Leverage (10 page)

“So you got a plan for Sasquatch here?” he asks Scott, tipping his chin in my direction.

“Already implemented it,” Scott says. “My boy here is solid. He passed the test.”

Disappointment hoods Tom's eyes. “Aw, come
on
, man. We were
all
supposed to help.”

“Too late, Tommy,” Scott says. “Tell you what, though. Get the peons here to wash my car and scrub it down real good. We did a little off-roading on the way over. Some idiot drunk, going like a bat out of hell, ran us off the road on Old Highway Eight.”

“No shit?” Tom asks.

“No shit,” Scott says. “I need a drink. Come on, Kurt.”

“Shit stains, your work is not done here,” Tom hollers. “You want to be a true Knight? Then scrub this golden chariot spotless. Wash it with your tongues if you have to, just wash it. Now!”

Bald boys jump at Tom's command. They hustle to find rags, buckets, a garden hose, and soap. Whoever shaved them didn't worry about gouging divots of flesh from their scalps to get at the hair. Bloody scabs speckle every single one of their skulls. One JV kid has a swollen eye and cheek, and a bloody lip. Tom has a grip around the kid's neck, pushing him to his hands and knees. His skull is worse than the others. Fresh beads of red gleam all over his smooth dome.

“Goldberg, did you not hear what I just said?” Tom leans over, screaming right into the kid's ear. “How do you expect to even be considered for varsity if you can't listen to simple directions? Lick that wheel clean, Jew-boy. Lick it!”

“Sir, yes sir,” the kid answers. He sticks out his tongue and Tom, still squeezing his neck, rams Goldberg's face into the Camaro's tire.

“Lick it!” Tom yells, and the other bald boys start laughing. “That Jew-tongue better be black as coal when you're done.”

“Thir . . . yeth . . . thir,” Goldberg answers while his mouth mops the tread. Tom straddles the much smaller JVer while he's on his hands and knees, really smushing his face into the rubber.

“Just make sure it's spotless, pukes,” Scott adds. “Brodsky, follow me,” he says. “You could've done a lot worse for initiation than the ride I gave you.”

I glance back one last time before following Scott into the house. Jankowski's bent over Goldberg in a way I know from Meadow's House, a way I won't ever forget. A sickening tickle works its way up my gut, my breath gets short, and I fight the urge to run away fast as possible. A camera flashes and I notice Terrence aiming his digital at the same scene that's making me sick.

“Smile, Tom,” Terrence says.

“Fuck you, Terrence,” Tom fires back, not bothering to get off Goldberg. I turn away and follow Scott inside the house.

“Have a real man's drink,” Scott says, handing me a plastic cup that looks like Coke with ice. Anything's better than more beer. I glug back a big swallow of the drink before choking up the burning liquid and coughing out the rest.

“Attaboy.” Scott laughs. “Jack and Coke'll put hair on your chest.” He slaps my back until I finish coughing. “Drink up. The girls'll be here soon and I'm about to make you Mr. Popular.”

I nod dumbly, feeling miserable, wishing I could escape to the weight room or get under my covers and read about places far away, in jungles where no people exist, only jaguars hiding in trees and river rafts and chests of gold.

In the basement, there's a full bar that Studblatz's tending. When he sees me and Scott, he smiles at Scott and dips his chin at me. Scott and Mike give each other fist pounds across the dark wood of the bar top and I'm surprised to find his fist waiting to bump mine. A razor, a can of shaving cream, and a blood-splotched towel sit on one of the stools.

“You're real lucky our quarterback likes you so much,” Studblatz tells me. “Tommy and I been busting to shave that mop off your head, but Scott says you might be like Samson or something. He doesn't want to mess with your power accidentally, go shave you bald like the other numbnuts and find out you can't run the ball no more. Coach wouldn't be happy about that.”

“He wouldn't be
happy
about that?” Scott asks sarcastically. “Coach'd be a little more than
unhappy
.” Scott lets out a long whistle and raises his eyebrows at Studblatz. “If we messed with Mr. All-America's running game, Coach'd have our balls. And only
after
my dad finished skinning us first.”

