Dangerous Women (30 page)

“Do Jesus and Felina live here in the city?” Marvin asked.

“They don’t live nowhere. They got a motor trailer. And they got some retirement money. Like me. Jesus and me worked other jobs as well as wrestled. You couldn’t make it just on the wrestling circuit, especially the underground circuit, so we got some of that social security money coming, thank goodness. They drive around to different places. He trains, and he comes back every five years. Each time I see him, it’s like there’s this look in his eyes that says ‘Beat me this time and take this bitch off my hands.’ Only he always fights like a bear and I can’t beat him.”

“You win, sure she’ll go with you?”

“It’s me or him, and that’s all there is to it. Ain’t nobody else now. Me or him. It’s us she’s decided to suck dry and make miserable.”

“Can’t you let it go?” Marvin asked.

X-Man laughed. It was a dark laugh, like a dying man that suddenly understands an old joke. “Wish I could, kid, ’cause if I could, I would.”

They trained for the fight.

X-Man would say: “This is what Jesus the Bomb does. He comes at you, and next thing you know, you’re on your ass, ’cause he grabs you like this, or like this. And he can switch from this to this.” And so on.

Marvin did what he was told. He tried Jesus’ moves. Every time he did, he’d lose. The old man would twist him, throw him, lock him, punch him (lightly), and even when Marvin felt he was getting good at it, X-Man would outsmart him in the end and come out of something Marvin thought an oiled weasel couldn’t slither out of. When it was over, it was Marvin panting in the corner, X-Man wiping sweat off his face with a towel.

“That how Jesus does it?” Marvin asked, after trying all of the moves he had been taught.

“Yeah,” said the old man, “except he does it better.”

This went on for months, getting closer and closer to the day when the X-Man and Jesus the Bomb were to go at it. Got so Marvin was so focused on the training, he forgot all about the bullies.

Until one day Marvin was by himself, coming out of the store two blocks from the old man’s place, carrying a sack with milk and vanilla cookies in it, and there’s Hard Belly. He spotted Marvin and started across the street, pulling his hands out of his pockets, smiling.

“Well, now,” Hard Belly said when he was near Marvin. “I bet you forgot about me, didn’t you? Like I wasn’t gonna get even. This time you ain’t got your fossil to protect you.”

Marvin put the sack on the sidewalk. “I’m not asking for trouble.”

“That don’t mean you ain’t gonna get some,” Hard Belly said, standing right in front of Marvin. Marvin didn’t really plan on anything—he wasn’t thinking about it—but when Hard Belly moved closer, his left jab popped out and hit him in the nose. Down went Hard Belly like he had been hit with a baseball bat. Marvin couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe how hard his punch was, how good it was. He knew right then and there it was over between him and Hard Belly, because he wasn’t scared anymore. He picked up the sack and walked back to the old man’s place, left Hard Belly napping.

One night, during the time school was out for the Thanksgiving holiday, Marvin woke up. He was sleeping in the boxing ring, a blanket over him, and he saw there was a light on by the old man’s bed. The old man was sitting on the edge of it, bent over, pulling boxes out from beneath. He reached in one and pulled out a magazine, then another. He spread the magazines on the bed and looked at them.

Marvin got up and climbed out of the ring and went over to him. The old man looked up. “Damn, kid. I wake you?”

“Woke up on my own. What you doing?”

“Looking at these old magazines. They’re underground fight magazines. Had to order them through the mail. Couldn’t buy them off the stands.”

Marvin looked at the open magazines on the bed. They had a lot of photographs in them. From the poster on the wall, he recognized photographs of X-Man.

“You were famous,” Marvin said.

“In a way, I suppose,” X-Man said. “I look at these, I got to hate getting old. I wasn’t no peach to look at, but I was strong then, looked better than now. Ain’t much of the young me left.”

“Is Jesus in them?”

X-Man flipped a page on one of the open magazines, and there was a photograph of a squatty man with a black mop of hair. The man’s chest was almost as hairy. He had legs like a tree trunks.

X-Man grinned. “I know what you’re thinking: Couple mugs like me and Jesus, what kind of love magnets are we? Maybe Felina ain’t the prime beaver I say she is?”

