Slot Machine (11 page)

“Good, there you go. Doesn’t that feel better?” he said as he went back to running forward.

“Unh,” I answered.

By the half-mile mark the thrill was gone. I was spewing sweat like the sprinkler system down on Frankie’s golf course. I kept chugging, though, on through where the road turned to trail, and where the trail turned to path. The terrain also turned, from flat to rolling to just plain
up.
I was keeping Mikie in sight up ahead, but he was getting smaller.

I crawled along, putting as much pump into breathing as I was into advancing. The trees still passed by me on both sides, but more slowly now. Then the whole scene stalled, seemed to go nowhere for the longest time, as if I was running on a treadmill and not getting anywhere.

But through the fog of my heat vapors, Mikie actually was getting bigger. He wasn’t losing me. The gap was closing. Something must have been working right.

“You okay?” he asked, putting his hand on my stomach to steady me.

“I am,” I said, and I did feel better with him nearer.

“You want to quit?”

“I don’t want to quit. Soon, I will. But not yet.”

Mike smiled a firm sort of proud Marines smile. Next thing I knew, there was a tug at my middle. I looked down to see him tying the rope around my waist. He’d already looped it around himself, and we were lashed together.

“When you want to stop for good,” he said, “just fall down. I’ll get the message.”

And off he went. I staggered to get a little momentum before the fifty feet of rope between us pulled taut, but it did as soon as I moved. He jerked me ahead at first, but I got my balance. Mike slowed his pace a bit—okay, he slowed it a ton. But I kept with him. Then, being so close now, watching his correct form, listening to him—“Concentrate on your breathing, make it smooth,” he kept saying—I worked up an imitation of what he did. My right hand went forward when my left leg went forward. My left hand went back when my right leg went back. I breathed rapidly but regularly, one breath in, then one out, on each footfall. I never found myself with both hands at my sides at the same time, as I had at the bottom of the hill.

After several minutes I picked up a few steps, and the tension on the rope slackened. “There you go, Elvin, how you doing?” Mike said while looking back over his shoulder. I nodded, and I think managed something like a smile.

So he increased the pace. I had been sure that we had already maxed me out, but when I felt the rope tug at me from the middle, I shortened my stride, started dropping my feet a quarter step quicker. I kept up. He pulled me just enough and not too much, so that I could do what he was making me do. The pace he already figured I could do.

“All right there, El? All right?” he called once more, his words choppier now, his voice much breathier.

“... right,” I croaked.

“... ’Most there,” he said, and made one more quick jump up in the pace. The hill was cresting; I could feel it lessen. Still I nearly fell this time, even put my hands out in front of me before righting myself. I reached the new pace, held it for a minute of panting, wobbling, careening, before we reached the end and staggered into camp.

It was just short of a mile, mostly uphill, and it took us just under half an hour to do it. I fell flat on my face and rubbed it back and forth in the dew, then rested there happily on my forehead. In another minute I looked up to find Mikie sitting on a rock, sweating and panting almost as hard as I was, his head between his knees.

It was only then that it occurred to me, because I was thinking about me like I always do. Mikie
towed
me up that hill. And I outweighed him by twenty-five pounds.

After a struggle, I got to my feet. He still had his head down when I got to him.

“You going to barf?” I asked.

“Noooo,” he drawled, then stood up too quickly, to prove it. I saw him waver for a second; then he was all right. Then he wasn’t again. “Jesus,” he said, and walked past me.

The place we’d landed was the party place where we’d been with Frankie and all his new buddies the night before. There were a lot of smashed bottles around, making the ground like a jagged gravel driveway. At the far end of the campfire circle three trees were covered, their trunks plastered with pages and pages from nudie magazines. But not the magazines I knew of, with round-faced blond ladies who could just be the local Dairy Queen queen if it wasn’t for the enormous gold breasts and the eight miles of hair they could pull down their backs and thread between their legs. No, these magazines here had
lots
of people in the pictures, being all kinds of busy in ways I had never even thought of in the longest sleepless summer night. And the pictures were angrier than the ones I remembered from
Playboy
.

