Ironman

by Chris Crutcher

  I asked Elvis if the bike in the catalog was black.

  “Hell, I don’t know, I didn’t look. I just know it costs five thousand.”

  I know this bike, Lar, because I tried to make a deal with Dad last year to get one at dealer’s price. I wanted it so bad I told him I’d make payments at a very high interest rate, and call him sir until it was paid off. It’s fast. I thanked Elvis and walked back over and dropped into my seat. Shit. Could it be my old man wants these guys to beat me bad enough to shell out that kind of money for a Merlin Ultra-Lite? What the hell for?

  Mr. Nak brought me back from a fantasy involving high explosives and my dad’s pickup. “Let’s wrap ’er up. I brought some grub from none of the basic food groups, and you’re welcome to stay an’ polish it off, or you can go commit whatever felonies and misdemeanors I’ve kept you from. Thanks for comin’. I hope you read some things tonight that will give you a different look at yourself.”

  It’s a funny thing, Lar, Mr. Nak just leaves you with stuff. You want to ask him what to do with it, but you don’t because he just tells you to do whatever your little cowboy heart desires, and leaves you frustrated. When you grow up in a world where adults delight in telling you what to do, then make your life miserable when you don’t, Mr. Nak’s style can be pretty unnerving, but in the long run I know it’s best. A time is fast approaching when the universe will require me to make my own decisions and stand by them. But damn! When someone’s as smart as Mr. Nak, you can’t help but wish they’d give you a little push.

  There was more to Valentine’s night, Lar, but I’m getting serious drools and I can feel my eyelids about to slam shut. If you’ll listen, you can hear them, too.

  Whooosh! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  BO

  “What did your valentine to Elvis say?” Bo asks as he and Shelly leave the Valentine’s Day party and hurry down the walkway to the parking lot. The temperature has risen ever so slightly, and snowflakes drift lazily through the still air, dancing in the glow of the outdoor security lights.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I wants to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because of the way he looked at you,” Bo says. “Whatever you wrote threw him off.”

  “I said I’d take care of his brothers and sisters.”

  “Seriously? You mean take them home?”

  “Not for good, dummy. I just said I’d take them off his hands for a while sometimes. That would give him a chance to do things he needs to do without them. You know, get away from all the frustration of feeling like a failure, and getting so pissed.”

  “What are you going to do with them? I mean, these are Elvis’s brothers and sisters. You think they’re going to be like Care Bears or something?”

  “Is your little brother a Care Bear?”

  Bo is silent. The point is well taken.

  “Haven’t you figured it out, Bo?”

  “Figured what out?”

  “That there’s something the same about every one of us in that group?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, we all screwed up some way to get there. We all have to get out of the group to get out of school.”

  Shelly shakes her head. “No. We all need to stay. We’ve all lost something, and only Mr. Nak and the people in the group know what it is. I understand that after tonight.”

  Bo stares blankly. He doesn’t know what it is. At least he doesn’t know the name for it.

  Shelly seems to read his mind. “It’s the truth,” she says. “We lost the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They are near the Blazer, and Shelly swings her book bag off her shoulder, resting it on the sidewalk as she kneels to rummage through it. She removes a book. “Look at this,” she says. “It’s by a really smart woman named Alice Miller.”

  Bo stares at the cover: For Their Own Good. “I’ve heard that line a time or two.”

  “We all have. According to Alice Miller, it’s used mostly when something isn’t for our own good. Hey, I went to foster care for my own good, you spent nine months in your room for your own good, Hudge’s dad burned his legs and killed his dog for his own good; it goes on and on.”

  Bo’s eyes go soft as he stares above the Blazer at the snow falling through the glow of the streetlight. “My dad wants me to lose this triathlon for my own good….”

  “Exactly. So for starters, we’ve lost the truth. But we’ve also lost the people who took it from us. Elvis lost his dad, literally, I lost my family, Hudgie’s lost…God, who knows what all Hudgie’s lost. You’ve lost your dad—”

  “I wish.”

