by Adam Johnson
In the front row I catch Cheryl looking back at me. She waves.
Suddenly, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor plays over the public announcement system. Five guys in tight, red wrestling suits come running out. They jog circles around the weight gear, clapping in an exaggerated manner meant to make us join. Nobody does.
The Power Team doesn’t really say much. They just start lifting incredible amounts of weight, which is how we like it. An enormous man in a flattop ducks his head under the bar of a squat rack and takes the weight on his shoulders. He backs up in slow, staggering steps while the other guys crowd around, chanting, “feel the power.” He looks at the ceiling, chugging air, and dips down until his ass touches the ground. His rise is so slow we can’t take it. He braces his teeth, snatches great gasps of air, iron plates trembling.
“My God,” I say.
“Jesus,” Patuni says. He keeps spitting on the floor between his knees and rubbing it out with his foot, a habit of his when he’s excited.
The weights slam back on the rack, and the other guys ask him how heavy it was. He looks out to the audience. “I didn’t feel a thing,” he announces.
Patuni and I look at each other. “There’s cocky,” Patuni says, “and then there’s pissing in people’s faces.”
Another Power Teamer does a tremendous military press while the others jog in place and chant “yeah, uh-huh” over and over. When the bar is over his head, and his elbows lock, he manages to stutter, “I used to be weak. Then one day I found strength.” He drops the weight, which visibly moves the hardwood floor. They all high-five.
“Is this like a skit or what?” Patuni asks.
“I think they’re gonna try to sell us weight sets,” I say.
The black Power Teamer lies down on the bench.
The flattop Power Teamer asks him very loud, “Do you want a spotter?”
“No thanks,” he answers. “I’ve already got one.” He goes ahead with the press alone, and now we know they’re running some kind of scam. But the lift is magnificent. It has us. The iron rumbles like storm drain covers, the floors moan, and we are left gripping our own elbows. Cheryl looks back at me. We shake our heads in disbelief.
Another man presses a nail into a block of wood with his bare hands, and then, in what is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen, he blows up a hot water bottle. It takes forever, veins throbbing, tendons straining, and you can hear the dry hasp of his throat rattle through a balloon that now matches the color of his reddened skin. The sight has the same life-threatening grip as the natural childbirth video they scared us with back in Health and Hygiene.
Finally, a man steps forward with a chrome crowbar, and I know this is Jack. He is older than the others, with a thick mustache and blue eyes that scan us all. His tanned skin runs loosely over his muscles as he grabs the hook and spade ends of the crowbar in his fists. He starts the bend by wrapping it around the back of his neck, but then does the final crunch, elbows out, right in front of his face. It looks like he is bending it with his mind, and when the bar starts to fold, the chrome plating crackles off into mist of sparkly flakes.
“How did you bend that?” the black Power Teamer asks.
“I didn’t bend it,” Jack says. “Jesus did.”
You can tell it took a lot out of the guy.
Then Jack goes for the grand finale, a long, boring struggle with a phone book, and it is only the white pages, from a town the size of Tucson at best. The process involves a lot of folding back and forth, and mostly it looks like he is giving the book a massage. Afterward, Jack can barely breathe. “You don’t need a phone to dial up Jesus,” he says, and then leans over, hands on his knees, panting.
“Such bullshit,” Patuni says. “What are we, dupes?”
“This is such a lie,” I say. “Everything is so rigged.”
Yellow pamphlets entitled “Yield to Jesus” file down our row and as soon as the Power Team opens things up for Q&A, I stand up.
“Answer this,” I say. “Wasn’t Jacob stronger than the angel?”
The Power Teamers look at one another.
“Forget the Old Testament,” the black Power Teamer says. “Jesus is where it’s at.”
We all wait for one of them to expand on this, but they don’t, and we’re not sure if things are over. What’s clear is that Jack is beat. I wonder if he maybe strained something. Cheryl is down by him, running a hand over his back, and even bent over, his lats are like Corvette fenders.
