by Rick Bass
“I’m Lindsay!” she shouted. “John’s driving! Jerry’s not!”
Her hair swirled around her, a nest of red. She knew what Lory would say. Her sister thought that all the muscle on her brothers was froufrou, adornment, and unnecessary. Lindsay hoped that Lory would change her mind.
“Lindsay, get back in the car!” John shouted, looking in the rear-view mirror. But she couldn’t hear him. She was leaning farther out the window, reaching for A.C.’s wrist, and then higher, gripping his thick arm.
“She’s mad,” Jerry howled, disbelieving. “She’s lost her mind.”
A.C. grinned and held on to the car’s roof, taking the bumps with his legs.
When they drove up to their house, Lory had awakened from her nap and was sitting on the picnic table in her shorts and a T-shirt, drinking from a bottle of red wine. She burst into laughter when she saw them approach with A.C. riding the back bumper as if he had hijacked them.
“Three peas in a pod,” she cried. She danced down from the table and out to the driveway to meet him, to shake his hand.
It was as if there were three brothers.
From the kitchen window, Louella watched, horrified. The huge young man in the front yard was not hers. He might think he was, and everyone else might too, but he wasn’t. She stopped drying dishes and was alarmed at the size of him, standing there among her children, shaking hands, moving around in their midst. She had had a miscarriage, twenty years ago. This man could have been that child, could even have been that comeback soul.
Louella felt the blood draining from her face and thought she was dying. She fell to the kitchen floor in a faint, breaking the coffee cup she was drying.
It was the end of June. Fields and pastures all over the Hudson Valley were green. She had been worrying about Lory’s sadness all through the fall and winter, on through the rains and melting snows of spring, and even now, into the ease of green summer.
Louella sat up and adjusted her glasses. When she went outside to meet A.C., she could no longer say for sure whether she knew him or not; there was a moment’s hesitancy.
She looked hard into his eyes, dried her hands on her apron, and reached out and shook his big hand. She was swayed by her children’s happiness. There was a late-day breeze. A hummingbird dipped at the nectar feeder on the back porch. She let him come into their house.
“We’re going to teach A.C. how to throw the discus,” said Jerry.
“Thrilling,” said Lory.
He had supper with the family, and they all played Monopoly that evening. Louella asked A.C. where he was from and what he did, but he would only smile and say that he was here to throw the discus. He wasn’t rude, he simply wouldn’t tell her where he was from. It was almost as if he did not know, or did not understand the question.
They played Monopoly until it was time for bed. The brothers took him for a walk through the neighborhood and on into town. They stopped to pick up people’s cars occasionally, the three of them lifting together.
There was a statue of Nathan Hale in the town square, and, drunk on the new moon, drunk with his new friends, A.C. waded through the shrubbery, crouched below the statue, and gave the cold metal a bear hug. He began twisting back and forth, pulling the statue from the ground, groaning, squeezing and lifting with his back and legs, his face turning redder and redder, rocking until he finally worked it loose. He stood up with it, sweating, grinning, holding it against his chest as if it were a dance partner, or a dressmaker’s dummy.
They walked home after that, taking turns carrying the statue on their backs, and snuck it into Lory’s room and stood it in the corner by the door, so that it impeded her exit. It still smelled of fresh earth and crushed flowers. Lory was a sound sleeper, plunging into unconsciousness as an escape at every opportunity, and she never heard them.
Then A.C. went downstairs to the basement and rested, lying on a cot, looking up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. John and Jerry stayed in the kitchen, drinking beer.
“Do you think it will happen?” Jerry asked.
John was looking out the window at the garden. “I hope so,” he said. “I think it would be good for her.” He finished his beer. “Maybe we shouldn’t think about it, though. It might be wrong.”
“Well,” said Jerry, sitting down as if to think about it himself, “maybe so.”
John was still looking out the window. “But who cares?” he said. He looked at Jerry.
“This guy’s okay,” said Jerry. “This one’s good.”
“But do you think he can throw the discus?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “But I want you to go find some more statues for him. I liked that.”
That first night at the Irons’ house, A.C. thought about John and Jerry, about how excited he had been to see them walking up to him. He considered how they looked at each other sometimes when they were talking. They always seemed to agree.
Then he thought about John’s hair, black and short, and about his heavy beard. And Jerry, he seemed so young with his green eyes. His hair was blond and curly. A.C. liked the way Jerry leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, grinning, when he talked. Jerry seemed excited about almost anything, everything, and excited to be with his older brother, following him down the same path.
Later, A.C. got up from his cot—he’d been sleeping among punching bags and exercise bikes, with dumbbells and barbells scattered about like toys—and went quietly up the stairs, past Lindsay’s room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.
He sat down on the couch and looked out the big front window at the moon and clouds as if watching a play. He stayed there for a long time, dozing off for a few minutes. Around four in the morning he awoke to find Lory standing in front of him, blocking the moon. She was dark, with the moon behind her lighting only the edge of one side of her face. He could see her eyelashes on that side. She was studying him almost the way Louella had.
“Look,” he said, and pointed behind her.
