“Don’t let up,” Sam said. “It’s not over, don’t let them get anything going.”
“Have you looked at the score, Coach?” Tom asked.
“Forget the score!” Sam said. “Play hard every minute you’re out there. When Curtis is ready, I’m going to pull Olaf to rest that ankle, then maybe Tom. Have fun, and learn something.”
They huddled, shouted their team cheer, and stepped back onto the court with a bounce of confidence in their manner. Diana leaned close to Sam.
“I don’t think you’ll be resting Olaf. Curtis is hurting.”
Sam watched his team win the first round at the State Tournament with a clutch of dread hatching in his gut. Dean got his feet wet running the field house floor and he tickled the house when he took Nelson, the startled Wibaux guard, into the bleachers behind the basket coming pell-mell too late. The greater part of the huge crowd stood and cheered as the last few seconds blinked off the scoreboard clock. Willow Creek 69, Wibaux 54.
They followed all the proper rituals after the game, congratulated the Wibaux boys on a hard-fought game, iced the damaged body parts, and planned to eat with some of the Willow Creek parents and fans at J.B.’s Restaurant. Diana and Axel took Curtis to the hospital for X-rays. Sam and the boys ordered food, but he couldn’t muster an appetite. He had taken one tasteless bite out of his clubhouse sandwich when Curtis came toward him past the salad bar.
His arm was in a cast!
Sam almost swallowed the mouthful whole. He heard Diana’s words from weeks ago, If no one goes down. He glanced over a booth, where the Dutch Boy jabbered with the team, his frazzled Kamp Implement cap pulled tight, unaware that he had just been thrown into the North Sea.
NEWS OF CURTIS’S broken wrist spread from table to table like food poisoning. Curtis was heartsick; he would no longer be able to help them fight their way to the castle. Sam went over to the booth where Curtis’s parents sat with Alice and Ben Johnson and Sally and Denise Cutter. The Jenkins were Grant Wood caricatures, quiet, reticent, withdrawing, molded out of the silent seasons and rhythms of the land, polite, respectful, undemanding, expecting nothing.
“I’m sorry about his wrist,” Sam said. “I hope it will heal all right.”
“That won’t amount to nuthin’,” Albert Jenkins said, his narrow, weathered face carrying no anxiety in its leathered lines.
“I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” Sam said, riding an ambivalent merry-go-round of joy and shock.
“We want to thank you for what you’ve done for our boy,” scrawny little Elsie Jenkins spoke up, a rarity for her. “He was so shy, didn’t have any friends, thought of himself as a lop-eared no-account. You made him feel important, Mr. Pickett. He’d never go anywhere, just hang around the place. Now he isn’t afraid to go out and do things and meet people. Why, there isn’t anything that boy doesn’t think he can do.”
“He’s a great kid,” Sam said.
“I’ll never know how you got him to work so hard. He got an old backboard at Hazel Brown’s garage sale and put it up in our hay shed. After supper he’d go out there night after night, no matter what, and shoot that basketball for an hour or more. I came out one night when it was bitter cold and he was shooting that old ball with mittens on.”
Sam felt his throat constricting.
“I don’t know how you do it either,” Sally Cutter said. “I never can get Dean to do anything. But every morning he gets up a little early, and before the bus gets there, he runs full throttle between the corral and the pump house, back and forth like his pants are on fire, rain or shine, snow, cold, doesn’t matter. Said you told him he was a good runner.”
No wonder Dean was always sweating, Sam thought.
“They’re right,” Alice Johnson told him. “I don’t know how you get the boys to be so dedicated. Rob got himself one of those dumbbells—”
“Barbells,” Ben said.
“Barbells, and he hoists that thing over his shoulders and then does knee bends, squats he calls them. It weighs a ton. He must do fifty or sixty every day no matter how tired he is. I never saw a kid work so hard. Sometimes, when he’s come home dog-tired, I’ve sent him to bed early and told him to forget the exercising. You know, I could hear that thing rattling from his dark bedroom.”
Sam tried to find a response. Claire Painter, eavesdropping from the next booth, leaned in to add her amazement.
