Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  “Yes, you showed me your—”

  “You weren’t supposed to tell anybody about that. . . .”

  “Trophies,” she said sternly. But I was disappointed to notice she was also fighting down a grin.

  “Oh yes, my trophies. Thank you for bringing that up. Too modest myself. Yeah, I was good. Until I had to give it up when that old injury flared up again. Knee, or brain or something, I can’t remember.”

  “I bet you were good,” Sandy said.

  “He was a fine athlete,” Ma chirped.

  “Taught this lump everything he knows,” he said, ignoring that past tense, lucky for the rest of us, and pointing with Uncle Sam certainty at the lump of me.

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Want to see some pictures, Saundra?” he said. “Some family pictures?” Lloyd’s mind lately, postfootball, tended to make the laser-­quick cuts upfield and back that his body used to. He was up and Lair-­bound before I could finish my protest groan. Sandy patted my arm across the table sympathetically. Dad, you could feel, was reverting into cold storage.

  “He has pictures in there?” Ma said. She hadn’t ventured into that realm for years. “Really? Pictures of us?”

  The answer was headed our way, and even whistling as he did. The tune was unidentifiable but suggested malicious intent all the same.

  “This is my file,” Lloyd said.

  I still had my head buried. Slowly I raised it to see Sandy’s open and happy holiday face fade into shade as Lloyd opened The File to begin the tour. The File.

  “Jesus, Lloyd,” I said.

  Nobody else said a word to protest. Dad, well, this wouldn’t have been his moment. But Ma? This would have seemed to be precisely the time for one of her intervention swoops to save a situation.

  But. Ah. Right. Conflicted.

  And if Sandy came to understand some of the life lessons of sport?

  Let us give thanks indeed.

  “Oh, now there’s a picture of me,” Lloyd said to her happily. You could almost buy into his enthusiasm. “And that one there, that’s our little Arlo. Isn’t he precious?”

  Sandy looked at me, her complexion with a worrisome gray-­meat kind of effect.

  Not unlike the damaged brain slices laid out before her.

  “Boy, am I suddenly sleepy,” Lloyd said, rising, stretching. “That turkey chemical thing, it’ll get you every time. I’ll just leave that with you then, Saundra, huh?”

  He walked around to my side of the table, which was not the route to his room. He leaned himself heavy on my back, draped himself over me, and got right up in my ear.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he breathed.

  I waited. Waited for the punch line, or the punch.

  Then he was off me and toddling away to his bedroom.

  There Are No Off-­Seasons

  I wanted to be great. That’s what I knew. I planned to pack on another twenty or thirty pounds before I started sophomore year. I let Dinos know that I would be training day and night, every day, and he could jump in or out as he wished, but I didn’t have time for off days anymore. I left for school early and even though there weren’t practices anymore, I came home later than ever, splitting afternoons up between lifting and running on the track.

  In other words, I started spending all my time at school, at exactly the time my brother quit spending any time there at all. Kind of a universe-­balancing equation in there someplace.

  One fine, strange morning, Lloyd summoned me into his lair after I had finished my push-­ups, sit-­ups, pull-­ups, biceps curls, which I did for an hour every day. Strange would be inaccurate, actually, as there was no longer any strange with him because every day the realm of that possibility got bigger.

  As I walked in he sparked up, pulling his product out of his Pop Warner Defensive Player of the Year cup. He took a hit of his breakfast, offered it to me.

  “Of course not, man,” I said. “I have no interest at all. And don’t you worry about Ma and Dad smelling that stuff?”

  He took another hit, shrugged, exhaled a response in my direction. “God knows I’ve tried, but they seem to be turning a blind nostril. They probably like me sedate. Weed’s harmless, though. Certainly are worse things you can do to your brain. Like that shit you do. What’s it called again? Right, football.” He offered me the smoke again as if we had not already settled that.

  I shoved it away. “Never. And even if it wasn’t never, we have to get to school.”

  He exhaled, then waved the smoke—and school—away from his face. “No time for that shit, man. I have to get on with life, and high school ain’t life. Not for me anyway.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Gonna make money, like a man’s supposed to do. That’s why this is so fortuitous that you just happened to drop by.”

  “I didn’t just happen to—”

  “Steroids. Human growth hormone. That’s your ticket. And it just so happens I can supply these things to you at a family discount.”

  “Hell, Lloyd. Jeez. Hell no, not a chance, not ever.”

  “Huh,” he said, his voice constricted as he held in some smoke, “you don’t want greatness. Stop wasting my time. Go to schooool,” he drawled as he let the smoke roll my way. He said the word school as if he expected me to pull my cape over my head and slither down through the nearest sewer grate with the shame of it.

  ***

  February: eight pounds. March: ten. I started spending a lot of time around the spring track-­and-­field guys, working on intensity sprints, and I found that I enjoyed this dynamic, this feeling of being my own athletic bubble, my own pod working right in the midst of this team I did not belong to. There but isolated.

  The track-­and-­field varsity coach came up to me while I stretched alongside the track.

  “You ever try any of the events?” he asked.

  I looked up from my spot on the ground, my right leg extended and my head almost touching my thigh. “What events?”

