“Hello,” Dunk said.
The girl nearly jumped out of her skin. “Jesus!” she said to Mahoney. “Who are these—more of yours?”
The flesh crinkled around Mahoney’s eyes. “Mine? Do you think I have a brood in every town?”
“I don’t know why you’d think that might surprise me,” the girl said.
“Don’t be spiteful. These boys came to the show. They got separated from their fathers. I’m taking them home.”
The girl was a high-schooler—the pleated skirt gave it away. She smelled of Noxzema and cigarette smoke. “Separated from your father, huh? Join the club.”
We drove along the river. Mahoney pulled into a lookout along the water’s edge.
“Yeearrrgh!” He stepped out of the van and stretched his long frame. “That air! Takes years off a man.”
We sat at a picnic table under a canopy of spring leaves. The night air was moist like inside a greenhouse. Mahoney opened a beer and held it out to the girl.
“So,” she said to us, “you’re fans of the mighty Bruiser, I imagine?” There was a small, perfect coin of gold in the centre of her left eye.
“We are,” Dunk said solemnly.
“So serious!” She sipped her beer. Mahoney watched her with a crooked eye. “I suppose you’d like to hear stories of his greatest matches, wouldn’t you?”
“We would,” said Dunk.
“Well, Bruiser?” she said. “Care to indulge them?”
“Dearest heart,” he said, “what tale would you have me regale them with?”
The girl stroked her chin, considering. “How about Giant Kichi?”
Mahoney slapped the table. The
crack
of his palm caused a flock of nesting starlings to take flight.
“Aha! Giant Kichi, is it?” He rounded on us. “Kichi was the meanest wrestler on the Japanese circuit, one of twins born in Hiroshima. Their father was a madman. He raised cows on a patch
of soil where the first bomb touched down, you see, and suckled his sons on the milk. When they were old enough, he had those same cows slaughtered and made his sons eat the irradiated meat. The radiation did something to those boys—lengthened their bones, gave them incredible strength. A pair of giants, the two of them!”
Mahoney upended his beer, then set one huge meathook on my shoulder and stared sorrowfully into my eyes.
“On their twelfth birthday, much the same age you are now, that madman led his sons into the woods.
Whichever one of you comes out alive is my true son
, he said, and left them there. Two weeks later, Giant Kichi came out. Torn up and scabbed and practically naked. Something had happened in those woods. He’d changed. Become a madman like his father.
“His father trained Kichi to become a wrecking machine. He brought in masters of each martial arts discipline. Wing Chun. Praying Mantis. Kung fu fighting. Everyone was doing it.” He winked at the girl. “Giant Kichi sucked it up like a sponge. Big and strong he was, but also nimble. He beat holy hell out of his masters, full of rage and bloodlust. Finally his father stepped up and said,
How’d you like a piece of your old man?
Giant Kichi said,
I’d like that quite a lot, thanks
, and snapped his father over his knee like a stick of wood!”
“He did, did he?” the girl said.
“He did indeed!” Mahoney grinned. “Giant Kichi popped up on my radar years ago. I’d been touring the Eastern Seaboard with Killer Kowalski and Spider Winchell, eking out a rough living in the squared circle and doing some pest elimination on the side. I heard that Tugboat Sims—one tough S.O.B. and the only man to have beaten the Plague—had taken the challenge of this crazy Jap wrestler. Giant Kichi beat him so bad that Tugboat pissed his trunks and begged for his mama. Well, wouldn’t you know it but
two weeks later I’m at home dusting my knick-knacks when comes a knock at the door. I open it to see this little Jap fella with a wrinkly face like a cat’s clenched bunghole. It was RiJishi, Giant Kichi’s manservant. He hands me this funny scroll. It’s an invitation to fight Kichi in the Tokyo Dome!”
Mahoney paced round the picnic table, stabbing his fingers through his hair.
“I took a steamship and trained as it sailed. Long hours in the boiler room, flinging lumps of coal into the greedy engine, my skin stained as black as night with the dust. The ship hooked past Greenland. I ran round the deck until icicles formed in my hair and jangled like castanets. I got bigger, stronger, as I knew I must to stand even a snowball’s chance. And I swear, boys, I swear I heard Kichi’s voice on the salt wind, calling me, haunting me, tormenting me.
“
Maaahoney
,” Bruiser mimicked. “
Maaahoney, I kirr you, Maaahoney
. Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a shredded bag of nerves by the time I reached the land of the rising sun. A rickshaw ferried me to the Tokyo Dome and next I’m being led into the ring. A hundred thousand faces screaming for blood
—my
blood!”
