Kornwolf

by Tristan Egolf

  Apologizing just made it worse.

  She turned away, yelling: “Thirty more seconds!”—then back to him: “Whenever you’re ready.”

  They booed—all of them, still jumping rope.

  The Coach and his lady had drawn the blinds.

  Owen got back on it, heaving to lift his feet from the floor without twisting an ankle. He tripped again with ten seconds remaining.

  “Thirty more seconds!” Rhya repeated.

  Somebody yelled at him: “Come on, man!”

  It was all he could muster to finish the round without spraying his innards across the mirror. At “TIME!” he tripped to the water fountain, but found himself panting too heavily to drink. His legs were trembling. The face sweating back in the mirror was starched. He looked like a crowd control hose had been turned on him. Nobody else in the group looked as bad.

  Managing somehow to slip to the toilet unchallenged, he locked himself in the stall. For a moment, the nausea almost receded. But no. It was coming …

  He vomited beans.

  Fitting enough, he thought to himself: after years of indulgence, it served him right. He should have been thankful, really—to still have a chance, that it wasn’t too late already. Assuming it wasn’t too late already … The agony of training confirmed its need. He was lucky to suffer in relative youth.

  The bell rang. Out there. Miles away …

  With his vision fogged over in static pinpricks, he leaned on the wall. His lungs were burning. His chest was tight, full of garbage and phlegm. He couldn’t imagine smoking a cigarette … Something was wrong with his hearing, too—a blockage. He couldn’t yawn it away. Through a high-pitched ring, Rhya was shouting: “Seven more minutes!”

  Jesus Christ.

  Leaning forward, he flushed his breakfast. He opened the stall door and limped to the sink. He turned on a faucet and cupped his hands and splashed his face and neck with water.

  Afterward, staring despondently into the mirror—into one of his dilated pupils—he drifted in silent, void suspension …

  That’s when the roar of intrusion sounded.

  To start, there was garbled hollering, what might have been Calvin and Holy War having an argument.

  Then came a booming “Yo!” and what sounded like somebody kicking the gym’s back door.

  Right away, Owen thought of the heroin dealers Roddy had told him about: the ones who had shot up the alley that morning.

  His scalp went hot with a burst of sweat.

  But then, rising over a chorus of shouts, he heard taunting. The unequivocal ring of a challenge.

  He opened the door for a look.

  The first thing he saw were the card girls, two of them—long-legged, busty and far too scantily clad for the weather—framed in the doorway. They sauntered in like advertisements.

  Behind them, a couple of muscle-bound goons in trench coats followed along from the alley.

  Then, a cameraman stepped in. He leveled his lens and moved away from the door …

  A honky in skin-tight jeans, with a handlebar mustache, appeared, crowding the shot. He looked like a queer iguana. His eyes were narrow, hateful, venomous slits. His expression was so far beyond malicious, it could have been taken, at first, for play-acting. However, once he spotted Roddy, he let out a yell of real hostility. “There he is!” Pointing, the man looked possessed. Owen had never seen anything like it. It gave him the creeps. Who was he?

  All of them took a step back from the door and, with swagger and gall, The Cobra stepped in.

  Now it made sense. A publicity stunt.

  To date, Owen had never seen Fido Jones in the ring, on or off of television. The “Philth Town Destroyer” was still on his way up and hadn’t, as yet, received national air time. He had been featured in Boxing Digest, and mentioned on Thursday Night Fights on occasion. But, so far, his bouts had been broadcast regionally, mostly here on the eastern seaboard. Owen had been in the South for years. He’d never witnessed The Cobra in action. But, based on all that he’d learned that week, he felt like he pretty much knew the deal. Jones was one of a recurring breed—a showboating fool who, by grace of his natural talent, could fight—but whose greatest aet lay with his knack for riling the crowd. In fourteen undefeated bouts, he had probably made a small fortune already. Whether by verbal assault of opponents at weigh-ins, or calling out critics in public, he knew how to rope them in, get their temperatures boiling and, as a result, sell tickets. His manager, Ronald Travers, encouraged such antics—going so far as to stage them. Which seemed to be what was happening here. The Shark had ordered a raid on the West Side, with regional media droogs in tow. The camera was marked with a Channel Ten logo—the Philth Town nightly news at six.

