Blind Your Ponies

by Stanley Gordon West

Genres: Sports; Literary Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Hope is hard to come by in the hard-luck town of Willow Creek. Sam Pickett and five young men are about to change that.

Sam Pickett never expected to settle in this dried-up shell of a town on the western edge of the world. He's come here to hide from the violence and madness that have shattered his life, but what he finds is what he least expects. There's a spirit that endures in Willow Creek, Montana. It seems that every inhabitant of this forgotten outpost has a story, a reason for taking a detour to this place--or a reason for staying.

As the coach of the hapless high school basketball team (zero wins, ninety-three losses), Sam can't help but be moved by the bravery he witnesses in the everyday lives of people--including his own young players--bearing their sorrows and broken dreams. How do they carry on, believing in a future that seems to be based on the flimsiest of promises? Drawing on the strength of the boys on the team, sharing the hope they display despite insurmountable odds, Sam finally begins to see a future worth living.

Author Stanley Gordon West has filled the town of Willow Creek with characters so vividly cast that they become real as relatives, and their stories--so full of humor and passion, loss and determination--illuminate a path into the human heart. 

Release date: January 18, 2011

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

Looking back, Sam Pickett knew the trouble began that day at the state fair, when the madness winked at him. Even as a ten-year-old, he had a sneaking suspicion that, somewhere in that shrouded realm where fates are sealed, his life had been irrevocably jinxed.

ON A LATE AUGUST afternoon, while students still enjoyed summer vacation, Sam hunched over his desk, polishing details on a lesson plan for November.

Use movie version of Man of La Mancha for section on Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote … first half of movie this period with time for discussion. Assignment: Read first 18 pages on life of Cervantes. Introduce theme: The problem of appearance and reality.

Sam glanced up from his dog-eared lesson plans. The sun had worked its way around and sunlight slanted in through the large, west-facing windows of his classroom, signaling the passing of another day. He was still surprised at the strangeness of his life, teaching high school in the fly-over town of Willow Creek, Montana.

A rattletrap farm truck hauling hay bales backfired as it chugged past the school, startling him. That damned muffled discharge! The feeling came over him with a choking sensation, and he fought for breath. He stared at the blackboard where the sun, coming through cottonwood leaves, left a dappled pattern.

He thought back to that day, to that Friday afternoon. He’d picked up Amy at the school where she taught. They were both high-spirited and happy, looking forward to the weekend together.

He pulled into the long line waiting for drive-up service. Amy said she could get the French fries faster at the counter, so she blew him a kiss and hurried into the building. It was a race to see who’d get the food first, and he hoped she’d win just so he could see the enchanting expression on her face and be rewarded by her childlike laughter. He felt a rush of happiness when he thought of the games they often played, like hide-and-seek in their apartment, in the dark, naked.

From the car, he heard the muffled sound, and then it came again, and again. A backfire? Not inside a building! He ran from the car and collided with terrified people stampeding out the door, fleeing the Burger King. Inside, it was bedlam, a madhouse in which people screamed, crawled under tables, and dove over counters. He frantically searched for her face, and then he saw her. With the bag of French fries still clutched in one hand, she had been hurled onto the tile floor, but not all of her. Parts of her were spattered on the wall, shrapnel from her head, small bits of brain and bone, skin and hair, sailing down the stainless steel on a sea of gore.

He knelt beside her and gently pulled her long black hair over the mutilation, as if that might heal her shattered skull. He took her hand in his, the hand that clung to the French fries she had playfully insisted on getting for him. Amid the chaos a white-haired man knelt beside him.

“She didn’t appear to be afraid,” the man said, slowly shaking his head. “She looked right at him and said, ‘No, please.’ Then he pulled the trigger.”

Sam looked into the man’s watery blue eyes as if asking for understanding.

“Was she your wife?” the man kneeling in her blood said.

Sam nodded. He couldn’t breathe, the room was spinning. Five minutes ago his life was full of joy and anticipation. “Oh God, oh God,” he moaned.

The man put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.

“Why did I turn on Elliot? We could have gone another way, stopped some place else.”

It was as if Amy had been drawn to the shotgun blast by some irresistible fate, and he had been helpless to prevent it. He stared at the grisly scene, the blood, the bits of flesh and bone.

