“Watch which muscles move,” I said to Paul, “that way you learn which exercise does what for you.” I pressed the bar up, let it down, pressed it up. I breathed out each time. I did ten repetitions and set the bar back on the rack. A faint sweat had started on my forehead. Above us in the maple tree a grosbeak with a rose-colored breast fluttered in and sat I did another set. The sweat began to film on my chest. The mild breeze cooled it.
Paul said, “How much can you lift?”
I said, “I don’t know exactly. It’s sort of a good idea not to worry about that. You do better to exercise with what you can handle and not be looking to see who can lift more and who can’t and how much you can lift. I can lift more than this.”
“How much is that?”
“Two hundred forty-five pounds.”
“Does Hawk lift weights?”
“Some.”
“Can he lift as much as you?”
“Probably.”
I did a third set. When I got through I was puffing a little, and the sweat was trickling down my chest.
“Now we do some curls,” I said. I showed him how. We couldn’t find a dumbbell light enough for him to curl with one hand, so he used both hands on one dumbbell.
After two hours Paul sat on the weight bench with his head hanging, forearms on his thighs, puffing as if he’d run a long way. I sat beside him. We had finished the weights. I handed Paul the canteen. He drank a little and handed it back to me. I drank and hung it back up.
“How you feel?” I said.
Paul just shook his head without looking up.
“That good, huh? Well, you’ll be stiff tomorrow. Come on. We’ll play with the bags a little.”
“I don’t want to do any more.”
“I know, but another half hour and you’ll have done it all. This will be fun. We won’t have to work hard.”
“Why don’t you just let me alone?”
I sat back down beside him. “Because everybody has left you alone all your life and you are, now, as a result, in a mess. I’m going to get you out of it.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean you don’t have anything to care about. You don’t have anything to be proud of. You don’t have anything to know. You are almost completely neutral because nobody took the time to teach you or show you and because what you saw of the people who brought you up didn’t offer anything you wanted to copy.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“No, not yet. But if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault. You’re old enough now to start becoming a person. And you’re old enough now so that you’ll have to start taking some kind of responsibility for your life. And I’m going to help you.”
“What’s lifting weights got to do with that stuff?”
“What you’re good at is less important than being good at something. You got nothing. You care about nothing. So I’m going to have you be strong, be in shape, be able to run ten miles, and be able to lift more than you weigh and be able to box. I’m going to have you know how to build and cook and to work hard and to push yourself and control yourself. Maybe we can get to reading and looking at art and listening to something besides situation comedies later on. But right now I’m working on your body because it’s easier to start there.”
“So what,” Paul said. “In a little while I’m going back. What difference does it make?”
I looked at him, white and narrow and cramped, almost birdlike, with his shoulders hunched and his head down. He needed a haircut. He had hangnails. What an unlovely little bastard.
“That’s probably so,” I said. “And that’s why, kid, before you go back, you are going to have to get autonomous.”
“Huh?”
“Autonomous. Dependent on yourself. Not influenced unduly by things outside yourself. You’re not old enough. It’s too early to ask a kid like you to be autonomous. But you got no choice. Your parents are no help to you. If anything, they hurt. You can’t depend on them. They got you to where you are. They won’t get better. You have to.”
His shoulders started to shake.
“You have to, kid,” I said.
He was crying.
“We can do that. You can get some pride, some things you like about yourself. I can help you. We can.”
He cried with his head down and his shoulders hunched and the slight sweat drying on his knobby shoulders. I sat beside him without anything else to say. I didn’t touch him. “Crying’s okay,” I said. “I do it sometimes.”
In about five minutes he stopped crying. I stood up. There were two pairs of speed gloves on top of the light bag strike board. I picked them up and offered one pair to Paul.
“Come on,” I said. “Time to hit the bag.”