* * *
Toward the early afternoon, an unusual weather front moves in. It sweeps up from the Baja and stalls in the Phoenix Valley. Cloud heads rise, threaten, and dissipate, leaving the city overcast and hot. The mugginess gives my father a considered mood as he works quietly in the heat, finishing the last pink panels that will seal us into Treen’s back lot. The blocks flow with method and precision—he tamps down a row, steps back, eyeballs the line, hefts another block. Already, I have a mixer of bright yellow mortar turning for the curved, decorative wall out front, and as I feed him the last of the pink block and mortar, I keep thinking about Jack, about how much that phone book meant to him.
Halfway through the yellow wall out front, my father loses his steam. He does not like the weather, he says, and we take a late lunch. We search the back roads of Chandler for a Burger King, but we are forced to settle for a tavern that in some way appeals to my father. There used to be an air force base out this way a long time ago, and the tavern is called The Lazy Jet.
We sit at two empty stools in the center of the long bar and order drafts and a microwave Tombstone pizza. Everyone in the bar watches TV, including the bartender, whose wild, choppy hair looks like it was cut in an emergency room. Four or five people to the left of us look up to a TV that shows One Life to Live, while those to the right watch a documentary on Africanized bees.
The TVs are loud, especially all the buzzing, and we don’t really talk much. The tavern’s air-conditioner struggles to keep the place cool in this humidity, and when the pizza comes, I am hungrier than I thought, even after eating earlier. Dad lets me have the extra piece. The bar phone rings, and the bartender answers in front of us. He mutes the TVs with the remote.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay, yeah, when?” He looks at his watch and hangs up. “The caller said there’s a bomb in here,” he announces. “And it will go off in five minutes.”
Nobody makes to leave, and neither do we.
Dad uses plastic tongs to help himself to a pickled egg, which he eats whole.
The bartender sets up a silver shaker and follows a scoop of ice with a clear stream of liquor. He shakes it with two hands, and the muted rattle of ice sounds like the rocks inside the rotating drum of the cement truck when my father and I pour footings. But with the smell of chilling alcohol, I think of Loren, try to picture the inside of her house. I see a refrigerator at the center, hear Christian rock everywhere, but other than that, I mostly see objects—sports cups, crowbars, protein cereal, a hot rod in the garage—and I can’t really get them to come together, get them rolling like a movie in my head.
Dad orders two more beers. “I wish it would hurry up and rain,” he says.
I’ll confess I’m also thinking about the bomb, which is getting to me a little.
A guy at the end of the bar asks if the caller’s voice was a woman’s, but the bartender doesn’t answer him—instead, he just turns the TVs up again.
“Enough with the bees, already,” I say and get some dirty looks.
* * *
Back at the job site, Treen shit-heels us. I load up the trucks while Dad finishes the yellow wall by himself. I hose out the mixer, shovel sand, and pack the leftover cement and dye. I spray down the walls with the hose, and I like the feeling of the water coursing through the nozzle. The slower the mortar dries, the harder it gets, so this is the last part of every job, and I’m on the west wall when Treen comes out with a check that’s only half of what it should be.
Treen points
to a crack in his driveway he claims wasn’t there before we stacked block on it. “I’ll have to repour the whole pad,” he says.
“Driveways crack,” my father says. “That’s how it works.”
“Nobody cracks my driveway and gets away with it.”
“Your driveway was probably cracked long before I came,” my father says.
“Look, this isn’t about you,” Treen says. “It won’t cost you anything. You’re bonded and insured. All you have to do is file a claim.”
“This is a bad idea,” Dad says. “You’ve come up with a real mistake of an idea.”
“You’re bonded and insured, otherwise you couldn’t get a license. We all know it’s a crime to contract without a license. I know it is because I’m a member of the county commissioner’s board.”
“You can barely see that crack,” I say and point, but they don’t even hear me.
My father considers Treen very carefully and then walks to his truck.
