Stanley Gordon West - Blind Your Ponies

BLIND YOUR POINES

BLIND YOUR POINES

Also by Stanley Gordon West

Sweet Shattered Dreams

Growing an Inch

Amos: To Ride a Dead Horse

Until They Bring the Streetcars Back

Finding Laura Buggs

a novel by

STANLEY GORDON WEST

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

2011 by Stanley Gordon West.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Quotations from Man of La Mancha used with permission of Dale Wasserman 1966.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

West, Stanley Gordon, [date]

Blind your ponies: a novel / by Stanley Gordon West.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56512-984-91.

Basketball coachesFiction. 2. High school boysFiction. 3. City and town lifeMontanaFiction. 4. Willow Creek (Mont.)Fiction. 5. Basketball stories. I. Title.

PS3573.E8255B58 2011

813'.54dc22 2010038087

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

For my father and mother

How did they keep a fire going
with the few scraps of wood they were given?

ALDONZA: You spoke of a dream. And about the Quest!

DON QUIXOTE: Quest?

ALDONZA: How you must fight and it doesnt matter whether you win or lose if only you follow the Quest!

DON QUIXOTE: The words. Tell me the words!

ALDONZA: (speaking to music)
To dream the impossible dream
But theyre your own words!

from Man of La Mancha

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 Cervantess 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. Hed 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 whod get the food first, and he hoped shed 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 didnt 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 mans watery blue eyes as if asking for understanding.

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

Sam nodded. He couldnt 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 Sams 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 Sams 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 didnt 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 Sams 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, Ill 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. Cant expect discipline in this outpost.