The chaos continued, but he stayed beside her on the floor. He felt no fear, hoping the maniac would return and with one more pull of the trigger send him off to be with her. He heard the words from somewhere deep inside, The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Was it God who nudged him to take a different route home? Was it God who stoked Sam’s impatience with the heavy traffic? If God had any hand in this, then life was a slaughterhouse.

When the sadness erupted over his happy life, the abyss opened beneath him and he fell. In this headlong plunge he instinctively reached out and grabbed hold of something, he didn’t know who or what. He hung there, trying to catch his breath, trying to restore his heartbeat, dangling over the darkness.

The city he loved turned gray: green trees, the waterfront, his classroom, friends, the concerts and plays, the lovely boulevards and buildings, all gray. The sadness overwhelmed him. He left everything and fled.

At present, he was hanging on, but he knew he had to identify what it was he clung to, and he knew he had to find some reason to continue to hang on or he would give in to it, let go, and fall into the great dark void and be lost.

“Pickett!”

The voice startled him, jolting him from the trance. Truly Osborn stood in the doorway. Sam caught his breath.

“Hard at it I see,” Truly said, as he stepped smartly to Sam’s desk.

“Yes,” Sam responded, standing, slightly unbalanced.

“I wish a few of the other teachers were as conscientious. When I was running the school in Great Falls, well, things were different, I’ll tell you.”

Truly glanced at the walls Sam had cluttered with quotations and posters depicting films and books and musical plays.

“Had seventy-six teachers under me, seventy-six. Could account for every paper clip. Can’t expect discipline in this outpost.”

He twitched his nose as was his habit.

“Is all this necessary?” he said, waving a hand at the wall. “It’s so … unorganized.”

Without allowing a moment for a response, he turned his gaze on Sam, who had settled back into his chair, his heart still racing. He swallowed and tried to pay attention to his superintendent.

“Now then, the other night the school board nearly did away with the basketball program. John English expressed the frustration and embarrassment we all feel because of the team, but due to the persistence of that foolhardy Wainwright and his lackey Ray Collins, they decided to go one more year. Can you imagine?”

Sam glanced down at his lesson plan and his eyes focused on The problem of appearance and reality. He was lost. Somehow, Amy’s voice came softly and calmly.

Truly continued to talk, and finally his words penetrated.

“… However, they realize how hard it has been for you to coach these past five years, the time and travel for what, heaven knows, is little extra money. We’re prepared to assign the task to Mr. Grant, our new math teacher. Hopefully it will only be for one more year. Might as well pass the misery around.”

Sam wanted to protest, wanted to volunteer for another year. If nothing else, the basketball program filled many hours during the winter months, and he didn’t know how he’d handle that much unscheduled time.

“Oh, and the board asked me to convey their gratitude for the way you’ve stuck to it, even though you never did manage to win a game.”

Sam caught the not-so-subtle sarcasm. The superintendent twitched his nose like a rabbit.

“They appreciate your … fortitude. Mr. Grant can carry on the ridiculous comedy with the boys.”

He slung a hand toward the classroom wall.

“See if you can’t neaten this up a bit.”

Then he turned and scurried from the room.

Pompous ass, Sam thought.

He stood, teetering slightly, still finding it hard to breathe. He pulled the shade, darkening the room. Truly’s cruel reference to the team’s efforts as “comic” had made him wince, and he admitted that deep inside he had wanted to win just one game, for the boys, for the town. Though the furthest he’d gone with basketball was playing on his high school team, Sam believed he was a capable English teacher. As a basketball coach he was 0–87. Wasn’t that some kind of a world’s record, a Guiness Book oddity? And even better, the team was 0–93, having lost its last six the season before Sam arrived. It would be exceedingly difficult to lose ninety-three in a row without some law of nature kicking in to bring the odds back into balance, something like an entire opposing team coming down with trichinosis in the middle of the third quarter or their eyes going crossed for all of the second half.

What Truly viewed as a ridiculous comedy actually had taught Sam something about heroism. Heroism wasn’t playing hard with a chance to win, a chance to receive the acclaim and praise of victory. True heroism was refusing to quit when there was no chance to win. True heroism was giving your all in the face of absolute defeat. He thought that these boys, who were pitied by some, were learning life’s lesson sooner than most, learning that life is a series of losses.

Sam gathered several folders off his desk and worried about how he would fill this new block of free time. He regarded the lesson plans for a moment, then dropped them on the desktop. He picked up his tattered copy of Don Quixote and left the room. He’d read the eight hundred and some pages again; that should occupy him for several days at least.

