by Diana Wieler
Splurrt.
“Oh, no — gel!” The spectators roared.
Tully smiled wickedly, advancing forward with his arm outstretched, spray can poised. Desperate, A.J. turned on the cold water tap full blast, positioning his palm under the spigot. The water shot across the room in a tight, icy stream, blasting Tully’s left side. He yowled with surprise and twisted out of the way. A.J. giggled and took aim again.
“Well, well. Tulsa Brown.”
The voice was low but surprisingly sharp. It cut through the giddy air like a sabre.
Landau! A.J.’s heart skipped a beat and in one deft movement he’d silenced the tap. He straightened up apprehensively and looked over his shoulder, but Coach Landau wasn’t there. It was only a guy, a player, one of them.
Just a panic attack, A.J. breathed. But as the moment stretched out and nobody moved, he felt his muscles tighten. What was this? Who was this guy? Why was he just standing there, staring at Tully?
The young man was tall, almost five-ten, A.J. guessed, and he was fresh out of the shower. His mahogany hair glinted red under the lights. He was wearing blue jeans, but his chest and feet were bare, and he’d slung his jersey over his shoulder. The number was twisted but readable: 19.
Number 19 was handsome in a hard-edged way, but unremarkable. Except for his eyes. They were a colour A.J. had never seen before, a dark cement grey. And they were fastened on Tully like thumbtacks.
A.J. felt his stomach wrench. In his mind’s eye he saw Tully hamming it up around the pylons — bowing, for Pete’s sake. Now you’ve done it, you stupid ass, he thought bitterly. Old team members were wary of newcomers, even newcomers with talent.
A.J.’s heart was thumping in his ears. You weren’t supposed to interfere. But you didn’t let a friend take a beating. A.J.’s hands curled into fists.
But Number 19 didn’t move. He stood maddeningly still, his mouth twisted in a faint smirk. A.J. glanced at Tully. His friend had pulled himself up tall, but the colour had drained from his face. He still held the spray can, clutched in a death grip at his side.
What was this? What was going on? Number 19 was tall, but not that big, and Tully could scrap when he had to. Everybody was staring, for Pete’s sake. Why didn’t Tully just walk away or throw the first punch or something?
It was Number 19 who moved first. He stepped forward at last, brushing past Tully so slowly he could have been underwater.
“Fancy feet, Tulsa,” the boy whispered, the words as soft and insidious as a hypodermic needle. A.J. watched the bare shoulders slide easily into the crowd and disappear.
There was a second’s pause, then somebody spoke. In a few moments, guys were milling around again, getting dressed. But their voices were subdued; the lighthearted mood had sunk.
A.J. was trying to sort out the images when Tully stepped past him and up to the sinks. The words were out before A.J. could stop them.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
Tully turned away abruptly, as if he hadn’t heard. He began walking towards the lockers. A.J. stared, as if he’d been hit. He didn’t notice that the foam on his back had melted, and was sliding into his shorts.
THREE
IT was a long ride home. Tully was driving like a zombie, careening in and around the other cars, tromping on the gas. A.J. slouched in his seat, staring out the window to hide the way his heart lurched every time Tully cut somebody off or flew through an amber light. There were rules to being sixteen and male. One of them was that you never told a friend how to drive his car.
A.J. concentrated on the view out his window instead. On the sidewalk, early shoppers were fighting the cold wind that had caught September by surprise. The trees in the park were still green, pugnaciously clinging to summer, but there was no doubt. Autumn was in the clouds and in the wind. You could smell it, A.J. thought.
He felt the car sliding slowly, surreptitiously into the next lane, and he caught his breath. A horn blared and Tully swerved, jerking the Mustang back on course. The green half-ton they’d almost hit surged ahead. Its driver glared at them. A.J. chewed on the inside of his cheek.
Questions were crawling around inside him like ants, but he let them crawl. Tully never pressured him when something was wrong. He let A.J. unwind at his own speed. He’ll tell me when he’s ready, the boy thought.
Tully wasn’t ready.
