Part Seven
Nathan McCann
11 August 1980
Various Forms of Resistance
At a little after seven in the evening, Nathan set down his newspaper and turned off the light in the den. The darkness surprised him, because both Nat and Carol were home. Then he corrected himself. Carol was home, in addition to Nat. When was Nat ever not home?
In any case, he expected lights to be on in some other part of the house.
He stepped out into the darkness of the living room and heard sobbing. He switched on a lamp. Carol did not look up or respond. She continued to cry, curled in a fetal position, on her side on the sofa.
Nathan resisted the temptation to ask foolish questions, such as, what’s wrong? From the point of view of Carol’s world, what wasn’t wrong?
He sat down beside her on the couch. Put a hand on her shoulder. She sat up and tucked under his arm, still crying. Though it made him uncomfortable to play such a role, Nathan sat still with his arm around her while she cried it out.
After a time he said, “I take it he still won’t talk to you.”
“Right.”
“Anything worse than usual going on?”
“Yes.”
But she didn’t immediately elaborate. And he opted for declining to pry. A few seconds of silence. Her sobs seemed to be calming some.
Then she said, “He said one word to me tonight. One word. Guess what it was?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Nathan.”
“Nathan what?”
“He wants to do his physical therapy with you. Not me.”
“How do you get all that from the one word: Nathan?”
“Because I asked him. I said, ‘Nathan what? What about Nathan?’ And he pointed to what I was doing with his leg. And I said, ‘What? You want Nathan to do your PT with you?’ And he nodded.” On that last sentence, she began again to cry softly.
“Why would he want that?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t understand him at all these days. I don’t understand why five months later he suddenly doesn’t want me for the exercises any more. I don’t understand why he talks to you, but not to me.”
“Barely. He barely talks to me.”
“Well, it’s a pile of words compared to how much he says to me.”
“Have you ever asked him why? Oh. Never mind. That was a foolish question. I forgot. He doesn’t talk to you, so what good would it do to ask questions? I’ll go in and see if I can find out what’s going on with him.”
“Thanks, Nathan.”
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Nathan found Nat lying on his back on the bed, in just a pair of boxer shorts, listening to the irritating drone of some kind of raucous cartoon comedy show on TV. The TV he’d insisted on having placed in his and Carol’s bedroom. He did not look up as Nathan came through the door.
Feathers lay on the bed beside Nat, snoring audibly, his chin on Nat’s belly. Nat stroked the dog’s head absent-mindedly while he gazed at the TV screen.
Nathan stood over the bed for a moment, expecting the young man’s eyes to meet his eventually.
It was hard not to notice that Nat’s body was changing.
Nathan’s mind filled with the image of Nat’s last night in the Golden Gloves in New York. In the remembered image, his chest was so fully developed. Carved, almost. Visible right through his tank top. The muscles in his calves looked like thick ropes. The circumference of his upper arms was so remarkably impressive.
Now he looked as if he’d gained twenty pounds and lost twenty pounds of muscle, all at the same time.
Nat’s eyes finally came up. Questioning.
Nathan turned off the TV.
“Hey!” Nat said. Just that one word, exiting Nat’s mouth all by itself, sounded almost normal.
“You need to do your physical therapy,” Nathan said.
The young man turned his face away.
Nathan picked up one of Nat’s bare feet. Raised Nat’s leg so that his knee bent, and his calf paralleled the bed. He waited for Nat to push against his hand. And waited. He shouldn’t have needed to say, “Push against my hand.” After five months of physical therapy, both the professional and the homework variety, Nathan figured he must have caught on to the routine by now.
“What’s going on with you tonight?” Nathan asked. Nat only shrugged.
“Would you like to start by pushing against my hand?” Light pressure from Nat’s bare heel. Very light. “I can’t imagine that’s all you’ve got.”
First only silence. Then Nat spoke. “Don’t you know… I’m a cripple?”
The words twisted in the usual way as they made their way through Nat’s mouth, sounding like the words of a deaf person guessing at speech. But Nathan was able to understand each one.
“Your speech is getting better.”
Nat snorted bitter laughter. “I sound like … a retard,” he said.
Much as Nathan hated to admit it, and unlikely as he was to say it out loud, Nat did speak as though he suffered from a serious learning disability.
A thought struck him for the first time. “Is that why you won’t talk to Carol?”
