MAGIC (5 page)

Fifth picture: Joe and his girl back on the beach. The girl is watching as Joe smashes the Bully with Muscles so hard on the chin there were stars around the Bully with Muscles’ face. And all Joe said was, casually: “Here’s a love-tap—from that ‘Bag of Bones.’ Remember?”

Last picture: Joe standing there, nothing but raw power. His girl clinging to one arm. Joe’s girl (love in her eyes?): “Oh Joe! You
are
a real he-man, after all.” And in the background, two beautiful girls saying at the same time to each other: “And he used to be so skinny!”

And above them all, in big big letters surrounded by a sunburst:

Corky stuck his feet up on his wall and lay that way awhile, right-angled.

What must the world be like when people actually said that kind of thing about you? “What a man that Corky Withers is.” You walk along and people just come up to you and say, “Oh Corky, you
are
a real heman after all.” And wherever he went on the streets of Normandy would be this trailing whisper: “… and he used to be so skinny …”

Everyone would know inside a day. Normandy just wasn’t big enough for secrets. It was your standard Catskill town, ninety miles from New York, nine from Grossinger’s, ringed with mountains, and totally dependent on outsiders for survival.

Naturally, everyone would be looking for you to get conceited, so you couldn’t let that happen. And you couldn’t let your grades slip either, although that wasn’t likely in his case.

As good as big brother Willie was in sports, he was at whittling. And as good as he was at whittling, he was twice that good in school. It used to bother him sometimes that it wasn’t harder. For a while, through third grade at least, he had tried to make it seem harder, tried to act nervous when it was quiz time, used to worry aloud at recess that he’d goofed. But after awhile he stopped the feigning, it wasn’t working anyway. He wasn’t necessarily smart, he decided, but he was good at school. Even before he was ten, he knew there was a difference, which probably meant that he was both smart
and
good at school, but he never much bothered pursuing the thought.

Besides, Mutt didn’t give a damn.

Maybe if his mother had stayed around, she would have done sufficient oohing and stuff, but she’d had it one winter evening when Corky was eight, just packed and fled for Oregon with an equally unhappy plumber from the other side of town.

Corky was the only one she told beforehand. She came into his room late one night going “shhhh” and smelling, as she always did, of sherry wine. She crossed
the dark room, sat on the edge of his bed, and got right to it. “I’m gonna miss you, Cork,” she said.

Corky waited in the night.

“You gotta promise not to think bad, but when you get a shot at waking up without a hangover ’cause you don’t need the booze, you gotta take it, you’ll understand that someday.”

Corky nodded.

“Ferd’s waiting outside in the pickup, I can’t take but a sec’, I just hadda give you a wet one for goodbye.”

She kissed him then.

“Drunk as a skunk,” she said. “Wow, I bent down too fast, the whole place is spinning.”

“Don’t go,” Corky said. “I promise I’ll be good.”

“You
are
good, Cork. You don’t cry, you do nice things, you clean up your room without no one telling you. You want the truth why I came back tonight?”

Corky nodded.

“To pick up the menagerie you made for me.” He had given her a half dozen tiny animals he’d whittled for Christmas. “That and the heart.” The wooden heart he’d made for her birthday. She touched her purse. “Got ’em all in here.” She stood. “Gonna miss me?”

“… oh Jeez—”

“—come on now.”

Corky got control.

“That’s my Cork.”

“Will you write? I’ll whittle you a merry-go-round for Christmas if you’ll write. It’ll turn and everything.”

“If I can, you know I will.”

Corky knew a ‘no’ when he heard one.

“Bye, Cork.”

“What about them?”

“Willie don’t care about nothing but sports and Mutt only cares about Willie. If you play your cards right and don’t tell him, I don’t think Mutt’ll know I’m gone.”

The truth of it was she was probably right; at least Mutt never mentioned her name again. At least not when Corky was around.