He raced down the hall and a flight of stairs, then ducked out the front door. The basketball court in front of the school stood empty in the late afternoon heat. The mountains shimmered to the west and the sweet aroma of freshly-cut alfalfa filled his nostrils as he headed toward his rental house. The town stretched along the road for about eight blocks, with the school situated on the south end, and Sam’s one-story home—for which he paid two hundred dollars a month in rent—in the middle.

Rip, the oldest resident in Willow Creek, shuffled along the street toward Sam. The skeletal-looking man’s suspenders appeared to be pulling him further and further down into his pants.

“Hello, Rip,” Sam said, slowing as they passed.

“Hey, Coach,” Rip said, flashing a toothless smile. “We’re gonna do it this year, by golly, ain’t we?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sam said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

It still amazed Sam that Willow Creek—with an entire high school enrollment of eighteen or nineteen students, and with a senior class last year consisting of three—somehow managed to maintain a basketball team and compete in the state-sanctioned conference. The school, whose greatest athletic achievement was fielding five standing, breathing boys, hadn’t won a basketball game in over five years, spreading a pall over the lives of those who identified with the community and its team. It was a virtual blood-letting, sanctioned by the Montana High School Association.

He turned in at the walkway to his house, mentally planning the evening ahead: run and walk the loop over the Jefferson River bridge, shower, supper, an hour of television, read until he fell asleep. He stepped onto the creaking porch, shoved the ill-fitting door open, and prayed he could hold off the afternoon’s vision until he escaped into the murky shadows of sleep.

Though he hated to admit it to himself, he was afraid to go to sleep, and he dreaded waking up in the morning to the memory of his relentless dreams. Somewhere in his mind, Amy’s voice played back at random times throughout the day and night.

He was also haunted by the Indian legend he first heard when he came to Montana. Members of the Crow tribe 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, were all dead. So overcome with grief, sure they would join their loved ones in another world, they blinded their ponies and rode them off a sixty-foot cliff.

Five years after losing Amy, Sam still identified with those Crow warriors who couldn’t bear life without their loved ones. He would never admit to anyone that, on a daily basis, he entertained the thought of blinding his pony and riding off the cliff to be with her.

Peter Strong waited for his Grandma Chapman in front of the café that doubled as the bus depot in Three Forks, Montana. The family-shattering detonation of his parents’ divorce had been followed by the anguish of leaving his girlfriend and the comfort zone he knew in St. Paul, Minnesota, and heading by Greyhound to eastern Montana, where he’d spend one dreaded school year in Willow Creek.

“Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Peter said as he watched his mother’s mother amble toward him from her faded green VW bus.

“I’m cookin’, sweetheart, I’m cookin’.”

Having already noticed the comfortable temperature, without a touch of Midwest humidity, he figured she wasn’t referring to the weather and that it must be some kind of Western-speak. She hugged him and then held him at arm’s length, eyeing him like she might a newborn pup, checking to see if it had all its parts. He hadn’t seen his grandmother in several years and was taken aback by her appearance and bluster. She had no left hand, but he already knew that. No, it was the clothes. Dressed in Levis, and wearing a white sweatshirt with black lettering, beat-up Reeboks, red-framed glasses, and a man’s brown felt hat perched on her snow-gray hair, she reminded him of the street people he saw in Saint Paul, and he couldn’t decide if he should laugh or hand her a dollar.

“Welcome to Montana!” she half shouted.

“Welcome to the end of the world,” he said under his breath, glancing at the three blocks that made up Three Forks’ depressed business district. “Willow Creek is bigger, right?” he asked.

“Smaller.”

“That’s impossible,” he said, trying to swallow a sudden rush of panic and loneliness.

“You’ve gone and growed up,” she said, hugging him and then stepping back to look at his hair. “That how the young lions wear their mane in the big city?”

“Yeah, some.”

She rubbed her hand over his blond hair, cut short along the sides, long on top and back. “Looks like the barber got started and you ran out of cash. Reminds me of the bushmen in National Geographic.”

She smiled—sadly he thought—and her face took on the look of a worn leather glove. Her figureless body slumped toward the middle: no hips, no curves, just legs and arms and a head sprouting from a slightly bent and twisted trunk. Her sweatshirt read:

This package is sold by weight, not volume.
Some settling of contents may have occurred
during shipment and handling.

“Sure got your mother’s eyes; the gals’ll be fluttering over you.”

“I have a girlfriend.”

