Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 Read online

  "Pete says, what the hell, give the kid a chance."

  The skinny kid—I can't remember his name—was very tentative at the beginning, but started flipping that evil Pete character all over the place. The audience loved it. He put a toehold on Pete. The audience loved it even more. They were cheering. Pete kicked the kid in the head when the referee wasn't watching. They both got up. Pete went to give the skinny kid a dropkick, but the kid moved and Pete just plopped onto the ring and bounced three or four times. His stomach bounced seven or eight times. The audience went nuts. The skinny kid tied Pete up in a knot. The referee was on his knees, crouching very low.

  "One."

  "Two."

  Then Pete, whose legs were flailing two feet over his head, managed to catch the referee with one of them, and the referee was flung back, knocked down onto the mat. When he got up, you could see that he was groggy. He kind of stumbled forward, slowly, and crouched down once again.

  "One."

  "Two."

  Then Pretty Pete reached into his trunks, in plain view of every member of the audience, and removed something and whacked the skinny kid over the head with it. The skinny kid fell off, onto his back. The referee, still groggy, crawled over.

  "One."

  "Two."

  "Three."

  The poor ref could hardly stand up, but he held up the hand of Pretty Pete, who jumped around as if he had just won the lottery. He pranced back and forth in the ring, stomach flopping like a dropped fish on the bottom of a boat. The crowd was ready to burn down the tent. The promoter, who must have fallen asleep and missed the whole match, stepped forward.

  "What's the commotion about?"

  The entire audience started screaming about cheating and foreign objects and incompetent referees and the like. Little kids in the crowd were crying. The skinny kid was moaning with his hand over the left side of his face.

  "I don't know what to do,” the promoter said.

  "I've never encountered anything like this before."

  "We've got to talk to the manager."

  Every one of us walked out of that tent, through the carnival crowds, as if we were on a mission from God, which we all felt that we were, and we arrived at the carnival manager's trailer. There was a knock. The manager appeared at the door, in a torn T-shirt, drinking a beer.

  "What's the problem?"

  There was shouting and some attempts at a rational explanation.

  "I don't understand."

  There were more attempts at a rational explanation and lots of shouting. Finally, the promoter took the carnival manager aside, whispered in his ear. I've never seen such an expression of astonishment and puzzlement. That guy was good. He shook his head a number of times, stepped up.

  "I've never heard of anything like this."

  He wiped his face and his forehead as if he had just been through a nuclear blast.

  "The only thing that I can think of is this: we need a re-match."

  Everyone cheered. A rematch! That's what we all wanted. The skinny guy wouldn't only beat Pretty Pete, he'd pick him apart.

  Of course, the skinny kid was a good guy, so he wouldn't tear poor Pete from limb to limb. He'd only beat him handily, no body parts lying on the mat. We all walked back for the rematch. The promoter walked back into the tent first, then the skinny guy and Pete. When the rest of us tried to walk into that tent to see an honest man defend the honor of Western civilization against the likes of Pretty Pete, well, we had to pay another buck-and-a-half.

  I didn't have but thirty cents in my pocket. I don't know who won. Maybe those guys couldn't really wrestle, but they should have been nominated for an Academy Award.

  Andrea said, “Yes, I know it's fake.” She didn't sound sincere. Little Luke started winning matches.

  He won thirteen in a row.

  He was a little shit, though. He could play his mother. Even at seven years old, he could play his mother. I'd like to say that he took after me, but I was never that clever.

  After Luke's fourth-grade Christmas party, some drunken maniac grabbed Andrea and I ran up from behind and put a sleeper hold on the guy and held on until the police arrived, maybe four minutes later.

  The guy never went to sleep, but Andrea thought that I was Superman, and later that night we conceived another child, a girl. At least, I think it was that night.

  Luke did very well in wrestling that year, won a medal.

