by Chris Lynch
“I know it’s old habits and all that, Arlo,” Sandy said as we jogged along together the following week, “but you probably want to think about writing yourself a new program. Without football, is there really a lot of use for the big muscle workout? Older gentlemen like yourself have to gear down and streamline sometime. There’s no shame in it, you know. I promise the rest of us mere mortals won’t think any less of you.”
“Har,” I said, “har . . . har.” The great gaps of time between hars weren’t helping me in the debate. But at least they helped me put up a front of good humor. Because the honest first reaction I had to that, deep inside and stabbing sharply, was, Yes you will. Of course you will. Gear down and streamline? Never mind the mere mortals, I’d think less of myself. And we’d all be right.
“You know,” Sandy said, giving me a merciless unamused stare, “I’m not loving that weird expression on your face. I think I’ll run ahead.”
“Sure,” I said to her speedy backside after it was obvious that she was not seeking my approval. “I’ll catch up.”
She may have been spitting, like runners do, or she may have been commenting, when she made the sharp hacking noise. “Bet you won’t,” she said boldly.
She had every right to be bold. Whether she meant that as a challenge or a taunt or a complaint, she knew she was winning that bet.
I was not catching up.
***
It was way before my wake-up time, so I didn’t really stir at the first few rings of the house phone. Four. Probably five. But when I heard my father’s voice, as full of fury as I could remember it ever being, I shot up.
“What? Hello . . . what? Are you fucking serious?” Nothing and nobody could ever whip that wildness out of Dad.
Well, not nobody, exactly, but it took a special somebody.
“No!” Dad bellowed. “Not a chance, not for a minute, not one single dollar, no. I had my chance, and it was no good. You keep him. And may you have better luck than I did.”
I was at the door now, straining to hear more. My father was quiet and I wasn’t sure at first if he’d hung up. But then small, reasoned unnh and huhh sounds came out of him as if somebody on the other end had presented him the kind of cost-benefit analysis of choices he could appreciate. Things he might want to think about before hanging up and giving up.
“Right, of course. I agree,” Dad said in a tone that said a whole lot of things were not right and not agreeable.
He bashed the phone down and growled words that I didn’t have to hear to understand. He was already stamping back to their room, then all around their room, as Ma talked calmness and sense. “No, Emma, no, no. It’s humiliating enough already. I won’t let you be degraded by going to that place in the middle of the night.” The conversation halted right there, and he stamped back out and toward the door to find me right there and ready.
“What?” he said. “Go back to bed, Arlo, this doesn’t have to concern you.”
“Oh, it absolutely does have to,” I said. “I know when a situation demands a referee.”
***
“We found him asleep, on his motorbike, at a stoplight,” the sergeant at the desk said. “He was like a flamingo, one foot up, resting, the other one on the street for balance. More importantly, his saddlebags were loaded with a fair amount of weed broken up into a lot of small baggies. Not good.”
“No,” Dad said at a lower volume but a higher level of disgust, “not good at all.”
Paperwork filled out, bond arrangement settled, Lloyd appeared almost instantly, like we’d just purchased him out of a loser candy machine. He looked like they had had to wake him up all over again. Out of a refrigerator box.
“There’s your court date right there,” the sergeant said, looking at Dad instead of Lloyd. Fair enough, since this was a lot more than one guy’s problem. “I would strongly advise you not to miss it.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked when Lloyd slinked away without bothering to ask.
The sergeant shrugged his shoulders all the way up to his fleshy earlobes. “Impossible to tell, kid. No priors, very helpful. Quantity of dope, packaged for distribution, very unhelpful.”
The three of us walked down the wide concrete steps of the police station under bright lights that showcased the awfulness of all this. Dad was first, followed by Lloyd, followed by me.
“Sorry,” Lloyd just barely said as he reached the pavement. But just barely was enough to get my father started.
