Flat Water Tuesday (15 page)

I watched them go, Wadsworth tall and lanky, Perry shuffling beside him in his untied, clownishly oversized Bean boots. From behind they looked like two busted-out boxers on the bum. The future leaders of America.

*   *   *

Wadsworth was right. Soon after our exchange on the boardwalk, Connor and Channing wanted roadwork. By late afternoon a few days later, the sun was weak and pale beside the mountain, darkness falling ever earlier. We jogged stiffly down the road against the wind. Channing drove behind us, his war-torn Chevy burping exhaust from its busted manifold. The gas fumes were eye watering even at twenty yards in the brisk cold. Connor ran behind the herd, next to Perry, who was wearing a filthy brace over the yard of cloth covering his right knee. Ruth ignored us, staying just out of Connor’s range of vision, pacing the crowd in her heavy sweat clothes, her mirrored sunglasses making her look like a bug.

Perry was puffing hard, hawking, plodding forward with his head down. His face was red right to the tip of his nose, as if he was cooking from his own internal combustion. Basted in his own sweat, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand as he ran, then smeared snot on his chest like streaks of mucosal war paint. Connor kept hounding him. “Run. Go, load.”

Perry wheezed, spat, pushed his knees up and bunched his massive shoulders around his head. “It’s all muscle, Connor. Pure muscle.”

“Dead weight. All dead weight for this team to haul over the finish. Run.”

Perry coughed and tried to pour on some speed to get away from him, loping now toward the rest of us. Connor just lengthened his stride a fraction, not even breathing hard, and was all over him again. I could hear Perry’s meaty footfalls and smell him: a musty, elephant pong. “I’m benching three hundred even, dude. Free weights. Three hundred even.” Perry gasped this out to the general crowd, but mostly to irk Connor. Connor shoved him and he almost lost his footing. It always irritated Connor when Perry brought up weightlifting. Connor maxed out at two hundred ten on a good day—on a day when that’s all he was focused on. He hated the free weights bench in the boathouse and always put his book bag and sweatshirt on it when he trained down there, as if that ominous equipment was only good for hanging clothes. “You’re not lifting the boat,” Connor spat out. “You’re rowing it. Run it off, fat boy.”

Perry had a Buddha’s patience, his meaty bull shoulders dropped and rounded against the cold and strained against the wet cloth of his sweatshirt. I couldn’t even hear Connor’s footsteps as they bickered. “Where did they find you, Jumbo?” he asked, running easily and lightly, not the slightest bit winded. “Seriously. I really want to know. The admissions committee must have interviewed you and somebody actually had to say, ‘Okay, John Perry’s a good candidate for this school. He’s the right stuff.’ I mean, Carrey I can just about understand. We have to help underprivileged people in this world, but there’s no excuse for you, Jumbo. None.”

Perry took it and took it. I wondered what would happen if he just turned around and swung at him. It was all he had to do. Connor wouldn’t last a second in a fight with Perry. One smack from that moist, fat fist and Connor would wake up in summer vacation needing therapy to relearn his name. Maybe Perry thought taking shit from Connor was good for him. Like it was character building or something. Back home, where kids routinely fought out of sheer boredom, Connor wouldn’t exist. Somebody would have killed him.

I upped my pace and broke away from the group, started lengthening my stride when I saw the boathouse. I wanted to leave all of them behind me for just a minute, hit the road in front of the boathouse at full speed. But Connor shadowed me, staying just out of my peripheral vision. I could hear his footsteps striking the ground with mine and I pushed it a little harder. I couldn’t lose him. By the time I saw the boathouse peeping over the fields, I put my head down and charged it, figured I had two hundred yards to shake him, but he stayed right behind me, and then he was next to me. I laid it on and he kept it up. “Nice pace, Carrey. Very nice.”

I ignored him, kept the speed up until we had twenty yards and then I tried to lose him again. I took a breath and dug in, sprinted as hard as I could, thinking I’d beat him to the driveway by a stride, but he was already pouring on the juice and just managed to cross next to me. It took all my self-control to resist the urge to hit him down to the water. I turned away from him and walked it off.

He hadn’t beaten me, but there was no way I could have pulled away from him. I turned and looked up at him and he was doubled over, wheezing, gasping, then stood up when the rest of the team stampeded onto the boathouse drive. He quickly turned and looked at me, grinning, his breath short clouds of vapor. “Sweet one, Roberto.”

