Ring Game (31 page)

Buck said, “What the hell do you call that?” He had become surly during his number-five martini.

“John Collins,” Hyatt said.

“
Tom
Collins,” Buck corrected, adding, “you fucking idiot.”

That made Hyatt sit back, startled. Buck laughed, “
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
,” an extended version of his usual outburst. Saying the word “fuck” out loud always made him a little giddy, like a bottle of champagne uncorked.

“Actually,” Hyatt said, looking hurt, “it’s a
John
Collins. They make it with ginger ale.” He bent over the drink and sipped through the straw.

Buck blinked, not sure what to do with that bit of information. “How the
fuck
did you know to find me here?”

Hyatt tipped his head, looking amused and puzzled. He said, “When I called you this morning, you said I could meet you here.”

“Oh.” He watched Hyatt eat his cherry, the bright red orb leaving blue-green afterimages on his retinas. “Where the
fuck
is Maraschino, anyway?” The problem with the “f” word was that it lost power as fast as a sputtering party balloon.

“It’s in California,” Hyatt said. He worked the cherry stem over to the corner of his mouth. “So listen, Buck, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. What I wanted to ask you is—man to man—when you marry us, me and Carmen, is there something you can do? Forget to file some papers, or say the wrong words during the ceremony, you know, so that we aren’t really legally married?”

Buck was offended. “I won’t screw it up,” he said, trading in the “f” word for its more acceptable alternative.

“You don’t understand. I mean, what would it
take
for you to screw it up? Could you—for instance, if you forget to say ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’? Would the marriage be illegal then?”

Buck gaped. Was this guy for real?

“You don’t want to get married?” he asked, staring at the cherry stem sticking out from between Hy’s lips.

“I want to
get
married,” Hyatt said. “I just don’t want to
be
married.”

Raise or fold.

—Crow’s rules

S
OPHIE LIT ONE OF
her long brown cigarettes and watched her daughter opening envelopes, the last of the RSVPs before they had to let the caterer know how many guests to expect. As each envelope revealed its contents, she could see by the expression on Carmen’s face whether it was a yes or a regrets.

Mostly, the returns had been running in favor of regrets, much to Sophie’s relief.

They had mailed nearly five hundred invitations. Three dozen to Sophie’s friends and relatives, half as many to Axel’s acquaintances, including his bitchy sister in California, another thirty-four to high school friends of Carmen’s, and the remaining four hundred to a list provided by Hyatt Hilton. Sophie had balked when Hyatt had presented his original list, which had contained close to six hundred names.

“I didn’t know you had so many friends,” Sophie had remarked.

“Don’t worry,” he had told her, “most of them won’t be able to come. We probably won’t have to feed more than a couple hundred.”

“Two
hundred
? There’s no way Axel will pay for that!”

Hyatt had agreed to cut back, but they had still ended up with four hundred names for Hyatt’s side of the aisle.

Later, while addressing the envelopes, she noticed that Hyatt had invited the governor, both Minnesota senators, a horde of local television and radio personalities, and Conrad Hilton who, she thought, had been dead for years. Hyatt had also invited the entire Minnesota Twins baseball team and the CEOs of 3M, General Mills, Cargill, Dayton Hudson, and Honeywell. She almost decided to cull the list herself without saying anything to Hyatt, but the possibility, however slim, that Hyatt actually
knew
some of those people seduced her into completing her task. The idea of the governor coming to her daughter’s wedding, no matter how unlikely, made the cost and effort worthwhile.

Thus far, the only public figure to have accepted the invitation was Billy Budd, a pro wrestler who was familiar to TV viewers as the spokesperson for Wally Wenger’s Truck Country, a Roseville GMC dealer. Wally Wenger himself had declined. Most of Hyatt’s other invitees had simply not responded.

“How many do we have so far?” Sophie asked.

Carmen consulted a sheet of paper. “About eighty all together. Hy’s going to be real disappointed.”

“It’ll be big enough. There were only about eighteen people at mine.”

“Yeah, and look what happened.”

“The wedding had nothing to do with it. Your father turned out to be a jerk.”

“That won’t happen with Hy.” She laughed. “He’s a jerk already.”

“That’s not funny. Axel’s spending a fortune on this.”

