Outside, when the ceremonies are over and they emerge from the locker room again, ready for the trek home, the air is so cold the lungs contract. The arc lights gleam on the desiccated snow of an embankment that falls from the racetrack next to the auditorium. The brush edging the fence at the top of the embankment is red-gold, the color of willows when they begin to hint of spring.
Under a roofless sky, Greenspark Academy at 2:30 a.m. glows with light and vibrates with noise. It needs only smoke boiling from its foundations to complete the illusion it is about to erupt like an enormous clumsy pod into outer space, there to scatter seed to alien corners. An hour later, the parking lot begins to empty, the brilliance of the lights to fade and the sound to diminish. At 3:45, only the arc lights cast a sickly tarnish. A single boombox spews a pelvic thrust anthem into the shortening shadow of the night. On the outdoor basketball courts, Greenspark’s class A state championship teams are playing a little mixed five-on-five. Dunking is allowed and everyone hotdogs outrageously. A solitary cop, there to make sure the school suffers no vandalism, watches the kids instead. The cop wants to smoke a cigarette but he gave away his last five stale butts to Sonny Lunt when he locked the logger up in the drunk tank. Here he was prepared to close his eyes and pretend to be cooping, in case they had themselves a prank to play, and the kids just want to play hoops.
So intent is he on watching the kids on the court, he doesn’t notice the commandos sneaking up on the signboard out front to add to the legend STATE CLASS A/WESTERN REGIONAL BOYS & GIRLS BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS 1991 the lower-case postscript: We’ve got ALL the Balls.
43
Soft as a fat dirty snowflake, the neatly folded newsprint floats from the plain envelope with a Greenspark postmark onto the supper table Tuesday night. Sam drops the envelope onto the pile of mail next to his plate and opens the piece of newsprint. Cut from Monday’s sports page, it is a picture of himself with Deanie on his shoulders in the vortex of the mob on the floor. Their foreheads have been perforated by small black circles made by a ballpoint. He crumples it hastily before she can see it. Fortunately, she is spooning mashed banana into Indy, who is remarkably cooperative for a change.
He doesn’t know what to do about it. Maybe it’s nothing. But he finds himself looking around, tensing at sudden movement at the periphery of his vision, checking the rearview mirror in the truck when they are commuting.
On Thursday he is called from class to the Office. Lonnie Woods is there, hat in his hand, trouble darkening his eyes. Laliberte is so solemn, Sam’s stomach turns over with apprehension. Has he somehow done something illegal as well as ignorant? Then Deanie comes bouncing in, saucy as ever and popping gum.
Laliberte sighs. “Gum,” he mutters and points at the trash can.
One look at them and Deanie’s grin fades into wariness. She pitches the wad of gum automatically.
Laliberte clears his throat. “Sergeant Woods has something to tell you, Deanie.”
“It’s your mother,” Lonnie says and Sam moves to Deanie’s side, for whatever good he can do.
The neighbors bundle up to stand in the streets and watch, even after the body bag is carted past the TV cameras to the meat wagon. The state police lab van is there for hours and hours, and the TV people come and go, doing sound bites about a possible homicide. In broad accents the neighbors confide to the cameras that no one ever imagined this could happen, or they had always known it would. The newscasters lengthen their faces and note the irony of the tragedy in this week of what should be celebration in the life of a high school basketball star, the dead woman’s daughter.
Tony Lord has vanished. Fled the state, the police assume, issuing the usual bulletins. Lonnie Woods tells Sam—not Deanie—that the evidence indicates Lord slept for several hours in the same bed with Judy Gauthier while she expired, of his last beating, probably on Sunday night. Rising from the squalor of their bed, he then took a shower, dressed and packed and drove away, leaving the furnace running and the thermostat set at sixty-eight.
Deanie does not cry. She lies in Sam’s arms on the couch while they watch the evening news together and when the body bag is removed from the house, she hides her face but that is all. Over the next few days, she withdraws from everyone except Sam, and half the time, he can’t reach her either. When she does talk, as often as not, she is muttering she wants a cigarette, she wants to get high.
He’s not surprised to catch her going through his desk one night. She doesn’t bother to deny she is looking for money but flies into a rage. Her stealing, she asserts, is what he deserves for taking most of her earnings to pay her medical bills. She’s got a right to get stoned if she wants. She’s earned it, stayed straight all the way through basketball season and now it’s over and if he doesn’t like it, he can go fuck himself. All the while she rages, she struts around, flinging off her clothes until she is barefoot and topless. The pain the words code falls on him like the needleprick of sleet.
In the lamplight that is the color of candlelight, she jerks herself around on the edge of hysteria, her small girlish tits quivering, ribs showing again because she hasn’t been eating since her mother’s death. More than ever, she gives off the frantic terror of a creature trapped. He opens his arms, holds out his hands and she throws herself at him.
She is on top of him, focused
