Free Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West Page A

about him?” she asked.
    “I feel sorry for Tom,” Sam said.
    “Will Tom play?”
    He peered out into the darkness. “I don’t know.”

CHAPTER 10
    It came after Sam that morning.
    Was it his confrontation with George Stonebreaker that had unearthed it? Was it because of that terrifying moment when he teetered between cowering under a table or ripping the man’s throat out with his bare hands? This feeling somehow always manifested, just when he thought he was doing well. He gobbled breakfast and hurried to school, but no matter how hard he concentrated on the students and lesson, it stalked him in his classroom, staring out from unoccupied corners, rising in the shadows, sucking the breath from his lungs.
    He force-fed his mind with pointless details and jabbered to his class like a nervous wreck. And when his mid-morning free period arrived, he fled from the building to the school yard, where a fresh, balmy southwesterly wind gushed across the mountain flanks and barnstormed through town.
    Sam spotted Dean Cutter chasing Helen Bates during recess. For years Sam had thought of Dean as a frisky grade schooler who, peering out of his thick lenses and habitually wearing a dog-eared maroon Kamp Implement cap, seemed to regard life in a happy-go-lucky way. Now the squat kid was a freshman and played an integral role in the expectations Sam was guardedly inventing. He didn’t know much about the family; Dean was the only Cutter in attendance. He had an older sister, but she had been born with cerebral palsy and didn’t come to school. In his class that fall, Dean had shown little interest in academics but exuded a rough-and-tumble zest for life.
    Sam spotted Diana on the far edge of the playground like a homesteader’s wife. He waved and she waved back, as though they conspired to display warm affection for each other from a safe distance, and at close quarters had to be on guard, polite, and restrained.
    A United Parcel truck pulled up and the young suntanned driver hollered toward Sam. “You know where the Skogan place is?”
    “Yeah!” Sam shouted. “You have to go back to the fork north of town and go west until you hit 287, then southwest about four miles.”
    “Thanks!” the driver waved a hand as he roared off.
    On the wrong road, Sam thought, maybe his first day.
    Oh, God. It avalanched over him and he couldn’t hold it off. The lunatic had been
lost.
The outraged husband went to the
wrong
Burger King. His estranged wife worked at a Burger King four miles east on the same street. With the shotgun hidden under a long coat, he demanded to see his wife and when they told him she wasn’t there he went berserk and started shooting. It should never have happened, not there. It was a
mistake,
all a mistake.
    Sam tried to rid his brain of that voice. He clapped his hands over his ears and bent forward. Sweat immediately soaked him and he fought for breath. He had to escape, knowing his sanity hung in the balance, how he hung in the balance, entertaining the thought to just blind his pony.
    When he got up and turned around, Diana was there, close, looking into his eyes.
    “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”
    “Oh … no. I was …” He tried to laugh, to hold her off.
    “Is there anything I can do?” she asked with a tenderness in her voice.
    “No, thanks. I actually came out to talk to Dean.”
    He turned abruptly, then hurried toward the children. He retreated from the reflection in her eyes. He fled from the currents threatening to drown his soul.
    “Dean!” he shouted.
    The scruffy, nearsighted boy skidded to a stop and regarded Sam.
    “Could I talk to you a minute, Dean?” Sam wiped his face with a handkerchief.
    The boy glanced at his playmate with a shrug and walked hesitantly toward the English teacher.
    “Hi, Dean. I’m coaching the basketball team again this year and I hope you’ll be coming out.”
    Relief spread across the freshman’s face, as though the teacher hadn’t found out what