Nat turned his face away again, and did not reply.
“Carol loves you, Nat. That young woman genuinely loves you. You have to trust that. You have to trust that it’s really you she loves. Not the speech patterns or the biceps.” The minute the words left his mouth, Nathan realized that the comment about Nat’s muscles would have been better left unsaid.
A long silence, during which Nat did not bother to push against Nathan’s hand.
Then Nat moved his right hand in a way that suggested writing. Asking Nathan to give him something to write with, and on.
“No,” Nathan said. “I promised your speech therapist I would not let you write things out any more. She says it’s a lazy habit. You need to keep practicing your speech, Nat. You won’t get it back without practice.”
More silence. Nathan watched the young man move his jaw in some indecipherable, repetitious pattern. Finally, Nat took his leg back from Nathan and let it fall on to the bed.
“Tell me what’s wrong tonight,” Nathan said. “I know a lot has been wrong for a long time. I know this is a hard adjustment for you. But something changed tonight. And I’m hoping you’ll tell me what it is.”
Nathan sat down on the edge of the bed and waited.
A split second before he gave up and left Nat to his solitude, the young man spoke. His words formed slowly, with long breaks in between. A pattern that suggested great concentration and stress on his part.
“Finally … figured out …” He trailed off.
“What? You figured out what, Nat?”
“I won’t …” He trailed off again, as if refusing to finish.
“What, Nat? You won’t do what?”
“Make the doctors eat their words.”
A long, sad silence. I should have known, Nathan thought. Whatever the doctors told him to expect, I should have known he wouldn’t believe it. Not Nat. He’d think those rules applied to everybody else except him.
“Nat—”
“I’m disappearing.”
“You’re still here, Nat.”
“Look.” He raised his right arm, somewhat unsteadily, and tried to flex his bicep. With less than dramatic results.
“I really don’t think a big bicep is the heart of the issue here, Nat. But if you want your muscle tone to improve, you need to throw yourself much harder into your physical therapy.”
“Tired,” Nat said.
Nathan sighed. “I understand. I can imagine you would be. But I’ve never known you to give up before. So I know you’ll keep up with the exercises.”
Long silence.
“With you,” Nat said.
“You don’t want Carol to help you with your therapy any more?”
Nat shook his head.
“Because you don’t want her to see you like this?”
Nathan waited. But Nat never answered.
After a time, Nathan rose, turned the TV back on, and left Nat alone.
4 March 1981
Almost Any Idea Will Do
“Yeah? Who is it?” Manny Schultz’s voice, calling through his battered and poorly painted apartment door. It was like a flashback for Nathan, who had stood in this spot on one previous occasion. Only the weather had changed. It was now a lovely, cool spring afternoon.
“It’s Nathan McCann, Manny.”
The door opened a crack, as it had two summers earlier. Again Nathan’s sinuses recoiled from the assault of thick, stale tobacco smoke.
The tiny man’s face appeared.
“Oh. Nathan. Yeah. How are you? I feel bad. I oughta come visit the kid more. I know I oughta. It’s not just because it’s depressing. Even though it is. But I think it’s hard for him, too. It seemed to bring him down those few times I visited. Did you notice that, too?”
“I’m not sure,” Nathan said. “That’s not exactly why I’m here, though.”
“Oh. OK. Come in.” Manny brushed his hair roughly back into place with one hand and held the door wide for Nathan, who did not step in. “Oh. Right. I forgot. You’re a non-smoker. OK. I’ll come out.”
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“I notice the gym downstairs is for lease,” Nathan said, leaning against the fire escape rail. He looked out over the declining downtown neighborhood, amazed at how much further it had decayed in just a couple of years.
“Yeah. I told ’em. I told ’em they were making a mistake. You know, putting in an upscale gym and all. This is downtown. You don’t go upscale downtown. The people here, they come up hard. They don’t want to put on them silly tights and bounce up and down on a stairclimber. I could just kick myself for letting the place go when Jack died. That was such a great boxing gym. He was doing good, too. All I had to do was take the wheel. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It just cut the heart out of me when Jack died.”
“I don’t know anything about a Jack,” Nathan said. “I don’t know who he was.”
“A story better left untold.”
A long silence as Nathan sorted through his thoughts. He supposed Manny was waiting to hear what he wanted, why he had come. But Nathan was still organizing and framing those thoughts in his mind. It was unlike him to enter into a conversation without first putting his thoughts in order. But these thoughts seemed particularly hard to tame.