“We,” Dad said, whipping around and stabbing his number one son in the chest with his finger, “were not the type of people this was supposed to happen to. You have no reason to be this way, Lloyd, none. You have no right to be this way.” He spoke in a sort of desperate, cracking voice I had never heard before.
Lloyd stood rigid, like a soldier being inspected, as Dad inched closer and made a frightening two-handed claw gesture inches away from his face. “I swear, I could . . .”
“Do it,” Lloyd said calmly. “Go for it, Dad. You’ve earned it. I won’t fight back. Might do us both some good.”
I gave it a second just to see. Then I saw Dad going for him, and I just couldn’t let it happen, especially with Lloyd so weak and pathetic. I banged into the toxic space between them, surprising myself by giving Lloyd a bit of a shove toward the curb.
Not that my brother didn’t deserve an ass whipping. He’d get it, when he was ready. And when I was.
“Do you both some good?” I shouted at Lloyd. “Count again, there are three of us. Let’s just get away from here, huh?”
Without a word, I headed after Lloyd and my father followed. As I reached him, two cars came heading down the street at a fast enough clip that they must have been taunting the desk sergeant. I stopped just as they were about to barrel past us.
But Lloyd didn’t. He stepped right off the curb without even pausing. My right arm shot out and grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar, and I pulled him back with almost enough force to pull his stupid head off but definitely enough to fling him sprawling across the sidewalk back toward the steps of the station.
Everything stopped. All traffic had vanished, all sound snuffed. As I looked down at my brother, who lay there in a heap, bathed in hard light, the thought I had above all the others was how easy that had been, to throw him. He was so . . . insubstantial.
Eventually my brother got back to his feet. My father did not give him a hand. I did not give him a hand. The three of us negotiated our way across the road in an eerie vacuum of almost any sensation at all.
The sounds of the engine and the talk radio blah-blah-blah got us home. The door opened and Ma shot through the stillness like a greyhound out of the gate. She slammed into Lloyd and hugged him tight enough that they would possibly meld into one organism if they held the hug just long enough. Dad drifted away to his room, and I floated off to mine, so numb I didn’t even call Sandy.
***
It was probably not an exaggeration to say that my mother saved my brother from prison. She wrote a letter to the court on his behalf, detailing Lloyd’s history of mental instability, of substance abuse issues that she maintained were both exacerbated by and resulted from a succession of head injuries. All the homework she had put into compiling The File paid off here as she pumped in equal shots of hard data and mother love. She had even contacted Coach Fisk, and he showed up at the hearing, and spoke privately with two separate court officers.
Between Ma and the Coach, they did twice as much as Lloyd’s lawyer, who mostly just sat slumped in his chair as if he was just a leftover from the hearing before this one. With the two of them side by side, it would have been tough to tell who was who if Lloyd had worn a suit like he should have.
The judge’s verdict: probation, mandatory counseling, and community service.
Arlo’s verdict: everybody in the room would probably have benefited from sending the accused to jail for a few months.
Lloyd was not grateful.
&nbs
p; “Look what you did to me, Ma,” he whined after we left the courtroom, pointing at details of the judgment here, here, and here on the pages. “I mean, okay, I’m not going to jail, but look at all the shit I gotta do. Ma, I know your heart was in the right place, but y’know, you went a little overboard with all the storytelling. What am I gonna do with counseling, for cryin’ out loud?”
Ma was already absolutely spent by the ordeal and all she had put into rescuing the ungrateful rodent, so said absolutely nothing back to him.
But I did.
“I am going to kill you,” I said, leaning into him and banging the bridge of my nose on his. I knew how genuine I was in that threat when I saw Lloyd’s eyes try to smile but stay wide with fear instead. In a building that knew killers when they spoke, I did not feel one bit of a faker at this moment.
“Good result, I’d say,” Coach Fisk said then, squeezing my upper arm firmly.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Ma said, spontaneously hugging him and then retreating shyly.
