Kornwolf

by Tristan Egolf

  The Heap interjected. “It was closer to one.”

  “It was midnight exactly. Bob had just left. I remember.”

  “Bob worked late last night.”

  They argued the point. Owen allowed it to roll for a moment. Then he cut in: “So what did it look like?” he asked, not knowing where to begin.

  They shifted uncertainly.

  The Heap was the first to venture an effort: “He looked like Nixon.”

  “Right,” said Gibbons. “Maybe after a beating.”

  The bartender shook her head. “It weren’t Nixon. More like an ape in overalls.”

  “Dirty ones.”

  “Smelled like it …”

  “Ugly.”

  “—as Nixon.”

  “And talks like him.”

  Owen’s head was spinning. “Hold on now.” He stepped in, reeling. “Do you mean to tell me this thing wears clothing?”

  He could hear how ridiculous the question sounded.

  They stared at him.

  “And that it talks” he continued, trying to justify having spoken.

  (The Blue Ball Devil as Richard Nixon?)

  “That’s right,” said Gibbons. “He’s a regular guy. Though to my ear, it don’t speak English too good.”

  “He’s not a regular guy,” said the barkeep.

  “He ain’t a guy at all,” said The Heap. “He’s a devil. Just like you called him, mister.”

  Owen gestured to Gibbons’s newspaper. Sitting faceup on the counter, the motion detector photo begged his retort. “That doesn’t look like a person to me.”

  “Of course not.” Gibbons said, shaking his head. “That picture was taken on October first.”

  Owen stared for a moment. “And what does that mean?” he asked.

  Gibbons stared back. “All I can say is: check your calendar.”

  Suddenly, Owen felt disadvantaged, as though the ground were sliding beneath him. What did these people know that he didn’t? What did that sneer of Gibbons’s mean?

  Just then, a beverage delivery man stepped in. He was older, grizzled, stocky. The door swung shut behind him. The barkeep directed him back toward the take-out coolers. She picked up a clipboard and moved to join him.

  The Heap kept talking: “I heard The Devil’s a chimp they shaved and taught to speak.”

  Gibbons dismissed him. “The Devil’s no chimp.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Cuz.” He glowered. “I seen it.”

  Another argument started up. Owen listened in disbelief as they went back and forth on the creature’s appearance, then onto theories of nuclear accidents just down the river and Nature’s revenge …

  In spite of his prior insistence, The Heap was now sure that the Blue Ball Devil, the original, was dead: some local farmers had shot it. The freak that had come in the night before was a fake, he claimed: an imposter, a charlatan.

  Down the bar, at the end of the counter, the beverage delivery man overheard them. He looked up from tallying invoice figures to chime in, calmly: “It’s definitely dead.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  “What would you know?” Gibbons demanded. “You don’t even live in this area.”

  “True,” said the man, unfazed. “But I used to.”

  “So, then?” asked The Heap. “Have you seen it?”

  “No,” the man admitted. “But it ripped the handle off of my grandfather’s whiskey still, if that counts.” He laughed out loud.

  “I thought you said it was dead,” Owen followed up.

  “I said, the Blue Ball Devil’s dead. You folks are talking about something else.”

  “Like what?” asked Gibbons.

  The man shook his head with a grin: “The Mennonites call it the Corn Wolf.”

  “The what?” said Owen.

  The Heap added: “What is it?”

  Grinning still, the man came back. “Hey, you tell me. I don’t live here, remember?”

  At last, The Heap and Gibbons fell silent.

  But Owen continued to press the issue: “How do you know for certain it’s dead?”

  The man replied with a casual shrug. “Because,” he said, reaching into his pocket to pull out a Swisher Sweet cigarillo. He lit it, puffed and concluded: “His name was Jacob Speicher. He died in The Nam.”

  Jack was on the telephone with Jarret Yoder the moment Scarlet walked into the gym. Her appearance found him, The Coach, in ill humor. It had been a hell of a morning already.

  To start off, somebody—probably one of the heroin dealers from down the street—had blown two holes in a neighbor’s car hood, and planted a third in the gym’s back wall.

