22
MACHO MAN
“So you have something to tell me,” Meat said.
Herculeah sat across the table from him. The pictures of Meat and his dad were in a pile on the table, facedown. She had practiced her introduction to the pictures many times.
Now she surprised herself by saying, “I cannot believe that I was so, so worried about you—my hair was actually frizzling—and there you were hugging some woman.”
“I can hug women if I want to.” Despite the unpleasantness of the situation, the actual hug had been sort of enjoyable.
“And a cold-blooded killer at that.”
“She may be a killer, but she certainly is not cold-blooded.”
His voice had the ring of authority.
“Well, you ought to know,” Herculeah said, pretending interest in the pictures.
“Is that what you called me over here for,” Meat asked, “to discuss my hugging women?”
“No.”
Meat could tell from her expression that it was something more serious than that. The episode with Marcie Mullet, though momentarily exciting, had left him with the feeling he’d had enough serious things to last a lifetime. This, then, was the bad news she had been putting off for so long.
Herculeah turned over some pictures from the pile in front of her. “Meat, do you remember my getting that camera from Hidden Treasures?”
“Yes, but—” He groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re going to show me pictures of myself. Herculeah, at this moment in my life, I’m just not up to it.”
“Meat, these are pictures of you when you were probably three or four years old.”
“What?”
“The camera came from your house, Meat. Your mother took the camera, along with a lot of other stuff, to Hidden Treasures. She didn’t check to see if there was film inside, but there was.”
He looked at the snapshots in Herculeah’s hand. “Pictures of me?”
“Of you and your father.”
The hand he held out was not completely steady. “My father?”
He took the pictures and spread them out in front of him. He peered down at the faces. He recognized his own—it hadn’t changed that much—but his father’s face... He didn’t recognize that at all. He bent closer.
She said, “Meat.” A more serious tone this time. He looked up. There were more snapshots in her hands.
“There’s more?”
“Yes.”
He waited. His throat was dry.
“Meat,” she said quietly. She had practiced this part. “Meat, your father is a professional wrestler. He’s known as Macho Man.”
She kept her eyes on the pictures as she laid them out on the table, because she couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on Meat’s face.
She knew that he had at one time imagined his father as the conductor of a symphony orchestra, at another time as a great writer, a poet. And here he was in black leather with boots that laced to his knees and a black tattoo on each shoulder.
Meat drew the pictures closer. He slid aside those of him with his father to make room. He glanced at them one by one with an intensity that seemed to make all the goings-on in his body grind to halt. He wasn’t even breathing.
“I’m sorry, Meat,” she said, real regret in her voice, “but you had to know.”
“Sorry?” He looked at her in amazement. “Sorry?” His eyes shone.
He glanced down. Here spread out before him was the father of his dreams—a man bigger than life—not a shoe salesman in Belks as he had once feared, not the elderly man who marked receipts with a Magic Marker at Wal-Mart. Here was a hero.
“Why didn’t my mother tell me?”
“Maybe she was a—” Herculeah swallowed the rest of the word “ashamed.”
“Look, did you see this one? He has his cape thrown back. He’s big, Herculeah, like me, but it’s all muscle.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I could be like that.”
“A wrestler?” she asked, trying without success to hide her horror.
“No, muscle. I mean this gives me something to shoot for. With him as my example, I can turn all this,” he indicated himself, “into muscle!”