I jogged by him toward the boathouse.

Ruth caught up with me. “Good run, Carrey.”

“He still almost beat me.”

“You don’t have to compete with him for everything, Carrey. He’s not the enemy.” Sweat glistened in her hair. Her sunglasses had slid down her nose.

“I can’t help it.”

“Just be cool, all right? Can you do that for me? Play nicely with the other boys.” She grinned wickedly. Punched my arm. “Don’t make me mad at you, Carrey. Or make me do something I’ll regret.”

Ruth herded us back into the unheated boathouse for another hour of training. Channing had posted the workout up on the bulletin board on an index card written in his jagged script:
Work on the ergometer, a weight circuit, bench pulls circuit.
He didn’t come into the boathouse with us, simply drove off and left us to our own devices.

We descended into the catacombs beneath the boats and set to work on the machines. I rowed next to Perry, who started gasping for breath after a seven-hundred-meter piece—just a few minutes of effort—and bent double against the foot stretchers with his eyes bulging. Ruth sat next to him, wrote down his slightly improved time. Perry studiously ignored her, knowing that she was paying attention to him at Channing’s request because the erg was his special weakness. He glanced at me. “You okay, Carrey?

“You don’t need to take that crap, Jumbo.”

“You know how he is.”

“I know how he is.”

He rubbed his knee. “This sucks. I want to get out on the water.”

Ruth spoke, finally, looking down at her clipboard. “Spring is months away, John. You still have to deal with a whole winter in this place.”

Two machines over, Connor finished his second seven-hundred-meter piece and rowed it off on the machine, then laid the handle against the cage gently, as if it were alive. He leaned over, looked at Perry and me sitting there and shook his head, checked his watch. Then he stood up. He came over and looked down at Perry’s knee, Perry’s leg as big around as both of mine, pale and hairy. Connor looked at it as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “You’re going to be able to row on that, right Jumbo?”

Perry nodded, stood up, eye to eye with Connor. His head was perfectly round, and his hair clung to the sides of it like a helmet, thick and bushy as a dog’s.

Ruth looked up at both of them, a diminutive referee. “Perry, seriously, should I have you booked in for treatment on that knee?”

“Nah.” Perry was breathing hard, I realized. His recovery off the machine was awful. “My knee is cool. It always eases up after a while.”

Connor pointed at the weight bar we kept in the corner of the room. When we’d cleaned up the week before somebody had stacked the extra forty-five pound weights on either side of it, three on each side.

“How much is six times forty-five, Perry?”

Perry’s mouth worked as he thought.

Connor made a disgusted sound. “It’s two hundred and seventy pounds, you
goof
. Add an additional forty-five for the bar and we come to three hundred and fifteen. Do you think you can clean that?”

“Hell, yeah.” Perry sounded just a tad too eager. The repentant zealot, wanting to make amends with the high priest of crew.

“That’s impossible.” Connor wiped his mouth, looked Perry up and down. “Don’t lie to me.”

Perry sized up the bar. He slowly rolled it from the corner and stood in front of it. Even the guys on the ergometers stopped rowing. Perry looked over at Connor. “I can lift it. Yeah, I can.”

“To your chin?”

“I can lift it and throw it, if you want me to.”

“Ten dollars right now says you can’t.”

Ruth was watching this with increasing alarm. “Wait. This is dumb, you guys. John’s hurt, I don’t think—”

“Shut up, Ruth. Jumbo is fine. He needs to toughen up. That erg is kicking his ass.”

“John, you don’t need to do this. Coach hasn’t called for any heavy lifting yet. It’s not on the program.”

Connor laughed. “Who cares what’s on the program? This is just a wager. Between gentlemen. Jumbo says he can lift it and I want to see him do it.”

“Connor, I really—”

“Shut
up
, Ruth.”

Ruth’s face set in anger and she looked up at Perry. “John, you don’t need to do this, okay?”

Connor’s eyes flashed. “He damn well does, Ruth.”

Perry shrugged. He set his eyes on the bar. He licked his lips and wiped his wrist across his nose, stood over the weights, reached down with his fleshy palms and tested the bar, released it. Then he rolled his neck, shook out his paws and circled his shoulders, breathing hard the whole time. It was a transformation. He looked like the work of a sculptor who had been asked to carve a huge human figure and not bother with the details. He was menacing, indestructible. His was a body meant to lift and work and absorb pain.