  My accounting firm, when I became a junior partner, gave me a nice reception. At work, they treated me like a doormat. Billable hours. That's all they talked about, billable hours. I did grunt work, for the most part. Then, one day, little Doogie Pearl walked in, and things changed. Doogie was the president of the SWWA, the South Western Wrestling Alliance. They needed a new accounting firm. He remembered me from my days with my brother, how I used to help with the alliance's photographs way back when. He remembered me from when I was the ring bearer at King Conan's wedding way back when. He remembered me from the testimony that I gave at Count Rashke's divorce case just a year earlier. Doogie was a character, a midget, and he wrestled. He had won the midget tag team wrestling championship maybe three or four times in various parts of the country.

  Doogie knew something about money and about wrestling. After the alliance went through that accounting scandal, they elected Doogie to straighten things out. Big money was involved, and I started to get some respect around my peers. I was made a partner.

  Our daughter was born the following September and I made a vow to myself that she would never get within ten miles of a wrestling match. You can't be too careful.

  Andrea was the driving force behind Little Luke the wrestler. I never understood why. Andrea is an educated woman. She's well read and on the board of a number of professional associations. When it was announced that Hulk Hogan would wrestle in Phoenix, Andrea was on the phone for tickets within seconds. It's as if Socrates had, in the midst of one of his dissertations, said, “Oh my God, The Flintstones are on channel nine. We'll put off this discussion on the nature of humanity until some later date."

  But that's Andrea, and I love her dearly.

  The situation with my accounting firm and the wrestling alliance began to get dicey—very dicey. There were transactions on the books that bordered on being illegal, and Doogie was in no mood to negotiate.

  "Bobby, you guys can just straighten it out."

  "Actually, Doogie, we can't. There's no way we can make this unreported income disappear. We can plead ignorance. There was embezzlement involved—there's been a conviction—so the IRS will understand. But they won't forget that you owe them money."

  "I don't know what we can do, Bobby. We need to raise a lot of cash. We need to raise it fast."

  They needed to raise it fast. I talked with Andrea about their predicament, and she was appalled. “We've got a few bucks put away,” she said. “We could help out a little."

  "Andrea, they don't need dollars. They need tens of thousands of dollars. They need some really big event."

  Luke took the state championship in the 103-pound weight category when he was in eighth grade. He'd still be the state champion today if he hadn't put on another eighty-five pounds.

  But Andrea had ideas about the wrestling alliance—ideas she shouldn't have had, since I shouldn't have told her that the SWWA needed ideas. I'm a Certified Public Accountant, for heaven's sake.

  "A world tag-team championship would bring in money."

  Give me a break. They have one every day.

  "You could have Honest Earl, who's always been a good, get hit on the head with a folding chair. He staggers, and his brain goes south. He becomes a bad guy and starts attacking members of the audience. The Sheik runs up into the crowd. In a moment of faith, he becomes a good guy and takes out Honest Earl, who threatens to kill him."

  "That's good, but it only draws interest for the next event. There's no time for a next event."

  "How about this. You have a cage match, but not your ordina
ry cage match. You have an oversized ring, surrounded on the sides and on the top with fencing. There's one hole, maybe three feet by three feet, at one end. This cage mask has different rules. Whoever is left in the cage at the end is the winner."

  "Imagine it, Bobby, all those wrestlers trying to throw some guy out that opening. You'd have people underneath the opening with mattresses and things to break their fall. Some wrestlers would be climbing up the sides, across the top, and dropping down on other wrestlers like Spiderman. It would be quite a show, like nothing that's ever been done before."

  I pitched the idea to Doogie. He liked it. He was a midget—an emotional midget, a strong midget—and he gave me a hug that almost crushed my thighs. The match was set for March 13th in the largest auditorium that the alliance could find. Do or die. It was the motto for the match, promoted on the radio and television. It was also the motto for the wrestling alliance. If this didn't work, they were down for the count.

  Our daughter, Kate, loves the nature channel, and wouldn't watch a wrestling match if it was the only show in town.