The clouds were moving past the moon in fast-running streams, like tidal currents, eddying, it seemed, all to the same place, all hurrying by as if late to some event.
“What is that statue doing in my room?” Lory asked. She was whispering, and he thought her voice was beautiful. A.C. hoped he could be her friend too, as he’d become a friend of her brothers. He looked at the moon, a mottled disc.
“Do you want to sit down?” he asked. He patted the side of the couch next to him.
She did, and then, after a few seconds, she leaned into his shoulder and put her head against it. She put both her hands on his arm and held on.
After a while, A.C. lifted her into his lap, holding her in both arms as if she were a small child, and slowly he rocked her. She curled against him as tightly as she could, and he rocked her like that, watching her watch him, until dawn.
When it got light, she reached up and kissed him, touching his face with her hands, and got out of his lap and hurried into the kitchen to fix coffee before anyone else was up. A few minutes later, Louella appeared in the living room, sleepy-eyed, shuffling, wearing a faded blue flannel robe and old slippers, holding the paper. She almost stepped on A.C.’s big feet. She stopped, surprised to see him up so early, and in her living room. He stood up and said, “Good morning,” and she smiled in spite of herself.
Around eight o’clock John and Jerry got up, and they chased each other into the kitchen, playing some advanced form of tag. The lighter, faster Jerry stayed just ahead of John, leaping over the coffee table, spinning, tossing a footstool into his path for John to trip over. Lory shrieked, spilled some milk from the carton she was holding, and Louella shouted at them to stop it, tried to look stern, but was made young again by all the motion, and loved it—and A.C., having come meekly in from the living room, stood back and smiled. Louella glanced over at him and saw him smiling, looking at the brothers, and she thought again of how eerie the fit was, of how he seemed to glide into all the right spots and stand in ex
actly the right places. It was as if he had been with them all along—or even stranger, it was as if he were some sort of weight or stone placed on a scale that better balanced them now.
After breakfast—a dozen eggs each, some cantaloupes, a pound of sausage split among them, a gallon of milk, and a couple of plates of pancakes—the brothers went out to their car and tossed all their throwing equipment in it—tape measure, discs, throwing shoes—and they leaned the driver’s seat forward so that A.C. could get in the back, but still he wouldn’t fit.
He rode standing on the bumper again. They drove to the school, to the high, windy field where they threw. From there it seemed they could see the whole Hudson Valley and the knife-cut through the trees where the river rushed, the Sacandaga melting through the mountains, and on the other side the green walls of the Adirondacks. A.C. looked around at the new town as they drove. He thought about Lory, about how soft and light she’d been in his arms, and of how he’d been frightened by her. Riding on the back of the tiny car reminded him of being in the river, swimming up through the rapids: all that rushing force, relentless, crashing down over and around him, speeding past. Things were going by so fast. He looked around and felt dizzy at the beauty of the town.
There was a ring in the center of the field, a flat, smooth, unpainted circle of cement, and that was where the brothers and A.C. set their things and began to dress. The brothers sat down like bears in a zoo and took their street shoes off. As they laced up their heavy leather throwing shoes, stretching and grasping their toes, they looked out at the wire fence running along the south end of the field, which was the point they tried to reach with their throws.
A.C. put his shoes on, too, the ones they had given him, and stood up. He felt how solid the earth was beneath him. His legs were dense and strong, and he kicked the ground a couple of times with the heavy shoes. A.C. imagined he could feel the earth shudder when he kicked. He jumped up and down a couple of times, short little hops, just to feel the shudder again.
“I hope you like this,” said Jerry, still stretching, twisting his body into further unrecognizable shapes and positions. He was loosening up, his movements fluid, and to A.C. it was exactly like watching the river.
A.C. sat down next to them and tried to do some of the stretches, but it didn’t work for him yet. He watched them for half an hour, as the blue air over the mountains and valley waned, turning to a sweet haze, a slow sort of shimmer that told A.C. it was June. Jerry was the one he most liked to watch.
Jerry would crouch in the ring, twisted—wound up—with his eyes closed, his mouth open, and the disc hanging back, hanging low, his knees bent. When he began to spin, it was like some magical force was being born, something that no other force on earth would be able to stop.
He stayed in the small circle, hopping from one foot to the other, crouched low, but with the hint of rising, and then he was suddenly at the other end of the small ring, out of room—if he went over the little wooden curb and into the grass, it would be a foul—and with no time or space left in which to spin, he shouted, brought his arm all the way around on the spin, his elbow locking straight out as he released the disc, and only then did the rest of his body react, starting with his head; it snapped back and then forward from the recoil, as if he’d first made the throw and then had a massive heart attack.
“Wow,” said A.C., watching him unwind and recover and return, surprisingly, to a normal upright human being.
But John and Jerry were watching the disc. It was moving so fast. There was a heavy, cutting sound when it landed, far short of the fence, and it skidded a few feet after that and then stopped, as if it had never been moving.
