Brubaker was in the garage, working out. He began with bench presses, laying on the steel bench with its padding and black leatherette cover. Feet flat on the floor, he pushed up, surprised by the speed and ease at which the bar, fifty pounds in all; went up.
He’d been at it a while. Bru did arm curls with the ten-pound dumb-bell, he did his leg lifts, then used the hand-squeezers. Each session it was a different sequence.
The day before; he only did twelve overhead lifts, but that was because he left them until the end of the session.
Overhead lifts with fifty pounds. He stood there with the bar at his waist, and cleared his mind. He did ten in about forty seconds or a minute, and rested. Bar at his waist, he let the weight stretch out those muscles. Then he managed ten more, after a very short rest at shoulder level. Then he managed to squeeze out another six.
A good day. By doing twelve different exercises every day, he figured to be in pretty good shape when spring rolled around.
He needed a new hobby. Bru had flown model airplanes, radio control, for about seventeen years. He simply got bored with it. After designing more than fifty planes, some big, some small, some duds and some real masterpieces; the fact was that you really couldn’t compete with nine-year old Chinese kids making, ‘almost ready to fly,’ planes for less money. The government over there subsidized military aviation engineers to design some pretty good toys.
You just couldn’t compete. It took hundreds of hours to build the things. That’s why he was thinking about archery lately.
It was something different.
That’s why he was taking a lot of photos with a hundred-dollar digital camera. He could at least afford to put the pictures on the hard drive. A quick calculation revealed to the inquisitive Bru, that he had saved a couple of thousand dollars—money he just didn’t have—on developing and printing, film and battery costs.
With a digital camera, you could post pictures by going online. He tried it a couple of times at his mom’s house. This was something he hadn’t done before, and it was a new skill to learn. Brubaker had been on a kind of personal ‘continuous improvement program,’ for over twenty years. Not his fault if he wasn’t getting nowhere.
All he really needed was a job, a girlfriend, and a home.
He didn’t design a system gone mad, and he wasn’t consulted in the makeup of a sick society. Digging out from a hole in the ground was tough. Climbing back up out of the gutter; dragging yourself up by the boot-socks; was a long and labourious process.
While most people who hit rock bottom seemed to find their way eventually, he despaired sometimes.
And yet he didn’t know anyone who had a stronger will.
If he couldn’t do it…who could?
Who could?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Paddling up the Shashawanaga…