I must have stood in the stairwell, head bowed, listening for about thirty seconds. I wasn’t intending to spy on anyone, but I couldn’t quite understand what I was hearing. This is none of your business, I thought as I walked toward the door, drawn by a powerful curiosity. I crept up to the door and then peered through the narrow opening between the door and the frame.
The room beyond, from the narrow slice of it that I could see, had a high ceiling from which hung a tangle of pipes snaking in various directions. The walls were a dull mustard yellow, though clean and lit by lamps and sunlight filtering through what looked like narrow skylights at the top of the back wall. About ten feet from the door, in the middle of the room, sat Pelham Greer in his wheelchair. He was turned about three-quarters away from me so that I mostly saw his back and the side of his long, lean jaw, but I could see that he was shirtless and glistening with sweat. Hair sprouted from the tops of his shoulders in ragged patches. He was curling dumbbells, one in each hand, releasing a grunt each time a dumbbell passed the apex of its curl. The right bicep would swell into a round, compact mass beneath the skin and then relax. Each time he lifted a dumbbell, he rocked slightly in his wheelchair, which creaked.
Then, just as he started curling his right arm again, something happened—the dumbbell fell out of his hand, causing his rising arm, which had been straining to lift the dumbbell, to jerk upright so that he barked his hand across the spokes of the right-hand wheel of his chair. “Fuck!” he said aloud, and he turned to examine his hand. As he turned, he faced toward the partly open door, and for an instant his eyes swept the doorway. I jerked back so he couldn’t see me. I thought I heard a slight hiss, a sharp intake of breath. Was he in pain? Or had he seen me? I swallowed and waited a beat, and then called out. “Hey, everything okay in there?” I reached for the door, knocked on it twice, and slowly pulled it open. “Hello?”
When I stepped into the room, Greer looked up at me, startled. “What do you want?” he asked. I relaxed slightly—it seemed that he had not seen me spying at the door.
“Sorry, Mr. Greer,” I said. “I was walking by and heard you cry out . . .” I paused, staring at his hand. It was bleeding from the knuckles, blood tracing the back of his hand to his wrist and forearm.
He shook his head in disgust. “Doing some curls and the fucking dumbbell slips out of my hand,” he said. “Smashed it on the side of the goddamn wheel—” He stopped abruptly, as if he had just revealed a secret, and then sighed. “Get me a rag over there, by the sink. Please.”
There was an efficiency kitchen on the wall behind me, next to the door, and a stack of dishcloths sat on the counter. I ran some cold water over a cloth and brought it and a dry one to Greer, who dabbed at his knuckles with the wet one, wincing once, and then wiped up the trickles of blood before awkwardly wrapping the dry dishcloth around his hand. I didn’t offer to help—he hadn’t asked, and I got the sense that he would resent such an offer—so I glanced around what was obviously his apartment. Aside from the kitchen, there was a bed, a workbench, a card table with a single chair, a small television on top of a trunk, two white fiberboard cabinets, and a large footlocker at the foot of the bed, and not much else. At the far end of the room was a slight ramp leading up to a door that led outside. As bare as the room looked, especially under the exposed pipes overhead, everything was neat and orderly, including the made bed.
Greer used his teeth to finish tying the dishcloth around his right hand, flexed his fingers, and seemed to think it would do. Then he turned his eyes on me. “Thank you,” he said. “Like a beer?”
I hesitated. It was hot outside and a beer would have tasted really good right then, but I already felt guilty for having spied on the man; more practically, I also thought about running into students with beer on my breath.
As if anticipating this last thought, Greer said, not unkindly, “Kids are going to be at practice for another hour or so. If you don’t have to go coach . . .” He paused, waiting.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
He rolled himself to the kitchen, easily maneuvering around the two dumbbells on the floor. He got two bottles out of the refrigerator and returned, handing me one. I couldn’t help but notice how deftly he handled the wheelchair. “Nice moves,” I said, twisting off the bottle cap, and then I froze, unable to believe I had just said that aloud. But Greer just nodded, gave me a strange little smile, and raised his beer, and I gladly drank along with him. I could smell his sweat, hot and a little rank. It suddenly struck me that Greer was wearing soccer shorts, with what was left of his legs sticking out from the shorts and rounded off near the knees, like a battered pair of baseball bats.
“You like teaching so far?” Greer asked me.
I tore my eyes away from his legs and shrugged. “Yeah,” I said. “I like it. Working with kids is fun. Sometimes.” I said this last word ruefully.
Greer gave a short chuckle. “When they aren’t yanking your chain?”
I smiled. “Something like that.”
“Different than when you were first here.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t help thinking that Greer must feel the same way. Aside from the passage of time, both of us had experienced loss, and we had both returned to Blackburne irrevocably changed. It must have been that thought that prompted me to put my beer down on the card table and say what I said. “I actually wanted to ask you a question about . . . Fritz.”
Greer looked at me blankly.
“Fritz Davenport,” I said. “He was my—”
“I know who he was,” Greer said. His blank look had been replaced by one of wariness. “He went missing. Ran off and nobody’s seen him since.”
Something had changed in the room, a tension that displaced the earlier geniality. I plowed forward. “I heard that you saw him, coming out of our dorm that night.”
He nodded slowly. “I did. He had a backpack over one shoulder.”
“What—what was he wearing? His track uniform?”
“No. Jeans and a sweater. A dark blue sweater.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Told the police that.”