Boswell (17 page)

Everyone looked shabby, fatigued, their heavy florid faces empty of everything save a kind of dull ache. Those who were not returning from menial jobs were going toward them, to wash down office buildings, tend lonely warehouses, stand outside lavatories in theaters and nightclubs. Almost everyone carried some worthless thing in some unimportant package—brown paper bags which once contained cheap fruit and now held rolled-up stockings, extra rags, soiled aprons, torn trousers, stale sandwiches and waxy pints of warm milk for two-thirty in the morning. Only some teen-age boys standing at the back of the car looked as though they could still be interested in their lives, and even they seemed, despite their youth, as disreputable as the others, romanceless in their shiny jackets and billed motorcycle caps.

Outside, the rain clung listlessly to the barred windows of the streetcar. The ride was interminable. No one ever seemed to get off. The car would stop and more would climb on, crowding steamily, smelling of wet wool and poverty and dirt, into the overheated, feverish brightness of the car. They swayed dreamily against the poles and left greasy smudges on the chipped milkish porcelain.

A colored woman as big as myself sat down heavily next to me. Her knees, spread wide, bounced comfortably against my thigh. Her skirt was pulled up so high that I could see the rolled tops of her stockings, oddly light and obscenely pink against the dark insides of her legs. They looked like the massive, protective lips of some brutish sexual organ. Across the way an old man in a winter overcoat too large for him stared openly at the woman’s crotch. Too large and too tired to close her legs, she sighed and turned away her enormous head, her teeth like the decayed blunt stubs in the mouth of a hippopotamus.

I had been glancing repeatedly at the conductor, as much to identify myself as a stranger and thus isolate myself as to proclaim my unfamiliarity with the route. He stared back without recognition. “The Arena,” I mouthed across the colored woman’s breasts. He flicked his eyes away impatiently. I closed my eyes and saw again The St. Louis Institute for the Research and Treatment of Social Diseases and General Skin Disorders. In the dark the streetcar slogged forward with a ponderous inevitability.

I thought of the fight. What was the old man’s strategy? Did
I
have any strategy? Was he really the Angel of Death? Would I be able to talk to him beforehand?

An arm shook me. “You dropped your mask,” someone said sullenly.

“What’s that?”

“Here’s your mask you dropped,” the colored woman said. It seemed ridiculously white and silken in her big brown hand, like some intimate undergarment.

“Thank you,” I said, embarrassed.

I glanced down at my lap. The clumsy bundle had come loose. One end of the silk cape dragged in a puddle. The old man across the aisle, leaning so far forward in his seat I thought he would fall, retrieved the cape for me.

“Thank you,” I said, and looked nervously toward the conductor. He held up two fingers to indicate that it would be two more stops. I stood up. “Have a nice party,” the old man said in a throaty voice. When the car stopped I got off, though I knew I had moved prematurely. “Hey,” the conductor called as I stepped down. I pretended not to hear him and walked to the Arena in the rain.

In the locker room I could hear above me the thin crowd (the rain had held it down) shouting at the referee. It was an unmistakable sound; they thought they saw some infraction he had missed. A strange sound of massed outrage, insular and safe, self-conscious in its anonymity and lack of consequence. If commitment always cost so little, which of us would not be a saint?

I dressed quickly, squeezing uncomfortably and awkwardly into the damp trunks. I laced the high-top silk shoes, fit the mask securely over my head, and buckled the clasp of the heavy silk cape around my throat. Down a row of lockers a couple of college wrestlers I didn’t know and who had already fought were rubbing each other with liniment. I went over to them.

“Excuse me, did you see John Sallow?” I asked.

They looked at me and then at each other.

“It’s a masked man,” one of them said. “Ask him what he wants, Tom.”

Tom pretended to hitch up his chaps. “What do you want, masked man?”

“Do you know John Sallow? The wrestler? He’s on the card tonight. Have you seen him?”

“He went thataway, masked man,” the other said.

I walked away and went into the toilet and urinated. One of the college boys came in. “Hey, Tom,” he called. “There’s a masked man in a white cape in here peeing.”

“Knock it off,” I said.

“It’s all so corny,” the kid said.

“Knock it off,” I said again.

“Okay, champ.”

“Knock it off.”

I went back to my locker. John Sallow was there, one gray leg up on the wooden bench.

“Bogolub tells me you may try to give me some trouble night,” he said.

