A Night at the Y
Stories by
Robert Garner McBrearty
CONUNDRUM PRESS
A Division of Samizdat Publishing Group, LLC.
A Night at the Y. Copyright ©2014 by Robert Garner McBrearty. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, email
[email protected].
epub ISBN: 978-1-942280-08-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014951810
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Conundrum Press books may be purchased with bulk discounts for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please email: [email protected]
Conundrum Press online: conundrum-press.com
Cover Design: Sonya Unrein
Author photo: Mary Ellen Metke
As ever, to my beloved Mary Ellen, my sons Zane and Ian, to all my family near and far, and in memory of my mother,
Virginia Garner McBrearty.
PREFACE
A Night at the Y, my first collection of short stories, was published in 1999 by John Daniel and Company. Alas, the book went out of print a few years back, and I always hoped it would be revived. I’m delighted to say that day has come as Conundrum Press, which also published my latest collection of stories, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, is graciously sending the book back into the world. I am grateful to Debbie Vance for her fine editorial assistance and to my publisher Caleb Seeling. A writer could not hope for a more enthusiastic or supportive publisher.
Many of the stories date back into the 1980s and early 1990s and already that seems like a simpler time—before cell phones and the internet were so widespread, before the dread day of September 11th and all that day ushered in. They seem to me hopeful stories for the most part, stories of people setting out on new paths, sometimes pushed onto those paths reluctantly, when the old self and old ways of doing things no longer serve.
I hope this republished book will find new readers, and a few who might enjoy a second look. If some of the details seem already antiquated, I hope the themes and the characters remain relevant. Above all, I hope that it will provide some good reading pleasure. I sometimes picture my reader as being a wanderer who wakes in a hotel room at 3:00 am, restless, adrift, lonely, and the traveler picks up the book and feels like a friend is speaking.
A Night at the Y reappears here in somewhat modified form. To avoid repetition—“First Day,” “Back in Town,” and “The Dishwasher,” are also included in Let the Birds Drink in Peace—those stories are not included in this new edition.
A NIGHT AT THE Y
Finished with his day job, Ralph stops back at his apartment just long enough to change clothes and kiss his wife and baby goodbye before rushing off to his night shift at the Y. He stands behind the front desk with his left hand picking up phones and his right dispensing towels and locker keys. With a harried grin, caffeine-inspired energy, and the sinking realization that there is baby spit-up on his blue sweater, he greets the incoming members who are frantic to run, swim, lift, jiggle, jazz, and whirlpool away the jangled nerves of a long day. As the members burst through the front doors, stomp snow from their boots, and charge the desk with lowered heads and hunched shoulders, they remind him of truculent bulls, and he is transported by a memory to a day in a mountain town in Mexico twenty years before.
The bulls are poised in the cattle truck, ready for the run. Ralph, twenty-one years old then, full of wild hope and amoebic parasites, dagger-thin and crazed from dysentery and ingestions of medicinal tequila, has taken refuge on the steps of El Patio café.
Nine bulls come down the ramp—motley, scraggly, apathetic bulls to be sure. No monsters of Pamplona in this September fiesta. They clomp into the roped-off square, and the crowd lets out a collective half-gasp, half-giggle as it huddles against the barriers and gathers on the steps of the café. Young men prance in the cobblestone streets, whistling and jeering. The bulls come to a standstill, snort, wheeze, roll anxious eyes about. Perhaps in the backs of their dim brains flickers the uneasy suspicion that this bacchanal can only finish with them on the wrong end of a public barbecue.
These humble, pastoral beasts see no cause for confrontation. They show no inclination to trample, hook with their horns, or spew foam. They’d like to laugh this off; couldn’t it all be resolved peacefully? They stomp on the cobblestones, leaning their heads together, discussing their strategy as their breath rises in white puffs on this crisp, blue Sunday afternoon in late September. They try to back up the ramp into the truck, but four exasperated rancheros swing cowboy hats at their rumps; disconsolately, the bulls come forward into the sunny but bracing afternoon, and the crowd releases another excited cry.
In his memory, Ralph sees himself backing up as high as he can on the café steps, wending his way behind children and serape-wrapped women. But the other young men, so boldly challenging the bulls, seem to beckon to him: Come down! Run with the bulls! And briefly he yearns to encounter his fate, to die on those dusty cobblestone streets with a horn in his chest, blood in his boots, a wine flask tipped to his lips, while his fingers rise and twitch gracefully, keeping time with the mariachi music as he fades . . . on, brave marvelous soul!
The rank odor of sweat and soggy towels and leather basketballs wafts over the desk, and from the gym comes the reverberation of bouncing balls and the trill of a referee’s whistle. Ralph’s memory of the fiesta momentarily slips away and he finds himself back at the Y desk, in the present, though he wonders, given the vast and inexplicable discoveries of modern physics, just exactly what is the present. His uncertainty about the nature of time makes him suddenly aware that he will never be able to explain modern physics to his son, or even cogently describe the inner workings of a telephone. Thinking of his inadequacies as a father makes his heart flutter as he continues handing out towels and keys.
