Lion said, “It’s okay to tell it.” Lion knows a thing or two about family that used to be.
“My brother was seven years older than me,” Nortie said, and smiled. “I was a mistake. A big one, my dad says. Anyway, we lived in a small town called Beaumont in Nebraska and my dad was a truck-driver. He was really mean then. He used to do real damage. He drank a lot—way more than now—and he’d come home some nights in a rage. He’d drag everyone out of bed and choose one of us to pick on—usually Mom or Jeremy, because they protected me. He’d call us names and ask why the hell we were trying to ruin him and make wild accusations until either Mom or Jeremy had had enough and challenged him. Then he’d knock them around and storm out. We’d comfort each other and finally go back to bed and Dad would stay away a day or so—or go out on a haul—and then come back like nothing had happened. No one would mention it, but you could see Jeremy starting to hate him. And I didn’t understand that then, because Jeremy talked about all the things he wanted to do to Dad, and would do as soon as he was big enough; but then I’d see him trying to please him all the damn time. He’d go out and wash his truck—once he even waxed it. A whole truck he waxed. It was a monster. And I’d want to ask him why. I wanted to ask him why he did anything nice for Dad. But I didn’t ask. And I understand now, because I do it all the time.
“I remember one night Dad came home drunk and decided Mom had been sleeping around, so he called her a whore and a bitch and some names a whole lot worse than those. She stood there crying, asking how he could be so mean when he just knew that wasn’t true. But he wouldn’t give it up, and he started describing what she did with all these other guys she was messing with. Finally, he made her stand up on this big round coffee table so her kids could get a good look at their mother, the whore. Jeremy cried and held my head against his chest so I couldn’t look, and Dad came over and jerked him away and threw him against the kitchen table. Then he made me throw things at Mom. He stood there slapping me on the back of the head until I did it. I said, ‘No!’ and he’d slap me, and then he started to choke me. Mom was begging me to go ahead, and Jeremy was trying to get up to come help, but his arm was broken. Finally, I threw an ash tray at her, and I think a small vase that was on a TV tray. Neither one hit her, but somehow it satisfied him, and he called us all some more names and left.
“Jeremy was thirteen years old, and I think he thought Dad had finally gone too far; that we’d pack up and leave, because that’s what Mom said. But the next morning, when she took us to the hospital to have his arm set and put in a cast, she told the doctor that he’d broken it falling off the garage roof. I remember the look on his face like it was yesterday. I think he hated her more for that than he hated my dad. He knew right then we were stuck with it forever, and he hated himself for not being able to make it better.
“The next day Mom sent me out to the garage to see the bike they got me for my birthday, and to get Jeremy to come in and watch me open the rest of my presents. Dad was on the road.
“The garage was just off the kitchen, and I walked through the door and Jeremy had hung himself from the rafters. A stepladder was kicked over and his Adidas dangled right above my eye level. There was a note tied to one of them with my name on it.
“I was a Stotan, guys. I was tough and I showed no pain, as Max says. I walked over and took the note, turned around and went back into the house and up to my room. I didn’t cry or say a word; just crawled under the covers. A couple of weeks later I read the note. All it said was Jeremy was sorry; that I’d have to take care of myself. He wished me good luck.”
Nortie told the story without changing tone or expression once. Jeff and I were paralyzed; staring at him, waiting for more; waiting for the rest. Tears streamed down Lion’s face and he rolled over and faced the wall.
“I don’t even know what happened after that,” Nortie said. “I don’t know how Mom got him down or how they notified my dad or what happened to the bike. Neither of my parents ever said another word about it—at least not to me. In a few months we moved. I think we moved about four times in the next couple of years until we showed up here. My dad’s been at the hardware store ever since. He doesn’t drink as much as he used to, and he doesn’t beat on us as much.”
I finally said, “Nortie, is there anything we can do?”
“Nope,” he said. “I just needed to tell somebody.” He rolled over and laid his head down. “I’ve been needing to tell somebody for a long time.”
