I’m pretty sure I could take Carlito in a fair fight, but his reputation is for guns and knives and gang attacks, not fairness. Still, the way Brenda looks back at him suggests they have some shared history. The thought makes my stomach clench. I’ve never felt jealous of him until right now. Maybe he senses that I’m watching him back because he smiles and nods at me as if I’m a eunuch or her gay dance partner or the warm-up act before he takes over.
Brenda picks up on the silent drama and spins around so her back is toward him, then steps up the pace. She puts no pressure on me to keep up with her, which is a good thing, since dancing isn’t my best event. Carlito turns away too, drifting over to a pack of other full patch members. It’s as if they have adult business to attend to and are content to leave the dancing to us kids.
There are a couple of particularly large bikers at the barn today who I know are members of the Popeyes. They don’t look relaxed, or like they even want to be relaxed. The Popeyes are an international club, with chapters on four continents. In contrast, next to no one knows the Annihilators exist once you get outside of our area code. The Popeyes appear to be checking things out today, not partying. A few are wearing red Kevlar vests that look new and a bit bulky, something like the ones police SWAT teams wear. These guys seem particularly keyed up. None of the Annihilators are into Kevlar vests; I imagine they’d find them heavy and sweaty and expensive—though I could see Trollop getting one just to look dangerous. He’s a bit in awe of the Popeyes, although he’s trying not to show it. Ripper’s harder to read.
One of the Popeyes says something to Brenda’s brother, Trent, and his face tightens up. This guy looks jacked up on steroids, something I recognize from my gym. I’ve been told he’s a Quebecer from the Nomads. The Nomads are an elite chapter of the Popeyes; these guys travel anywhere they want and pull rank on pretty well anyone in the club. You don’t see Nomads often, and when you do, no one is all that comfortable. What’s particularly unsettling about this man are his eyes. They’re hard like bullets, and I feel like they’re staring right at me. Then he puts on a frozen smile as Trollop shuffles in to take a selfie of them together with one of his phones.
Jamie walks by carrying beers for Ripper and himself, but nothing for Trent, who’s standing nearby. Trent says something to Jamie that I can’t hear, and Jamie turns back at him and glares. And that’s all it takes.
“I’m not your waiter,” Jamie says.
I’m surprised by Jamie’s tone, but not shocked. I’ve seen this before, when he’s close to snapping. If Trent’s smart, he’ll notice that Jamie’s body is tensing up, like a dog just before it lunges. When Jamie looks like this, I know it’s best just to leave him alone. What I don’t know is what brought this on.
Whatever it is, I guess Trent takes the hint, because a few minutes later, he steps outside by himself, looking less than thrilled. Brenda doesn’t notice, and that’s just as well. But Jamie catches me looking in his direction and I know he’s aware I’ve seen the tense exchange. The next thing I know he’s at my side.
“What time does the gym close?” he asks.
It’s his not-so-subtle way of saying that he thinks I should leave.
He’s right. I’ve made as good a first impression as I can manage with Brenda. Better to leave looking relatively cool rather than show myself for the geek I truly am.
“Say hi to Mom,” Jamie says.
I nod.
The guy from the big club with the red vest and the bullet eyes gives me a hard look as I move toward the door, and even with warm and fuzzy thoughts of Brenda in my head, I can’t help feeling a shiver of fear.
Chapter
4
It’s a twenty-minute drive from Trollop’s barn to my gym, which is housed in a now-shuttered department store on the main street of St. Thomas. I love summer evenings like this, when it feels like it will stay light forever.
I’m greeted by a familiar voice at the gym door.
“Which way to the beach?”
It’s Jake Doyle, my workout buddy from the football team. He’s striking a bodybuilder pose and, as he pumps a bicep, he points dramatically off to one side and says, “The beach is that way.”
Jake’s my best friend on the team. He’s also my best friend, period. My “brother from another mother.” That said, there’s no way I’d ever take him to a biker barbecue or party. He’s got an innocence about him, almost like he’s younger than he really is, and that crowd would freak him out. Worse, he might really love it.
I’ve seen Jake’s Muscle Beach routine hundreds of times, and I’m not surprised to see it again today. It’s still kind of funny, though. In a way, he’s making fun of himself. Jake’s not the biggest, strongest guy you’ll ever see, especially on a football team like ours, which is pretty solid and usually in contention for the city championship. He’s also not as scrawny as he was back in grade nine, when he started the joke. But he’s definitely not Muscle Beach material either.
He gives me a long look, like he’s wondering what’s on my mind.
“Things good?” he asks.
“For sure,” I mumble, shutting down the conversation. That’s as close as we generally come to sharing feelings.
I’m not about to spew about Brenda, or about anything that went on at the barbecue—not the Popeyes appearance or Jamie and Trent. It would all be too hard to explain, and what can Jake do about it anyway? Better just to do what we can do, which right now is pushing weights.
Jake’s not one to pry. That’s one of the reasons we’re friends.
He makes his pecs dance as we get ready in the locker room.
