He jacks in the system headphones and scans the airwaves, not sure what he’s listening for, but trusting he will hear it. It will reach out of the static and the garble and grab him by the earlobes and lift him out of his socks. It’s out there. He just has to be patient.
2
Winter has crept in like a cat to suck his breath when Sam wakes. Frost scratched on the windows, the bedroom is brittle with cold and as gloomy inside as it is outside. The clock-radio is only three minutes from going off. Coughing, he rolls over and hits the off button on the alarm.
When he peeks into the nursery, Indy is sitting in her crib, wide awake, drooling around a pacifier she has managed to plug into her mouth. She squawks at him. He holds out his fingers and she curls her tiny digits around them and tries to tug herself to her feet. Loosing her grip, she sits down abruptly with a squishing sound. She reeks of baby pee.
In a pair of sagging pajama bottoms, Reuben comes in behind Sam. It is always first thing in the morning that it strikes Sam how much white there is now in his father’s beard and chest hair.
“How’s my little Miss Take?” Reuben asks.
Sam laughs and so does Indy.
Reuben picks her up. Lower limbs pumping, she shoves the binkie purposefully into the corner of Reuben’s mouth.
“Oh yummy.”
With the baby under his arm, Reuben disappears into the bathroom and a second later, the shower erupts.
Sam and Pearl nearly collide at the door of the bedroom she and Reuben share.
“Oops,” she says. “Need a traffic light this time of day.”
As she hustles past him to the bathroom, he catches a glimpse of her red bikini underpants under the shirt of Reuben’s pajamas.
“Use those drawers for a stoplight,” he teases.
“Sam!” she says, but her outrage is all show.
There are two bathrooms but only water enough for one shower at a time. With all of them up and going to work or school at once, they can’t afford an excess of privacy. Sam does his showering before bed and shaves in the downstairs bathroom in the morning to free the upstairs conveniences for the rest of the family.
Overnight the hard freeze they have been awaiting has turned the ground to iron, the air to rust in Sam’s lungs. His truck—a 1978 International Harvester four-wheel-drive that despite its unimpressive appearance has a lot more under the hood than when it came off the assembly line—starts reluctantly. From now on, he needs to remember to plug in the engine-block heater before he goes to bed.
Though it is too cold for hanging around outside the school, the Mutant is alone on one of the outdoor courts, shooting hoops through a netless rim. The pavement is greasy with frost and fallen leaf. Her hands and nose are scarlet in the frigid atmosphere. She wears a man’s overcoat, unbuttoned so the skirts will not hamper her, the too-long sleeves cuffed back to uncover her hands. Her exposed skull makes Sam think of a baby abandoned in a garbage can.
Inside the school, it is almost too warm. He crouches over the lost-and-found carton outside the Office and scavenges a home-knit marigold-yellow scarf, a pair of gloves with a couple of fingertips popped and a shapeless pilly watch cap. He stuffs the items in his jacket and leaves the building again and lopes to the court.
The Mutant comes to a standstill, holding the ball on the flat of her left palm. Silently, he drops the scarf over her thin shoulders and winds it loosely around her neck. She is as passive as a little kid being dressed. When he tugs the watch cap down over her skull and ears, her skin is cold to the touch. Her nostrils glisten and a snail’s trail of clear mucus begins to slide toward her upper lip. Sam finds a handkerchief in his jacket, performs the practiced to-and-fro swipe under the Mutant’s nose he has learned on Indy. He takes her right hand, puts a glove on it, transfers the basketball from her left to under his own arm, and gloves her left hand.
With her head covered, he sees how she would look with hair. Her narrow face with her dark doe’s eyes under really fine eyebrows is like an eighteenth-century portrait—the frontispiece of some mildewed old book, matted in an oval frame with a little veil of tissue to protect it.
Stepping back, he tips the ball to her. She just stands there, rigid, holding it. Feeling as if the frost has gotten to his brains, Sam falls back. When he looks over his shoulder from the entrance of the school, he sees cap, scarf and gloves in a tangle on the ground. The Mutant pivots in a red-handed, bald-headed, snot-nosed turnaround jump shot. The ball twangs angrily on the iron rim.
The warmth inside is suffocating now. Sam lets himself into the gym and helps himself to a ball from the rack in the equipment closet. He flicks on the sound system, drops a cassette into the tape slot. It is just a few minutes past six. When Sam first started at Greenspark, there was no morning gym. He lobbied it into existence and now he has the keys because he’s always there first. Though it isn’t compulsory, most of the team turns up before school, even in buck season. As eight o’clock creeps up, students and teachers and administrators are apt to stop and watch awhile. Coach usually wanders through too, but he thinks it’s important that his boys continue to regard the game as fun so he’s usually content to let Sam set the pace and tone.
Sam is unable to forget the Mutant, outside courting frostbite. For the first time it sinks in that the girls don’t use the gym before classes. The boys own it. It’s not