He was squaring off over three hundred and fifteen pounds. Dead weight, clean and jerk. I considered what would happen to me if I tried it with even two hundred. I’d been on a job back home with an ex-army guy named Quayne McAllister, who’d tried to roll a sixty gallon drum full of silica gel out a loading dock and had caught its full weight when it rolled back in on him. He’d hit the floor clutching his twisted spine and howling; raspy, high-pitched screeches of pain that had brought my father running into the room yelling at me to call an ambulance. I still remembered my father rolling him on his stomach while the grown man with two sons older than me lay there snorting in the dust like some animal he’d found gutshot in the road. After that McAllister was just another guy at work with a back brace and tape on his wrists who walked with a limp.

Perry wrapped a leather belt around his kidneys and pulled it tight. He pushed the bar out farther, so it was between Connor and himself. “You want to try it first, Connor?” Perry looked like he meant it. As if skinny Connor Payne, with his measly one hundred and eighty-five pounds, was going to have a chance even moving the thing. Perry smiled ingratiatingly. I willed him to needle Connor just a little more. Remind Connor he was asking him to do something he himself could not.

Wadsworth, who had been watching all this from one of the weight benches, broke in. “Call it off, Connor. This is grotesque.” There was a fault line of fear in his voice.

Connor didn’t even look at him. Seemed not to have registered that Wadsworth had spoken.

Perry swung his arms out and then practiced getting into position, leveling the bar, finding just the right spot for his drive. He breathed low, from his stomach, as if sucking energy in from the close, rank air. He pursed his lips, swallowing some idea about the weight, some concept about leverage we didn’t know.

Then, in one blur of movement, he seemed to almost fall on the bar, to collapse over it and catch himself as his hands found the metal. Hunched over the bar for only a second, he drove with his legs and stepped forward at the same time. The bar came off the floor just a shade unevenly, and Perry puffed his cheeks, looking right at Connor, and ripped it upward to his shoulders, the weights rotating slightly, his knees bent just a touch, the left leg taking the greatest strain. Finally he rose, the weight parallel to his shoulders. He grinned, his face tight and florid with the effort. He sucked in a chestful of air, a strained contortion that showed his teeth. He exhaled hard and took a quick inhale. The boathouse was dead silent. We could hear Perry’s feet sliding on the floor to keep his stance, his tendons red and pulsing over his socks.

Connor leaned forward, almost into his face. “Can you get it over your head, Perry?” he needled. “
Can you?
”

And for that one second Perry thought about it, thought about trying for that last push and getting his body beneath it. Wadsworth tried to spot him but he was too slow. Perry gave it one last heave and stood, wavering under the strain, legs apart. Finally, he pushed the bar outward and it crashed down with a loud clatter leaving two deep indents in the blue wooden floor. Perry rocked back so his shoulders were straight. Wadsworth pounded his back, “You okay?”

Perry nodded, making fists, rolled his neck again and turned away. Wadsworth turned around furiously and pointed at Connor. “What the hell was that?”

“I thought he could do it. If you get it to your shoulders, the rest is easy.”

Wadsworth shook his head, hearing something he wasn’t sure he could believe in Connor’s voice. Connor took a quick step in his direction and spun him around. “Wads, you know what? I can’t lift that weight. Can you? Don’t even answer me. Perry’s the only one who can.”

“So fucking leave him alone, for—”

“But I can tell you something. If I
could
get that bar up to my shoulders, I would get it over my head. That’s the difference between Jumbo and me.”

Connor seemed to dismiss him and turned to Perry, waited while he caught his breath. “Well done,” Connor said. “I’m impressed. Very impressed.” He held out his hand. Perry didn’t take it. Connor left it there between them and I willed Perry to hang tough. After a few slow seconds Perry brushed Connor’s fingers with his.

I had to look away.

Ruth pushed by the three of them and clumped up the stairs. I heard her kick open the door above and stomp past the boats and outside. Connor smiled. I got off the ergometer and pulled on my own coat and my
Carrey’s Joinery
hat. “Come on, Jumbo. Let’s get out of here, man.”