Winners Read Free

was firing. Some dude already wanted to sell his green ’99 Outback and Carl Deed, eighty-five, died at home, survived by a younger brother. When he’d finished every word he turned on the television and watched sports. One channel showed old games, classics, where slim Pickney danced through Georgetown’s monsters, Bednarik flattened Gifford, Valenzuela slouched heavy from the mound, again and again.
    He slept and ate constantly, making extravagant lists for his wife of needed food. He fried potatoes several times a week, cooking them twice to perfect the crunch, filling the house with the rich tang of oil. He ate too much cheese. He’d always been healthy, pretty naturally: you worked with your body, cooked at home, you hooped six days a week and got to be a decent specimen. Stunned by inactivity, the specimen decayed slowly, waiting to walk again, to run, expecting to snap out of it and return to the old body as if arriving home after a brief, disastrous vacation. His own scent turned stale, then sour. By the time foot break number three rolled around he really really really didn’t give a shit. He sank down into the couch with a sense of permanence and ate and watched TV and eyed the busy city with all its filthy chimneys and all its busy, pleased prosperity.
    His wife, Lou, meanwhile worked like crazy and managed and provided and paid the bills. She was seldom home. He missed her but they both wordlessly agreed she might as well take advantage of his shittiness by taking care of business. She left him alone. She went on business trips. She went to conferences. It seemed possible that at one of them she might have kissed someone. She must have thought about it at least. This damaged Shane was not a man she recognized, but they both thought they could wait it out. During her absence and his hibernation Lou continued to operate the house by computer remote control. A cleaning woman appeared once a week. Clothes, books, movies, meals, curtains, light bulbs, electronics arrived at their front door. Brightly colored bins and boxes came and went in the bulky arms of young men made cheerful by stock options. Doing him the favor, they’d carry everything up the stairs, biceps bulging out of tight knit neo-corporate-branded shirts, asking what’d ya do, how d’ya do it, aw dude bummer, nodding respectfully at his curt response. They left him there with the goods and the receipts and he spent the afternoon examining the artifacts, balancing on one foot as he put them away.
    After eight months of hardly working, he’d finally climbed back into the van in April, resurrecting the business, although to his wife’s dismay he didn’t hire anyone to help. For days he called old clients, reminding them he was alive, invoking his father, strolling down memory lane. He was quickly busy again. He went to physical therapy in the evenings and an obscure gym at night. Not his wife’s luxurious Paragon, not his b-ball buddies’ well-equipped Koret, not the spanking Y downtown. A cramped and dank low-ceilinged thing on outer Mission where no one known could possibly arrive. He hired a cheap, enormous man named Craig to be his personal trainer and grappled with machines as Craig bullied him to greater weight, one more, one more. Craig yelled at him and he fantasized about dropping enormous barbells on the giant’s toes and neck.
    But slowly his old calves and thighs emerged. His stomach hardened again. A recognizable shape returned. His clothes shrank tight around his shoulders, neck, arms, thighs. It was as if someone had challenged him to construct a body that could never break again. He began to run miles and miles through the summer wind and fog, striding out through the avenues in outrageous orthopedic shoes, touching the ocean sand and then hustling back. He stretched in the morning after waking up and at night before going to sleep. He exercised his foot and ankle for hours, rotating and flexing against the resistance of blood