  In February, the principal called to tell Andrea that Luke had kicked a fellow student in the back. Andrea almost had a heart attack. When Luke got home that afternoon, Andrea grabbed his hand, did an arm twist, spread his fingers apart, forced him to the ground, held him there—her foot on his shoulder, his nose to the floor—and she lectured him about right and wrong until Luke almost cried.

  Those were tense times. If the SWWA went down the tubes, I probably would go there, too, since a couple of the older partners never liked me to begin with. If the wrestling thing worked, they might be gone. There was a lot of money and egos involved. I'd come home at night and look to Andrea for comfort, and she'd look to me for the same thing. Luke was not an easy child any longer.

  Kate was a piece of cake.

  The unprecedented cage extravaganza went off without a hitch. People filled the auditorium at twenty to ninety bucks a ticket. The spectators got their share of entertainment, wrestlers being cast out of that hole in the cage at five-minute intervals, bouncing once, landing on mattresses, cursing politely in wrestling talk. No person went home unfulfilled. The SWWA brought in enough to pay their back taxes and the parking lot attendants, too. That was some night. I was made a senior partner a week later and given a considerable raise. Doogie shook my hand so long my shoulder started to hurt.

  The next school year, Luke told Andrea that he didn't want to wrestle any more. Just like that. He wanted to play basketball instead. Imagine. Poor Andrea, it almost killed her. All I wanted to say to Luke was, OK, you don't want to wrestle, don't wrestle, I don't care, but if I catch you smoking cigarettes or dope, I'll rip your heart out. Wait a minute ... you're a teenage punk; I'll rip your testicles off. Luke would understand that. I did say something to that effect to Luke, like, if you do this or that, you'd be grounded for a while, at least I think I did. Andrea cried for three days.

  Doogie asked me to be the godfather to his third child, and I accepted. My brother James photographed the event. It was like old times, wrestling people wandering all over, shaking hands as if they were family. Sodbuster Sam was there. I hadn't seen him for quite a while. Sam has the heart and the brains that keep professional wrestling alive. He knows more about wrestling than any person on Earth, but he's never won a match, on purpose. Yes, yes, he had had prostate problems, he told me, but those problems were behind him now, no pun intended. Sodbuster Sam was a joker, so, of course, there was a pun intended, and we laughed about it for quite a while. We milled around, traded old stories, and James called us together for a group photograph.

  Kate's learning to read, only five years old. She's a smart kid, couldn't wrestle if the salvation of the galaxy depended on it, thank God. Luke is still causing us problems. He's at that age. That age. That's what my mother used to say when I was at that age. She said it when my older brother was at that age and my brother before that and my brother before that. It's hard on Andrea. She believes in good. She believes in evil. I don't think she believes in anything in between.

  When Luke stole that car—borrowed it, as he claimed—and was arrested, we had quite a crisis. I was afraid Andrea was going to try to kill herself or that she was going to kill Luke. She spit fire and walked back and forth across the kitchen. Doogie showed up, eight o'clock in the evening, uninvited. “I'll talk to him, Bobbie. He'll believe me. Step outside.” We did. Doogie closed the door and pulled the shade. Andrea and I sat on the step and watched the sun go down.

  I never found out what transpired in the kitchen that night, but Luke was repentant. He hung his head, and I thought maybe I don't have to have Righteous Mike the Minister come to my home and put his hand on Luke's head. That always worked on Saturday night wrestling. If Righteous Mike got a firm grasp on your forehead for more than five seconds, your knees would get weak and you'd collapse on the canvas, unless, of course, you had a foreign object in your trunks, or your tag team partner could find a folding chair near the ring.

  But Andrea would not be comforted. I held her tightly, and she eventually stopped crying. We talked softly, afraid to awaken more law-enforcement agencies. I understand my wife.

  Gray is a color she cannot tolerate. Andrea wants the world to be in black and white.

