The judge barely looks at Deanie, nor does she look at him. She keeps her eyes downcast throughout the hearing, answering the few questions in monosyllables. The glossy wood of the table they sit at reflects her face almost as clearly as a mirror. The studs in her nose and ear wink dots of light off the overheads. Her eyes are dark and smudgy, like something drawn by a child. The scar between her nose and ear could be a ripple in the grain of the wood.
This February at war, awaiting the clash of ground forces in the desert, doesn’t feel any different than any other year. February is always a waiting month. Waiting for winter to be done with it. Waiting for the furnace to stop running all the goddamn time. Waiting to be able to go outside in the morning and have the motor turn over on the first go. Waiting to be able to breathe out of doors without it freezing the hairs inside the nose and shocking the lungs. Waiting for the planet, in its lumbering pas de deux, to tip this particular latitude into the sun’s face—oh for some heat in the daylight, some heat on the face.
Talk keeps you in the store or the post office or just inside and out of the cold a little longer. It kills the time, burns a few of the calories from that jelly donut you shouldna had. Talk about the weather. And the war. And about high school basketball.
In the rural states, high school basketball breaks up the dead of winter. Even though the tournaments are televised now, when the local kids make the cut, the little towns still automatically empty out, everybody headed toward wherever the tourney’s being held that year. There’s always joking about the last person out of town turning off the lights and remarks about what an opportune time it would be to burglarize East Bugswat.
With the last regular-season games in the books, it’s time to study the tapes of the other nine teams qualifying for tournament play. Every possible clash between the tournament-bound teams is war-gamed until the players are as familiar with the characteristics of each team as if they played them regularly. Single elimination means everything rides on each game; lose and the buses go home. Two of the four lowest-ranked teams will be eliminated in preliminaries. In the boys’ division, the eighth-ranked survivor is scheduled to meet number-one-seed Greenspark in the prime-time night game on the first of March. Number four in the girls’ division, Greenspark will meet number five, Comfort, in the quarterfinals during the afternoon of the same day.
Squirt-gun wars break out, spreading rapidly from the jocks to the rest of the student body. Bither is busted in a shootout on the stairwell when the vice-principal walks into the line of fire. He gets off with a warning.
There is a sudden escalation to shaving foam and then to cheese spray. Someone fills the inside of Bither’s jock with cheese spray—Mouth himself, Rick Woods insists, probably to have a snack handy.
No locker or gym bag is safe. Jocks are discovered filled with shaving foam, toothpaste, liquid heat and depilatories. The insides of high-tops, sweats and uniforms are coated with Vaseline, with K-Y, with peanut butter. Lockers are slimed with various substances. Sam finds the interior of his stuccoed with marshmallow fluff, the goo studded with crushed Cheez-Its. It doesn’t actually taste too bad.
When a teacher picks up the can of Maxwell House in the teachers’ lounge to start the first pot next morning, she finds herself holding the bottomless cylinder as coffee grounds cascade over the counter. The sugar bowl is heaped with alum, the cookie tin filled with dog biscuits. Every tampon dispenser in the girls’ rooms dispenses its contents all at once like a slot-machine jackpot. The fountains suddenly spurt green water and in the boys’ room, wash basins and urinals run blood-red. When Coach’s weight depresses the toilet seat on the pot in the teachers’ lavatory, it sets off a police siren. The effects on Coach’s chronic constipation are known only by scatological rumor.
There is a special assembly in which Wild Bill, twinkling with patient amusement, perches on the edge of the auditorium stage. When he calls on the vice-principal to deliver a sterner caution, Liggott is unable to rise from his chair in the first row. The student body is dismissed while the vice-principal abandons his Super Glued trousers for a pair of sweats volunteered by an assistant coach. The principal concludes the assembly over the PA system with the edict that the next stunt will be punished by suspension. No sooner does he sign off than there is a shriek of static like nails on a chalkboard and then a long, fluting (prerecorded) fart erupts from the intercom, followed by the principal exclaiming “Shut that goddamn thing off!” into the open mike.
The next morning, the grounds are festooned with toilet paper and the door to the Office is Super Glued. Once entry is gained, it is discovered that all the filing cabinets and desk drawers have also been Super Glued. Disgusted, the principal gives a jerk to his top drawer, the front panel separates into his hand and dozens of condoms spill out of the drawer. When Laliberte opens the door of his private lavatory, the popcorn the room has been packed with collapses onto the flailing principal. Laliberte begins, at last, to look a little ragged.
In the dull let-down light of too early in the morning, the buses load for Portland. The kids are relatively quiet—sleepy, some of them, and some of them spooked and nervous. Nobody’s fantasies of playing and winning ever include the mundane boarding of the bus. It’s like the beginning of a journey of a