Lion saved the day. We lay for those few minutes, dreading going to sleep on Nortie’s story. I couldn’t imagine having that incident be part of my life, or living with what it must be like to have Mr. Wheeler as a dad. It made me wonder how Nortie got the day-to-day things done—how he got up and went to school, or took out the garbage, or shoveled the walk.
Lion said, “I have a Stotan story that will put yours to shame, Nortie. And it will diminish yours to the rank of ‘amusing anecdote,’ Jeff.”
Jeff said, “So tell it, Anus Breath.”
Any story would do.
Lion reached up and switched off the flashlight above his bed, leaving us with only the glow from the streetlight outside and the reddish flash of the neon bar sign. “Close your eyes,” he said. “You’ll want to visualize this.
“At fourteen—a frosh—I was not quite the fully bloomed Tom Selleck clone you see before you today. While not the King of adolescent clumsiness and buffoonery, I certainly qualified as a Duke or an Earl. And I had the hots for Melissa Lefebvre.”
“You and every guy who draws breath,” Jeff said.
“Yeah, but I had it bad.”
I said, “This is beginning to sound like Melissa Lefebvre’s Stotan story.”
“Funny man,” Lion said. “The girl was enchanted. She just didn’t know it. So shut up and let me tell this.
“You guys remember Melissa. Already a varsity cheerleader, she was Sophomore Class President, Frost High School Carnival Queen and carried a 4.0 grade average, with a reputation so pristine you felt the stabbing, twisting saber of guilt the moment you tried to sneak her into one of your fantasies. More than once she turned me into a one-man Ship of Fools with a smile or a nod that wasn’t even meant for me. A curious mixture of tomboy and princess, those subtle dimples, long brown hair and light blue eyes just made you ache.”
Jeff let out big air. “This isn’t a Stotan story,” he said. “This is disgusting.”
Lion went on as if Jeff hadn’t spoken. “I wanted her. But to have her, to really have her; to shroud her in the purple-and-gold letter sweater I had yet to earn; to have my class ring wrapped in adhesive tape coated with fingernail polish so it would fit her delicate finger; to meet daily at Dolly’s for a chocolate Coke; well, that would have been what you call your amazing come-from-behind victory.”
“That would have been an amazing come-from-way-behind victory,” Jeff said.
“Whatever,” Lion said. “Anyway, a few nights before the Football Frolics dance up at the gym, during which I had promised myself to ask her to dance—maybe even a slow one—I was visited upon by the first of a forest of pimples yet to come. This wasn’t an advance man, an insignificant pimple scout sent ahead to determine whether this peach-fuzz frontier could support a whole pimple nation. This was Sitting Bull. This pimple was red and sore and angry and given to harmonic tremors. Friends asked if I were growing another head. Enemies said it must be my date to the dance. This was a big zit.
“I considered flying down to some obscure Central or South American country where it’s possible to have an illegal alien growing on your face surgically removed, but decided against it, because I was fortunate in those days to count among my friends one Walker Dupree, a promising young swimmer and budding sports-medicine specialist, ready with a quick remedy for my leprous condition.”
I was already laughing—I knew this story. “Really,” I said, “it worked for me.”
It was as if I hadn’t spoken—or didn’t exist. “After close
examination,” he went on, “my friend Walker recommended Coke-bottle treatment. ‘I beat it to death with a Coke bottle?’ I gasped, then considered it. ‘That might work.’
“But Walker revealed to me a nearly invisible scar from a boil on his right calf that he had treated with this method just three days earlier.
“That night, with my parents finally tucked away in their beds, I closed myself in the kitchen, quietly boiled a Coke bottle in water and deposited a wet washrag in the freezer. When the water came to a rolling boil and the rag was nearly stiff, I carefully removed the bottle with tongs, wrapped it in the freezing washrag and slipped the piping-hot mouth over the mountainous zit—the idea being that as the air inside cooled and contracted, it would suck the boiling core of the Vesuvian blemish whappo! right into the bottle, rendering it dormant and harmless.
“It didn’t come off as advertised.”
I said, “You must not have done it right.”