Mutt was small and he was tough and the Gods had pissed on him all his life—his way of putting it—and for proof he always showed his legs—the right was a good inch and a half shorter than the other. He’d been born that way and if he hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a stadium big enough to hold his fans. He knew that in his feisty heart. Grange would have been trash and the Four Horsemen would have been dogmeat alongside him. Maybe Bronko Nagurski might have been his equal, but no one else,
no one
.

Except he couldn’t run well, not well enough, not with his legs, and if the Gods pissed on you, there wasn’t a shelter anywhere you could hide, so he never heard the cheers, never saw the girls dance and wave, he gave rubdowns at Grossinger’s and talked sports with the guests.

And made Willie Withers a star. He fed him right, nursed him through muscle pulls, taught him moves, drove him, drove him, and when Willie was a freshman he ran back a punt for a touchdown the first time he touched the ball and by the end of that season he was Willie the Wisp Withers, the biggest thing in Normandy since ever …

Corky got off his bed and went into his big brother’s room. Willie was seventeen now, a junior, but already he had visited Syracuse and Penn State, and Cornell had as much as promised they’d take him if he could get his grades to an even halfway decent point.

Corky looked at the photos on the wall. Willie scoring this, catching that, Willie on shoulders, Willie held high. “If brains were dynamite you couldn’t blow your nose,” Corky said to the face on the walls, then ran back to the Charles Atlas ad.

Dare he?

Corky studied the picture of Mr. Atlas standing
there, one perfect arm flexed, modestly smiling by the caption that identified him as “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” He read the copy again, about how this incredible being was once actually
ashamed
to strip for sports. “Just watch your scrawny chest and shoulder muscles start to swell … those spindly arms and legs of yours bulge.”

Corky examined his legs. No doubt about it. Spindly. Thousands were becoming husky. The ad said so. All over America chests were ballooning and here he was, afraid.

Of what?

Of anybody finding out, obviously. Corky looked at the coupon.

Then it just asked for your name, age and address. Plus you had to mark if you were under fourteen for Booklet A. Corky filled out the coupon, decided Booklet A wasn’t for him, didn’t check the box, lied, wrote his age as seventeen. He didn’t mail the coupon. He put it in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it and stuck it underneath his arithmetic homework in the bottom of his desk.

If it had said anything guaranteeing a plain brown return envelope, he might have sent it off. As it was, he felt like a fool, forgot the whole thing.

Until the Saturday Willie scored three touchdowns against Liberty High giving Normandy its first victory in eleven years. There was honking in the streets that
afternoon. And his coupon was in the mail that evening.

Within a week he actually owned
Everlasting Health and Strength
. He grabbed it before anybody else looked at the mail and ferreted it up to his room and lay on his bed and before he read anything, even the letter from Mr. Atlas himself, Corky studied the booklet.

Oh to have a mighty chest. A stomach made of iron. Legs that ran forever. Corky looked at picture after picture of perfection. And all of them, every specimen had once been skinny and beaten, had been saved only by dynamic tension for fifteen minutes a day.

Corky was crushed when he read the letter. It was friendly. It was encouraging. It talked frankly of his problems—Mr. Atlas sensed Corky’s growing dissatisfaction with the way he looked.

But the course cost $64.00.

He closed his eyes and lay on his bed. Mutt was right, the Gods pissed on you and that was the way of the world. Not that Mr. Atlas was charging too much—a thousand sixty-four would have been fair to look like you had to look to belong in
Everlasting Health and Strength
.

But he had—he always knew exactly how much money he possessed—one dollar and forty-five cents, period, witn no real hope of increasing his fortune till Christmas when Mutt always hit him with a fiver. Briefly, he wondered if his father might lend him his next thirteen Christmases on account, but that was foolish because who had that kind of money.

That night just before he slept, Corky decided that what he needed more than anything else right then was a piece of good news.

It wasn’t long in coming. Two weeks was all it took. And it came in the form of a letter from Mr. Atlas himself, nice and chatty, wondering how things were, wondering why he had not received an answer. If it was money, Mr. Atlas went on, that was never a problem.
If you were interested in bettering the condition of the human race, money was a secondary motive.