  The Cobra was dressed in a pin-striped suit. He was twirling a cane. He looked like a pimp.

  Smirking, he stepped in and walked toward Roddy, waving a glistening T-bone steak.

  “You’re just another piece of hamburger, son,” he announced.

  He threw the steak on the floor.

  A moment of indecision commenced—everyone gawking dumbly, wide-eyed—even The Cobra’s goons and the card girls—nobody knowing quite what to make of this—and less so, how to react, exactly. The only one able to stay on his game without freezing up was the cameraman—who steadied his lens on the pitiful glob of meat lying still on the sweat-soaked floor.

  Then, in a flash, there was pandemonium.

  Calvin and Holy War flew off the canvas, yelling and lunging against the ropes. Travers’s goons hollered back at them, jeering. Rhya let out at the top of her lungs. The class joined in. The iguana gyrated, as Jack, at last, appeared from his office.

  Desperately, Owen ran for his bag. He got to it, reached in and pulled out the camera … unloaded. (My God, would he ever keep up?) New rolls of film in the side pocket. Move it …

  Off in the cluster, he spotted Roddy, alone at center floor in confusion. Just hold on, Owen thought—five more seconds, I’m on it, just—one—to feed the leader, as everyone hollered and stomped in pitch—two—activating the power, switching the focus to auto and lifting the cap for—three—maneuvering into the fracas without calling undue attention to self—four—to set up the shot, a beautiful angle of Roddy and Jones on the face-off, though Roddy was obviously having a good deal of trouble keeping a straight expression, Jones with a hiss, craning his neck in spirals, leering into the camera, then—five—losing his footing either in Owen’s sweat or the juice from the steak and, all too suddenly—legs out from under him, upended—falling down flat on his ass …

  Owen could never have seen it coming. His shutter had snapped in mid-collapse. No one could see what had happened until it was over, by stroke of a minor miracle.

  The silence to follow was broken, at length, by howls of laughter from Calvin and Holy War. Everyone else, excepting the goons and the queer iguana, followed suit. Rhya doubled over in stitches. The tough-looking girl shouted: “Smooth, you idiot!” The cameraman struggled to keep it together. Even the card girls were hooting out loud.

  The Cobra got up, wincing in pain. Owen snapped a recovery shot, this one of wobbling, pigeon-toed Jones with a hammy lip and his eyes half-shut. It was perfect. The consummate—no, the ultimate jackass. And, standing over him: Roddy, grinning. Unbothered. Amused, by the look of it.

  One of the goons went after the camera. Owen shielded it, stepping away—into the reach of the second goon, who got ahold of his collar and pulled. While falling back, Owen spotted a face in the fleeting downward blur, beside him: The Coach’s girlfriend, reaching out. He fumbled the camera into her hands.

  Then his head hit the floor with a smack.

  Everyone—Jack, Roddy, Holy War, Calvin and Rhya—charged the group. Caught unawares, the goons retreated, stumbling back, if not leaping in terror—with one of them falling into the alley. The cameraman followed. Then, by moderate force (a medicine ball to the torso, hurled by Rhya), The Cobra himself. And finally, hoisted aloft by the seat of his p
ants, squawking and kicking, the queer iguana (who must’ve been out of his mind to come here), tossed to the pavement by Jack.

  Rhya slammed the door in their faces. She locked it.

  The queer iguana got up. Behind him, regrouping, the others looked stunned.

  The Coach’s girlfriend blew them a kiss. They fired back with a slew of curses. She laughed at them. Stomping back and forth, they glared at her—twitching with murderous rage. Their game had been totally blown off the planet. And their hometown cameras had caught every moment. The Philth Town Destroyer had just made a blithering, almost unparalleled ass of himself. Channel Ten had caught the whole thing going off in his face, and despite Ronald Travers’s objections, the footage was sure to be broadcast all over Pennsyltucky by fight night. As long as the tape wasn’t bought off or stolen, the footage was simply too good not to air. The news at six would replay it for days. The cameraman, likely, would be a celebrity.

  This was the greatest thing Owen had seen since Reagan was shot. He couldn’t believe it.

