Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

Grace Hill and Martha Greber pushed their way along an aisle through the temporary wooden chairs that were set up around the Beaver Gardens ring. The Gardens was a gigantic indoor hockey arena, its permanent seats rising tier on tier to the upper reaches of its hangar-like walls. Besides hockey it afforded the city a building which housed in bewildering succession, winter and summer, such sports, spectacles, and exhibitions as professional basketball, ice revues, boxing, grand opera, Billy Graham, rock-’n’-roll, and wrestling.

Until it became frowned on by the government, the Gardens had also been used at times for giant bingo games, in which hundreds of elderly and middle-aged drabs had placed small plastic markers on numbered cards to the exhortations of a transplanted midway talker who had moved to town for the carnival off-season. In exchange for their devotion, determination, and dexterity, plus an entrance fee and payment per game, a small number of these women had carted home individually expensive prizes, the value of which came to almost five percent of the total take.

It was the belief of some Gardens habitués that after the bingoes were banned a number of the game’s devotees switched their allegiance to the Thursday evening wrestling matches. This was never proved, but a casual glance along the “ringside” seats showed a majority of tongue-chewing old women gazing with the same concentration at the wrestlers in the ring that they had once given to the magic cards of the bingo era.

Grace bared her false teeth at a pair of acquaintances as she and Martha neared their regular seats. It was cooler inside than it had been on the street, but both women were overheated from their hurried walk east from the subway station.

“Hello, Goldie!” shouted Martha at a friend sitting a few rows behind them. “How is Charley?”

Goldie, a grandmotherly little woman, smiled and nodded and held up a circled thumb and finger to show that Charley was all right.

“Oh, I’m glad we got here!”Grace said as she plopped down into the second chair from the left end of their row. Martha pushed her bulk past her and sat on the outside chair.

To the left of them was a fairly wide open space leading from the ringside to the front of the permanent seats. Built above this space was a temporary wooden ramp along which the wrestlers came from the opening to the dressing rooms. The two women always sat on the same numbered chairs, separated from their ambulant wrestling idols and enemies only by the narrow no man’s land of empty space. They were good seats, for they offered an uninterrupted view of the ring, an easy exit from the Gardens at the end of the show, and an unblocked view of the performers during their arrival and departure.

Martha had crossed the forbidden space on several occasions to shout and spit at her enemies following a bout, but Grace had only run across it once, to pound at the legs of a hated Italian with her purse. The Italian, who had gazed down at her in laughing astonishment, had bested Grace’s god, a fellow German called King Koenig.

That incident, which had almost got her barred from the Gardens, had placed her briefly before the gaze of hundreds of thousands of wrestling fans, as a quick-witted TV cameraman had zoomed his lens on the fracas for all the television audience to see. The incident, which was relayed to her by Martha on the following Saturday night when the film was telecast locally, had given her quite a bit of prestige among the Gardens fans. It had also almost broken down her resolve never to buy a TV set, but she had resisted the lure. To Grace a TV antenna on the roof was a built-in lightning conductor, and her fears for her safety from thunderstorms overrode her wish to see herself on the TV screen.

“It’s going to be a small crowd tonight, Gretchen,” Martha said in German, “Except for the tag-team match there’s nobody on the card but bums.”

“I wish King Koenig was here,” Grace answered in the same language. She had read that Koenig was on a circuit through several American cities and wouldn’t appear for several weeks.

“The main bout’s got that good-looking young fellow in it, Jumping Jimmy Jones,” Martha said. “I could love him if I didn’t know what a coward he is in the ring. Always backing away and pushing that cute little ass of his through the ropes. Still, I wouldn’t shove him out of bed.”

Grace laughed at her friend.

A few minutes after their arrival the communications system gave a few preliminary squeaks, followed by the recorded sound of a long drum roll that introduced the national anthem. Grace and Martha stood up with the rest of the crowd, and collapsed gratefully into their chairs again when it was over. Then all the lights other than those above the ring were turned off.

The first match on the card was a slow-moving affair between a local wrestler and a heavy-set Negro, who seemed afraid to let himself go.