Deep down, I know my dad isn’t going to hurt anyone, but I want it to happen, I do. “You better start running,” I say to Treen, and the two of us watch my father stride toward his truck like he will return with a bazooka.
Instead, he comes back with a push broom. He sweeps out the crack to show its age, which begins a long, futile debate with Treen that leaves my father exhausted and angry. At the end, Treen holds a light check in one hand and a cordless phone in the other, threatening to call some public agency I’ve never heard of.
My father will not take the check.
I’m looking at Treen, and his collarbone is right there. I am so ready to lay some jiu-jitsu on him that I start bouncing up and down on my toes. “Come on,” I tell Dad, “let’s take him out.”
“Go wait in my truck,” he tells me, and I just do what I’m told.
It’s only a minute later that my father is behind the wheel, and without really speaking, we’re driving to a gas station to buy a twelve-pack of Coors. Then we return to the job site, where we find Treen’s gone inside, the check sitting under a rock in the driveway. Here we drink in the hot cab for three hours, until sunset, looking at the blue kachina symbol painted on Treen’s garage door. It is a rainbird.
My father starts talking and he never really stops. He talks about everything, most of it I’ve never heard before, and though his mind goes all over the place, it’s like he’s only telling different parts of one big story. He tells me that when he was a boy, he had a half-wild sheepdog named Bone that killed the mayor’s son’s prize boxer in front of the Bijou Theater. He tells me I was named after his great uncle Ronald, who was rumored to have seen an angel, underwater, when he was drowning in the Atlas River—the angel said breathe the water, but Ronald knew the angel was lying. I hear that Dad enlisted in the navy on a bad impulse, and regretting it, stole a horse from a ranch in Kingman, rode into the hills to decide whether to report for service, and when he returned nine days later, no one had noticed the pony was gone. I was conceived at a drive-in feature of The China Syndrome, he tells me, a movie that kind of rattled him because it was a true story.
We sweat beer, and the adrenaline settles into a dull ache in my stomach. While Dad talks, he lets his arms hang on the steering wheel, so that it seems like we are driving to a place we know so well there is no need to watch the road. The illusion is ruined only by Treen’s head popping over our pink wall from time to time to view us with eerie concern. But my father does not seem to see him.
“You know,” my father says, “by the time I was your age, I’d made it through shark survival school, dengue fever, and a magazine fire. I’ve made it through the seven seas of the world.” He lifts his hands. “Now where am I?”
“Let’s go home,” I say.
Looking tired, he says, “I suppose,” and puts a smoke in his lips that he doesn’t light. Then he steps out of the truck, walks up the driveway, and bends down to grab the check, which he folds and puts in his shirt pocket. “I’ve got a repair job for us tomorrow, at the end of Ocotillo Street,” he says and clamps a hand on my shoulder, squeezing the way he used to when I was a kid. Then we part.
My legs are cramped when I climb into my own truck. Pulling away, I can barely work the clutch. In the rearview mirror, I see my father pausing to light his rojo before he, too, heads out. His face flares orange as he lifts the glowing lighter, smoke curls from the cab, and then comes a faint clang as his shifter finds reverse.
* * *
Loren’s house is across from the Presbyterian Youth Center, and at eight, I pull into its parking lot. Under this low cloud ceiling, the moon, if involved, casts no glow, and it is absolutely dark. The church’s perfect lawns crawl right to the asphalt, and my headlights set to glowing a row of white-trunked orange trees.
I find Loren sitting on the curb, the way her daughter might between classes. Right away, I can see she’s been crying, and when she climbs in, a shiner is clear under the dome light.
“What happened to your eye?”
“Don’t say anything, please. Jack had another relapse. Let’s just leave it.”
“Is this because of me?” I ask. “I mean, I got a look at his power thing today.”
“Don’t worry, tiger. He’s more likely to try to baptize you than kill you.”
“I’m worried about you,” I say. “I can take care of myself.”
Loren laughs once, a little too hard, and has to blow her nose.