“You know it’s been almost a year,” Nathan said.
“Don’t think I don’t know it. Don’t think I don’t got those dates burned into my brain. March ninth was the date he landed in the hospital. I got it memorized. March seventh was the day …” But the little man never finished the thought.
“Please finish your sentence, Manny. What happened the night of March the seventh?”
“I can’t. I promised Nat I’d never say nothing, never, to nobody. I’m not an angel, and I’m not a saint, and I don’t do everything right. But I don’t look somebody in the eye and promise ’em I won’t tell a story, and then turn around and tell it. That bad I’m not.”
“All right,” Nathan said. And then listened to the straining awkwardness of the silence that followed. “So, does the new gym going out of business put you out of a job?”
“Not sure. If it does, it puts me out on the street, too. These little apartments go with the lease and they might wanta use ’em for something else. Or maybe they’ll still want somebody to clean up at night. Depends on who moves in.”
“How many square feet?”
“I got no idea. I’m no good at stuff like that. Why? You thinking of setting up some kind of shop?”
“I just wondered.”
“You wanna see it? Till somebody leases it and changes the locks, I still got the key.”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “I would like to see it.”
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“I’d put a boxing ring right here,” Manny said. “And over there is where we used to hang the heavy bags.” Nathan watched dust swirl in the late afternoon light through the storefront windows as the little man paced the empty, dusty space. “I’d probably put some workout equipment over there in the corner. Just real basic stuff. Slant board, weight bench, free weights. Nothing fancy. What kills me is it wouldn’t cost much to get it going. You don’t need that much equipment, and anyway you can get it second-hand. And the rent is cheap because the whole neighborhood is falling apart. But it’s about a thousand times more than what I got. I shoulda kept it going when Jack died. I just didn’t have the heart to do it back then.”
“How much would you need?”
The little man stopped moving. He did not immediately speak.
“Why do you ask that?” he said after a time.
“Just a question.”
Manny shook his head. “Seems to me we took enough from you already. Every time I went and saw that kid since the … since he got hurt, he said the same thing to me. ‘Good thing Nathan made us get insurance.’ He kicked about it at the time. Thought he was invincible. Now he figures the insurance solves everything. But I know better. It covers eighty per cent. Right? So twenty per cent of all that’s happened to him is a shitload of money. Pardon my French.”
Nathan shrugged slightly. Gathered his thoughts before answering. “It just means an extra year or two of doing people’s financial records before I retire. It’s not like I’m having to work as a coal miner or a heavy-equipment operator. I think an old man my age can still lift those heavy books. If I made an additional investment, maybe one more year beyond that.”
“Now why would you wanna do a thing like that for me? You haven’t already made enough bad investments?”
“Would this be a bad investment?”
“Actually, no. I might not make a fortune, but I bet I could make enough to pay back a small business loan. I still wanna know why you’d do a thing like that for me.”
“It wouldn’t really be for you. Quite truthfully. It would be for Nat.”
“Oh. Oh! I get it. You think if he could go to work in a boxing gym, it might get him out of the house. Yeah. Yeah, he might be good here. He could pay back what me and Jack gave him for free. You know, find some other kids and help them come up. I’d pay him something, of course. Only … I just hope he wouldn’t scare the new guys away. You know, remind ’em how bad you can get hurt.” Manny seemed to chew that thought over for a beat or two. Then he said, “Well, one good thing, anyway. They won’t gimme a hard time when I tell ’em to put on that head guard.”
“So he wasn’t wearing a head guard that night?”
No reply.
“I guess he couldn’t have been.”
Little Manny stared at the floor. “I promised him,” he said.
Nathan nodded and moved the conversation in another direction. “I keep telling him he needs to find another dream. But he says he can’t. He says he only ever had that one. So, I thought, if he can’t fight any more, at least he can be involved with the sport in some other way.”
“I think I get it now, why you came over here. How long have you known this place was for lease?”
“I didn’t know until I parked my car just now.”
“Really? So what did you come over here to say?”
“I’m not sure, actually. I just knew I needed an idea. I thought you might have one. I didn’t expect one to be dropped into my lap. But I guess life is like that sometimes.”
“Much of the time as you let it be,” Manny said.
“So how much would you need?”
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