Once when the Negro had his white opponent pinned with a full nelson in the middle of the ring, Martha turned to Grace and whispered in German, “Did you ever have a black man Gretchen?’

Grace laughed. “No, did you?”

Martha winked. “After the war there was lots of them in the old country, in the American army.”

“Did you try one?”

Martha winked again, and both women giggled.

The second match was between a pair of Gardens unknowns. Though it had been advertised as a grudge fight, neither wrestler aroused much interest in the crowd. The third match was a tag-team affair between four dwarfs (called “midgets” on the program), who did a lot of clowning around in the ring, but engendered more laughter than partisan interest.

During the intermission preceding the main bout, Martha bought herself a hot dog and two paper cups of orangeade, one of which she gave to Grace. They sat there with their orange drinks, chattering to each other about the events of the week, even those they had already discussed on the telephone.

Then the lights went out and the crowd fidgeted in its seats.

“My beautiful blond boyfriend is next,” Martha said, slapping Grace on the knee. “I hope he murders that dirty schtunk tonight.”

“Here they come,” Grace said, swinging around and staring at the dressing room entrance. Martha also turned, and along with several others began to boo lustily as a fat man with a shaven head and a black moustache swaggered into sight and stood on the ramp midway to the ring. He looked about him with a sneering grin, raising his arms in a victory clasp, taunting his enemies. He was wearing long pliable leather boots that came halfway up his muscular calves and a shabby black silk gown that bore the name Krosniac in white lettering on its back.

“You dirty Russian bastard!” Martha shouted in German. “You’re a stinking cheater!”

Her words were drowned out in the general uproar, and Krosniac swept the Gardens with his supercilious grin, knowing he was the master of them all, daring them to hate him. Grace watched him closely, her mouth opening slightly, a feeling of weakness overcoming her as she gloried in his size and strength.

“Pig! Russian pig!” shouted Martha, her big red face glistening.

The big man ambled slowly to the ringside and with a movement quick but dainty for a man his size parted the ropes and stepped inside. Without another glance at the crowd he walked to his corner, grabbed the ropes and flexed his knees.

Grace took her eyes off him long enough to notice a small woman sitting three rows ahead of her who was waving in her direction and trying to catch her eye. It was Mrs. O’Brien, at least temporarily cured of her gall bladder trouble.

“Hello, Lil!” Grace shouted at her over the intervening heads, “How’s your — how’s everything?”

“Fine,” answered the little Irish woman. Cupping her hand to her mouth she added, “They didn’t have to operate! I’m on a diet.”

Grace smiled and nodded, ending the shouted conversation by shifting her eyes once more to the big man in the corner of the ring, who had now doffed his dressing gown. Though he was fat it was still possible to see the heavy rolling muscles on his back as he stretched at the ropes. His shaven head gave him a look of Oriental cruelty, and Grace imagined him pulling a small blonde Teutonic virgin to him with the reach and heavy strength of a careless bear. He turned towards her, and leaning indolently on the ropes showed his sagging belly. His fat breasts were covered with a mat of black Negroid hair which ran from his chest to his navel, spreading as it disappeared beneath his tight black trunks. His jockstrap made a noticeable bulge at the base of his belly. Grace sucked in a long breath of air.

She tore her eyes from him as the Gardens became filled with the ragged cheers of the crowd. Jumping Jimmy Jones was walking towards the ring, his short blond crewcut giving him a boyish appearance. He looked neither to right nor left as he climbed into the ring, his manner almost insolent.

Martha turned to Grace. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she whispered. “I hope he fights tonight.”

Jones handed his white terry cloth bathrobe to an assistant and smiled and nodded to an acquaintance at the ringside, showing off a mouthful of perfect white teeth.

“Gott verdammt!” exclaimed Martha, staring at him hungrily.

The two wrestlers came together in what the announcer called a twenty-minute one-fall exhibition. For the first five minutes they sparred around the ring, sizing each other up, loosening their muscles. The crowd began to boo, and there were shouts for Jones to stop backing away.

“Look! Didn’t I tell you he had the cutest little ass in the city,” Martha said, turning her wet red face to her companion. “He can put his shoes under my bed anytime he wants to.”