His rush hour helper, Maggie Vivigino, the twenty-two-year-old, green-eyed olive-skinned weight room trainer, joins him behind the counter. Her taut body ripples beneath her purple leotard, and Ralph imagines she would have made a wonderful companion for his former self when he was cringing on the steps of El Patio café. But Maggie, he suspects, considers him a loser, working at the Y at his age, though she kindly tries to conceal the feeling.
The evening rush speeds up. The Y members, punchy and frayed from another hectic workday, will brook no delay, resent showing their membership cards.
“Don’t you know who I am by now?”
“I want a good locker tonight! Last time you stuck me in a drafty corner.”
“When are you people going to get your act together?”
Meanwhile the phone lines are ringing urgently, the red buttons pulsating; the callers are desperate with weighty questions. Ralph stabs at buttons, puts people on hold, accidentally disconnects a few.
“Where is my son’s soccer game tomorrow?” a caller inquires. “He lost his schedule and I don’t have the coach’s number.”
“How do I sign up for the karate class?”
“Where is the director? I want to speak to the director.”
“Have you seen a woman in a green bikini?”
“The Y? I wanted Pete’s Pool Hall. How long have you had this number?”
; “Who’s in charge there? I want to speak to the director!”
“If you see a woman in a green bikini, tell her I want to meet her.”
“Are you sure this is the Y?”
“If I sign up for the karate class, do I need to know how to kick beforehand?”
“Listen, this is serious. I’ve got to find out about my kid’s soccer game . . .”
Unfortunately, Ralph has little information to dispense. His job is to answer calls and forward them to the appropriate offices. But it is Friday evening and the director and administrators have fled the building.
“Would you mind if I put you on hold?” Ralph says for the hundredth time.
“Yes, I would mind. I’ve been on hold twice already. Can’t you just tell me where my son’s damn soccer game is tomorrow?” By this time, the soccer man’s voice has turned thick, hoarse, and boozy.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have the schedule here. I just answer the phones and forward them to the program desk.”
“Then let me have the program desk.”
“I’m afraid they’re closed. They don’t open again until nine in the morning.”
“But the game is at eight! You people are screwed up, you hear me? Screwed up!”
“Ralph! Help!” Maggie screams from her station behind the desk. Ralph turns from the phone to see a fresh wave of incoming customers.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to put you on hold, sir. I’ll find out what I can.”
“Don’t you put me—”
He joins the fray and confronts a woman who snarls, “This is the longest I’ve ever had to wait. Can’t you make your calls on your own time?”
A man flings his key back onto the desk. “This is a boy’s locker,” he hisses in righteous rage.
A tall, bearded man takes a towel from Ralph’s trembling hand and inquires cheerfully, “Are we having fun yet?”
Right in front of the customers, Maggie puts her hands to her face and screams, as she screams nearly every day at this time, “I’m quitting! I’m quitting!”
The members meet this pronouncement with a stony indifference, and she continues snatching cards from their hands and hurling their locker keys and towels at them.
Then suddenly the wave dissipates; the customers disappear into the locker rooms and quiet settles over the front desk as another rush hour at the Y comes to a close. Maggie looks at Ralph with a bright mist in her eyes. “This is what I get for not finishing college. I’ll always work at crappy jobs.”
He takes her aside, draws her back to the tall metal equipment lockers, thinks of holding her steely biceps, but doesn’t. He assures her she can still go back and finish college, though inside a subversive voice whispers: Of course, you can finish college like I did and still work at crappy jobs.
As night deepens, only a few people straggle in from the snow. The calls, too, have slackened, though the soccer man keeps phoning, sounding drunker and more abusive each time he calls. Maggie has returned to the weight room to Stairmaster away her blues; her sinewy legs provide inspiration to all the panting after-hours jocks.
Ralph calls his wife, and she groans with fatigue. Their six-month-old boy has been crying for hours.
“What did the doctor say?”
“It’s probably just teething.”
“How long do you think it will last?”
“About ten more years.” She sniffles, “I think I’m losing it.”
“Courage, love,” he whispers, “courage.”
He slips away from the quiet desk to take the dirty towels to the laundry room, and his heart twists as the sweet strains of Joni Mitchell drift from the overhead speakers:
I was a free man in Paris.
I felt unfettered and alive . . .
Alive and unfettered indeed, Ralph, on that day twenty years ago, huddles on the café steps as the bulls make rings around the square and feign charges at the young men. The bold ones rush among the bulls, slap rumps and pull horns, and when the bulls are inspired enough to give chase, the young men dive for cover at the last moment.
Ralph remains on his perch, cautiously watching the action. He detects about him, in subtle glances and stiffened shoulders, the faint signs of disgust: Oh, cowardly American, go down with the other young men and do battle with these ferocious bulls!
