Then he was in his car, and forget the D.U.I., the big green waxed cup cold between his legs, breaking Tuinal caps and looking for a parking space along the course. He pulled in under a huge Monterey pine that was like its own little city and finished doctoring the Gatorade, stirring the stuff in with his index finger. What would it take to make her legs go numb and wind up a Did Not Finish without arousing suspicion? Two? Three? He didn’t want her to pass out on the spot or take a dive into the bushes or anything, and he didn’t want to hurt her either, not really. But four — four was a nice round number, and that ought to do it. He sucked the finger he’d used as a swizzle stick to see if he could detect the taste, but he couldn’t. He took a tentative sip. Nothing. Gatorade tasted like such shit anyway, who could tell the difference?
He found a knot of volunteers in their canary-yellow T-shirts and caps and stationed himself a hundred yards up the street from them, the ice rattling as he swirled his little green time bomb around the lip of the cup. The breeze was soft, the sun caught in the crowns of the trees and reaching out to finger the road here and there in long, slim swatches. He’d never tell Paula, of course, no way, but he’d get giddy with her, pop the champagne cork, and let her fill him with all the ecstasy of victory.
A cheer from the crowd brought him out of his reverie. The first of the men was cranking his way round the long bend in the road, a guy with a beard and wraparound sunglasses — the Finn. He was the one favored to win, or was it the Brit? Jason tucked the cup behind his back and faded into the crowd, which was pretty sparse here, and watched the guy propel himself past, his mouth gaping black, the two holes of his nostrils punched deep into his face, his head bobbing on his neck as if it wasn’t attached right. Another guy appeared round the corner just as the Finn passed by, and then two others came slogging along behind him. Somebody cheered, but it was a pretty feeble affair.
Jason checked his watch. It would be five minutes or so, and then he could start watching for the Amazing Bone Woman, tireless freak that she was. And did she fuck Klaus, or Olaf, or whoever he was, the night before the big event, or was she like Paula, all focus and negativity and no, no, no? He fingered the cup lightly, reminding himself not to damage or crease it in any way — it had to look pristine, fresh-dipped from the bucket — and he watched the corner at the end of the street till his eyes began to blur from the sheer concentration of it all.
Two more men passed by, and nobody cheered, not a murmur, but then suddenly a couple of middle-aged women across the street set up a howl, and the crowd chimed in: the first woman, a woman of string and bone with a puffing heaving puppetlike frame, was swinging into the street in distant silhouette. Jason moved forward. He tugged reflexively at the bill of his hat, jammed the rims of the shades back into his eyesockets. And he started to grin, all his teeth on fire, his lips spread wide: Here, take me, drink me, have me!
As the woman closed, loping, sweating, elbows flailing and knees pounding, the crowd getting into it now, cheering her, cheering this first of the women in a man’s event, the first Iron-woman of the day, he began to realize that this wasn’t Zinny Bauer at all. Her hair was too long, and her legs and chest were too full — and then he saw the number clearly, No. 23, and looked into Paula’s face. She was fifty yards from him, but he could see the toughness in her eyes and the tight little frozen smile of triumph and superiority. She was winning. She was beating Zinny Bauer and Jill Eisen and all those pathetic jocks laboring up the hills and down the blacktop streets behind her. This was her moment, this was it.
But then, and he didn’t stop to think about it, he stepped forward, right out on the street where she could see him, and held out the cup. He heard her feet beating at the pavement with a hard merciless slap, saw the icy twist of a smile and the cold, triumphant eyes. And he felt the briefest fleeting touch of her flesh as the cup left his hand.
(1995)
Killing Babies
When I got out of rehab for the second time, there were some legal complications, and the judge — an old jerk who looked like they’d just kicked him out of the Politburo — decided I needed a sponsor. There was a problem with some checks I’d been writing for a while there when all my resources were going up the glass tube, and since I didn’t have a record except for traffic infractions and a juvenile possession when I was fifteen, the court felt inclined to mercy. Was there anybody who could speak up for me, my attorney wondered, anybody financially responsible? Philip, I said, my brother Philip. He’s a doctor.
So Philip. He lived in Detroit, a place I’d never been to, a place where it gets cold in winter and the only palm trees are under glass in the botanical gardens. It would be a change, a real change. But a change is what I needed, and the judge liked the idea that he wouldn’t have to see me in Pasadena anymore and that I’d have a room in Philip’s house with Philip’s wife and my nephews, Josh and Jeff, and that I would be gainfully employed doing lab work at Philip’s obstetrical clinic for the princely sum of six dollars and twenty-five cents an hour.
So Philip. He met me at the airport, his thirty-eight-year-old face as trenched with anal-retentive misery as our father’s was in the year before he died. His hair was going, I saw that right away, and his glasses were too big for his head. And his shoes — he was wearing a pair of brown suede boatlike things that would have had people running for the exits at the Rainbow Club. I hadn’t seen him in six years, not since the funeral, that is, and I wouldn’t have even recognized him if it wasn’t for his eyes — they were just like mine, as blue and icy as a bottle of Aqua Velva. “Little brother,” he said, and he tried to gather a smile around the thin flaps of his lips while he stood there gaping at me like somebody who hadn’t come to the airport specifically to fetch his down-on-his-luck brother and was bewildered to discover him there.
“Philip,” I said, and I set down my two carry-on bags to pull him to me in a full-body, back-thumping, chest-to-chest embrace, as if I was glad to see him. But I wasn’t glad to see him. Not particularly. Philip was ten years older than me, and ten years is a lot when you’re a kid. By the time I knew his name he was in college, and when I was expressing myself with my father’s vintage Mustang, a Ziploc baggie of marijuana, and a can of high-gloss spray paint, he was in medical school. I’d never much liked him, and he felt about the same toward me, and as I embraced him there in the Detroit airport I wondered how that was going to play out over the course of the six months the judge had given me to stay out of trouble and make full restitution or serve the next six in jail.
“Have a good flight?” Philip asked when I was done embracing him.
I stood back from him a moment, the bags at my feet, and couldn’t help being honest with him; that’s just the way I am. “You look like shit, Philip,” I said. “You look like Dad just before he died — or maybe after he died.”
A woman with a big shining planetoid of a face stopped to give me a look, then hitched up her skirt and stamped on by in her heels. The carpeting smelled of chemicals. Outside the dirt-splotched windows was snow, a substance I’d had precious little experience of. “Don’t start, Rick,” Philip said. “I’m in no mood. Believe me.”
I shouldered my bags, stooped over a cigarette, and lit it just to irritate him. I was hoping he’d tell me there was a county ordinance against smoking in public places and that smoking was slow suicide, from a physician’s point of view, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just stood there, looking harassed. “I’m not starting,” I said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I’m just concerned, that’s all. I mean, you look like shit. I’m your brother. Shouldn’t I be concerned?”