Grace smiled and glanced dutifully at the blond young man’s backside as he backed away from Krosniac. Her glance was momentary however, for her eyes were drawn back to the big Russian, who was stalking the younger and leaner man like an avenging killer. Once he grabbed hold of Jones and threw him expertly to the mat, stamping on the young man’s throat as he held him with a wristlock

“Stop him! Stop him!” screamed Martha, her words hurled at the unhearing referee who had his back to the wrestlers.

“How can that dumkopf let him get away with that?” Martha asked. “Do you see what he’s doing!”

Grace was too intent on the sight of the big man to care. It was as though she were the one lying on the mat, suffering exquisitely from his stamping foot, writhing in an agony of expectation for what was to come. She was crying out weakly, but there was no one to hear her cries. The foot on her throat was the heel of her master grinding her protestations into sobbing silence, robbing her of her strength and exciting her for the degradations he would make her commit. Above her she could see the heavy bulge of his loins and the sweat-streaked hair on his cruel crushing belly, while his unshaven face, twisted with depravity, grinned down at her and mocked her.

With a sudden twist Jones sprang to his feet, and the crowd roared its approval. He faced his opponent warily, pointing to his throat and saying something to the referee.

“Tell him, Jimmy! Tell him what the bastard did!” Martha cried in English. Slipping into German again she said, speaking about the referee, “He’s blind, that fool! Look at him shaking his head!”

From the seats behind them came a loud murmur of protest at the imagined foul. The voice of an elderly woman, hysterical and phlegm-choked, screamed in Grace’s ear. Two men stood up in the rows ahead and shook their fists at the ring.

Shouting into the face of his opponent and kicking at his shins, the fat Krosniac stepped forward, grabbed him in a wristlock, and pushed the blond man’s arm up behind his back. They turned this way and that, the younger man’s face strained from the pain of what had now become a hammerlock, stepping up on his toes to relieve the pressure.

Grace’s eyes were caught by the fat man’s cruel grin, as he forced his opponent’s arm higher along his back. As they faced in her direction Krosniac seemed to be looking straight at her, his clenched teeth locked in a promising smile, taunting her with the expectation of what was to come. Hardly able to stand the feelings she got from his grin, Grace tuned her head away and let her eyes sweep along the row of out-thrust heads to the right. The man in the next seat was chewing gum, taking in the sight with a smirk of disbelief. Next to him his wife, or at least the woman who accompanied him to the wrestling every week, had her eyes half shut and seemed to be invoking God to step in on the side of Jimmy Jones.

Suddenly the blond young wrestler lifted his foot and brought it down crushingly on his opponent’s instep. Krosniac, pulling an agony-filled face, dropped his grip on the others arm and ran away, lifting his injured foot in a pitiful limp. The large auditorium filled with delighted screams and cries. Mrs. O’Brien was standing up, her flowered hat askew, cheering on her gladiator with curses and imprecations aimed at the injured villain.

“Now’s your chance, Jimmy boy!” yelled Martha.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” the crowd cried, beginning to stamp its feet in unison.

In the ring the two men circled each other warily, Krosniac emphasizing his limp and Jones working his arm to rid it of its stiffness. Around them, from the rows of ringside chairs and back into the tiers of permanent seats, there was a constant stamping of feet and a bubble of excited advice. The wrestlers, seemingly impervious to the noise around them, circled each other with concentrated awareness as if taking part in a ritual dance.

Suddenly the lithe young form of Jumping Jimmy, no longer retreating from the bigger and heavier man, made a feint in his direction, but danced out of the way as the large hairy arms of the other reached out to clutch him. Then, quickly, like a boxer’s counterpunch, he leaped in again and this time caught the slower man in a flying scissors, his strong smooth legs gripped around the sagging torso of the big Russian. The big man grunted as the youthful body struck him, but recovering quickly he began to turn slowly, dragging the younger man with him, Jones’s blond head held just above the canvas of the ring. As he accelerated his macabre pirouette his mouth twisted with the strain of his movements and the pressure of the young legs locked around his middle.

