Push (Fight Card)

by Jack Tunney

  I knew something ought to be done, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what. What was I going to do? Go to Lou and say, geez, Lou, good seeing you out there, can we talk about these guys Thumper is beating getting thrown into cars and never heard from again? He’d just laugh at me. Or talk to me some more about my push. Because I was pretty sure I’d sold my going for it pretty well, and he thought I was falling in line.

  What else? Talk to other wrestlers? I’d talked to Tino. He was a pretty smart guy, but when they told him what they told him about Bart Valerian, he said, “Why not?” Maybe because he wasn’t the suspicious type, maybe because being willing to get pushed around by the promoter didn’t end when you got past being a jobber.

  I thought about going to the cops. Walk right in to the station, say, hey, I’m a wrestler and one of the other guys is really hurting, maybe even killing his opponents in the ring, and the guy who runs things seems fine with it. If I had some proof, I could probably get them to believe it. But all I had was, one guy probably got thrown into a car and another one for sure did, and I haven’t seen either since. If you were the police, would you do anything about it?

  Just to cover my bases, over the next couple of days I tried getting hold of Lenny Lemaire. I tracked down his phone number, but when I called it, all I got was an answering machine. I left a couple of messages…Hey, Lenny, you okay? But I didn’t hear anything back.

  The Tuesday after I got back from Springfield, Charlie and I had our next workout. I’d gotten back to where I was close to nailing the standing dropkick. I figured out the one I’d managed a couple workouts back was a fluke, and that I’d been using it to let myself get discouraged. Once I realized that, I started making progress again.

  We were in the kitchen with some lemonade. I said, “Something I need to talk about.”

  “Figured.”

  “It’s about Thumper. You know, the guy…”

  “I know who Thumper is.”

  I launched into the whole Lenny Lemaire business. Didn’t take that long. It wasn’t complicated.

  When I was done, Uncle Charlie said, “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re gonna have to ask it.”

  I took a big gulp of lemonade, thought about the question, drained the lemonade. Put the glass on the counter. Refilled it. “The question is, what do I do?”

  He shrugged. “Best as I can tell, you keep your eyes and ears open.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You think I’m some kind of guru? Take an impossible situation and make it clear for you?”

  “I don’t think that, but I was kind of hoping it would turn out that way.”

  He smiled. He used his finger to make a face in the water collected on the outside of the cold lemonade pitcher. “I’m not any smarter than you are. Just older.”

  “Older is supposed to mean wiser.”

  “Turns out that’s BS.”

  “Well, hell.”

  “Only one I’ve ever known who is even close to a guru is Stephan.”

  “He still in Chicago?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “So, you don’t have anything else to say?”

  “Nope.”

  “What would make you have something else to say?”

  “A body.”

  “So, next time I should run after the guys and grab the body from them and cart it to the police station?”

  “I imagine the ring would be easier. And more effective. You drop a dead guy in the center of the ring, it pretty much blows up whatever Lou’s got going.”

  “So, you do think Lou’s got something going.”

  “Don’t try to analyze my every word. I told you what I think and that ought to be the end of the conversation.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Thanks, Uncle Charlie.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, and headed to the basement to play with his trains.

  I had another week off, and I stepped up the training again. More arms, more shoulders, more back, and I even did some leg work I didn’t really need.

  Charlie and I kept up the workouts too. We spent a lot of time on the standing dropkick, and I got to the point where I could manage it maybe two out of five tries. Some more practice, and I’d be there. It had kind of taken on a life of its own.

  I was up to running four or five miles a day, and it wasn’t just jogging-type running. One time, a dog came out of nowhere when I was going by a big field, and started snapping at my legs. He was a medium-size gray thing, probably part pit bull – what Sue would call an All-American dog. After putting up with him for a quarter mile or so, I just stopped, looked at him, growled real loud, and made a strongman pose. I figured this would either get him to run off whimpering or get him to come up and bite me hard. The first would make me feel tougher mentally and the other would toughen me up wherever he bit me.

  But that dog surprised me. When I played strongman he put his front paws down and kind of bowed to me. Then he came up and started licking the sweat off my legs.

  I stopped at a house nearby and asked about him. The lady there said he’d been running around the neighborhood for weeks.

  So, I looked at him and he looked at me and when I started running again, he ran with me. All the way home. Sue took one look and decided we had to keep him. She asked what we should name him. I thought about it and couldn’t come up with anything.

  Sue said maybe his name should be Stephan. I thought that was a little weird. I hadn’t talked about him for a year or two, and except for that guru business with Charlie I hadn’t thought of him for almost as long.

  But I looked at that dog and there was something about his face, and I said, “Stephan it is.”

  He ran with me the rest of the week. I took to talking to him. I asked him what he thought of the business with Thumper, but his thing was squirrels, not rabbits, so he didn’t say anything back.

  A week later Lou was on the phone. “I'm calling about your push,” he said. “I haven’t figured out all the angles yet, but I just wanted you to know it’s still coming.”

  “That’s good, Lou.”