  Then the plumbing had gone out downstairs: a septic pump flooding a third of the level. It smelled like a field of outhouses, wafting up, halfway over the training floor …

  To add to which, a collection bureau had called on behalf of an ambulance depot, seeking in excess of two thousand dollars in tournament dues—a debt which Aldo Lowe had incurred, unbeknownst to Jack.

  And crowning the heap, his watch was missing—a silver Timex awarded him early that year by the Stepford Commissioner’s Office for “outstanding work with city youth.” Ironic, of course, that it wind up stolen. Which certainly seemed to be the case. Twice now, Jack had combed the building. And he wasn’t given to losing things … Nor was he overly prone to theft. Sure, missing wraps and gloves were common. Headgear came and went with the weather—and some of it borne away on the sly, perhaps. But nothing right out of his office. That was another game entirely—one that The Coach was relaying to Yoder, suspecting, between them, Franklin Pendle.

  Of course, there was no way of knowing for certain. Franklin had already left the building and probably, if, indeed, he had taken it, wouldn’t hold on to the watch for long. Besides which, it could have been somebody else. Scores of locals belonged to this gym. In theory, somebody could have slipped into and out of the office unnoticed that morning. Jack hated jumping to any conclusions … However, his own recollections were clear: other than Franklin, just Roddy, Holy War, Calvin, Rhya Deeds and her class—which consisted of two girls from Weight Watchers, one Cuban schoolboy, their junior starlet, Denise, the Brynmor kid and a Horaceburg drunk in recovery—had been in the building all morning. And Jack was pretty much certain on them. Whereas Franklin, while he hadn’t been caught in a while, had a mile-long record for petty theft. Moreover, he’d been in the office that morning, using the phone with The Coach’s permission—and would have stood right there, above the desk, looking down on the Timex where Jack had left it.

  Beyond that, he just had a feeling, did Jack—something he couldn’t deny much longer. He had known Franklin for half the boy’s lifetime. Twice, he had taken him into his home. Twice, they had gone to the semifinals. Twice, he had kicked him out of the gym for indiscipline. And twice, he had taken him back. He knew all the writing on Franklin’s wall. And right now, it didn’t look good. Not at all.

  Only a few months earlier, the young man’s uncle and guardian, a small-time pusher, had been shot holding up a convenience store. Franklin had been on the slide ever since. Former habits had quickly resurfaced: running with trouble, shirking on training and smoking—and now it seemed selling—grass.

  Just that week, he’d been picked up for dealing—along with a carload of homies, joyriding, windows down, smoking a blunt with the stereo blasting, straight through a four-way stop sign. (Reasonable what?) And the fools had been carrying seven ounces—which, worse, had been split into multiple bags. They were all being charged with intent to sell. It was everything Jack had been able to do to keep Franklin out of the juvenile hall. And this, it appeared, was how Franklin repaid him. The little bastard.

  Another one down.

  As much as it saddened him, Jack was compelled to relay his suspicions to Yoder by phone. Maybe they’d made a mistake, he submitted. Maybe the kid belonged in jail.

  “Don’t take it to heart,” he was told in a well-meant
, if futile attempt at consolation. “There’s only so much a person can do.”

  But that brought little solace to Jack. He’d never been able to throw in the towel without beating himself up.

  “We’ll handle it,” Yoder assured him. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  Yes, as a matter of fact, there was …

  He began to explain.

  Then Scarlet walked in.

  In a sense, it was better this way: forgoing the pleasantries, skipping the awkwardly overjoyed greeting, a whiff of the giant past, and proceeding, instead, directly to business.

  Of course, she looked great. She was still Talutah. A few years older perhaps—some touches of gray where the hair had once flowed down her back and shoulders in pure, obsidian black—some lines of age underscoring her eyes, though in fact, they were probably creases from grinning. That much hadn’t changed a bit: beaming down on him now from the doorway.

  She overheard most of his conversation. Which spared him having to paraphrase later. Once he had hung up the phone, she slumped in a chair to the right of the door and looked at him. “Well,” she sighed, as though most of her worst suspicions had been confirmed already (yet bidding, still, on a doomed appeal): “There’s still time to call this a false alarm.”

