“Hey, ‘god! Great fucking game!”
Sam nudges his lunch bucket in her direction. With a quick grin, she dives into it. He’s packed extra but she doesn’t need to know it.
“You got a hoop at home?” he asks.
“Had one. Just an old rim I took off an old abandoned house. It was a bitch getting it up onto the side of the house by myself, too. Tony tore it down one night when he was shitfaced. Sometimes I go to the court in the park or the one at the grammar school. They’re closer than the high school.”
And out of doors, Sam adds to himself. He ticks his head toward the glovebox. “Made you a mix. All punks. It’s in the glovebox.”
She yanks off the piece of cardboard he has gaffer-taped over the doorless glovebox and rummages for the cassette with his carefully printed listing of cuts on the jacket card.
“Mostly it’s classic stuff you probably know already—Ramones, Dickies, Buzzcocks—”
She tucks the tape into her gym bag.
“Couple years ago,” he says, “my mother was hassling my old man, trying to get custody, so I cut out to visit my aunt who lives in Oregon—anyway, while I was there, my cousin got me into some clubs in Portland and Seattle.” Remembering excites him and he founders, struggling to convey the experience. “It was amazing,” he blurts, and blushes at the lameness of the phrase.
The Mutant tucks her knees under her and stares at him. “No shit? You got a fake ID?”
“Most of the places we went weren’t fussy if you had the cover charge in your hand. Lot of times there’d be about seven people listening—well sometimes they were listening—and the band. One of the best I heard, it was like that. But sometimes it was packed and totally out of control. It was great.”
Her eyes are wide.
There’s a funny warm feeling in the pit of his stomach—he’s impressing her. He starts to sweat. “I heard about a job in the school cafeteria. It’s just the lunch hour, serving the line, busing. You’d get paid and you could eat for free, not just lunch either. Be easy to pick up breakfast and snacks and stuff. Help you bulk up some.”
The Mutant flops against the door. “I gotta wear a hair net?”
“To keep your hair from falling in the food?” Sam can’t help a snicker.
Swinging a leg across the seat, she boots him in the thigh.
“Hey! That hurts.”
“Would you wear one of those stupid things?”
“No! I wouldn’t shave my head or stick a ring in my nose either. Come on, Deanie. You gotta put some weight on and get your stamina up. The bigger players are gonna blow you away.”
She grabs his lunch bucket. “Right, right, ‘god’s always fucking right.”
“Anyway, they want something on your head in the cafeteria, maybe you could wear that tie-dye thing. I kind of like that.”
She glances up. “You do?”
He rolls his head as if his neck were stiff. “Well, yeah.”
When he lets her out at the corner, he yells after her. “Turn those witches of yours out tomorrow! Burn some ass!”
“My pleasure!” floats back to him.
“You’re welcome,” he calls.
Guys Our Secret Weapon, under the fold, headlines the brief interview with Greenspark Indian sophomore star Deanie Gauthier in the morning Portland paper. It’s all a matter of mutual support, the controversial point guard has told the reporter who covered the Ravenswood-Greenspark contests, in which first the Greenspark Indian boys exhibited a notable enthusiasm while the girls were on the floor and in turn were cheered on by the distaff Indians. A photograph of a struggle for possession between the Mutant and a Ravenswood player accompanies the piece, along with one of the guys, on his feet in the bleachers, cheering the girls’ action.
Asked for comment, the Ravenswood girls’ coach remarks her girls had a bad night, that’s all, and it is amazing that Greenspark tolerates Gauthier’s disruptive appearance. As to reports the Greenspark buses were vandalized with obscenities and personal attacks against players, both Ravenswood coaches agree Greenspark’s got an attitude and the whole incident was overblown.
Sam rolls the newspaper and taps out the processional opening beat of Queen’s “Under Pressure” on the edge of the kitchen table before he tosses the paper to his father. Everybody’ll be at practice this morning. Stroke of genius. Thank you, Gauthier. And thank you, Ravenswood, for being piss-poor losers.
At lunchtime, the Mutant is behind a stainless-steel steamtable, with a ladle in her hand. It feels zooey. She’s one of the feeders and the animals are on the other side, dragging their trays down the gutter, studying the contents of the steamtables like scavengers turning up their noses at insufficiently fragrant carcasses.
Everything—food, utensils, kitchen workers and kids—smells overcooked, like canned tomato soup on a back burner until it has a wrinkled skin on the top and a pebbly layer of black gunk on the bottom. The animals mutter and whisper and giggle and chatter. Her pits are wet, she’s nauseated with the overwhelming smell of it all and she wants a drag in the worst way. The poisonous suspicion has come upon her that this is all a plot by a certain overgrown grease monkey to keep her from the smoking area at lunchtime.
Only he’s too stupid to be that devious. She remains convinced that most of the time there’s nothing going on in ‘god’s cranium but mental basketball, played to a tape loop of Coach’s clean-living bullshit punctuated with little-boy varooms and automobile crash noises. Like one of those video games that plays with itself when nobody’s punching in quarters.
And still the animals shuffle along, whining and carping