The old man went around to the head of the bed and dragged a small cardboard box out from under it. He sat it on the bed between them, popped the lid, and scrounged around in a pile of yellowed photographs. He pulled one out. It was slightly faded, but it was clear enough. The woman in it looked maybe mid-twenties. It was a full shot, and she was indeed a knockout. Black hair, high cheekbones, full lips, and black as the Pit eyes that jumped out of the photo and landed somewhere in the back of Marvin’s head.

There were other photos of her, and he showed Marvin all of them. There were close shots and far shots, and sneaky camera shots that rested on her ass. She was indeed fabulous to look at.

“She ain’t that way now, but she’s still got it somehow. What I was gonna do, kid, was gather up all these photos and pile them and burn them, then I was gonna send word to Jesus he could forget the match. That Felina was his until the end of time. But I think that every few years or so, and then I don’t do it. You know what Jesus told me once? He said she liked to catch flies. Use a drinking glass and trap them, then stick a needle through them, string them on thread. Bunches of them. She’d knot one end, fasten the other to a wall with a thumbtack, watch them try to fly. Swat a fly, that’s one thing. But something like that, I don’t get it, kid. And knowing that, I ought to not get her. But it don’t work that way … Tell you what, you go on to bed. Me, I’m gonna turn off the light and turn in.”

Marvin went and crawled under his blanket, adjusted the pillow under his head. When he looked at the old man, he still had the light on and had the cardboard box with the pictures in his lap. He was holding up a photograph, looking at it like it was a hand-engraved invitation to the Second Coming.

As Marvin drifted off, all he could think about were those flies on the thread.

Next day the old man didn’t wake him for the morning workout, and when Marvin finally opened his eyes it was nearly noon. The old man was nowhere to be seen. He got up and went to the refrigerator to have some milk. There was a note on the door.

DON’T EAT HEAVY. I’M BRINGING THANKSGIVING.

Marvin hadn’t wanted to spend Thanksgiving with his mother and the painter, so he hadn’t really thought about it at all. Once his mother dropped him out of her mind, he had dropped the holidays out of his. But right then he thought about them, and hoped the painter would choke on a turkey bone.

He poured a glass of milk and sat in a chair by the ring and sipped it.

Not long after, the old man came back with a sack of groceries. Marvin got up and went over to him. “I’m sorry. I missed the workout.”

“You didn’t miss nothing. It’s a fucking holiday. Even someone needs as much training as you ought to have a day off.”

The old man pulled things out of the sack. Turkey lunch meat, some cheese slices, and a loaf of good bread, the kind you had to cut with a knife. And there was a can of cranberry sauce.

“It ain’t exactly a big carving turkey, but it’ll be all right,” the old man said.

They made sandwiches and sat in the TV chairs with a little table between them. They placed their plates there, the old man put a video in his aging machine, and they watched a movie. An old black-and-white one. Marvin liked color, and he was sure he would hate it. It was called Night and the City. It was about wrestling. Marvin didn’t hate it. He loved it. He ate his sandwich. He looked at the old man, chewing without his dentures. Right then he knew he loved him as dearly as if he were his father.

Next day they trained hard. Marvin had gotten so he was more of a challenge for the old man, but he still couldn’t beat him.

On the morning of the bout with Jesus, Marvin got up and went out to the store. He had some money X-Man gave him now and then for being a training partner, and he bought a few items and took them home. One of them was a bottle of liniment, and when he got back he used it to give the old man a rubdown.

When that was done, the old man stretched out on the floor on an old mattress and fell asleep as easily as a kitten. While he slept, Marvin took the rest of the stuff he had bought into the bathroom and made a few arrangements. He brought the bag out and wadded it up and shoved it in the trash.

Then he did what the old man had instructed him to do. He got folding chairs out of the closet, twenty-five of them, and set them up near the ring. He put one of them in front of the others, close to the ring.

At four-fifteen, he gently spoke to the old man, called him awake.

The old man got up and showered and put on red tights and a T-shirt with a photograph of his younger self on it. The words under the photograph read: X-MAN.

It was Christmas Eve.

