StairMaster exercise machine, climbing briskly to nowhere.
“It’s great,” he said, pumping his exquisitely developed legs.
“Six more flights, and I’ll be at the top of the Washington monument.”
He was breathing hard but not as hard as Holly would have been breathing
after running up six flights to her third-floor apartment in Portland.
She sat in a chair he had indicated, which put the StairMaster directly
in front of her, giving her a full side view of him. His sun-bronzed
glistened with sweat, which also darkened the hair at the nape of his
neck. The spandex embraced him as intimately as the white shorts clung
to the receptionist. It almost seemed as if he had known Holly was
coming and had carefully arranged the StairMaster and her chair to play
himself to his best advantage.
Although she was plunging into deception again, Holly did not feel
as bad about lying to Eddie as she had felt when lying to Viola Moreno.
For one thing, her cover story this time was somewhat less fanciful:
that she was doing a multipart, in-depth piece about James Ironheart
(the truth), focusing on the effect that winning a lottery had upon his
life (a lie), all with his approval (a lie). A veracity percentage as
high as thirty-three percent was enough to salve her guilt, which she
supposed didn’t say much for the quality of her conscience.
“Just so you spell Dojo right,” Eddie said. Looking back and down at
his right leg, he added happily, “Look at that calf, hard as rock.”
As if she hadn’t been looking at it all along.
“The fat layer between my skin and the muscle underneath, it’s hardly
there, burned it all away.”
Another reason she didn’t mind lying to Eddie was because he was a vain,
self involved jerk.
“Three more flights to the top of the monument,” he said. The rhythm of
his speech was tied to the pattern of his breathing, the words rising
and falling with each inhalation and exhalation.
“Just three? Then I’ll wait.”
“No, no. Ask your questions. I won’t stop at the top. I’m gonna see
how much of the Empire State Building I can climb next.”
“Ironheart was a student of yours.”
“Yeah. Taught him myself”
“He came to you long before he won the lottery.”
“Yeah. More than a year ago.”
“May of last year, I think.”
“Mighta been.”
“Did he tell you why he wanted to learn Tae Kwon Do?”
“Nope. But he had a passion.” He almost shouted his next words, as if
he’d triumphantly completed a real climb: “Top of the monument!” He
increased his pace instead of slacking off “Did you think it was odd?”
“Why?”
“Him being a schoolteacher, I mean.”
“We get schoolteachers. We get all kinds. Everyone wants to kick ass.”
He sucked in a very deep breath, blew it out, and said, “In the Empire
State now, going up.”
“Was Ironheart good?”
“Excellent! Coulda been a competitor.”
“Could’ve been? You mean he dropped out?”
Breathing a little harder than before, the words coming in a quicker
though similar rhythm, he said: “Hung in there seven or eight months.
Every day. He was a real glutton for punishment. Pumping iron and
doing aerobics plus martial arts. Ate his way through the pain. Man
was getting tough enough to fuck a rock. Sorry.
But he was. Then he quit. Two weeks after he won the bucks.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Don’t get me wrong. Wasn’t the money that made him quit.”
“Then what?”
“He said I’d given him what he needed, he didn’t want any more.”
“What he needed?” she asked.
“Enough Tae Kwon Do for what he wanted to do.”
“Did he say what he wanted to do?”
“Nope. Kick someone’s ass, I guess.”
Eddie was really pushing himself now, ramming his feet down on the
StairMaster, pumping and pumping, so much sweat on his body that it
appeared to be coated in oil, droplets spraying off his hair when he
shoot his head, the muscles in his arms and across his broad back
bulging almost as fiercely as those in his thighs and calves.
Sitting in the chair about eight feet from the man, Holly felt as if she