In both the girls’ and boys’ matches, Greenspark beats Breckenfield, as Kevin Bither explains solemnly, “real bad.”
If the weekend could be reduced to an ideogram, it would be two parallel wavy lines, like a long giggle. Shivering awake at the edge of dawn and going out to practice together at the meetinghouse. Wolfing breakfast at the diner before Sam takes Deanie to meet Miss Reggie at the supermarket. The old women waving at him from their kitchen window as he idles in the driveway and she runs back out to him when he picks her up. For their supper, eaten at the garage, he gets Chinese take-out and they have lemon-coconut cake from the bakery for dessert, Deanie’s treat. She hangs out with him until he closes up. Sunday morning at the meetinghouse again, shooting, doing drills. Studying, listening to music, sharing the sports page, all reassuring and mundane events, in the course of which they are surprised by the sudden awareness of each other. Then they become rambunctious, tickling and pinching each other through the house and wrestling over the couch.
Off the court, or outside of work, Sam whistles “Froggie Went A-courtin’” all weekend. Miss Mousie, Miss Mousie, he finds himself whispering to her as they thrash, foundering in the current that sweeps them once again toward the edge of something like a waterfall. It’s all right, he assures himself, this is just like tourney fever. It’ll pass.
Deanie’s notebooks rash out in giddy bagel-shaped flowerchild graphics to record such ephemera as how many baskets she shot in weekend practice. Sometimes she breaks out in a cold sweat and feels like she’s going to throw up and wonders if Pearl is sprinkling hash in the brownies or lacing the coffee with windowpane.
She still wakes in the night, sweat-soaked and choking for breath. What begins as comfort becomes a frantic struggle for an instant’s oblivion in which she punishes Sam, biting him, tearing him up with her nails. Once as he turns his head on the pillow, he sees her hand unclenching, the long fingers trembling, releasing strands of his hair like threads of spun straw and realizes why his scalp is tingling.
As the regular season began, so it ends, meeting Castle Rock—only away at the Rock, after both girls and boys again have taken the Cork Cougars and Hamlin Pipers down to defeat. At the Castle Rock town line, the Greenspark buses are greeted with a jingle:
Gauthier is bad and bald,
Sam the Slam is big and mean,
but CASTLE Rock
has got the tools
to jam the Big Machine.
“Hey, I resent that,” Rick complains, “they didn’t mention me.”
Before they reach Castle Rock High School, though, each and every starter on both the girls’ and boys’ teams has been derided by name in a roadside insult.
Who Woodsie is
we think we know,
watch us
hold his scoring low.
“Well, I’se scared, Sambo, I’se jest scared,” Rick squeaks in Butterfly McQueen’s falsetto. “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no hoops.”
“Good ol’ Woodsie, dark and deep,” Sam teases, “with blondes to d-d-dick before he sleeps.”
The boys on the bus occupy themselves with the new game of answering the jingles. By the time they reach downtown Castle Rock—two blocks with a Reny’s five-and-dime, a cafe, a bar, a mom-and-pop store doing a heavy trade in video rentals, a video game parlor, a tiny barbershop, a sewing goods shop, a Western Auto, a laundromat, a Sunoco, two banks, and five boarded-up storefronts, among them a real estate office with a tattered for-sale sign on the outside of the plate-glass window, itself full of curling, yellowed three-by-five cards describing other properties on the market—the Greenspark players are hanging out the windows, reciting their own doggerel boasts and threats to pedestrians and passing traffic all the way to the high school. In response, the girls’ bus provides rude cheers and then picks up the hastily composed doggerel and joins the recital.
Between the girls’ squads, the game is one-sided but the Rockettes refuse to lie down and call it quits. The Mutant’s irritation builds with the opposing team’s persistence. When she glances in his direction—how am I doing?—Sam gives her the high sign. She gets his message and relaxes. Her shift in mood affects the players on both teams. All at once the game is looser. When the Rockettes’ center slips and falls on her ass in a post scramble, the Mutant gives her a hand up and pats her fanny and gets a grin from the other girl.
The boys’ game that follows is one of the hardest-fought of the schedule. The weeks of play since the last encounter have seasoned the Rockets into a tougher team. Priest and Clutterbuck are the best they have ever been. Of the trio of sophomores who start with them, Gary Seeds has emerged as a quick-handed point, Mike Fairbrother has taken enthusiastically to big forward and Nick Young now plays his guard position with confidence.
Sam is double-teamed by Priest and Fairbrother. The latter is only a middling shooter, does a little better at the stripe, but he can run and pass and he does have timing. Lucas Priest, of course, is far too devoted a student of Sam Styles’s moves. They succeed in frustrating him just enough to make it worthwhile for them. Tim Kasten helps out the Rock with an overthrown pass that results in a turnover and then commits a couple of thoughtless, useless fouls, and comes down with the jitters. With Castle Rock up six points at the half, Coach subs Skouros for Kasten.
Greenspark ties up the score during the third quarter and Sam takes a breather while Joey Skouros fills in for him. Alquist subs for Joey at
