Wrestling Sturbridge

by Rich Wallace

  “No. It’s not. Not this season,” Hatcher says. “It’s Susan.” He lets the kid go. There’s a fat kid standing there looking dumb and scared in a purple T-shirt, and Hatcher grabs one of his nipples and starts twisting. The kid jerks back, but Hatcher holds tight and laughs. When he lets go, the kid looks around at the other freshmen, mostly just embarrassed. “You’ll be Claudia,” Hatcher says.

  Hatcher heads back for the gym and I start to follow. I turn to Tommy Austin, who I know from church and because our mothers are friends. He gives me a raised-eyebrows look because he’s a tough enough kid and senses that this is part of the game.

  “Hatcher was Eleanor for the first month of the season when we were freshmen,” I tell him. The fat kid is holding his nipple, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to make it. “I was Princess.”

  The kid smiles a little.

  We get back to the gym and the coach splits me and Al up so we can work with younger guys. We’re working on takedowns, and I’ve got fat Claudia in my group. He’s soft, like he’s never wrestled before, so it’s like wrestling one of those blow-up punching bags with a Bozo face or something. Then we do leg lifts and very slow push-ups and other painful exercises for about a half hour, and hit the showers. A lot of guys look just about dead.

  I reach into my locker and wipe my face on a T-shirt, sitting there in a jockstrap and still breathing extra. Al is six feet away, telling some of the new guys that you have to hate your opponent, you have to crush him or he’ll do the same to you. You never let up, he says, and he’s right, but he’s looking hard at me and I don’t feel like looking back. I take a bottle of shampoo from the shelf in my locker and strip off the jock, then pick up my towel and head for the shower.

  There’s a wall of steam coming from the shower area, and about twenty-seven guys are crammed in there under the ten showerheads. Hatcher’s facing the shower in the corner, so his butt is toward me. Hatcher’s almost square, he’s so muscular, and the almost crewcut exaggerates his Marine look. Al isn’t so much muscular as angular, with just the right balance and flexibility.

  Hatcher’s got his eyes closed, so I reach over and turn off the hot water and turn up the cold. He jumps and laughs and tells me I suck, then he grabs a freshman and holds him under the cold water. I duck under another shower and get my hair wet. Hatcher gets bored with the freshman, takes a piss on the wall, and walks out into the locker room.

  I get back to my locker and Coach is sitting there on the bench, talking to Al. He turns to me and points, but keeps talking to Al. “This is the reason nobody’ll beat you this year,” he says. “Benny is the best workout partner you could get.”

  I give him a tight smile, and he swings his legs over the bench so they’re on my side. He’s about thirty-five and paunchy. He wrestled down at East Stroudsburg State and works out with the upper-weight guys now. He leans in like he’s about to confide something to me, taking his lower lip between his teeth and squinting some.

  “You’ll get your matches,” he says. “Al and Hatch will need some work against heavier guys, so they’ll shift up a weight sometimes and you’ll handle 135.”

  “Let him wrestle JV,” says Al, who’s been listening the whole time, drying his frizzy hair with a towel. “Seniors on other teams do it all the time.”

  “No way,” he says. “No seniors go JV in this school. You know that.”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” I say. I was 16–0 JV last winter and won a holiday tournament, but I’m not looking for consolation this year. I look at Al, then at the coach, then I turn my head to my locker. They’re both full of shit if they think I’m going to accept being a backup. I want to be state champion just as much as Al does.

  There’s a party tonight, mostly because of the end of football season, but any excuse for a party will do around here. I think I’m up for it. We all get dried and dressed and pile into Al’s car—me and Hatcher and Digit and Al. I keep telling myself that I’ve won forty-two high school matches and lost only five (even though it’s mostly been JV), and you never know who might get hurt. The coach has me listed second on the depth chart at 135 and 140, and if I really dry out, I might still have a shot at Digit down at 130. Something has to give. I’m not going to watch these guys have all the fun.