“So I’ve heard. Well, better pull the shades on those gorgeous blue peepers, then. I don’t want you breaking any hearts.”

With the dull ache in his chest he’d carried all the way from Saint Paul, he picked up his suitcase and duffel. At least there was one good thing, he thought: he liked his kooky grandmother.

“How’s your mom doing?” she asked as they walked toward her bus.

“I don’t know.” He wanted her to ask how he was doing. He was the one who got shipped out! “Divorce sucks.”

“Don’t suppose it’s a picnic for you,” she said.

“Some people wait until their kids are grown up—why can’t they?”

“Got no answer for that.”

“I can take care of myself when Mom has to travel. She’s only gone for a week at a time. She thinks I’m a baby or something.”

“Wants you to get the care you deserve.”

“They just don’t want a snot-nosed kid around anymore.”

“Well, that’s my good fortune then, because I’ll love having you around.”

A dusty red pickup rattled to the curb and stopped a short distance from them.

“Oh, Peter, come here,” his grandmother said.

She walked to the passenger side of the truck. He followed and found a girl with wide blue eyes sitting beside the somber woman driver.

“Hello, Sally. Want you to meet my grandson, Peter,” his grandmother said through the open window. “Peter, this is Sally Cutter.” She nodded at the driver. “And this is her girl, Denise. How are you, honey?”

“Hello,” the woman said without turning her eyes on Peter. He regarded the girl for a moment. Her lively eyes seemed to pick up on everything, even though her head teetered gently and a string of drool hung from the corner of her mouth. Strapped into the pickup with some special kind of seat belt, she made a guttural sound.

“Hello,” Peter said and smiled. He sensed the mother was embarrassed by her girl.

Feeling uneasy, he picked up his suitcase and duffel and tossed them into the VW bus. A road-worn bumper sticker clung to the back bumper: “DO IT IN WILLOW CREEK, MONTANA,” it read. Feeling ill at ease, he climbed into the passenger seat and waited while the women visited. In a minute his grandmother pulled herself up behind the wheel and turned the key. Nothing happened.

“Wouldn’t you know,” she said, grabbing a screwdriver out of the glove box.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing I can’t fix.”

In moments she was out the door, around behind the bus and out of sight. Peter climbed out and found her lying in the street on her back, only her jeans and tennis shoes sticking out from under the bumper. He knelt to peer under the bus when suddenly the engine kicked over and started. She slid out, stood up, and brushed herself off.

“Happens now and then.”

They climbed in and roared down the main drag, the engine sounding as if they were doing eighty, although he knew they couldn’t be doing more than twenty-five.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Jumped it, like a hot-wire.”

He had no idea what that meant, but he didn’t let on, didn’t want her thinking he was a stupid city kid.

“Two of Willow Creek’s heroes,” she said, by which, Peter finally realized, she was referring to the mother and daughter he had just met.

“They live in Willow Creek?”

“Few miles south of town, in the hills where the soil is pretty thin.”

His loneliness slid up into his throat; the mother and daughter rattled him. “Why heroes?”

“ ’Cause they keep playin’ with the hand they were dealt, not like some people I know.”

“How old is she, the girl?”

“Sixteen, seventeen, about your age.”

He wanted to tell her it scared the hell out of him to see someone his age like that, knowing it could be him, but he’d learned from painful experience not to share such things with anyone.

“Got a driver’s license?” his grandmother asked.

“Yeah.”

“Ever drive a stick shift?”

“No, we have automatic.”

“Trilobite is nearly automatic,” she said while laying her right hand atop the stick shift.

“Trilobite?”

“A fossil they find in rocks. As vehicles go, she’s about as much a fossil as I am, so we respect each other. She’s a sixty-five, twenty-five years old, so I’ll expect you to drive her with respect.”

“Dad says only hippies drive VW buses,” he said.

“That so … what else does your dad say?”

“He thinks you’re kind of a screwball, says you’re a ‘refried hippie.’”

“Well, coming from my distant son-in-law I’ll take that as a compliment.” They laughed.

His grandma’s faded white-frame house sat on Main Street, halfway between the Blue Willow Inn and the school, where—Grandma explained—the teachers attempted to enlighten kindergarten through senior high students, and the school board annually took its stand against the inevitable, like fighting gravity, hanging onto the high school for one more year.

She introduced him to her family: a motley green parrot named Parrot—whose cage she quickly covered before he could speak—and her three-legged cat, Tripod.

