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
