Athletic Shorts Read Online Free PDF

he should explore all possibilities. He’s young.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “This was really interesting. In fact, Jenny Blackburn and I came up with an idea he thought might make it.”
    “Which was?” Dad says.
    “We’re going to do a situation comedy about a talking horse with an IQ of about forty-three.”
    Dad’s face twitches. He knows…
    “Yeah,” I say. “Gonna call it ‘Special Ed.’”
    Dad’s head bobs like a toy beagle in the back window of a ’57 Chevy, calculations whizzing through his computer brain at laser speeds. “That’s very funny, John,” he says, but he’s not laughing. “That’s worth exactly one thousand thirty push-ups.” Dad has total recall. I’ve got to learn to cut down on the setup. “I think you’re finished with your dinner. Why don’t youwait in the living room?”
    I stare at my plate, hiding my glee. “Yes, sir.”
    There is madness to my method. Wrestling is in full swing. I can’t eat anyway, and it drives me seriously loony to sit and watch my family packing away steak and potatoes when all I can hope for is that the dishwasher didn’t get all the egg off the back of my fork after breakfast. I mean, I’m ready to sit below MacArthur’s chair with my tongue hanging out to catch the overflow of strained peas, and Dad simply will not allow me to be absent for our one sit-down family meal of the day unless I foul up on protocol. Fortunately my father will tolerate no shenanigans at the dinner table. None. “Boys,” he says at every opportunity, “eating is not a pretty thing. It is our job as civilized men to learn proper etiquette to make it tolerable.” Mom only nods, having long since given up on convincing Dad of anything.
    And the push-ups? I’m going to need miraculous strength to win state this year. The cream of the crop at a hundred sixty is a transfer named Butch Lednecky from a little logging town called Trout down in central Idaho. Word has it this guy hires out in the summer as logging machinery. His old man was this legendary eight-man football coach down there before he got thedefensive coordinator’s job at Montana State.
    More often than not, when a guy shows up out of the blue from Podunk High with good numbers and a big rep, he turns out to be a one-move minotaur with a single-digit IQ who self-destructs when he discovers it’s a penalty to rip off an opponent’s body parts. But it looks like old Butch is for real. He’s a natural at a hundred seventy, so he doesn’t have as far to drop as I do, and he’s tearing up his league. I won’t know how I’m doing against opponents he’s pureed because it won’t be until the end of the season that I’m that light, so the whole thing’s a shot in the dark. I feel kind of like Louden Swain from Vision Quest , and that makes me proud.
     
    My arms are noodles. I can knock out 100 push-ups every ten minutes while I’m doing homework, then finish up with 100 every five minutes. That’s 600 an hour while I’m stuffing my brain; 1,200 when I’m not. I had about forty-five minutes’ worth of homework tonight, so you can figure for yourself how long it took to rack off 1,030. Dad critiqued every one. My father considers it a personal sin to fail to follow through with an exacted punishment. If he tells you you’re grounded for one week (his shortest grounding on record), you’regrounded for a week. If you begin your grounding at high noon on, say, Saturday, and your watch runs a minute faster than his and you let yourself off at eleven fifty-nine on the following Saturday, your grounding starts anew. My dad is a hardass.
    One thousand thirty push-ups. My father can count push-ups while he’s reading, or watching television, or, for that matter, making love, which I assume is why he and Mom don’t do that anymore. (I overheard her talking to my aunt last summer. I guess Dad’s never been a real hero in the sack. Once during a fight Mom screamed at him that pushing me around was the only