“I learned fighting by hard knocks. Now and then I met some guys knew a thing or two, and I picked it up. Some of them Jap tricks and the like. I had folks down in Mexico. So when I was in my twenties, I went there and became a wrestler for money.”
“Wasn’t that fake?”
The old man gave Marvin a look that made the water inside Marvin’s body boil.
“There was them that put on shows, but then there was us. Me and Jesus, and ones like us. We did the real thing. We was hitting and kicking and locking and throwing. Look at this.”
The old man jerked up a sleeve on his sweatshirt. There was a mark there like a tire track. “See that. Jesus bit me. I had him in a clench and he bit me. Motherfucker. ’Course, that’s what I’d have done. Anyway, he got loose on account of it. He had this technique—the Bomb, he called it, how he got his nickname. He’d grab you in a bear hug, front or back, lift you up and fall back and drive your head into the mat. You got that done to you once or twice, you felt like your ears were wiggling around your asshole. It was something. Me, I had me the step-over-toe-hold. That was my move, and still is.”
“Did you use it on Jesus?”
“Nope. He got the Bomb on me. After the Bomb I thought I was in Africa fucking a gorilla. I didn’t know my dick from a candlewick.”
“But you’re still wrestling him?”
“Haven’t beat him yet. I’ve tried every hold there is, every move, every kind of psychology I know, and nothing. It’s the woman. Felina Valdez. She’s got the mojo on me, the juju, the black doo-doo, and the silent dog whistle. Whatever there is that makes you stupid, she’s got it on me.”
Marvin didn’t follow any of that, but he didn’t say anything. He drank his glass of tea while X-Man drank another beer. He knew he would come back to the subject eventually. That’s how he worked.
“Let me tell you about Felina. She was a black-eyed maiden, had smooth, dark skin. A priest saw her walking down the street, he’d go home and cut his throat. First time I seen her, that stack of dynamite was in a blue dress so tight, you could count the hairs on her thingamajig.
“She was there in the crowd to watch the wrestling. She’s in the front row with her legs crossed, and her dress is slithering up to her knee like a snake creeping, and I’m getting a pretty good look, you see. Not seeing the vine-covered canyon, but I’m in the neighborhood. And looking at that broad, I’m almost killed by this wrestler named Joey the Yank. Guy from Maine who takes my legs out from under me and butts me and gets me in an arm bar. I barely manage to work out of it, get him and throw him and latch on my step-over-toe-hold. I put that on you, you pass through time, baby. Past and future, and finally you’re looking at your own goddamn grave. He tapped out.
“Next thing I know, this blue-dress doll is sliding up next to me, taking my arm, and, well, kid, from that point on I was a doomed man. She could do more tricks with a dick than a magician could with a deck of cards. I thought she was going to kill me, but I thought too it was one hell of a good way to go. Hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir,” Marvin said.
“This is all kind of nasty talk for a kid, ain’t it?”
“No, sir,” Marvin said.
“Fuck it. You’re damn near eighteen. By now you got to know about pussy.”
“I know what it is,” Marvin said.
“No, kid. You talk like you know where it is, not what it is. Me, I was lost in that stuff. I might as well have let her put my nuts in a vise and crank it. She started going to all my fights. And I noticed something pretty quick. I gave a great performance, won by a big margin, the loving was great. It was a mediocre fight, so was the bedding. I had it figured. She wasn’t so much in love with me as she was a good fight and my finishing move, the step-over-toe-hold. She had me teach it to her. I let her put it on me one time, and kid, I tell you, way she latched it, I suddenly had some mercy for all them I’d used it on. I actually had to work my way out of it, like I was in a match, ’cause she wasn’t giving me no quarter. That was a cheap price to pay, though, all that savage monkey love I was getting, and then it all come apart.
“Jesus beat me. Put the Bomb on me. When I woke up I was out back of the carnival, lying on the grass with ants biting me. When I came to myself, Felina was gone. She went with Jesus. Took my money, left me with nothing but ant bites on my nuts.”
“She sounds shallow.”