  He gave this funny high laugh. “Did you see Thumper on TV the other day?”

  “Well, you know, they run it at different times in all the different…”

  “Best thing that’s happened to this federation in a long, long time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Speaking of Thumper, I haven’t seen Lenny Lemaire lately.”

  It was only a second before he said, “Didn’t you hear? His mother’s real sick and he’s gone back to Alabama to take care of her.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said. “He’s a hard worker. You got a number? I need to ask him about something.”

  “I don’t. Fact is, she lives way out in the country somewhere. I don’t know she’s got a phone.” Lou cleared his throat. “Now, we've got a card coming up in Easton...”

  “Isn’t that a house card?”

  “It is. But I got a couple of jobber matches on it. You'll do your regular job there, but by the next taping, I think I'll have a big surprise ready for you.”

  “That'll be great, Lou,” I said. “I like surprises.”

  ROUND 9

  House matches mostly had heel stars against face stars. Whoopee! I was doing good. A two-count against a star, a masked win, and a house card. Any more excitement, they’d have to give me oxygen.

  Charlie drove up with me, and Sue wanted to come too. “Your first house card!” she said. “Another milestone!” But she had to work on Saturday – some case about drilling for natural gas in rock causing an earthquake was how I understood it – and couldn’t get out of it.

  I called in a favor and got Charlie a seat right behind the announcers. Charlie knew Joe the Greek a little from the old days, and they were already talking about them by the time I stepped off for the dressing room.

  There were only two jobbers. I was scheduled to go against Monster Madigan, and Paul Tom
pkins was up against Tino Terranova. We kind of clustered together, Paul and me.

  Paul sometimes wore black tights and a mask with big white felt teeth and went on as The Shark. A couple of times we were a tag team together, The Sharks, and I had to Scotch tape some teeth on a mask. Those couple of times, Lou let us do a little better, actually pound our opponents for a little while, with me getting in some martial arts stuff, before one of us ended on our back, one, two, three.

  I managed to get the talk around to Thumper. He was on the card too, up against Illegal Alien, the jobber-to-the-stars. I hadn’t seen Thumper in the dressing room yet, and I didn’t want to.

  I said to Paul, “You know much about Thumper?”

  “Guy’s a mystery,” he said. “Nobody knows his real name. No one knows where he came from.”

  “Lou must know.”

  “Lou doesn’t know everything.”

  “Sometimes it seems he does. You ever see his eyes? Thumper’s?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Freakin’ weird. I’m glad they haven’t had me in against him. Guy freaks me out.”

  The Michigan Men ambled into the dressing room. They'd just been beaten by Pro Bono. They were laughing and talking about some girl in Cleveland.

  Then Thumper rambled in. He stopped by a locker across the room and dropped his bag and spotted me. He watched me like he recognized me, but couldn’t figure out from where. Thirty, forty seconds. Then I turned my back on him.

  Paul kind of giggled. “Like I said. Freakin’ weird.”

  I had my match. It went about as expected, though I did get off one pretty good kick. When I came back in to watch Paul lose to Tino on the monitor, Thumper was gone, and that was fine by me.

  Then Paul and Tino came in, and the three of us watched Thumper beat the crap out of Illegal Alien. Illegal was a big guy, probably a legit 300, but Thumper threw him around like he was a baby. Then there was a thump, and then the whole stretcher thing.

  I got up to go track down the latest victim, but just a couple steps outside the dressing room I spotted Illegal coming down the hall. Limping a little, but otherwise he looked fine. He brushed by me and went in the dressing room, stripped off his duds, and headed for the showers.

  ***

  Charlie and I stayed overnight. Charlie knew the local Ford guy, and had set up dinner with him. He said I could come, but hearing about Tauruses and Crown Vics was about the last thing I wanted to do. After Charlie left, I called Sue from the motel room. I knew she wouldn’t ask about Thumper, so I brought it up. “You remember Illegal Alien?”

  “Big fat guy?”

  “Yeah. He was there tonight.”

  “And you’re telling me this why?”

  “He was up against Thumper.”

  “Oh.” Three, four seconds. “Did he get dumped in a car?”

  For a second I couldn’t remember if I’d told her about Lenny. But I hadn’t. So she was talking about Bart.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, good.”

  “Matter of fact, other than a little limp, he was fine after.”

  “So the reign of terror is over.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You still have suspicions.”

  I almost told her about Lenny. That would’ve been real bright. I was keeping it from her because I didn’t want her to worry. Because keeping stuff from your girlfriend because you don’t want them to worry always works out. “I don’t know why I brought up Illegal.”

  “Man of mystery.”

  “That’s me. Look, I’m gonna go to sleep.”

  “Okay, g’night. Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  I told the guy at the desk to give us a wakeup call at six. That way I’d be home to Sue by one or so the next afternoon. Which was when she was supposed to get off work, and we would have most of the day together. Us and Stephan the dog.

  I was rubbing my right knee, which I'd bruised during my four and a half minutes in the ring with Monster Madigan, thinking about finding some ice to pack around it. Somebody knocked on the door. “It's Lou.”