  He raised his hands in helpless apology.

  “I will forgive you.” Upping her bid, she ignored the gesture. “I’ll tell you what: cover my expenses and we’ll call it even?”

  Torn between less than witty comebacks, Jack was left shaking his head in silence.

  She frowned. “Well, how about we just call it even, then? I’ll even act like I wasn’t enjoying my first vacation in twenty-two months.”

  Finally, The Coach had heard enough. “How in the hell do you think I feel?”

  And at last, with an instantaneous dissipation of mirth, she accepted it. “Damn.” She leaned forward, holding her head in her hands. She looked up and sighed again, puffing her cheeks. She was no longer smiling.

  “Word is: you’ve got exactly a month.”

  He leaned back, expressionless. “That’s what I figured.”

  The rhythm of bag work lingered between them.

  Then she sat up. “Well, let’s have it, then.” Gone was the sarcasm. “What have you got?”

  Jack pulled a folder from a drawer in his desk. He handed it to her.

  She looked inside. An angled rut furrowed into her brow. “And you think this will work?”

  “It better.” He nodded.

  “And where does one … buy …” She trailed off.

  Jack took the folder and closed it, tucking it back in his drawer. “From a farrier,” he answered.

  She blinked. “A what?”

  He waved her off. “Don’t worry about it.”

  A pained expression came over her face. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. Then she sat up, remembering something. “And who’s the reporter?” she asked, as though broaching a whole different subject: the insult to injury.

  Heaving a short, delirious sigh of his own, he peered through the glass behind her.

  She sat up and followed his gaze out the window to center floor. There were six of them, jumping rope.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “Which one do you think?”

  She looked closer. Two Caucasians. And one of them sweating profusely, suffering, starched …

  “Whoa.” She drew back. “He looks like he’s dying.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jack, with the only grin that would crease his expression all day. “He’ll make it.”

  But that much remained on the table. The Coach had seen too many white boys who looked just like him: the washed-out, flabby, repentant lush on an early to midlife panic attack. Most of them lasted no more than a week.

  “So what do you know about him?” Scarlet asked.

  Shrugging, Jack relayed his findings:

  … Owen Kelly Brynmor. Age: thirty. Born and raised in Stepford, Py. Received his bachelor’s in journalism from PSU in 19–. Graduated sixth in a class of four hundred. Subsequently stationed in New York City, freelance reporting for seven years. Thereafter, headed south for a string of primarily rural and small-town assignments. Recent positions included police reporting for a daily in Roswell, New Mexico. Followed by film reviewing in Little Rock. Then on to crime reporting for the Gorbach Daily in western Louisiana.

  His record was clean, for all practical purposes. One count of discharging illegal fireworks. A couple of unpaid traffic fines. A suspended driver’s license in West Virginia. Possession of cannabis, two grams.

  “He’s harmless enough,” Jack declared. “He just can’t hold a job for long.”

  They watched him heave and wheeze through the glass.

  “And he just walked in here?” she asked, very matter-of-factly, almost asserting the question.

  Jack nodded yes: “Strange as it sounds.”

  Scarlet shook her head, incredulous.

  Out on the floor, Owen could feel them watching. It caught him completely off guard. Until then, aside from their first encounter, The Coach had ignored his side of the planet. Not once had he met Owen’s gaze directly. Not once had he deigned to return his greetings. In fact, his only acknowledgment of Owen’s existence had come indirectly, and that—“Go easy, we’ve all got to start somewhere”—in hushing his juniors from poking fun. Owen’s footwork had made them laugh. The Coach had forced them to quiet down. Which hadn’t exactly amounted to contact, but Owen had, at least, felt visible.

  He still didn’t know what to make of Jack’s attitude …

  Roddy had warned him about it beforehand, down in the locker room, just before noon.

  “Coach gets lost in his world sometimes. You know what I’m sayin’?”—in trying to explain: “He gets distracted. It’s nothing personal. Just don’t bum-rush him.”

  No worries there.