  “No, don’t you see? A real dad would never stack the deck against you. When he gives Wyrack’s guys that bike, he’s stealing the truth about how you really stack up against them—about who you are as an Ironman. Remember you told me once how you loved the way your dad used to teach you things—that he always let you learn how to do things on your own?”

  “Yeah.” For a reason he can’t quite grasp, Bo feels a tightness in his throat. “Yeah,” he says again.

  “When was the last time you felt that?”

  Bo smiles. “Long time.”

  “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Yeah, I miss it.”

  “That guy who taught you stuff, that was a dad. The guy who has to have his hand on the outcome of everything you do, the guy who’s running around in the shadows doing his best to make sure you lose Yukon Jack’s—he’s no dad. Baby, you’ve lost him.”

  Bo takes Alice Miller’s book from Shelly’s hand, staring at the cover: For Their Own Good. “I can’t believe I care.”

  Shelly places her hands on Bo’s shoulders, stands on her tiptoes, and kisses his cheek. “But you do. And if you say you don’t, you perpetuate the lie. That’s why I told Elvis I’d take care of his brothers and sisters, because as ornery as he is, he’s trying to do something different than his dad did. But trying to do something different doesn’t get it. You have to do it. The only time I ever thought I saw that juvenile delinquent scared was when he thought he couldn’t pull off taking care of those guys. Every time he hits his little brother, he carries on the family lie.”

  Bo considers his own rage, his stubbornness. It differs very little from his father’s, or Elvis’s for that matter. “So how do we fix this?” he says, still gazing at the book’s cover. “Does Alice Miller tell us that?”

  “Mr. Nak tells us that. Every day we sit in that group, he tells us that. About a week before you came, he said the most important thing he’s ever said to me. He said, ‘There is no act of heroism that doesn’t include standing up for yourself.’ That’s how we fix it; we take back what we’ve lost. We give it to ourselves; we learn the truth, and we put it in place of the lie.”

  They step into the Blazer and snap the seat belts. “That has to be easier said than done,” Bo says.

  “No shit. And I think even when the lie is replaced, the scar remains. I could be the best, most famous American Gladiator ever, and I’d still miss the chance I should have had to be part of Redmond’s basketball team—to get the varsity letter and the glory, and to suffer through the losses with my teammates. To belong. But what I lost makes me want what I want with passion. I’ll be better for it, even though I’ll hurt for it.”

  FEBRUARY 15 DAMNED EARLY

  Dear Larry,

  A while back, Mr. S. told me he didn’t know where I’d find my Stotans, but to choose them carefully. Well, I know where they are now, Lar, though I’m not sure how to recruit them, and I’ve chosen them with the greatest of care.

  A Stotan all the way,

  Brewski

  CHAPTER 13

  “I’m telling you, Shelly, these guys don’t know they’re sled dogs. My mother raises them because she likes the way they look, not because she longs to explore the Northern Slope.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s bred in,” Shelly says back. “Besides, you’ve had them in harnesses a lot.
It can’t be much different dragging you down the road than pulling one of these.” She points to the ancient sled she’d appropriated from a distant relative with a husky ranch in northern Idaho. The four younger dogs leap and scrap with one another, eager to go. “It’s been cold; the snow down by the tracks should be packed hard. This will get you in shape.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan says from his spot bundled up on the sled, “this will get you in shape.”

  “Yeah,” mimics Fabian, Elvis’s younger brother, from his position directly in front of Jordan, “get you in shape.”

  “Yeah,” says Leslie, Elvis’s four-year-old sister.

  Bo glances around the yard, adjusting his ski mask. “Anybody else?”

  “Yeah,” Shelly says. “Get this right. You be the lead dog. I’ll bet they’ll go where you go. I figure they’ll be too fast for the first mile or so, so I’ll dig in and provide the drag. After that, you should be able to run right beside them, and I can ride with the Younger gang.” She nods at the kids. “Now, mush! We’re gonna get in some miles.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan says. “Miles.”

