Kendra Lumm lifted her uncle’s old dumbbells for the first time when she was nine years old.
By ten, she had her own set of weights and a bench on the back porch—and pretty decent biceps. She was out there most afternoons, even the hottest ones when the aggressive Arizona sun beat her silly and tanned her skin until it matched the dark brown of her sweat-stained leather lifting belt. Inside, when she watched television, she’d do curls. During commercials, she’d do crunches. By the time she hit junior high, she was worked, thick with muscle and intimidating to some of her teachers. Her abdominals were like six caramel apples, and her shoulders were as wide as an Olympic swimmer’s. At home, she walked around in her sports bra, on display, pausing to flex in mirrors and snack on protein.
In seventh grade, she nearly lost her virginity to Petey Vaccarino. Petey was one day younger than Kendra, and lived across the arroyo with his mother in a sprawling stucco house. Back then, Kendra liked how Petey wore his ball cap redneck-style, propped up high. It made his head look elongated, watermelon-shaped, cute. They attempted sex after school in the Vaccarinos’ living room on a pile of unfolded laundry, Vince Gill on the stereo. Petey ejaculated seconds after Kendra touched his penis. She wondered why it wasn’t as big as the ones she’d seen in the faded magazines she once found in the arroyo next to a rotten mattress. But she figured her breasts weren’t as big as the women’s in the magazine either.
On the bus the next morning, Petey pulled a University of Arizona Wildcats sweatshirt from his backpack and flaunted the stain. “Proof,” he bragged to the kids sitting near him.
Kendra stood when she heard him, and plowed to the back of the moving bus. “It was dumb,” she announced to everyone there. “Plussing as how Petey came on the rug and stepped in it when he stood up.”
Petey slapped her then, so hard his cap tumbled to the floor of the bus.
An eighth-grade girl screamed, “Hit her again!” as the bus rolled through a dip on River Road.
Kendra could have killed Petey—he was skinny-armed and short for his age—but she didn’t. She was just glad that Petey had been courageous enough to slap her. Good for him, she thought. She wobbled back to her seat and licked a smile face on the dusty bus window.
Kendra made it to tenth grade, and for almost a year, she seemed calm and happy. Her eyes grew wide like she had figured out a puzzle, like she was anticipating something spiritual. She still lifted weights and flexed, and continued sex play with Petey, who had cultivated a sketchy mustache and had long since abandoned Garth Brooks and a few other trends to mumble gangsta rap songs under his breath, but she began to move through life a little more gracefully and softly. She used a napkin instead of her shirt to wipe her mouth as she sipped her protein shake in the morning, and she held her chin self-assuredly as she strolled through the shiny halls at Catalina Foothills High School. She combed out the snarls in her golden hair with cream rinse, and sometimes wore Heidi braids with girlish pink ribbons. She grew taller: five feet seven inches—a miracle, according to her pediatrician, who had warned Kendra and her parents for years that weight training would permanently damage her bones and stunt her growth.
In March, soon after Kendra’s parents threw her a sweet sixteen party crowded with kids from the subdivision she didn’t really know or like, her guidance counselor switched her from special-ed math to pre-algebra, and her teacher sent home a note saying how Kendra was not only an ace on the tests, but a delight in the classroom. Her mother taped the note to the refrigerator. When her father read it, he said, “Looks like this long nightmare has ended—knock on wood,” and he knocked his head.
But a month later, Kendra pushed her older brother Thomas down the tile stairs that led from the kitchen to the den. She had caught him in her bedroom looking at her muscle magazines, and the two of them began a teasing game of tag, racing through the house, squealing, skidding in their socks on the polished floors.
She meant only to grab his shoulders and shake him a little, but he stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs, and the grab turned into a shove. She almost fell after him, but she caught the banister. When Thomas hit the den’s floor, both his arms broke, one of them audibly—a wet crack that made Kendra’s stomach twist in fear and guilt.
Thomas missed his senior prom because of the accident. He stayed home and watched videos. His mother ordered him a pizza. She cut it up and fed it to him with a plastic fork. Kendra had spied from the top of the stairs. She had been restricted to her room, where she did push-ups and styled her hair with an old set of curlers she’d found in the garage, until Petey Vaccarino busted through the oleanders and climbed the veranda. He appeared at her window, smiling coyly, twirling a marking pen through his fingers, looking anywhere but into Kendra’s eyes.
