The Mutant watches, taking a sardonic pleasure in his undoing. Mr. Sam Styles, aka Double-Zero, after the number on his jersey, also rumored cattily to be his IQ. Slammer. Shammer. Sambot. Sambo. Samson. Preacher. Saint Sam. Godzilla. Samgod. Mr. God-To-You. He has more names than God, for sure. She hears in the locker room they call him Bigger, for Bigger Than God. Numb as a pounded thumb but they love his ass in this frigging hole. Bet they blame her for the way he’s fucking up. She should give a shit.
What does Samgod do at parties? Reps, maybe. Chows on the Doritos. Looks under the hoods parked in the driveway. Clicks around the cable, pausing for a few seconds to check out Club Meat on MTV. Settles on something involving men chasing a ball. Goes home early to rewire his speakers. Is almost asleep before he remembers he was going to choke the cobra. Decides he’s been doing it too often—might be affecting his game—and rolls over, to dream of a new four-wheel-drive with a plow attachment. The Mutant grins.
Toweling her sweaty face, she streaks the cloth with grime. She grabs the water bottle. Some of the boys have emerged from their locker room to watch the girls from the sidelines. Samgod is among them, no doubt itching to escape home to Center Cowshit. The vision of a longhaired blond giant dribbling through a herd of black-and-white Belted Galloways transports the Mutant. She adds the thinnest flurry of snowflakes to the scene: a cow’s long tongue unrolls to catch the wet flecks of cold. The gamboling mooseboy blinks against the spit of snow, and laughing, imitates the cow, tasting winter.
She hopes he has seen her play. Nobody can touch her; she is quicksilver. Coach is yanking her to yammer bullshit about pacing herself, meaning the frigging twinkies can’t keep up with her. She could keep up with Samgod Himself. Anyway she’d like to try. She wipes her nose on the back of her arm and gets a whiff of her armpit. She likes it. Sourly, Coach signals the Mutant back to the scrimmage.
Watching the girls on the court, Sam drifts into his own fantasy: Round and pumpkin-colored, he spins from fingertip to fingertip, bouncing rhythmically under the damp palm of the blonde forward as if he were being petted. Shooting into a sudden underhand pass, then driven around, among, between long bare legs. Aware of rapid breathing, swish of shorts, sweet tang of girlflesh, vibration of the floor, the squeak of sneakers like hungry little birds. And rising, rising in a long elegant arc to apogee, an instant’s weightlessness, spinning in perfect balance with the planet—and then the grab of gravity through the hoop, a belly-jumping rush into eager reaching hands.
Abruptly he is himself again. Sweating piggishly, though he is just out of the showers. He tries to concentrate on the girls’ moves. At last and inevitably, his eye is on the Mutant, drawn first by the fluidity with which she moves and then her obscenely naked skull and desperate little face. She is as quick as a frog’s tongue, slick as wet leaves over drowned sand, nasty as a needleburst of freezing rain. Everything moves like she has first-class suspension. She has fresh bruises and scrapes on her legs he realizes guiltily are the result of his falling on her between the bleachers. And there is that hair in her armpits. It looks kind of soft and silky, like the fur in his old bear’s armpit, the one that is currently being drooled all over by his baby sister India. Which reminds him—home and supper are on the other side of Greenspark and the Narrows.
Tony is having his wake-up beer at the kitchen dinette.
Without speaking, the Mutant passes him and goes into her room, a narrow space under the stairs scarcely big enough for her cot. Judy and Tony sleep upstairs in a low-ceilinged room that was once a storage loft. The Mutant closes the door between her and Tony. A hook and eye hangs together on the back of the door and the frame is splintered.
The room is windowless, every surface painted black. Mounted on the black ground is an alligator skin of reflective glass composed of cheap handmirrors and tarnished framed mirrors from junkshops and yard sales. Here and there an oval looking glass with a handle punctuates the mirror mosaic like an exclamation mark. When the Mutant is stoned, the black ground becomes a web trapping bright nodes of reality.
Spilling books and notebooks from her backpack, she flips open her biology text. In the gap where the human reproduction segment has been sliced out is a roach. She reaches across the cot to flick on her clock-radio. Sitting cross-legged, she lights the weed with a paper match and listens to Axl Rose singing about finding a safe place.
Tony opens the door. He leans over her to snap off the radio. “Gimme a hit.”
She hands it to him. He would take it by force if she didn’t.
“I need this,” he says. “I gotta look at a freak like you, I oughta be stoned.”
She doesn’t respond and he goes away, taking the roach with him.
She turns the radio back on and cranks the volume to hear Axl still wailing. The hell with the roach. She needs to get her homework done, keep her grades up to stay eligible to play. Just a toke or two was all she wanted but Tony has to be a pig and take it away from her. She doesn’t dare to be grateful he didn’t stay. He might come back.
And he does. He comes back and turns off the radio again and lets her have the last couple hits