The Mustang pulled up in front of A.J.’s house and the boy hauled his equipment out of the back seat. Then he hesitated, leaning against the open door.
“You wanna come in — grab something to eat?” he asked. Then he shrugged. “Cartoons are still on.”
Tully smiled ruefully, the first expression he’d been capable of in half an hour.
“Nah. I might as well face the firing squad now. Get it over with.”
A.J. shouldered his duffle bag. “Maybe tonight, hey? We’ll do some lifting or something?”
“Better call first. I might be busy attending my own funeral.”
“Right.” A.J. felt himself stalling. He shut the car door with a determined thud. “See you.”
Tully waved and popped the clutch into second gear. A.J. paused in the driveway, watching the car gun down the quiet street.
Tully drove until he was out of sight, then pulled into the parking lot of a tiny strip mall. He switched off the ignition and sat, still buckled in his seat belt. He felt too exhausted to move. Just getting from the rink to here had been an ordeal.
He was frightened, and furious with himself. He’d frozen there in the locker room. If he could have laughed it off or walked away, it would have been nothing. Nobody would have noticed. But he’d stood there, pinned like a scared kid, and it had turned into an event. Even now he could feel the crowd’s eyes on him, and A.J.’s bewildered stare.
It had begun last night. When he’d left the reception he’d gone to a party he’d heard was happening. He hardly knew anyone there but that wasn’t a problem. Most were drunk and all were friendly. Tully didn’t feel tired until early morning, and then he’d wandered into the backyard, thinking of catching a short snooze in his car.
But by the gate he met someone coming in, someone he did know, very well. Tully discovered he wasn’t tired anymore and besides, the yard was dark and empty. There were three very nice minutes, three minutes that made his heart bang like a drum in his head and his throat, before he opened his eyes and looked over the shoulder and saw the fiery red dot burning a hole in the night.
It was a cigarette, and someone was smoking it. It was then that Tully realized the yard wasn’t dark enough. Light washed out from the windows and the open door. There was enough light to make out a body and a face, and it worked both ways.
He was in his car and gone in a matter of seconds. But he’d had too good a summer and too much to drink to be afraid. He let the anxiety slide away.
In the locker room it had boomeranged back at him. Tully ran his hand across his eyes. It was the same face, he knew it. You didn’t forget cheekbones like that, so high and sharp they seemed to be made of something harder than bone. And there was no mistaking the message in Number 19’s shark-grey eyes:
All I’ve got to do is say the magic words, and you’re out, ready or not …
Tully’s heart was pounding, even now. He wasn’t ready, damn it. He was scared and he wasn’t ready.
He knew the day was coming, and a small part of him was relieved. When you build a house of cards you know it’ll come tumbling down sometime. But he was used to being liked. He had dates when he wanted them. When he told a joke, everybody laughed. When he drove up to school in the Mustang, there was an immediate cluster of guys leaning against the doors and fenders, willing to sit and shoot the breeze. And he had one good friend.
He wasn’t ready to lose any of it.
So fix it, Tulsa, he told himself, and smarten up. Summer was over and school was back and he had to slide into the acceptable rut. Tully thought over the possibilities. There was a girl who sat in front of him in E
nglish, a pretty girl with nutmeg hair that fell in crinkles over her chair and swept across his desk when she leaned back to whisper to him. The hair intrigued him. Each long strand was so perfectly curled, yet separate from the others. He’d found himself wanting to touch it. Andrea. Andrea Knutson. She was nice, Tully thought. She would do.
But he had to fix the other thing, too. Tully felt his insides contract. He flicked the ignition and listened to the familiar rumble of the engine. What was Number 19’s name? Derek or Drake.
The Mustang squealed out of the parking lot, hell bent for home. Tully knew he had one last thing to fix before he could fall into bed. He wasn’t worried, though. He’d been honing a story for his parents since last night. He’d tell them he’d had too much to drink and had slept in his car. They’d be mad, but they’d believe him.
And after the grand slam in the locker room, this confrontation had to be easy. Had to be.