Kendra would wet the washcloth, then squirt a few pumps of pearlescent soap, as Thomas maneuvered into the tepid water and propped his arms on either side of the tub. His casts were wrapped in plastic bread bags, cinched with rubber bands above his elbows. The ends of Kendra’s braids dipped in the water as she leaned over. Sometimes they’d brush Thomas’s skinny white legs, causing him to squirm. Sweat beaded on Kendra’s upper lip and coursed down her sinewy neck as she went to work on Thomas with the washcloth and the soap. Her arms shone in the afternoon light that seeped through the clouded window, each muscle defined and glistening. She was conscious of her arms, and she moved to accentuate their bulk.
“Stop looking at my dick,” Thomas said.
“I don’t have a microscope,” Kendra said. She wasn’t looking at his dick, anyway. She had seen it a million times.
Kendra knew Thomas was washed in a similar manner by their mother every night after dinner, but she didn’t care. The bathing was the least she could do after breaking both his arms. Their mother brushed his teeth and wiped him—two things Kendra began to think she should do for him. Kendra would hear Thomas’s muffled complaints that worked their way through the bathroom walls, and many times she was close to going in there to help him herself, close to telling their mother to get the hell out, to leave him alone, that it was her job to help Thomas because she was the one who broke his arms.
This continued until his casts were removed in late May. Kendra never did tell her mother what she thought, even after her mother began to complain that her work—leasing retail properties—was suffering from all the time she had to spend tending to Thomas.
Thomas was able to attend his graduation ceremony cast-free, baking in the bleachers with the rest of his class, wearing his green-and-white robe. Kendra screamed and whistled for him when they announced his name and handed him his diploma.
When Merv Hunter turned thirty, a few of his coworkers from Splash World, mostly security guys, liquored him up at the Saddlehorn Saloon and brought him across Tucson to Les Girls, where he was treated to a lap dance from a woman with a mane of wild red hair and stationary breasts the size of softballs. After the dance, his old buddies from prep school, Jason and Rusty, forced him into Rusty’s new Volvo and drove him into the foothills, near the neighborhoods where they all grew up, the neighborhood where Merv still lived with his mother.
When Rusty pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of Skyline Drive, Merv knew what they had planned for him, and he was annoyed. Ice-blocking. Annoyed not because he didn’t want to ride the ice block down the hill onto the eighth hole of La Paloma Country Club’s world-renowned golf course, but annoyed because he had to pretend to be more enthusiastic about it than he was. It had been fun when he was younger. The loss of control, the speed, the thrill of destroying priceless greens and trespassing on clearly marked private property. But Merv was thirty now, and he was sick of how predictable Rusty and Jason had become.
On Merv’s eighteenth birthday, they had introduced him to ice-blocking. The three of them drove down to a huge meatpacking plant in South Tucson and bought two blocks of ice the size of tombstones for five bucks each. On their way back up to the foothills, they bought a case of Coors from a clerk at 7-Eleven whose eyes were so bloodshot they looked as if they might drip. The clerk didn’t ask for I.D., just told Jason he had a real sweet ass. They began to drink the beers on the way to the golf course, and by the time they got there, Merv had a nice buzz going. They placed folded beach towels on top of each block of ice, and soon the three drunk boys were gliding down the hill, wiping out, tumbling in the perfectly moist grass.
Merv was able to forget himself the night of his eighteenth birthday, was able to forget for a while that Rusty and Jason would be heading off to distant colleges in the fall—Rusty to Baltimore, and Jason to New Hampshire. Merv concentrated only on his aerodynamic tuck, on speeding down the hill and catching air before being hurtled into the sand trap. The beer gave him confidence enough to try to surf down the hill. He stood on the block, but he slipped and landed on his ass right away. In the moonlight, he could see that his buddies were streaked in mud. He watched as they tackled each other and wrestled on the green.
He knew it was corny, but back then he had wanted to thank them for taking him ice-blocking, thank them for being so cool when his father died, tell them they were his best friends and that he was going to miss them when they went away for college. He didn’t say any of it, though. He just finished off the beer and lay flat on the green, allowing the alcohol to mess with his equilibrium, watching the moon drift, then float back to its actual location.
When a groundskeeper showed up and shined a flashlight on Merv, Merv jumped up and raised his hands in the please-don’t-shoot-me position. Rusty yelled, “Run!” and without hesitation, Merv booked up the hill, his tennis shoes slipping in the wet grass.