“It was my pleasure, for sure,” Coach said. He shook Lloyd’s hand and then introduced us all to a friend he’d brought along. “Folks, this is an old, old pal of mine, Jamie McAlpine.”
“What do you mean, old, old . . . ?” Jamie said, and everybody laughed more than the joke probably deserved. He shook hands with Ma first, then with me, firmly. It was like shaking a glove full of rocks. Finally he gripped Lloyd’s hand and shook it vigorously, for a long time. I could tell by the expression on Lloyd’s face that Jamie wasn’t letting him release, but also that Jamie McAlpine could just do whatever it was Jamie McAlpine wanted to do and for as long as he wanted to do it.
“Could Lloyd and I have a private word just for a minute?” Jamie said. He kept squeezing and shaking Lloyd’s hand while looking at Ma for permission.
“Certainly, by all means,” Ma said.
Jamie finally let go and led the way to a bench in the far corner of the black-and-white marble floor. Lloyd slouched after him.
As they went off, Ma said, hushed-like, “Well, he looks better than I would have thought, all things considered.”
“He takes good care of himself now,” Coach Fisk said.
Jamie McAlpine. If our town had one legitimate legend, it was probably Jamie. He had been a tenacious, rock-hard middleweight, then a bulky but still fearsome light-heavyweight boxer who never got the big fight because it was said even in defeat he was hell to tangle with and made everybody suffer and look bad in the process. I only saw him fight one time, toward the end of his career. He was the headliner on a card of local guys who were never going anyplace. But the whole afternoon, at the old Memorial Auditorium that got torn down a month later, was spoiled because the young guy Jamie fought turned out to be a lot more of a legitimate prospect than he was supposed to be. The kid wasn’t a power puncher but he was fast and precise, with that twisting snapper type of a jab that produced cuts as if his gloves were covered in coarse sandpaper. I remember, as a twelve-year-old soft kid, wincing and turning away as the kid made Jamie’s face into something you’d see in a butcher’s shop window. It was only when the referee stepped in and warned Jamie that he was going to stop the fight soon that desperation took over and restored order. Everybody could hear the conversation, that’s how stunned silent we were. After that the old slugger went all raging bull and finally landed three straight bombs right on the kid’s button nose and dropped him like a big dead tuna bouncing on the ring mat. Jamie retired a couple of months later to open his own gym—and to close a lot of bars. According to the local paper.
Ma was completely right, that he could have looked a lot worse. And as he guided my misguided brother into that far corner of the courthouse, I thought he was possibly the one person with the weight to get him to listen.
I mean, I couldn’t even hear what he was saying and I found myself nodding agreement to every bit of it from all the way across the lobby.
Nodding right along with Lloyd, until I realized that and I stopped.
Hello Good-Bye
It was a long way to go before the August day when Coach Fisk was going to reinstate me and I was going to begin the kind of senior season folks around here would still be talking about for years. I thought about it every single day, even though the school year had just ended and the whole summer stretched ahead. It was all consuming, and as I had gotten more intense about my solo workout program, I got less interested in what anybody else was doing, even if Sandy was that anybody. Even Dinos. Especially Dinos.
“Yes, Arlo, the graduation. You know, where they give out diplomas? Like the one they will be giving out to your best friend today?”
“You’re my best friend, Sandy.”
We were talking on the phone as I walked home after my longest run ever. I woke up to such a crazy gorgeous morning, the kind of air that makes you just have to get outside and do something with it even if you were not planning to run at all. It must have been twelve hard miles, and I felt so good about it I had to call my best girl and the best runner I knew to tell her about it before I even reached home.
“Not right now, I’m not. How could you blow that off?”
She was ruining the day’s perfection, and I already regretted calling her.
“I never said I was going to the graduation. Anyway, it’s for family.”
“Yes, you did say you were going. Dinos asked you to go.”
