Athletic Shorts (8 page)

I really thought I had it all in perspective, but then, about a week ago, Neal Anderson showed up at my door. First, I should say my door isn’t an easy one to find. My place is best described by my friend Walker Dupree in an essay he wrote last year for junior English:

Mrs. Phelps, our junior English teacher, read that, gave Walker an A+, and sicced the Department of Social and Health Services on me again, which brought Max once again to the rescue. Actually I have enough money from my parents to live in a much nicer place, but somehow this one fits me like a glove, though Walker calls it Nouveau Tobacco Road.

Under any circumstances, Neal found me. Through some miracle of zoning, though we went to the same grade school and junior high, we don’t attend the same high school. Neal doesn’t swim anymore, so I haven’t seen him since the day he killed my family. And that’s a good thing, because when things are at their worst, and I want someone to blame, Neal’s my man. What the hell was he doing? Why didn’t he
think?

I stared at him through my open door. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

I barely recognized him, wouldn’t have if I hadn’t heard his voice. His dishwater brown hair was stringy and unkempt, hanging to his shoulders; his clothes were dirty and threadbare. I considered a moment and said, “No.”

He looked away, over the rickety banister surrounding the wooden landing outside my door, then back at me. I couldn’t see anything of the happy rich kid I knew in grade school. But it was Neal, it was Neal for sure, and I was instantly aware of my rage.

“Come on, man. I need to talk to you.”

“Anderson,” I said, “if I let you come in my house, I’ll probably hurt you. In fact, I might anyway. You must be out of your goddamn mind. What the hell are you doing here?”

He looked directly at me. “Trying to give myself a chance.”

“A chance to what?”

“To make it right.”

I gripped the doorjamb, all my resolve directed at stopping myself from pushing him over the banister into the alley. Three years, and his face brought back the rage like a broken dam. “Anderson, turn around. Walk down those stairs. If you see me on the street, cross it. If you see me at a dance, or in a pizza place, or even at a gas station, stop what you’re doing and run. I’ll let you know if it’s ever different.”

“Lion, c’mon…”

“You must not have heard me.”

He started down the rickety stairs, then turned back
about halfway down. I noticed how thin he looked, how raggedy. All his athleticism, that confident gait he had in fourth grade, when he was the sixth-fastest hundred-yard breaststroker in the state, was gone. The Andersons are rich people. They aren’t well to do, or comfortably well off, or even upper middle class. They’re rich. Their lake cabin cost double what my parents’ house cost, and we lived in a nice place. But Neal looked like the poorest of poor kids. I mean, he was dressed bad and all that, but there was more. It was in his eyes. Neal was gone. I forced all those thoughts out of my mind.

I didn’t care.

I even wondered briefly about my coldness, but that thought was like a wispy breeze passing through my mind in sleep. It never found space in my consciousness.

He said, “I’m not leaving because I’m afraid you’ll hurt me. Nothin’ you could do to me would matter. I’m just leavin’ because you want me to.”

“Whatever reason you use is fine with me,” I said. “Long as you leave.”

Neal nodded, stood staring a second longer, and slowly moved on down the stairs to the alley.

It was later that night when I realized how vicious I’d been. And it felt good. I have a lot of friends, people
who look after me in one way or another and people I look after. Jeff and Nortie and Walker, the guys I swim with, and Elaine—those are people I’d die for, because their friendship is so important. But that night I realized it’s my
rage
that’s kept me alive over these three years, not friendships. Make no mistake about it, if I had been left alone in the water with Neal that day, I
would
have drowned him. And I have never trusted for a moment since what I might do if I ran into him. Now he was feeling
some
of what I’ve felt over the past three years, and for all I cared, he could waste away to nothing.

Shortly after the Domino pizza delivery truck left, my phone rang. “Hello. Make it fast, my pizza’s getting cold.”

“Is this Lionel Serbousek?”

“That it is.”

“Lionel, this is Vicki Anderson.”

Neal’s mom. I closed the lid of the pizza, waiting silently.