  Bo crouches, placing his gloves on Jordan’s cheeks. “Put a snowball in it, buddy, or I’ll hang you out in front of these dogs like a carrot on a stick. And when we’re through, I’ll let ’em eat you.”

  “Heh!” Leslie says. “Eat you.” She laughs like a maniac.

  Jordan scoops a handful of snow and flips it in Bo’s face.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, Bo sits in the deep snow of his backyard, gasping for air and nuzzling the dogs, adding them to his short list of Stotans. Inside, his mother and Shelly pour cups of hot chocolate for the kids and break up three two-fisted altercations between Fabian and Jordan, who has taken exception to Fabian’s wholesale appropriation of his X-Men collection.

  Ellen Brewster is mildly startled to find herself face-to-face with Elvis when she opens the door in response to the ringing of the bell. “Hi,” she says, recovering quickly when she realizes who he is. “Come on in.”

  Elvis steps inside, removing his knitted cap. “I just come for my brother and sister.”

  “Would you like a cup of cocoa?” she asks, measuring him with her gaze. “Or coffee? A beer?”

  Elvis smiles uneasily. “No, ma’am. I just come for the kids.”

  Bo is struck by Elvis’s uneasiness. He seems uncomfortable there in the doorway, out of place in the surroundings of a comfortable home. And smaller. “Come on, man,” he says. “Stay a few minutes, warm yourself up.”

  Elvis’s jaw sets. “Nah, I just…”

  Shelly is up, snatching Fabian’s coat from the back of the couch. “Come on, you guys, your brother’s here. Time to go.”

  Bo watches Elvis’s face relax. He has something to learn about respecting a person’s sphere of comfort.

  “Hey, Ironman, you really think those things are going to help you?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Bo says back. Ian Wyrack has just finished ahead of him on eighteen of twenty hundred-yard sprints, and Bo’s shoulders ache to the marrow.

  Wyrack glances up at the pace clock, noting they have a minute before starting the next set. He reaches over the lane rope. “Lemme see those.”

  Bo slips the rubberized webbed gloves off his hands, passing them across. Wyrack measures their weight in his hand, then slips one on. “Heavy,” he says. He turns his hands over and back, assessing the gloves. “Where’d you get these?”

  “My girlfriend got them out of a Speedo catalog.”

  “The dyke comes through.”

  Bo has long since learned not to take the bait. “The dyke comes through,” he says back.

  Wyrack removes the gloves. “You really think these are going to make a difference?”

  “Hey,” Bo says, “the first day I had ’em, you beat me on every repeat. Today I got two. Tomorrow it’ll be three.”

  “You dipshit. I’m starting to taper for Nationals. You beat me because I backed off.”

  Bo smiles and retrieves the glove, directing his nod upward. “The clock says different.”

  Wyrack finishes ahead of Bo by a body length on nine of the next ten in a set of two hundreds, but Bo touches him out on the last. The ache in his arms and shoulders deepens in response to the extra pound inserted inside the back of each glove and the resistance of the webs. He glances at the clock: nearly a full second under Wyrack’s time standard. “Tapering?” he gasps.

  “Up yours,” Wyrack gasps back.

  “Tomorrow I’ll get two.”

  “Get me on as many as you want. This’ll all be settled at Yukon Jack’s.”

  “That it will,” Bo says. “Tell you how I got it figured. You been bustin’ your butt in this pool since September. You’ll go to Nationals in two weeks, and probably do okay, come back here to a ticker-tape parade and have to start training all over again—while your buddies are hitting the keggers and leading the good life. Sun’ll come out and the guys’ll head for the beach, but you’ll be stuck here swimming back and forth, back and forth, staring at that ugly black line when you should be out testing the back roads in that hot car of yours. And what for? Just to prove you and two other guys can take a skinny punk high schooler to the cleaners. Could be hard to keep up the motivation, Wyrack, know what I mean?”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Wyrack says. “I’ll be relieving the skinny punk high schooler’s dyke girlfriend of five hundred green ones, most of which she’ll probably have to get from him unless she wants to spend some serious hours on her back. And besides, Ironman, the key to our success lies with our biker. You’ll never get close enough to see me in the water. I’ll be dried off and out testing the back roads while you’re sprinting for the finish line.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  “Mr. Brewster, could I see you for a moment?”

