Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories

  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.

  I searched more than an hour and was finally ready to leave and try again tomorrow night—I wouldn’t face Elaine again until I found Neal—when I saw a dim light between the slats of the wooden bridge. I walked to the edge and started down, not believing there was a chance….

  “Neal?”

  He looked up dreamily, eyes glazed. His mom was right about the drugs. The light from his flashlight reflected off the steel bridge beam, casting his face in a gauzy yellow haze. He said, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me. Lion.”

  He sat hard on the dirt, dropping his head to his hands, then gazed back to me. His words slurred. “Lion. I killed your mom and dad, man.”

  “Listen…”

  “And your little brother.”

  I said, “Yeah. Look, Neal, I’m not over this yet, but we need to talk.”

  “No, man, you were right—”

  “No, man, you were right.”

  “I was just gonna ski,” he said. “I just wanted to ski before my mom and dad—”

  “Pack your shit,” I said. “I’ll get the Jeepster. I was gonna give myself a day off school tomorrow anyway. Maybe you and me oughta go fishin’.”

  Telephone Man

  PREFACE

  TELEPHONE MAN

  Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom it is directed.

  A seventeen-year-old friend of mine, Justin Thomas, understands that truth as most adults in his life don’t. Following a summer league basketball game last year, Justin laughingly told his mother the player he’d been guarding called him a “dirty nigger” shortly after he had slapped the third shot into the bleachers. With African, Native American, Norwegian, German—and smatterings of Chinese and French—blood coursing through his veins, Justin could well be the United Nations poster boy.

  “What did you do?” his mom asked, a little worried about what he could do at six feet five inches, 235 pounds, and catlike reflexes, but Justin only smiled and said, “Just what I’d been doing. Get a guy talkin’ like that, you can wipe up the court with him.”

  Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom it is directed.

  Telephone Man, from Crazy Horse Electric Game, is a racist. He’s a racist because he has no tools to elevate his status in the world without putting others down, at least in his mind. He has been schooled by a fearful, insecure father to believe he is superior because of nothing more than skin color and place of birth. It is easy to imagine his ignorance was passed to him through generations.

  I have fears in writing a story about racism. In fact, there are a significant number of people who don’t understand the simpler truths about bigotry in the same way my friend Justin does and who don’t believe that basic lessons are best taught by reflecting the truth. Those people believe when I use the word nigger or spic or beaner or any other of a million slurs, I am condoning the use of those words. They think kids should not be exposed in print to what they are exposed in their lives.

  But I believe what I believe, and so I write my stories.

  TELEPHONE MAN

  If they think I don’t know they think I’m weird, they’re crazier than they think I am. I’m not crazy, though, I’m really not. And there’s nothin’ wrong with my nose, either, except for maybe it gets some pretty big zits on it. People just say that to make me mad. Mostly it’s the niggers. They’re the ones. Except sometimes it’s the white kids, too, and every once in awhile a spic or a Chinaman or one of them Japans, but I bet they get the idea from the niggers. Dad says they’re the worst.

  Dad says he’s sorry he had to send me to another nigger school, but it was the only one he could get me into after I had trouble at my regular school; that’s Oakland High, which is a nigger school, too. It wasn’t my fault, though. It was because everybody teased me, and then I’d get real mad and do things I don’t remember too good, like they said I tried to bash my face through the door to the boys’ rest room, and I don’t remember that at all. Except they must of been right, I have to admit, because when I started remembering things again, my face was all bloody and my nose was broken. There’s nothing wrong with my nose, though, except for maybe a few pimples. Anyway, next thing I knew they were telling my dad to send me to this special school. Only they didn’t call it that. They called it OMLC, and it’s a lot smaller than Oakland High; but it’s still a nigger school. They said I’d get “specialized attention” because there’s no more than twelve kids in a class, and that’s supposed to be good for kids who are “eccentric”—along with kids who should be in prison. “Eccentric” is what the teachers at Oakland High School call kids they think are crazy. They use words like that so people like me won’t know what they’re really saying, but I been hearing that word as long as I’ve been alive because it’s what everybody calls my dad. My dad is a fencer—you know, like he teaches people to sword fight—and he’s a great guy, even if a lot of people call him Zorro. I don’t know why they call him that. He never wears black clothes, and he’s not a spic, which the real Zorro was. But he could sure carve a Z in you quick enough. He wouldn’t, though, because his name’s Carl, so it would probably be a C.

  There’s a few people I’d like him to carve something in, which are mostly the niggers and other colors of people that give me a hard time about my nose—which there’s nothing wrong with
, I think I already said—or my telephone equipment, which is the most important thing I have. Around this school they call me Telephone Man, which is one of the few things I like, even though I know they think I’m a dork for wearing telephone equipment strapped to my hip. But without it, I feel like how the Duke must feel when they make him check his six-shooter at the saloon door. I feel bare naked. I heard the Duke say that.

  I have a deal with André, the guy who runs this place. He’s a nigger, but he’s not so bad because he makes deals. When I first got here, I went right into his office, real toughlike, because I saw through the outside window on my way in what color he was and I knew you have to shoot first and ask questions later. So I walk straight in there with my dad right behind me, looking good in his white fencer’s suit and his mask under his arm, and I walk right up to that André—only I don’t know that’s his name yet—and I say, “I don’t want to go here.”

  He looks at me and sort of smiles and says, “So why are you here?” and I says, “Because I have to be.”

  He looks some more and shakes his head real slow and smiles and says, “No, you don’t. You don’t have to be anywhere,” and I figure he probably don’t know the truth because he ain’t white, but already I like the way he’s thinking except I can’t think of anything to say back, so I turn around and look at my dad.

  My dad says, “Good morning, sir, I’m Carl Simpson. This is my son. He’s Jack. I apologize for his rudeness.” My dad says lots of things about niggers behind their back, but when he’s talking right to them, like to their face, he acts like there’s nothing wrong with them. He says that’s the only way to get by if you’re a man of peace like he is. So anyway, my dad just comes right out and tells old André I’m being rude when all I was doing really was getting the jump on him. But André says, “That’s quite all right. I like a man who speaks his mind,” which confuses me because that sort of puts the nigger on my side and Dad on the other side, and that’s not usually how it is, and I’m thinking maybe this André got the jump on me while I wasn’t looking.