Flat Water Tuesday (21 page)

I straddled my station and gave my arms one last shake before lying down and reaching to the floor for the bright steel bar. I lifted it with loose fingers, testing. I rested my chin on the end of the board and inhaled the icy air. I pressed my legs together and looked to my right, straight at Connor. Connor got into position, regarded me without interest, his eyes dull. I took three more deep breaths, felt the cold settle into my lungs.

Ruth squatted down into our line of vision. “You guys both ready?”

Connor moved his gaze straight ahead, his eyes blank pools. I grunted out an affirmative, felt my neck stretch as I tried to talk, my head heavy on my jaw.

“Both of you know that you can’t move your chin or your legs. You have to connect with the bar every time, then go back to full extension of the arms. No getting up. No quitting. Five minutes.”

I took up the weight and waited for the command.

Ruth shifted her feet. “Ready? Let’s go!”

I drew the bar up to my chin, bashed it into the board under my jaw with a jolt. I dropped the weight and began counting off a cadence in my head. One—hit. Two—hit. Three.… I tried to knock the bench lightly to conserve power.

Connor was hitting his board with the regularity of a machine gun. I filled in the spaces between each of his hits. Hit—hit. Hit—hit.
Bang—bang
. The sounds knocked around the inside of the boathouse. The room sounded like a workshop where clumsy joiners had been assigned iron mallets to pound planks apart for kindling. Channing cleared his throat. “Thirty seconds.”

Ruth’s voice cut through the racket, “Let’s go, Carrey. You missed that one. You have an even twenty, don’t miss again.”

I lowered the weight, yanked it up to my chin. There was a sharp stab of heat in my upper back now. I went back to banging away, intent on making forty good lifts before Connor. I moved my head until I could see the bar.
Bang
.
Bang
. Hit. Hit.
Thud
.
Thud
. I shut my eyes to it.

“That’s a minute and you’re on thirty-five, Carrey,” Ruth hissed. “Wimp.” I vaguely heard Channing uttering venom at Connor, standing over him as he lay prone, laboring away.

The sharp points of heat were expanding like two big, white spiders stretching their legs over my shoulder blades. My muscles were stiffening. I would drop the bar to full extension, then pull up. Drop, pull. But I couldn’t tell where it was on its ascent anymore. The upper part of the motion was lost in a dead numbness.

“One minute fifteen, Rob, and you have thirty-nine, don’t you lose me.”

Connor was juddering away on his side, an even series of bangs. I tried to block him out but because I couldn’t resist, opened an eye and peeked over as I pulled the bar to the wood. Connor’s hair had fallen in front of his face. I could hear him grunting with every hit. Ruth jammed the watch in front of his eyes, then mine. “We’re twenty-five seconds into minute number two boys, now you get this going. Connor has forty-seven, Rob has forty-three. Go! Now go!”

Nearly halfway through the second minute, the danger minute, the panic minute. I kept the pace even, fell into step behind Connor again. I heard him grunt in displeasure as I echoed him for thirty seconds, then hammered out two quick ones, ruining his concentration.

“You’re up, Rob. Fifty-eight to fifty-six. Don’t let it get this close, you take him. You don’t lose by one stroke, ever, not at this school. Now go. Two minutes down and buried.”

I snapped off two quick ones and tried for a third, missed. The bar came within an inch of the board and dropped. I took a breath and pounded in two more, then fell into a slower step behind Connor.
Thud—thud
. Pause. Breathe.
Thud—thud
. Pause. Breathe.
Thud—thud
. Then Connor pushed through three fast ones and waited for me to fall out of step. He was following me now, answering every hit with one of his own. I was losing count of how many lifts we had. The fat, white spiders had sunk their fangs into the middle of my shoulders and were digging the hooks of their legs into my sides and the center of my back. The long veins standing out of my pink biceps were filled with blue poison. I took a deep breath and pounded into minute four.

“One ten on the dot. Connor, you’re at one thirteen, two up on Rob. Finish this,” Channing growled.

“Hear that, Rob?” Ruth asked me. “Coach says you’re fading. Now show him you’re not.” I saw Ruth’s sneakers move as she looked over at Channing. She was duck-toed, I realized, and for some reason that was immensely amusing.