  Bo stops in the doorway to the hall. “Sure,” he says, and steps aside to let the rest of the Senior English students pass. He walks slowly back to Redmond’s desk and waits.

  “Are you aware that you are no longer required to attend Mr. Nakatani’s anger management group?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m aware that you’re still attending.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m saying you can call it good,” Redmond says. “I think it’s time you got on with things.”

  Bo nods.

  “Good, then. I’ll write a note to Mr. Nakatani, and you can end your participation as of today.”

  Bo nods again.

  “Mr. Brewster,” Redmond says at the sound of the bell ending class, “could I see you for a moment?”

  Bo waits again in the doorway for the rest of the class to pass into the hall, then moves back toward Redmond’s desk.

  “I thought I told you last week that you could end your participation in Mr. Nakatani’s anger management group.”

  “Yes sir. You did.”

  “I’m told you’re still attending.”

  “Yes sir. I am.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bo raises his eyebrows and shrugs.

  Redmond bristles. “Are you playing stupid with me, young man?”

  “No sir.”

  “There are students in greater need of Mr. Nakatani’s group than yourself, Mr. Brewster. I’d appreciate it if you would withdraw.”

  “Mr. Nakatani told me there was plenty of room,” Bo says. “I told him I’d pull out if he needed the space, but he said it was up to me.” He is careful to display no disrespect, show no emotion. Mr. Nak’s anger management techniques are indeed paying off.

  “Well, as the teacher who directed you to that group,” Redmond says, “I am now directing you out of that group. Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Mr. Brewster. See me after class,” Mr. Redmond says as his Senior English class files into the room.

  “Mr. Brewster,” Redmond says fifty-five minutes later, when the students ar
e gone, “I directed you to cease participation in Mr. Nakatani’s anger management group last week. You told me you would do that.”

  “No sir, I didn’t. You asked me if I understood, and I said I did. I didn’t say I’d quit the group.”

  Redmond leans forward onto his elbows. “You know something, Brewster? I’m about up to here with your attitude. You’ve done a good job in here since your last blowup, and I’ve treated you with respect in response to that. But you need to learn to follow direction. Now, if you’d like me to take this to a higher authority, I’ll be glad to do that, but I would rather settle it between the two of us.”

  Bo drops his book into his book bag, slings it over his shoulder, and says, “I vote for a higher authority.”

  FEBRUARY 26

  Dear Larry,

  Are you ever embarrassed to be an adult just because of the way other adults act? That happens to me sometimes with teenagers. The TV news will report a kid blowing somebody away at school, or raping a retarded girl, or committing some equally unspeakable act, and his attorney will use the fact that he’s a kid to get him tried as a juvenile where nothing much can happen to him. Then I wonder how the fact that someone hasn’t been on the planet quite eighteen years relieves him of responsibility for the horror his actions bring upon his victims and their families. I don’t know the answer to the question, but I know I feel a sense of shame when I think society could excuse me for committing some atrocity because I’m seventeen years old.

  Anyway, the reason I brought it up is that Mr. Redmond is seeming more and more like a cartoon character to me, and rather than getting angry at him, I’m starting to get embarrassed for him.

  It has taken a long time for me to understand Mr. Nak’s notion that my anger is a cover for my fear, and only when I admit to that fear will I get control of my anger, or in fact have no need for it. I am coming to understand that the fear comes from feeling inadequate when Redmond or my dad pushes me, and if I can acknowledge it, there’s no need to cover it. Believe me, Lar, that’s a lot easier said than done, because it’s a natural, unthinking thing to haul out your rage in a flash so no one sees how scared you are. But understanding that—truly understanding it—is like being handed a secret of the universe, because people look different to me then: my dad, Redmond, even guys like Elvis.