“As the air inside the bottle contracted,” Lion continued, ignoring me, “my forehead drew tighter and tighter; my eyes bulged. The pimple didn’t pop; just extended like a throbbing finger deeper and deeper into the neck of the bottle. It wasn’t working! I pulled on the bottle to remove it, but it was sucking my face off my head. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to wear this bottle to the dance. Melissa won’t be impressed.’
“With that horrifying fate in mind, I gripped the bottle in both hands, closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and yanked. It popped free with the sound of two anteaters kissing in an echo chamber.
“Tremendous relief washed over me as I sank to the kitchen floor. Given the alternative, I was more than happy to escort the throbbing postule to the Football Frolics.
“But in the bathroom I gazed into the mirror and changed my mind. The mouth of the bottle had left a deep purple ring around the angry sore, forming a perfect three-dimensional bull’s-eye right in the middle of my head.
“At the dance, after an infinity of I’ll-ask-her-for-the-next-slow-ones, I screwed up the courage to do just that, and we glided across the dimly lit dance floor beneath the purple-and-gold crepe-paper streamers, two jerky steps forward, one jerky step back, at arm’s length.
“Melissa peered deeply into my eyes. ‘Is that a corn plaster on your forehead?’ she asked romantically.
“I acknowledged that it was. ‘I was showing some of the football players how to do a head spear,’ I said, ‘and drove a loose rivet in the helmet I’d borrowed into my forehead. No big deal.’
“‘That must’ve hurt,’ she said, nodding. ‘It got you right on that monstrous pimple.’”
CHAPTER 7
WEDNESDAY
We flew through most of the workout today on the Norton Wheeler Express. Nortie was feeling so good about unloading the weight of his brother that he didn’t care how badly Max hurt him. We didn’t talk much last night, even after Lion lightened things up with his tale of the Pimple That Ate Serbousek, but one thing is sure: Nortie doesn’t have to carry that around by himself anymore. I was glad that Elaine and her friends didn’t make it over; that whatever magical bond Nortie’s tale created among us wasn’t broken. Jeff went out into the kitchen to make us another round of sandwiches, and KZUU sang us off to sleep.
When we got up this morning, there was a lot less bitching and moaning and general dread and more a sense of going up there to take on The Man together. Somewhere early in the workout, just after we stood at closed-ranks attention for our post-warmup hosing down, the back of Lion’s suit clutched tightly in Jeff’s fist to prevent him from attempting some kind of new and torturous entry into the water, I followed Nortie into that soft-bordered world where my body is capable of doing whatever it will. The other guys fell in and our little machine hummed right through both five-minute breaks. Max had said all along that those five minutes were our time to do with what we pleased, so we spent one of them in the Torture Lane and the other doing no-breath sprints.
I think all swimmers use some kind of gimmick to keep them going during the really tough spots in workouts. I knew a state champ from two years ago who imagined a shark at his toes and got into swimming for his life. Jeff says he uses Colleen, his girlfriend, beckoning him from the far end of the pool in a translucent black negligee. He goes on with that description, but I’ll spare you. Who knows what Lion uses? Probably something new and different from his bag of wizards and dragons and sorcerers for each lap he swims. I’ve tried them all—usually I tell Jeff I use Colleen too, same negligee, same sordid details, just like the football team does on their wind sprints—but today I used Nortie’s brother, Jeremy. And so did Nortie. He had told his story and not been condemned to rot in Hell for letting it out, and now, for the first time, it seemed like he might be able to use the power of Jeremy’s memory for something positive in his life, rather than just a hammering reminder that the world can turn on you in the wink of an eye, with no warning whatsoever; no thirty-day notice to get your things in order. Because of what he got back from us; because our response to his story was to give him a Stotan Day, a day in which no one backed off, I think he got a taste of something that’s been absent all his life: trust.
