The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

She went up the step at the feed store door, one foot and then the other, holding the doorframe with her elbow. She walked across that concrete floor to the place where the boys had already set up the first plate tree. And she set her 10-pound plate on the bottom peg, very carefully, like she was putting a baby down.

Then she turned around and looked at me, and she was out of breath, and her cheeks were pink from the cold.

“There,” she said. “That is mine.”

I had to go stand at the loading dock for a minute by myself.

At ten minutes to ten, the last bench went in through the feed store door.

The ranchers had both racks bolted back together on the far wall. The boys had laid the bars across the plate trees. Neva had found my old boom box and plugged it in by the window.

The 10 o’clock class was standing in the doorway in their coats. They had come to the old room first and found nothing there, and they had followed the trail of people down the sidewalk. A couple of them had picked up a plate on the way.

I looked around that room. It was not set up right. The mats were still at the old room, rolled up, too heavy to carry until the trucks came. The mirrors were still on the wall in Cyrus’s building. Everything was crooked.

But it was there. Every pound of it.

“Give me five minutes,” I said to the 10 o’clock. “I left the chalk bucket.”

I walked back up the street by myself, the three blocks, empty-handed for the first time all morning.

My shoulders ached in the good way. The sun was high now and warm on the back of my neck, the kind of October sun you get in the Hills that fools you into thinking winter might not come.

The sidewalk in front of my old room was bare. Swept, even. Somebody had swept it, and I never did find out who. The only thing left was my chalk bucket sitting by the door, and a little drift of white chalk dust in the crack of the concrete.

I picked the bucket up. And the bell over the hardware store door rang.

My uncle Cyrus stepped out onto his sidewalk.

He did not look at me at first. He looked down Main Street, toward the feed store, three blocks of bright brick in the morning sun. He stood there in his apron with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, and he looked the way a man looks at a field after hail.

It was ten o’clock. I know because I heard the bell at the church start to ring the hour, the way it does every hour on Saturday.

And then I understood what he was looking at.

There was nothing in his store. Not one customer. On a Saturday morning in October, with the first hard freeze coming and every rancher in the county needing heat tape and stock tank heaters, there was not one truck parked in front of the hardware store.

They were all parked three blocks down, in front of the feed store.

Arvid came up the sidewalk behind me with the last thing left, a single 45-pound bar that somebody had leaned in the alley and forgotten. He had it across his shoulder.