8. Maddox
MADDOX
The gym at four PM is the best gym.
Morning is full of guys who have a problem. Evening is full of guys who had a day. Four is just whoever is paid to be here and whoever has nothing better to do, and today that is me, Phoenix, Jax, and Grayson, and the bench press and the racks and the cable machines and the mirrors that do not lie.
I am lying anyway.
I am lying to myself in the mirror about why I am here at four PM when my lift day is Wednesday.
I am here because the meet is at seven and I do not know what to do with my body until seven.
I am here because if I sit in my loft from two to seven, I will put my fist through the drywall again, and the landlord will send another email, and the team will pay for it again, and I do not feel like getting that email today.
I am here to burn off three hours.
I am on the rack behind Phoenix. He is doing squats with more weight than a man his age should put on his back.
I am spotting. Jax is on the bench doing a warm-up set at nothing.
Grayson is on the cable machine pretending to do face-pulls and actually watching a video on his phone. This is a normal Wednesday four PM.
It is Friday.
It is not Wednesday.
“Creed.” Phoenix racks the bar. Wipes his face with the bottom of his shirt.
“Captain.”
“Spot me one more.”
I glance at the loaded bar. The plates are not lying about their weight.
“You don't need one more.”
“I said spot me one more.”
I step up behind him. He unracks. He drops. The bar bends a little when he comes up, which is the bend of a weight that is not safe on a human spine. He locks out. He racks.
He turns around.
“Okay,” he says. “Now talk.”
“About what.”
“About the thing.”
Jax, on the bench, has not lifted the bar in two minutes. Grayson has put his phone down. I notice both of these things without turning my head.
“There's no thing.”
“Creed.”
He says my name without moving his face.
“Phoenix.”
He strips a forty-five off his side of the rack. I strip a forty-five off mine. The plates click onto the tree. He reracks his belt over his shoulder. He drinks half a water bottle and sets it on the floor between our feet.
“Last night,” he says, “you stood up at Vigil and announced something in front of the team.”
“I'm aware.”
“Yeah.”
He rolls his neck. Something in it pops.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say if it was a thing or a joke.”
The gym has the usual gym sounds. A treadmill belt, a weight dropping, somebody's playlist bleeding out of cheap headphones. Jax has found a reason to stretch his calves against the wall closest to us. Grayson is not pretending to watch anything.
I could tell Phoenix it was a joke.
I should tell Phoenix it was a joke.
The sentence is in my mouth already. Just a chirp, Cap. Laurent went pink, it was funny, I'm done with it. The sentence would land. Phoenix would accept it because Phoenix wants to accept it. The team would metabolize it by Monday. Paul would still hate me by Friday for other reasons.
I do not say it.
I pick up the water bottle. I drink the rest of Phoenix's water. I hand him the empty.
“Creed.”
“Cap.”
The bar on the rack behind him has started to settle with a faint metal tick.
“That's your answer?”
“That's my answer.”
Jax, against the wall, makes a sound that is half a laugh and half a cough. Grayson puts his phone in his pocket. His video was over five minutes ago. He is only listening now.
Phoenix looks at me a long time. He has a face that does not move much in the first place, and when it does not move it is not the same as nothing happening. Something is happening. I am watching him decide what size of problem I am.
“Twenty,” he says, finally.
“I'm aware.”
He sets the towel down on the rack.
“Creed.”
“I know how old he is, Cap.”
His eyes do not move off my face.
“Paul's kid.”
“I know whose kid he is.”
Phoenix's mouth tightens a quarter inch.
“You know his dad is going to take your jaw off with a skate.”
“Paul is welcome to try.”
I roll my shoulder. It clicks.
Phoenix picks up his towel. Wipes his face. Does not look away from me.
“Is this a thing?” he says.
“I don't know yet.”
That is not the sentence I meant to say.
That is the sentence I say.
Phoenix hears it. Phoenix hears I don't know yet and reads it as yes.
Captain reading a second-liner's stickwork, already knowing what system the guy came up in.
He does not smile. His face stays where it is.
But a small line comes in between his eyebrows, a line I have seen before only when he is working through something on the ice that he is going to have to solve later.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay.”
He shifts his weight to his other foot.
“You're a grown man.”
“I'm aware.”
He wipes his palm on his shorts.
“He's not.”
“He's twenty, Cap.”
The vent overhead cycles on. Cold air moves across the top of my head.
