Ironman

by Chris Crutcher

  “Ain’t nobody makin’ my life hell,” Elvis says.

  “You’re doin’ that by yourself?”

  “My life ain’t hell!”

  Nak says, “Eye of the beholder.”

  “Yeah, well, behold someone else’s life. I’m sick of this shit.”

  “Your choice.”

  Bo is tentative. “Mr. Nak, how am I supposed to own what I said to Mr. Redmond in a way I can be proud of? I don’t mind that I called him that, really, but I mind that I let myself that far out of control. I mean, you just don’t go around calling your teacher asshole.”

  Shuja laughs. “Not to his face, you don’t. Yeah, Mr. Nak, let’s hear you teach this young sewer mouf how to be proud he called his teacher asshole. Now I could find plenty to be proud of, an’ ol’ Rock ’n’ Roll here probably be all swellin’ up in the chest if he done it, but this boy look like he come from a good home.”

  “I didn’t say he should be proud of what he done,” Mr. Nak says. “I said he should own it in a way he can be proud of. A man makes a mistake, he’s got to be able to stand up and say so. That way he don’t get so many of ’em stacked on his shoulders they weigh him down.”

  Shuja says, “So how he gonna own it in a way he be proud?”

  “Name it an’ claim it,” Nak says. “He can say what he done and why he done it. If he thinks it was a mistake, he can say so. If he’s sorry, he can say that.”

  Shuja laughs. “What if he ain’t sorry? He get to go tell Mr. Redmond that? ‘Mr. Redmond, my man, wish I was sorry I called you what you is, but hey, can’t do it, homey.’”

  “Probably makes more difference to the powers that he don’t do it again,” Nak says. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry to say you’re gonna cut it out.”

  Shuja sits forward. “How come nobody make Redmond apologize for bein’ an asshole?”

  Nak laughs. “Eye of the beholder,” he says. “One man’s asshole is another man’s toilet-seat cover. Sorry, Shu, you come to the wrong place if all you want is justice as you see it.”

  “Finish your piece on Yukon Jack’s?” Lionel Serbousek stands behind Bo, who stares at an empty word-processing screen.

  “Not yet. Can’t get an angle. I don’t think anybody at this school cares about some stupid triathlon.”

  Lion lays a hand on his shoulder. “Good journalism will make them care.”

  “I’ve been thinking about doing a piece on ‘American Gladiators.’”

  “That’ll be an in-depth piece. What the hell is an American Gladiator?”

  Bo quickly explains the concept.

  “And you think people won’t be interested in a triathlon?”

  Bo explains why he wants to do a piece on American Gladiators.

  “Tell you what, lover boy,” Lion says, “you get me a three-part article on training for Yukon Jack’s, and I’ll consider letting you do a short piece on American Gladiators.”

  “You’ll consider letting me do a piece?”

  “Make Yukon Jack’s a good one and American Gladiators is in.”

  “You’re on,” Bo says, turning back to the empty screen, staring a moment. Then, “I still need an angle.”

  “Do it from a Stotan angle,” Lion says. “That’ll win ’em over.”

  “What’s a Stotan?”

  Lion swells at the chest. “You’re lookin’ at one, lover boy. Find out what Stotan means, and you’ll have your angle. Guaranteed.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Bo gently pumps the brakes as his mother’s Blazer approaches the stoplight at Browne and Sprague in downtown Spokane. Shelly sits relaxed, feet on the dashboard. It is Christmas Eve, and they are in town for last-minute shopping after a particularly intense workout at the CFU weight room.

  “So what did you get me?” he asks. “Something pretty nice, I’ll bet. Pretty expensive.”

  Shelly laughs. “You’re right. I got you custom-made blow-up biceps that fit under your shirt so you won’t be embarrassed to go out with me.”

  “Hey, I out-benched you today.”

  “Yeah, but you used both arms.”

