The gypsys curse, p.15
The Gypsy's Curse, page 15
“No he won’t. Al’s pretty old but he knows what he can do and what he can’t do.”
She said: “Whatever you say.”
I kept the flashlight on her mouth and it didn’t move again. We lay that way for a long time. After a while a thought came to me that I had never had before. I put the light on my hand.
“Are you talking?” I asked.
“What?”
“When you talk to me like this in bed in the dark, are you making the sounds?”
I knew the answer before she said it. I realized in the asking that I had never felt the words.
“No,” she said. “They’re just on my lips, the words are. There’s no reason to make the sound. Even whispering might wake up Al, if we did it long enough.”
“It wouldn’t,” I said.
“It might.”
“From now on when you talk to me, make the sounds.”
“All right,” she said. Then after a little pause while her tongue touched her lips: “You hurt Aristotle.”
“Yes.”
“You could have killed him,” she said.
I said: “I guess I lost my head.”
“It can happen to anybody,” she said. “I feel like that all the time.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve got to lose my head. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Things get so … so …”—she moved on the bed, seemed almost to struggle—“… so dead. Everything just dies and then I have to do something.”
“I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”
“I guess not,” she said. She pressed against me, her hands in the small of my back. A tremor shook her. Her fingers pressed into my skin hard enough to hurt. “I just want you to understand this. All I’m trying to do is stay alive. When everything starts to die, I get this dreadful loneliness. No, not lonely. Alone. Like I was the only one in the world. Like everything else is a desert. People dry up and die. Food’s got no taste. Color goes out of the trees, out of everything. Tomorrow won’t ever come. Yesterday isn’t worth remembering. Or if you can remember it you wonder how you lived through it.” Her lips stopped moving, but I held the light on her mouth. My hand was shaking. More than the words, it was the look on her face. In her eyes. It was the look of someone who’s having a nightmare and can’t get out of it. “That’s when I … well, when I have to change things. I just have to. What I want to do has nothing to do with it. I have to turn things around, and then it’s all interesting again.”
“Christ,” I said.
“So I know why that happened with Aristotle Parsus,” she said.
“That’s not exactly it,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the way it was.”
“You were defending yourself,” she said. Her eyes seemed to grow more solid and opaque, to recede in the light. “I expect you to defend yourself,” she said. “That’s something I always expect.”
I kissed her. Then: “Lady, I’ve been defending myself all my life.”
She smiled that slow soft heavy smile. “You do it good. It’s what makes you interesting,” she said. “Marvin Molar, you’re a very interesting person.”
We went to sleep exhausted, but I woke in the middle of the night. I opened my eyes onto the blank moonwashed face of the brick building across the alley. I stared at it a long time before I realized Hester had never made the sound of the words, never once had done what I asked her to do. I made love to her again before I went back to sleep and I was able to make her throat rattle and shake with the pleasure of me, felt it come into my hand and race right down my blood. But I never felt a word. Maybe she didn’t know I could feel the noise in things. She wasn’t a deaf mute, only her parents. Maybe she didn’t know how it was with me. I watched her face, helmeted with the dark hair on the pillow beside me, and went back to sleep thinking that there was probably a lot she did not know about me.
Nine
Al kept working out. Worse than ever. But he didn’t do any more bridges. For the most part what he did was old stuff: tearing tennis balls (he had to start with worn-out slick ones that he sent Leroy down to the public courts to beg off the players) and tearing decks of cards—he couldn’t quarter them anymore but he could snap a single deck in two smooth and clear as a knife. In the late afternoon he went to the heavy stuff: half squats with two hundred pounds taken off the rack, and stifflegged dead lifts with two-fifty, and military presses using the wide lifters’ belt to support his back. He went around the gym with a heavy soured expression. I saw him tell Leroy it was his competition face. Except when Hester was near. Then he walked with a hip-stiff strut and smiled a lot. He was eating salt tablets like M & M candies and taking about two hours of steam a day. His old gray skin was pink as a baby’s when he finished his final workout late in the afternoon. But it only made him look like he was about to have a heart attack.
“Al, you going too fast,” I said.