“He's a kid and his dad runs the bench, Creed.”
“I'm aware of that too.”
My jaw sets.
Phoenix nods. Once. He picks up the water bottle, realizes it is empty, drops it.
“I'm going to ask you one thing,” he says. “And then I'm not going to ask you about this again until you want me to.”
“Ask.”
“Are you going to hurt him?”
My hand is on the rack. I become aware of my hand.
I become aware of the bar. I become aware of the plates on the tree and the smell of rubber flooring and the fluorescent light in the ceiling and a guy three racks down who is grunting through a deadlift.
I become aware of everything in the gym at once, which is a tell, and Phoenix sees the tell, and Phoenix is the only man in this building I would let see it.
“No,” I say.
“Creed.”
“No.”
My hand comes off the rack.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
He nods once.
“I know.”
He picks up the empty bottle. Slaps me on the shoulder once. Walks toward the water fountain.
Jax and Grayson both look at me at the same time, like boys who have been told not to look at the accident on the highway.
“What?”
“Nothing,” says Grayson.
“Nothing at all,” says Jax.
They go back to not lifting.
I do legs. I do legs because legs are the only muscle group that will actually take five o'clock to six o'clock off my life.
I do back squats and I do Bulgarian splits and I do leg press, and I hate leg press but I do it anyway because the machine does not give me anywhere to look except at my own thighs in the mirror.
At the end, I do calves. After calves, I go to the heavy bag in the back.
I wrap my hands.
I hit the bag.
Phoenix is gone. Jax is gone. Grayson is gone.
The bag eats six rounds.
On round seven, I stop because my shoulders are done and my knuckles through the wraps are not going to hold up for warm-ups tomorrow and there is no reason to break my own hand tonight when there is a specific thing I am saving this hand for in two hours.
I unwrap.
I look at myself in the gym mirror.
I am sweaty. I am in the same black shorts and black tee I pulled out of a clean pile this morning. My hair is wet at the temples. My shoulders are tight. My jaw is tight. My whole face looks like a man who is going to do something stupid.
“You're going to do something stupid,” I tell the mirror.
The mirror does not argue.
I rinse my face in the sink, not a full shower. I change my shirt for the spare shirt in my bag. I walk out of the gym in shorts and a new tee at six-fifteen in the evening with my hair still damp, and I head for the waterfront.
The west pier is the narrow one.
The west pier is the pier that goes past the working side of the harbor, past the fishing boats, out to the concrete teeth where the tide breaks.
At seven PM in late September the sun is going down behind me.
The water is dark green going black. The wind is off the lake and smells of diesel and cold.
He is here already.
Of course he is here already. He is here twenty minutes early because he is twenty years old and he is Paul's son and Paul's son does not show up on time, Paul's son shows up early.
He is sitting on the concrete lip at the end of the pier, feet hanging over the water. Backpack on the ground next to him. Navy warm-up jacket. Jeans. He looks smaller in street clothes than he does in pads. He looks his age.
He hears me come up. He turns his head.
He does not stand.
His face does the thing it does, which is nothing and also everything. Green eyes up. Mouth a little open. Hands flat on the concrete on either side of his thighs.
“Hi.” His voice comes out very small.
“Laurent.”
“Sir.”
I shake my head once.
“Don't.”
“Maddox.”
It is the first time he has said my name.
The first name in his mouth. In his voice. The two syllables his father was probably on the ice listening to three hours ago. Maddox. The shape of it in a kid's mouth that has never said my name.
I become aware of my hands again.
I stand over him. He has to tilt his head back to look at me. He does not get up.
“Stand up, sweetheart.”
He stands up.
His backpack comes up with him by the strap. He settles the strap on his shoulder. His posture is the posture of a boy at a school assembly, chest forward, hands still.
He is waiting.
“I'm going to say a thing,” I tell him. “I am going to say it once. I need you to listen to it like a grown man and not like a kid, even though you are a kid. Can you do that.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.”
My jaw clenches.
“Don't.”
“Yes, Maddox.”
The shape of it again. I am going to have a problem with this specific sound.
“I want to take you somewhere,” I say.
“Where?”
“A room I keep. Ten minutes from here. It is a place I go with people when I want to do something I do not want anyone to see me do. It is not my home. It is not yours. It is a room.”
His throat does the swallow thing. Once.
“Okay.”
“I'm not done.”
“Okay.”
A gull goes past low over the water behind him, wings tipping.