  Shaking his head, Jack peered through the window. The Cobra was throwing a fit out there.

  “Try wearing tights next time!” Rhya shouted. She lowered the blinds and turned away.

  Holy War, Roddy and Calvin escorted the trembling card girls, the only intruders remaining inside the gym, out the front door. Nobody else in the room had stopped laughing—except for Jack, who looked calmly disgusted.

  He walked up to Owen. “Are you all right?”

  Owen gawked in amazement. The Coach was addressing him.

  “Yeah.” He nodded self-consciously, rubbing the back of his head. “I’ll be fine.”

  Jack picked up the steak and walked off.

  His girlfriend replaced him, grinning at Owen. “You might want to sell these.” She handed him back his camera. “But don’t get carried away.”

  Still grinning, she turned and, shaking her head, went back to the office.

  Confused, Owen watched her.

  She still looked like a Native American Goddess.

  From his desk at the window, Ephraim sat watching a one-man crop duster circle the neighborhood. Only a moment before, he had spotted it topping a line of trees in the distance. Now, he was riding the pilot’s eye: though washed out, overexposed and bowed at the edges for a spherically oblong effect, the earth beneath him passed in vivid detail, igniting a sensory overload. Hovering south, over courtyards and oak-lined streets on the eastern half of the city—with layers of orange and autumnal gold and wild ivy passing beneath him—emptying out to a public park, at the end of which stood the county prison, its wing walls jumbled with razor wire, enclosing a massive, hexagonal yard and connecting a prominent central tower with smaller towers at both extremes—appearing as one part carnival fortress / one part medieval torture dungeon … Continuing, over a stickball diamond and sweeping the rim of a water tower, above a congested intersection—bumper to bumper, a blast of exhaust and emissions, the humming of motors below—down the slope of a weedy embankment, an upcoming rush of organic decay—to the edge of a shabby housing development (Isaac Hoeker had called it “The Ward”) where hundreds of home units dotted the hillside in varying states of dilapidation, with auto parts, garbage and slabs of concrete strewn down the incline, leveling out to a fenced-in military compound full of rusty cannons and draped machinery … Veering east, with a change in the wind, a lessening glare and the rising coolness of moss and trickling water below, the freshening sweetness of fertile earth—skirting a bridge, over white-water shallows and rivulets, quivering pools of foam—hugging the edge of the county park, a rolling expanse of overgrowth marked with occasional open fields and pavilions—and on, toward a wind of manure from The Basin—around, heading north toward the juvenile hall, another fenced-in, razor-lined compound, ending right back at the rehab center: an overhauled sanitarium commonly known as the “The Tank” or “The Barley Stockade,” its parking lot dotted with shoddy bicycles, up-to-date sports cars and Old Order buggies.

  From start to finish: affluence, poverty, crime and captivity—cluttered extremes: a castle, the slums, artillery, the stockade—all in the course of a two-mile run.

  The center itself was no more consistent. Paisley walls with barred windows. Plastic seats with old wooden desktops. Polished floors and windows, yet stains on the ceiling. And low-powered halogen lighting … The odor of solvents and buried asbestos offsetting, by contrast, the smell of manure and sweat and cologne emanating from the crowd of juvenile offenders seated around him: four other Crossbills—Gideon, Samuel, Isaac and Colin—two Beachies from Smoketown, a Mennonite girl from District Eight and upward of ten inner-city kids dressed in jackets that read: “The Beaver Street League”—all of whom looked more fit and limber than, last, the fifteen English on hand, each of them splotchy, obese and coiffed in appearance—some in stickball caps, with goatees, halitosis and hair-gel …

  Only a juvenile alcohol counseling session in Stepford could host such a gathering.

  So far, the class had been uneventful. Ephraim hadn’t been paying attention. He was too busy riding the crop duster’s eye. There was also a groundhog out by the creek. And, more distractingly, he was thirsty. His tongue was like leather. His throat was burning.

  Somebody knocked on the door. As the session instructor stepped out, a small piece of metal, a coin, hit the back of Ephraim’s head. Ripples of laughter spread around him. Ephraim turned. A fleshy, uni-browed Redcoat was sitting behind him, leering. He was bigger than the others—considerably bigger. His hair was cropped in a dirty-blond flattop. Something was clogging his left nostril. His skin was pink. He smelled like a diaper.

