Ironman by Chris Crutcher

Author:Chris Crutcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

“God, sometimes I just hate my dad,” Bo says. He sits in Gatto’s across the booth from Lionel Serbousek, waiting for their pepperoni-and-sausage pizza. They have come to organize training strategies for Yukon Jack’s.

“I’d be careful of that if I were you,” Lion says.

“You wouldn’t if you knew my dad.”

“I don’t know your dad,” Lion says, “but I knew mine.”

Bo is instantly embarrassed. Everyone knows Mr. S was orphaned at fourteen, when his family was killed in a freak boating accident across the state line on Lake Coeur d’Alene. Only Lion survived. “Oh, God, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

Lion lifts his hand in protest. “Don’t worry about it. I said it because my dad was a lot like yours. He liked control—needed it—and he was hard to deal with when he felt he was losing it.”

“They sound like brothers.”

“They do, don’t they?”

“So what did you do about it?”

“Argued a lot,” Lion says. “Tried to piss him off as much as possible.” He hesitates as their pizza number is called over the intercom, and Bo rises to retrieve it.

“We were scrapping a bit that day on the boat,” he says when Bo returns. “Arguing about responsibility and fishing.”

“You were arguing about fishing?”

“Fishing demanded all the attributes my father believed led to an exemplary life,” Lion says. “It required intelligence and patience, and though there were no guarantees, one could certainly stack the deck in his favor by doing it right.” Lion has considered his story a thousand times, told it few. He believes Bo should hear it. “We’d been fishing from the boat near shore, under an overhang of bushes. I was beat from a night of screwing around with my friends and didn’t even want to be there. My little brother and Mom were up front, as far as they could get from Dad’s relentless instructions. The bait was up with them and I was too lazy to get it, so I baited my hook with berries from a bush hanging out over the boat.”

“You were fishing with berries?” Bo laughs. “I don’t fish and even I know—”

“Yeah, well,” Lion interrupts, “so did Dad. And don’t think he didn’t let me in on it. You know how your father palms the back of his neck when he’s getting close to the edge? Well, my dad would shake his head in this certain way. He’d grimace and look at the ground and then shake his head real slow.” Lion imitates memory. “Whenever I got on a self-improvement kick, I’d promise myself to reduce the number of times per day Dad did that.”

Bo thinks of his own dad. “It didn’t work, did it? You didn’t reduce that number one bit.”

“Not one bit,” Lion says with a smile. He sips his beer and places a slice of pizza on his plate. “His head shook in classic fashion while he watched me reel in those berries; fishing was just too important to my dad to be trivialized. He had to give me

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