I know Max couldn’t have had any idea what was going on, though every once in a while he makes you think that he knows everything by the way he just goes with it. It took him three or four reps of the first set of 200s to realize how things were, and he did his part by keeping the pressure right up there at the edge. After the first ten minutes or so, the bullhorn was nowhere in sight and the Airborne cap mysteriously disappeared. We did fewer deck drills and more swimming, with Max cutting back on the rest intervals between reps, subtly, a few seconds at a time, until we were getting not one second more than we needed and still holding time standards. That’s what Max has: touch. He knows when to put on the pressure, how to hold it and when to back off for room. Max Il Song is the Prince of Touch.
The trip back to reality wasn’t as rough today. This Stotan stuff seems to be taking hold. After we lay on the shower floor awhile, I glanced up to see Lion looking over at Nortie, who was leaning up against the wall, watching the water hammer on his stomach. He said, “Nortie, you did the right thing, telling us.” Nortie looked straight back at him, eyebrows raised, lips pursed, and nodded.
We didn’t just go back and hole up all day today like we did for the past two. Some of the soreness and stiffness is starting to recede and we’re feeling more like human beings again, so we decided to get out and around a little bit. It was a day without scrambled-egg and peanut-butter sandwiches. First, we hit the Savage House, Spokane’s premier pizza place, and fairly astonished their lunchtime crew with the sheer bulk of what we ingested. Savage House management may think twice before choosing to continue their “Wednesday Lunch Special—all you can eat for $2.99.” Then we whipped downtown to catch a matinee before heading back to Lion’s dungeon to prepare for Elaine and her friends, which is to say straighten out the sleeping bags and make sure the heater was working. Along about six Jeff and I decided to run over to the drugstore and get some toothpaste and maybe a couple of comic books for distraction. We were thumbing through the somewhat limited selection when I happened to look out the plate-glass window to see O’Brian walking toward the entrance with a bundle under his arm. He dropped the bundle on the sidewalk beside the three newspaper racks standing there and snipped the wire that held it together with wire-cutters. I didn’t recognize the guy with him, but he was carrying several identical bundles. They talked for a quick second, then walked off across the parking lot.
Jeff and I paid for our stuff—I told the man behind the counter it might be in his best interest to strip-search Jeff—and we split. Outside, I didn’t have to look for more than a second to know the contents of O’Brian’s cargo. That unconscious jerk-off is a paper boy for those Aryan Nation idiots over in Falls Lake. The small sign they left beside the papers said it all: TAKE ONE—LEARN THE TRUTH. We picked up one of the papers and walked back across the street to Lion’s
, deciding not to tell Lion yet because we didn’t want to spend the rest of the evening hunting O’Brian down like the scum he is and spreading his body parts over the city.
Shortly after we got back, we heard a car pull up outside, then the sounds of girls’ voices. Nortie got up and looked out the window and said, “Uh-oh.”
I said, “What?”
“Elaine’s here,” he said.
“So, what’s ‘uh-oh’ about that?”
“Milika’s with her.” He rubbed his hands on the front of his pants. “Oh, Jeez,” he said, “I haven’t seen her since I quit the Center.”
“You haven’t even called her?” Jeff asked.
Nortie shook his head.
Jeff said, “Uh-oh.”
“She’s gonna pop you upside the head,” Lion said.
“If I’m lucky. God, I should have at least called.”
“Twenty-twenty vision,” I said. “The man’s a romantic genius. A modern-day Errol Flynn.”
Jeff answered the knock at the door. Nortie looked as if he were visualizing Milika standing on the other side wrapping her fist around a roll of quarters so she could put him away with one punch. The two of them entered laden with grocery sacks; evidently Elaine’s other friends couldn’t make it. Milika set her groceries on the counter, then turned around and looked at Nortie, who was standing over by Lion’s bed with his hands in his pockets. He started to shrug and she marched across the room and whapped him alongside the ear with an open hand.
Jeff looked to Elaine. “You women are so predictable,” he said.
“What’s the matter with you?” Milika yelled at Nortie.
“I—”
“Where you been? Why didn’t you call me? No wonder your dad hits you.” She started to take another shot at the side of his head, but he flinched and she held back. “You think you’d just never see me again? You think you can crawl off and disappear?”