“Found him in the backyard a year ago, a stray no one’d claim. Sick and dying, his right front leg shredded by some beast or machine or steel-jawed trap. Nursed him back to life after the vet amputated his bum leg. Ever since he sticks to me like panty hose.” She led him into the cozy and cluttered kitchen. “You can call him One Chance if you like.”

“Why One Chance?”

“When I took him to the vet he said the cat had one chance in a million and maybe we should just put him to sleep. I told him no, that if he had one chance, let’s go for it.”

Peter sat in a chair by the kitchen table, and the apricot-and-white cat came to him as if with some instinctual understanding that they were orphaned kin. His grandmother slipped larger eyeglasses over the pair she wore, and stuck a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in place in the half-finished depiction of a sailing ship that sprawled across part of the table.

“I play bingo on Tuesdays and Thursdays, go bowling Wednesday afternoons, do aerobics most mornings in front of the TV, hit the garage sales on Saturday mornings with Hazel Brown, have coffee at the Blue Willow once or twice a day—that was the joint we passed comin’ into town—watch The Waltons reruns, and we get up a game of hearts or whist whenever we’ve a mind to, but generally I’m just hanging around.”

She found another puzzle piece that fit and thumbed it into place. “Landsakes.” She looked at him. “What’s the matter with me? You must be starving.”

She pulled off the top pair of glasses.

“Oh, darn, forgot again.” She opened a prescription bottle near the sink and popped a capsule in her mouth, washing it down with a glass of water. “I have to keep gettin’ a new doc,” she said.

“Why?”

“They keep dyin’ on me.”

His grandmother laughed and fetched a carton of milk from the refrigerator. He noticed a small hand-lettered poster on the wall: “AS LONG AS SHE SWIMS I WILL COOK.” It made no sense to Peter.

She poured a glass and set it in front of him. “What kind of milk do you like?”

“Two percent,” he said. “Are you sick?”

“Landsakes, no. This doc keeps wanting me to come in for checkups. Fussy old fool. Thinks my blood pressure is high.” She hooted. “Just never seen a seventy-four-year-old who’s still alive.”

They hadn’t been in the house a half hour—enough time to stuff him with milk and uncounted Oreos—when his grandmother challenged him to a game of Horse.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked, startled.

“A game of Horse. You play Horse in Saint Paul, don’t you?”

“Yeah … but—”

“Then quit your stammering and get on your playing shoes.” She opened a closet and produced a shiny new basketball, firing a snappy pass that he caught more with reflex than skill.

Somewhat astonished, he followed silently as they walked the two blocks up Main Street to the school grounds. Looking about, he realized it appeared to be the only street.

“Where’s the rest of the town?” he said.

“You’re lookin’ at it.”

“We have shopping malls bigger than this.”

“Minus the Tobacco Roots,” she said, waving a hand at the massive mountain range to the west, “and clean air and cutthroat trout.” Attached to an old three-story brick building—which Pete at first thought must be the grade school—stood a more recently built gymnasium with HOME OF THE BRONCS AND THE BLUE PONIES lettered in weather-beaten blue on its east wall.

“Who are the Blue Ponies?” he asked.

“Girls’ basketball … haven’t had enough players for a team the past few years, though. You might say the Blue Ponies are temporarily, if not permanently, out to pasture.” She nodded at the gym. “Seeing as the boys’ nickname is the Broncs, some of the nasty folks around here refer to this as the glue factory.”

In front of the school there was an asphalt basketball court with four baskets. His grandmother promptly made a free throw and tossed the ball at Pete. He tried a shot and missed, and she hooted with delight.

“ ‘H’! You got an ‘H,’ boy!”

His grandmother actually won the first game by methodically throwing a spastic sort of hook shot, but when Peter got his bearings, he began hitting baskets, and eventually had to hold back, feeling guilty for beating her so badly.

“You’ll be as popular as all get-out around here come basketball season,” she said, while trying to throw the ball from outside the circle.

Peter retrieved her errant shot. “Do they have a good team?”

“Nope, haven’t won a game in five years. But, lordy, I think that’s gonna change.”

“Five years!” He swished a long shot. “That’s diseased. Think I can make the team?”

His grandmother cocked her head as if he were putting her on. “All you have to do is show up. Everyone with balls makes the team, and by that I don’t mean the family jewels. I mean guts, I mean backbone, I mean heart.”