  “Good thing I’m in Anger Management,” Bo says. “Otherwise I’d have to jerk you out of the car by your coat collar and leave you bleeding in the snow.” It has been an exceptionally hard winter all over the Northwest. Three to four feet of snow cover the ground, and snowbanks reach seven or eight feet in places where the plows have nowhere to dispose of it.

  Shelly snorts and stares out the windshield. “Speaking of Anger Management, aren’t you supposed to be getting out of there pretty soon?”

  “One more week after vacation,” Bo says, “but I don’t know….”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “Between you and me?”

  “Iraqi Gladiators couldn’t make me break a confidence,” she says. “What’s between you and me?”

  The traffic light turns, and Bo’s tires spin through the intersection on the ice. “I’m not sure I want out of Anger Management.”

  “Brewski, we start before sunrise three days a week. Think of the extra sleep.”

  “I swim before group,” he says. “Wouldn’t be any extra sleep.” Though the light is green at Second, Bo brakes for a heavyset man clad in only a T-shirt and jeans and sporting several days’ stubble on his chin as he stumbles from the sidewalk into the intersection, oblivious to the traffic.

  “Hey!” Shelly yells.

  “Can’t hear you,” Bo says. “He’s drunk. Besides, your window’s rolled up.” The man staggers in front of them, goosebumps and purple splotches of cold gracing his bare arms. He reaches the curb and Bo says “shit” under his breath, stomping on the emergency brake as he opens the door. Shedding his down jacket he jogs up behind the man, who flinches when Bo taps his shoulder. “Hey, man,” Bo says, holding the coat in his extended hand. “Take this.”

  “Wha’?”

  “Take this coat.”

  “Le’ me alone.” The man pushes the air in front of him weakly away.

  “No, man, take it.”

  The man squints. “Whaddaya want? How come you’re givin’ me your goddamn coat? Whaddaya want?”

  “I don’t want anything,” Bo says. “I want you to get warm.”

  “Git away from me!”

  “Take the goddamn coat!” Bo yells, beginning to shiver in the single-digit Fahrenheit. Drivers backed up behind the Blazer honk as the light again turns green. Bo places the coat around the man’s shoulders and hurries away, cranking the heat to high as he steps back into his vehicle. He watches in his rearview mirror as the man stands befuddled before sliding his arms into the coat and pulling it tight around his shoulders.

  Bo says “ha!” in satisfaction, then “what?” in response to Shelly’s silent stare.

  “That was nice.”

  Bo shrugs.

  “But I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What are you going to do for a coat?”

  “I’m gonna buy a new one. I work for a living.”

  Shelly is quiet another moment, then moves across the seat and places her hand on Bo’s leg and her nose next to his ear. “That was really nice.”

  Bo drapes his right arm over her shoulder and smiles. “It wasn’t as nice as it looked,” he says. “That kind of stuff pisses my dad off so bad it’d be worth it to freeze all winter.”

  DECEMBER 24

  Dear Larry,

  If I were mailing you this saga as I wrote it, you might have thought I dropped off the face of the earth, it’s been so long since I’ve put pen to paper. I’ll bring you up to date. Shelly’s my girlfriend now. If you ever meet her, though, don’t say I called her that, or I’ll get Gladiator’s knuckles for lunch. Shelly thinks “having” a boyfriend or girlfriend smacks of ownership and wants nothing to do with it. My mother agrees with her.

  I said, “So what’s to keep us from going out with other people?” and she doubled her fist under my nose and said, “This will keep you from
going out with other people. The choice not to is all I need.”

  Hey, Lar, should a guy allow himself to be blackmailed by the brute force of a comely blond television warrior-to-be? And if so, how far should he let that go? My current thinking on the subject is yes, he should, and as far as she wants to go. I will welcome any opinion you might have that agrees with mine.

  But there’s more, and it’s not good. My Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, has gotten me into some warm brown smelly stuff. Seems she got into a yelling match with Ian Wyrack, the mondo humongo swimmer from CFU, and told him to round up his two studliest fellow swimmers—one to run and one to bike—to form a relay team so I could kick their collective butts in Yukon Jack’s in May.

