Slot Machine (15 page)

“I want to get along,” he said.

I reached him, caught his hair. I gave it all the hate I had, which right then was more hate than anybody, when I pulled him down over my head and slammed him on the floor.

He was tough. He didn’t even seem to mind what I did, or when I landed on top of him. He just wanted me to get it.

“I had to say yes,” he went on as I tried lamely to force his shoulders to stay down. “Guy like me... guy like you. Best you can do. Be a sport. You get along.”

More than ever I wanted him down. I wanted to slam him. But I couldn’t do it.

Then I looked up, into the crowd. I was so lost, I didn’t even know what I felt about it. I needed to read my mother’s face.

I was frightened by what I saw. She was frightened. She was scared and sad and looking to me like she might cry except that she was so totally confused. That was it, the problem was that she didn’t know. She might cry in a second, if I let her know. Or she might laugh if I didn’t.

When he gave me the tiniest shove, I flew off Little Death like I was slung from a catapult. My fans gobbled it up. I stood in classic ready position as he then came stalking me.

“Now you get it,” he said quietly. “It’s better this way. Come on, you’ve seen it a million times on TV—let’s go for it.”

He rushed me, punched me, not hard, in the solar plexus, and I doubled over. When I did, he grabbed me in a headlock. I straightened up, with him still clinging to me, and walked all around the stage.

“Where is he?” I demanded of the crowd, as if I didn’t know he was hanging off my face. I turned all around, spinning us both in a circle until I got dizzy and we fell in a heap.

We got up and did some more of the tried-and-true big-fat-guy-chasing-little-dwarfy-guy shtick, him running between my legs, then when I bent over to look between them, him leapfrogging over my back. The kid was a great athlete.

By the time he finally pinned me a couple of long minutes later—me lying flat on my back with my arms and legs jerking like a heart patient getting electrical jolts—we had them all roaring with laughter.

I got up and we shook hands to the background music of applause, but we could not look at each other. As we made our way off the stage, Brother Jackson held out his happy hand for me to shake. I walked right by him.

My mother was still awestruck after I’d changed into my regular clothes and returned to the table.

“I have never seen that side of you, Elvin. You’ve become a real cutup. What have they done to you here?”

I didn’t even touch it. If she was happy, I was happy. I smiled nice. Mike smiled nice too. He knew.

The kids’ parents with dough stayed at the hotel or one of the bed and breakfasts in town. The rest stayed in the dorms at the seminary. Mom and Brenda shared a room there.

We walked to the dorm to pick them up in the morning and carry their bags back to the car.

“Very gallant of you two,” Brenda said, “dropping the girls off at the dorm at the end of the evening,
going home
, then coming back to pick them up in the morning. Remember that when you’re in college.”

“College?” I put my hand over my heart. “Could we slow down please? It was just a few weeks ago we were perfectly content in that school it had taken us eight years to get used to... then this... then
that
school in September... now the college thing. This is just too much, it’s just to much.”

My mother and Brenda laughed and laughed, as if I was putting on yet
another
show for them. I wasn’t.

They were leaving is what it was.

When we reached the car, I took Brenda’s bag from Mikie and brought it along with Mom’s around to the back. I popped open the Omni’s hatch, threw in one bag, threw in the other, then climbed in after them. I wedged myself in between the luggage and the spare-tire compartment, flattened myself out, and pulled the hatch shut on myself.

The three of them came back at once. They stood there staring in at me, smiling broadly like I was something in a pet-store window. From my end, breathing was already a little hard.

Mikie looked back up over his shoulder, cupping a hand against the brilliant sun. It was already beating in on me through the glass.

“Remember what we used to do to frogs with a magnifying glass?” he asked. “You’ll never make it home.”

Brenda popped the hatch open. It made that hydraulic
Pffffft
sound. Although that may have been me. “You are too funny, Elvin,” she said.

“Too,” Mom echoed, offering me a hand to get out. It was a struggle, much harder than getting in was, but together we extricated me. Mikie and his mom walked around to the driver’s side, I and mine to the passenger’s.

“Why don’t you go and get your bag, Elvin,” she said. “We can wait.”

