On November 25 of that same year, Fawn Hall, secretary to Lt. Colonel Oliver North, unlocked with a simple turn of the wrist a file cabinet in her boss’s office, so that she could retrieve confidential papers that she would then smuggle out, conveyed within her leather boots.
Each safe, vault, luggage locker, and file cabinet noted above was opened with relative ease. In keeping with this pattern, you might think that it should be an effortless thing for an old man — entirely naked but for his gym-issue towel, standing in front of his locker in the basement of Town Lake YMCA in Austin, Texas, on the morning of Saturday, December 6 of that same year — to turn the dial of the single-dial Masterlock which dangled before him and gain easy access to his possessions inside.
And it would be a simple and easy thing if the old man, whose name was Lester Henderson, could remember the numbers of the combination in their proper order.
But he could not.
As hard as he tried.
The numbers had been there in his head not twenty minutes earlier, when he had put his gym clothes and shoes inside the locker and locked it up and padded barefoot and bare-bodied to the showers. And the numbers had also been there three afternoons before when he had come to the Y — just as he had come today — to lift dumbbells, to punch the boxing bag, and to toss the old-fashioned medicine ball about. All these things he could still do, though there were now things that he could not — things that his wife of forty-nine years, whose name was Audrey Henderson, would no longer permit him to do. Lester could no longer cut the grass, for example, after Audrey had found him standing motionless one day in the yard, the motor of the mower still whirring, either lost in thought, or thinking, more troublingly, of nothing at all.
He could no longer light the backyard grill and attend the flame after it flared up one day and singed his cook’s apron.
And he could no longer drive. This was the hardest prohibition to accept. He had started driving when he was thirteen; he had driven the pickup truck on his father’s ranch north of Waxahachie. He had taught all three of his own sons to drive.
On some days Lester understood fully why his wife felt it necessary to take these things away from him. He wasn’t as sharp as he used to be, he had to admit, and much more forgetful as of late. On other days, however, Lester Henderson raged against his wife for relegating him to a kind of second adolescence — one with restrictions and curfews, and marked by a humiliating lack of trust.
Audrey had driven her husband to the YMCA that morning. He had told her that his friend Charlie would be there. The two men usually worked out on the Nautilus machines and sparred with the boxing gloves and then went for a trot around Town Lake, which was actually a dammed section of the Colorado River overlooked by the skyscrapers of downtown Austin on the north side. But this particular Saturday Charlie would not be there. Lester knew this, but he lied so that his wife would let him come to the YMCA that morning while she shopped. There was very little that she and their grown children allowed him to do for himself these days. At the gym, he could be his own man. He could be the young man that he once was, working his muscles and expanding his lungs. Lester felt invigorated, revitalized there. He didn’t feel like the doddering, forgetful person he had become. Not the Alzheimer’s victim that everyone else knew him to be.
The numbers had left his head. They had been there only minutes before; he had turned the dial in the correct access sequence — clockwise to the first number and then counter-clockwise past the first number to the second and then clockwise again to the third number. It had always been so simple for him that he could almost do it without thinking.
But now he was forced to think about it quite a bit. The first number was thirty-six…he was sure of this much. But the second and third numbers remained elusive.
The locker room was nearly empty. It was late morning. The early risers had finished their crack-of-dawn workouts and gone home. The young men who came in the afternoon after sleeping off their carousing from the night before had yet to arrive. There was a man at the end of the row of lockers, but he seemed in a hurry to dress and leave, and Lester was reluctant to bother him. There were classes going on upstairs — aerobics and abdominal intensives. He could go up there and find someone, let them know that he was having trouble with his lock, but the towel was small and left a good part of him fully exposed. His was an old man’s body, drooping and flaccid and covered with wrinkles in spite of his best efforts to tighten up à la the eternally youthful Jack LaLanne. This wouldn’t work at all.
The only thing that potentially could work was to sit and think and perhaps the numbers would eventually come back to him. Or he could sit and wait for one of the young YMCA employees to come by — one of the young men who gathered up the used towels and wiped down the exercise machines.
Lester sat. He wondered if he would have to stop coming to the gym. It was important to lock up his clothes. Clothes often got stolen from unlocked lockers. He liked to shower at the gym. The shower at home was over the bathtub. Sometimes he would forget to put down the non-slip bathtub mat and his wife would make a comment. She would say that she was going to start doing it for him, because she didn’t want him to fall and break his hip.
Audrey had started to do too many things for him already. Things like chauffeuring him around. Smaller things like going to the grocery store alone when the two had always gone together. It was something they’d done since they were young newlyweds, pinching pennies and eating buttered spaghetti, and rice and beans. He was an undergraduate at the time, studying accounting at the University of Texas on a small scholastic scholarship.
Lester laughed mordantly to himself. As a CPA, he had spent his life around numbers. He had arranged them for specific purposes, subjected them to countless mathematical operations, used them as a form of language to tell hundreds of different stories. Numbers comprised the nuts and bolts of his life. His facility with them had provided a good home for his wife and three sons, had put each of his boys through college.
Now the numbers betrayed him. They left him sitting naked and wet upon a wooden bench facing a locker that would not allow him access because he couldn’t crack the elusive code. His world had become inscrutable — filled with things that had stopped making sense to him. He felt helpless. And he hated feeling helpless, hated feeling dependent.
Men would soon come into this locker room in large numbers — young men, vibrant men, men with their lives spread out in front of them — they would come and see him in this compromised state and they would pity him and there would be nothing he could do to win back their respect.
The man at the end of the row had been turned away from Lester but was now clearly looking in his direction. The man’s name was Cleve. Cleve was in his early thirties — just slightly younger, he appeared to Lester, than Lester’s youngest son Jack.
Cleve closed his locker door and slung his gym bag over his shoulder. He started out of the locker room but then stopped and turned back to focus on Lester again.
“You having some trouble there?” Cleve asked, casually but not mocking.
“A little, yes. I can’t seem to get my locker opened.”
Cleve nodded. “You got it open before you went into the shower, right?”
Lester nodded. “But it’s giving me trouble now.”
“Oh.” Cleve walked over and set his gym bag down on the bench. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. His hair was wet and combed and he smelled like Dial soap. The smell reminded Lester of his sons, who had often come down to dinner from showering after their late afternoon football and basketball practices smelling strongly of deodorant soap and youthful colognes.