Grace saw the heavy calf muscles bulge above his high-top boots, and his heavy thighs and buttocks straining from the weight they bore, as Krosniac gathered momentum in his spin. The crowd, which had screamed its approbation a moment before, now subsided into silence as the big man spun faster and faster on his straining legs, dragging the bouncing body of the hero around the ring, the blond head hitting the canvas with every revolution.

“Let go! Let go!” Martha cried, the sweat running unnoticed down her flaming cheeks, half crouched now in the open space beside her chair.

With a mighty roar from the crowd the body of the blond man separated itself from that of the spinning Krosniac and slithered across the mat, to be brought up with a heavy thud against a cornerpost.

Martha screamed, standing on her feet now in the open space beside her chair. A sympathetic moan rolled down from the hidden seats at the sides of the smoke-filled auditorium and was carried forward to the ringside.

The big Russian, left standing dizzily in the middle of the ring as Jones was thrown away from him, hesitated only long enough to find his way to the other’s side. With a wild grin he threw himself on the supine form of the blond young man, straddling him with his legs, and pulling him clear of the ropes. Then he grasped both of the other man’s arms and forced them back beyond the young man’s head. The referee ran over and bent low to catch the touching of Jimmy’s shoulders to the canvas to signify the fall.

The crowd went wild, standing up on its feet, shouting, screaming, cursing. The woman two seats away from Grace turned on her disinterested male companion and berated him openly for refusing to get to his feet and protest. Grace looked across the head of the man in the next chair to the figure of his insignificant wife, slightly amazed at the way she had switched her hatred from the villain in the ring to her husband.

Then she strained to the left into the space vacated by Martha, who was now three or four feet out from the rows of chairs, waving her arms in the air and shouting to the referee in both German and English. Grace found an uninterrupted view of the corner of the ring where Krosniac, to her a picture of big cruel maleness personified, was striving to pin his opponent’s shoulders. The referee straightened up without giving a sign that a fall had been made, and the two men on the mat, locked together in a straining embrace, pushed against each other, their arms jerking from side to side with the strain.

The younger man, seemingly unhurt from the crash against the ringpost, was forcing his arms up from the canvas and pushing the big Russian back from him, so that no longer did the mat of heavy hair on Krosniac’s chest come in contact with his face.

Grace gripped her hands into fists, feeling that she was the one straining beneath the bull weight and strength of the big man, able to smell the sweat of him, being forced into an exquisite agony of sexual refusal, knowing that soon she would collapse inertly, letting him have his way with her, yet meeting him with a new-found eagerness and pliability that his mastery had brought about. She found her nipples harden and rub themselves against the cups of her brassiere as she twisted around on her feet, her breath hissing from her open lips.

Krosniac was forced back by the other’s strong young arms until he sat upon the other’s belly. Grace watched him spellbound, wanting him to have his way with the figure beneath him, feeling the weight and heat from his loins upon her own soft belly. The big Russian lifted one knee and forced it between the other man’s thighs, spreading them in a true re-enactment of the sexual posture. The figure on its back upon the canvas was no longer a man but a blonde virgin, the timid Grace of forty years before, being taken in lust by a dark naked hairy figure in her bed in Bad Kissingen.

The big man forced his other knee between the spreading thighs of the blond young man, his fat belly lowering upon that of the other. The smooth hairless legs of the younger man spread wide upon the canvas, pushed aside inexorably by the strength of those that were inserted between them. Jimmy Jones gradually forced his body up, regaining his strength against the bigger man, but Grace was no longer interested in reality.

Weaving on her feet she shut her eyes and once again felt herself give way beneath the bulky weight of the man who had forced himself upon her in her virgin bed. Things she had forgotten until then came back in a head-splitting rush: the roughness of his hairy legs between her thighs, the heavy sagging belly falling upon her, the mumbled threats and pleas in her ears, and the sudden weakness in her arms. She gave in, as she had given in that other time, hearing the tearing of her nightgown in the darkness, feeling the fumbling fingers, gasping at the sudden thrust of him, conscious of his moustache on her cheek and the rasping scrape of his chest upon her breasts …

“Vat —” she started to cry involuntarily, but cut the cry short through clenching teeth.

“Hey, Grace, what’s wrong with you?” asked Martha, staring at her strangely.