  Places I want to go:

  Iceland, because it’s isolated

  New Orleans during Mardi Gras

  Penn State on a wrestling scholarship

  Kim’s house

  Places I don’t:

  Staten Island, because it’s in New York

  Australia, because it’s so far from everything

  prison

  the Middle East

  CHAPTER 4

  Al is one of the school’s biggest drinkers, but he’s sitting at the kitchen table tonight with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi in front of him. The other guys at the table are mostly football players, and they’re sucking down beers like we would do if it wasn’t wrestling season.

  Parties like this one are tense if you’re not drinking. I can’t talk to girls much unless I get my tongue loosened first. Kim is here, the one from geometry, but she’s in a corner with some other girls, laughing and drinking wine coolers.

  We got here twenty minutes ago, and Al has said something about his not drinking at least four times. Then he confides in whoever’s closest that there’s a pint of vodka mixed in with the Pepsi, and we’re all just so stunned we can hardly stand it.

  Digit’s got a new pair of pants on and he’s wearing shoes, which is unusual for him (leather shoes, I mean, like for church or something—he almost always wears sneakers). He’s decided to be mature all of a sudden; got his hair cut short and acts polite. He’s sitting next to me on a kitchen counter, chewing gum.

  There’s not a whole lot of room in this house (this is where one of the cheerleaders lives; her parents are out of town at a funeral), and anybody who’s cool, borderline cool, or knows somebody that’s cool is here. That’s just about every senior and junior and some sophomores. A couple of extremely hot-looking freshman girls are along. That’s about the whole guestlist.

  If the party follows the usual script, then a handful of last year’s seniors will show up later on, very drunk and still wearing their lettermen’s jackets, and there’ll be one or two arguments and a couple of punches. I could be involved, but usually I’m not.

  Kim comes into the kitchen, squeezing through the crowd, and I look sideways at Digit. He’s sitting with his hands on his knees, looking around. Since he got his hair cut, it’s lighter, almost red, and his ears stick out. He doesn’t say much, but he’s deep. Every once in a while he shows evidence of that. Not lately, though.

  Kim has on a dark sweater and black jeans. She’s got a healthy tone to her skin, which looks good with dark hair. Five three; weighs about a hundred; no excess. She’s looking for another wine cooler, which could be in my favor. She hasn’t seen me yet. She’s got a thin silver chain around her neck, which I like, and she shows an athleticism that could be useful. She runs cross-country and track, which is good for the legs.

  Digit nudges me and stares at Al over at the table. I can only catch part of what Al is saying because the music’s sort of loud, but he’s talking to Richie Foster, who’s a junior and looks like he’ll be our man at 189, and pointing to the Pepsi bottle. Richie heads into the living room and Al turns to right tackle Ernie Corso and tells him again that the Pepsi isn’t just Pepsi. Everybody laughs real hard.

  “Hi, Ben.” Kim’s standing in front of me, very friendly looking. “Hi, Digit,” she says, too.

  She hands me a bottle and asks me to open it, and that seems like an excuse to come over, but I’m not complaining. It doesn’t open as easy as it ought to, but I get the cap off.

  “How’s it going?” she says.

  “Great,” I answer. I nod my head to reinforce what I said.

  “You like this song?” she says, pointing to the CD player.

  I hadn’t really thought about it. Bu
t I figure she must like it, since she asked. “Yeah,” I say. “I like it.”

  “I listen to these guys a lot,” she says. “They get me psyched before I run.” She looks out into the living room, where a few people are dancing. She looks back at me and just rotates her shoulders slightly. “I have most of their tapes.”

  I can think of absolutely nothing to say, so I just nod with my mouth hanging open. She looks back into the living room, then takes the bottle from me. “Well … thanks,” she says with a smile. She punches Digit playfully in the knee, then heads back for the corner where her friends are.

  I look at my hand, which has a little ring of cuts on it in the shape of the wine cooler cap.

  Digit smirks and grins at me. “Smooth” is all he says. Like I said, he’s deep. He can say an awful lot in a word or two, like “Nice going, jerk, she’s standing there looking great and giving you an obvious opening with that lame ‘Open this bottle, please, you big strong man’ thing, and you just nod your head like a goof and let her get away.” He said all that and more with just a look and a single word from the fifties: smooth. I often wish I could be that eloquent.

