Ring Game (36 page)

The only other person in the gym was a guy doing bench presses. Flo paid no particular attention to him, except to note that he was big and black. She was thinking more about the way she had felt in the locker room, imagining Bigg on the other side of the glass, there but not there, real but not real, like a creature watching her from another dimension. It reminded her of being a little girl, of the excitement she had felt undressing alone in her room at night, wondering if God was peeking.

Chuckles stared at the woman with the snarled hair and rumpled, dirty-looking gray sweats. He wasn’t sure. She was about the right size, but she looked different when she wasn’t running and screaming and leaping and dressed in gold snakeskin and lime green pumps. She was barefooted. If he could get a closer look, maybe he’d recognize her feet. He searched for an excuse to walk past her, spotted a drinking fountain, and headed for it. She was on the floor doing a hurdler’s stretch, her face to the mat as he walked by. The feet looked right—long and slim, about a size seven, maroon polish on the nails. Chuckles drank a few ounces of water, then made a second pass. This time she looked up, right into his face, showing him those golden eyes.

“S’app’n,” Chuckles rumbled, moving quickly past. It was her all right, but what was that
smell
? It reminded him of something out of his past, something sour and sweet and overwhelming. He sat down on his bench and took a deep breath, inhaling the gaseous fragments that had clung to him in passing, and remembered. The smell came from years ago, from his old apartment in St. Paul, across the alley from a Vietnamese restaurant. That was it. The Vietnamese restaurant’s dumpster in August: fish sauce and lemongrass, rotting fruit and maggoty meat. He raised his eyes. Flowrean was on her feet, staring at him. What was that around her neck? It looked like a bunch of dead fish.

Chuckles smiled and gave her a little wave. Did she remember him?

She turned away and began a set of calf stretches, looking back over her shoulder every few seconds, as if she thought he might sneak up on her. Chuckles decided to continue doing his bench presses, give her time to get used to him. He added a pair of ten-pound plates to the bar, bringing the weight up to 245, and managed to squeeze out eight reps. When he sat up, she was gone. No. She was at the other end of the gym talking to the guy at the front counter. They both looked at him. Chuckles returned a friendly smile. The counter man smiled back, but Flowrean looked away.

Chuckles loaded another twenty pounds onto the bar and lay down on the bench. He stared up at the knurled steel, his fingers laced across his chest, thinking about two things. He was imagining Flowrean watching him, and he hoped he could still handle that much weight. Back at Stillwater, two sixty-five would not have presented a problem, but that was a year ago. He’d lost a lot of muscle tone since then. Eaten a lot of longjohns.

“Want a spot?”

Chuckles rolled his eyes up to look at the man standing behind him. It was the counter guy.

“My name’s Bigg.”

“You the owner, huh?”

“Yup. I haven’t seen you here before. You just join?”

“Last night. My name’s Chuckles. Your man with the sore foot sign me up.”

“That would be Beaut, my assistant manager.” Bigg checked the plates, snugging them up against the collar. “You look like you could handle more than this,” he said. He added a five-pound plate to each end of the bar. “There you go.”

“I don’t know,” Chuckles said.

“Sure you do,” Bigg said. “So, you know Flowrean?” He inclined his head toward the squat rack, where she was performing a set of slow, deep, warm-up squats with the empty bar.

“We met,” Chuckles said.

“Yeah, that’s what she says.”

“I didn’t think she’d remember. What’s she got ’round her neck?”

“Those are her pet goldfish. They give her that little extra something, you know?”

“Uh huh. She got a boyfriend?”

“Flo?” Bigg laughed. “You gonna do your set or not?”

Chuckles grasped the bar. “Sure,” he said. He lifted the weight off the rack and, not giving himself time to think, lowered it to his chest, then heaved, the small of his back coming up off the bench, his chest bunching, his arms slowly straightening. At one point the bar stopped its ascent and began to tip to the left. Bigg’s hands appeared, lightening the bar by a pound or two, just enough to let Chuckles complete the lift.

“Again,” Bigg said.

“I dunno.” Chuckles was breathing hard.

“Go for it.”