About seven that evening they began to arrive. On sticks, in wheelchairs, and on walkers, supported by each other and, in a couple of cases, walking unassisted. They came to the place in dribbles, and Marvin helped them locate a chair. The old man had stored away some cheap wine and beer, and had even gone all out for a few boxes of crackers and a suspicious-looking cheese ball. These he arranged on a long foldout table to the left of the chairs. The old people, mostly men, descended on it like vultures alighting on fresh roadkill. Marvin had to help some of them who were so old and decrepit they couldn’t hold a paper plate and walk at the same time.

Marvin didn’t see anyone that he thought looked like Jesus and Felina. If one of the four women was Felina, she was certainly way past any sex appeal, and if any one of them was Jesus, X-Man had it in the bag. But, of course, none of them were either.

About eight o’clock Marvin answered a hard knocking on the door. When he opened it, there was Jesus. He was wearing a dark robe with red trim. It was open in front, and Marvin could see he had on black tights and no shirt. He was gray-haired where he had hair left on his head, and there was a thick thatch of gray hair on his chest, nestled there like a carefully constructed bird’s nest. He had the same simian build as in the photograph. The Bomb looked easily ten years younger than his age; he moved easily and well.

With him was a tall woman and it was easy to recognize her, even from ancient photos. Her hair was still black, though certainly it came out of a bottle now, and she had aged well, looked firm of face and high of bone. Marvin thought maybe she’d had some work. She looked like a movie star in her fifties that still gets work for her beauty. Her eyes were like wells, and Marvin had to be careful not to fall into them. She had on a long black dress with a black coat hanging off her shoulders in a sophisticated way. It had a fur collar that at first glance looked pretty good and at second glance showed signs of decay, like a sleeping animal with mange.

“I’m here to wrestle,” Jesus said.

“Yes, sir,” Marvin said.

The woman smiled at Marvin, and her teeth were white and magnificent, and looked as real as his own. Nothing was said, but in some way or another he knew he was to take her coat, and he did. He followed after her and Jesus, and, watching Felina walk, Marvin realized he was sexually aroused. She was pretty damn amazing, considering her age, and he was reminded of an old story he had read about a succubus, a female spirit that preyed on men, sexually depleted them, and took their souls.

When Felina sashayed in and the old man saw her, there was a change in his appearance. His face flushed and he stood erect. She owned him.

Marvin put Felina’s coat away, and when he hung it in the closet, a smell came off it that was sweet and tantalizing. He thought some of it was perfume, but knew most of it was her.

Jesus and X-Man shook hands and smiled at each other, but X-Man couldn’t take his eyes off of Felina. She moved past them both as if unaware of their presence, and without being told took the chair that had been placed in front of the others.

The old man called Marvin over and introduced him to Jesus. “This kid is my protégé, Jesus. He’s pretty good. Like me, maybe, when I started out, if I’d had a broke leg.”

They both laughed. Marvin even laughed. He had begun to understand this was wrestling humor and that he had in fact been given a great compliment.

“You think you’re gonna beat me this year?” Jesus said. “I sometimes don’t think you’re really trying.”

“Oh, I’m trying all right,” X-Man said.

Jesus was still smiling, but now the smile look pinned there when he spoke. “You win, you know she’ll go with you?”

The old man nodded.

“Why do we keep doing this?” Jesus said.

X-Man shook his head.

“Well,” Jesus said. “Good luck. And I mean it. But you’re in for a fight.”

“I know that,” X-Man said.

It was nine o’clock when X-Man and Jesus took out their teeth and climbed into the ring, took some time to stretch. The chairs in the audience were near half empty and those that were seated were spread apart like Dalmatian spots. Marvin stood on the outside of the ropes at the old man’s corner.

The old man came and leaned on the ropes. One of the elders in the audience, wearing red pants pulled up nearly to his armpits, dragged his chair next to the side of the ring, scraping it across the floor as he went. He had a cowbell in his free hand. He wheezed himself into the seat, placed the bell on his knee. He produced a large watch from his pants pocket and placed it on his other knee. He looked sleepy.

“We do this five years from now,” X-Man said to Marvin, “it’ll be in hell somewhere, and the devil will be our timekeeper.”

“All right,” said the timekeeper. “Geezer rules. Two minutes rounds. Three minutes rests. Goes until it’s best two out of three or someone quits. Everybody ready?”