26

FROM THE AUDITORIUM CAME A BOOMING VOICE wired with tin:

“And now, our first match! Coming to the ring, hailing from Syracuse, New York, and weighing in at two hundred and fifty pounds . . . Kiiiiid Icarus!”

A young guy in a striped shirt yanked the curtain open and I ran out into the tepid embrace of a lukewarm Olympic crowd.

The first beer hit me at a steady thirty miles per hour, exploding on my face with a wet gush and turning my breath into a spray. I raised my arms and flexed as much as I could, since I’d gained about fifty pounds when the announcer gave my baloney stats. Perhaps they couldn’t see my heroic physique without heroic poses.

“Victory is mine!” I screamed at what looked like a confetto of people tossed into a darkened hall and began a light jog. That’s when the second beer hit my back like a giant’s golden shower. I smiled and rolled with the punch, spinning around so the beer twirled off my skin and back into the people lining the aisles. Teenagers seethed over the top rail while a bored cop shoved them back.

“Faggot!”

“Go back to New York!”

“Eat shit, you big faker!”

I ran past them, sure that more adoring examples of humanity awaited. And lo, there sat a matron of about sixty years with her friends in Sunday hats. Old school fans, with old school values. I ran over.

“Tonight, I dedicate my match to you ladies!”

The fascinator veil on the head matron’s lilac velvet chapeau trembled as she growled and thrust a hat pin the size of a shark’s tooth toward me. “Don’t touch me, you swarthy Greek!”

I smiled and muttered “go to hell” to everyone in general, while I spun the rest of the beer off and made it to the ring steps. My soaked body cut through the ropes to the kind of applause has-beens receive when the MC belts out “half-price chicken wings in the China Room.”

“Now, coming down the aisle, from the Aleutian Island in Alaska, weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, Kodiaaaaaak . . . SLIM!”

The crowd didn’t have time to register their disgust, because Kodiak ran out like he was a real mamma bear and I was kicking her cubs. His close to three-hundred-pound frame shook with the vicious intent of a career criminal with nothing to lose. He slid beneath the bottom rope, slick with sweat and no beer. The crowd was cheering for the bad guy as he pulled himself to his feet and I saw his dead smoky red eyes. And worse: the fetid magic scent of his breath.

Black Lotus.

“Keeeyah!” he screamed, throwing a wild haymaker with closed fists, the kind that would make your dentist cheer and a neurosurgeon cancel his golf plans.

I dodged, feinting left and right, ducking and diving as every wild throw missed me, but not for lack of trying. Sweat replaced the beer as Kodiak reared back his head and yelled, giving me time to drill his liver with a savage kick.

The audience oooowwww’d as the pain paralyzed Kodiak for a second, long enough for me to catch my breath.

“Slow down!” I yelled, giving him the bird, keeping up the illusion that this was in fact a bullshit wrestling match and not a real one. “You’re off book. I don’t mind if you squash me but I don’t want you to kill me!”

Clarity returned to his hazy red eyes, but not the sober kind. His long arms grabbed for my neck. I ducked and ran under his arm, much to the joy of the crowd, who hooted at David avoiding each blow from Goliath. Me? I was grateful he was so jacked he was fighting like a monster and not a fighter.

I ran around the ring and laughter smacked me from all sides, along with fistfuls of peanuts as I played the wuss, puss, wimp, and mollycoddle while a six-foot-six monster chased me. But I had to keep the match alive, or Shemp would welsh my deal for Jack’s pay and Sam and her daughter would be out of their papa’s last payday. Thank god for the ref.

Herc finally thrust himself between us and pressed me back with ease and Kodiak with seemingly similar ease, but he’d given each of us a knuckle-punch to the solar plexus, stealing my breath and making even Kodiak stagger. “Come on!” Herc said, then turned to Kodiak. “Stick to the match! Kodiak, squash him now. Do it.” Iron laced Herc’s voice. But my vocal cords were stolen. I tried to scream out “Herc, no!”

