Early Autumn

by Robert B. Parker

  The bedroom door opened and he came out. He had on jeans that had obviously been shortened and then let down again, his worn Top-Siders, and a green polo shirt with a penguin on the left breast.

  “You want coffee or milk?” I said.

  “Coffee.”

  I poured some. “What do you take in it?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never had it before.”

  “May as well start with cream and sugar,” I said. “Calories aren’t your problem.”

  “You think I’m skinny?”

  “Yes. There’s corn bread, jam, fruit, and coffee. Help yourself.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  I said, “Okay,” and started on the corn bread. Paul sipped at the coffee. He didn’t look like he liked it. After breakfast I cleaned up the dishes and said to Paul, “You got any sneakers?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, first thing well do is go over to North Conway and buy you some.”

  “I don’t need any,” he said.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “We’ll pick up a newspaper too.”

  “How you know they sell them over there?”

  “North Conway? They probably got more flashy running shoes than aspirin,” I said. “We’ll find some.”

  On the ride to North Conway Paul said, “How come you made me get up like that?”

  “Two reasons,” I said. “One, you need some structure in your life, some scheduling, to give you a sense of order. Two, I was going to have to do it sometime. I figured I might as well get it over with.”

  “You wouldn’t have to do it if you let me sleep.”

  “It would’ve been something. You’d push me until you found out how far I’d go. You have to test me, so you can trust me.”

  “What are you, a child psychologist?”

  “No. Susan told me that.”

  “Well, she’s crazy.”

  “I know you don’t know any better, but that’s against the rules.”

  “What?”

  “Speaking badly of another person’s beloved, you know? I don’t want you to speak ill of her.” We were in Fryeburg Center.

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  We were quiet as we drove through the small open town with its pleasant buildings. It was maybe fifteen minutes to North Conway. We bought Paul a pair of Nike LDVs just like mine except size 7, and a pair of sweat pants.

  “You got a jock?” I said.

  Paul looked embarrassed. He shook his head. We bought one of them and two pairs of white sweat socks. I paid and we drove back to Fryeburg. It was ten when we got to the cabin. I handed him his bag of stuff.

  “Go put this stuff on and we’ll have a run,” I said.

  “A run?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t run,” he said.

  “You can learn,” I said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know, but we’ll take it easy. We won’t go far. We’ll run a little, walk a little. Do a little more each day. You’ll feel good.”

  “You going to make me?” Paul said.

  “Yes.”

  He went very slowly into the cabin. I went in with him. He went into his room. I went into mine. In about twenty minutes he came out with the new jogging shoes looking ridiculously yellow and the new sweat pants slightly too big for his thin legs, and his scrawny upper body pale and shivery-looking in the spring sun. I was dressed the same, but my stuff wasn’t new.

  “We’ll stretch,” I said. “Bend your knees until you can touch the ground with both hands easily. Like this. Good. Now without taking your hands from the ground, try to straighten your knees. Don’t strain, just steady pressure. We’ll hold it thirty seconds.”

  “What’s that for?” he said.

  “Loosen up the lower back and the hamstring muscles in the back of your thighs. Now squat, like this, let your butt hang down toward the ground and hold that for thirty seconds. It does somewhat the same thing.”

  I showed him how to stretch the calf muscles and loosen up the quadriceps. He did everything very awkwardly and tentatively as if he wanted to prove he couldn’t. I didn’t comment on that. I was figuring out how to run with a gun. I normally didn’t. But I wasn’t normally looking after anyone but me when I ran.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re ready for a short slow run. Wait till I get something in the house.” I went in and got my gun. It was a short Smith & Wesson .38. I took it from its holster, checked the load, and went out carrying it in my hand.

  “You going to run with that?” Paul said.

  “Best I could think of,” I said. “I’ll just carry it in my hand.” I held it by the cylinder and trigger guard, not by the handle. It was not conspicuous.

  “You afraid they’ll find us?”

  “No, but no harm to be safe. When you can, it’s better to deal with possibilities than likelihoods.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on, we’ll jog. I’ll explain while we run.”

  We started at a slow pace. Paul looked as if he might never have run before. His movements seemed unsynchronized, and he took each step as if he had to think about it first.

  “Say when you need to walk,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “When you’re thinking about something important, like if your father might try to kidnap you again, it’s better to think of what the best thing would be to do if he tried, rather than trying to decide how likely he was to try. You can’t decide if he’ll try, that’s up to him. You decide what to do if he does. That’s up to you. Understand?”

  He nodded. Already I could see he was too winded to talk.

  “A way of living better is to make the decisions you need to make based on what you can control. When you can.”

  We were jogging up a dirt road that led from the cabin to a larger dirt road. It was maybe half a mile long. On either side there were dogberry bushes and small birch and maple saplings under the tall white pines and maples that hovered above us. There were raspberry bushes too, just starting to bud. It was cool under the dappling of the trees, but not cold.