  Whatever the state of his graces—financial, domestic, the plumbing situation downstairs—The Coach was someone you wouldn’t cross paths with. On size alone he commanded respect: at 6’5”, 240-plus and maintained, he was bearlike in stature—with steely arms, enormous legs and a powerful frame. And his tempered, even disposition imbued him with rare, uncommon authority. The fact that his juniors refrained from the use of profanity here in the gym spoke volumes. Eliciting such obedience testified to The Coach’s strength of character.

  So did his taste in women. Yowza—assuming the matron saint was his. She was striking. She looked like a Native American Goddess.

  What were they doing here, both of them? And why were they staring at him? Lordy. What? …

  Locking his gaze to a photo of Lupe Pintor hanging above the mirror, Owen grew painfully conscious of the jump rope’s every pass, just over his head. The floor beneath him was streaked with sweat. It was dripping, rolling, pouring out of him—steadily, two and three drops at a time.

  Surrounding him, two fantastically obese women, a quiet Hispanic kid, one tough-looking dark-haired girl whose confidence, movement and strength betrayed her experience and one old man in a Kansas shirt paid vigilant heed to Rhya Deeds—Rhya, best known for shattering one-time media darling Katherine Collier’s well-protected title reign in a thrilling, nationally televised upset. Owen remembered that fight as a smoker. Of course, the idea that he might ever train under Rhya would never have occurred to him then. Yet, here and now, as the gym’s assistant instructor, she faced him, barking orders.

  Behind her, Roddy was working the bags, to Owen’s marvel and incomprehension. When Roddy tore into that hundred-pound trainer, the building roared like a firing range. You could hear his punches from down the block. It was hard to imagine anyone taking them. For Owen, less than a round of the same activity left his body spent. Just landing on target at full extension felt like driving his arms through quicksand; on impact, he carried no wallop at all. His right cross wouldn’t have staggered a girl scout. His cardiovascular state was worse. And his bowels were churning.
He couldn’t keep up …

  But he had to—even when every muscle was still on the cross from the session before. Even when most of the damage had only begun to register early that morning, even while every inch of his body was pushing spontaneous disassembly … Realistically, all of that was to be expected, and no doubt more: a hell ride—what salvaging bodily wreckage should have entailed, at least to begin with—as meanwhile, back in the grueling now, Rhya shouted for double time (“Thirty more seconds!”) and Roddy laid into the bag with his hooks, resounding like cannon fire—and, even more humbling, numerous greats of the game looked down on him, gazing from hundreds of photos and posters and foldouts and programs all over the room, every inch of the walls—(concentrate on them): Sugar Ray Robinson. (Keep it together.) Benny Leonard. Sweet Pea. Little Red. (Lopez.) Alexis Arguello. Duran in a panama hat …

  In addition to premium standards in women, The Coach had impeccable taste in fighters: many of Owen’s brightest beacons were on display throughout the room. Their appearance alone made him place a good deal of faith in Jack as a competent trainer, even if, thus far, his social skills had fallen short of ingratiating. Anyone who mounted a portrait of Mathew Franklin over his door could be trusted. And right on across, as methodically showcased: Salvador Sanchez, minus the halo. Carmen Basilio digging an uppercut. Archie Moore playing stand-up bass. Battling Siki in gangster apparel … And, front and center, the one that had caught Owen’s eye in a flash upon entering the gym: the “Human Windmill,” Harry Greb, in the prime of his short, magnificent life—Greb the enigma, the legend, the myth, whose record, conversely, was rooted in fact: in 299 fights, he’d won 264, lost 23 and drawn 12. And his quality of opposition, on the whole, was nearly unrivaled in boxing history.

  Two hundred ninety-nine fights. Against some of the brightest and best of a glorious era. The figure was crushing. Owen was hoping to spar three rounds before it was over.

  Or, right now, to make it through jumping this rope.

  At last, it snared on his dragging feet. He sprawled.

  The class erupted with laughter.

  Rhya stood over him, choking it back. “Are you OK?” She offered a hand. He got up without it, disgraced. “I’m sorry.”