Jerry threw two more times—they owned only three discs—and then the three of them, walking like gunslingers, like giants from another age, went out to get the discs. The brothers talked about the throws: what Jerry had done right, and what he had done wrong. His foot position had been a little off on the first throw. He hadn’t kept his head back far enough going into the spin of the second throw. The third throw had been pretty good; on the bounce, it had carried to the chain-link fence.
John threw next, and then Jerry again, and then it was John’s turn once again. A.C. thought he could do it himself. Surely that whip-spin dance, skip, hurl, and shout was a thing that was in everyone. It had to be the same way he felt when he picked up a cow and spun through the tall grass, holding it on his shoulders. When it was his turn to throw the discus, he tried to remember that, and he stepped into the ring, huffing.
A.C.’s first throw slammed into the center of the head-high fence and shook it. John and Jerry looked at each other, trying not to feel amazed. It was what they had thought from the beginning, after all; it was as if he had always been with them.
But A.C.’s form was spastic. It was wrong, it was nothing. He threw with his arms and shoulders—not with his legs, and not with the twist of his wide back. If he could get the spin down, the dance, he would throw it 300 feet. He would be able to throw it the length of a football field. In the discus, even 230 feet was immortality.
Again, the brothers found themselves feeling there was a danger of losing him—of having him disappear if they did or said the wrong thing, if they were not true and honest.
But the way he could throw a discus! It was as if their hearts had created him. He was all strength, no finesse. They were sure they could teach him the spin-dance. The amazing thing about a bad spin, as opposed to a good one, is how ugly it looks. A good spin excites the spectators, touches them all the way down and through, makes them wish they could do it—or even more, makes them feel as if they had done it, somehow. But a bad throw is like watching a devil monster changeling being born into the world; just one more awful thing in a world of too many, and even spectators who do not know much about the sport will turn their heads away, even before the throw is completed, when they see an awkward spin. A.C.’s was, John and Jerry had to admit, the ugliest of the ugly.
His next throw went over the fence. The one after that—before they realized what was happening, or realized it too late, as it was in the air, climbing, moving faster than any of their throws had ever gone—rose, gliding, and hit the base of the school. There was a crack! and the disc exploded into graphite shards. One second it was there, flying and heroic, and then it was nothing, just an echo.
“A hundred and ten bucks,” Jerry said, but John cared nothing for the inconvenience it would bring them, being down to two discs, and he danced and whooped, spun around and threw imaginary discs, waved his arms and continued to jump up and down. He danced with Jerry, and then he grabbed A.C.
“If you can learn the steps…” John was saying, almost singing. The three men held one another’s shoulders and danced and spun across the field like children playing snap-the-whip. John and Jerry had never seen a discus thrown that far in their lives, and A.C., though he had felt nothing special, was happy because his new friends were happy, and he hoped he could make them happy again.
Riding home on the back bumper, the air cooling his summer-damp hair and clothes, he leaned against the car and hugged it like a small child, and watched the town going past in reverse now, headed back to the Irons’ house, and he hoped that maybe he could make them happy forever.
The brothers bragged about him when they got home, and everyone listened, and like John and Jerry they were half surprised, but they also felt that it confirmed something, and so that part of them was anything but surprised.
John was dating a schoolteacher named Patty. A shy-eyed Norwegian, she was as tall as he was, with freckles and a slow-spreading smile. A.C. grinned just watching her, and when she saw A.C., she would laugh for no real reason, just a happy laugh. Once when John and Jerry had gone to their rooms to nap, A.C. went outside with Lindsay and Patty to practice field hockey.
A.C. had never played any formal sports and was thrilled to be racing across the lawn, dodging the trees and the women, passing the ball along clumsily but quickly. Patty’s lau
ghs, Lindsay’s red hair. If only he could live forever with this. He ran and ran, barefoot, back and forth in the large front yard, and they laughed all afternoon.
On the nights when A.C. did not stay with the family, he returned to the old stone house in Vermont. Some days he would swim all the way home, starting upstream at dusk and going on into the night—turning right where the little creek entered the Sacandaga, with fish bumping into his body and jumping around him as if a giant shark had passed through. But other nights he canoed home against the rapids, having loaded boulders into the bottom of the canoe to work his shoulders and arms harder. After he got home, he tied the canoe to the low branch of a willow, left it bobbing in the current.
Some nights in the farmhouse, A.C. would tie a rope around his waist and chest, attach the other end of it to one of the rafters, and climb up into the rafters and leap down, swinging like a pirate. He’d hang there, dangling in the darkness. He’d hold his arms and legs out as he spun around and around, and it would feel as if he were sinking, descending, and as if it would never stop.
He would tell no one where he had come from. And he would forget the woman in Colorado, the one he was supposed to have married. Everyone comes from somewhere. Everyone has made mistakes, has caused injuries, even havoc. The woman had killed herself after A.C. left her; she had hanged herself.
This is what it’s like, he’d think. This is the difference between being alive and being dead. He’d hang from the rope and spin. This is the only difference, but it’s so big.
Sometimes he would sleep all night dangling from the rafters: spinning, a bit frightened, hanging like a question mark, only to awaken each morning as the sun’s first light filtered through the dusty east windows. The sound of the creek running past just out front, the creek that led into the river.