“They're here!” comes a cry from up the basement steps.

“Finally,” Scott says. “The females have arrived.”

“Let the games begin.” Studlblatz smirks.

Girls! Soft, beautiful, girls float down the steps wearing lots of short, tight, and skimpy. They parade around the wood-paneled basement with flowing hair, bare tummies, dark eye shadow, and glossy-wet lips. The party's been spared from guy poisoning. Curvy beauties—bright eyes, soft necks, round butts, and luscious cleavage—mellow out the scabby scalps and fill the room with a scent that makes me want to lick the air. Everyone in the basement loosens up with their arrival. Except me. See, the shaved plebes look stupid but their hair will grow back. My scars and my stutter cling to me, embarrass me, like permanent BO.

The bald boys wear the dried blood on their hatcheted scalps like war ribbons, grinning proudly even as the girls touch them and go
ewwww
. Goldberg—bruised eye and puffy lip—must be done licking Scott's Camaro clean. He's in a beer chugging race with two other baldies.

From my bar stool in a dark corner, I watch the girls dance in little groups, sipping red- and orange-colored drinks through rainbow straws, flipping their hair from one shoulder to the other, throwing off their girl scent. A hungry knot tightens below my belly. Unable to approach the girls, they still give me hope and make me feel safe. No girl, no woman, ever caused me to hide or hunker down, expecting a beating. The swell of their thighs and hips, the creases in their laps, invite tenderness, not pain. Their boobs feel the exact opposite of pain. Even their shoulders are soft. Nothing about them can hurt you in the least.

I see how they glance at me, know I scare them.

A camera flashes in my eyes.

“Good one,” Terrence says, then turns around, aims his camera into the room, and fires again. The room strobes. “Guaranteed, I'll have some great shots once the drinking gets in high gear. Might make the trophy page on my site.”

“What site?” I ask.

“Greatest hits and misses,” he says. “All the good stuff. Need a secret code to get to the page, though. Can't have some of it getting out there, you know what I mean.” Terrence aims his camera at the butt of a girl I think is named Heidi. The camera flashes.

“Damn, she's sweet!” Terrence sucks in his breath sharply, then slaps my arm with the back of his hand. “You play your cards right, I'll let you take a peek at the site. Course you don't play your cards right, you may be the star of your very own what-were-they-thinking page,” he says, laughing more to himself than me, like he's in on his own personal joke. He throws his arm around my neck and holds up the camera to point at the two of us and it flashes, so I'm blind for a few seconds. When I get my eyes back, he's showing me the camera screen. There's Terrence, mouth open in laughter, teeth gleaming, having the greatest time, and there's me looking like I just got pulled into a mug shot.

“I'll come back after you've had a few more drinks,” Terrence either promises or threatens, wearing his big grin. “See if we can actually capture you with a smile on your face.”

And then he's off, moving into the grooving bodies, camera flashing away, leaving me alone on the stool, watching.

“Kurt, get over here,” Scott shouts over the music. He stumbles over and grabs my arm, towing me behind him toward one of the girl groups I've watched for the last hour. At least Studblatz's basement is dark and noisy, all the better to hide my scars and stutter. I let my hair fall against my jaw, covering it.

“Hello, ladies.” Scott inserts himself into the center of the girl ring. They giggle as if he's done something brilliant. I wonder what that's like, to have that level of charm. Scott sips at his drink and twirls around for all of them to admire. They cheer. He can do no wrong. I stand outside the circle until Scott reaches out of the group and grabs my arm and tugs me into the center next to him. We are the bull's-eye of attention. I look down at my feet.

“I don't know if all you ladies have personally met our new star,” Scott shouts over the music. “Coach recruited him,” he continues. “You believe that? That's how good my man here is. Coach stole him from Lincoln.”

“Wow,” one girl shouts back. I imagine her rolling her eyes, but when I chance a peek at her, she's staring right back at me, the drink straw between her teeth while she winds the other end around her finger.

“That's right,” Scott keeps hollering. “He's a terror on the field but just a gentle, misunderstood beast off it.” Scott slaps my back. The girls titter. “Ladies, introduce yourselves to the man who's going to lead us all the way to a state championship.”

