The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page B

kiss. But I should have known what got diesel fuel and what did not. And of course now I was prodigiously frightened, the fear of imminent bodily harm.
    â€œGet X on the phone right now,” he said. X was the owner. I hurried back into the office to call him, but before I did, I called my father. “Dad, come to the gas station,” I said. “I’ve got a problem here.”
    My pal, a fresh gumball in his face, said, “You really did it now, fruit.”
    Soon my father was there, and the owner, too, and my father said: “We’ll have to siphon it out.” The owner was embarrassed by this, I saw, but he was missing the rage I’d expected. The guy I’d just dieseled had an icy attitude toward my father—he wouldn’t shake hands—as if he was to blame for my gas-station stupidity.
    From the garage the owner and the dieseled guy gathered tools, tubes, red cans, and didn’t include my father in whatever remedial plan they had. In the shade of the building—it was four o’clock now—my father leaned with one foot up against the white brick, no doubt wondering what he should do about this, waiting to be of some assistance. His look said to me both Good God in the morning and Oh my aching back .
    And it was then that I noticed, in his navy blue, hole-strewn sweatpants, the flaccid bulge in his lap. He must have scrambled from the house to come here. Perhaps he’d just stepped from the shower when the phone rang, and he must not have had time to hunt for underwear, and now he had this flaccid bulge at the center of his sweatpants. I was mortified by this; feeding diesel fuel into a gasoline engine seemed charming in comparison.
    The owner and dieseled guy left to undo what I’d done, and my father left too, although I’m not sure if he went with them. Later I would learn that he’d paid to fix the guy’s truck, handed over cash he did not have to reverse my mistake. I finished my shift at the station that day; I wasn’t fired. In fact, the owner was compassionate toward this blunder: the heat, my youth, my father’s willingness to pay, etc.
    No, I had to wait a few more weeks to get fired. It was another shift with my fruitcake -saying pal and we were knocking around in the mechanics’ bays, making the car lifts rise and fall, handling hydraulic tools, objects we should not have been touching. A grease gun hung from the steel beams so the mechanics could simply reach up for it when they were beneath the opened hoods of cars, and I leapt to grab this gun, dangled from it, the trigger engaged, salvos of grease unloading upon everything.
    I never thought to mop this mess—I hoped it wouldn’t be noticed?—and so I left these ejaculations of engine grease all over the garage bays. On the day I was fired, I pedaled home and spoke those words to my father: “I’m fired, Dad.”
    â€œYeah,” he said, “that sounds about right.”

VI
    A gym has several seasons a day, and the early season, during my shift from five to ten, was far less severe than the evening season. It was the mellower, coffee-scented spring of morning you’d expect. Most of the A.M . crowd consisted of those civilians who wouldn’t have meshed well with the evening behemoths. They were fit without being muscled, healthful without zealotry, professionals who entered in spandex and sports bras, sweatpants and sneakers, and exited in pantsuits and heels, dress shirts and ties.
    There were the silver-haired ones, as well, those who were up at five not because they’d pried their slumped frames from bed, but because sleep had betrayed them, deprived them of its gifts. When you have fewer days ahead than behind, dawn rushes upon you, mugs you awake, as if in reminder of your truncated time. I was very fond of them all and their normality; they talked to me about their jobs and their retirements, their kids and grandkids, and they