  “We’ll hang a right here,” I said, “and head along this road a ways. No need to push. Stop when you feel the need and we’ll walk a ways.” He nodded again. The road was larger now. It circled the lake, side roads spoking off to cabins every hundred yards. The names of the cabin owners were painted on hokey rustic signs and nailed to a tree at the head of each side road. We had gone maybe a mile when Paul stopped running. He bent over holding his side.

  “Stitch?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t bend forward,” I said. “Bend backward. As far back as you can. It’ll stretch it out.”

  He did what I told him. I hadn’t thought he would. An old logging road ran up to our left. We turned up it. Paul walking with his back arched.

  “How far did we run?”

  “About a mile” I said. “Damn good for the first time out”

  “How far can you run?”

  “Ten, fifteen miles, I don’t know for sure.”

  Walking on a felled log, we crossed a small ravine where the spring melt was still surging down toward the lake. In a month it would be dry and dusty in there.

  “Let’s head back,” I said. “Maybe when we get back to the road you can run a little more.”

  Paul didn’t say anything. A redheaded woodpecker rattled against a tree beside us. When we got back to the road I moved into a slow jog again. Paul walked a few more feet and then he cranked into a jerky slow run behind me. We went maybe half a mile to the side road leading to our cabin. I stopped the jog and began to walk. Paul stopped running the moment I did.

  When we were back to the cabin, I said, “Put on a sweat shirt or a light jacket or something. Then we’ll set up some equipment.”

  I put on a blue sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off. Paul put on a gray long-sleeved sweat shirt with a New England Patriots emblem on
the front. The sleeves were too long.

  We brought out the weight bench, the heavy bag; the speed bag and its strike board, and the tool chest Paul carried one end of the tool chest and one end of the weight bench.

  “We’ll hang the heavy bag off this tree branch,” I said. “And we’ll fasten the speed bag to the trunk.”

  Paul nodded.

  “And well put the weight bench here under the tree out of the way of the heavy bag. If it rains we’ll toss a tarp over it”

  Paul nodded.

  “And when we get it set up, I’ll show you how to use it.”

  Paul nodded again. I didn’t know if I was making progress or not I seemed to have broken his spirit.

  “How’s that sound, kid?” I said.

  He shrugged. Maybe I hadn’t broken his spirit.

  CHAPTER 17

  It took about an hour to set up. Most of that time was spent getting the speed bag mounted. I finally nailed through the strike board into two thick branches that veered out at about the right height. For me. For Paul we’d have to get a box to stand on. It took three trips in and out for me to get the weights out. Paul carried some of the small dumbbells. I carried the bar with as many plates as I could on either end, and then went back and carried out the rest of the plates in a couple of trips.

  “Now, after lunch,” I said, “we’ll work out for a couple of hours and then knock off for the day. Normally we’d do this in the morning and build the house in the afternoon, but we got a late start today because we had to get you outfitted, so we’ll start the house tomorrow afternoon.”

  For lunch we had feta cheese and Syrian bread with pickles, olives, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber wedges. Paul had milk. I had beer. Paul said the cheese smelled bad. There were a couple of camp chairs outside the cabin, and after lunch we went out and sat in them. It was one thirty. I turned on the portable radio. The Sox were playing the Tigers.

  Paul said, “I don’t like baseball.”

  “Don’t listen.”

  “But I can’t help it if it’s on.”

  “Okay, a bargain. I like the ball game. You like what?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Okay. I’ll listen to the ball game when it’s on. You can listen to whatever you want to any other time. Fair?”

  Paul shrugged. On the lake a loon made its funny sound.

  “That’s a loon,” I said. Paul nodded.

  “I don’t want to lift weights,” Paul said. “I don’t want to learn to hit the punching bags. I don’t like that stuff.”

  “What would you rather do?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll only do it on weekdays. We’ll take Saturday and Sunday off and do other stuff.”

  “What?”

  “Anything you want. We’ll go look at things. We’ll fish, shoot, go to museums, swim when the weather’s warmer, see a ball game in case you learn to like them, eat out, see a movie, go to a play, go down to Boston and hang around. Have I hit anything you like yet?”

  Paul shrugged. I nodded. By two thirty the Sox were three runs ahead behind Eckersley and our lunch had settled.

  “Let’s get to it,” I said. “We’ll do three sets of each exercise to start with. We’ll do bench presses, curls, pullovers, flyes, some shrugs, some sit-ups. We’ll work out combinations on the heavy bag and I’ll show you how to work the speed bag.”

  I hung a big canteen of water on one of the tree branches. It was covered with red-striped blanket material and it always made me feel like Kit Carson to drink from it.

  “Drink all the water you want. Rest in between times. No hurry. We got the rest of the day.”

  “I don’t know how to do any of those things.”

  “I know. I’ll show you. First we’ll see how much you can work with. We’ll start with bench presses.”

  I put the big York bar on the bench rests with no weight on it.

  “Try that,” I said.

  “Without any weights?”

  “It’s heavy enough. Try it for starters. If it’s too light we can add poundage.”

  “What do I do?”