“This is my last match,” I said. “I’m quitting after tonight.” It was true. I hadn’t known it was true until I said it. Too often it rained; too often I had to take the streetcar; too often I sat too close to the steamy, seedy poor. I could still see the nurse. I never forgive a face.

There were excited screams and a prolonged burst of applause above us. Sallow looked up significantly. “Upstairs,” he said. “You’ll be introduced first. I’m the favorite.”

“Look,” I said, “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Upstairs,” he said. “Talk upstairs.”

I took my place behind two blue uniformed ushers at gate DD. Some boys just to the right of the entrance kept turning around to look at me. They laughed and pointed and whispered to each other. The ring announcer, in a tuxedo, was climbing through the ropes far in front of me. He walked importantly to the center of the ring, stopping every few steps to turn and pull a microphone wire in snappy, snaking arcs along the surface of the canvas. He tapped the microphone with his fingernail and sent a piercing metal
thunk
throughout the arena. Then, shooting his cuffs and clearing his throat, he paused expectantly. The crowd watched with mild interest. “First I have some announcements,” he said. He told them of future matches, reading the names of the wrestlers from a card concealed in his palm. He spoke each wrestler’s name with a calm aplomb and familiarity so that their grotesque titles—The Butcher and Mad Russian and Wildman—sounded almost like real names.

Then there was a pause. Jerking more microphone cord into the ring as though he needed all he could get for what he would say next, the announcer began again. “Ladies and gentlemen—In the main event this evening… two tough… wrestlers… both important contenders for the heavyweight champeenship of the world. The first… that rich man’s disguised son… who has danced with debutantes and who trains on champagne… the muscled millionaire and eligible bachelor… who’d rather rough and tumble than ride to the hounds… from Nob Hill and Back Bay… from Wall Street and the French Riviera… from Newport and the fabled courts of the eastern potentates… weighing two hundred thirty-five pounds without the cape but in the mask… the one… the only…
Masked Playboy!”

I pushed the ushers out of the way and bounced down the long aisle toward the ring. To everyone but the kids who had spotted me earlier it must have looked as though I had run across all the turnpikes from Wall Street, over the bridge across the Mississippi, and through the town to the Arena. Modest but good-natured applause paralleled my course down the aisle, as though I were somehow tripping it off automatically as I came abreast of each row. I leaped up the three steps leading to the ring, hurled over the ropes, unclasped the cape and, arching my shoulders, let it fall behind me in a heap. Then swelling my chest and stretching my long body, I stood on the tips of my high-top silk shoes, seemingly hatched from the cape itself, now a crumpled silken eggshell. The crowd cheered. I nodded, lifted the cape with the point of one shoe, slapped it sharply across one arm and then the other, and then tossed it casually to an attendant beneath me. I grabbed the thick ropes where they angled at the ring post. Without moving my legs I pushed, head down, against the ropes. Snapping my head up quickly I pulled against them. I could feel the muscles climbing my back. I looked like a man rowing in place. I let go of the ropes, dropped my weight solidly on my feet and did deep knee bends. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the ring announcer waiting a little impatiently, but the crowd applauded cheerfully. Suddenly I made a precise military right-face and sprang up onto the ropes, catching the upper rope neatly along my left thigh. I hooked my right foot under the lower rope for balance and folded my arms calmly. I looked like someone on a trapeze—or perhaps like a young, masked sales executive perched casually along the edge of his desk.

I smiled at the ring announcer and waved my arm grandly, indicating that he could continue.

He turned away from me and waited until the crowd was silent. When he began again he sounded oddly sad. “Meeting him in mortal…physical…one-fall…forty-five minute-time-limit combat tonight…is that grim gladiator, ancient athlete, stalking spectral superman, fierce-faced fighter…that plague prover…that hoary horror…that breath breaking…hope hampering…death dealing…mortality making…heart hemorrhaging…life letting—” For the last few seconds the crowd had been applauding in time with the announcer’s rhythms. In a way their applause incited him; they incited each other. Now as he paused, exhausted, there were a few last false claps and then silence.

“Widow making,” someone yelled from the crowd.

“Coffin counting,” someone else shouted.

“People pounding,” the announcer added weakly.

I slid off the rope. “MUR… DER… ING,” I shouted from the center of the ring. “All death is murder!”

Angrily the ring announcer motioned me to get back. By exercising the authority of his tuxedo, he seemed to have regained control. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began again more calmly, “in gray trunks, from the Lowlands, John Sallow… The Grim Reaper.”

