Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

“Pet!”

A couple of people look vaguely in the direction of Julie’s voice, but I remain invisible.

It’s like sucking the life right out of their veins.

“Pet!”

No danger, no evil. Only a clean muscular pull.

“Pet, this is it!”

And no damage has been done. That’s the beauty, feeling it for the first time, accruing genuine power.

When the car starts up, I trip back through the gravestones, seeing in the corners of my eyes the ectoplasmic shapes that hover and embrace.

I arrive at Roy’s Gym an hour earlier than usual. My stomach feels like a cement mixer, one that has been turned off and the hardened ball of concrete just sits there in the middle.

Inside the gym, no sign of Barnett. The usual grisly collection of males are pumping up, sweating it out, flexing and crunching, burning and ripping.

My muscles automatically feel warm, and so does the juju around my neck.

The huge room is chock-full of row upon row of weight plates, aligned with military precision. They reek of that mysterious lubricating oil that men love to spray on anything metal.

“Hey there!” Roy calls by as I pass his office.

“How are you?”

“Got another personal.” His face is handsome and kindly, with classic macho-man dark looks: mustache, massive but trim body in cute red short shorts, deep tan—yet his skin is entirely, excepting subdued afro and mustache—hairless. He shaves every day from top to bottom. “Six-seventy on the bench.”

“That’s great, Roy! Listen, did that guy I called you about yesterday ever show up?”

Roy squints, as if to recollect. “No,” he says. “I don’t believe he did.” His voice is sad, but that’s normal. Sometimes the other lifters tell stories about Roy, about the time he worked out for forty-eight hours without stopping, or about how he used to drink six gallons of milk a day, a pint between each set. Right now, though, he seems like a regular guy. Only sadder.

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“Deadlift?” he asks hopefully. He likes to spot me on deadlift because my spirit rises up strong and inspires him.

“Chest.”

His face reveals his loss of interest. Women are dismal on the bench. And besides, the telephone is ringing.

I’m disappointed that he won’t coach me today—it’s always an iffy business, depending on his mood and attitude and how crowded the gym is. This is Friday, the busiest day, and perhaps Roy doesn’t enjoy the other guys seeing him help a girl, though my strength is special.

Because I am a girl, my strength remains largely invisible. Of all the men who have seen me lift—though the empty times are my preference—only Roy understands.

And Barnett.

Weaving my way between machines and bodies, I find “my” corner, as usual, unoccupied. After the bag is placed on the bench, the strict ritual begins. Ritual .

First you pose in front of the mirror, feeling the heavy beat of the rock music, waking up your muscles, the banging and clanging of the other athletes. Your chest and arms pump up rosy in the glow of near-exertion. Chest: you regard your torso in the black-on-white suspender leotard and imagine your perfect physique. A ghostly image of perfection hovers before you, the model and inspiration.

You look hard enough, or quick enough, and it’s there .

After the posing and the visualization, I lay out the book and pen to keep track of reps and sets and time. Also, it is useful to comment on the degree of soreness, which is special today from the other day’s thousand pounds.

A thousand pounds!

The rock radio insists: “You don’t have to live like a re-fu-gee-ee-ee.”

After duly inscribing all necessary data, I utilize the “Joe Weider Instinctive Principle,” which is simply Weider-jargon for doing what you want to do. Which is flat bench first—the literal feeling of “a weight off your chest.” Then some incline dumbbells. Then incline flyes. Then flat flyes, pullovers, triceps extension prone, and perhaps a few sets of wrist curls.

The whole pattern strings out in the air before me, a mystical pathway to whatever. It could be drugs, it could be poetry, but here and now it is the body, pure and simple.

The Body becomes all and then there is no Other.

Because the truly great thing about lifting is that you cannot think while you are doing it. Stuff in the mind interferes with the power load to the muscle, primal and direct.

I lie on the bench and begin.

Zen nothingness.

Sufi dance.

Arms bend and straighten, muscles burn, you call out:

“Aurgh!”

And the weight goes up.

In between sets you stand there, as if listening to the music of the spheres, or the sound the electrons and protons make, whirring around the nuclei of the atoms.

“Night, Roy.” Two hours later I exit the gym. The place is packed, all the slight misfits in the town consoling themselves for not having dates tonight or, worse, for having people they dread waiting at home. You come here to bang the iron around and try to connect with a few people who might speak the same language you do.

“You too,” Roy replies vaguely from his glass cubicle, where he is concocting some sort of mysterious beverage in a blender. No doubt next week I will be purchasing the ingredients.

The early evening air is cool and clear. Every pore in my body breathes deeply. As my hand fits the key into the door of the jeep, I envision dinner: fresh salmon, Cajun tomatoes, heaps of snow peas.

A hand clamps down on my shoulder and my body whirls around, keys at the ready.

Barnett!

“I see you got yourself a magic charm,” he says, pointing at the juju hanging from a string around my neck.

My hand lowers the keys; the sight of his level gray eyes and whirling mass of red hair subdues me like a lullaby. “Look, about yesterday—”

He waves away my apology like a gnat. “You needed a day off and that’s the truth. I knew where to find you.”

No doubt he means Roy’s, but my mind flicks back to the ghostly figure crossing the swamp at night….

“But where’d you get this sucker? I haven’t seen one of them things in years!”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“Oh, hell, yes. They used to be all over the Quarter, like pralines or pickaninny dolls.”

“They did?”

Under the pretext of examining the juju, he strokes my throat. “Made them at some sort of tourist trap voodoo store. They closed that thing down after all the trouble they got in—must of been near fifteen years ago.”

The cool night air is now cold night air. “What trouble?”

His face doesn’t look happy. “They had these torture machines in there? Part of the so-called museum? Come to find out they was still using ’em. They’d collect street people, murder them as part of their ceremony, or whatever they called it.”

“What happened to the people that worked there?” All of this is horrible, but none of it is really a surprise.

“The head guy—”

“Sammy?”

Barnett looks at me oddly. “I dunno what his name was.”

“I’m sorry, go on.”

He steps back and looks off toward the lavender remainder of sunset. “Whoever the head guy was, they never could find him. Seems like everybody else, all the women, went to jail.”

Has Deane been sitting in prison all these years, provided I ever saw her, that she was ever there, that they ever caught her… endless unraveling carpets, and whatever matters anymore?

“Do you remember any of the names—”

Barnett holds up his hands. “It was in all the papers is how I know. But, honey, I don’t think they ever named names. Only a couple paragraphs—the rest was word of mouth. You know how that kinda stuff goes down.”