Peter blushed slightly at her reference to the family jewels, and when she said she had to get home and work on the dinner, he was glad to stay and shoot for a while. The few vehicles that had drifted by showed no surprise at this seventy-four-year-old, one-handed woman out banging a basketball off the backboard.

THE ROAD FROM Three Forks made a gentle curve into Willow Creek and became Main Street, the only pavement in that end-of-the-road village. Peter could see snow-tipped mountains in almost any direction, and they looked huge. As for Willow Creek, it was hard to tell where the fields and cow pastures ended and the town began. There just wasn’t anything there.

Peter tried to be positive, but he was pissed and confused and scared. He began practicing with a vengeance because he didn’t know what else to do: long shot, rebound, lay-up, over and over, breaking a sweat, trying to dunk the rebound and coming close, there on the outdoor court of a school where by some fluke of fate he would have to spend his junior year. His life had blown up on him, and he had been hurled to this godforsaken place.

As if in a dream he sent the ball on its graceful arc, and the swish of the net blended with the sounds of lowing cattle and distant children’s voices drifting in the dry mountain air. He looked around him, already plotting his escape.

With only a few days before school was to start, Sam Pickett labored at his desk over lesson plans. In the background, the soundtrack from Rocky reverberated from the stereo in the corner of the classroom, prodding him with its beat.

He felt the floor tremble and glanced up to see Hazel Brown as she blustered into his classroom.

“Mr. Pickett, there’s something you’ve got to see.”

She wore a sheen of sweat on her face and labored to catch her breath, which wasn’t unusual for Hazel. Sam wouldn’t call Hazel obese, though he figured she was twice the size God intended. He’d call her big.

“What is it?” he said, wanting to finish what he was doing before going home, and anxious not to be interrupted.

“Something out in front.” She giggled. “It won’t take long, Mr. Pickett.”

For years he had explained that she didn’t have to call him mister, but she refused to pay attention. As the school cook, Hazel sometimes helped out with custodial chores, and Sam figured she always heard the students call him Mr. Pickett and felt obliged to follow suit.

“Can it wait until I leave? I’ll only be another twenty minutes,” he said with an intended irritation in his voice.

“It may be gone by then, Mr. Pickett. It won’t take but a minute.”

She stood there in enormous jeans and tentlike sweatshirt with her head slightly tilted, holding her chubby hands together in a supplicating pose.

“Oh, all right,” he said and tossed his ballpoint down on his desk. He pushed his chair back and followed Hazel out of the room, urged on by the Rocky soundtrack. As he walked behind her down the stairs he couldn’t help but wonder where she found jeans that size. When he first met Hazel, he held back, expecting some unpleasant body odor because of her enormous bulk, but instead he whiffed a sweet cosmetics-counter aroma that became as much a part of her in his mind as her heavy tread. He walked down the stairs, following the wake of that pungent fragrance, and realized that if he had to he could track Hazel in the pitch dark.

She didn’t go out the school’s front door but instead led him around through the gym and into the small lunchroom where they could peer out at the asphalt basketball court without being seen.

“There,” she said, giggling and pointing to the court. Sam slid up beside her and gazed through the lunchroom window. Outside, a boy he’d never seen before assaulted the rim and backboard with a basketball, going at it as if his life depended on it.

“Watch this,” Hazel said. The boy dashed toward the backboard, grabbed the bouncing ball and nearly dunked it. “Grandma Chapman made me promise I’d introduce you. He’s her grandson from Saint Paul.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy … maybe I can meet him some other time,” Sam said, anxious to get back to work but unable to turn away as the boy hit shot after shot from the far side of the court.

“Oh, c’mon, Mr. Pickett,” Hazel said, and she hauled her body out the lunchroom door toward the asphalt court.

Sam hesitated a moment and then gave in to his curiosity.

“Peter!” Hazel shouted.

The boy stopped dribbling and turned toward the approaching couple.

“Peter, this is Mr. Pickett.” She turned to Sam. “Mr. Pickett, this is Peter Strong, Elizabeth Chapman’s grandson.”

Sam moved up beside Hazel and extended his hand. “Hello, Peter.”

“Hi.”

With his chest heaving and his T-shirt soaked, the boy took Sam’s hand in a sweaty grip. Sam guessed him to be about six foot even.

“Mr. Pickett’s our basketball coach,” Hazel said, as if it were some unheard of honor instead of an ungodly indictmen