Early Autumn (12 page)

“Watch which muscles move,” I said to Paul, “that way you learn which exercise does what for you.” I pressed the bar up, let it down, pressed it up. I breathed out each time. I did ten repetitions and set the bar back on the rack. A faint sweat had started on my forehead. Above us in the maple tree a grosbeak with a rose-colored breast fluttered in and sat. I did another set. The sweat began to film on my chest. The mild breeze cooled it.

Paul said, “How much can you lift?”

I said, “I don’t know exactly. It’s sort of a good idea not to worry about that You do better to exercise with what you can handle and not be looking to see who can lift more and who can’t and how much you can lift. I can lift more than this.”

“How much is that?”

“Two hundred forty-five pounds.”

“Does Hawk lift weights?”

“Some.”

“Can he lift as much as you?”

“Probably.”

I did a third set. When I got through I was puffing a little, and the sweat was trickling down my chest

“Now we do some curls,” I said. I showed him how. We couldn’t find a dumbbell light enough for him to curl with one hand, so he used both hands on one dumbbell.

After two hours Paul sat on the weight bench with his head hanging, forearms on his thighs, puffing as if he’d run a long way. I sat beside him. We had finished the weights. I handed Paul the canteen. He
drank a little and handed it back to me. I drank and hung it back up.

“How you feel?” I said.

Paul just shook his head without looking up.

“That good, huh? Well, you’ll be stiff tomorrow. Come on. We’ll play with the bags a little.”

“I don’t want to do any more.”

“I know, but another half hour and you’ll have done it all. This will be fun. We won’t have to work hard.”

“Why don’t you just let me alone?”

I sat back down beside him. “Because everybody has left you alone all your life and you are, now, as a result, in a mess. I’m going to get you out of it.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I mean you don’t have anything to care about. You don’t have anything to be proud of. You don’t have anything to know. You are almost completely neutral because nobody took the time to teach you or show you and because what you saw of the people who brought you up didn’t offer anything you wanted to copy.”

“It’s not my fault.”

“No, not yet But if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault. You’re old enough now to start becoming a person. And you’re old enough now so that you’ll have to start taking some kind of responsibility for your life. And I’m going to help you.”

“What’s lifting weights got to do with that stuff?”

“What you’re good at is less important than being good at something. You got nothing. You care about nothing. So I’m going to have you be strong, be in shape, be able to run ten miles, and be able to lift more than you weigh and be able to box. I’m going
to have you know how to build and cook and to work hard and to push yourself and control yourself. Maybe we can get to reading and looking at art and listening to something besides situation comedies later on. But right now I’m working on your body because it’s easier to start there.”

“So what,” Paul said. “In a little while I’m going back. What difference does it make?”

I looked at him, white and narrow and cramped, almost birdlike, with his shoulders hunched and his head down. He needed a haircut. He had hangnails.
What an unlovely little bastard
.

“That’s probably so,” I said. “And that’s why, kid, before you go back, you are going to have to get autonomous.”

“Huh?”

“Autonomous. Dependent on yourself. Not influenced unduly by things outside yourself. You’re not old enough. It’s too early to ask a kid like you to be autonomous. But you got no choice. Your parents are no help to you. If anything, they hurt. You can’t depend on them. They got you to where you are. They won’t get better. You have to.”

His shoulders started to shake.

“You have to, kid,” I said.

He was crying.

“We can do that. You can get some pride, some things you like about yourself. I can help you. We can.”

He cried with his head down and his shoulders hunched and the slight sweat drying on his knobby shoulders. I sat beside him without anything else to say. I didn’t touch him. “Crying’s okay,” I said. “I do it sometimes.”

In about five minutes he stopped crying. I stood
up. There were two pairs of speed gloves on top of the light bag strike board. I picked them up and offered one pair to Paul.

“Come on,” I said. “Time to hit the bag.”

He kept his head down.

“Come on, kid,” I said. “You only got up to go. Let me show you how to punch.”

Without looking up he took the gloves.

We were digging the last hole for the foundation tubes. It was hot, the going was slow through rocks and the usual root web. I was working with a mattock and Paul had a shovel. We also had use for an ax, a crowbar, and a long-handled branch cutter, which we used on some of the roots.

