Nat and Billie laugh and they give him high fives and take his threat to the team huddle.
Among his own team, Sam thumps up some bleacher support. It helps that the guys are feeling restless and frustrated at the way the game is going for the girls. It’s child’s play to kick-start the kind of rowdy obstreperous mood they had the night of the Ravenswood wins.
When the girls go to the floor again on a wave of manic enthusiasm from the boys, the girls’ coach crooks a finger at Sam.
“Who made you assistant coach?” she growls but she’s got a twinkle in her eye.
It gets brighter as Greenspark rallies.
Frogged out on cold medicine, Sam croaks and stamps in the bleachers.
From the locker room as the boys change for their game, they hear the uproar as the clock counts down the final few seconds on the end of the girls’ contest: someone has pulled Greenspark ahead at last. Then the cheers of triumph falter and flutter away. The team manager slams into the locker room and kicks a locker in frustration.
“I don’t friggin’ believe it!” he screams. “Chamberlain scored on a wild throw from the side with five seconds to go! One goddamn point!”
Sam is as stunned at the reaction of his own team as he is at the heartbreaker. They go berserk, as if it were their loss. What has he wrought? The explosion of anger is phenomenal. Even more startling is its object.
“That fucking Mutant!” Pete Fosse curses. “You know what the bitch did this weekend! Partied her whorin’ ass off!”
Rick Woods drop-kicks a sneaker over the rank of lockers. “Freakin’ little burn. They should kick her off for letting her team down.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Sam objects. “She’s sick. She’s got pneumonia. I checked on it myself.”
Kevin Bither crouches like a gargoyle on the bench.
“Bullshit,” he snarls. “What world you livin’ in, Sambot? You think she’s gonna admit she was at Dickie Bouchard’s with Chapin? Everybody knows she was, everybody knows she got so wasted, she fucking passed out.”
“Everybody knows shit,” Sam answered. “Anybody else here go to Bouchard’s, actually witness any of this famous partying?”
In the subsequent silence, Gramolini tosses Rick his high-flying sneaker.
Hauling it on, Rick leans close to Sam. “Saturday night at the dance, Slammer. You weren’t there on account of you had that Bible reading to do? Chapin was bragging on how bad they got fragged Friday night.”
“Chapin likes to talk. Everybody likes to talk. It’s a frigging shame the girls lost tonight. Maybe they would have anyway.”
His team is distressingly sullen. Their faces, their shoulders, all say they think otherwise.
“An average game, she’s a twenty-point shooter, Sambot,” Bither says. “Get fucking real. That’s twenty points the girls didn’t have tonight. It could have been a nineteen-point win.”
“Hey, bud, all right,” Sam soothes. “That game’s over. We gotta play our own now.”
In the bleachers, Reuben glances at Pearl. Indy is quiet in her lap, concentrating on her fob of plastic keys. Pearl looks up at him with an encouraging smile.
He’d be a liar to pretend that how the girls do means as much to him, though Gauthier makes their games interesting. They don’t seem to have be able to do it without her—though to be fair, they all look tougher than they did last season. He could swear they have picked up some moves from the boys.
With their faces tight, the Greenspark boys take the floor. All tensed up, except for Sammy. As always, Reuben is struck with the change in his son that occurs when the kid steps onto a basketball court. His very frame seems to enlarge and he moves differently. His face changes. Though it is more masculine, more adult in its planes and shadows, there is an eerie transparency to it that evokes the six-year-old Sammy, with an angelic tranquility to his features.
Right from the tip, though, Sammy seems a little off. A tick slow, and widening his eyes and blinking every once in a while. Probably his damned head cold getting to him. Rick Woods comes on strong. Gramolini’s hot, able to take the ball whenever Rick and Sam can get it to him, to do the necessary. A minute and a half into it, Kasten twists an ankle and Coach replaces him with that goofy kid, Skouros. He looks like some particularly stupid moose mistook his mother for a cow, but shows instinct and guts in the big guard position. Bither at small forward flubs a couple of free throws after being fouled.
While the Colonels double-team Sammy, the other four Greenspark starters outplay their trio of Chamberlain defenders. Sammy amuses himself playing to his guards, faking them out with an exhibition of tripping on his own feet. They are under the Greenspark post, players weaving among each other, when Gramolini dishes off to Rick, Rick rises from the floor to bop the ball in midair toward Sammy, and Sammy’s there, one enormous hand thrust casually overhead as he pistons upward, his guards falling away like rocket boosters. Their faces are caricatures of surprise. Gently he taps the ball and it drops through the hole.
The tally is not two but three. A Chamberlain guard has fouled Sammy in trying to block him. The ref calls a free shot and Sammy makes it. Chagrined and desperate, Chamberlain goes to triple-teaming Sammy and he settles down to making sure they foul him repeatedly. He makes most of his next quarter’s points at the free-throw line. While the Chamberlain guards rack up fouls, the only real gain for them is exchanging an occasional three-pointer for Sam for two at the line.
Toward the end of the quarter, Rick goes out for a rest. Coming in for him, Billy Rank makes two turnovers