“I don’t know how you do it either, Mr. Pickett. Olaf says he’s going for a walk. But I see him circle back to the barn. He’d go up in the loft and shoot the ball, over and over and over. I’d sneak out to the barn sometimes. If he heard us coming, he’d go out the high side of the barn and come back from his walk and we’d never say a word. That sweet Carter would call and call and he’d rather be practicing basketball.”
“Haw!” Grandma said, sitting next to Claire. “My grandson dribbles the ball up stairs, down steps, behind his back, between his legs. He sleeps with the ball. He talks to it like it’s alive, and sometimes, when I see what it will do for him, I believe it.”
Utterly speechless, Sam held up a hand, signaling that he would be right back. He shoved himself through the bustling restaurant and out into the crisp night air. It was the last moments of February; at midnight March arrived. He gazed down the blurring strip of blazing signs, beckoning the traveler into motels, filling stations and fast-food places. He felt the flood of tears coming like a great tidal wave from deep inside.
All his life it had seemed he hadn’t noticeably influenced any of his students, and now this: this extraordinary affirmation and effusive gratitude toward him as a person. The unexpected praise from these parents and the unimaginable loyalty of these boys overwhelmed him utterly, redeemed him, healed him with tears of joy. He stood for a moment as the traffic thinned along Main Street. He would have to go back in and face them, face these people he had unknowingly come to love. But not just yet. He shuddered and allowed a sob to fall, wiping his eyes and nose with his handkerchief. Someone came up behind him. It was Diana. She put her arm around his waist. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah… I’m okay.”
“Can we do it?”
“Yes,” he said, without doubt in his voice. “Let’s go in.”
They walked back into the restaurant, staggered but undaunted, to take their five-man team into the semifinals.
CHAPTER 78
Sam ran out the old road into the March morning. A sharpness in the air brought him fully awake. He couldn’t sleep past six and he didn’t know what to do with himself. The tumultuous experience of the previous night—not only playing in the State Tournament, but winning—had left him drained, which was compounded by the incalculable loss of Curtis. With little Dean starting and with a bench impoverished of any support, Sam had severe doubts about their chances to advance any further. Add to that the frightening fact that tonight they went up against Rocky Boy, the fire-engine team from the reservation, and doubt seemed all that was left to the sane.
The reservation was an uncompromising parcel of wind-swept land portioned out to the Chippewa-Cree as well as a mixture of other tribes and nations. They were boys caught in an environment where drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, and hopelessness stalked them with the cold perseverance of a wolf pack, and through the long, wind-borne winter the only game in town was throwing a round ball through a hoop on the wall of the school gymnasium. Needless to say, some of them could do it blindfolded, in their sleep, with one hand tied behind them.
It occurred to Sam that maybe Rocky Boy needed to win more than Willow Creek, but he quickly recycled that sentimentality when he stopped to realize that Rocky Boy had a proud winning tradition that needed no charity, asked no quarter, was consistently on top year after year with many Divisional Championships and regular appearances in the State Tournament. From an enrollment of eighty or more, they never had a lack of boys who wanted to play, supporting a twelve-man varsity, a JV squad, a “C” squad and a freshman team, talented bo
ys whose basketball careers, lamentably, ended with high school. Though many of them would be welcome additions to college and university teams, Sam had learned that seldom did any of these boys go on with the white man’s institutional notion of education.
Sam found himself running hard across the old iron bridge as he envisioned the trial to come. Rocky Boy would attempt to consume Willow Creek in the twin furnaces of their trapping defense and their unrelenting run-and-gun offense, to run them and run them and run them, and finally, fry them in their own exhaustion. He wished there was some way he could go out on the court and take his stand with the boys.
AT THE BLUE Willow, dozens of excited fans were waiting in their vehicles when Axel opened the doors, as if the inn were serving underdog dreams for breakfast. Emphasizing words for dramatic effect, Grandma read the Billings Gazette aloud as though it were news from the front.
WILLOW, WHITTLED TO FIVE, ADVANCES
With an answer for everything Wibaux threw at them, the dogged
Willow Creek Broncs made believers out of many in the state.
A cheer arose from the breakfast tables.