  We drink sometimes, me and Digit, but not to lose ourselves. It’s great in the early fall on a really crisp evening to get a bottle or some beers and sit in the woods, up past my house or in the cemetery. When the four of us get drunk together, we might act like jerks, but if Hatcher isn’t around—when it’s just me and Al and Digit—we can get down to some serious stuff.

  One night, maybe two weeks ago, we sat under the stars till really late, talking about getting out of here next summer, maybe going out West. Al said he’d like to work in the rodeo. He’s never been on a horse, I don’t think. But you say things like that when you’re really relaxed, when you know you can get away with it. If Hatcher had heard that, he’d never let Al forget it; he’d be calling him Tex or something. But I get it, and so does Digit, even if it’s not really about the rodeo or working on a fishing boat or going to Wyoming. It’s about getting out. Breaking the pattern.

  You can’t talk about things like that at a kitchen table with everybody in school here, trying to be cool.

  I hop off the counter and squeeze through the crowd to the refrigerator. I get a can of 7-Up for me and one for Digit (he doesn’t really want one, but I have this thing about balance, and if he drinks one too it will be even). I come back over to the counter and sit down again. That took about two minutes, maybe less.

  “Seen Hatcher?” I ask.

  Digit says he thinks Hatcher’s upstairs already with Marcie, a cheerleader who just broke up with Andy Larson, the quarterback. Hatcher and Andy are pretty good friends, though, so that shouldn’t cause much trouble. Plus Hatcher could kick the shit out of Andy if it came to that.

  I can see through the doorway into the living room, where Kim is. And I notice that Marcie is there, too. “Marcie’s out in the living room,” I say to Digit. He says, “Oh.” Andy’s at the table with Al. Al’s already getting kind of loud. Me or Digit’ll have to drive his car home, which is something we do a lot.

  About an hour later I finally get around to talking to Kim out on the back porch. I saw her slip out there, probably for some air because a lot of people are smoking in here, so I get down from the counter and tell Digit I’ll be right back.

  “How’s it going?” I ask. I think I asked her that before, but it’s been an hour and things might have changed.

  “Great,” she says, which is pretty much how it was last time. “Want a sip of this?” she asks, holding up a bottle.

  “Nah,” I say. “We don’t drink in season.”

  “Oh,” she says and smiles. She chugs down the rest of the bottle (maybe two ounces) and shows me the label. It’s non-alcoholic cranberry sparkler. There’s a tiny pink drop of it on her lip. She sets the bottle on the railing and flicks back her hair, which is medium long and sometimes gets in her eyes. There’s no light on the porch, but there’s quite a bit of light from the kitchen, so we’re not standing in the dark. It’s stopped raining.

  “How’s wrestling going?” she asks.

  “Well, this was the first day,” I say. For once I don’t want to talk about wrestling. “So it’s hard to say. Things look good. How’s things with you? You been running?”

  “Five a day,” she says. “I’m going easy right now, getting my head back together. I’ll step up my mileage soon.”

  I don’t know a whole lot about cross-country. I know she won the league meet but bombed in the states.

  “You ready for that test?” she asks.

  “Not yet.” I definitely don’t want to talk about geometry. What do I want to talk about? Al saves me from worrying about that for long.

  He comes out and puts his arms around Kim from behind. He barely knows her, but I guess he figures that anything of mine is also his by association. She turns and gives him a kind of puzzled look, but she’s not annoyed or anything. “Hi, Al,” she says.

  He keeps an arm around her shoulder and says to her that I’m the key man in his life right now. “You gotta push me,” he says to me. “If I’m gonna win the states, I gotta work my ass off every day.”

  Kim slowly twists out of his grasp, and Al puts his hands on my shoulders. He’s drunk, and there’s this sudden surge coming over him. “Nobody’s gonna touch me this season,” he says with his teeth clenched, smiling at me. “You gotta make me work, Benny, you gotta make me work.”