Corky could have the identical course for $48.00.

He almost wrote a thank-you note explaining his position, but he decided that Mr. Atlas was much too busy to read letters from kids, no matter how great their sense of gratitude. Besides, probably his handwriting would give him away. He glanced at
Everlasting Health and Strength
again (it resided beneath his mattress, obvious but safe—no one else made his bed), did a few push-ups, and tried for sleep, deciding that what he really needed more than anything else was a piece of
great
news.

It came two weeks later. Not only was Mr. Atlas lowering his price for the secrets of Dynamic Tension all the way down to its all-time record breaking low of $32.00—
not only that there was more!
Not only would Corky get the identical $64.00 course, if he ordered by return mail he would also get,
at no additional cost whatsoever
, Mr. Atlas$ own book on defending yourself against all odds
plus
a photo album portraying
The Greatest Feats of Strength of the Century
.

But this was it, Mr. Atlas said. There would be, if this offer was spurned, no more correspondence between them.

Corky put the letter along with the other two under his mattress. That night at dinner, while Willie and Mutt talked sports, he listened even less than usual. Was he imagining things?

Or was Mr. Atlas getting mad at him.

Two weeks later left no doubt. What is this with you, Mr. Atlas seemed to be thundering. I spend my life getting my system ready so that anybody can have mighty thighs and I offer you a chance and you say no and I offer again and again after that and you still say no? Is money all you care about?

Well it’s not all I care about. I care about
you
. And you care about your
body
, or you wouldn’t have
written in the first place. All right. This is it. The final, final offer.

$16.00.

And because I can tell you’re the kind that needs coaxing, here’s the deal. You get the $64.00 course. The identical not one syllable changed course. And you still get the pamphlet on defending yourself against all odds, not to mention the photo album of
The Greatest Feats of Strength of the Century
.

But there’s more.

The Atlas Secrets of Success with the Opposite Sex
is yours free. If you can find it in a bookstore, it’s $5.95.

But you get it
free
.

That is a saving of unparalleled value. Act Today. Offer expires midnight Saturday.

The PS below the signature was when Corky realized genuine fear. It seemed innocuous enough. A simple little additional thought: “If for some reason you cannot accept this offer, perhaps you would feel better if one of our many field repres entatives called on you.”

Corky could not control his heart.

They were coming after him now.

He tried to imagine what a “field representative” for Charles Atlas would look like. A knock at the door. Mutt would answer. A pair of shoulders wider than the frame would be outside. A voice like gravel would ask for a certain seventeen-year-old Charles Withers. Mutt would say, you got it wrong, Corky’s not even ten yet.

“Ten!” the field representative would cry. “
Ten?
We been wasting our stamps on a ten-year-old punk? He
didn’t check that he was under fourteen on the coupon,
that’s against the law
.” Maybe Corky didn’t know he was doing anything wrong, Mutt would say but now the monster was in the house, roaring. “I DROVE ALL THE WAY UP FROM DEPARTMENT SIX-O-FIVE, ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN EAST TWENTY-THIRD STREET NEW YORK CITY, WHERE IS HE, WHERE IS THAT LIAR, LET ME GET MY MIGHTY FINGERS ON THAT LYING CHARLES WITHERS.”

Corky could not—not—sleep that night till close to morning. He just lay there thinking that he hadn’t meant to cause trouble, hadn’t wanted any anger, he was just a kid who whittled and one day wondered what it might be like to be strong, please, I’m sorry, just let me alone.

But they wouldn’t. Two weeks later: $12.00.

The Charles Atlas organization was after him now. This letter was really angry. Angry and hurt and there would
definitely
be a field representative in the area in the near future.

He hadn’t meant to upset anyone. Yes he had lied, sure he had claimed age he hadn’t earned yet, but that wasn’t worth their anger.