  Most people do. Things are defined that way in the world of professional wrestling. You know who's good. You know who's bad. The good guy always wins in the end. The end may be a ways off and cost you some money, but he always wins. Andrea needs heroes and villains, and professional wrestling grows them on trees. The world of accounting is not quite as certain. We talk about those damn billable hours. We tell jokes only accountants can understand. They are not very funny.

  Doogie can walk into our office nowadays like the king of diamonds. Everyone goes out and shakes his hand. He's looking for me. We get a private office and talk—talk about the old days, about body slams and whether Verne Gagne said this or that, and we laugh and laugh. Andrea's idea saved the wrestling association. I know it. Doogie knows it. Don't put a sleeper hold on my brother, I told him. Just because you had your eyes closed at the last photographic session doesn't mean that it was his fault, you little bastard. I laughed.

  Doogie laughed. The other partners are jealous as all hell.

  I'm a lucky man. Kate's an angel who lights up a room. Luke's a minor juvenile delinquent, but we'll cure him. I'm a CPA. Andrea's just a person who believes in good and evil. Good guys are good guys. Bad guys are bad. Andrea has a sweet voice and wears beige and amber-colored sweaters. I will try to always be one of the good guys, and, together, we will keep that precious, gold championship belt where it belongs—here, wrapped around our hearts.

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  Phone Call Overheard on the Subway

  Nancy Jane Moore

  Baby, I need your loving ... Baby, I need your loving ... Baby, I need...

  Hello? Oh, hi baby. Just getting up? How you feeling this morning?

  Relax, honey. I laid everything out for you. There's coffee in the pot and a bagel sitting in the toaster just waiting for you to push the button. Your clothes are hanging on the bathroom door.

  Baby, please calm down and speak slower. I can't understand a word you're saying.

  Oh. Don't worry, baby. Your penis is on the bedside table. No, no. On my side of the bed.

  Well, I just had to take it off you last night. It kept crawling around me ‘til all hours. That thing of yours got a mind of its own.

  Baby, of course I love your penis. And you know I need your loving. Got to have your loving. But I had to sleep sometime if I was gonna get up for work this morning.

  You got it back on now, honey? You have yourself a nice cup of coffee and things will be just fine.

  Love you.

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  The Troll in the Cellar

  Laura L. Washburn comes up in the afternoon. He pretends his basket is full and heavy with shirts folded in crisp lines. His h
unched back is a sham. If you catch him stretching, you see his vertebrae are loose as a cat's.

  I almost slipped once, let him know

  I was watching his transformation, started to say, “My Granny's spine has more curves than yours.” Of course, that's what he wants: you have to pretend he's a slavish troll, avert your gaze, feign distaste or smile broad and sick with compassion.

  If something bright catches his eye out the window, perhaps the crow who carries found gold rings in his beak, he'll turn and stare slack-jawed, riveted and dumb as the troll we all know he is not, then you can lift the first layer from the basket, look quickly before he turns back to his labors

  at what is beneath the creased jeans and matched socks. I have found a briefcase there. I have seen portfolios, and once, glimpsed the spine of what's accurately a tome, Oxford's

  English Dictionary, the latest version—this from the man whose elbow has rubbed a deep gouge into the wall on the left hand side of the stairwell over years, who walks before you, neck sideways, legs bent as though filled with jelly and lead. He would have you

  believe with his smirks and groans that life in a dank cellar turned the body in on itself and left the mind to rot. He'd keep you outside his scope as though his words were trapped under a thick black tongue. You would think his life was a small pain, sharp like a stitch in the side, confined

  and broken. Don't confront him.

  Though he could tell you long stories of continents you'll never see, explain the ancient history of language, the linguistic origins of soul and heart, pater and mutti, don't do it. Don't fall for his obvious and easy trap. Don't ask any question, but give the order

  every day: this for a cold cycle, make sure it lies flat, no bleach, no crease for these, air dry. If careful you can keep the fragile spell unbroken.

  Though so many secrets go unexplained or lost in time, each day you'll find warm towels, fresh socks, underwear, clean and hung on a line, the way it should be, laundered careful so it lasts like new for years at a time.