Holding her is the best part of it so far—having her warmth, the smoothness of her body against him. But he’s beginning to worry the rest of it is never going to work. Every failure to satisfy her chips away at his confidence. It isn’t enough to get off himself; he can do that with his own hand any time. Until the pleasure is mutual, he is just using her as a wet spot. Millions do this every day, he tells himself. Is everybody lying like a mad motherfucker, claiming it is such an ecstatic experience while suffering similar agonies of embarrassing clumsiness and frustration? Or is he just a total fuckup at this too? If it’s going to be like learning to read, he’ll be getting the hang of it around the time he turns forty.
Screw it. The two of them don’t like each other well enough to be successful at making love. There’s just too much underlying hostility. It’s just like he can play with either Rick or Billy, and Rick will help him and he’ll help Billy, but if he had to work with Pete Fosse as his point man, it would be a disaster.
He manages to get out from under her and is sitting on the counter, hauling on his boots, when she stirs.
“I gotta go. You want me to take you home?”
“No,” she murmurs and rolls over, with her arm over her head. He tucks her coat around her. The cubby’s warmed up since they arrived and turned the heater on.
“Goodnight,” he says, with a quick kiss on the crown of her headrag.
“ ‘Night,” she mutters.
Looking down at her, he hesitates but in the end he just leaves.
Friday’s away is against the Mount Grace Red Demons and Lady Demons. The boys’ bus is unusually quiet. Though the team truce seems to be in place and things appear to be back to normal, there is a sense of unfinished business simmering. Sam pulls his headphones down over his ears as if he were yanking down a windowshade. He slips into an uneasy doze and dream comes upon him as a shadow, winged and ominous.
A church piano reverently and sedately plunks a childhood hymn, the one they always sang at Easter Service in the Universalist-Congo church on the Ridge, but it is accompanied by the disembodied and mournful working-class British nasality of Billy Bragg singing
And was Jerusalem builded here,
among those dark satanic mills?
Then he is in the cubby, reaching for the support of the cartooned wall. His splayed fingers upon the plaster sink into it and as the darkness begins to press upon him like a great hand, he is flattened into the wall. He cannot breathe and it is hugely painful and then he feels himself bursting in poisonous colors like some great pustule lanced. He flows for some time and then he is much thinner, hardly there at all, no more than an attenuated web of lines upon the wall.
It is like being in prison, only it is space itself that jails him. Around him the other cartoon figures struggle frantically to free themselves. He hears them but can only see outward, in the direction in which the points of his pupils are fixed. Their struggle is entirely internal. He hears not their hands pounding upon the flat plane of their prison but their hearts, their lungs, the workings of their bodies down to their cells, in a desperate cacophony of anger and fear and yearning. He hears their thoughts like lyrics and they are astonishing, all woven together, polished bright here and rusty there, chains of words looping in a childishly simple pattern that gradually becomes clear to him, in a mocking voice he knows well.
She linked up all the iron hoops,
She smoked up all the rope,
She tried to eat the basketball
But it wouldn’t go down her throat.
He sits up abruptly, wide awake. The bus is warm with bodies but the window next to him is a plane of chilly damp. He shivers.
“It wouldn’t go down her throat,” he mutters groggily.
“I bet,” Rick says. “Be a brave wench to even try.”
Sam stretches and rolls his head and then slumps against the window again, fingertips to the cold condensate beading there. “The basketball,” he says. “The basketball.”
“Well”—Rick grins—“if we’re talking about the Mutant, you had the right idea.”
Under the lights her bald head gleams disconcertingly among the frizzies and curls and satiny bouncy heads of hair of the other girls. She looks like a baby buzzard, with her thin neck and the bulbous curve of her skull and her dark fierce eyes. Her mascara and eyeliner run as she sweats, in dirty tears and streaks. She uses the bottom of her tunic to wipe her face and smears the dirt around until it is a faded war paint. At the foul line, she sinks a little, then rises from flexed knees to take the shot and even as he notes