Chuckles took a breath and lowered the barbell. This time, Bigg kept his hands cupped under the bar the whole way. Chuckles stopped it at his chest, then pushed. The bar didn’t move. He focused his mind and pushed harder, to no avail. Bigg’s hands were gripping the bar, but they weren’t helping.

“Hey,” Chuckles gasped. “Come on, man.”

“You need a little more lift?” Bigg asked, pulling up on the barbell. It came up an inch, then stopped again. “Or maybe you don’t need my help.” Bigg leaned on the bar, pressing it down into Chuckles’s ribcage. Chuckles’s arms quivered with effort, fighting the increased weight.

Bigg said, “Flowrean, she likes to be left alone, you know? She comes here, she doesn’t want to be bothered. You bother her. You hear?”

Chuckles gave up a nod. Bigg eased up, giving Chuckles room to take a breath. “We’ve got three rules here at Bigg Bodies. You rack your weights. You pay your dues on time. And you stay the fuck away from Flowrean. Understand?”

Chuckles nodded. He understood. This wasn’t so different from prison after all.

With no apparent effort, Bigg lifted the loaded barbell off Chuckles’s chest and racked it. “Any time you need a spot, you just give a wave.” He gave Chuckles a friendly grin, and walked away.

Chuckles turned his head and looked over at Flowrean doing her slow squats, smiling to herself, her eyes fixed on someplace far away. Sooner or later, he thought, all things must come to pass. One of the advantages to being an immortal was that whether they happened sooner, or later, he would be there.

Polly stood beside the Range Rover watching, her arms crossed, as Rupe lifted the last suitcase into the back and closed the tailgate. Rupe smiled at her and rubbed his hands together. Polly frowned and looked away. She was still sleepy, and angry about being forced to skip her morning café au lait.

“What’s the matter, love?” he asked.

“I’m tired, and I want my coffee.”

“It’s a beautiful day.” Rupe gestured skyward.

“I’m worried. I’ve got a bad feeling. What does Benjy know about running the church? He’s been working full time on Stonecrop. What if something comes up?”

“The Charleses will be here to help him.”

“That worries me, too.” She yawned. “Chip’s been acting strange.”

“Chuckles will keep an eye on Chip.”

“He’s been acting weird, too, ever since that woman stuck her heel in his thigh.”

“They’ll be fine, love. They can watch each other. And Sandra will help Benjy with the day-to-day details—she knows the computer system inside and out. Everything will be fine.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“You must let go of your doubts, my love.” He held his hands out, palms up. “Give them to me.”

“Jesus Christ, Rupe, give it a rest, would you? This isn’t a goddamn event.”

Rupe pushed his hands closer to her. “Give them to me.”

Polly sighed. She knew he wouldn’t quit until she did as he asked. She reached out her own hands and let him fold them into his own, let him draw her close.

“Give it all to me,” he said again. Polly felt the tendrils of energy reaching out to her, felt the heat of his will. For a few seconds, she resisted, holding back, clinging to the solid comfort of her doubts and fears, but then, as if her psychic arteries had suddenly opened, she felt a stream of energy gush out through her palms into her husband. It lasted less than one second. Her knees buckled. She would have fallen if Rupe had not caught her.

“Are you all right?” she heard him ask.

She nodded shakily. The surface of the parking lot looked bright, the pebbles standing out in painfully sharp focus.

“That was a big one,” Rupe said.

Polly took a breath and looked around, reorienting herself. They were leaving for Stonecrop. Going away for four weeks. She had been worried about leaving the business in the hands of the Faithful. What was there to worry about?

She couldn’t remember. And she didn’t need that café au lait anymore—she felt strong and alert, energetic enough to jog the seventy miles to Rochester.

She said, “I don’t know how the hell you do that.”

Rupe smiled. “Neither do I,” he said. He looked at his watch. “We had better go. We’re supposed to be in Rochester by ten. Dr. Bell was quite clear on that point.”

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

—Satchel Paige

“I
T’S A LITTLE TIGHT,”
Carmen said.

Sophie picked up Carmen’s Marlboros from the night-stand and shook one loose. “I told you it would be.”

“Maybe it’s supposed to be tight.”

“I don’t think so. That roll you’ve got going … no, I really don’t think so.”