“I’ll try to make this quick. I know your pizza’s getting cold.”

“That was just—”

“I know. It was a joke. Listen, Lion, I need to ask you a favor. A big favor. I’m calling about Neal.”

I gritted my teeth, waited.

“I know he came and saw you today.”

“Yeah.”

“Lionel, he’s dying.”

“Like my parents. My brother.”

“Slower,” she said. “Lion, I’ve never known what to say. I’m so embarrassed we haven’t contacted you. I couldn’t feel worse about what happened. I pray for you every night of my life. Neal’s father has set up a trust for you, but we’ve been afraid to tell you just because we didn’t know how to say it. We’ve just felt
so bad
. I know that’s awful—”

“I don’t need a trust,” I said. “I have everything I need. I’m fine.”

“Well, it’s there nevertheless. No one can touch it—including us.”

“Mrs. Anderson,” I said, and felt the heat rising in my chest. “Money isn’t going to bring my family back.”

“If money could have brought your family back, we’d have already done that,” she said. “It’s just all we have.”

“So what about Neal?” I asked, feeling the cold steel lock again around my heart.

“He needs you to forgive him.”

“Won’t happen. He killed my family.”

I heard Mrs. Anderson choke, then go silent. Then: “Lionel, he hasn’t lived with us for more than six months. He’s on the street. I think he’s using drugs. I can’t talk to him. He’s dying, Lionel. Please, if not for him, then for me. For his father.”

Until that moment I hadn’t the slightest inkling of the true power of my hate. The sorrow that rose in my chest for Mrs. Anderson was crushed by it. I said, “Mrs. Anderson, I’m sorry. But do you know what it’s been like inside me for the last three years? Do you know how many times I’ve watched my parents and my little brother get cut in two? Do you know how much I’ve missed them? Mrs. Anderson, if I thought I could spend fifteen minutes with my little brother starting at the moment of my death, I’d be gone tonight.”

Silence again. Then: “I’m sorry, Lionel. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

The pizza was ruined. It was still hot enough; but it tasted like hatred, and I ate only part of one piece before splattering it against the wall. I snatched my Speedo and a towel out of the bathroom and headed for the pool at Frost. A couple of years ago the school janitor asked me to regulate the chlorine and pH over one weekend, and I had a key made because I already knew that sometimes swimming is the only way to get
what is inside me out before it strangles me.

I flipped the switch for the underwater lights, casting the pool enclosure in that eerie green, and hit the water. I started with twenty-five-yard butterfly sprints, giving myself fifteen seconds between. I have no idea how many I swam, but my chest and triceps were molten steel when I pushed off and saw a body knife into the water beside me. I finished the lap and looked up to see Elaine. I waited the fifteen seconds and pushed off, switching to freestyle. We sprinted twenty-fives at least another half hour without speaking. I thought I could wait her out, but I should have known I could have sprinted all night and she’d still be there. Finally I stopped and hung on the edge at the deep end, gasping for air, still fueled by my wrath.

“Go ahead and leave,” I said finally. “I’m okay. I want to be alone.”

Elaine said, “Tough shit.”

I laid back and pushed off, backstroking a long, slow lap, cooling down, and stood in the shallow end. Elaine was waiting there for me. “I said I was okay,” I said. “I just want to be alone.”

“And I said, ‘Tough shit.’”

I pulled myself out of the water. “Elaine, get out of here. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Well, you’re gonna,” she said back, pulling herself out as well, and stood facing me. “I didn’t come here to listen to you cry.”

“Careful…”

She snorted. “What’re you gonna do, Lion? Beat me up? Like you did Neal Anderson. Or his mom.”

“Hey, don’t start,” I said, but she took a step forward. Elaine Ferral really is the toughest person I know.

“I’m already started.”

“Elaine, we go back a long way, but—”

“It’s not a question of how far we go back,” she said. “It’s a question of if we’ll go forward.”

“Is that what this comes down to?”

“We’ll see.”