I had fallen into step again behind Connor, tongue between my teeth. Nothing existed except the prospect of beating him. I was only one behind now. I dropped the bar, spread my fingers, and willed the aching poison to move away from my arms. I cocked my head and picked up the bar again, slapped off two, three, four. The clusters of bones in my wrists were expanding and contracting with each pull, the long bones of my fingers stretching apart from one another as I brought the bar up into the wood.

Then Connor coughed and dropped his weight.

Ruth laughed. It was shrill, horrible. “He’s losing it. Carrey, you are one up. Fifteen seconds more of this minute and you have him. Give me three more and this minute is history, and that’s one … and that’s two … and … lift it, lift it, c’mon, don’t you die on me, that’s it. Three.” Ruth thrust the watch in my face again. “Four-oh-one. One fifty on the dot. Now, last minute.”

The bones in my hands weren’t springing back anymore. As I pulled I felt my vertebrae crunching together. Blue, toxic blood from my arms washed over the deadened muscles. I closed my eyes, banged off three, four, ten.

Connor had recovered and was rapping them out on his side. Channing barked out, “Connor you are at one sixty-seven. You can do this. Carrey’s exhausted.” I slammed the bar up to my chin, the two fistfuls of muscle in my shoulders contracting and colliding. The bar was coming up unevenly now. The sound of metal hitting wood became frenzied.

I was favoring my right arm. I felt the juices in my elbows freeze and each time I dropped the weight I felt the tendons on my forearms begin to tear. The spiders on my back were heavy now.

“Fifteen seconds. Rob, you have one seventy. Go for six more and you’re over. C’mon. Don’t leave me hanging.”

Connor grunted. I glanced up through a blur of sweat and saw him lay into the bar, bring it crashing to the wood.

“One seven five, Connor, keep going. Dig in,” Channing intoned.

“You’re just about there, Rob. Go. Go,” Ruth said.”

But Connor was ripping the bar up to his chin now. I managed two more hits and time was up. I dropped the bar to the floor and took a long breath, the two fat spiders sucking on my shoulders resting with me. Ruth marked something on her pad and stepped away. I pushed myself up and looked over at Connor, who was still hugging the board like a surfer waiting for a wave. A thread of glistening spit stretched down from the end of his board to a round puddle on the floor. When he pushed himself up, I saw a pink stripe of blood across his chin and lower lip.

Ruth turned to Channing. “Rob was at one seventy-seven. I counted one eighty for Payne, is that right?”

Channing looked directly at Connor. “No. His back rose off the table for the last three. These two oarsmen are tied, dead finish.” Channing shook his head and then laid his dark eyes on Connor. “You looked like a fish out of water, Mr. Payne, flopping around like that.”

Connor looked down at the floor and wiped the blood on his face away with the palm of his hand. Two icy, sated spiders scuttled off through the lights dancing before my eyes as I hopped off my station. Connor tuned his back to me, breathing easily, rubbing his arms. I picked up my gear and left the room in that dead silence after nodding once to Channing and once to Ruth. I stood out in the adjoining weight room and wiped my face and eyes and adjusted to the dark, focused on the weak, white rays of late autumn light filtering through the grimy basement windows. It felt hot and prickly under my arms and at the base of my neck and in the back of my throat. I believed I might collapse, but the feeling passed. It was only hours later, that night, that I knew I’d be all right.

16.

I had been drinking for almost twenty years and I had never been a good drunk. But after my phone call to Carolyn from Zambia, and my frantic attempts to call her back after she hung up on me, I had gone down to the hotel restaurant with the intention of getting very, very drunk. I sat under the umbrellas around the pool at my own table, in the corner, by the tall wall that was meant to keep out the beggars on the street who you could hear shouting at the traffic. I sat in the sun and started out with scotch and sodas, which I drank one after the other until I was hungry, and then I ordered dinner—a leathery steak and canned vegetables—and drank a few glasses of wine with that. I then moved to the bar and ran into a sunburned produce buyer from a chain of markets in London, and I bought him warm, oily martinis while I drank more scotch. The two of us hatched a plan to meet some of the leggy flight attendants who were drifting in and out of the lounge.