Paul was dressed like I was: jeans and work boots. Mine were bigger. The sweat shone on his thin body as he dug at the dirt I loosened.

“What are these holes for again?” he said.

“See the big round cardboard tubes over there? We put them in these holes and get them level and fill them with reinforced concrete. Then we put a sill on them and the cabin rests on them. It’s easier than digging a cellar hole, though a cellar’s better.”

“Why?” He dug the shovel blade into the dirt and picked it up. He was holding the shovel too far up the handle and the dirt flipped as he pried it up and most of it fell back in the hole.

“Cellar gives you place for a furnace, makes the floors warmer, gives you storage. This way the house sits above ground. Colder in the winter. But a lot less trouble.”

Paul shifted his grip a little on the shovel and took
another stab at the dirt. He got most of it this time. “Don’t they have machines to do this?”

“Yes.” I swung the mattock again. It bit into the soil pleasingly. We were getting down a layer, where the roots and rocks weren’t a problem. “But there’s no satisfaction in it. Get a gasoline post-hole digger and rattle away at this like a guy making radiators. Gas fumes, noise. No sense that you’re doing it.”

“I should think it would be easier.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. I swung the mattock again, the wide blade buried in the earth to the haft. I levered it forward and the earth spilled loose. Paul shoveled it out. He still held the shovel too high on the handle and he still moved too tentatively. But he cleared the hole.

“We’ll use some power tools later on. Circular saws, that sort of stuff. But I wanted to start with our backs.”

Paul looked at me as if I were strange and made a silent gesture with his mouth.

“It’s not crazy,” I said. “We’re not doing this just to get it done.”

He shrugged, leaning on the shovel.

“We do it to get the pleasure of making something. Otherwise we could hire someone. That would be the easiest way of all.”

“But this is cheaper,” Paul said.

“Yeah, we save money. But that’s just a point that keeps it from being a hobby, like making ships in a bottle. Only when love and need are one, you know?”

“What’s that mean?” he said.

“It’s a poem, I’ll let you read it after supper.”

We finished the last hole and set the last tube into it. We drove reinforcing rods into the ground in each tube and then backfilled the holes around the tubes. I
went around with a mason’s level and got each tube upright and Paul then shoveled the earth in around it while I kept adjusting it to level. It took us the rest of the afternoon. When the last one was leveled and packed I said, “Okay, time to quit.”

It was still warm and the sun was still well up in the western sky when I get a beer from the refrigerator and a Coke for Paul.

“Can I have a beer?” he said.

“Sure.” I put the Coke back and got a beer.

We sat in the camp chairs with the sweat drying on our backs in the warm breeze. When the sun went down it would get cold, but now it was still the yellow-green spring of the almost deserted forest, and no human sounds but the ones we made.

“In the summer,” I said, “it’s much noisier. The other cabins open up and there’s always people sounds.”

“You like it up here?”

“Not really,” I said. “Not for long. I like cities. I like to look at people and buildings.”

“Aren’t trees and stuff prettier?”

“I don’t know. I like artifacts, things people make. I like architecture. When I go to Chicago I like to look at the buildings. It’s like a history of American architecture.”

Paul shrugged.

“You ever seen the Chrysler Building in New York?” I said. “Or the Woolworth Building downtown?”

“I never been to New York.”

“Well, we’ll go sometime,” I said.

One squirrel chased another up one side of a tree and down the other and across a patch of open ground and up another tree.

“Red squirrel,” I said. “Usually you see gray ones.”

“What’s the difference?” Paul said.

“Aside from color, gray ones are bigger,” I said.

Paul was silent. Somewhere on the lake a fish broke. A monarch butterfly bobbed toward us and settled on the barrel of the shotgun that leaned against the steps to the cabin.

Paul said, “I been thinking of that stuff you said that time, about being, ah, you know, about not depending on other people.”

“Autonomous,” I said.

“Well, what’s that got to do with building houses and lifting weights? I mean, I know what you said, but…” He shrugged.

“Well, in part,” I said, “it’s what I can teach you. I can’t teach you to write poetry or play the piano or paint or do differential equations.”