But Kodiak’s eyes glazed with rage. His hands clutched Herc’s throat. The audience was howling, loving the attack on the ref, a completely vile bit of sportsmanship. Herc fired out his arms to reach for a hold, but Kodiak yanked Herc into the air before his iron fingers could find purchase. The one-time masterpiece of cultivated muscle and viciousness hung in the air, blocking out the spotlight, before Kodiak rammed him into the mat. Thankfully, his reflexes were still good, and he extended his limbs in a Jesus Christ pose to keep the impact divided among his skin and organs.

Silence. The crowd might as well have drowned in blood. Kodiak rose from his knees and I tossed a spinning heel kick to the back of his skull. He stumbled back onto his knees and I leveled an ax kick to cut him down to size. But the slippery giant had dragged Herc to his feet, and I nearly hit my old friend. With his hands under Herc’s arms, Kodiak waltzed with a human shield. I couldn’t tell if Herc was alive or dead.

“Looks like the ref is back in action!” Kodiak said.

“Put him down!” But the audience howled, dark and guttural, loving this macabre turn of events. I was just glad to see Herc start huffing and puffing. “Put him down now!”

“Or what, mark? What you got? What can you make me—”

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, asshole!

I slid into a joyride and moved faster than even Kodiak could sense, and then I ran like a soul past hell’s gate, leapt, and drew my fist back for a haymaker that, if it connected, would have felled a redwood that had stood for a century.

Pain jolted through me as the joyride taxed every nerve into submission, bleeding my aura as if I were in a mystic iron maiden. Damn it! Tyger Tyger, burning bright!

I snapped back to reality, but with the momentum of the joyride carrying me like a train. My fist clocked Kodiak’s jaw before his eyes registered me as a lethal weapon . . . and that big mouth unhinged. Literally. I’d broken his mandible just below his ear.

Kodiak screamed and hit the ground, and I hugged Herc to keep him afloat. Around the ring were officials, Shemp included, staring at me as if I’d done something wrong.

“Herc? Can you count?” I said, a plan forming just in time to save my hide.

He shook his head and he muttered death threats in Greek until he said “Yes.”

“Then get ready to drop.”

Herc hit the ground as Kodiak roared with his jaw hanging off its hinge amid the crowd’s vicious screams. Kodiak was not entirely impervious to his injury, however, and hunched over in pain as his hand began to explore the damage done to his jaw.

I ran and jumped on his bent back, landing with my arm hooked around his neck, his jaw hanging loose against my forearm as I locked the same blood choke that took out Mick.

Boos and hisses hit me right before the lit cigarettes sparked off my wet skin. Kodiak lumbered around the ring like Frankenstein’s monster being drained of his life-force. He bolted to the corner and dropped to his knees. Next thing I saw was the turnbuckle coming at me like a perfect bull’s eye was painted on my skull.

My head crashed into the turnbuckle, which had all the give of a boxing glove filled with sand. But the shock of pain did not break the choke I had vice-gripped on Kodiak, who was finally starting to fade. Outside the ring, Shemp and the cronies were circling like starved piranhas. If I fucked up the match, I was doomed, and “I didn’t want to be killed” wasn’t going to cut it with carny management, regardless of the era. Kodiak lunged up, running on Black Lotus fumes, aiming to go to the well for one last drink. As he surged forward, I let go.

Kodiak boned his half-asleep noggin at full speed on the turnbuckle, his nose going crunch while his jaw swung like a drunk pendulum.

The crowd eeeww’d! as he staggered backward and tried to straighten his back. All the while I ran around inside the ropes with Shemp yelling, “What the fuck are you doing?”

I had no breath to say what I was thinking: Need to land in a Jesus Christ pose.

I climbed to the top rope, glad my feet could grip them like a prisoner’s fist around iron bars while the warden works the whip. Crouched on the top, I rose. The audience glared at the man at whom they’d tossed pennies, butts, and beer, not believing that Davey had a slingshot’s chance of destroying Goliath.