  “Shot put, discus, javelin, hammer throw. I’ve seen you and I would bet with a little coaching you could throw a hammer a country mile.”

  Thing was, I was so into a zone, right then and whenever I was training, that this kind of unscheduled interaction sounded to me as foreign as somebody talking to me underwater. I received his words, reconstituted them in my head, but I was afraid I did not engage like a fully functional human.

  “Why would I do that?” I said, looking all around the infield of the track oval where throwers and jumpers were throwing and jumping to no purpose I could figure.

  He laughed. “Competition? Fun? The purity of noble athletic endeavor?”

  Well, yeah, all right. But I couldn’t feel it. That was the thing, the hard reality thing. All those things were just things to me. Just stuff. Like disjointed pieces of some larger game that wasn’t fully assembled yet.

  Where was the contact? How boring it would be to train for a sport that had no contact. Those weren’t even actual sports but just training exercises for sports.

  Sports with contact.

  “Thanks for asking, Coach,” I said, the return of my interpersonal skills indicating I had been pulled out of my training zone for too long. “But I’m just too busy.”

  He nodded, shrugged, and walked away without saying anything more. Which I really appreciated.

  Sandy was already looking at me kind of sideways over the workout thing. She liked me in shape, but once Memorial Day came she seemed to think a clock had been punched somewhere, a bell had rung for recess or something.

  “Ah, I think it’s safe to say you’re there now, muscles,” she said when we got down to the beach on the first really warm day. I took my shirt off, as guys do.

  “Where is there?” I said, laughing. I grabbed her in a quarterback sack and tumbled her into the sand.

  “There,” she said, poking her sharp nails into my chest, then my deltoids, then my abs, “and there, and there, and there.”

 
“Ha,” I said, squirming and twisting away. Little thing that she was, she had a mastery of debilitating me that I was helpless over.

  I was helpless all over, over her, to tell the truth. She was the only person in the world who made helpless feel good.

  “Now that it’s summer, you’ll back off the hard-­core training for a while, right? You can’t get better conditioned than you are right now, and off-­season should be for winding down and resting up, shouldn’t it?”

  I had to judge the balance on this one. Sneaky notes of disapproval were starting to waft into Sandy’s football opinions. I knew what I had to do to succeed, but the only two things in the world I really needed were this girl and that game. I couldn’t have them going at each other.

  I had to choose my words carefully.

  So there is no excuse for what came out of my mouth. “Off-­seasons are for losers.”

  There would be no more muscle-­poking, sand-­rolling Sandy this day.

  “What?” I said, scrambling to my feet and spraying sand behind me as I ran like a cartoon character after her.

  “Seriously, Arlo,” she said, shaking my hand out of hers twice before she finally let me hold on. My heart rate came back down then. “At a certain point hypertraining becomes a kind of sickness.”

  “Are you saying I’m sick, Sandy?” I said, giving myself away by being too happy about it.

  “I swear, boy, if you’re doing that thing of using the word sick to mean awesome . . . I’ll show you real sick by barfing right on you, right now.”

  Which of course made me laugh out loud but also made me surrender. I yanked on her hand for her to slow down and stop trying to pull away from me. “Okay, okay, I get your point. I don’t entirely agree with it . . . but that should make it all the more meaningful that I’m going to take your advice and ease up. A little.”

  She faced me. “What’s a little?”

  “Ah . . . okay, how ’bout one gym session a day instead of two? But you’ll give me till the Fourth of July. To taper off.”

  She pulled her hand away yet again, then offered it back to me in the form of a handshake. “You do hear yourself using the language of the addict, however.”

  I took that hand, and gave it a good shaking. “I’m addicted to you,” I said.

  “Yeah, well don’t be that, either. Just try to be normal.”

  “I’ll write that on my Hit List.”

  “God, if I ever find that you have a real, physical hit list . . . ,” she said, turning away and laughing as if she were picturing it.

  I made a mental note to stop talking about my Hit List.

  ***

  Dinos was off to stay with relatives in Greece for the summer and I was all two-­a-­days solo by the end of June. The school facilities were open for community stuff, and the only people I saw were parents taking their little kids for swim lessons and the summer school dopes who didn’t take any better care of their bodies than they did their grades but needed a credit or two to graduate. Sounded like Lloyd, except for the giving a hoot about graduating part.

  After Lloyd did not graduate and made it clear he was not going to summer school, there was a sort of Lloyd Conference at a nice Indian restaurant where his short- to medium-­term future was brought up. Dad and Ma were good, well prepared, as positive as possible, and spoke with one voice. That voice sounded like it had two different and recognizable tones within it—one signaling concern for his future happiness and the other that Lloyd had to realize that stay-­at-­home deadbeating was not a route to that happiness. They managed to blend the voices well enough.

  Lloyd remained silent for a while, pounded himself with enough of the four-­alarm lamb bhuna to make the sweat start running down his forehead, until Ma insisted he stop that.

  He did, and then he responded.