There was a stench of burned rubber still hanging there in the middle of the dead campfire, and it wasn’t too hard for Mikie and me to guess whose size-ten basketball shoes were sitting there charred and black in the ashes.

Nice shoes too, they were, before. Frank’s stuff was always nice. It was important to him, more important than to anyone else I knew, to have nice things. And to look good. Must have hurt like sticking his actual feet in that fire, to burn his shoes. I wondered if he laughed that one off too.

Mike shook his head and walked, two and three and four times circling the ring of stones framing the fire pit. “They’ll probably stop soon, don’t you think?” he asked, as if I knew. “They’ll just treat him jerky for a little while, then that’ll be his initiation, then he can just be in their dopey club, right?”

I circled with him once, the rope still tethering us, but then I sat down to get something back in my legs. I started to answer, then looked at Mike looking up into the sky. I realized he wasn’t asking me the question, he was asking himself.

“It stinks here,” I said.

“Ya, it really stinks,” he repeated.

“We should be getting back,” I said, wanting to get him away from what was only going to piss him off. “And,” I added brightly, standing and stretching a little, “since you did all that work on the way up, this one’s on me. Down is my specialty, you know.”

“What?” he said, but we didn’t have time for that. I took off, barreling out of that camp and assaulting the downside of that trail like there was a bear on my back. Mike made hysterical cackling noises, trying to stay up through the first couple hundred yards when I was so possessed that I barely kept my feet myself. The breeze was back in my face; gravity was now, for a change, my friend; and though I was weak in the knees and afraid of what every new step was going to bring, I kept on wheeling madly, watching my legs spin like the paddles of a big steamboat.

I bounced off a soft bending birch tree but kept going. I stepped ankle deep into a brook I hadn’t found the first time. I heard myself wheeze, but it was half from laughing, so instead of slowing, which my body was now screaming at me to do, I pressed. I saw the bottom of the hill coming up, and I pressed harder.

Into the ground was where I pressed. Just as the ride was about to flatten out, my legs just quit. My hands were too slow to get out in front when my leg refused to extend that one more time, and I hit the earth facefirst. All my weight, and gravity, and Mikie, who I didn’t realize was right up my back, came slamming down on top of me as I hit, flipped, flopped heels over head, finally landing on my back in the path. Mike bounced off me and caromed off the slope of the road, momentarily out of view. All I could see when I turned my head that way was the rope, still connecting us, as it dipped down and over.

He was laughing spastically as he climbed the rope, using me as an anchor. I almost choked myself as I joined him, laughing as I lay on my back removing a big lump of pine bark from my cheek and pine needles from my gums.

“Do you think you can you get up?” he asked, though he didn’t look too concerned about it.

“Do I want to is the question,” I answered. But I did, both. I wanted to, and I got up, slowly. “Maybe we should walk it in from here, huh, Mike?”

He agreed, and we took it slow for the rest of the way, walking still tied up along the road.

People were just starting to roll out in my Cluster when I slogged through, showered, and dressed my mole quickly, then left again. Frankie was not yet up.

Taking Mikie’s advice, I grabbed an apple, a nectarine, and a carton of cran-grape juice and beat it out of the dining hall before I went after real food. They had those coffee crumb cakes this morning, the kind in the two-packs with the little balls of brown whatever-it-is on top that make me insane. I had to run.

I stopped running, of course, as soon as possible. On the porch of the dining hall. From there, on top of everything, I could scan, and pick a spot far away from the maddening food smells inside. There, at the far corner of the valley in the middle of the complex, was the loneliest building in the place. The library.

“Go for it,” I thought. Why not find something on wrestling? There were books on everything else, so maybe I could uncover a few tricks that could give me an advantage. It was a long shot, but I needed something. Besides, I was sure nobody else in wrestling was reading his way to the top.