“Axel has money.”

“You’re even getting a limousine. I don’t know why you need a limousine.”

“Trust me, Mom. We need the limo.”

Beaut Miller felt like a six-foot-four-inch hard-on, pumped from his bulging traps to the tip of his half-hard salami, busting out of his black AC/DC T-shirt. A month ago, the shirt had fit him, but that morning, before he’d even started his routine, the shirt had split down the back and the armholes had parted at the seams. He loved it. A hard-on so hard it was busting out of its skin.

Beaut understood that pumping anabolic steroids into his body might have certain undesirable side effects, including liver damage, blood clotting, hypertension, swollen breast tissue, reduced sperm count and shrinkage of the testicles and, most obviously, severe acne. The acne was the only part of it that bothered him, and that would go away. The positive effects from the testosterone—increased strength and endurance, increased muscular hypertrophy, faster recovery time, increased aggressiveness, and enhanced sex drive—were so immediate and profound, why worry about things he could not see?

Recently, he had added a new exercise to his routine. He called it “slamming.” Grasping a fifty-pound dumbbell in each hand, he swung his arms up over his head and slammed the dumbbells together, producing a loud clang. He then brought the dumbbells down, clanged them again in front of his thighs, and repeated the motion until he could no longer lift them, or until one of the weights went sailing off across the room. He had done as many as twenty-four of them in one set. The exercise gave him an awesome pump, and the feeling of the crashing iron, felt from his wrists to his flared lats, was orgasmic. Afterward, he could almost feel his quivering arms growing.

Because of the occasionally airborne dumbbells, slams could be performed only when Bigg was not on the premises. Beaut liked to do them first thing in the morning, before Bigg showed up. It was a good way to wake up the pencilnecks. He liked the way they watched him, giving him plenty of room. Even the serious bodybuilders found something to do on the far side of the gym when Beaut was slamming. Lately, a lot of them had been waiting till afternoon to visit the gym. This morning, Beaut had the place to himself.

He was on his second set of slams when Joe Crow walked into the gym.

The prudent course of action, Crow knew, would be to stay as far as possible from the pumped-up gym rat with the shredded shirt and the flailing dumbbells. Looking around, he noticed that, except for Beaut, Bigg Bodies was unpopulated—unusual for 7:30
A.M.
on a weekday morning. It made him doubly uncomfortable to be around Beaut with no witnesses. While Crow had been recovering from his beating, Beaut had continued to grow at an astonishing rate. He had stretch marks across his chest and shoulders, his back was spattered with pimples, his arms were ropy with enlarged veins, and the way he was slamming those dumbbells together was insane. And dangerous.

Crow decided to add another rule to his ever growing list:
Avoid insane, dangerous bodybuilders.

On the other hand, Crow had come to the gym for his first workout in a week. It just wouldn’t feel right to let Beaut scare him off. He had a right to be there, and he needed to get back into his routine. That was the key to getting in shape: no excuses. He waited until Beaut finished his set, then walked over to the rack and picked up a pair of fifteen-pound dumbbells. Beaut, slick with perspiration, gasping for breath, glared red-faced from the other end of the twenty-foot-long rack. Crow turned his back, put Beaut out of his mind, and began a series of slow laternal raises to warm up his shoulders.

Something about the way Crow held his dumbbells had an intensely irritating effect on Beaut. Maybe it was the slow, deliberate way he performed his lifts. Or that he had turned away, showing Beaut his back.

Beaut aimed his eyes at Crow’s neck. Laser vision. If he stared hard enough, he might produce a puff of smoke. Set the son-of-a-bitch’s hair on fire.

Crow continued his exercise, showing no signs of discomfort. Beaut kept his eyes focused, methodically flexing his traps, his lats, and his biceps. A few more threads parted on the left sleeve of his shirt. Whatever uncertainties Little Leslie might have been feeling were lost in the soup of steroids and adrenaline flooding his arteries.

Crow finished his set and replaced the dumbbells. He looked at Beaut, then turned away as if there had been nothing for him to see and picked up a pair of sixties. Beaut stood up and lumbered past him, his swollen arms held well out from his body in the official bodybuilder’s swagger. He let his left arm brush against Crow, knocking him aside.