I looked over the top of the car at Mikie and Brenda hugging.

“Thank you very much for coming, Mrs. Bishop,” I said. “I trust you enjoyed your stay here at the Rancho Diablo retreat. All our guests have a fine time, whether they like it or not, and we do hope you will return.” I smiled good and cheesy and shook her hand.

“See you next week,” she said, as bravely as I did. Then, as I was shutting her door, she whispered, “
Very
proud. I love you.”

“There ya go now,” I said, slamming the door hard. “On your way. Drive careful. And watch that drinking now.”

We stood and watched them go. They all thought it was a joke, when the truth was it took everything I had to pull myself out of the back of the car.

But she was proud of me.

When the red Dodge Omni had finally disappeared, Mikie slapped me on the back. “Want to go get something to eat?” he asked cautiously.

I shook my head.

“You want to just hang out?”

I nodded.

“You want me to leave you alone?”

I shook my head.

“Library might be cool.”

I nodded, and we started walking.

We could do that, sometimes for hours, times when things weren’t so good for me. Me not saying a word the whole time and Mikie not making me. It took us years to get that just right, and now it sure made things a lot easier.

MA SUPPOSE THIS LETTER
will beat you home by a couple of days since I imagine you and Brenda have been
Thelma and Louise
ing it across the countryside. But isn’t it nice to know that I at least am still thinking about you?

I regret that this cannot be a long letter, but I must get to work. Your visit really threw off my training (so it’s true, women weaken an athlete’s legs), and I have a stiff week ahead. Coach has been matching me with smaller and smaller wrestlers until we locate somebody I can actually defeat, and if I continue at my current pace, I’m scheduled for an exhibition match on Friday against the spring lamb we’re eating on Saturday.

Early betting’s running about eight to five for the lamb. But I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t look that tough.

Wish me luck.

And while you’re at it, wish me skill and strength and bravery.

Elvin

Monday morning, I was paired with—well why not?—the dwarf. This time for real. I boned up on Rummy. I hung on to everything Eugene tried to remind me of. None of it rooted.

This was not the same dwarf who had played the game for the circus crowd on Saturday night. This was a dwarf who knew how to wrestle. He was strong and elusive. He was nasty. And he had something to prove—to me.

He threw himself at me, bounced off, came at me again. He grabbed my leg and nearly upended me, but I got my foot down, stomping his foot. He grabbed my leg again—the way a pit bull lunges and snaps and clamps and tears at the same piece of leg over and over—got it up, backed me up, then reversed direction. Now I was following him, hopping, trying not to fall. With a surge, he reversed me again, tipping me now, dumping me.

When I was down, he jumped on me. He grabbed my arm, pulled it up over my head. Then he was kneeling over me, pulling the arm up and digging his knee into my side.

“Punishing hold,” Coach yelled, but the kid wouldn’t break it. “Punishing hold!” Coach yelled louder, and the kid pulled harder on my arm. Tears came to my eyes, and some nerve thing happened so that I couldn’t wiggle my fingers. The arm now went right past my head, to where I couldn’t even see the elbow in my peripheral vision.

“Ow,” I said. “Hey,” a little more loudly, as if he would now notice my pain and let up. As if we were somehow on the same side of something. He made small straining grunt sounds as he tried to push my arm up farther, to snap it off.

Somehow I rolled. I got away, my deadened arm flopping after me. He jumped on me again when I was halfway up.

“Takedown,” Coach yelled. “Come on, Elvin, break out of it.”

It was beyond a takedown. I was on all fours, two palms pushing off the floor, one knee down, and one foot down, when he caught me, hooked an arm up under my crotch, and slammed me down, just like a rodeo calf roping.

“Come on, Elvin,” Eugene yelled.

“Come on, Elvin,” the dwarf snarled.

But I couldn’t. Everyone in camp could have jammed the hall and started cheering for me. I could have reread Rummy Macias a hundred and fifty times. Rummy himself could show up in my corner and shout instructions, and it would make no difference. I was on the bottom, and I was staying on the bottom.

The two minutes were up, and the whistle blew ending round one. It was a formality. To start round two, I won the coin toss and took the top. The dwarf got down like a dog, I crouched over him, grabbing his arm and waist, and the whistle blew again.

