“Shit!” she shrieks.
People laugh.
Though she is visibly fighting the discomfort of using the hand, she throws herself back into the action. She begins to guard it and rely on her right. Her coach takes her out. The Mutant sulks on the bench, cradling her hand and chewing her lip. By the last quarter, when Sam and his teammates adjourn to the locker room to change for their game, the outcome is in doubt despite a rugged effort by Billie and the other girls.
When the girls are defeated, Sam leads the line of boys in offering each of the Greenspark girls a handshake and a consoling pat. The girls have their chins up and are dry-eyed. Sometimes girls cry when they lose but not this team. Rumor has it any girl who even clouds up suffers the Mutant’s apparently terrifying scorn.
The Mutant glares at his hand and stalks by him. He wants to laugh. She is so ridiculously fierce. It’s like one of Indy’s all-body freakouts when the baby’s chubby fingers lose their grip on her water bottle or plastic keys and she goes rigid with fury. Somebody should give Deanie Gauthier a good tickling and make her laugh until she hiccups. But it’s hardly the moment to assure her it’s just another game.
On court, Sam slips the cat’s cradle of his life. Tugs the string and the knots disappear as if they never had been. Here is the place where for all his many names, he is most himself.
During a time-out, he glances up from the huddle around Coach and catches a glimpse of the Mutant, returned to the gym with the rest of her teammates after showering and changing. She is next to Nat Linscott—some pair they make, Nat with her flaming red hair and Gauthier with her cueball skull and her face chained up like it was something dangerous that might escape.
A while later, toeing the free-throw line, Sam wipes his face with his shirt. There is some discussion going on between the two refs. Everyone else is still sorting out their position. Again he glances toward the Greenspark bleachers and sees the Mutant turning in her seat to say something to Nat. The ivory curve of her throat and jaw remind him forcefully of her hands before the cigarette burn.
He returns his focus to the ref now poised under the post with the ball in his hand. Then it’s in his hands and he tries to empty out everything except the easy arc that drops the ball into the peach basket. As he releases the ball, the sudden image of the fiery orange coal sinking into the back of a pale, slender hand wrenches him. He knows the shot is a brick even before it wobbles around the rim and then tiredly slips the channel. He is in motion with the surge into the paint.
The old bagmobile humps and stutters to a lame halt in front of the supermarket and Miss Reggie Rodrigues unfolds her rigidly corseted six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame from under the steering wheel. With her big high rump and stiff gait, she looks like an exotic flightless bird of some long-extinct species.
Saturday mornings begin with the old biddy piloting her late father’s 1954 Buick Century Special to the market, where she and the Mutant do the weekly shopping. After the groceries are stored in the Buick’s capacious trunk, they go to the pharmacy. There may be a stop at the dry cleaner’s or at the self-service pumps down the street to put a few dollars into the Buick’s bottomless tank. Filling up is the Mutant’s job as Miss Reggie’s knobbled fingers are no longer able to exert the initial pressure on the gas nozzle to set the trigger guard. Last stop is the bakery, for the afternoon tea-break goodies, one of which the Mutant is allowed to choose for herself. With the whole glass case of pastries at her command, she always winds up choosing a slice of lemon-coconut cake.
With seven elderly and incontinent cats, the Rodrigues sisters live in the late Dr. and Mrs. Rodrigues’s home at the eastern edge of Greenspark village proper, a mile from Greenspark Academy on the Main Road—Route 302. Set among aged evergreens that block the light, the narrow wood-frame farmhouse is high-ceilinged within and clad without in fading yellow-painted clapboards. The furniture-crowded rooms smell of cat piss and lavender, of lemon polish and musty old upholstery and disintegrating horsehair plaster under mildewed wallpaper. The kitchen features a slate sink and a handpump, a wood-fired cast-iron range supplemented by a small enameled gas one, and a Kelvinator with a compressor on top. Miss Katherine is waiting at the kitchen door. She is the older of the sisters. As stout and heavy-framed as Reggie, she is much more crippled by arthritis, depending upon a walker for anything more than a step or two.
The Mutant scours the kitchen top to bottom. The linoleum is so old it has long since been rubbed raw. Every bucket of dirty floor water she pours down the toilet carries off a quantity of the crumby tarry substance of the eroded lino, like topsoil into the Mississippi. She picks a comber of cat hair from the edge of the disintegrating floor sponge. It takes most of the forenoon to scrub the kitchen, where the old women and the cats spend most of their time, particularly in the cold months when it is the warmest room in the house.
The afternoon is consumed with changing the sisters’ beds, cleaning the two bathrooms, vacuuming, dusting and polishing the herd of heavy-limbed Victorian furniture. On her hands and knees, scrubbing bathroom fixtures with baking soda and an old toothbrush, her Walkman blasting decibels into her ears, the Mutant is as content as she is anywhere out of reach of a net.
While the