  I didn’t bother to try to figure out how he’d found me. I slowly walked to the door and pulled it open. “It's late, Lou.”

  “I'll just be a minute.”

  He came in. He had on that damn raincoat. His eyes scanned the place. “Kind of a pit,” he said.

  “It's a jobber room.” Charlie had offered to pay for better, but I played hardhead and wouldn’t take him up on it.

  Lou nodded and sat on one of the rickety wooden chairs. “Once you get your push, you'll be able to afford better than this.”

  “And that'll be...”

  "Next week, at the taping in Grandville. We’re going to call you Samson Sanders. You'll come out in this strongman getup.”

  “Face or heel?”

  “I'm not sure yet. Probably face. I've got a couple of contract negotiations in the next few days, and I have to see what the balance is afterward.”

  I let a big stupid smile grow on my face.

  “There's just one thing,” Lou said.

  The stupid smile went back where it belonged. “What's that?”

  “Nothing much,” he said. “I just need you to job once more. It’ll be early in the card. The crowd won’t even remember you by the time Samson Sanders shows up.” He got up and walked out without saying another word.

  After a while Charlie came back. I didn’t tell him about Lou’s visit. Not because I wanted to hide it from him, but because I didn’t think he’d have anything useful to say about it. At least, that was what I told myself.

  Not long afterward, I got undressed and into bed. I had the radio on low, because sometimes it helps me fall asleep. A Tom Petty song came on, and made me remember Lenny Lemaire didn’t come from Alabama. He always used to sing Louisiana Rain.

  I was crying before I knew it. Worse than it had ever been. Big old hacking sobs, and tears and snot and everything. Next thing I knew, there were hallucinations. Giant loud booms and flashing lights and pieces of men and women and children. Then the face of a buddy I’d lost, whispering from the back of a Crown Vic, “You could’ve stopped it, you could’ve stopped it.”

  Then I came halfway back, and there was Charlie looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. I stumbled out of bed and jumped in the shower and turned the cold water on. I don’t know if the hallucinations or the crying ended first. When they both had, I turned the hot water on and shut off the cold, and stood there until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  After that, I slept like a baby.

  ROUND 10

  Sue and I spent Saturday afternoon at the outlet mall. Our sheets all had holes and we were running short of glasses and there was a big Petco outlet where Sue wanted to pick up all sorts of crap for Stephan the dog, who she thought was pissed at us because we’d had him spayed.

  Then we had to go over to Sue’s sister Karen’s and her husband Ollie’s place for dinner. We brought Stephan and he had a hell of a time letting Karen’s Chihuahua Teensy think she was beating him up.

  So it was Sunday morning before we got any quiet time together. Sue had the paper, and there was an article about some drunk driver in Easton running himself off an overpass and getting out without a scratch, and I said, “So, Easton ...”

  “Right,” Sue said. “Where you were Friday night. You told me a little about it on the phone.”

  “There’s more to tell.”

  “I figured there was.”

  “How come?”

  “Call it woman’s intuition. So what happened?”

  “I got to go back further first.”

  “I have time.”

  I told her everything. All about Lenny and what a jerk I thought I was for letting myself get convinced nothing had happened to Bart Valerian. And about Lou’s visit after she and I hung up the night before. And how Lou had said Lenny Lemaire was back home in Alabama, but he was really from Louisiana.

  “So you think he’s lying?” she said
.

  “Yeah. He just made something up. If Lenny told him, hey, my mom’s sick back in Louisiana, Lou wouldn’t get it wrong when he told me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t say, back in Louisiana. Maybe he just said his mom was sick.”

  “And maybe you’re right. Fact is, it doesn’t matter. Even if he’d said exactly where Lenny’s mom lives and given me the right RFD route and the exact number, it wouldn’t matter. I just knew he was lying.”

  “And now’s when you’re going to do something about it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t know what.”

  “Yeah. I’m no cop. I’m no detective. I wouldn’t know where to start trying to bring Lou down.”

  “Isn’t this exactly where you were before Lou’s midnight visit?”

  “In a way, it is, but in another, it isn’t.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “Before, it was, forget the kid. Kind of left it up to me. Now he’s lying to me, and that means he doesn’t respect me, and that’s where it has to end.”

  “You’ll miss out on your push.”

  “But I’ll have my self-respect.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Play along. Sooner or later I’ll get my chance to make this right. There were other people mixed up with this. Lenny and the Bart kid didn’t just end up in the backs of cars by themselves. There were a couple of other guys who carried them. Oh, and there’s one more thing.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I told her about the crying, and the hallucinations, and the shower. Then I said, “I’m gonna get help.”

  At which point Stephan the dog farted.

  “Oh my God,” Sue said. “That’s awful.”

  “I didn’t know dogs farted.”

  “Is this a sign the conversation’s over?”

  “It is,” I said. “It most definitely is.”

  “Except for one thing.”

  “Is it that thing that I shouldn’t hide stuff from you anymore?”

  “It is.”

  “I was trying to keep you from worrying.”