  Then he’s got a hand on my thigh and he’s taking me down, right there in the muddy backyard. And before I know it I’m on my back, and he’s got me cradled and I can’t do anything about it.

  “Guys, stop,” Kim says. “Come on.” But Al’s got me pinned down and there’s mud all over my back. He backs off and I get up on my knees, then he’s on me again, shouting “Two, two.” (That’s how many points you get for a takedown.)

  “Al, cut the shit,” I say, with my cheek pressed into the dirt and my arm twisted behind my back. “That’s my bad shoulder, asshole.”

  He gets up and pulls me to my feet and I shove him away.

  “You gotta work my butt off, Benny,” he says. “You gotta get me that championship.”

  He goes back into the house. There’s about six guys on the porch watching. Kim is shaking her head. “What’s wrong with him?” she says when I come over.

  “He’s … got problems, I guess.” I wipe the back of my head with my hand, then wipe the mud from my hand onto my jacket. “I gotta go home and change.”

  “Are you going to come back?” I think I hear some hope in her voice.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  But I go home and take a shower and change and do another hundred sit-ups, and since it’s still pretty early, my father says I can use the car if I’m not drinking. “Get some gas while you’re at it,” he says from his chair, handing me a ten. So I pull out of the driveway and debate whether to go back to the party or just drive around by myself. There’s about a quarter tank of gas in the wagon, so I can get away with thirty or forty miles, I figure.

  It’s downhill from my house to the party, which is on the other end of town. You can walk from one side of Sturbridge to the other in ten minutes, and drive it in two. There’s two traffic lights, one on either end of Main Street: up where it crosses the Pocono River and down at our end, up Monroe Street from the plant. We live two blocks up the other side of Monroe, which puts us just about out of town.

  Sturbridge is very compact—tightly spaced houses with narrow driveways, small yards with thick trees overhead—then the land spreads out quickly when the houses end. There’s a dairy farm about two hundred yards up the road from our house, and the road turns to dirt another quarter mile along. When I hunt, I just go out the back door, cross my neighbor’s yard, and walk a couple hundred yards to the woods.

  I pull up to the party, and Kim and Digit and surprisingly Marcie are sitting on the front steps, waiting for me, I think. They come over and get in, and Marcie’s weari
ng Digit’s Red Barons cap. They get in the back and Kim gets in next to me.

  “Get the mud out of your hair?” Digit says.

  I smirk back at him and show him that my hair’s still wet from the shower, and I say “What a jerk,” meaning Al, but I say it in a way that doesn’t have any bitterness, I think.

  “He was wasted,” Digit says. “When he came back in, he stood on the kitchen table and told everybody he just won the Olympic gold medal. He started singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

  I put the radio on; we only have AM in this car and the only station that comes in clear is country-western. I’m surprised that Digit’s sitting so close to Marcie, who only cheers during football season because she plays forward on the basketball team. She’s good-looking and athletic, and she’s on that plane a little above me and Digit, in the most popular fringe. Hatcher and Al have started crossing into that fringe at times, but me and Digit have always been a notch below.

  Kim’s not sitting close to me at all, which is okay since I haven’t earned it yet. “I miss anything?” I ask.

  “Darla broke up with Eddie,” Kim says with not much enthusiasm. “Ernie won a chugging contest.” She looks at me and kind of rolls her eyes. “I can only take so much of that nonsense.”

  We’ve already covered the whole length of Main Street, and I stop at the light where it dead-ends into Route 6 above the plant. The usual routine here is to make a left and loop back around the block, heading up Main Street in the opposite direction. You follow the same general pattern when you reach the other end of Main, and in this fashion you can be sure to keep up with all the major developments outside the Turkey Hill Market and the Rite Aid drugstore, which are the only places in town open past dinnertime. (The McDonald’s, Kmart, and a few other places are out on 6, about a half mile away from the business district. Those establishments are not so essential that they need to be included in every loop; every fifth or sixth time is sufficient.) Rite Aid closes at ten, Turkey Hill at one.