by Gary Paulsen
Wayne wanted to perfect his favorite trick, which was to jump a line of three barrels and at the top let go of the handlebars, turn sideways and wave and smile, just like a man named Rocketing Red, who jumped a motorcycle over two cars, turned and waved, landed and rode through a Hoop of Flame! We had talked Wayne out of the hoop of flame with some difficulty—pointing out that if we lit up a hoop of flame anywhere in town we would all probably wind up in jail, if we were lucky—but he had a good smile and was proud of it. So one afternoon we all set up the ramp and barrels and Wayne got ready for his practice run.
As it turned out we didn't have time to get all the stuff to the bottom of Black Hill and so we just set it up near the Seversons' backyard, which was where we usually set it up for short runs, but there was a major difference now.
Its name was King.
The Seversons were a sweet elderly couple without a mean bone in their bodies but their son Curt had gone off to the army and had left his dog with his parents.
King was perhaps a third pit bull, a third Doberman and about a third crocodile—the meanest animal on four legs. The Seversons kept him tied on a chain in their backyard, where he had watched us whipping by on our bicycles on many days, roaring and slavering to get at us, tearing at the earth, ripping up clods of sod and dirt, grinding his bared teeth and hating us, hating bicycles, hating air, hating the world.
And this morning Wayne came careening down the alley, took the jump, turned sideways and smiled and waved at an imaginary crowd just as King made a lunge and found to his everlasting joy that his chain had broken free from his collar.
You've got to hand it to Wayne. He knew instantly that he was in trouble. He hit the ground still smiling—or it might have become a grimace of horror—and stood on the pedals, looking for speed.
He had been moving pretty well to make the jump and had a fair lead. I saw gravel spurt from his rear tire as he slammed the pedals down and I thought he might just outrun King, and in fact I was thinking that if he did outrun King there was a good chance the beast would be coming back after us, and I was wondering about taking off in the other direction to get up my own head of speed when Wayne made his mistake.
Instead of barreling straight down the alley, he thought—as he told us a week later, when he could speak again—that if he cut through the Nelsons' backyard and got out in the street it might confuse the dog.
So he angled right, really moving now, just a blur, with King coming after him—and ran into the Nelsons' clothesline.
Mr. Nelson had worked hard on that clothesline. He had set four-inch steel posts in concrete and strung four quarter-inch-thick steel cables to hang the clothes on, and Wayne caught not the first but the last cable under his chin and it took him off that bike as if a giant hand had come down from the sky and plucked him away.
Up, up, his feet went in a beautiful arc.
Both feet straight out, the bike traveling on, Wayne's body swinging up and up and back over the top of the line and then down to land across all four clothesline cables and then bounce onto the ground.
King was there in an instant. I thought, Lord, the dog will kill him.
But the dog went past him and attacked the bicycle. It was bicycles he hated and he tore both tires off while Wayne sat up and pointed at his throat, which had a red line across it, and then fell over to the side sucking air and making a sound like a broken vacuum cleaner.
A perfect backward somersault off a bicycle.
Girls.
When we were eleven and even twelve they were just like us.
Sort of.
That is, we could be friends and do projects together in school and some boys could even talk to them.
Not me. I never could. And neither could Orvis. Alan seemed to have worked out a way to pretend they weren't even there and Wayne, who had had that experience with the power supply for the picture tube on the back of the television set,swore that it didn't bother him at all to speak to girls.
And then we became thirteen.
Everything changed.
Well, not everything. I still couldn't talk to them, lived in mortal terror of them, and Orvis was the same way. But we talked about them all the time, how they looked, how they smiled, how they sounded, how they must think, about life, about us, how Elaine was really cute but Eileen had prettier hair and Eileen seemed one day to actually, actually look at me, right at me. But we couldn't speak to them.
Except that now it became very important that we be able to speak to them. Before, it didn't seem to matter, and now it was somehow the only thing that did matter. I even approached Wayne one day and asked him what he thought about me coming over and touching the back of his television set but he pointed out that (a) it was just luck that it hadn't killed him and (b) it had had some bad side effects for a couple of weeks involving bed-wetting and strange dreams about a robot made of electricity and chewing gum that I probably didn't want to deal with.
Still, I had this problem because Eileen actually had looked at me one day on the way out of school, or so I thought, and on top of it she had smiled—I was pretty sure at me as well—and I thought that maybe I was In Love and that it was For Real and when I asked Orvis about it he agreed that I might be In Love for Real and suggested that I take Eileen to a movie.
Which nearly stopped my heart cold. I couldn't talk to her—how could I ask her to go to a movie? Finally it was Orvis who thought of the way. I would ask Wayne to ask Shirley Johnson to ask Claudia Erskine, who was a close friend of Eileen's, if Eileen might like to go to the movies with me the following Saturday afternoon.
This tortuous procedure was actually followed and by the time I was told that indeed Eileen would like to see a movie the next Saturday, I was a nervous wreck and honestly hoped she wouldn't go.
We met in front of the theater, as things were done then at our age—I couldn't even imagine going to her home and ringing the bell to pick her up and having her parents answer the door. If I couldn't really speak to girls, what in god's name would I do with a set of parents of the girl I was going to take to a movie?