His sister, Summer, must have heard the Mustang’s engine a block away. She was at the back door before Tully turned the knob. He pushed past her and leaned against the wall to take off his shoes.
“You’re dead meat, Tulsa,” Summer hissed, hovering at his elbow. “Where were you all night? Don’t think you can slime your way out of this one. Mom and Dad were out of their skulls.”
She was crowding him, choking him. Without looking, he put his palm on her forehead and forced her back, not nicely.
“Oh, right, aren’t you tough. We’ll see how cool you are without the car. They’re going to yank it on you, jerk.”
Tully was almost numb with exhaustion and anxiety, but he felt a stab under his ribs. Not the car. They wouldn’t take away the Mustang. He looked up at Summer and their eyes caught, and he saw for the first time that her face was taut with alarm.
“Tully, where were you?” Summer whispered.
“That’s what I want to know,” Mr. Brown said, stepping into the kitchen.
At first, Tully was relieved that his father had drawn the duty of chewing him out. Of his parents, Tully’s mother was the usual disciplinarian. She had the hotter temper, the sharper tongue and the more clearly defined sense of crime and punishment.
His dad was a counsellor, in his job and in his life. Tully knew how it would work. He’d get the chance to explain what had happened, and together they’d figure out how to avoid it next time. He might get a lecture, but then he’d get a hug. Tully followed his father into the family room and dropped into his favourite chair, waiting to be counselled.
Make it quick, he pleaded inside himself. He had to sleep and he had to think. But for long moments Mr. Brown only stood, hands in his pockets, looking out the window. Tully noticed that his father’s hair was lapping over the back of his collar again. He had to be nagged all the time, to get a decent haircut and trim his beard, and maybe to buy new clothes. Mr. Brown seemed to forget about things like that.
As the silent minutes stretched out, Tully forgot about them, too. Why was this taking so long? Worry pulled him forward in his chair. Please, he thought, not the car. Anything but the car …
“I’m so disappointed in you,” Mr. Brown said suddenly, softly.
Tully couldn’t stop the heat from coming to his cheeks and forehead.
“We gave you a lot of freedom this summer,” his father continued, still not looking at him. “God knows, you didn’t deserve it, not after last year. But we thought that if we trusted you just once more, treated you like an adult, you’d get your act together.”
Tully swallowed, struggling over the knot in his throat. It had been a bad year, a year full of lies and little deceits. A year of bad plunges he hardly remembered, and what he did remember made him wince.
“Damn it,” his father said, his knuckles striking the window ledge. “You were doing so good. I was starting to think, ’yeah, he can handle it. I don’t have to watch him every minute.’ And then you blew it. Last night.”
Something in Tully lurched. “It wasn’t my fault, Dad. I—”
His father wheeled to face him, cutting him cold.
“Tully, I don’t even want to know the story. It doesn’t matter if you were stoned or sober or singing in the school choir. You didn’t come home and you didn’t call.” His beard quivered. “I love you, kid, but if you can’t live here under our rules, you can’t live here. You think about that the next time somebody makes you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Then he left. And there was no hug. And Tully was left sitting on the edge of his chair with his fingers locked, feeling his pulse throb between his knuckles where his hands met so tightly.
He wished his father had taken away the car.
At two in the afternoon A.J. was shooting baskets in his driveway. It wasn’t a challenge. The net over the small garage was at least a foot below regulation height. Without opposition it was just mindless physical activity. A.J. liked mindless activity sometimes. He’d been thinking all morning and he was tired of it.
Thunk, thunk, loft, dunk. Thunk, thunk …
A.J. wanted to get as much mileage out of T-shirt weather as possible. This had been the first summer in a long time he’d been able to jump without jiggling.
When you liked your body, A.J. thought, you weren’t really aware of it. When you didn’t like it, you couldn’t think of anything else. Every bulge was like a balloon. You spent your waking life trying to hide it.
Except in hockey. In the bulky pads and oversized jerseys, everyone looked like a gorilla. Nobody cared how he looked anyway; they cared about how he could check. And defensemen were supposed to be a little chunky, right?