  So I says to her, Lar, I says, “Are you out of your blood-vessel-constricted head?” and she says, “In every triathlon I’ve watched, the fastest individual has finished ahead of the fastest relay,” and I says, “How many triathlons have you watched?” and she says, “One, but the first finisher was way ahead of the first team,” and I says, “That, you cerebral behemoth, is because in almost every triathlon except Yukon Jack’s the individuals start first, as much as thirty minutes before the relay teams.”

  She says, “Oh.”

  I say, “Oh,” back.

  “So sue me.”

  “There won’t be enough left of me to sue you. The judgment would simply go to my descendants, of which I have none, because I’m too busy training like an Olympian to conceive any.”

  “Believe me,” she says, “that’s not the only reason you don’t have descendants.”

  I prefer not to explore that further.

  The good news is that Wyrack can only use guys from the swim team, and none of them can begin their training until swimming season is over in middle to late March, because Mr. S would kill them if they risked their lives running or biking on ice, or building muscles for any purpose other than torpedoing themselves through the water. The rest of the good news is that Wyrack is the only guy on the team who hates me enough to shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails, so he’ll be the only one with the obsession of pushing me till I drop quivering and foaming at the mouth. I’m hoping the fact that the swim comes last in Yukon Jack’s will keep my passion piqued enough to take him.

  The bad news is that one of his guys is as much a cyclist as a swimmer. I can minimize his advantage by training all winter while he’s sentenced to the water, but there’s no way I can beat him. Still, that news isn’t as bad as it could be, because, like I said before, Yukon Jack’s is the only triathlon I know about that doesn’t favor cyclists. What this means is that I’d better be in monster running shape, and training in these winter conditions is, in Shelly’s words, the shits, especially when you’re stumbling behind a team of two Super V-8 huskies with traction that makes your Nikes seem like skates.

  No more time for talk, Lar. I’m off to train.

  Later,

  The Brew

  Bo kicks the sides of his cross trainers against the doorjamb at the entrance to his father’s apartment, turning the knob on the second knock. He hollers, “Hey, Dad” into the dark kitchen.

  “Hey,” his dad yells back. “Come on in. Merry Christmas.”

  “Same to you. Brought you some stuff.”

  Luke Brewster stands to greet his son as Bo appears in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, laden with food and gifts. Nothing in the decor of Luke’s apartment hints at any celebration of the season.

  “Damn, boy, where’s your coat?”

  It’s Christmas; Bo chooses to fight another day. “Left it in the car.” He places the gifts on the coffee table and glances around the bare room. “Thought you were going to get a tree.”

  “Naw,” Luke says. “Maybe next year, when your brother’s with me.” He stares at the packages. “I wish your mother wouldn’t do this. It seems like we’ve been apart long enough that she’d let things be.”

  “You know Mom. Can’t think about anybody missing out on Christmas.”

  Luke’s eyes go soft—something Bo seldom sees—as he reaches for the cup perched on the arm of his easy chair and takes a swallow. “Guess she doesn’t know it’d be easier for me if she’d forget it,” he says. His eyes snap back into focus and he raises his cup. “A little Tom and Jerry?”

  Bo smiles and shakes his head, leaning his butt against the arm of the sofa. “No thanks, I’m in training.”

  “I wasn’t going to add rum,” Luke says. “I’ll pour it virgin. Just some batter and hot water.”

  Bo appreciates the attempt at communication. “Okay. Sure.”

  When Luke returns from the kitchen, he hands Bo a steaming cup, raises his own, and says, “Cheers.”

  Bo nods and says “cheers” back.

  They sit quietly a moment, sipping their respective drinks, and as he feels the weight of their silence, Luke says, “Beauregard, Beauregard, Beauregard. What am I going to do with you?”

  Bo smiles and shrugs, realizing this probably isn’t his father’s first drink of the evening.

  “We do go after each other, don’t we, son?”

  “We sure do, Dad.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  Bo shrugs. “Guess we both just want to be right.”

  His father sits back in the easy chair, nodding. “Maybe. Ever wish I’d just get off your back?”