Grace opened her eyes as the lassitude settled in her limbs and she became soft and dizzy with post-climactic weakness. She felt Martha pushing at her with her hip and as she moved back to her own chair she saw that everyone else was seated once again. With the blood rushing to her face and neck, and afraid to remember what had happened to her, she dropped into her chair keeping her eyes on the ring, but no longer conscious of what was going on there.

From around her came the increased noise of the crowd as Jumping Jimmy threw the heavier man away from him. Then an ear-splitting din filled the Gardens as the blond young man caught the older one in a flying neck scissors and forced him back to the canvas, switched to an overhead wristlock, and pinned Krosniac’s shoulders to the mat.

Martha was standing beside her chair, her hair undone and her arms waving wildly. “That’ll teach him, Jimmy!” she cried. “Oh, you big beautiful sweetheart!”

As Krosniac stepped from the ring, his dressing gown thrown loosely around his shoulders, the crowd gave him its customary boos. He acknowledged them with an ugly grin, turning his face from right to left and raising it to the unseen seats above the circle of light. Martha joined in the booing lustily, screaming at the wrestler until he disappeared into the entrance to the dressing rooms. After Jones had been photographed and had smiled his boyish smile in the direction of the television cameras, he donned his gown and left the ring to the strident cheers of the crowd.

Martha took her seat once more, searching in her handbag for some Kleenex to wipe the sweat from her face. “Jimmy didn’t run away tonight!” she exulted in Grace’s ear. “Maybe a little bit at first but that was all.”

Grace nodded and tried to smile at her friend.

“Say, what’s the matter, huh?” Martha asked, bending forward and staring into the eyes of her friend. “What happened, Gretchen?”

“Nothing,” Grace answered. She was uncomfortable, feeling betrayed and ashamed of herself, yet somehow relieved and pacified.

“You don’t look too good, Gretchen,” Martha said. “It’s the heat in here.” She finished wiping her face and neck with the paper tissues before squeezing them into a hall and throwing them beneath the chairs.

“I’m all right, Mart’,” Grace said.

They got to their feet and slowly followed the crowd to the nearest exit door. Now that the lights were on, the people looked thoroughly ordinary. All the screaming, panting people of a few moments before had taken on their everyday drabness, the women old and ugly and with lecherous faces and many of the men weak and frightened-looking. In many ways they had enjoyed themselves, pretending to believe the faked cruelties of the villains and the stalwart goodness of their heroes in the ring. Some of them had vicariously asserted themselves before their boss, while some like the little woman two seats away from Grace, had won their battles with their husbands. A few bored men and some of the younger women had watched the matches merely from the interested position of spectators at the exhibition, as the promoter called it.

There were others, like Grace, who had got more out of it than was there. They left the Gardens with the satiated step of Romans leaving the Coliseum or the shamed shuffle of unsatisfied spectators leaving a sexual circus.

Grace began to feel let down, her mind still reeling from the re-enactment of her defloration, her senses made sluggish by the too-vivid memory of that horrible yet strangely fascinating night so long ago. She felt alone in the crowd, separated from it by the incident she didn’t really want to forget.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” her friend asked.

“Sure. My lumbago is bothering me, that’s all,” she answered. “I’ll have to remember to get some of my pills.”

As the two women stepped into the street they felt the unseasonable heat of the day rising from the pavement, making the evening air even warmer than that inside the Gardens, though it was only June.

“Let’s go over to Yonge Street and get a cup of tea,” Martha invited.

“Not tonight, Mart’,” said Grace. “I’m going to catch the subway and go straight home.”

“I’ll be running along then, Gretchen,” said Martha, who lived in the opposite direction.

“I’ll see you, Mart’. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

By the time she reached the movie house near the subway station, the crowd from the Gardens had thinned. Standing against a display case full of movie stills was her newest roomer, Clark Cronin. He was smoking a cigarette while keeping his eye on the figure of a thirtyish woman who was pretending to read the posters on a stand in the middle of the doorway. He didn’t see Grace as she passed, and she quickly turned her head away.

When she reached the shadows of a building farther along the street she looked back. The woman was walking slowly in the direction of the Gardens, and Clark was sauntering behind her.