He stopped with his hands positioned on the Olympic bar, about to take it off the squat rack. “You telling Al how he’s going?”
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “Al’s got a big demonstration at Clearwater Beach. Fireworks. Pretty girls. The mayor. And Al. Al’s not through yet. Step out of the way.”
“I told you he wouldn’t quit,” said Hester, who was leaning against a wall, watching us.
“I know what you told me,” I said.
Hester had been good as her word. I hadn’t seen her talking to Al about working out or about the Fourth of July celebration at Clearwater Beach. Not that it made any difference to Al. He kept right on. If anything, it seemed to make him crazier. But I was trying not to let it bother me. Things seemed to be all right, or as all right as they ever were with us at the Fireman’s Gym.
Hester stayed home at night. I hadn’t seen or heard anything about Aristotle Parsus and I figured he was over on his boat with the rest of the Greeks cheating middle-aged lady tourists from Kansas, or whatever they do in Tarpon Springs now that Dupont has made Greeks and natural sponges obsolete.
Al let the weight slip from his shoulders in a half squat when it started to get away from him, and the plates slammed onto the lifting platform. Waves of sound ran in my hands from the floor and all the way up to the bones in my hips. Al stood there glowering down at the weight. Russell Muscle came across the gym from the place where he’d been doing dips on the parallel bars. He stepped between Al and the weight, snorted through his nose once, did a flat-backed squat, and cleaned the bar to his shoulders like it weighed two pounds instead of two hundred. He dropped it onto the squat rack and started toward the parallel bars again. Al grabbed Muscle by his flapping sweatshirt and spun him around.
“What you doing?’’ demanded Al, the vein stiffening and leaping in his neck.
Muscle didn’t move. His mouth came slightly open.
“Al wants to know what the hell you trying to do?”
Muscle looked at me. He looked back at Al. Still he didn’t say anything. Of course, the truth is, the only guy I ever met who was quieter than Al was Russell Muscle. His idea of a big conversation was: Hello.
“Work out,” he said finally, and you couldn’t tell by the way he said it if he meant that’s what he was trying to do or if that’s what Al ought to do.
I got between them anyway. Russell admired Al because he was an old-time strongman, but I wasn’t sure he couldn’t be provoked into killing him. I also might as well admit that I wasn’t sure Al might not kill him. The old man was still dangerous.
“Come on, Al,” I said.
“Al don’t come on,” he said, just like a kid ten years old standing on a playground.
“You slipped the weight doing squats,” I said. “Russell only put it back on the rack, for Christ’s sake. What are you doing?”
I don’t know what you know about weights but the issue was this: a man can squat with much more weight than he can clean to his shoulders, so he normally takes a weight he’s going to squat with from a rack.
But, Jesus, he was only using two hundred and fifty pounds and even Al could clean that, so the whole thing was silly. Muscle saw that, and so did I, but what we didn’t see, and I think we both understood it at about the same time, was that the reason Al had his back up was not the weight on the rack but Hester standing six or seven feet away watching it. Russell looked at me.
“You’re kidding,” Russell Muscle said.
I shook my head.
“Disgusting,” Russell said. He turned and went toward the dressing room, his workout apparently ruined, leaving Al still bowed-up and redfaced.
“What did he mean?” said Al.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He cain’t talk to Al like that.”
He started toward the dressing room but before he could get off the lifting platform, Hester stepped in front of him. “It’s all right,” she said.
“Al don’t know that,” he said.
“I don’t think he meant anything,” she said.
“Said ‘disgusting.’ ”
“Well, said Hester, “you know how that is.”
“Right,” said Al. He went back to the rack. I’d been watching what they said to each other and it didn’t make a bit of sense. But Al calmed right down. He went back to the bar and started doing half squats again.
“I didn’t mean to get into it,” Hester said.
“O.K.,” I said.
“The last thing I wanted to do was put my two cents’ worth in,” she said.
What could I say? Her two cents’ worth in? The thought, the words, came out of the ends of my fingers: she’s making fun of you. Worse: she knows you know it. We stood there watching Al strain under the bar, looking like he was going to die any second, gray-faced, eyes walled, his old legs varicosed to the point of rupture. I was sitting beside her on the edge of the lifting platform. I touched her leg. She looked down at me.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said.
