In the meantime, the Mutant backs off. And registers the changes. Eyes widening, she wanders into the cavern of the Mill’s main floor and stares at the basketball hoop on the wall. In the harsh glare of the floods, the shadow of the hoop on the wall is a hangman’s loop waiting for the stickman’s parts to be drawn.
She clasps her hands and whoops in delight. “You did this?”
Sam nods. He essays standing up and makes it.
The Mutant scoops up the ball and dribbles it slowly over the crumbles and cracks of the cement floor. Positioning herself almost reverently at an imaginary free-throw line, she bounces ritually on her knees and lofts it up and in with a soft, smooth motion.
He applauds.
The Mutant throws herself into a cartwheel and comes out of it into a jump, prancing about with her hands on her hips like a cheerleader. She snatches up the ball. “Come on. Even ‘god can’t skip practice.”
The place is so grubby in the light. There’s no one else to enjoy her secret court with her. A few shots wouldn’t kill him. His first few shots as a free man, for whom basketball is just an occasional recreation. Then he’s out of there. Ignoring the ache in his testes, he shambles toward the hoop.
With a little use his arm comes back. And now it’s just a game again, he remembers why he loves it, the way it takes him out of himself. Sam the Sham becomes Sam the Slam. And scrawny Deanie Gauthier becomes the Mutant, superpowers flashing from the tips of her fingers. Once they are warmed up, they discard their jackets and she unwraps her headrag. She wears her chains heedlessly, though they snap and whip against her jeans and against the thin flesh of her cheekbone. At one point he stops her and tickles them questioningly. She shakes her head.
With a pretense of slapstick clumsiness, Sam mysteriously gets the ball into the bucket and then scratches his head in buffoonish puzzlement at his success. The Mutant becomes a dervish thug, mugging him for the ball, climbing his back to knock it from his hands, squirting between his legs and rolling away across the floor like a cartoon hedgehog, arms hugging it tight. He picks her up by the ankles and she yelps and lets it go.
“Too bad we didn’t have a boombox,” he says, “music to hack by.”
“Yeah.” She’s on one foot, then the other, arms crossed. Almost shyly, she says, “You got chains.”
Reminding himself by touch, he fingers the chains, the thin hard edge of braided metal warmed by his body. They are already so much a part of him he hardly ever thinks about them except when he takes them off and then puts them on again to practice. It must be the way her chains feel to her.
“All you need is an earring and a stud in your nose and some tattoos,” she says.
He can’t help grinning at the new and improved Sam she imagines. “S’pose I should shave my head too?” She reacts with genuine alarm. “Don’t you dare!” He doesn’t know what to say and a sudden awkwardness widens up between them. Slowly, stealing glances at her, Sam picks up his ball. “I should be going.”
The Mutant shuffles her feet. “Don’t quit the team.”
He studies the ball. “I’ll think about it.”
There is a sudden flutter of relief through her thin body and then she presses herself against him and slings her arms around his neck. The quickness and enthusiasm of her embrace startle and move him. Laughing in surprise, he drops the ball to hug her back. She rises on tiptoe and quickly kisses him, startling him again. Before he can react, she pistons upward, legs scissoring around his waist like a monkey up a pole. Her mouth is hard and wet on his. He grasps her waist instinctively to keep his balance and then to hold her there against him. The taste of her is irresistible. He takes his time, savoring the slick heat of her mouth and the silky hardness of her chains against his face, his mouth when he traces them with his tongue. His hands move to her bottom and telegraph the way it tightens straight to the root of his balls.
She wriggles against him and their mouths are together again. When he lets her down and their faces lose contact, she presses against him. Butts her head into his chest, rolls her pelvis against his thigh and moves his hand underneath her shirt to her breast. It is a powerful argument, reinforced by repeated sexual fantasies about her. All the words and reasons against it have gone out of his head, leaving only a numb thick protest jammed in his throat. In a dry-mouthed daze and ferociously tumescent, he lets her lead him to the watchman’s cubby.
When she sees the space heater, she raises an eyebrow mockingly. “You planned this!”
All he can do is shake his head as he scooches to turn it on. The little room is an icebox, holding the cold as if it were precious.
When he boosts her to the old countertop, she wraps her legs around him again. He kisses the tattooed death’s head on her right arm and the tearful man on the moon on her left before he lifts her shirt to taste the raspberry bumps rising to little points. When she pulls the shirt over her head, her breasts rise and fall in his hands. He buries his nose in her armpits, tasting the fresh metallic salts of her sweat. Undoing his fly buttons, she cops his boner, squeezing him and stroking him.
“You’re buh-buh-beautiful,” he says.
“Jesus,” she says, rolling her eyes and pushing him away.
A second’s confusion resolves itself; she wants to unlace
