Page 20 - Leather Blues

8 Jack Fritscher

“A guy has to keep in shape. If old Rick had been in a
little better shape, he wouldn’t have gotten himself wasted
in Nam.” He rewoke the memory of her dead son, his dead
brother, to divert her. “Beside the gym doesn’t cost me any-
thing. I pick up a few extra bucks spotting older guys who
don’t have a buddy to train with.”
“What’s spotting?” she asked.
“Will you pour me the coffee!” he said. “Spotting is help-
ing a guy work out. You make sure his elbows position right.
Get him to breathe right. Maybe wrestle with him to warm
him up or cool him down. If he pulls a muscle, you might
rub it down with liniment.”
She walked across the old clean kitchen to her stove.
The stove was her. She was the stove.
“I’m sorry, ma,” he said. He felt something deep for her:
something lost. He’d have left months ago, but the thought
of her abandoned to his father had held him home. He
remembered too well living as a boy under the Old Man’s
thumb. Now he couldn’t say why he was sticking around.
Maybe just for this summer after high school, with nothing
better to do, maybe it was just for her.
There had been a day seven years before. He was eleven
and that autumn his mother had taken him after school to
shop for a winter coat. She had wanted to buy an on-sale
jacket at Penney’s, but he had convinced her they’d get a
better buy at the Army-Navy Outlet. She had thought of her
husband who had said the boy’s last year’s parka would fit
well enough this winter. The next year he could wear Rick’s
hand-me-down. But Denny thought only of the brown
leather bombardier’s jacket he and his buddies had stared
at through the plateglass window. They all planned to get
one and form their own squadron. His friend Stoney named
himself command pilot and barracks captain. Denny was to
be head bombardier.
“This is the size,” Denny said to his mother.

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