A Boy Named Pony - A Sequel to East West Sunset

Chapter Twenty-Three - Ponyboy

It was going to be tight - squeezing in a date with Betty Anne before Curly told me he'd pick me up for the holdup - but I figured it was my best bet to staving off any of her suspicion. Besides, I figured I hadn't been paying her the most attention lately. We hadn't been on a date since the afternoon of the robbery at her father's bank.

I swung by to pick her up at her locker as soon as the bell rang at 3:00. She was frowning inside her locker as I approached, but the cloudy expression faded away when she saw me walking towards her.

"So, ice-skating, huh?" she said, slipping her arms into a tan and white sheepskin jacket. "I didn't know you could skate."

"Oh! I can't," I admitted. Ice skating had just been the first thing that came to mind, especially since the rink was on the opposite side of Main Street as the dive bar where Tim had said he'd pick me up.

She closed her locker door, dragging her hair out from under the collar of her coat. "Interesting choice, then," she chuckled.

"Just looking for an excuse to hang onto you some more." I winked and offered her my arm.

"Well, I don't think I'll be much help! I can hardly stand on my own two feet, so grab me and we'll both end up falling down!" she warned.

She took my arm and I pulled her close to my side; my heart began to beat very loudly in my ears. "I guess we'll have to teach each other, then," I replied.

Outside, the wind whistled through the bare trees with an eerie, mournful sound. Stray bits of paper tumbled across the parking lot as people hurried, shoulders scrunched and heads bent against the chill, to their rides. It was freezing for winter in Oklahoma; I'd bet well below freezing. Such temperatures were unheard of here.

"Brrr!" Betty Anne wrapped her coat more tightly across her chest and pressed closer to my side. "It sure is cold!"

"And a good thing, too, otherwise the ice rink would be just a puddle of slush." 

"That's true, I guess."

Still, it was hard to keep up the same optimism, especially after the six-block trek to Main Street, by which time my fingers were so cold they'd turned such a violent shade of red that I worried I was experiencing the first stage of frostbite. I glanced at Betty Anne's hands somewhat jealously. She'd had the sense to wear a pair of blue woolen mittens that looked so warm my own hands throbbed with envy. But I didn't want to seem like a wimp, so I kept my complaints to myself.

"How much is it to rent skates?" Betty Anne asked as we (finally!) sidled up to the rink.

"Uh, dunno. No more than a quarter, I'd guess."

The rink itself was ... nothing special, that was for sure: a square tub-like structure constructed from plies of plywood, overlaid with plastic sheeting, and then filled with a couple inches of water which froze solid. Most winters the park district built it and operated it for free, so long as the weather was cold enough, but mostly so little use was got out of it that they were able to keep reusing the same sheets of plywood over and over again. Some of the edges of the wooden plies were half-rotten.

"It's probably nothing like what you've got out in the country," I admitted to Betty Anne, "But this is the best we city folks have got."

She laughed. "Yeah, it's a bit smaller than the pond on my stepdad's farm. But it's probably smoother."

I frowned at the uneven chunks of ice near the corners of the rink. Yeah... much smoother.

There were only a handful of people skating; the bitter wind must have driven everyone else inside. A couple moms and their kids, an elderly couple, a group of middle schoolers clowning around pretending to be hockey stars.