So we met at the theater at one-thirty. I wore what I thought were my best clothes, a pullover sweater over a turtleneck, with my feeble attempt at a flattop, Butch-Waxed so much that dropping an anvil on my head wouldn't have flattened it. I think now I must have looked something like a really uncomfortable, sweaty, walking, greasy-topped bottle brush. (Have I mentioned that with my sweater and turtleneck I had gone solely for fashion and had ignored the fact that it was high summer? Or that the theater was most decidedly not air-conditioned?)
But Eileen was a nice person and pretended not to notice the sweat filling my shoes so they sloshed when we walked or how I dropped my handful of money all over the ground. I had brought all of my seven dollars in savings because I really didn't know how much it would cost, what with tickets and treats, and maybe she was a big eater.
She also pretended not to notice when I asked her if she wanted popcorn.
So I asked her again. Louder.
And then again. Louder.
All because I was blushing so hard my ears were ringing and I wasn't sure if I was really making a sound and so when I screamed it out the third time and she jumped back, it more or less set the tone for the whole date.
We went into the theater all right. And we sat next to each other. And she was kind enough to overlook the fact that I smelled like a dead buffalo and that other than asking her three times if she wanted popcorn I didn't say a word to her. Not a word.
I couldn't.
The movie was called The Thing, about a creature from another planet who crashes to earth in the Arctic and develops a need/thirst/obsession for human and sled-dog blood and isn't killed until they figure out that he's really a kind of walking, roaring, grunting plant. So they rig up some wire to “cook him like a stewed carrot.” All of this I learned the second time around, when I went to the movie with Wayne, because sitting next to Eileen, pouring sweat, giving her end
less boxes of Dots and candy corn and popcorn (almost none of which she wanted but accepted nicely and set on the seat next to her), I didn't remember a single thing about the movie. Not a word, not a scene.
All I could do was sit and think, I'm this close to a girl, right next to a girl, my arm almost touching her arm, a girl, right there, right there….
It was a nightmare. The movie seemed to last two, three weeks; I know I aged at least ten years. When at last it was over and she headed home (I should have walked her there but I didn't dare), all I could think of was the relief. I had done it. I had gone on a date. Though we would never do it again—I would never ask her and I'm certain if I had she would not have gone—I had done it. And I had spoken to her.
“WOULD YOU LIKE SOME POPCORN?”
A scream, to be sure, but I had taken a girl to a movie and sat next to her the whole time and I think my arm may have touched her arm somewhere along the way, or at least it felt that way through the sweater and turtleneck and I had finally done it. An extra benefit was that I had also learned just why those things are called sweaters.
But the reason I bring up this whole disaster of my first date, and my fear of girls, is to show that as terrified and shy as I was, as horrified of being with a girl, talking to a girl, as awful as I turned out to be…
Orvis was worse.
He was clinically shy, could hardly even look at girls, and wanted desperately to be able to do so.
So he evolved a method for getting attention from girls: showing off.
Suddenly it wasn't good enough just to make the bikes jump a ramp or do a stunt; he had to do it in front of girls. And it wasn't enough just to do a stunt in front of girls; he had to do it higher and farther and harder.
And in a more dangerous way.
Here is where Orvis came into his own. Somehow he mixed the ability to do stunts of truly amazing risk with the absolute fearlessness he had demonstrated when he ran into the wall of the gas station where Archie worked. He didn't seem to care if he was injured. As long as a girl was watching he would try anything.
We would jump over two barrels, so he would try to clear three; we would try to get eight feet in the air, he would try for ten. We would try landing with no feet on the pedals, he would land with no hands on the handlebars or feet on the pedals.
He crashed and bashed and flopped and flipped and cartwheeled and somersaulted until even when he was standing still he seemed to be a blur and all we had to do was say, “Look, there's Margaret,” or “Elaine” or “Judy,” and he was tearing off on his bike, bouncing off a curb and flying through the air.
Finally, this led Orvis to the Circle of Death.
County fairs now are fun and there are wild rides to go on and bad candy and antique hot dogs and clip joints to take your money for throwing a ball or pitching a coin onto a plate or tossing a ring over an impossible peg. All of that was the same back then, except there were other things that aren't allowed anymore:
Sideshows with strange people and animals and closed tents where there were large glass jars full of alcohol and some really ugly body parts. Wild things. Snakes with two heads or human kidneys in the shape of Rhode Island. There was usually a strip show, called the “Hootchy Cootchy Dancers,” where women well past forty would dance to raspy music and take their clothes off. We never got into those tents because we were too young and even if you went around to the back and tried to peek under the canvas they had a second flap hanging down inside that made it impossible to see anything, and even if you somehow got past the second flap all you saw was the back of the stage. Or so I'm told.
And there would be the “Wild Man from Borneo!” show that had a half-naked man in a pit, wearing rags, who would pretend to be the missing link trapped in the jungles and bite the heads off live chickens.