Carmen looked down at her bare midriff, where the waistband of the skirt was buried in her flesh. She raised her arms and sucked in her stomach, turned her right hip toward the mirror. “That looks pretty good.”

“I’d like to see you hold that pose for the whole ceremony. Have you got a light?”

“There’s a lighter in my purse. What am I gonna do?”

Sophie shrugged. “We could make you a sash. You know, like a beauty queen.” She found the lighter and lit the cigarette. She’d been off them for three months, but marrying off her only daughter, that was no time to quit. She’d been bumming them off Carmen for the past week. “This is a nice lighter,” she said.

“Hy gave it to me. It’s a Dunhill.”

“It looks expensive.”

“Three hundred dollars.”

Sophie put the lighter back in Carmen’s purse. “That would buy a lot of matches.”

Carmen tugged the waistband down an inch, revealing a red stripe where it had dug into her stomach. “You don’t think we could let it out in back a little?”

Sophie breathed smoke out through her nose. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Let’s have a look.”

Carmen swished over to her mother and presented her derriere. Sophie fixed the cigarette between her lips and examined the seam that began at the small of Carmen’s back. “There’s no extra material back there. I don’t see how we could let it out. Unless you want to walk around with your butt hanging out.”

“Better than this thing digging into my belly.”

“I suppose we could open up the seam, then cover it up with something.”

“Like what?” Carmen asked.

Sophie frowned, then smiled. “How about a nice big bow?”

After their little talk, the long telomere guy had simply walked out of the gym without another word. Bigg figured he wouldn’t be back, and that was what he told Flowrean.

“I guess I owe you,” she said, looking not at all happy about it.

“Just part of our complete membership services package.”

Flowrean returned to her workout. She must’ve done eighteen sets of squats, going all the way up to three fifty-five for her heaviest lift, then coming back down, a plate at a time, working as hard, in the end, to lift the empty bar as she had at three fifty-five. Bigg loved that about Flowrean. She held nothing back. Every set was done to failure, even if she had to repeat a lift thirty or forty times. Two solid hours of brutal lower body work, as much as Bigg himself had done back in his powerlifting days.

Flowrean had gone from the squat rack to the vertical leg press, then on to leg extensions, curls, and three varieties of calf raises, attacking each new exercise with undiminished intensity, leaving each machine pooled with perspiration. At one point, Bigg could stand it no longer and had wiped down the leg extension machine. Flowrean seemed not to take offense—if she even noticed.

She was on the mats now, finishing up her stretching routine, sweat dripping from the tip of her nose, contorting her body in ways that had Bigg adjusting his briefs every thirty seconds. When she finally gave it up and headed into the locker room, Bigg hurried into his office, locked the door, turned off the light, and opened the door to his viewing chamber.

This time, he was not disappointed.

Flowrean had positioned herself directly in front of the mirror. As Bigg watched, she slowly peeled her sodden top up over her head and dropped it on the floor. Her upper body glistened, striped with rivulets of perspiration. Bigg put his face close to the glass, watching one descending droplet, then another. For several seconds she stood there, her breasts rising and falling with each breath, eyes on her reflection, one hand stroking her belly, her index finger making slow circles around her navel. With her other hand, she pushed her sweatpants down past her hips, let them fall around her ankles. Her legs were pumped and flushed. She stepped out of her puddled sweats and turned slowly around, flexing and relaxing her calves, thighs, glutes. Bigg pressed his face to the glass, breathing heavily as Flowrean Peeche showed him, in narcissistic detail, every square centimeter of her flesh.

When she came out of the locker room, Bigg was waiting at the front counter.

“Hey, Flo? You got a second?”

Refusing to meet his eyes, she headed out the door. He caught up with her outside as she was unlocking her car.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

“I’m kind of busy,” she said, opening the door to put it between them. She was still turned on from her performance in the locker room. Being this close to Bigg, having a conversation, felt weird and wrong, as if he had stepped inside of her body.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

Bigg wasn’t acting like his usual self. He seemed uncomfortable and embarrassed. Flo waited, suddenly curious.

“I was wondering … I have to go to a wedding tonight,” He held up a slightly crumpled invitation and gave her a crooked smile. “I was wondering if you’d like to go. With me.”