It was fun to walk into the dark empty library. The lights were off, the sun barely seeped in, dust had gathered on all the mahogany paneling. And it was even cool. The place hadn’t been warmed by the heat of a single body since the summer started. It was a temptation to let loose a scream, the stillness was so inviting, and the place was so totally mine.

I did not, as I have always not, resist the temptation.

I hid in a stack of books as I waited for my echo to die and the No Excessive Pleasure Police to come and haul me off. But since the Knights could probably hear gunplay and not respond if it was only the library getting shot up, I was safe.

One of the reasons nobody used the place, I realized, was that it was ninety percent filled with religion books. Old, old religion books. Also a smattering of psychology books, dealing mostly with religion. They had a small science section that was so exciting, it made me lonely for the religion books; a Great Works of Literature section all full of English textbooks—
that
kind of great literature—and a Latin section. Art, music, and theater were lumped together on a three-shelf stack, on top of which rested the world’s first copying machine.

And then there was the sports section.

If any of the guys came here looking for
Rare Air
, by Michael Jordan, I believe they would have been put on a waiting list of about seven thousand years. The Greatest Stars of Today series of baseball books included a volume on Duke Snider. There was a book on Wimbledon with pictures of women players who wore longer skirts than the nuns did in my old school.

Then there was the Creative Sports Series of the Physical Fitness Program published by the Creative Educational Society of Mankato, Minnesota. This series must have been the core of the seminary’s stellar and rigorous athletic program, because they had all the books in the series, all nineteen of them, from
Archery
to
Badminton
to
Table Tennis
to
Waterskiing.
All the big ones.

And right there, beaming out at me from position fourteen, its uncracked plain red spine gleaming, was
Wrestling
.

I sat down with it and cozied up with my new main man. Rummy Macias, Wrestling Coach, Mankato State College, Mankato, Minnesota.

First I was hooked on the name. If the guy’s name was Rummy, must he not be one tough mother? Then he had the endorsements in the front of the book, from the wrestling coaches at both Oklahoma State and Iowa State. Universities.
Universities
. One of the coaches even called Rummy the “Mr. Wrestling” of the state of Minnesota. I had heard of those colleges. Much tougher than this small-time high school Knights stuff. I could learn something that would get me there, beyond my competition, even if Rummy and his black-and-white crew cut were a tiny bit, well, dated.

And one of the demonstrator wrestlers in the pictures had
the
hairiest arms and back I’d ever seen. I was checking this book
out
. I signed myself a card and stamped it before leaving.

I passed Mikie and a tired-looking Frank on my way back through the dining-hall door.

“Morning, Buck,” I said to Frankie. I was feeling the power and improvement already as I carried the book, all the great grappling secrets tucked under my arm—though not yet tucked into my head.

He looked at me through droopy lids. “Missed a fun time, boy.”

“I’m an athlete, Francis. I need to be in bed early.”

Frankie just laughed at me. Mike took the book from me and checked it out. “Good,” he said. “You’re going to apply yourself.”

I nodded forcefully, and he did the same in return. I took my book and marched inside.

All I had time for before getting to business was a quick shot of inspiration from Rummy. I cracked the book open to the introduction and was rewarded immediately.

It is normal for every boy to want to wrestle. From early childhood one of his greatest pleasures is a good tussle. It is the coaches’ responsibility to direct and train this desire for satisfying activity in such a way that it will culminate in superior fitness.

I felt like such an animal. It surged in me, this beastly thing, this desire for satisfying activity. I had that desire.

I wanted a good tussle. Right now.

I came thumping out of the dressing kitchen anxious to get to work. Eugene was already giving a mighty lesson to the unteachable Bellows. I went directly to the weight chart to see who was on the menu today. I was free-falling now, tumbling down through the weight divisions, as the coach searched for somebody I might be competitive with.

Today I drew Victor the welterweight, a mere thirty pounds below me. Too bad for Victor—it wasn’t his fault. The fall would stop with him, and then I’d reverse field to take my revenge on those who had wronged me earlier. Like in
Carrie
.