But you had to come off the ice sometime. Getting dressed for school had been a horror show. Finding something that fit — and hid what he wanted to hide, and looked halfway decent and wasn’t what he had worn the day before — had been more than he could bear some days. A.J. remembered grade ten as two pairs of pants and three sweatshirts. He didn’t like to remember it at all. For a lot of reasons, it had been a dark year.
Thunk, thunk, fake, turn. Thunk, loft, dunk.
There was a full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door and A.J. found he could look into it now. Not very closely or for very long, but it was a start. When he did look and he saw his skin growing tighter and his shoulders widening and his waist shrinking, he felt a warm ripple run through him. It was the first thing that had worked right in a long time.
He didn’t kid himself into thinking he wanted to be a bodybuilder. It was too much work and his heart wasn’t in it. His new strength and stamina had accomplished what he wanted. He was on the Cyclones, marginal or not. That was all the body he needed.
One I can put a T-shirt on, A.J. thought. One I can stand to see when I’m coming out of the shower. Just one that somebody could put their arms around and touch, and not laugh.
Last winter, when Tully dated Aimee and Claire and Sandra and Kathy, A.J. went out with Jacquie. She was funny and nice, someone who filled the silent spaces in the conversation and didn’t keep saying, “Are you mad at me?”
But she could be quiet, too. In her rec room, when the only light was the glow from the dials on the stereo, Jacquie could be so quiet and acquiescent that there was no mistaking what she didn’t say.
It was nice to be hugged and held, but A.J. never asked the question she had already said yes to. I like you, he thought, his face pressed into the warm curve between her shoulder and her ear. I just don’t like me enough yet.
Over the summer holidays they stopped dating, and just before fall, Jacquie moved away. A.J. was surprised by how much he missed being held.
“Hi,” said a voice behind him. A.J. dropped the ball. He fumbled to retrieve it and turned around.
The man was substantial, but not really big; the green uniform made him look taller than he was. His hair was boyishly thick and so dark it glinted blue under the sun. You couldn’t tell his age by his hair, but A.J. could see forty-three years in the creases on the tanned neck, and in the dark smudges under the eye
s.
“Hi, Dad,” A.J. said.
Decco Brandiosa lifted his hands expectantly, and A.J. bounced the ball to him. They passed it back and forth while A.J. tried to read his father’s face, and the eyes that wouldn’t meet his. He could sense something, as taut and invisible as a trip wire. He was familiar with this silence. He knew its cold edge. Decco Brandiosa could keep you waiting until you froze.
He ran the last few days over in his head. What had he done, or forgotten to do, that had earned him this? All he could pinpoint was the fact that he had been late last night, very late.
“Well, muscles,” Decco said finally. The word curled and twisted out of his mouth. A.J.’s heart leapt.
“Is that what you do it for?” Decco said.
“Do what?” The ball passed between them, once, twice, infuriatingly slow.
“You know,” his father said, looking up and pinning him with his eyes. “Whatever it is you do in his basement. The weights.”
A.J.’s scalp crawled. He could feel the accusation but he couldn’t see it.
“You know my weights are at Tully’s,” A.J. said, struggling to keep the exasperation from his voice.
“It makes you feel like a big shot? Hey, muscles?” Decco was firing the ball with force now, stinging the boy’s bare hands. “It makes you feel like a tough guy?”
“Dad—”
“Shut up.” Decco snapped up the ball and held it. “If you had any guts you would have told me first. But, no, I had to hear it on the telephone at work with everybody standing around.” His voice was deadly even. “Your own uncle, and you, acting like some kind of street punk. Mike is an old man, A.J. With a heart condi — You look at me!”
A.J.’s head jerked up.
“He’s an old man, but I’m not,” Decco warned. “You keep throwing your weight around and I’ll show you tough, tough guy. Jesus, this makes me sick.”
He threw the ball hard, so that it flew past A.J. and onto the lawn. Then he turned and stalked into the house. The boy stared after him, the saliva rising like a bitter flood in his mouth. The telephone was caught halfway through its first ring.