  “I’ll show you.” I lay on my back on the bench, took the barbell in a medium-wide grip, lifted it off the rack, lowered it to my chest, and pushed it straight up to arms’ length. Then I lowered it to my chest and pushed it up again. “Like so,” I said. “Try to do it ten times if you can.”

  I put the bar back on the rack and got up. Paul lay on the bench.

  “Where do I hold it?”

  “Spread your hands a little, like that. That’s good. Keep your thumbs in, like this, so if it’s too heavy it won’t break your thumbs. I’ll spot you here.”

  “What’s spot?”

  “I’ll have a hand on it to be sure you don’t drop it on yourself.”

  Paul wrestled it off the rack. It was too heavy for him. His thin arms shook with the strain as he lowered it to his narrow chest. I had a hand lightly at the midpoint of the bar.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good. Good. Now push it up. Breathe in, now blow out and shove the bar up, shove, blow, shove.” I did some cheerleading.

  Paul arched his back and struggled. His arms shook more. I put a little pressure under the bar and helped him. He got it extended.

  “Now onto the rack,” I said. I helped him guide it over and set it in its place. His face was very red.

  “Good,” I said. “Next time we’ll do two.”

  “I can’t even do it,” he said.

  “Sure you can. You just did it.”

  “You helped me.”

  “Just a bit. One of the things about weights is you make progress fast at first. It’s encouraging.”

  “I can’t even lift it without the weights,” he said.

  “In a couple of months you’ll be pressing more than your own weight,” I said. “Come on. We’ll do another one.”

  He tried again. This time I had to help him more.

  “I’m getting worse,” he said.

  “Naturally, you’re getting tired. The third try will be even harder. That’s the point. You work the muscle when it’s tired and it breaks down faster and new muscle builds up quicker.” I was beginning to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Paul lay red-faced and silent on the bench. There were fine blue veins under the near-translucent skin of his chest. The collarbone, the ribs, and the sternum were all clearly defined against the tight skin. He didn’t weigh a hundred pounds.

  “Last try,” I said. He took the bar off its rest and this time I had to keep it from dropping on him. “Up now,” I said, “blow it up. This is the one that counts most. Come on, come on, up, up, up. Good. Good.”

  We set the bar back on the bench. Paul sat up. His arms were still trembling slightly.

  “You do some,” he said.

  I nodded. I put two fifty-pound plates on each end of the bar and lay on the bench. I lifted the weight off the cradle and brought it to my chest.

  “Watch which muscles move,” I said to Paul, “that way you learn which exercise does what for you.” I pressed the bar up, let it down, pressed it up. I breathed out each time. I did ten repetitions and set the bar back on the rack. A faint sweat had started on my forehead. Above us in the maple tree a grosbeak with a rose-colored breast fluttered in and sat. I did another set. The sweat began to film on my chest. The mild breeze cooled it.

  Paul said, “How much can you lift?”

  I said, “I don’t know exactly. It’s sort of a good idea not to worry about that You do better to exercise with what you can handle and not be looking to see who can lift more and who can’t and how much you can lift. I can lift more than this.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Two hundred forty-five pounds.”

  “Does Hawk lift weights?”

  “Some.”

  “Can he lift as much as you?”

  “Probably.”

  I did a third set. When I got through I was puffing a little, and the sweat was trickling dow
n my chest

  “Now we do some curls,” I said. I showed him how. We couldn’t find a dumbbell light enough for him to curl with one hand, so he used both hands on one dumbbell.

  After two hours Paul sat on the weight bench with his head hanging, forearms on his thighs, puffing as if he’d run a long way. I sat beside him. We had finished the weights. I handed Paul the canteen. He drank a little and handed it back to me. I drank and hung it back up.

  “How you feel?” I said.

  Paul just shook his head without looking up.

  “That good, huh? Well, you’ll be stiff tomorrow. Come on. We’ll play with the bags a little.”

  “I don’t want to do any more.”

  “I know, but another half hour and you’ll have done it all. This will be fun. We won’t have to work hard.”

  “Why don’t you just let me alone?”

  I sat back down beside him. “Because everybody has left you alone all your life and you are, now, as a result, in a mess. I’m going to get you out of it.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “I mean you don’t have anything to care about. You don’t have anything to be proud of. You don’t have anything to know. You are almost completely neutral because nobody took the time to teach you or show you and because what you saw of the people who brought you up didn’t offer anything you wanted to copy.”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “No, not yet But if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault. You’re old enough now to start becoming a person. And you’re old enough now so that you’ll have to start taking some kind of responsibility for your life. And I’m going to help you.”

  “What’s lifting weights got to do with that stuff?”

  “What you’re good at is less important than being good at something. You got nothing. You care about nothing. So I’m going to have you be strong, be in shape, be able to run ten miles, and be able to lift more than you weigh and be able to box. I’m going to have you know how to build and cook and to work hard and to push yourself and control yourself. Maybe we can get to reading and looking at art and listening to something besides situation comedies later on. But right now I’m working on your body because it’s easier to start there.”