I finished the beer and opened another one. Paul still sipped his. We were drinking Heinekens in dark green cans. I couldn’t get Amstel, and Beck’s was only available in bottles. For a cabin in the woods, cans seemed more appropriate. Paul finished his beer and went and got another one. He looked at me out of the corner of one eye while he opened the new can.

“What are we going to do tomorrow?” he said.

“Anything you’d like to do?” I said. “It’s Saturday”

He shrugged. If he did enough weight lifting maybe I could get him too muscle-bound to do that “Like what?” he said.

“If you could do whatever you wanted to do, what would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you are twenty-five, what do you imagine yourself doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there anyplace you’ve always wanted to go? That no one would take you, or you were afraid to ask?”

He sipped at the beer. “I liked the movie
The Red Shoes,”
he said.

“Want to go to the ballet?” I said.

He sipped at the beer again. “Okay,” he said.

It was Saturday morning.

I put on a blue suit and a white shirt from Brooks Brothers, all cotton, with a button-down collar. I had a blue tie with red stripes on it, and I looked very stylish with my black shoes and my handsome Smith & Wesson in my right hip pocket. The blue steel of the barrel was nicely coordinated with my understated socks.

Paul broke out a tan corduroy jacket and brown pants and a powder blue polyester shirt with dark blue pocket flaps. He wore his decrepit Top-Siders and no tie. His socks were black.

“That is about the ugliest goddamned getup I’ve seen since I came home from Korea,” I said.

“I don’t look okay?”

“You look like the runner-up in a Mortimer Snerd look-alike contest.”

“I don’t have any other stuff.”

“Okay, that’s what we’ll do this afternoon,” I said. “We’ll get you some clothes.”

“What will I do with these?”

“Wear them,” I said. “When we get new ones you can throw those away.”

“Who’s Mortimer Snerd?”

“A famous ventriloquist’s dummy from my youth,” I said. “Edgar Bergen. He died.”

“I saw him in an old movie on TV.”

The ride to Boston took three and a half hours. Most of the way down Paul fiddled with the radio, switching from one contemporary music station to another as we went in and out of range of their signal. I let him. I figured I owed him for the near daily baseball games he’d listened to while we worked. We got to Boston around a quarter to twelve.

I parked Susan’s Bronco on Boylston Street in front of Louis’.

“We’ll go here,” I said.

“Do you buy your clothes here?” he said.

“No. I don’t have the build for it,” I said. “They tend to the leaner pinched-waist types.”

“You’re not fat.”

“No, but I’m sort of misshapen. My upper body is too big. I’m like a knockwurst on a canapé tray in there. The lapels don’t fall right. The sleeves are too tight. Guy that’s lean like you, they’ll look terrific.”

“You mean skinny.”

“No. You were skinny. You’re beginning to tend toward lean. Come on.”

We went into Louis’. A slim, elegant salesman picked us up at the door.

“Yes, sir?”

He was wearing a pale gray-beige double-breasted suit with the jacket unbuttoned and the collar up, a round-collared shirt open at the neck with the blue paisley tie carefully loosened, Gucci loafers, and a lot of blue silk handkerchief showing at the breast pocket. He had a neat goatee. I decided not to kiss him.

“I’d like a suit for the kid,” I said.

“Yes, sir” he said. “Come with me.” If Louis’ were a New York restaurant, it would be the Tavern-on-the-Green. If it were a municipality, it would be Beverly Hills. Lots of brass and oak and indirect lighting and stylish display, and thick carpet. As we got into the elevator I said softly to Paul, “I always have the impulse to whiz in the corner when I come in here. But I never do.”

Paul looked startled.

“I got too much class,” I said.

We bought Paul a charcoal three-piece suit of European cut, black loafers with tassels, nearly as nice as mine, two white shirts, a red-and-gray striped tie, a gray-and-red-silk pocket handkerchief, two pairs of gray over-the-calf socks, and a black leather belt. We also bought some light gray slacks and a blue blazer with brass buttons, a blue tie with white polka dots, and a blue-and-gray-silk pocket handkerchief. Under pressure they agreed to get the pants shortened for the evening. The jackets fit him decently off the rack. I offered the elegant salesman a check for seven hundred fifty dollars. He shook his head and took me to the front desk. A far less elegant young woman handled the money. The salesmen were too dignified.