Free Stotan! by Chris Crutcher Page A

Stotan! All the way!”
    Jeff reappeared in seconds, walked into the kitchen and started throwing large globs of peanut butter onto the bread he’d laid out earlier for sandwiches.
    I crawled out of my bag and fiddled with the heater for a few seconds, pulling and pushing the frayed cord, and it magically came on. Nortie let out a quick “All right!” and scrambled over to stand by it. “Gotta get warm,” he said. “When Lion gets back up here, he’s going to beat me to death, and I want to feel it.”
    Lion stepped back through the door, dragging his snowy sleeping bag, dropped it on the floor, pounded his chest three times and said, “Stotan.” He flipped a snowball to Jeff, who dropped it in the sink.
    Nortie watched him warily a few seconds to be sure Lion wasn’t going to turn on him, breathed an almost inaudible sigh of relief and said, “Boy, we really got hummin’ today, huh?”
    I said, “Huh.”
    â€œHow does he do that?” Nortie asked.
    â€œHe doesn’t do it,” Lion said. “We do it.”
    â€œYeah,” Nortie said, “but I couldn’t do it by myself.And I wouldn’t, either. I mean, it’s crazy. You guys know that, don’t you? There’ll come a time when we ask ourselves why we did it. Like right now. Why are we doing this? Are we jerks?”
    â€œYou are,” Jeff said, “but that has nothing to do with Stotan Week. Let me give you a little advice. Forget that question until we’re out of here. You’re either going to do it or you’re not. Questions like ‘why’ only make it tougher.”
    Nortie grunted in agreement. “What time’s Elaine coming anyway?”
    â€œAbout seven,” Jeff said, and came through the kitchen door with the first plateload of sandwiches. “Eat up. Gotta have these gone before she gets here to make us a real meal.”
    At the sight of the sandwiches, my mouth watered uncontrollably. Christ, even my salivary glands were sore.
    It was quiet for the first few minutes we ate, except for a noise that sounded suspiciously like feeding time at the county fair. Then Nortie said, “I wonder if this could hurt us. I mean, I wonder if Max could work us so hard we’d drop dead or something. We get working so hard it doesn’t hurt anymore. I mean, it hurts, but I don’t care—I just keep swimming harder. Isn’t pain supposedto be a signal? I wonder if this is dangerous.”
    â€œIt’s what I’ve been talking about all the time,” Lion said. “It’s your mind that stops you from working out like that all the time—protecting you, holding you back. When you let go of the idea that you can’t do it, there’s nothing to stop you.” He rolled over with great difficulty and looked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes when I’m working on a painting—a good one—I’ll get going and I can’t stop. I see exactly what needs to be where. I’m zipping along miles ahead of what I actually have on the canvas, and the idea of stopping isn’t thinkable. I’m into it so much my brain can’t tell me it’s too good for me to be doing. I’ve completely lost whole afternoons and nights to that. I think this is how you get really good at something.”
    Nortie nodded and was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said, “Yeah, but these are our bodies . How much can they take?”
    Jeff looked up from his second sandwich and said, “Want me to tell you how much they can take?”
    I said, “Yeah, Dad, tell us a how-much-they-can-take story.”
    Jeff ignored me.
    â€œIs this a Marine Corps story, Dad?” Lion goaded.
    At the end of his junior year, Jeff had an opportunity to sail around the world with a friend of his dad’s. The opportunity came after Jeff punched out a student teacher for putting some major moves on his girlfriend,