Eutawville: A Novel

By Olin James Nettles

Kyle is a rising bodybuilding champion. Driven and focused, he is also a beautiful yet enigmatic loner with a dark side.

Teenage Danny (called “Opie” by his friends) is enjoying his last summer in Charleston before going off to college. His sexual awakening parallels his burgeoning interest in bodybuilding as he befriends his role model, Kyle.

Bernard is an aging, cynical, yet humorous gay man, once a bodybuilder himself but now mainly a worshiper of muscle with a thing for Kyle...a fixation that ultimately leads to tragedy.

At once poignant and gritty, Eutawville follows these three denizens of a small gym, alternating among their points of view as their lives intertwine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Olin James Nettles
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310785733

Olin James Nettles

Olin James Nettles is a personal trainer, competitive bodybuilder, writer, actor, and musician. He currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina. Eutawville is his debut novel.

Book preview

Eutawville

Olin James Nettles

Copyright 2016 by Olin James Nettles

Published by Olin James Nettles at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Author photo by R. Jay Crouse

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant back-bone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,

The same old blood!

The same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart—there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations;

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred,

And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted;

And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face

—Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric, Leaves of Grass, 1855

CONTENTS

Opie

Kyle

Opie

Bernard

Opie

Kyle

Opie

Bernard

Opie

Bernard

Kyle

Opie

Kyle

Opie

Kyle

Opie

Bernard

Opie

About the Author

Opie

Blast Your Upper Chest With Incline Flyes! Mount Muscle: Eight Weeks to a Bigger Biceps Peak. Leg Training With New IFBB Pro Barry Donnelly.

I flip to page 87 and look at the thighs in the picture. I try to make sense of the cords of massive muscle. I need to wrap my head around how a leg like that is human, but it’s like a picture that goes in and out of focus; it seems real one second then impossible the next, a cartoon idea of what muscles can be if built to the extreme. In the photo on the opposite page, his pecs are unreal too, like balloons of meat hanging down. He’s only 24 years old. He started getting huge six years ago, at my age. When I get to college in September, I’m going to be a real bodybuilder. Anything it takes. I don’t care. I’m going to get massive like him. Well, that probably won’t happen, but maybe like Kyle McKinnon at the gym. Known for my muscles. Maybe find some other serious lifters on campus. Push each other to keep growing. Play Frisbee shirtless on the quad. Everybody looking at Muscle Dan. Chicks and guys both.

Danny! I put the magazine in a drawer and go into the living room to see what she wants. She points to the little kitchen. Can you reach to the top shelf on the far side and see if you can find those preserves that Inez brought over? I think we put them up there, but it’s been a right long time and I can’t even reach if I stand on the stool. I see it right away, grab it, and hand it to her, all in about two seconds. Lordy, I wish I was tall like you! You’re so big and strong now. Mercy me. She always says stuff like that. I smile a little, but it’s fake.

Sometimes I feel bad when I get cranky with her, but I guess I should be glad she’s like that, and not like her son, my dad. He wouldn’t say stuff like that even. I bet if you asked him right now, wherever he is, if his son Danny was tall, or big, or even a nice boy, he’d shrug and say, Hmm, I don’t rightly know. I reckon so, and then change the subject. But Gram, I just get a nice haircut or something and she’s all over it.

Some kids run along the breezeway right outside our window, screaming and yelling. It echoes. God, I hate these fucking apartments. Even as apartments go, they suck. I know it’s all sort of temporary for all involved, but I can’t wait to get into the dorms in September. It’s not going to be luxury living; shit, I’ll even be sharing a room. But it will be all kids my own age, no weird old people, no little kids running around like feral hyenas. If there is too much noise from the next room, it will be some of my kind of music, just a little too loud. I will walk over in my underwear and say, Dude, can you like keep it down? It won’t be like the druggie couple next door here, screaming at each other and then later fucking like rabbits in surround sound.

Until like two years ago, when I lived in a house. A normal house with a yard. The only place I ever lived. Nobody walking drunk past the living room window and yelling two inches from us. I go to France, and then I come back—NO HOUSE, sold, Dad and me in a townhouse in North Charleston. Fucking NORTH Charleston! Why! Well, maybe it was easier, ditching the house and all while I was in France and not feeling as nostalgic about it or whatever.

