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A Novel
by Lucas Schaefer
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"Your sister didn't think, 'Man, this boy can defend himself'?"
"My sister's tired," said Bob. "Single mother, raising some gloomy kid? And now he's suspended for the rest of the year? She wanted them to toss him into juvie for a couple days! Scare him straight. I said, 'Linda, he's a white kid from Newton, Massachusetts…'?"
David let out a guttural laugh. "If I was a white boy from that rich place, you know the first thing I'd do?"
"If you were smart, rob a bank." Bob pulled a dime bag from the pocket of his tiny tennis shorts, tossed it David's way. "I told her, 'Linda, they'll do it all right, but only after they find your body!'?"
David had assured Bob Alexander they'd be fine. He'd worked at Shoal Creek close to three decades, and for many of those years had taken under his wing a summer volunteer. Usually these were wayward high school boys who the other department heads didn't want to deal with: the crater-faced grandsons of wealthy donors, the burger-breathed spawn of longtime trustees.
Indeed, David had learned long ago that among the various do-gooders who populated the place, he derived the most pleasure from the ones who did the least good. The rosy gerontology majors who speed-walked onto the scene straight from College Station? It was never any fun with those competent souls, their small, tasteful gold crucifixes and toothy grins making David feel each of his forty-seven years. Stoners, slackers, cultural Wiccans: these were his people.
David snapped his neck, indicating Nathaniel should follow. He usually saved his most lurid commentary for the locked Special Care Unit—best to keep it clean around the sentient—but this was not a man who countered silence with more of the same.
"Tell me this," said David, in a voice so low only the boy could hear. "When was the last time you think I ate some pussy?"
Nathaniel winced in disgust. "How should I know?"
David let a heavy silence fall between them. In these situations, David knew, patience was key, and it didn't take long for the boy to surrender.
"Last week?" said Nathaniel.
David let out a high-pitched Oh! "You think that low of me? Last week? Last night I ate the finest, wettest pussy on all of Highway 290." Then, at normal volume: "And a good morning to you, Mrs. King!"
At the service elevator, David pressed the up arrow, then gave the boy a friendly elbow. "She called herself Juanita Boggs." The elevator dinged. "Juanita Boggs of Elgin, Texas."
"Cool," said Nathaniel, trying to sound indifferent.
"And how about you?" David asked, after they were both inside. They stared straight ahead as the doors closed in front of them. "When did this young stallion last lick the sweetness?"
Eight hours later, David pulled into the gravel lot outside Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym.
He'd been coming to the gym since it opened, to little fanfare, in 1984. In the time since, he'd watched it become an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out as one.
This was not his usual gym-ing hour. In recent years, David had fallen in with an irascible assemblage of men in their late-thirties and forties (plus Bob Alexander) who gathered early in the mornings, though David's work schedule allowed him to join only on Saturdays. These were a chatty band of boomers, but for David all white and all dads, but for David all men for whom sartorial and hygienic considerations no longer factored into their pre-gym preparation. Who cared if the thick band of Stan Hart's jockstrap was somehow always visible over the waist of his shorts, or if Lee Gorbinski, the runner of the bunch, wore smelly athletic shirts with globular stains at chest level from where he'd Vaselined his nipples? Not Stan Hart, not Lee Gorbinski. David suspected Bob, holder of an endowed chair in American history at the state's flagship university, rolled in each Saturday without having so much as brushed his teeth.
Excerpted from The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. Copyright © 2025 by Lucas Schaefer. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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