“Go ahead,” says the janitor, George Moody. “You do it, Bill. My back ain’t up to it. Anybody asks me, I say the first thing is get the damn thing off’n the roof.”
Bill Laliberte, the principal, suffers the janitor addressing him by his first name with a pained grin. Moody has been known to leave a dead rat clogging Laliberte’s private can as a protest against work he doesn’t want to do.
Sitting on the hood of Lonnie’s cruiser, Sam Styles and Rick Woods dare not look at each other directly.
The fire department shows up. All of it. There isn’t much to do in Greenspark on a Sunday morning, and it isn’t every day there’s an eight-foot ice sculpture of a stiff prick on the high school roof. Eventually the hook-and-ladder is backed into position and the firemen clamber to the roof. Quite a few other people get up there too—the chief of police and the head selectman and the principal—until somebody notices the number of camera lenses pointed their way and it occurs to the dignitaries, more or less simultaneously, that being photographed with a giant ice dildo could be embarrassing.
It is almost eleven o’clock by the time the fireboys have the sculpture rigged for removal. By then most of the student body, some of it severely hung over, is part of the audience. Lonnie Woods is too involved in traffic control to keep track of Rick and Sam. They continue to use the hood of the cruiser as a beach blanket, where they lounge in weary splendor. Gradually, the rest of the basketball team assembles around them to watch.
At last, the ice dick rises from the roof to cheering and applause. The fireman at the wheel of the hook-and-ladder throws the truck into gear and it begins to roll away from the building.
Sam sits up. “Oh, oh,” he says.
The ice dick sways dramatically in its cradle of rope. Suddenly something lets go. Sensing the shift, the driver brakes the truck and the abrupt stop propels the sculpture backward. To the gasps and screams of the spectators, the thing slips its cradle and goes hurtling through the glass doors. It shatters on impact with the lobby floor. Fragments of ice and glass commingle like white confetti.
Sam slides off the hood of the cruiser onto the pavement of the drive, so convulsed the only sounds he makes could be taken for inconsolable grief. Around him, his teammates bay and shriek.
Forty minutes later, the two boys trudge up the stairs. Rick flops onto his bed and rolls over to undo the laces of his high-tops.
“On the floor,” Rick says. “I ain’t sharing my bed with nobody with a dick.”
The blankets and pillows Mrs. Woods has left to spread out on the carpet are just fine by Sam, who is beat enough to sleep on nails.
For a little while there is silence and then Rick groans. “Don’t know if I can sleep, Slammer.” He pounds his pillow. “Fuck! We won the fucking state!”
Rick squirms to the edge of the bed and hangs his head over to see if Sam is appreciating it all.
But Sam is silent, his eyes closed. Rick knows his friend is far from fragile—without Sam’s drayhorse strength they never could have gotten that thing to the roof without a power winch—but he hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Had himself a game. And partied with the rest of them. In his own weird way. Could have had any girl he wanted last night but spent most of the party with headphones on, sucking up beer and playing DJ for them with Scottie’s music.
Sam’s sudden lapse into unconsciousness is sleep as crashing, a sudden precipitous loss of elevation. In his exhaustion, Sam’s dreams are as intense and violent as the physical exertion and emotions of the past day might be expected to provoke. Of his dreams, on waking, Sam Styles recalls only the image of the solitary shooter out in the cold, an image with the eerie quality of an instant Polaroid. The figure is flat and grainy, the sole color and clearest focus the ghostly but still warmly dirty-orange basketball grasped by fingers so perfectly formed they seem sculpted of ice. There is no way to tell if the picture is fading or still developing. Weirdly the memory evokes the chemical smell and taste of the rubber ball, like nothing so much as dirty tears.
1
The Back of the Room—his natural haven—has no space for his legs so Sam Styles folds himself like a Hide-A-Bed into the tube-frame angles of the desk at the outside corner of the first row. Gradually he relaxes until his size-sixteen Converse All-Stars are in the no-man’s-land where the English teacher, Mr. Romney, paces.
“People,” Romney says, in a tone that suggests he wishes he had a cattle prod handy. “You have all read the material, haven’t you? Why am I asking?”
Sam struggles to focus on the teacher. The heel of his palm rests against his crotch underneath an open notebook, hiding the semi that has popped up from nowhere. Frigging thing has a life of its own. He is, he has long since concluded, merely a life-support system for a dick.
Romney strides to a window and opens it. The rush of cold air at least makes them all stir about a little.
Sam tugs his unbuttoned red flannel shirt forward over his T-shirt, which bears the legend Dope Is The Opiate Of The People, and hunches against the sudden chill. He gives Romney an apologetic look.
The teacher cocks an eyebrow at him but Sam continues to slump there taking up space. Too vividly, Romney recalls his first class with Sam, three years earlier, when the boy’s posture made it clear he was