“Look, I don’t want him to ruin this, too,” she says. “Let’s just go to the desert again. That’s all I want right now.”
I put the truck in gear and swing south toward the desert, but as soon as we hit the two-laner that crosses the Indian reservation, we get stuck behind a semi rig pulling an open trailer of onions. The papery skins snap into the wind and flutter in our headlights like snow. Our eyes water as they whip in the cab, do loops, and leave.
The onions make me sniff and tear up, but what I really feel is pissed.
“What a hypocrite,” I say. “Does he think Jesus is just going to forgive him? I wouldn’t forgive him if I were you. I say don’t do it.”
“Please,” Loren says. “Let’s just drop it.”
I can’t drop it though. I’m getting all worked up out of nowhere.
“Who does he think he is? Why doesn’t he pick on someone his own size? That’s what these Christians do, they—”
“You ever stop to think about the kind of problems you’d have to have to want to be born all over again?” Loren asks me. “I suppose other people become marines or wind up in jail. But before this church thing, Jack was raging all the time. All the time. My daughter, Cheryl, was completely out of control.”
The city lights dim with the curving road, reducing the flurry of skins to two cones of mothlike flutter in our high-beams until the highway finally divides, and we can pass the rig. It’s so dark that it’s hard to know how fast we’re going—creosote and palo verde appear in flashes, leaning over the road’s tight shoulders, and then are gone.
As I swing into the new lane, I ask, “How come you didn’t join the church? I mean, what kept you in control?”
“I can cope with lots,” Loren says, bracing a hand on the dash. “I can roll with just about anything.”
The trees start to disappear in the west, and I know we have taken up with the SanTan rail line beside us, though the only sign is the rise and fall of a purple shine that paces us in the power wires that follow the tracks.
In the dark, I find a turnoff that looks like the one we took before, but I can’t tell, and we’re pretty much committed when we hit the soft sand. We wander through a web of scrub brush, the lights casting stark shadows that wheel and bounce through all our wrong turns and back-outs.
We wallow down a dry arroyo, and the virgin desert we’d hoped for isn’t in the cards. We come to a halt before some old drums and a pile of blackened bedsprings left from a giant mattress fire. I switch off the dome light so it doesn’t blind us when we open the doors, and even maki
ng the few steps to the tailgate in such dark is like negotiating the cold ass of the moon. In the Chevy’s work bed, we make out for a while under a low sky, staticky and featureless. I scatter the tools, throwing shovels and trowels over the side, and then I peel back a plastic tarp to reveal a half ton of cool, wet sand, into which we sink our shapes like snow angels.
Loren lays her body on mine, and as our clothes come off, our breath alternates, hard, in each other’s faces. She pulls me inside her, then presses her thumb hard behind my scrotum. The feeling is deep and weird, and I am erect forever. For a while, about six degrees of the moon, I am outside of myself, I am a part of someone else, and it doesn’t feel like flying, the way you might think. It feels like landing, maybe the way a jet comes down out of the clouds, or a ship steams all the way around the world and finds its slip.
I drop her off in the church parking lot, rolling in with my headlamps off. Across the street, instead of seeing the green-black Chevelle in the driveway, the garage door is open, with all the lights on, and we make out the distant figure of Jack, leaned-back on an incline bench, smoking a cigarette with one hand while his whole other arm soaks in an orange cooler.
Loren kisses me quick, climbs out, and then leans in the window. “It’s been a night,” she says to me. “You’ve joined the ranks of the complicated.”
I look over at Jack. “I don’t think the night’s over.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s harmless for now.”
“I guess I’ll see you at the Redirection meeting tomorrow.”
Loren turns and walks away, but as she nears the streetlamp, she slows, then underneath it, stops. She stares at her arms, leans over to examine her legs. She looks back at me with astonishment, and I start to realize what has happened.
I put the truck in gear and creep forward into the light of the streetlamp. I stick my arm out the window and it’s splotched with patches of fluorescent yellow.