  “I just want the summer,” he said with watery curry eyes and a surprisingly earnest tone to his voice. He even made a point of glancing from Ma, to Dad, back to Ma again, and then for emphasis back to Dad, looking him respectfully right in the eyes for a change. “I have some ideas but they aren’t worked out enough for me to talk about them yet. If you guys just give me space, let me do my thing, I promise I’ll have a plan once the summer’s over.”

  I don’t think anybody was expecting something like that. Something more combative would have been truer to form. My parents were wrong-­footed enough that they didn’t say anything at all until they finally said okay.

  So Lloyd went back to the tandoori.

  As far as I could tell, for the first month those plans involved getting high and at last working on his motorcycle in the garage. You could hear him clanging away in there, and you could smell him, at all hours. Well, all except the morning hours when regular people were up and about.

  ***

  Every week I was bigger. My clothes told me that. Which made me want bigger still.

  A one-­hour gym workout in the morning, hard and fast and sweaty, followed by a protein shake. Home for lunch. Nap. Running. Back to the gym for an hour in the afternoon. Hard, fast, sweaty. Protein shake.

  ***

  By July I was hard. I was a hard individual, which I never was before.

  Sandy took off for a month with her family on Nantucket, starting the second week in July.

  I was reduced to one daily workout and zero Sandies.

  Five days in I was so bored and achingly lonely, I started thinking that swimming to Nantucket was not only possible and sane but a pretty darned good workout within the bounds of our agreement.

  I did not, ultimately, attempt the swim.

  My one-­a-­day workouts got a little longer, though. Then a little longer. Goals.

  Nobody had ever yearned for sophomore year to arrive like I did, I was certain of that.

  Lighter Air

  Sandy was due to get back two weeks before the start of school, followed by Dinos the week after that. That was when I was expecting to emerge from my training bubble, and my life would settle back into something like a more normal routine.

  A little before that, however, it settled into something very different.

  I got up one morning and just like every morning, my feet landed on the carpet and I started my stretching. I reached for my toes to wake up the hamstrings. Then I pressed my hands to the wall in front of me and my heels to the floor behind me to work out the calf tightness. I latched on to the chin-­up bar mounted in the doorframe to my room and pulled a quick twenty, then hit the floor for an eye-­opening thirty push-­ups. And by the time I got to my feet again, I was double-­espresso awake without needing to subject my body to any caffeine at all.

  Then I reached for my thirty-­five-­pound medicine ball with the handles, to do my torque exercise that leaves me feeling like my core muscles could repel bullets. That is the way to leave the house in the morning.

  The medicine ball was MIA.

  “Where is my medicine ball?” I said. The shock of its absence had me speaking out loud to the spot on the floor in the two-­foot space between my dresser and my closet where my medicine ball was supposed to be. It was always there. Unless one of my parents decided they just had to take my medicine ball with them to work, I could not think of any conceivable explanation. Because Lloyd sure wouldn’t have any use for it.

  “Lloyd,” I said, banging on his door aggressively enough to prepare him for how seriously I would take it if he had in fact screwed around with my medicine ball.

  When he, unsurprisingly, didn’t answer, I barged in.

  No Lloyd. I knew he was there last night, because I heard his music. But the idea of him getting up before me this summer made even less sense than the medicine ball disappearing. I headed outside and as I moved down the driveway, I could faintly hear the clanging from the garage but did not smell the smell.

  “What are you doing, Lloyd?” I said, walking through the side entrance, the only entrance since the main garage door corroded shut years ago.

  He dropped the dumbbells to
the concrete floor.

  “Who would understand better than you what I’m doing?” he said. “I’m working out.”

  He certainly was, and he had the sweat-­drenched T-­shirt to prove it. His hair was matted to his head. The motorcycle was in the far corner, dismantled into so many pieces that the original factory would have trouble getting it all back together. In the center of the garage, Lloyd had unrolled a tattered old Oriental rug that was in our living room when I was in kindergarten. Arranged around the rug were the components of a pretty sad version of a home gym. There were the rusted iron weights that I forgot we ever had, the weight bench that was in the basement, which Ma used to hang shirts and blouses on for drying. And my medicine ball.

  “Is that my medicine ball?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he answered, picking it up by one of its handles and walking it over to me. “You were asleep, so I thought borrowing it quietly would be better than waking you up.”

  I took the ball from him and watched him walk back all businesslike to the dumbbells and resume his curls.

  “Why are you out here?” I asked as he curled. “You know I’m doing this stuff every day at the gym. Didn’t it occur to you to just tell me and maybe we could go together?”

  “You didn’t want me,” he said, pumping harder and looking at the floor. “Anyway, this is fine. Works out great for me.”

  I held the medicine ball by both handles, in front of me like I was about to begin my torque routine. As I walked up to where he was, my abdominal muscles started twitching. “What are you shaping up for all of a sudden, Lloyd?”

  He let his arms drop and his head rise, and he looked grateful for the excuse to stop. The sweat was beading up on him, he breathed audibly, and his eyes were clearer and more focused than I had seen them in a long time.

  “I’m joining the army,” he said, flashing a wide smile that had likewise been a stranger to me lately.

  If he told me he was forming his own army, I’d have been less surprised.

  “The army?”

  “Yup.”

  “The United States Army?”