Ah, those were the good old days, before there was all this control. If it sounds a bit weird, the history of fairs in medieval times is even more bizarre; for a couple of centuries there was a contest, a wildly popular sporting event that involved hanging a live cat from a post and killing it by beating it to death with your face. It was taken very seriously and men who were good at it became grand heroes. Talk about extreme sports— you have to wonder what tailgate parties would have been like. This makes even golf look sane.
But back to our fairs. Along with the rides and body parts in alcohol and strippers and other good times there was the Circle of Death.
Or Pit of Death.
Or bear pit.
It was a small boxing ring set up in the center of the midway. A man with a trained bear would stand in the middle of the ring on the canvas and keep the bear on a leash—the bear was also wearing a muzzle—and people could pay a quarter to get into the ring and test their strength by “wrestling” the bear. A big sign read:
STAY IN THE RING WITH BRUNO FOR ONE MINUTE AND WIN TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS!
Of course it sounds silly. Bears are immensely strong. No human on earth could wrestle one and win. It just couldn't be done.
And yet …
The bear pit was as popular as beating a cat to death with your face was in the Dark Ages. (And probably for similar psychological reasons.) Young men from the farms were always looking for ways to prove their strength and they flocked to the Circle of Death and we flocked there to watch them pay their quarters and get thrown out of the ring.
And what's more, Bruno seemed to like it. He would stand in the middle of the ring on his back legs, weaving slightly, his trainer next to him, watching as the next victim climbed in. The bear actually knew how to wrestle. He probably weighed four hundred pounds and could easily have flattened an opponent with a swing of his paw. But he didn't hit. Instead he would get into the stance, one paw on his opponent's shoulder, the other on his arm, and they would lean into each other and the handler would yell, “Go!” and Bruno would simply throw the other man out of the ring.
Then he would get a bottle of Coca-Cola, which his trainer would open and hold up to his mouth. Bruno would drain it and emit a huge belch before getting ready for the next farm boy.
Of course we were too cool to try wrestling the bear. Or too chicken. It amounts to the same thing. We would watch and cheer the bear and tease the farm workers—although not excessively, considering how strong they looked—but we didn't really think of climbing into the Circle of Death.
One day we were watching the bear wrestle, and laughing, and when I happened to glance at Orvis I saw a strange look come into his eye. It was very similar to the look Carl had after viewing the newsreel about breaking the speed record on skis.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded. “I'm fine, why?”
“You looked at the bear kind of funny….”
“Not the bear so much as the sign. Did you see that sign?”
“What about it?” “It doesn't say anything about actually beating the bear at wrestling. It just says you have to stay in the ring with him for one minute.”
“Orvis …”
“I think if you just hung on to the bear—”
“Orvis, that's a bear. A real bear. One minute is a long time. There's farm boys here who could pinch your head like a pimple and they can't stay in there with Bruno.”
“Loan me a quarter. I'll pay you back when I get the twenty-five dollars.”
All right, I know what you're thinking; that twenty-five cents was a lot of money to waste, that Orvis wouldn't make a good bicep on those farm boys, let alone be a problem for a bear. But, remember, I still had that scientific curiosity and I was starting to wonder just what would happen if Orvis took a try at the bear.
So I gave him a quarter.
And he stepped into the ring and took the stance with the bear.
Orvis came out of the ring a little faster than he went in—of course the bear tossed him out— but he got up and dusted his pants off. I said a permanent goodbye to my quarter and had started to walk away when I heard soft giggling and looked up to see Elaine, Eileen and
Margaret watching Orvis and laughing. I thought, Oh no, and turned to pull him away. Too late. Orvis had seen the girls.
“Give me another quarter.”
“Orvis …”
“Now.”
“I don't think it's a good idea.”
“Now!”
It was as if I weren't there. It was just Orvis and the girls.
And, oh yeah, the bear. Let's not forget the bear.
I talked to the trainer later while we were bandaging Orvis. The trainer was a nice guy, and so was the bear, who really did love to wrestle. “But he has his pride, too,” the trainer told me. “Bruno has his pride.” The thing is, the bear had trained himself after countless contests to match the strength of his opponent; he would kindly feel the other person out, then just apply enough extra strength to win the match.
But he hated it if they came back a second time. “It's like they don't believe him,” the trainer said. “Like he was being nice and they didn't be-lieve it, so when they come back he makes it a little worse for them.”
That would begin to describe what happened to Orvis: The bear made it worse for him.
I still do not believe you can do those things to a human body without breaking it.
Orvis took the stance, the bear took the stance, the handler pocketed his quarter and looked at Orvis and asked, “Are you ready?”
Orvis nodded, the trainer said, “Go!” and the fight was on.
Well, it wasn't a fight so much as Orvis just trying to stay alive. Initially the bear decided to make it just a little worse, and with one paw on Orvis's shoulder he used the other paw at Orvis's stomach to bend him in the middle, pound his butt down to the ground, fold him over like he was folding a piece of paper and slam Orvis's face down between his own knees on the canvas so hard I saw snot fly out of Orvis's nose. Whereupon the bear held him flat that way and calmly used his other paw to scoot Orvis out of the ring under the bottom rope. Kind of like a big hockey puck with legs.