Tom Stonebreaker, their husky 6'4" forward, led the charge in the first half, nearly unstoppable inside. When the Longhorns made adjustments to stop him, the other Broncs took over, led by their towering 6'11" center, Olaf Gustafson, and their two excellent guards, Peter Strong and Rob Johnson.
More cheering and clapping.
At the end, Willow Creek had outclassed and outshot the courageous Longhorns but lost their starting forward, 6'2" Curtis Jenkins, midway through the fourth quarter with a broken wrist, leaving the Broncs without a bench. With only five players left standing, their chances against the firestorm basketball of Rocky Boy seem dismal. But don’t count them out. We’ve made that mistake all season. Their bench won’t be empty tonight in the Brick Breeden Field House. It will be occupied by Courage and Character and Iron Resolve, and by a masterful coach who has brought his six boys through the District and Divisional trenches and has them well prepared for the tournament wars.
The inn exploded with applause and Axel banged on an empty pan from the serving window. Grandma passed the paper around, the article becoming smeared with maple syrup, bacon grease, and coffee stains. People kept showing up, those who had never come in for breakfast, until the Blue Willow bunch was lost in the happy smorgasbord of fans. Grandma scanned the crowd. One of them was missing. Amos’s weather-sautéed hat was nowhere in the inn.
AT THREE THEY gathered in the gym. The cheerleaders, Scott, and Diana stood in for the Rocky Boy players as they went through offensive sets in their street clothes. Curtis languished on the sidelines with a cast that had been autographed by half the population of the county. Dean was jittery at finding himself on the starting five. When they had gone over a few new plays, they sat in the stands and Sam attempted a matter-of-fact demeanor.
“They’ll play eight to ten boys, they run to keep you unsettled, off balance.” He glanced at Pete. “We must keep our cool. They can’t match up with Olaf. We’ll use him to bring the ball up at our pace, control the tempo of the game, work our half-court offense, and eat the clock. Remember, they can’t run if they don’t have the ball.”
When Sam finished, Tom pulled on a beat-up Kamp Implement cap he’d concealed under his jacket. Dean lit up and quickly felt his head to see if his cap was in place. It was. Then the other boys brought similar caps from out of hiding and pulled them on with the visor over one ear. They all laughed and cheered.
“Where’d you get them?” Sam asked, somewhat dumbfounded.
“Kamp Implement doesn’t have this kind anymore,” Rob said. “They’re like three years old, so my dad called around and found them. We figured now that since Dean’s a starter we all ought to look alike. It’ll make us run faster.”
Dean brightened like a full moon, and Sam shook his head at the unending surprise of these boys.
The team had an eager, confident manner as they strolled down the blacktop toward the Blue Willow where Axel and Vera, with Grandma’s help, had a pregame dinner set for them. The Dirty Half-Dozen ate calmly at the festive table that was decorated in blue and gold. The inn was closed to the public, who were all in Bozeman anyway, and the low-lit, peaceful ambience was just what Sam wanted. Diana had requested pasta salad and Axel had insisted on some red meat for the boys, serving them ten-to twelve-ounce tenderloins along with fruit and juice.
When they were nearly finished, Sam pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’d like to tell you a story.”
The boys went silent and all eyes focused on him.
“I’ve always been haunted by the Indian legend I first heard when I came to Montana. Crow Indians were camped along the Yellowstone River near present-day Billings. Warriors, returning from a long hunting trip, found the camp decimated by smallpox, their wives, mothers, children, all dead. They were so overcome with grief, sure they would join their loved ones in another life, that they blindfolded their ponies and rode them off a sixty-foot cliff.”
Sam paused. No one spoke.
“I’ve always been amazed at the incredible confidence of those Indians. They had no doubt that they would join their loved ones and they probably went over that cliff shouting. What courage, what faith. They believed!”
Sam glanced at their faces, hanging on his words, and he hoped his words were worthwhile.
“That’s what I want to say to you tonight. Believe. Go for it. Make that leap of faith. Believe that you will play the best basketball of your lives and shout as you go over the cliff.”