Whomp
. I was down quicker, harder than before. The dwarf was on top of me. But my shoulder was up. He slammed it down, snarling at me. I got the other one up. He slammed that one.

“Predicament,” Coach called, which made the dwarf angrier and more determined. He kept slamming, and I kept slithering, but I would not have this mean, tiny, angry person pinning me to the floor. He could have the rest, but he couldn’t have that.

After another tedious minute of this, Coach Wolfe called it off. As the dwarf got up off me, he pushed my face away hard.

“You’re the joke,” he spat. “I’m not the joke. You’re the joke. I’m not the joke. You’re the joke.”

“Fine. So how come you’re not laughing?” I said, slapping my arm back to life as he stalked away.

“Elvin?” Coach said after I’d had a few minutes’ rest. “Elvin, you got enough in you to go another round or two?”

I felt myself nodding. I was getting this feeling of time running out on me as my body broke down. I wanted this. I wanted to find out more about me before I had to ride out the rest of camp on a voucher.

My next opponent was soft. He was light. He was scared. He was a little fat kid, as opposed to a big fat kid, definitely heavier than the bantamweight class they had him in, but it would have been cruel to put him any higher. I liked him immediately.

We locked. My hand was clapped around the back of his neck, his around mine. We leaned on each other’s shoulders and pushed back and forth.

“You want to pin me?” he whispered.

“Huh?”

“My name’s Lennox, and I’m out of here. I’m quitting. This is it for me. So I don’t care. You want to pin me or you want me to pin you?”

I was mortified. “I want to
fight
, that’s what I want.” I backed him up across the ring.

He sighed a bored, disgusted sigh. “Spare me, all right? The only question is which one of us wants to not lose less than the other one.” He pushed me back the other way.

I almost fell down just trying to follow the sentence, then I recognized what he was saying. He was describing the thing I had developed in my week-plus as a wrestler: back-ass desire.

“I want to win,” I said, “but if you take a dive, I will not fall on top of you.”

It had become a mighty struggle of antiwill. I wouldn’t let him pin me. I wouldn’t let him pin himself. I was in all likelihood incapable of pinning him. It would be a long three rounds.

Smack
. He slapped me in the face.

“That’ll cost you a poi—” Coach half yelled when I went off.

I pushed, and slapped, and cuffed, and choked, and butted Lennox across the ring, where he fell in a heap. Where I dropped on top of him, bounced, and flailed on top of him.

After a few pointless seconds, Lennox had to instruct me.

“Here, grab this leg. Grab this arm. Apply weight at this point. There you go. Jesus, Elvin, good job. No way I can get out of this.”

“Try,” I yelled in his face. “Try to break it, or I’ll squish the shit out of you. I mean it.”

He did. He pushed, and he pushed, and he pushed until his face turned the color of eggplant. He was there for good.

The whistle blew. “Pin!” Coach yelled, and sounded dumbfounded to do so. Eugene rushed over to congratulate me, and Lennox shook my hand. We were two oddly happy fat guys. He was happy to be done with wrestling, I was happy to have done something with it. A tiny something, but something.

As we sat eating Nightmeal, we were three sagging boys. We didn’t really say much, other than “Pass the salt” and “You going to finish that?” July was never like this for us before. It was always September that was exhausting.

I sat as still as possible, trying to will away the shoulder pain that still made my pinky finger tingle, the headache, the new clicking in my ankles.

Mikie said it first. “Everyone knew it was you, Frankie, with all that hair all over your body.”

“I don’t think everyone knew,” Frank said.

“My mother recognized you,” I said.

“Well that’s because your mother’s seen me—”

“Don’t you
dare
,” I said, pointing a crooked index finger at him. He laughed.

“Couldn’t you quit now, Frankie? I mean, haven’t you been embarrassed enough? I think you’ve proved to them whatever it is you need to prove.”

“I’m almost there,” Frank said quietly.

“So what if you just said no more? You could hang out with us for the last week; we’d stick together day and night so they couldn’t do anything to you.” Mikie jerked his thumb over his shoulder at me. “As you know, the big El is getting pretty tough.”