She held my eyes for a long time. Nothing showed in her face. Then she said: “Good, it won’t be a surprise, will it?”
And just like on a signal the surprise walked in: Aristotle Parsus. He had his volleyball team with him. They were dressed out in their uniforms and sneakers. For a moment when I first saw them, a sort of panic started in me. There was no reason—just something that came over me—but I was scared. No, it was more than that, terrified. Then it passed as quick as it came.
Aristotle and his troops stood at the top of the stairs watching Al at the squat rack. The players were joking and talking, their hands flying. But Aristotle did not move at all and nothing showed in his face. Maybe that was it, what scared me. Maybe it was because Hester seemed totally indifferent to Aristotle suddenly appearing. She watched him across the gym like she might have watched a dog pissing on a fire hydrant. And he watched us the same way. Al still trembled and strained under the weight. When, finally, Al stepped forward and dropped the bar back onto the rack, Aristotle came rushing across the gym toward us. He was smiling wildly now. The second Al dropped the weight, the smile had popped into Aristotle’s face like magic. Coming across the gym, he had his arm out, his hand extended in my direction. He looked like a fool.
He stopped in front of me. “Shake,” he said.
I sat watching him.
“Now, listen,” Aristotle said, “I’ve forgotten all about what happened. You don’t have to worry.
“Shake,” he said.
Al had turned around. He watched us, gray-faced. Each of his cheeks had a single spot of purple in it, artificial and phony-looking, like something somebody had pasted on.
Aristotle stood with his hand extended down toward me where I sat. He glanced over at Al, held up his other hand, and said: “You looking good, Al. Jesus, you’re shaping yourself up.”
I don’t know if Al even saw what Aristotle said. He was watching me. “Shake,” Al said.
“Sure,” I said, and shook Aristotle’s hand.
“I forgive it,” said Aristotle. “Everything. Hell, I know how those things happen.”
I said: “I know you do.”
It was late enough in the afternoon that most of the lifters and boxers had left. Ordinarily, we would have been sitting down to eat soon, but since Al started training we had been eating later and later.
Aristotle’s players were moving around in the gym through the uncertain light filtering from the high windows, lifting tiny dumbbells, punching the heavy bag, two of them lifting a bar together. Dressed in their striped shirts and winged shoes they reminded me of fish swimming in a tank. I wondered what they were doing here. Had Aristotle come all the way over here to make this obviously fake gesture of shaking my hand? Whatever was about to come down, I thought I ought to be ready, so I flipped up on my hands and went to lean against the wall by the squat rack.
Three of the volleyball players were down at the other end of the gym now. They had climbed up in the boxing ring. One of them reached up and pulled the string that turned on the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The aluminum reflector above the bulb cast the ring in sudden bright light. The other players went down to the ring and sat on the apron. Al and Hester and Aristotle drew closer together beside the squat rack. They were talking but I didn’t try to see what they were saying.
Muscle came out of the dressing room, his blond hair plastered over his forehead and dark from the shower. He had a towel around his neck. He stopped just inside the gym and looked back toward the dressing room. He stood absolutely still, his wide beautiful hands raised and holding each end of the towel around his neck. Leroy and Pete came through the door and I felt the hair on the back of my neck move. They were both in shorts and wearing boxing gloves. They were eight-ounce gloves. You might as well get hit with a bare fist as with eight-ounce gloves. Leroy had on a headgear. Pete didn’t. Leroy, when he came by Muscle, went into a flurry of fakes and feints, shadowboxing all around Muscle’s head and belly, while Muscle looked at him as though he thought the kid might have gone crazy. Leroy smiled up at Muscle and I saw he was wearing a mouthpiece. Pete had gone to the ring and climbed up through the ropes. His old legs had knots of dark varicose veins behind the knees and trailing down into his calves. Standing in the ring, he was moving to some rhythm—not moving much, just barely, but keeping the rhythm with his head, his feet, his hands. From the hips up, he bobbed and weaved counterpoint to the rhythm. I went onto one hand and asked Al what was going on. But he pretended not to see me. He and Hester were already walking toward the ring. Leroy climbed through the ropes and stood under the bright light with Pete.