“Greetings from the Doyle twins,” he says. This is one of his standard routines, and it always makes me smile. He seems to be trying extra hard today. Other times, he flexes both of his biceps and says, “Welcome to the gun show. Please stand back for your own personal safety.” There’s also his gorilla walk and his security guard walk, when he puffs out his chest and throws his shoulders back, like he’s ready to haul rowdy skateboarders out of a mall or kick down a barn door.
Today, the angry rants of some old-school rapper blast from a boom box as we walk onto the gym floor. It’s not my favorite workout music, but it’ll do. The best is Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta,” which has a funny, straightforward, rebellious vibe I could listen to all day. You won’t hear any Lady Gaga or Adele in here. You’re more likely to hear vintage hip-hop, like The Notorious B.I.G. Our gym isn’t part of some glitzy chain, and we like to think it’s a hard-core sweat factory. A few of the other kids from the team work out here, but not too many. The more well-off players like the local branch of a club that’s advertised on TV, or else they have nice workout areas in their homes.
That’s fine with me. I like that this place isn’t jam-packed all the time. It’s kind of like our little secret. I get a home-away-from-home feeling that I love whenever I come here. Over the past few months, as I’ve rehabilitated my injury, I even missed its nose-peeling stink and the corny-but-true slogans on the walls: “Pain is temporary/pride is forever”; “Do today what others won’t, so you can do tomorrow what others can’t.” For the deep thinkers, there’s also, “Granted that I must die, how must I live?” That one kind of takes the air out of me. There are also a couple aimed directly at us football players, like “52 brothers are hard to beat.”
I’ve been back in the gym for about a month. I’m not a hundred percent yet, but I’m starting to feel more like an athlete and less like a therapy case.
Jake and I are like a team within a team. He’s a surefire bet to get back onto the squad, even though he’s a bit small for the offensive line and too slow to be a starting running back or linebacker.
We open up with some bench presses. We start with twelve repetitions each as a warm-up. The last two have a sharp burn. Next come ten with a higher weight; I’m definitely feeling the final couple of pr
esses. Then it’s eight with a slightly higher weight. There’s genuine pain now. Finally, we each do six repetitions at our maximum weight. For my final two, Jake’s guiding the bar with two fingers on each hand. I trust him, which allows me to go as hard as I’m capable of.
“Nasty exertion,” Jake says when I’m done. “Forgot my air spray. Forgot you were coming.”
“Didn’t stink until you walked in,” I reply.
“Perhaps you should go a bit easy on the beans,” Jake counters. “No judgment. Just a suggestion. Actually a plea. On behalf of humanity and all other living things.”
I’ve got a pretty fair sweat going, even though the front door’s propped open to allow some wind in.
“This is the year of the J-Man,” Jake says.
Since grade nine, Jake and I have sweated and even bled a little together in practices and games, cried in defeat, and held our helmets high in triumph. We’re both graduating next June, and Jake knows this is the last season he straps on a helmet. He wants it to be a big one. If all goes well for him, he might finally be a starter at center.
“Time to get aboard the J-Train,” Jake continues. “Next stop, city championship! Best years of our lives, bro.”
He might even believe that last line, although I can see Jake being happy with a nice little family in a couple of years. They’ll all be good years for Jake, just in different ways. And he knows I hate it when people say that your high-school years are the best ones of your life. Is the rest of life really that bad?
“Pretty soon, you’ll be getting paid to do this stuff,” Jake says. “Don’t forget us little people.”
I’ve had coaches say I’ve got a legitimate shot at the pros. I also know I’m just one hit in the knee away from pumping gas or serving coffee at a drive-through forever. I breathe in hard and exhale harder, doing seated shoulder presses.
“This is it, brother!” Jake chirps. “Make it good. It’s all downhill after this.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or swear at him, so I zone him out and push through the pain instead.
“Make those university scouts love you,” Jake says. “No woman ever will.”
No one in my family’s ever gone to university, but my coach thinks that I can and should. It’s kind of a rush, and I’m flattered when he talks about how I could handle the next level both in schoolwork and in football. He was a pretty good university player himself and had a few pro tryouts, so he knows what he’s talking about.
“Put our little borough on the map,” Jake says.
I don’t hate our town. There are times I feel really comfortable here, but plenty of other times I feel like I’m rotting. I also can’t shake the feeling that if I don’t get out soon, I’ll never leave.
“Got some catching up to do,” I say.
“Record it for posterity,” Jake says, gesturing toward the book in my hand. “Someday the Hall of Fame will be begging for these notebooks.”
We record all of our lifts on paper so we can’t kid ourselves about whether or not we’re making progress. You are either getting better or falling behind. There are no ties. Someone has to win. Why not us?
I see a friend of Jamie’s from years ago on the other side of the gym. His name is Dave Hanson; he’s now a cop. I’ve seen him around a lot less since he got his uniform and Jamie started wearing his Annihilators patch and stopped stammering so much.
I haven’t seen Dave here in a while. He’s focused pretty intensely on his workout, so we don’t have to interrupt the flow of things with some awkward “Hi, how are you, how have you been?” session. It’s been almost ten years since he and Jamie were friends, I realize.
Back in the locker room, Jake strikes another pose before a mirror. He knows it embarrasses me, which is half the fun for him.
