The Times Are Never So Bad Read Online Free Page A

some almost true story. I thought of some he would believe, or at least accept because he likes me and I do good work, something just a few feet short of saying Hey, lookit, I was running from a rape charge. But I didn’t go back, except one night to my apartment for my fishing gear and guns and clothes and groceries. Nothing else in there belonged to me.
    When I came up here that night I did it, I went to my place first and loaded the jeep with my weights and bench and power stands. So when I knew nobody was after me, all I did was work out, lifting on three days and running and swimming in the lake on the others. That was first thing in the morning, which was noon for everybody else. Every day was sunny, and in the afternoons I sat on a deck chair on the wharf, with a cooler of beer. Near sundown I rowed out in the boat and fished for bass and pickerel. If I caught one big enough for dinner, I stopped fishing and let the boat drift till dark, then rowed back and ate my fish. So all day and most of the night I was thinking, and most of that was about why I wasn’t going back. All I finally knew was something had changed. I had liked my life till that night in June, except for what Polly was doing to it, but you’ve got to be able to separate those things, and I still believe I did, or at least tried to hard enough so that sometimes I did, often enough to know my life wasn’t a bad one and I was luckier than most. Then I went to her house that night and I felt her throat under the Kabar, then her belly under it. I don’t just mean I could feel the blade touching her, the way you can cut cheese with your eyes closed; it wasn’t like that, the blade moving through air, then stopping because something—her throat, her belly—was in the way. No: I felt her skin touching the steel, like the blade was a finger of mine.
    They would call it rape and assault with a deadly weapon, but those words don’t apply to me and Polly. I was taking back my wife for a while; and taking back, for a while anyway, some of what she took from me. That is what it felt like: I went to her place torn and came out mended. Then she was torn, so I was back in her life for a while. All night I was happy and I kept getting hard, driving north and up here at Alex’s, just remembering. All I could come up with in the days and nights after that, thinking about why I didn’t go back to my apartment and working the bar, was that time in my life seemed flat and stale now, like an old glass of beer.
    But I have to leave again, go back there for a while. Everything this summer is breaking down to for a while, which it seems is as long as I can keep peaceful. Now after my workout I get in the hot shower feeling strong and fresh, and rub the bar of soap over my biceps and pecs, they’re hard and still pumped up; then I start to lose what the workout was really for, because nobody works out for just the body, I don’t care what they may say, and it could be that those who don’t lift or run or swim or something don’t need to because they’ve got most of the time what the rest of us go for on the bench or road or in the pool, though I’m not talking about the ones who just drink and do drugs. Then again, I’ve known a lot of women who didn’t need booze or drugs or a workout, while I’ve never known a man who didn’t need one or the other, if not both. It would be interesting to meet one someday. So I flex into the spray, make the muscles feel closer to the hot water, but I’ve lost it: that feeling you get after a workout, that yesterday is gone and last night too, that today is right here in the shower, inside your body; there is nothing out there past the curtain that can bring you down, and you can take all the time you want to turn the water hotter and circle and flex and stretch under it, because the time is yours like the water is; when you’re pumped like that you