  “Hey, Zeke.” He pinched his nose, wincing. “Man, you stink like wild ass.”

  The Redcoats laughed in quiet agreement. Expressionless, Ephraim peered around at them.

  A voice cut in: “Don’t worry ’bout them”—from a Beaver Street kid who was seated beside him. Ephraim looked over. The kid shook his head. He shifted, assuming a guarded air. “Check this out.” He looked both ways, turning his shoulder away from the Redcoats. He leaned forward, sliding his hand in one pocket. “Here.” He flashed a silver watch.

  At first, it seemed like an English trinket, one of no particular worth …

  Ephraim stared for a moment, unblinking.

  Then something started to hold his attention—the radiant luster and glare of the band. His vision narrowed.

  A wall of blackness flashed before him.

  Behind him, the Redcoats were snickering still. But he couldn’t make out what the fuss was about.

  Then, as quickly, his focus returned. He nodded to the Beaver Street kid: “How much?”

  “Fifty bucks,” he was told in a whisper.

  Without hesitation, he dug into one of his pockets and pulled out a wad of bills. A collective gasp went up behind him. The sight of his money had filled them with awe.

  Somebody whistled. Ephraim ignored it, quickly peeling three bills from the roll. He handed them off in open view. Out of nowhere, the Beaver Street kid looked nervous. He shoved the watch into Ephraim’s hands. And no sooner done than Riggs, the session instructor, poked his head back into the room. He pointed to the Beaver Street kid. “Pendle.”

  The kid raised his hands, looking guilty as sin and ready to lie through his teeth, if needed. Everyone yukked and whinnied around him.

  Riggs yelled: “Quiet!” Then to “Pendle”: “Come here.”

  Smirking, the kid got up from his chair and swaggered slowly out of the room.

  Unconcerned with him, Ephraim pulled on the watch and adjusted its silver band. Again, he was soon transfixed by the shimmering gleam of the metal, the points of reflected light dancing over his scope in patterns. Again, he couldn’t make sense of the conversation going on around him. And again, a flashing wall of blackness engulfed his vision momentarily. Jumbled images coalesced in semidiscernible, grotesque profusion—visions of moving in darkness, pain, the tearing of mulberry thor
ns on flesh …

  Returning, he sensed a level of muted alarm now filling the room around him. What had just happened? Where had he gone? How long had he been there? … He had no idea. He couldn’t account for these fleeting lapses any more than the cuts on his arms, or the odor he seemed to be exuding, or all of this money filling his pockets …

  The voices outside in the hall remained flat-toned. Riggs didn’t glance back in for a follow-up. Ephraim sat quietly still in his seat while his Redcoat antagonist held back in silence. Only when the voices grew louder, more heated, did Ephraim begin to squirm uncomfortably. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His shoulders twitched. His breathing quickened.

  This only added to the sense of alarm. He could feel it around him, from everyone present. He knew he was making them terribly nervous—panting, fidgeting, flaunting money and buying a watch from the Beaver Street kid. Certainly, charging a trailer in Jonathan Becker’s buggy was stranger still—an act for which, incidentally, he had been slapped with a routine drinking charge. That part, too, would have left them guessing. Ephraim had gotten off easy, somehow …

  But nothing would ever begin to contend with the spectacle set to unfold momentarily.

  Fed up, annoyed or somewhat nervous (probably all three in combination), the Redcoat seated behind him tossed another coin at Ephraim’s head. In a flash, before it hit the floor, Ephraim whirled, gripping the back of his seat and, to everyone’s utter shock—even the Redcoats’, who couldn’t have known he was mute, and the Crossbills’, who couldn’t know otherwise—snarled, with his cuspids bared and his narrowed eyes in a flash, with conviction: “Genug!”

  For the Redcoat, this would’ve been strange, to be sure—and obviously not what he’d been expecting.

  Likewise, the Beaver Street League sat speechless, as though a phantom had just blown in.

  Yet nobody could’ve looked more astounded than Gideon, Samuel, Isaac and Colin. For them, this would have brought into question the testimony of their own senses.