“You may be a beast but I’m the beauty,” he says, grinning at his own joke.
“No one drafted us into this army,” he continues. Jake’s been saying things like that to pump himself up since he had a squeaky little voice back in grade nine. In those days, most of the girls in our class were taller than us. Several also had deeper voices.
Back then, everything was scary. Football didn’t strike me as any more dangerous than riding the bus with a bunch of strange big kids. If I was going to get beaten up, it might as well be by athletes, who I considered a better class of bullies.
Some of the veterans on the team were twice as big as us; once, when we clearly didn’t know what we were doing, one of them picked us both up and carried us under his arms like pylons to the right spot on the field. I remember telling Jamie that night that I was going to quit.
“We all get scared,” Jamie said. “If you wait to not be scared, it’s not going to happen. Besides, what about Jake? You going to leave the little runt out there all by himself?”
Jamie was right, and I’ve always remembered that pep talk. Ultimately, it was giddy stuff to feel like part of a pack, even if we were experiencing it from a prime viewing spot on the bench. We still wore the purple and gold and we still felt invincible.
Our coach uses the phrase “earned confidence” a lot. It’s drilled into us that if we work hard and smart then we’ve earned the right to be confident. We are also conditioned to visualize success, to stay positive, and to keep thinking of the next right thing to do. The idea is to work our way into the Zone, a magical place where there is no room for panic. In the Zone, we just read the situation, process it, and attack. We don’t doubt.
“How’s the leg feel?” Jake asks.
“Minty fresh. Thanks for asking.”
The status of my leg has been a tender topic since the city championship game nine months ago, when I caught a fullback’s helmet square on my left thigh. I’d had nine quarterback sacks in six games leading into this one, which is really good in a league where there’s not much passing. I even had back-to-back sacks in our semifinal game—a big reason why we won, despite a shaky performance from our offense. That pretty well iced the game for us and got me a couple of star stickers to put on my helmet and a nice little mention in the Sun-Sentinel.
Then I got hit by the fullback, my leg swelled up instantly, and there was no way to Zone my way around that. Jake was one of the guys who helped me off the field. We were both crying a little, although we’ve never spoken of that. My leg hurt so badly I immediately assumed the worst. Was this going to be my last time on a football field? The team would figure out how to go on, but what about me? I wouldn’t let anyone take me to the hospital until after the game; I wanted to cheer on Jake and the guys. We won that championship game, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was all over for me.
“What do you call your injury again?” Jake asks.
“Myositis ossificans.”
I can actually pronounce it now. It means that your muscle calcifies and literally becomes like stone. It’s serious enough, but fixable.
“Still doing physio?”
“Couple times a week. No more heat or electronic stimulation, and I don’t need the whirlpool so much. Lots of stretching, and my physio’s got me going to yoga.”
“Namaste, bro,” Jake says. He pauses for a beat and then adds, “It’s good, though?”
“Doctor gave me full clearance.”
Jamie told me a couple of weeks ago that you don’t always get a second chance in life, and that I couldn’t blow mine. It’s not that often that I totally agree with my brother these days, but on that day, I did.
When we get out to the parking lot, Jake pauses, as if he wants to ask again if something’s wrong. He looks concerned, even worried. I guess I’m not hiding my anxiousness about everything that happened at the party as well as I think I am. I know he’d love to help, if there was something he could actually do.
Then he shifts back to the Jake I’m used to.
“Love to stay and chat but some cheerleaders want to oil
me down,” he says. “No need to get jealous; it’s not as great as it sounds. More of a responsibility.”
He strides away while I roll my eyes.
Chapter
5
On my way home, I swing by the townhouse where Brenda is staying. It’s not really even a decision. I just find myself driving there.
The place is owned by an Annihilator named Mark Goldberg. His dad is a successful dentist in Montreal, and Jamie tells me he’d be surprised if Mark is with the club five years down the line. He’ll go back to life among the rich folks once his slumming adventure gets old. For now, though, his townhouse is a good place for people connected with the club to crash.
I don’t see Carlito’s bike parked outside, a good sign for sure. Maybe I misinterpreted those looks between him and Brenda.
The townhouse’s garage door is open, which is odd. Biker hangouts aren’t known for their open-door policy. Easier to keep secrets when no one can see what you’re up to. Looking more closely, I’m startled to see Jamie there in the shadows, talking to someone. The anxious feeling I’ve been trying to ignore intensifies.
I slow the car to a crawl and roll down the window so I can shout something to my brother.
Then I see Trent.
Even through the shadows, I can see he looks dead serious, even afraid. Jamie has his hands balled up into fists, and Trent is cringing, leaning back. Jamie could destroy him in no time, and his body language says he knows it.
Jamie’s so focused that he doesn’t even notice me. He’s got his scary face on, the one I remember from when he fought back against our father for the first time. He’s staring directly at Trent, close enough to him to drop him with a punch. Then he puts his hands on Trent’s shoulders so that he can’t move. They’re almost nose to nose. I know that Jamie sometimes head-butts people in this position. He could break Trent’s nose or knock him out in an instant. I lean out the window, trying to hear what’s going on.
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