“Really?” another girl asks, sounding genuinely curious, making it a record for the number of girls I've met who show any interest in the game. This girl keeps watching me. She takes a sip from her drink, then purses her lips while her eyes wander all over me in a way that causes springs to tighten throughout my body. She steps up to me and grabs the thumb of my hand and then laces her fingers between mine.

“My, what big hands you have, Mr. Wolf,” the girl says, batting her eyes. She has to have seen my scars but ... it doesn't seem ... she doesn't seem to mind. She leans in until her bare stomach brushes the zipper of my jeans.

“You've got dangerous eyes,” she tells me, barely above the music.

“Marcia wins the prize!” Scott hollers. “Mr. Wolf. I love it. Mr. Wolf. We've got a winner!”

That's how I get my nickname. That's how I meet Marcia . . . and Tammy and Glory and Mona and Jessica. Lamar slips into my head as I keep drinking, surrounded by all this beauty. He tells me to take what I can get because tomorrow everything could change.

With that thought, and lots of Jack and Coke, I end up on the couch and Marcia ends up in my lap.

“I saw you play on Friday!” she tells me, putting her mouth right on my ear to be heard over the music. She lets her lips rest there when she's through talking. Her fingers come up to comb my hair out of the way and then her tongue flicks against my lobe. I'm getting way too excited below and I try readjusting my pants but she's sitting there and no way she can't feel it.

“I hear ... Mr. Wolf . . . you're the biggest . . . ,” she says, and her lips travel from my ear to my jaw to my neck. Still kissing me, her fingers come up to trace the long scar running down under my eye. Her other hand reaches down between her legs and lands on the spot where I'm totally hard. “Are you the strongest, too?”

Throughout the basement bar area people are sloppy drunk and swaying to the music—plebes and varsity starters, cheerleaders and dance line girls. Just before I stop caring about anyone but Marcia, I notice Goldberg handing a drink to Tom Jankowski and Jankowski laughing and rubbing Goldberg's scabby, bald head like a genie lamp, like they've been best friends for life.

H
ow'd your meet go today?” Dad asks. He pulls a slice of pizza from the cardboard delivery box resting on his lap. A long string of cheese attaches itself to his mustache. We sit on the couch, watching TV. I pull out a slice of pizza from my own delivery box balanced on my knees and bite into the soggy, hot goodness.

“Okay,” I say. “Bruce scored a personal best on rings and I got best score on high bar. Fisher surprised everyone. He got second-highest score on parallel bars. But we've got no depth. Farmington High killed us.”

“And why is that?” my dad asks, his eyes not looking at me, but watching the Friday night movie on TV, half listening to what I say. “Why no depth?” His hangdog expression deepens every year. The shadows under his eyes, which I never really noticed until after Mom died, progressively darken from lack of sleep during the week, so that by this time every Friday he looks like someone's given him two shiners in a fight. I think about answering his question by saying,
Well, if you ever came to a meet, you'd know our team has one, maybe two, good scores on each event but that we can't put up three solid scores on every apparatus and that's what the judges combine.

But I don't say that. My dad has basically worked two full-time jobs ever since Mom died, putting in long hours and also volunteering his time at a free clinic. It's selfish of me to expect him to stop treating really sick people to make one of my regular meets. He says he'll go see me in the state meet if I qualify. He won't come right out and say it, but sports, in his eyes, should be more like a hobby, like chess, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. Especially if it gets in the way of grades. That's why my secret plan to get an athletic scholarship is so important. I play and replay the scenario of a letter arriving one day and me opening it and handing it over to him—an offer for a full-ride scholarship. Then he'll understand why I spent all that time in the gym, why I pestered him to go to private clubs during the off-season. It won't be just a dumb hobby when I hand him that letter. It doesn't matter to me if he can pay for my education.
I
want to pay for it, show him I can do it on my own. Until that magic letter arrives, though, there's a little thing called math that keeps harshing my buzz.

“How's algebra going?” he asks, losing interest in his first question.
That's
what I have to work with here.