chest height. She wheeled over and McKenzie and his gang followed. When she unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off to reveal a workout bra underneath, I instantly wondered if she’d had this scenario in mind all along. Her arms and shoulders rippled with finely cut muscles, slim and corded, devoid of any softness that might indicate fat of any kind.
McKenzie stepped up and peeled off his shirt to go naked from the waist. He flexed his pectorals, which jumped like trained gerbils on his chest, and then tried to stretch his huge biceps, which because of their size seemed to bend his arms at a permanent angle.
An older man in khakis and a polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched on the breast appeared from behind the half-wall office and sauntered over. When he caught my eye and recognized me as a stranger, I gave him a shrug, as if I had no idea what was going on. He stood next to me and folded his arms, watching.
After locking the wheels on her chair, Sherry pushed herself to a standing position. On one leg, she hopped over to the machine on the right and positioned herself between the handles that flanked her shoulders. She put her palms on the two grips, with her elbows cocked behind her shoulders. The fabric of her bra stretched tight across her breasts. McKenzie followed suit on the machine next to her, his smile intact.
“Count out your own reps, McKenzie,” Sherry said. “Unless you need help from your boys here if you get past ten.”
She took a small hop and pressed herself up into a locked elbow position, and then lowered herself to the start. Then she pressed her entire body weight up again. McKenzie jumped up on his tower to match her.
“One, two, three…”
The music in the place had changed over to “Down ‘n’ Dirty” by Steelheart. I took the gym manager by the elbow and urged him toward his office.
“Maybe you could show me what kind of contract you have for a membership,” I said.
– 7 -
I knew the outcome of Sherry’s little “challenge” without watching or listening. But the manager couldn’t keep himself from peering around the corner of his cubicle for the first sixty seconds of our impromptu meeting.
Sherry has been doing those dips ever since I’ve known her. She’s been knocking them out on the curved stainless handles of the ladder into her pool for years. Even back then, she could do thirty reps without breathing hard. After her amputation, and the consequent loss of 20 percent of her body weight, I’d seen her do fifty before giving up, seemingly out of boredom. Mutt-faced McKenzie had maxed out at twenty-three. He was, of course, pressing an enormous muscle mass, which weighs even more than fat.
After Sherry had kicked his ass in front of his other lifter friends, she invited Booker to lunch quietly. I thanked the gym manager for a brochure and followed them out, depositing the printed materials in a trash can outside. On the sidewalk, Sherry and Booker wheeled over to a cafe on A1A. But I begged off, opting to go sit on the beachfront retaining wall with my feet in the sand and watch a trio of kite surfers fly off the waves and swells of the ocean in the shimmering sunlight.
Less than an hour later, I heard Sherry’s wheels crunching on the sandy sidewalk behind me. I let her pull up beside me, without turning. She said nothing, and I hoped she was enjoying the same sight I was. She knew, of course, that I was aware of her presence. It’s a gift that couples gain over time.
Finally, she broke the silence.
“Want to go swimming?”
When I turned to see if she was serious, the mischievous smile on her face answered the question. Then she stood up, put her palms on the three-foot-tall wall, and swung her torso and leg over it like a gymnast on a pommel horse. I leaned across and folded her chair before hoisting it over and laying it down in the sand for minimal safekeeping. While still sitting, we both took off our shirts and shoes, and then I looked at her with a question I didn’t want to ask. How did she want to get down to the water? Hop across the sand in front of two dozen sunbathers, or have me carry her?
Again she read my mind. And without hesitation, she stood up on one leg, and then leaned over to lock her arms around my neck, shifting her weight onto my back.
“Giddy-up, hoss,” she said, and I could feel the infectious smile behind my neck. I grinned and stood, adjusted her weight on my back, and then we half jogged across thirty yards of sand and into the white foam of low breakers.
We swam with the noncompetitive purpose of pleasure alone, for a while breaststroking, our faces popping up from the surface in slow rhythm, eyes blinking away salt water with each breath, and then letting the coolness wash over our faces again as we dipped our heads below. Then, at a distance from shore, we rolled over on our backs and floated, with our views of the sky the same: a cloudless canvas of blue like a porcelain cup covering our limited horizons. I could feel the movement of the sea, the rise and fall of deep waves.
As I sneaked a look over at Sherry, I saw that her eyes were open, but relaxed. I knew she was coming down from her earlier shot of adrenaline in the showdown with McKenzie. It was a rare pleasure to see her this way; I closed my eyes and enjoyed it.
Let her tell me what she wants to tell me, I thought. It might have been thirty minutes, it might have been an hour, but broken snatches of her voice finally brought me out of a trance.
“You know… kind of like… tell but didn’t.”
“What?” I said, rolling over and bringing my head and ears out of the water.
Sherry made the same maneuver and looked at me.
“Sorry. I was just talking out loud, I guess.”
“Couldn’t hear you, babe.”
“The meet with Booker,” she said. “Very odd.”
We were now treading water next to each other about fifty yards from shore. We both turned toward land and did a kind of head-out-of-water stroke, slowly heading in.
“First, he tried to apologize for McKenzie and the other assholes, saying they didn’t mean anything by it, and they weren’t really such bad guys.”
If it were possible to shake one’s head in a bobbing sea, I shook my head.
“Then he said something about them being the kind of animals that see a weakness in their prey and go after it.”
“What the hell was that about?” I said.
“Well, he tried to cover then by saying it was good police tactics, knowing the street, knowing the opponent.”
“So the rest of those guys were cops?”
“I only recognized three or four of them. Mostly District Three, the area they call the danger zone,” she said.
“And that’s where Booker worked?”
“Yeah, it’s been like some competitive club atmosphere out there for years-lots of macho shit. The captain in charge tries to keep a lid on it, but he also likes the image of being rough and ready. So he lets a lot go.”
I kept stroking. Everybody knows that kind of culture exists in policing. It’s natural, and sometimes even essential. You wouldn’t want a bunch of schoolteachers trying to control a riot. You can’t have a crew of desk jockeys running into a burning high-rise to carrying people down the smoking staircase. There’s going to be a macho element in every department. You cook up a blend of testosterone, a heightened sense of authority, an emphasis on physical conditioning, and pepper it up with a dash of gun oil, and you can’t avoid it. Good police management keeps it in check. I’d seen it in Philadelphia. I’d seen it fail in Philadelphia.
After a few minutes of silent swimming, I could see the sand below us. I stopped and stood. Sherry did the same on one leg, and then continued talking.
“The scuttlebutt has always been that a pack of these lifter cops are into steroids and uppers, but internal affairs can’t-or won’t-get involved. I sure wasn’t going to get into that with Booker. So I changed the subject and asked him if he’d tried to do his physical therapy at the hospital rehab center. I told him it would be a lot more
