Free Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

enthusiastic about Kurt’s nextadventure in the wide world of sports. That’s when Norman Hiller slouched over to pay us a visit, jabbing his thumb in the direction of the pool table and delivering a typical sample of Hiller wit. “You know why they call it blue ball, eh? Because that’s what the old farts who play it got dangling between their legs.” Having delivered this line, he dropped down on the bench beside us and started to beaver a toothpick for all he was worth.
    I laughed, but Hiller’s sally only caused Kurt to blink a couple of owlish, solemn blinks before resuming his monologue. “I was thinking I’d go out for the wrestling team this year,” he said. “I ought to be a pretty decent wrestler. I mean I got real strong fingers” – he held them up and flexed them under my nose – “and they say strong fingers are a must. I think I ought to make an okay wrestler.”
    I didn’t say anything. Hiller did. He always had an opinion when it came to sports. “You don’t want to wrestle,” he said. “Wrestling is a homo sport, guys dry humping each other all over a mat. There are more queers in wrestling than there are in figure skating. Little known fact. You want to take up the personal combat line – go into boxing, Meinecke.”
    “Boxing?” I said. There was no boxing club in our town, nor any boxers that I knew of.
    “Yeah, well, look at him,” said Norman turning to me. “Look at the fucking neck on him. The guy’s got a fucking neck like a tree trunk. Neck like that – works like shock absorbers on a car. You hit a guy with a neck like that, no way you could knock him out.”
    I cast Kurt a sidelong glance. I could see he was listening intently. Hiller could see it too.
    “Neck and hands,” continued Norman confidently. “That’s what makes a fighter. Kurt here has the neck but does he have the hands? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Let’s have a peek at the mitts, Meinecke.”
    Kurt showed the mitts, self-consciously displaying them on his knees where they lay immense, red, chapped, ugly.Norman prodded the knuckles with his index finger. “Look at them knuckles, Beman!” he urged. “Like fucking ball-bearings. These are lethal weapons we’re looking at. Stand back! Stand back!” he shouted theatrically, recoiling in mock alarm. “You don’t want those exploding in your face!”
    Apparently Kurt had it all, neck and hands. To hear Hiller talk we were in the presence of greatness. And greatness believed it. Norman shifted position on the bench and slipped his arm around Meinecke’s shoulders. “Ducks were made for water,” he said. “And you were made for the ring, Meinecke. You are a natural raw talent just waiting to be developed.”
    “But how? How do I get developed?”
    “You got to have like a manager, a trainer. Somebody to get the best out of you.”
    “But who?” said Meinecke. “Who’s a trainer around here?”
    I knew. Before answering, Norman leaned a little closer.
    The Meinecke training camp’s headquarters was established at Deke’s. Deke’s daddy had disappeared about the time Deke turned fourteen, three years before, and the mattress which Deke’s Mom had drunkenly set on fire while smoking in bed, and which his father had hauled smouldering through the house to heave into the backyard, was still there, a map of interesting stains dominated by the charred, blackened crater whose flames Mr. Deke had extinguished with the garden hose that fateful day. Shortly after this incident Mr. Deke had taken off for parts unknown and Mrs. Deke, down in the dumps and remorseful over the turn her life had taken, fell prey to Jehovah’s Witnesses and converted. Despite all these momentous changes, nobody got around to hauling the offending mattress off to the nuisance grounds and three years later it still lay where it had fallen. Which was convenient for Dooey, Hop Jump, Murph, and the rest of us because it provided a spot to loll about on