  “I almost never wish anything else.”

  “I’d like to, son. I really would.”

  “Well, don’t let me be the guy that stops you.”

  Luke is quiet a moment, gazing into the gas log fire, looking lost. “But what kind of father would I be if I did that?” he says finally. “What kind of dad would just turn his kid loose in the world the way it is today?”

  Sensing a window, Bo leans forward and says without malice, “You turned me loose when you and Mom split up.”

  “That may have been a mistake on my part. Turning you loose, I mean.”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “I could have fought for custody.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. I was old enough to choose for myself and we hadn’t had a decent conversation in years. I would never have stayed with you.”

  Luke’s tone takes a harder edge. “If I’d had custody, you’d have stayed.”

  Bo feels the window closing and wills it shut. “You’ll notice I haven’t spent any more Christmases in my bedroom.”

  Luke’s glare momentarily shoots daggers, then softens as he attempts to pry that same window open a crack. “That was a rough one for me, too.”

  Bo nods. “Yeah. ‘This is going to hurt me more than it does you, son.’”

  “That one may have.”

  “No way.”

  “Don’t think you always know what’s going on inside me, Bo. Sitting out in the living room in front of the tree that Christmas, opening our presents without you; it almost broke my heart. That one did hurt me more than it did you.”

  Bo continues shaking his head. “It did break my heart, Dad. If it had hurt you as bad as it did me, you wouldn’t have done it.”

  Luke looks away. “Your turn will come, Bo. It will be interesting to have this conversation with you in ten years.” He looks back into his son’s eyes. “I’ll tell you this, I never did anything to you I didn’t think would help you in the world. I never did anything I didn’t think would turn you into a better man.”

  For the first time in Bo Brewster’s memory he watches a tear trickle slowly down his father’s cheek, rest a moment on his chin to gather momentum, and drop almost lazily to the hardwood floor. He truly believes that. Bo literally aches to find some place of understanding with his dad, some place of peace, but before he can search, Luke’s eyes snap again into focus, and his tone becomes matter-of-fact, as if he can tolerate only so much intimacy. “I understand you’re about to be released from Anger Management. Learn anything?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I keep in contact with
the school. Hey, I’m still your dad. Mr. Re—uh, one of your teachers told me you’re about to be set free.”

  Bo slumps. “Yeah. You been talking to Redmond.”

  Luke waves a hand. “He was in the store picking up free weights for the off season.”

  “Oh,” Bo says. It’s possible.

  “I hear you’re taking on some kind of special challenge in your next triathlon,” his father says offhandedly.

  Bo feels off-guard. “You been reading my mail? Who told you that?”

  “Heard you’ve got a new girlfriend, too. What’s she like?”

  “She’s nice, Dad. I’ll bring her around sometime.”

  “Heard she’s on the beefy side.”

  Bo’s pulse quickens with anger in response to the dig. It changes so fast. He decides to preserve what he can of Christmas Eve. “She’s strong,” he says. “She works out.”

  Luke leans forward, nodding. “To tell the truth, I’m kind of glad you’re finishing up the anger management group.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, you’ve probably learned your lesson by now, and I hear that Nakatani character has some pretty strange ideas. In fact, I heard he might have brought down a lawsuit on the school district. Something about a skunk.”

  Bo laughs. Though he thought it bizarre in the beginning, he has come to think of the skunk ordeal as the incident that began winning him over to Mr. Nak. “Yeah, that was pretty funny.”

  “Lawsuits are no laughing matter, Bo. The district could pay a hefty settlement.”

  Bo places his empty cup on the coffee table. “What’s going on, you get elected to the school board or something?”

  “No,” Luke says, “but like any taxpayer, I’m interested in school business.”

  This doesn’t feel right. “You’ve been ‘hearing’ a lot lately,” Bo says. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Actually there is one more thing, but I’d kind of decided to let it sit.”

  “Uh-huh, but now that the cat’s out of the bag…”

  Luke shakes his head. “It’s not important. It’s…”