“As a saucer, kid. But once she slapped that hoodoo on me, I couldn’t cut myself loose. Let me tell you, it was like standing on the railroad tracks in the dark of night, and you can see a train coming, the light sweeping the tracks, and you can’t step off. All you can do is stand there and wait for it to hit you. One time when we were together, we’re walking in Mexico City, where I had some bouts, and she sees a guy with a wooden cage full of pigeons, six or seven of them. She has me buy all of them, like we’re gonna take them back to the States. But what she does is she takes them back to our hotel room. We had to sneak them in. She puts the cage on an end table and just looks at the birds. I give them some bread, you know, ’cause they got to eat, and I clean out their cage, and I think: this girl is one crazed bird lover. I go and take a shower, tell her to order up some dinner.
“I take my time in there. Shit and shave, good hot shower. When I come out, there she is, sitting at one of those little push tables room service brings up, and she’s eating fried chicken. Didn’t wait on me, didn’t say boo. She was like that. Everything was about her. But right then I learned something else. I saw that cage of birds, and they were all dead. I asked her what happened to the birds, and she says, ‘I got tired of them.’
“I went and looked, and their necks was wrung.”
“But why?” Marvin asked.
The old man leaned back and sucked his beer, took his time before he spoke. “I don’t know, kid. Right then I should have thrown my shit in a bag and got the hell out of there. But I didn’t. It’s like I told you about those train tracks. Christ, kid. You should have seen her. There wasn’t never nothing like her, and I couldn’t let her go. It’s like you catch the finest fish in the world, and someone’s telling you to throw it back, and all you can think about is that thing fried up and laid out on a bed of rice. Only it ain’t really nothing like that. There ain’t no describing it. And then, like I said, she went off with Jesus, and every day I get up my heart burns for her. My mind says I’m lucky to be shed of her, but my heart, it don’t listen. I don’t even blame Jesus for what he done. How could he not want her? She belonged to whoever could pin the other guy to the mat. Me and him, we don’t fight nobody else anymore, just each other. Every five years. If I win, I get her back. I know that. He knows that. And Felina knows that. He wins, he keeps her. So far, he keeps her. Its best he does. I ought to let it go, kid, but I can’t.”
“She really that bad?”
“She’s the best bad girl ever. She’s a bright red apple with a worm in the center. Since that woman’s been with Jesus, he left a wife, had two of his children die, one in a house fire that happened while he was out, and Felina gave birth to two babies that both died within a week. Some kind of thing happens now and then. Cradle death, something like that. On top of that, she’s screwed just about everyone short of a couple of eunuchs, but she stays with Jesus, and he keeps her. He keeps her because she has a power, kid. She can hold you to her tight as liver cancer. Ain’t no getting away from that bitch. She lets you go, you still want her like you want a drink when you’re a drunk.”
“The way you mentioned the fire and Jesus’s kids, the two babies that died … you sounded like—”
“Like I didn’t believe the fire was no accident? That the babies didn’t die naturally? Yeah, kid. I was thinking about that cage full of pigeons. I was thinking about how she used to cut my hair, and how she had this little box she had with her, kept it in the purse she carried. I seen her wrap some hair into the knot of a couple twisted pipe cleaners. Oh, hell. You already think I’m nuts.”
Marvin shook his head. “No. No, I don’t.”
“All right, then. I think she really did have the hoodoo on me. I read somewhere that people who know spells can get a piece of your hair and they can use that as part of that spell, and it can tie you to them. I read that.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s true,” Marvin said.
“I know that, kid. I know how I sound. And when it’s midday I think thinking like that is so much dog shit, but it gets night, or it’s early morning and the light’s just starting to creep in, I believe it. And I guess I always believed it. I think she’s got me in a spell. Ain’t nothing else would explain why I would want that cheating, conniving, pigeon-killing, house-burning, baby-murdering bitch back. It don’t make no sense, does it?”
“No, sir,” Marvin said, and then after a moment he added, “She’s pretty old now, isn’t she?”
“’Course she is. You think time stood still? She ain’t the same. But neither am I. Neither is Jesus. But it’s me and him, and one of us gets the girl, and so far he always gets her. What I want is to have her back, die quick, and have one of those Greek funerals. That way I get the prize, but I don’t have to put up with it.”
“What’s a Greek funeral?”
“Heroes like Hercules had them. When he died, they put him on a pile of sticks and such and burned up the body, let his smoke rise to the heavens. Beats being buried in the ground or cooked up in some oven, your ashes scraped into a sack. Or having to spend your last days out with that woman, though that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
“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.
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