I raised my arms in victory, knees bending as Kodiak shook his head and Herc shook out the cobwebs, looking at me like I’d lost all of my marbles down the drain. “Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight,” I yelled, then jumped into flight, arcing my spine, thinking of Oscar Wilde’s last line: “For the greatest tragedy of them all / Is never to feel the burning light.”

I leapt into a roar of adoration that I’d missed since being a stick for Herc at fairgrounds and parking lots. I crashed into Kodiak’s chest with my knees. I hadn’t twisted enough to make it look good, but the big man toppled with me on top of him. Awkwardly, I covered Kodiak’s chest and whispered. “For the love of gods old and new, stay the hell down!”

Herc dropped a hand as the crowd chanted, “ONE!”

Kodiak’s glazed eyes re-focused and his mouth swung wide without his jaw. Then his feet started to rumble.

“TWO!”

I elbowed his already-bashed liver, his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, and he screamed, “Arroooga!”

“THREE!”

Every member of the crowd was on their feet screaming so loud it drowned out the bell as I struggled to bring myself up to my feet, sweat pouring out of me by the pint. Herc followed, and I looked in his eyes. I pulled him close so Shemp and his crew could not read our lips.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Great, because I’m screwed. Shemp is going to tear my arms off.”

“No. He won’t.” Herc pushed himself off me as the bell rang through the din and grabbed my wrist, not an ounce of his strength having been drained by age or the chokeslam that would have killed a younger man. The bell rang and Kodiak still lay on the floor.

“The winner of this bout as a result of a pin fall . . . Icarus, the Great!”

Herc yanked up my arm and I sucked in the wild applause from the same drunk bastards and old nuts who had wanted me plastered not ten minutes ago. Now I could probably get them to vote me in for mayor.

I waved and did a short run around the ring as three mugs pulled out Kodiak and led him down the aisle on giant legs made of sand and dying fury.

That’s when all the pains in my body hit. Herc slapped my back, so I stood up straight. “Parade for them,” he said while looking at Shemp. “Sign autographs. Buy time for the son of a bitch-bitch to be tossed in back.” I did as instructed.

“That was so boss, man!”

“You got less insurance than Evel Knievel!”

“Here I thought you only skateboarded.”

Front row, with a girl under each arm, was Kevin.

“Well, I retired after having my ass handed to me by a kid. So, I started a new job. How’d I do?”

“It suits you, man. It’s a trip to watch you hit that guy. I always thought this stuff was fake.”

“Never trust anything but your own eyeballs,” I said. “Enjoy the rest of the show.”

“It will be hard to top a guy losing his jaw,” said one of the girls, auburn hair in two thick braids.

I bowed and then looked through the ring ropes. Kodiak was away. “Take care, Kevin.”

“You really know Icarus?” the other girl said with soft surprise. Kevin laughed and I waved goodbye as my brain scrambled for a plan once I left my adoring fans for a dressing room filled with men keen to break my ribs.

Rounding the ring, I saw Shemp waiting at the curtain. I walked with purpose, big smile on my face, as I passed by the hatchet-faced granny with the hatpin. She tapped her hat. “You live to fight another day, sissy,” she said.

Shemp sat before the curtain, cracking his chubby fingers and preparing to chop me up like mutton. The closer I got, the more obvious his anger became. His pockmarked skin and the heavy veins in his hands almost glowed with rage. Shemp was a shooter. And thanks to the joyride and every part of my body feeling like it had been worked over like a government mule, there was a good chance he could cripple me before I could get away or reverse the tables. Either way would kill the money I owed Sam. Either way he’d be harder to get on my side to tell me about Mick Butler. I was close enough to smell his cigar breath, but no Black Lotus. His eyes narrowed, then widened, but not on me.

Behind me, Herc ran up. Backup, as if I’d yelled “Hey, rube” against management instead of the fans.

Shemp made the come-here motion with his finger, then pushed himself through the curtain. We followed, Herc at my side. “I stay with you,” he said. “You don’t go piss without me.”