But North Charleston didn’t last either. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. You don’t need me, was his excuse to scram. Yeah, old enough to take care of myself, but not old enough to live alone, hence me here. Here with Gram. As far as I know, he’s living with this chick up in Columbia. He came back for my graduation, but only a couple of times before that. Gram says he had a hard time with things when Mom was sick and then after.

He never should have had a wife and kids. Oh, that’s not my opinion. That’s exactly what he says himself! Gee, thanks, Dad! Excuse me that my fucking existence has complicated your otherwise very fabulous life.

Three o’clock. I start packing my gym bag. I like to finish up my workout by 4:30 or so, because that’s when it starts to get crowded . . . and it’s not a big place. Plus, Kyle and Jason are usually there around 3:30, and they’re really cool muscle guys. I like talking to those dudes, and sometimes they ask me for a spot, which is really awesome. I look out my bedroom window. (Well, it’s not even my bedroom. At least, it doesn’t feel like it. My real bedroom is over on Stiles Drive.) The window faces the big grassy courtyard, but there is a little playground on this side of it, almost right outside my window. At least it's not used much, because the last thing I need in this ratty place are a bunch of kids screaming when I’m trying to sleep.

I see Becky Mueller cut across the courtyard, on the way to her car I guess. She went to a different high school than I, so I don’t know her very well. But she says hi and even said I have big muscles, when I was washing the car. Maybe I’ll ask her out, like to a movie, a real date, and then I can tell all the guys at the gym about it. I’ll be sitting on the bench, ready to do my bench presses, and they’ll gather around because word got out that I was seen at the movies with a pretty girl.

Who is she, stud?

Did she put out?

Opie in love! (They call me Opie there, on account of my red hair and freckles. It’s OK. Kind of makes me feel more like one of them.)

Back to the bag. Old sweat towel out, new one in. Clean t-shirt just in case, already in there, check. Lifting gloves, check. The right one has a tear along the seam on the outside below the thumb, but it doesn’t affect the fit, and this pair is worn in and perfect. Buddy and Chad on the football team said not to use them, but Kyle does, so they must be OK, and I feel stronger with them. Water bottle, check. Mike’s Gym doesn’t really have lockers, so I put on my gym shorts to wear there. T-shirt to work out in . . . this one on the floor, a little damp, sniff, not bad, pull on.

I should be back by five, I tell Gram as I glide through the living room on my way out.

OK, I’ll have an early supper ready with lots of protein for you! She learned to make supper early like that; if she doesn’t, I have a big shake instead, and then I’m not hungry until much later. But I have to eat one way or another after my workout. At least 25 grams of protein, to take advantage of that anabolic window.

The sun hits me so bright and hot on the way to my car. It’s like another planet that’s so burning up, we’re not supposed to be on it. I feel like a pioneer, the only brave man, as I cross the blazing asphalt parking lot to my car. A brief time out in the hostile open as I go from inside (apartment) to inside (gym) on a summer afternoon. Maybe I should be outside in a pool or at the ocean. But that’s OK. The outside can wait.

Kyle

It’s cool here in the gym. But I’ll be overheated and dripping with sweat inside of a quarter hour.

I set my bag down in the usual place, over in the hallway to nowhere. That’s what I call it. I think it used to be another entrance, but now it just goes to the emergency exit. Left wall, under the cinder block brick with the chip in the corner, as always. Zipper side out.

I retrieve my water bottle, shake bottle, workout log, pen, sweat towel, gloves, and tank top. I set the workout shake next to the bag on the left, remove my t-shirt, fold it neatly, and set it on top of the bag. I slip on the tank top and adjust it so that my nipples don’t hang out of the sides. Phone and car keys—out of my pockets and into the left side compartment of the bag.

It’s darker back here than in the rest of the gym. But the sunlight comes through cracks in the top and sides of the emergency exit door, and if I stand just right, a shaft of light runs across my upper pec and down onto my biceps, and another from my front deltoid down my triceps. It looks really cool, sort of like a futuristic muscle machine. I look at myself in the glass of one of the old prints