Muscle followed him over and leaned on the apron of the ring, watching. Aristotle and his players were leaping about the ring like children, somersaulting over the ropes, skipping into and out of the resin box, and sparring with each other. Pete and Leroy stood facing each other, looking very serious.
“What the hell?” I said, hitting Al in the leg and pointing up at the ring. “What the hell?”
He had taken a chair beside the bell. He had a stopwatch in his hand. “Hester said Leroy ought to be in training.”
“Al, for God’s sake, that kid is …”
Al started ringing the bell and he never stopped until Aristotle and his players cleared the ropes and got off the apron. Hester climbed up into one corner and Leroy came over to stand beside her. They stood with their heads almost touching. Hester’s back was to me, but I knew she was talking because Leroy kept nodding and glancing across the ring where Pete was still in his shuffling dance. Leroy kept showing his rubber mouthpiece and snorting through his nose. Muscle had dried his hair and taken a chair on the far side of the ring.
“Leroy’s no boxer,” I said to Al.
“Pete is,” he said.
“Pete’s a seventy-year-old punch-drunk nigger,” I said.
He stared at me a long time. “Why do you hate us?” he said.
“What?”
“Why do you hate us? Al never gave you reason. Pete and Leroy didn’t. Al didn’t.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “Where did you get the idea …”
“Al is not stupid,” he said, and smashed the bell with the little iron hammer hard enough to dent it.
When the bell rang, Leroy spun away from Hester and went flat-footed to the center of the ring where he stood facing Pete under the light. But then I saw that they weren’t going to box. They weren’t even going to spar. Leroy started hooking and jabbing the air, and Pete kept up a steady little song of coaching, every now and then stopping Leroy and showing him how to cross with a right over a left jab or how to use his shoulder to cover his chin. I felt a little better. I didn’t give a shit if they killed each other, except I did, if you can understand that.
I hate to see anybody make an asshole of himself trying to do something that’s not in him to do. You can do what you can do, you have the talents you have, and to try anything beyond that is assholeland. Besides, as people go in the world, Leroy and Pete weren’t bad guys. Dummies? Sure, but not bad dummies, if you can see what I mean.
They worked for what I guess was three minutes and Al rang the bell. Leroy went to stand head to head with Hester in the corner. Pete went to the other corner, dancing all the way, looking like a wrinkled, varicosed, shrunken child. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him in those shorts he was wearing. You forgot how tiny and shriveled he was when he had his clothes on. Even in the steam room, he didn’t look that bad. But up there in the ring under the light he was just as sorry-looking as you could ask for.
“Al,” I said, “I shouldn’t have butted in. If they want to work out that’s their business.”
Al stared in rage at his stopwatch and wouldn’t look at me. The two purple spots in his cheeks were flushed. His gray neck had a ligament standing in it. He hit the bell again.
Pete and Leroy went out and did another round. Aristotle and his players stood in a line on the far side of the ring, not moving or talking, looking now a little disappointed, or maybe angry. Muscle was already heading for the stairs as Pete and Leroy were coming out for the third round. Leroy came right to the center of the ring and caught Pete with a right hook that dropped him like an empty sack. Muscle ran back and jumped up on the apron and started shouting to Pete, who hadn’t moved. Leroy had gone to a neutral corner. He flashed his white mouthpiece at Hester. Al was counting. Every time he counted he slapped the ring with his hand. Pete had got to his hands and knees. Aristotle and his players were jumping up and down and clapping. Without thinking about it, I had been counting every time Al’s hand slammed onto the canvas, and even though Muscle was screaming for Pete to take nine, he was up at seven, wobbly, shaking his head. Leroy came running across the ring and threw an off-balance, looping left hand that missed by about a foot and almost took him through the ropes. Pete had got his old hands and feet working, bobbing and weaving. He was smiling. He was actually smiling. Leroy came back and missed five or six more times before he managed to catch Pete with a low blow that dropped him again. This time the bell saved him on the floor.