Later I would see a therapist, upon Carolyn’s insistence, after a drunken fight during which she had not only hit me, but had also managed to smash an entire set of dinner plates against a wall behind me, flinging them inaccurately at my head and then kicking me quite accurately in the shins. He would point out that binge drinkers like me have nasty habits of falling in front of cars, or driving cars into other cars. Binge drinkers have trouble with relationships because they make what he called “poor socially induced interpersonal relationship choices,” meaning they wind up sleeping with the wrong people. A man who routinely binge drinks forgets a great deal of what happens to him, but I have a fairly good recollection of the night when I was in the middle of a full-blown binge in the Taj Pomodzi Hotel in Zambia. The bartender thought this was fine; people came into his bar from all over the world and had no problem drinking all night, which is what I intended to do. The English produce buyer and I stayed there until eleven, by which time I was clearly and obviously very drunk. Stupidly, moronically, dangerously drunk. The women whom we had sent drinks to at the bar had left us long ago. The buyer finished his martini and wanted to go, too. I told him to stay. I reminded him, a few times, that I was buying. He shook his head and smiled. “Maybe you should go to bed, mate.”

I grabbed his arm and leaned over the bar, asked the bartender to pour this guy another shitty martini. The man removed his arm from my grasp and made a sign at the bartender. The bartender laughed and I smacked the bar with my open hand. “This isn’t
funny
,” I informed him. “I’m not sitting here alone.”

The man, who might have been a shade older than me, heavyset and used to serious farm work, wearing a khaki outfit and sandals, slapped me on the back. Hard. “There’s a good bloke. How about you call it a night, mate?”

“Fuck you.”

The guy left the bar and I ordered another scotch and the bartender, amazingly, poured me a fresh drink and I sat there, fuming, stewing, sipping from the glass, then adding water to it between sips so I could get it down faster. I was poisoning myself. I glared at the bartender, who had probably seen every kind of sordid behavior on this green earth. “What are you looking at?”

I doubt he even understood me, but he had no problem understanding the tone of my voice. He walked over to the register and picked up the phone calmly. Soon after, two security guards slipped into the bar and stood on either side of me.

One of them asked, “Maybe you have had enough, sir?” As if he was providing me a service. “Maybe now we can bring you to your room?”

I looked at one, then the other. I didn’t move. Finally, as if on cue, the two of them each took an arm and eased me off the stool. Once I stood up, my vision tunneled. Both men were smiling at each other I thought. “You go to your room now?” the one on the right, who had been doing all the talking, asked.

I smiled back at both of them, and then I could have sworn I heard a voice, heard it in a hissed whisper, the way I’d hear it when we rowed. “Do it. Do it now,” and I swung at the smaller one, the silent young guard who was probably getting his first crash course in dealing with drunken guests. The guard could not have been more than eighteen, his uniform was really only a red blazer that hung off the peaks of his shoulders and draped over his knuckles. He was looking at me gravely and seriously when I connected and sent him sprawling into one of the tables.

The two of them dragged me out of the bar and beat me up in the fire stairwell. They did it the way cops do, so they wouldn’t leave a mark, the young, skinny one with the bad fitting blazer linking his arms in mine, the other working me over with his fists to the belly, the sternum, the ribs. They searched me and found my key, which had my room number on it—there were no keycards in that part of Africa—and dragged me up the stairs. By then I was no longer resisting, being covered in puke and blood as I was and unable to even see my feet, much less stand on them. They opened the door to my room, tossed me in, and slammed it shut, leaving me in the humid dark. I lay there for quite awhile, retching and bleeding.

*   *   *

I had been running religiously at dawn and putting in time at Channing’s little debacle of a guesthouse/office in the late afternoons on average three times a week. I had sanded the outside and inside of the place and painted the woodwork, such as it was. One evening I just stayed out there past dinner until Channing came out and kicked me off his property. I had worked off my twenty hours in less than two weeks but I kept coming back whenever I couldn’t bear the thought of the boathouse or Connor or the rest of them. Whenever I felt homesick. The tools in the toolbox, the paint lined up on newspaper, the piles of fresh wood and the soaking brushes waiting for me; these were things I knew. I stored the tools and the brushes exactly the way I would on a project at home, covered the wood with a tarp and generally brought the whole site up to speed. Any good builder who went out to inspect my work would know a pro had been operating there.