I walked over to the long table behind the metal rail in front of the bleachers, grabbed my towel, and ran it over my hair and face. “Say what you have to say.”

“You treated Neal Anderson like shit today.”

“Neal Anderson
is
shit. What happened? That pussy call you up and tell you?”

She jerked the towel out of my hand. “It’s for sure no one could tell
you
anything. You’re the pussy, Lion. What would your dad say? I knew your dad, Lion, and he’d call game on this cheap bullshit in a second. And your mom—”

Almost involuntarily I lunged forward. “You leave my mom and dad out of this!” I screamed, and my voice reverberated like a handball across the high walls. “I’m warning you, Elaine.”

She took another step forward. “Wanna hit me, Lion? Go ahead. That do it for you? Who else do you need to hit? Let’s go find Nortie. He’s little. And weak. Maybe that’s what you need. But let’s start right here with me, Lion. Go ahead.”

My fist clenched, and my upper lip vibrated like a jackhammer. “I’m warning you…” and she punched me in the stomach so hard the wind blasted out of me like a released party balloon. “You double up your fist at me, asshole, you better be ready to use it. You make me sick, Lionel Serbousek. When your family got killed, your friends gathered around you like angels. We spent the last three years making sure nothing touched you, treating you like some kind of boy in a bubble or something. Bad-mouth Lionel Serbousek and you’ve got his friends in your face so fast you can’t breathe.”

“You can cancel your friendship out anytime,” I said, my breath returning, along with a rush of anguish that must have been down there for three years. “What the hell is the matter with you, Elaine? Neal Anderson killed my family!” I screamed through tears and snot.
“If I ever quit hating him, I—I—I’ll die right with them.” I dropped to the bleachers like a rock, dazed at what I had just heard myself say.

Elaine didn’t budge, but her voice softened slightly. “Lion, remember the night you and Walker and Jeff and I drank all those beers and you took us out on the ice up at the lake in your Jeepster? None of us knew the ice would hold—and it was four miles over icy two-lane roads to get there. You could have killed us. Easy. And anyone else on the road. You were drunk out of your mind. So were we. You could have
killed
us. Me and Walker and Jeff. Your best friends in the world. What if you’d killed us, Lion, and you’d lived?”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t….”

“No, but you could have. What you did was no less stupid than what Neal did. Only thing is, the universe caught him and it didn’t catch you. That’s the
only
difference.”

“It didn’t happen….”

“But it
could
have. Think about it, Lion. You’re an artist. You have an imagination. Think about it.”

“It didn’t….”

“
Think about it!
” she screamed. “
Think about it, Lion! Think about it!
” She flung the towel in my face and stalked to the bench, sobbing and pulling her jeans
on over her wet suit. At the door she turned, wiping her eyes fiercely. “You only get so long to be a shithead, Lion. Just so long to get decent again. Your time’s about up.”

It was early evening, and I putted along the edge of Riverfront Park in my Jeepster, watching the day people head for their cars as the night people took over. A drug deal here, a grizzly old man packing a raggedy sleeping bag on his back there. Groups huddled by the bridge and over by the bushes along the edge of the YMCA. It was my third night searching.

I knew better than to go into the park at night alone but was way past caring. I’m a big guy—a
tough
guy—and though I know a gang of thugs could take me out, I also know they’d get hurt doing it. Neal’s gaunt face had haunted me since Elaine stalked away from me; Mrs. Anderson’s pain over the phone had become real. And the thought of losing Elaine lay in my stomach like a sharp rock.

We hadn’t spoken since that night at the pool more than a week earlier, and I began to know the power of her friendship through the awful dread of losing it. I could either clean up my act or write Elaine Ferral off. It was the first time since my friends had created my
cocoon that I truly understood what could have happened without it.

And yet I couldn’t turn off what I felt.

I slammed the door to the Jeepster and walked through the entrance to the park. Suspicious eyes followed me, but I looked into the face of every person I met, hoping to find Neal. I wanted to believe I was doing this because I had come to my senses, but in reality I was learning the price of friendship.