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“Out of the way! We got an emergency here!” Frankie said, shoving the man aside and plunging Marvin’s head into the toilet bowl.
Then Frankie repeatedly flushed the toilet, pressing Marvin’s face deeper into the vortex swirling about his ears. When the manager burst through the door, Frankie pulled Marvin out of the bowl by his collar, a curtain of water cascading onto the floor. Marvin lay half unconscious against the wall, a long strand of wet toilet paper hanging from one ear.
“You people need to clean this place up. It ain’t sanitary,” Frankie said to the manager, gesturing at the paper towels someone had left scattered on the washbasin.
That evening I drove to Baron’s, our local health club, and worked out on the machines, lightly at first, then increasing the weight incrementally as the pain and the stiffness from the beating Legion had given me gradually dissipated in my muscles and bones. Then I went into the aerobics room, which was empty now, and did a series of leg-lifts and pushups and curls with thirty-pound dumbbells. I could feel the blood swell in my arms, my palms ring with the tremolo of the dumbbells when I clanged them down on the steel rack. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but at least I didn’t feel as though I had been rope-drug down a staircase. I sat in a folding chair, a towel draped over my head, and touched the floor with my hands, constricting the muscles in my stomach at the same time. When I glanced up, I saw Jimmy Dean Styles enter at the far end of the room and begin pounding the heavy bag with a pair of dull red slip-on gloves, smacking the bag so hard, sweat showered from his head.
He used the classic stance of Sugar Ray Robinson, his weight forward, raised on the balls of his feet, his chin tucked into his shoulder, his left jab aimed eye-level at an opponent, his right hook a blur of light. A row of stitches was ridged across one cheek, like a centipede embedded in the skin. With his sheep’s nose and close-set eyes, a ragged line of beard along his jawbones, his profile could have been lifted from a mural depicting an Etruscan gladiator.
But Jimmy Dean Styles was not one who performed or forfeited his own well-being for the entertainment of the upper classes.
A college girl and her boyfriend had just entered the room. The girl was rich, a well-known loud presence at the club, vacuous, obtuse, spoiled, protected by her family’s wealth, totally unaware of the tolerance that other people extended to her. Her blond hair was moist with sweat, tied up on her head, her white shorts rolled up high on her tanned thighs. She plugged a tape into the stereo and began an aerobic dance routine, kicking at the air, chewing gum, the stereo’s speakers loud enough to rattle glass.
“Like, I don’t want to create no problem here, but I don’t need my eardrums blown out,” Styles shouted, lowering his gloves to his sides.
But she kept up her routine, her hands on hips now, her breasts bouncing, her mouth counting one-two, one-two, her eyes shifting to Jimmy Dean Styles for a moment, then looking straight ahead again, one-two, one-two, her attention now concentrated on her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
“Say, maybe you ain’t heard me, but there ain’t no aerobic class in here right now. That means I didn’t come in here for no Excedrin headache,” Styles tried to yell above the music.
She paused and blotted her face with a towel, then wiped her arms and the top of her chest and threw the towel on the carpet. I thought she was going to pull the tape from the stereo, but instead she did a cartwheel all the way across the room, exhaled a self-congratulatory deep breath, then filled a paper cone with water at the cooler and brushed strands of hair off her forehead in the mirror.
Styles dialed down the volume of the music and picked up a second pair of heavy-bag gloves from a chair and tossed them to the girl’s boyfriend.
“Here, I’ll show you how to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he said.
“I don’t box,” the boy replied, his eyes looking away from Styles. There was a flush in his cheeks, like the color of a window-ripened peach. The softness in his arms, his narrow chest, the insularity he tried to wrap himself in, had probably made him the target of bullies all his life. “I mean, I probably would be just wasting your time,” he added, wondering which excuse would be acceptable.
“Better put ’em on, my man,” Styles said, then threw a left-right combination that stopped a half-inch from the boy’s nose.
“Okay, you showed me. Thanks.”
“Here, I’ll do it again. You ready? Tell me if you’re not ready. Don’t blink. I told you not to blink,” Styles said.
“I’m no good at this,” the boy said.
Styles’s fists flashed, zipping by the boy’s eyes and chin, causing him to flinch and cower, the old stain of fear and shame and failure creeping into his face.
Styles smiled, pulled the glove from his right hand.
“Hey, didn’t mean nothing by it. Right coaching, you could kick some ass. Ax your lady over there. She know a killer when she see one,” he said. He put his finger in his mouth and then placed a glob of spit inside the boy’s ear.
Ten minutes later I was alone in the steam room when Styles came in, naked, a towel tied around his neck. He sat down on the ledge, his buttocks splaying on the moist tiles. “You don’t like white people much, do you?” I said.
He felt the hard row of stitches in his cheek and untied the towel from his neck and spread it across his thighs and phallus.
“A couple of cops rousted me outside my crib. Tore the carpet out of my car. I heard them say your name. Like maybe you tole them I was dealing,” Styles said.
“They gave you those stitches?” I asked.
“I ain’t done you nothing, man. Why you always on my case?”
“You make life hard for people of your own race.”
He studied the drops of water running down the wall. His skin was gold, dripping in the clouds of steam. He bit down softly on the corner of his lip.
“You ax if I like white people. My grandfather use to say just a few white folks was bad. No matter how bad he got treated, he always say that. They chained him to a tree and burned him to death wit’ a blowtorch. Now, I’m gonna do my steam,” he said.
“You were out at Poinciana Island, asking about Tee Bobby’s sister. Why are you so interested in the welfare of an autistic girl?”