The three of them made it back to Rusty’s car and sped off. There was a small article in the Tucson Citizen the following day: VANDALS HIT LA PALOMA. Two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the eighth hole. The groundskeeper had come upon three teenage boys who were able to escape. The article also mentioned the beer cans and blocks of ice. For a week or so after that, Merv jumped whenever the phone rang.
The three of them relived that night on Merv’s twenty-first birthday. This time, they slid only a few times, abandoning the ice blocks for bong hits on the green. They sat down there, passing the bong around, drinking cheap red wine, not saying much to each other. Jason had gotten the pot from his brother, who went to college in California, and he was generous, packing bowl after bowl as the moon rose over the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Merv grew sick, threw up the third-rate wine and the birthday cake his mother had made for him. Rusty was asleep, wasn’t awakened by Merv’s violent coughing and choking sounds. Jason had wandered off toward the ninth hole. When Merv’s stomach finally stopping heaving, he remained on his hands and knees, afraid to move, gripping the grass so the world would stop tilting.
That night, at age twenty-one, wiping the vomit from his lips, he swore to himself he wouldn’t fuck up anymore. Rusty and Jason and his other friends from prep school had finished their third year at good colleges, made new friends from all over the country, and here was Merv, gagging, staring at the grass of the eighth hole on a golf course only a few miles from where he had always lived.
He had tried a few semesters at the University of Arizona, but it was so easy not to go to class when the weather was always perfect. Sometimes he’d make it to campus, but he’d sit on the richly watered lawn in front of the student union, soak in the sun, and watch the girls hurry by. Before he’d realize it, it was too late for class, and he’d walk down to Mamma’s Pizza for a slice the size of a magazine. By second semester, after having earned a 2.3 grade point average for his half-assed efforts during first semester, it became more difficult to wake up before double digits, and to do tedious things like go to the language lab or stand in line for registration.
He had visited Rusty at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and he had been amazed at how hard everyone studied, even Rusty, who left Merv alone the first night and hurried off to the library to cram for a history test. Everyone at Hopkins had a plan. They all seemed driven, unlike any group of people Merv had ever met. Rusty’s friends talked about Titian and Nabokov and Churchill—people Merv sensed he should know about but didn’t. They dressed differently, too, in dark overcoats and big logger boots. On the white marble steps in front of the Gilman Building, Rusty’s friends competed with each other for speaking time. Some quoted philosophers and poets. A few mumbled cynically between draws on their smelly European cigarettes. They all read and complained about The New York Times. Each of Rusty’s friends was self-important and pretentious, but—and Merv hated it when he realized this—each was also interesting, smart, and ambitious, three adjectives Merv figured no one applied to him.
Now, nine years later, here he was again, faced with the task of unloading heavy blocks of ice from the trunk of Rusty’s car, knowing that he hadn’t changed much since age twenty-one, realizing that he hadn’t done much in nine years.
“Hey,” Merv said, as Jason lifted a block, “this really isn’t fun anymore.”
Jason dropped the block into the dirt. “You got something better planned?” he said.
“Let’s just go to the Tap Room before they close,” Merv said. He knew Jason was pissed. He braced himself for an indignant speech, wished he had downed six or seven more beers at the Saddlehorn so he could abide it.
“Not all of us work at a waterslide park and sit in the sun sipping Gatorade all day,” Jason said. “Some of us sit in an office all day, under artificial light, breathing artificial air. Why don’t you indulge Rusty and me and join us for a few slides down the hill?”
“It’s my birthday,” Merv said. “You should indulge me.”
“You’ve been nothing but indulged since high school,” Jason said louder. “Rusty and I work, pay our own bills, drive cars we pay for. What do you do? Blow your whistle at a few kids who misbehave on the slides, live at home with your mother, don’t pay rent, watch television, exercise a little.”
“Feel free to shut up,” Merv said.
“Jason’s sort of right,” Rusty said meekly. “I mean, come on, Merv, you’re thirty.”
“So sliding down a hill on a block of ice is somehow going to help me mature?” Merv said. He lifted the other block from the trunk and heaved it into a small mesquite tree, his fingers stinging with the cold. “You guys can vent your cubicle frustrations to someone else,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
Cars flew past Merv as he walked on the dirt shoulder along Skyline Boulevard. To the south, he could see the lights of Tucson, gathered between the mountains like a bowl of gold dust. Even up there, in the supposedly affluent part of Tucson, beer cans, fast-food bags, and other trash lined the street, clinging to dry saltbushes and ocotillos.
