be a part of the elephant’s murder.

“You get on
right now,
you’re holding everyone up, you’ll be all right.”

Sam climbed on. They loaded two kids behind him. As he waited, he leaned forward and whispered in the elephant’s huge ear: “I’m sorry, elephant, I’m sorry.”

When he clambered off the animal he couldn’t look back into that window of sorrow, as though he had participated in stealing the animal’s life. From that day, he became a vigilant survivor who, at all costs, avoided looking into the elephant’s eye.

Sam Pickett, English teacher and former basketball coach at Willow Creek High School, scrounged for sleep in his tangled bed. He was thirty-six years old and he hadn’t a clue as to who he was or what his life was about. He bore a wound he couldn’t heal.

He pulled the bedding over his head and thought back to the boy playing basketball. Sam was relieved to have severed his connection with the basketball team, yet he couldn’t help harboring the inescapable shame of a traitor.

Mervin Painter stood in the drive waiting for his wife, Claire, to get ready, something he’d grown accustomed to over the thirty-one years they’d been married. He ran his eyes over the ranch, and memories glided to him like a red-tailed hawk on the warm August breeze. The original sod hut his grandfather built when he homesteaded the land, now returning to the soil; the two-story frame house in which Mervin grew up, sitting empty; and behind him the ranch-style brick-and-cedar-sided rambler they moved into when his girls were in school.

He reflected on how well he’d covered his inner firestorm, knowing his neighbors and Willow Creek townsfolk saw him as an easygoing, patient man who faced life with a calm resolve, while inside, underneath that mellow image, he wrestled with unresolved regret and remorse and rage. He would never let on, never give his big brother satisfaction or bewilder his unsuspecting wife.