With the rest of the crowd I glanced quickly toward the opposite entrance, but no one was standing there. Through the entrance gate I could see the long, low concession stand and someone calmly spooning mustard onto a hot dog. Then I heard a gasp from the other end of the arena. Sallow had been spotted. I looked around just in time to see him coming in through the same gate I had used. Of course, I thought. Of course.

Sallow walked slowly. As he came down the aisle toward the ring some people, more than I would have expected, began applauding. He has his fans, I thought sadly. Most of the people, though, particularly those near the aisle, seemed to shrink back as he passed them. Recognizing someone, he suddenly stopped, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and leaned down toward him, whispering something into his ear. When Sallow started again the person he had spoken to stood and left the auditorium. Sallow came up the three stairs, turned and bowed mockingly to the crowd. They looked at him; he smiled, shrugged, climbed through the ropes and walked to his corner. I tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at me.

“The referee will acquaint the wrestlers with the Missouri rules,” the ring announcer said.

The referee signaled for us to meet at the center of the ring. “This is a one-fall match, forty-five-minute time limit,” he said. “When I signal one of you to break I want you to break clean and break quickly. Both you men have fought in Missouri before. You’re both familiar with the rules in this state. I just want to remind you that if a man for any reason should be out of the ring and not return by the time I count twenty, that man forfeits the fight. Do both of you understand?”

Sallow nodded placidly. The referee looked at me. I nodded.

“All right. Are there any questions? Reaper? Playboy? Okay. Return to your corners and when the bell rings, come out to wrestle.”

I had just gotten back to my corner when the bell rang. I whirled around expecting to find Sallow behind me. He was across the ring. I moved toward him aegressivelv and locked my arms around his neck. Already my body was wet. Sallow was completely dry.

“Don’t you even sweat?” I whispered.

He twisted out of my neck lock and pushed me away from him.

I went toward him like a sleepwalker, inviting him to lock fingers in a test of strength. He ignored me, ducked quickly under my outstretched arms, and grabbed me around the waist. He raised me easily off the floor. It was humiliating. I felt queerly like some wooden religious idol carried in a procession. I beat at his neck and shoulders with the flats of my hands. Sallow increased the pressure of his arms around my body. Desperately I closed one hand into a fist and chopped at his ear. He squeezed me tighter. He would crack my ribs, collapse my lungs. Suddenly he dropped me. I lay on my side writhing on the canvas. I tried to get to the ropes, moving across the grainy canvas in a slow sidestroke like a swimmer lost at sea. The Reaper circled around toward my head and blocked my progress. I saw his smooth, marblish shins and tried to hook one arm around them. It was a trap; he came down quickly on my outstretched arm with all his weight.

“Please,” I said. “Please, you’ll break my arm.”

The Reaper leaned across my body and caught me around the hips. He pressed my thighs together viciously. I could feel my balls grind together sickeningly inside my jock. Raising himself to one knee and then to the other he stood up slowly, so that I hung upside down. He worked my head between his legs. Then, without freeing my head, he moved his hands quickly to my legs and pushed them away from his body, stretching my neck. I felt my legs go flying backwards and to protect my neck tried to force them again to his body. I pedaled disgustingly in the air. He grabbed my legs again.

“Please,” I screamed. “If you drop me, you’ll kill me,” I whined.

Again he forced my legs away from his body. Then suddenly he loosened his terrible grip on my head. I fell obscenely from between Death’s legs. Insanely I jerked my head up and broke my fall with my jaw. My body collapsed heavily behind me. It was like one of those clumsy auto wrecks in wet weather when cars pile uselessly up on each other. I had to get outside the ropes. I had a headache; I could not see clearly. I was gasping for air, actually shoveling it toward my mouth with my hands. Blindly I forced my body toward where I thought the ropes must be. Sallow saw my intention, of course, and kicked at me with his foot. I could not get to my knees; my only way of moving was to roll. Helplessly I curled into a ball and rolled back and forth inside the ring. Sallow stood above me like some giant goalie, feinting with his feet and grotesquely seeming to guide my rolling. The crowd laughed. Suddenly I kicked powerfully toward the ropes. One foot became entangled in them. It was enough to make the referee come between us. He started counting slowly. I crawled painfully under the ropes and onto the ring’s outer apron. “Seven,” the referee intoned. “Eight.” Sallow grinned and stepped toward me. He came through the ropes after me. The referee tried to pull him back, but he shrugged him off as I got to my feet. “Nine,” the referee said. “Ten. One for Reaper. Eleven for Playboy. Two for Reaper. Twelve for Playboy.”