Page 480 - Some Dance to Remember

450 Jack Fritscher

slept in the barn. Whatever Energy he and Kick had conjured was in his
custody. It lingered, passionate, stronger than the spirit of Thom lingered,
alive in the barn, adrift among the rafters and beams, asleep in the old
iron bedstead, as quiet as the rust on the chrome collars and black plates
of barbells strewn among the weight benches.
Ryan was no Sisyphus. He could lift no more.
Exercise depressed him. The very sight in his gym mirrors of his biceps
curling a dumbbell toward his chest was pathetic to him. He could no
longer address strength physically.
What remained was something better. Something beyond his body.
Something beyond Kick’s body. Something like a manly spirit, a mascu-
line ghost, that some nights overshadowed him with a dream of manliness
from which he hoped he’d never wake.
Charley-Pop.

17

In the pursuit of excellence there is no fault in high expectation. There
is only virtue. Then, finally, comes the realization that the quest is of
itself the only importance. The quest has no end. The questions have no
answers. The questions themselves are the answers, and the quest its own
end.
“You’ve got to dare to put your finger in the fire,” Ryan once said, “or
there’s no passion to fire at all.”
There may be embarrassments here, and ambiguities, but there are
no lies.
The big house at Bar Nada was quiet. The phone rarely rang. Quiet
music came from far-off rooms. I wrote, and Ryan pounded with his ham-
mer on the house and painted the barn and gardened the grounds. Some-
times he stood out in the green field wearing his yellow slicker against the
gray rain. He had turned the chickens loose and they gathered expectantly
around him and then wandered away. He cooked and cleaned. He spent
his evenings watching videotapes or reading magazines in front of the fire
built with wood he had split.
He could not sleep.
He took up smoking a late-night cigar. Its sweet aroma drifted dream-
ily through the house. Some nights he pulled himself quietly in under the
covers next to me in my bed. Most nights he bunked alone. He never asked
me for sex and I never offered it. He left Bar Nada once a week, always on
Friday, when he drove his big red pickup first to the office of Dr. Shrink for

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