A pickup slowed and pulled onto the shoulder in front of Merv. He fanned away the dust as he walked toward the passenger window. He knew he should probably cross the street, maybe run into the desert, but his birthday made him feel he was impervious to danger. It would be too ironic or poetic or whatever to get knifed to death or kidnapped or shot on your thirtieth birthday.
In the truck there were two guys, high school jocks with short hair and fresh faces slightly aglow in the dim light of the dashboard. Their loud stereo blared Korn or some other abrasive rock until Merv asked them what they needed, and one of them lowered the volume.
“You know where a bar called The Biz’ is?” the passenger asked, rolling down his window.
Merv could smell the whiskey on the kid’s breath, sweet and ripe. The driver drummed the steering wheel along to the music.
“No,” Merv said.
“How about a place called ‘It’s ’bout Time’?”
“Never heard of it,” Merv lied. He knew the drill. He had heard about it or read about it. They’d ask him where each of the gay bars was, and if he knew, they’d beat the hell out of him. He knew where It’s ’bout Time was. Right down there on Fourth Avenue near all the college bars he frequented. He’d been in there once to piss, plowed through brawny shirtless men on the dance floor to get to the rest room.
“I don’t go to many bars,” Merv told the kid. “Most are down near the U of A, I think.”
“Okay,” the passenger said.
“You sure you don’t know where It’s ’bout Time is?” the driver said.
“Sorry,” Merv said. “Can’t help you.”
“Later,” said the passenger, and the truck rolled into drive.
A few minutes later, the same truck sped by, and the passenger chucked a beer bottle at Merv: direct hit. It broke on his forehead. Merv was more shocked than hurt, although the blood came right away, stinging his eye and wetting his lips with a nasty metallic flavor. He pulled off his T-shirt, and used it to apply pressure to the stinging wound, treated it routinely, like he had learned in the first aid classes he had to take to get the job at the water park.
Merv figured he almost deserved a bleeding head. He should never even have talked to the kids in the truck. Stupid. But if he had run off into the desert or across the street, they would have chased him, would have eventually caught up and beaten him up. Fuckers. Fucking aggressive bored teenage trash.
He felt bad about leaving Rusty and Jason. They deserved a little fun, and he should have stayed and indulged them, like Jason said. They did work their asses off: ridiculous hours spent under fluorescent lights in East Scottsdale prefab office parks. Each had lost almost everything the year before. Jason had been working for a company that wrote Internet credit card processing software, and Jason had been a web consultant. Now Merv wasn’t sure what they did, but he knew they didn’t make half as much as they had the previous year. Each was forced to sell his condo, and had moved into an apartment.
Before tonight, they had told Merv that they envied his lifestyle, but he had suspected that they actually pitied him—or resented him—for living at home with his mother, working a mindless job, going out too much, and still having plenty of time to use the StairMaster and hit the weights at the Racquet Club. Rusty and Jason looked older than their ages, each having thick bags under his eyes, Rusty’s red hair thinning to nothing, and Jason’s gut sagging over his belt. Merv, with his smooth face and full head of light brown curls, still got carded almost every night he went out drinking.
Brian was working the gate at Rancho Sin Vacas tonight. He sat outside on a lawn chair, reading a magazine under the yellow bug light. He wore his dumb uniform: khaki shorts and a park ranger shirt. Back in high school, Merv used to get stoned with Brian once in a while. But then Brian met Kara, the woman who eventually became his wife. She introduced Brian to Jesus, and the pot-smoking stopped.
Merv crouched behind some bushes, sneaked up to Brian, and panted loudly.
Brian jumped, knocked over his lounge chair, dropped his magazine. “Lords of light! You scared me. What the heck happened to your head?”
Merv had forgotten about his wound. He realized he must look a little scary. The blood was drying, sticky. “Some fuckers threw a bottle at me,” Merv said.
Brian mashed his lips, like he was holding something back, like he wanted to curse. Then he took a deep breath. “I can drive you up to your house,” he said. “It’ll only take a minute. And you should call the police.”
“I’ll walk,” Merv said. “I want to.”
It was only half a mile, and he did want to walk. He enjoyed the cool night air that rolled off the mountains, the smell of desert.