Crow’s hip slammed into the dumbbell rack, bringing a surprised curse from his throat.

Beaut stopped and swung his shoulders toward him. “What did you say?” he demanded.

Crow stood up in the narrow space between the rack and Beaut, still gripping the dumbbells. Beaut looked down into Crow’s impassive face, inches away. A droplet of sweat fell from the pimple at the tip of Beaut’s nose, leaving a dark streak on Crow’s T-shirt. Beaut imagined what would happen if
he
tried to put on a shirt that size. It would disintegrate into cotton dust. He lifted his right hand and pressed his palm against Crow’s chest, then slowly closed his hand, gathering a fist full of cotton.

“What did you say to me?” he said again.

Arling Biggie had been hanging around bodybuilders and gym rats for most of his adult life. He’d been performing seven-hundred-pound squats back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was no more than an Austrian rumor, and he had opened Bigg Bodies years before the days of spandex and Nautilus and chrome-plated barbells. He had, he felt, a unique understanding of the subrace that looked upon each new hypertrophied muscle fiber as another riser on the stairway to heaven.

He was starting to worry about his assistant manager. Since Beaut had taken over the morning shift, the number of members signing in before noon had declined precipitously. In time, he knew, this would be reflected by a decline in membership renewals. Whatever his ’roided-out assistant manager was doing to scare people off, it would have to stop.

Bigg could see, the moment he stepped through the front door into the gym, that Beaut was about to erupt. He had seen his share of ’roid rages. He had experienced them himself, back in his competition days.

Being on a steroid cycle, he recalled, was to be an angry god in human guise. To walk the streets among mere mortals, holding back the power, filled with joy and fury.

Holding it in for days or weeks. Seeing every slight, real or imagined, as a personal insult to one’s dignity. That was the hardest part. Holding it in when challenged by a rude waiter, or when cut off on the freeway, or when some pencilneck wanted to work in between sets. Thinking about calling up the power, but doing nothing. It took both iron discipline and strength of character, two qualities lacking in Beaut Miller.

Bigg also remembered what it felt like to let go, to give in to the wrath and damn the consequences, a feeling of orgasmic intensity. He could see it happening for Beaut. He almost felt sorry for Joe Crow, who appeared to be the focus of Beaut’s swelling rage, but not sorry enough to do anything about it. In fact, he thought, he might just enjoy it.

Joe Crow did not want to get hurt again. His feelings on the matter were quite definite. At this point, with the memory of his last beating painfully fresh in his mind, he would have done almost anything to avoid it—confess to crimes he had not committed, pay extortion money, run like a scared rabbit—whatever it took to remain pain-free. But in this situation, no words or promises, not even out-and-out groveling, would blunt Beaut’s rage.

Only one course of action suggested itself. Crow opened his hands and let the two sixty-pound dumbbells fall toward Beaut’s size-twelve Nikes.

Arling Biggie did not see Crow release the dumbbells, but he heard a soft snap and, simultaneously, the familiar thud of iron striking the rubber mat. Beaut’s mouth fell open. He folded at the waist and took a clumsy step back, letting go of Crow’s shirt. Crow leapt quickly aside. Beaut seemed to recover, starting toward Crow, but as he took his first step he collapsed with a groan and lay on the mat, clutching his right foot. The entire incident took no more than two seconds.

Bigg sighed and shook his head. He’d liked to have seen Crow take the worst of it, but this was not all bad. Beaut had needed taking down, too. One thing Bigg had learned in his forty-eight years, you take what you can get. He walked over to Beaut, a faint smile on his lips, and asked him if he was all right.

Beaut said, through gritted teeth, “Fuck you.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Bigg.

Crow had backed a few yards away. He was breathing heavily, keeping his eyes on Beaut, his body tensed.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Bigg said. “I think you made your point.”

Crow said, “Was that your idea?”

“Me? Hell no. Beaut’s his own man, Crow.”

“Yeah, right.”

Bigg shrugged. Why should he care what Crow thought? Squatting beside Beaut, he asked him again if he was all right. “You gonna be able to walk, you think?”

Beaut tried to put weight on his foot and gasped.

“I believe you might have a fracture there, old buddy.”