Out of nowhere, a boy of about four has wandered into the middle of the street in front of the café. Too late, the crowd on the café steps spots him. In the same moment a bull, ten yards away, lowers its horns and charges.
The crowd is paralyzed, deathly still, as if by holding its breath it can make the bull turn aside. Then its silence gives way to a panicked roar. Ralph is not certain, but later he thinks that he felt a push on his back, a palpable—yet unearthly—touch. He rushes through the crowd like a fish gliding past boulders that give way to him, and leaps off the steps. Too late to sweep the boy aside, he runs directly in front of the bull. He feels a bone-jarring impact in his side; his shoes seem stuck to the pavement while the rest of his body flies upwards. He is totally breathless, yet at the same time trying to puke. He’s vaguely aware of sailing beneath a blue sky before he loses consciousness.
As he awakens, a wooden ceiling fan twirls slowly overhead. His eyes flicker open and shut, open and shut. The examining table is hard, and the scent of alcohol is familiar and comforting. The doctor and his nurse are marvelously efficient and reassuring as they smile down on him and tape his ribs. The young doctor is dashing in his street clothes; called away from the fiesta, he smells of beer and his eyes glitter. The nurse wears a lowcut flowery dress, and she leans over him and caresses his brow with a moist palm.
“How are you feeling now, my hero friend?” the doctor says.
Ralph blinks. “Is the boy okay?”
The doctor and his nurse grin at one another, and their eyes shine. “The boy is fantastic,” the doctor says. “And you will be okay. It’s the bull we are worried about now.”
The doctor and his nurse fall against each other in a paroxysm of laughter and then topple lightly onto Ralph, who puts his arms around their quaking backs.
***
“’Kay, wise guy, where’s the soccer game? Tell me where my son’s soccer game is. I’m not dropping this.”
“Look, I’ve done everything I can. I even tried to call the program director at home, but there was no answer. I don’t know what else I can do.”
“That won’t do, my friend. That won’t do. I only see my kid every fourth weekend. You’re not screwing this up for him. Somebody knows. Somebody there knows.” His voice rises, takes on a chanting quality: “Somebody knows, somebody there knows, somebody knows . . .”
“Look, I’m really sorry. But I’ve got to get off now.”
“Don’t you cut me off, you son-of-a-bitch. Don’t you—”
Ralph stares at the phone, but it doesn’t ring again. He almost regrets it because there is a sadness at the Y now as the hour grows late. Most of the members and all the other attendants have come and gone, and there are no distractions from his worries. He wonders if his family will make it in this new part of the country they have moved to. Will he find a better job? Will his son be happy growing up here, in this town hard-pressed against the Rockies? Will his wife’s health, already fragile, hold through the fitful nights as they get up again and again to comfort the baby?
Out of the dark comes a family—a father, a mother, and a boy of about four. As they come through the front doors they pause, half inside and half out. Behind them, the night pours snow; a gust of frigid air rushes all the way to Ralph at the front desk. They hesitate in the doorway. Then the man gives the boy a gentle nudge, and they all come forward anxiously toward the desk.
The man, about Ralph’s age, is short, thick, bearded, with a burly chest and wide hunched shoulders; he looks as if he has seen a lot of rough weat
her, done a lot of hard labor, yet there is something weak about him. His smile is tremulous. The woman is Hispanic, with dark somber eyes. When they reach the desk, the man keeps his family huddled close, one hand resting on the boy’s black hair, the other holding his wife’s elbow through her old flannel coat. In a Texas accent, his voice coming out high at first before it finds its range, he says, “Hi. Think you can rent us a room?” He shrugs. “We can’t pay motel prices.”
The one word Ralph doesn’t want to say to the worn-out looking family is no, but this is what he must tell them.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we don’t rent overnight rooms here. We’re mainly a gym. The Y in Denver rents some rooms.”
The man’s shoulders slump another notch. The woman’s eyes explore Ralph’s face, searching for lies. “Damn. We came through there an hour ago,” the man says. “We’re headed for Seattle . . . from Houston,” he adds, as if that explains their plight. He shakes his head and mutters, almost as if repeating a mantra, “Got good jobs in Seattle. Houston ain’t nothing but a bust.” The woman nods grimly, agreeing with him about Houston. Ralph wonders if she believes in the good jobs ahead.
Ralph sees that they are all dead tired. The man and woman glance sidelong at one another, calculating the time back to Denver, this late at night, in the bad weather, the lost time on their journey; the decision is coming down against it.
He is tempted to offer them lodging in his cramped little apartment for the night. But what would his wife say? Too dangerous to bring strangers in. Even though she is kindhearted, her fears for their son would make her say no. He knows he is only using her as an excuse, though. Even if he lived alone he wouldn’t offer, wouldn’t want to be drawn into their troubles. But the dark, round, staring eyes of the little boy remind him of what his own family might come to under different circumstances, adrift in a strange city, no money for a motel.
“There is a hostel by the campus,” he says slowly.
The man blinks. “A hostel?”
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