Dinos and I had been just barely on speaking terms since he called in the big guns to shut down my multidiscipline training plans. So on one hand, you could say it was easy for me to space out on his graduation day. But on another, bigger hand, you could say the effort he made in personally inviting me in the middle of the cafeteria on bacon burger day should have damn well stuck out in my mind.
“All right, all right, all right, Sandy, I’m on it.”
“Ceremony is starting right about now.”
“I said all right,” I said and hung up on her. I would have to make up for that social screwup after I took care of this one.
My sweat was almost dried up by then, in the perfect late-spring sunshine, but I’d have to get it going again from a cold start. I burst into sprint mode, and felt none of the easy fluidity of my earlier run. That was to be expected. Different stride, no warning, I’d loosen up again in no time.
I owed him, after all.
He was my friend. Since freshman year, Dinos was my one great friend, and as an upperclassman he pulled me along in his wake and made my journey easier and a whole lot more fun than it might have been. Yes, he was an ass for ratting me out, and he was wrong. But he was a wrong ass for his own right reasons.
My stride was not coming along. I pushed harder.
He did what he did. He did what he did for reasons he thought were noble, and because he was Dinos there was no reason to question that no matter how wrong he might have been.
He asked me to come.
I pushed harder, and got nothing for my effort. My sweat was not returning, either. The sun now felt like late summer mean, and that was not helping things.
I was going to be so late. Felt like a rat. Was a rat. Sandy was right to be disgusted with me. I was disgusted with me. How does she always know when to be disgusted with me before I do?
Every workout, every game, every time Dinos pounded on my shoulder pads came to my mind now as my legs flatly refused to do what they were well trained to do.
I got dizzy. Lightning strikes of pain cracked across the entire surface of my skull. I veered off the pavement, the wrong way, almost right into traffic. A car horn wailed in my ear, making everything happening in my head happen harder. I staggered back on the pavement, weaved and stumbled until I fell and found myself lying up against somebody’s dense and prickly hedge.
I felt like the hedge was inside my head, working its thorny way through the cracks the way roots get into a house’s foundation.
I had to close my eyes. The sun didn’t care and came right on inside wit
h me.
***
I was certain that I never lost consciousness. I sat, composing myself, eyes closed, thinking about getting to Dinos. First I would rest, lose the dizzies, get up the strength to rise. Then I’d get something to drink, because this was dehydration, was all it was. I had drunk plenty of fluids but obviously not enough. Didn’t plan for twelve miles. Didn’t plan for a crap conversation with Sandy. Didn’t plan for Dinos.
“Are you all right?” a lady’s voice asked me.
I slowly blink-blinked up until I could make out the figure of a woman, possibly in her seventies, but looking a lot fitter than I felt. She had on a flowered hat and a matching pair of gardening gloves.
“I am, ma’am, thanks. Just got a little dizzy, thought I should sit for a little bit. I’ll get out of your hedge now. Nice hedge you have. Firm.”
“Thank you,” she said as I started up. I got halfway upright before I went to my knees, grabbing my head with both hands to squeeze the pain away.
“Do you have a hose . . . handy by any chance . . . ma’am?” I looked at the pavement while I choke-spoke. She made some kind of worried sound in response, and in a few seconds I heard the scrape and splash of a live hose being dragged my way, the most delicious sound ever. “Thank you so much,” I said, and took a huge drink, bloating my belly before turning the water on my head, my face, my chest my shoulders, my head. My head. Dear God, my head.
“You are a true lifesaver, ma’am,” I said after I had emptied half the town’s water supply over myself. “I can’t thank you enough.”
She took her hose back and started dragging it into her garden again. “You can thank me by respecting the strength of that sun from now on. Wear a hat next time.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
I was feeling much better. Until I checked my watch.
Between being lodged in the hedge and hosing myself back to viability, I had lost fifty minutes.
I broke into a run once more.
And once more the headache screamed, the landscape wobbled, and I stopped trying to do anything more ambitious than gently walking myself home.