They finished their meal in hushed conversation and Tom explained to Dean what the coach was talking about. Then Tom added, “If we don’t win this game, we’ll feel like we went over a cliff.” Then Sam announced it was time to leave. They would arrive in Bozeman in time to watch the first half of the Roberts–Seely-Swan game. The boys headed out the door, out of the serenity of their little town, into the unrelenting inferno of fast-break basketball.
THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, Diana had watched the kids from Rocky Boy shoot the lights out of the scoreboard while scoring ninety-four points, and now, as she watched them warm up in maroon, gold, and white uniforms that didn’t quite fit, they appeared ragged, shooting the ball from all haunts of the floor without form. But she remembered Cervantes and the problem of appearance and reality and she wouldn’t be conned by appearance. Ninety-four points in a thirty-two minute game is a pace of scoring that would send college and NBA teams sneaking out the alley door. Playing Rocky Boy would be like stepping in front of a locomotive just beyond where you’d greased the tracks. There were only two possibilities. Either your game plan would stop them, leaving them harmlessly spinning their wheels, or you would be run over and flattened like a penny on the track.
For the last game of the semifinals, the field house was nearly filled, well over six thousand—partly due to the fact that the media had spread the word that a five-man team would be trying to survive against the run-and gun Northern Stars. The drama of a team without substitutes had gripped the hearts of many, and they had given up other Friday night plans to witness this extraordinary confrontation. Seely-Swan had knocked off Roberts in the first game, but Diana couldn’t afford a moment’s concern about something as far-flung as tomorrow.
Dean Cutter was the first Bronc introduced. After slapping hands with the team and coaches along the bench, Dean rambled out across the floor with his knotty legs and cock-eyed cap and intrepidly ran the steps of the bleachers up to the balcony, where he gave his wheel-chaired sister “five,” and then scampered back to the court. Tom also ran the bleacher stairs and gave Denise Cutter “five,” though he left his cap at the bench.
CHAPTER 79
The boys huddled around Sam at the bench. “All right,” he said. “Stick to our game plan, don’t let them rattle you, that’s their game plan. Keep your poise. We give nothing inside, five rebounders on defense. I’ll get a timeout when you’re hurting. Have fun and lear
n something. Let’s go!”
They cheered and the five of them stepped out onto the launching pad. Sam felt as though he might break, as though an arm would snap off or an eyeball pop out. John Two Horse lined up to jump with Olaf. The 6'4" Native American boy appeared overweight and without the manner of an athlete. The spectators roared, the referee tossed the ball into the air, and Olaf easily controlled the tip, flipping it to Rob on the side. Rob one-armed a long bounce pass between several Northern Stars that kissed the floor at the free-throw line and found Peter’s hands at the instant he left the hardwood. He soared through the colored space and rang the bell.
Under the peal of the crowd’s applause, Willow Creek backpedaled swiftly into their zone. The Northern Stars, with their galaxy of shooters, came headlong, wide open, finding the Olaf-anchored defense blocking their path to the backboard, ripping the ball around the perimeter until Little Dog snapped a shot so quickly Sam had to blink. It hit nothing but net, the kind of shot you feel a kid could never do again, a metaphor for the first half, and the game quickly turned into Sam’s most dreaded nightmare. The Broncs, with Dean Cutter starting, were following Sam’s game plan perfectly: playing excellent zone, avoiding sloppy fouls, giving nothing inside, allowing no offensive rebounds, and making them shoot from downtown. Trouble was, Rocky Boy could shoot from downtown; there were no rebounds! Rocky Boy hit its first seven shots, three of them three-pointers, seventeen straight points before a miss, and when the torrid first quarter ended, the Broncs panted on the bench, down 25 to 16.
“Okay, okay,” Sam told them. “Let’s not panic. You’re playing well. Stick to the game plan, work for the good shot.” He glanced at Diana who was checking the tape on Olaf’s ankle. “What are they shooting?”
“Almost seventy percent,” she said, shaking her head.
“How about fouls?” Sam asked.
“Dean one, Rob one… pretty clean.”
“Good, play our game. No team can continue to shoot seventy percent,” Sam said, attempting to sound convincing. “When their tires cool, we’ll still be on their back bumper and we’ll go by them like smoke.”
Blind Your Ponies Page 51