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

feet off the desk, stood up, and led me through the entryway into the gym. The place was surprisingly old-fashioned on the inside: mirrored wall to the right, with benches and Universal machines lined up in front of it; dumbbell racks, flye pulls, and more benches on the left; squat racks and curling stands at the rear; and a half dozen exercise bikes set up on gray mats by the door. Overhead, big-bladed ceiling fans stirred the boiling air.
    We picked our way among the machines and the men working out on them. Most of the bodybuilders were young -college-age jocks. But there were a few grownups in the crowd, including three guys in short-sleeve Cougar sweatshirts, working out on a squat rack at the back of the room. I recognized one of them -Fred, Kaplan's protege. He didn't see me. He was too busy trying to lift four hundred pounds of weights draped across his back. Eyes squeezed shut, jaw set, lips quivering, his face beet red and pouring sweat, he trembled, and groaned beneath an oversize Olympic bar so loaded down with plates that it drooped at either end. The other two Cougars stood beside him, arms outstretched, ready to lift the bar off his back if Fred failed. They shouted at him savagely, urging him on as if he were a horse caught hoof-deep in mud.
    The beachboy stopped to watch Fred for a moment, then looked at me as if to say, "That's what it means to be a real man!" He shouted, "Work!" at Fred, then walked up to a shuttered door by the racks and knocked. Someone said, "Come in."
    "You heard the man," the kid said and wandered back to where Fred was squatting.
    I went in. The door opened on a small white-walled office, decorated with posters of bodybuilders and with newspaper clippings. There was an air conditioner chugging in a window by a door in the far wall. The blast of cold air hit me so hard it made me shudder.
    Two men were sitting inside the room. One of them a huge kid with ringlets of brown hair all over his head and a fat, dimpled, stupid face- sat on a chair next to the door. His head was tilted back so that it was resting against the wall. Eyes half shut, chin pointing upward, arms folded across his chest, he peered down his nose at me, as if he could just barely make me out. The other man was sitting behind the desk. If anything he was a little bigger than Baby Huey. He was also a good twenty years older, and on the surface, at least, a lot more intelligent-looking. He had a ruddy, pockmarked face, fringed with a bushy black beard, muttonchops, and a thick mustache. His hair had been combed forward from beneath the crown, presumably to cover a bald spot. It made a little curtain of curls across his forehead. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with "Kaplan's Health and Fitness Club" silk-screened on the front. Maybe it was the beard or maybe it was the fact that the T-shirt rode so high up his chest, but the guy didn't seem to have any neck at all. His head rested on his shoulders like a bowling ball on a shelf.
    "Glad to meet you, Harry," he said, holding out an enormous hand. "I'm Walt Kaplan."
    I shook with him. He didn't squeeze down, the way Otto had. But I could tell from the size of his biceps that if he'd wanted to, he could have crushed my hand like an empty beer can. His upper arms were enormous and so thick with black hair that they almost looked simian. The only part of him that appeared even remotely weak were his eyes, and that might have been an illusion caused by the black horn-rim glasses he was wearing. One of the screws had fallen out of the right hinge, and he'd stuck a paper clip through the hole in its stead. But the clip didn't hold the glasses together tightly, and they drooped across his right eye, giving him the pained, fidgety look of a man stuck behind a pillar at the ballpark.
    "I'm glad you could make it out, Harry," Kaplan said in his deep, friendly voice. "Please, have a seat."
    I sat down in a desk chair across from him.
    "Would you like something to drink?" he said.