The Mutant harries her, harries them all half-crazy. Her eyes blaze depthlessly in the pale oval of her face, with its bizarre exoskeletal half-mask. Her perspiration suckers her uniform to her body and her skin gleams wet under the lights. She is electrical. The spark leaps between her and her teammates and they move with the darting flashing rapidity of a school of fish.
Nat Linscott seems to become taller and heavier as she blocks the Condor center. Everywhere the Condor guards move, there is a Jandreau twin, until it seems as if they have been cloned into a quartet. With her hair in its rigid halo, Deb Michaud is always somewhere relentlessly useful to the Mutant. Greenspark runs and runs and runs. The Condors pant like little birds, their economical little breasts fluttering rapidly. Tiring, they begin to be confusable. They look at each other, they look to McCandless, and find only reflections of their own glassy china doll eyes. Hypnotized, stunned, mind-fucked—they struggle to catch up and are still running, exhausted and zombie-eyed, when the final buzzer catches them thirteen points in arrears, 61–48.
The Greenspark Indian girls advance to the semifinals.
The light outside is going and the air comes into the lungs knife-sharp. Almost everybody else leaves the auditorium in search of a meal. Sam urges Deanie—headragged against the cold—onto the bus so she won’t miss a celebratory outing with her teammates. He watches the departure—waving at her, at his folks, who are there for her now as much as himself, at the whole contingent of two basketball teams, band, cheerleaders and an assortment of coaches, school administrators, Laliberte and Liggott among them, and the other kids’ parents. The kids are exuberant and noisy but under control. Liggott has all but Super Glued himself to Kevin Bither. The hammer’s been down on Mouth since before the buses departed Greenspark.
Sam leaves his gym bag on one of the chairs that form the bench on the Greenspark side. A couple of guys wield push brooms across the floor—a fat man and a thin man, like a couple of comedians from jerky old silent pictures. They pause to watch him stepping over TV cables at the ends and stroll onto the boards. Fingers in jacket pockets, he quarters the floor, rocking on his toes at certain points, once stooping to pick up a popcorn kernel.
“Hey, Sam, how’s it feel?” one of the sweepers asks as he draws near them.
The question breaks his concentration. He blinks and then nods affirmatively.
“Got a ball with you?” the other asks. “Go ahead. We won’t tell anybody, you want to shoot some.”
Surveying the cavernous room for signs of officials, he moves to his bag. Nobody around to become officious—all out chowing down, likely. Just the sweepers, the camera crews testing their vantages, some old farts lounging in the upper sections, a trio of idling cops watching a TV monitor where the local happy-news team is making weak jokes at each other. Ball gripped between his knees, he twists a rubber band around his hair.
The first kiss of the ball on the floor cracks the silence of waiting inside him. It’s as if a second set of eyelids opens for him and he is awake to himself and the world around him for the first time in a very long while—what a strange illusion, as if the ball carried some hallucinatory potion absorbed through the skin! Up the court he moves with the ball, bop she bop, partnered to it as a polo player to his horse and mallet. It’s like the dream, he suddenly remembers, and that’s why it seems so hyperreal. How wonderful it would be if it really happened, the girls in their birthday suits, all for him. Amused with himself, he dances around the ball, dances it around him. Spinning, he lifts himself from the floor, gently taps rubber through nylon and lands weightlessly on his toes, sweet and light, in a smattering of applause from the handful of loiterers.
Sam is unaware of the old duffers in the bleachers, tongues stilled, now moved forward to the edges of their seat, or that the cops’ attention has shifted from the monitor to the floor, or that cameras now track him. He is no more conscious of anything besides the permutations of ball, floor, net and himself than a dog with a Frisbee.
When he picks up his father in his peripheral vision, Reuben nods toward the clock. An hour and a quarter have slipped by. There are more people in the seats—came in to have a look-see and stayed—and now early arrivals staking places for the game.
“Come on,” his father says, “I brought you some sesame noodles and some tea.”
With Deanie in her gypsy headrag perched on the railing next to him, he eats a little of the take-out in an upper section of the bleachers. Indy is fussy with sore teeth and Pearl and Reuben have taken her to walk the concourses behind the stand, hoping to distract her from the discomfort in her gums. He gives Deanie most of his noodles and pulls her into his lap. They put their foreheads together. The fringe of her headrag tickles his eyelashes. And then it’s time.
Time. Time. Time. The word reverberates in his mind. Time to go to the locker room, time to change, time to listen to Coach, time to line up, time to lope out and through the stupid hoop onto the floor, time to stretch, warm up, time to go into himself, find his focus and all very possibly for the last time. However it comes out, this is the last high school tournament he will ever play.
During the introductions on the
