Life's Work by Jonathan Valin Read Free Book Online Page A

Stoner?"
    "Yes."
    "Quit calling me Otto. I hate that fucking name."
    "What do you want me to call you?" I said.
    "Mr. Bluerock would be nice. But friends call me Blue." He laughed. "You know, I'm setting a precedent here."
    "You afraid you're going to regret it?"
    "I think I already do," he said, and hung up.
 

    VII
    As holy shrines go, Kaplan's Health and Fitness Club was no Taj Mahal just a long, low concrete building with a plate glass door and window and a flat asphalt roof It was located right where Kaplan had said it would be, across from the Sohio station on Winton Road, in one of those little shopping plazas that used to be the rage before the big malls were built. The club was on the south side of the plaza, across from a bakery and a drugstore. I couldn't see into the gym from where I'd parked in the lot out front -the window was blinded and the plate glass door to its right had been painted over- but it looked identical to the bakery and the drugstore, except for the parade of men and boys who kept trailing in and out.
    Not all of Kaplan's clients were bodybuilder types. Some of them were chunky teenagers -high school football players with bull necks, crew cuts, and peach basket rear ends. A few were middle-aged businessmen, carrying canvas bags with "Adidas" and "Pony" stitched on the sides. But a goodly number of them were musclebound jocks in tank tops and shorts, with the rapt, tanned, hyper faces of professional bodybuilders. I spent a couple of minutes watching two of them standing on the narrow concrete curb in front of the club. They were talking to each other, but I didn't see them make eye contact once. In fact, they didn't seem to be looking at anything at all. It was as if they were still standing in front of a mirror, practicing curls, as if that circuit had never been broken. They flexed their biceps, shifted their weight from foot to foot, rolled their heads on their necks, and wiggled their fingers like they were practicing the scales on a piano. But they never looked at each other and they never stopped fidgeting.
    I waited until the bodybuilders had gone. Then I got out of the Pinto, walked up to the window of the club, and peered through the blinds. There was a small desk inside, manned by a burly beachboy in T-shirt and cutoffs. He had his feet on the desktop, and he was smiling at something that was going on in the gym. I couldn't see what he was laughing at because there was a drywall partition behind him, which cordoned off everything but the desk and a small waiting area to its right. I checked my watch -I was on time- and opened the door.
    The place was filled with noise -the creaking of chain pulleys on the Universal machines, the thud of barbells being dropped to mats, the whizzing of flye pulls and exercise bikes, and behind it all, like the night sounds of crickets and distant traffic, the groans of the bodybuilders themselves. I stood in front of the kid at the desk, waiting for him to acknowledge my presence. But he was listening to a ball game on a transistor radio -one of those ghetto blasters that look like assorted pie plates glued to a masonry block -and couldn't be bothered. He was an ugly kid, with a nest of curly red hair and a red, lumpy face, acne-scarred along the chin and neck.
    After a minute or two, I got tired of waiting, and started for the opening that led to the gym.
    "Hold on there, cowboy," the kid behind the desk said.
    He looked up from the radio, glanced at my face, then studied my arms and chest, as if my muscles were the windows to my soul. "What can I do for you?"
    "I've got an appointment to see Kaplan. The name is Stoner."
    "Stoner," the kid repeated slowly, as if he were sounding out syllables in a book. "Just a second."
    The kid reached out and jabbed at an intercom sitting on his desk.
    A voice crackled over the intercom speaker. "Yeah?"
    "Walt, a guy named Stoner is here to see you," the kid said.
    "Show him in," the voice said.
    The kid swung his