Mahoney’s expression darkened. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and shook his head.
“Ah, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.”
“No!” Dunk and I said in unison.
“Don’t be a tease,” the girl said.
Mahoney cocked a Spockian eyebrow. “I’m not boring you?”
She sighed. “Go on, you ham.”
“Visualize it, then, boys. Set the picture in your mind. Giant Kichi—he was a man only in the way Goliath was a man. His head swept the rafters. You think I’m big? Oh, I was a
guppy
compared to this guy. But I’d vowed to lock horns, a deal had been struck, and then as now I honour my commitments.”
The girl blew a raspberry.
“Yes, he was big,” Mahoney said, after a searching look at the girl. “And his eyes … the darkest, most light-eating things I’d ever seen. I could tell right off he was nutty as squirrel turds, a whole flock of bats in his belfry, but I stepped through the ropes and scuffed my feet in the rosin all the same. Now boys, the first time Kichi hit me”—he slammed his fist into his open palm:
RAP!—
“I thought he’d caved my chest in. The crowd roared. I peeled myself off the canvas before he could land the finishing blow. I figured a man that big was like a tree: once he went down, he wouldn’t get back up. So I chopped at him like a tree. Quick leg kicks, then scooting away.
Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop!
“Kichi growled like an animal and lunged, but I managed to squirt away.
Chop! Chop!
I felt him weaken.
Chop! Chop!
The sound of my foot striking his leg was like an axe hacking into wet wood. When he went down—and yes, Giant Kichi did go down—it was with a cry that sounded like a gigantic baby sucking its first breath. He crashed into the mat with a rattle, the whole stadium shaking. I looked at him curled on the mat, helpless … and I couldn’t finish it. He was raised a beast and that’s what he became. So I left him there, may the Lord bless and keep him. And that, boys, was Giant Kichi.”
The girl clapped. “Bravo!”
“Did it really happen?” I said.
Mahoney said, “Ask her. She was there.”
The girl said, “It’s true. Every word.” She turned her bottle upside down, beer sloshing onto the dirt.
“What a waste!” Mahoney said.
“I’ve got to get back home,” she said.
“Ah, come on. Another story.”
“Another time.”
Mahoney stared an instant, then rubbed his nose harshly with his palm. “Yeah, okay. Another time.”
We drove back. Bruiser reached into the case. The girl briefly set her hand on his. He let go of the bottle, goosed the accelerator and said: “Is it to be like this, then? Is it?”
“I don’t know what other way you figured it to be.”
“Did you get the money I sent?”
“I don’t need the money. Neither does Mom.”
“The letters, then. You read them?”
She said: “I read them, yes.”
“Everything I wrote, I meant.”
“Sure you did. But that dog’s not going to hunt.”
For a moment Mahoney rested his hand lightly on the girl’s knee. “We had some high times, now, didn’t we?”
“You’re a hell of a good time. Nobody would deny it.”
“Are you telling me we didn’t have some high ol’ times?”
The girl offered him a distressed smile. “Why would I tell you anything when you already know it all?”
Bruiser drove back down the river route. The sky had lowered over the river, which had turned the colour of lead. Reaching across the armrest, Bruiser took the girl’s hand. It covered her own like a tarantula clutching a cat’s eye marble. She patted his hand with her free one, the way you’d stroke a tame animal: a toothless old bear maybe, the ones that rode tricycles in Russian circuses.
Mahoney appeared aggravated with this treatment; the tenderness of it, I figured. Or maybe the fact she stroked his hand as a mother would stroke her child’s? He tore his hand away and punched the roof.
The girl’s laugh said she’d seen this song and dance before. She turned to us and said, “Big Bruiser
maaaad
! Bruiser make heap big thunder!”
“Don’t encourage her, please,” Bruiser told us as we laughed. He sucked on his skinned knuckles and said, “If you encourage her she’ll never grow up.”
The girl stuck out her tongue at him. “I grew up like a thief, didn’t I? Always out of your sight.”
He beheld her with reproachful eyes. “When did you get so cold, girl?”
She stared straight ahead at that. I got the sense it was some kind of act, in which she was playing the hard girl. It didn’t suit her, but she played it well enough.
We arrived at the house with the small fenced-in yard. The girl kissed Mahoney on the cheek.
“He’ll get you home safe,” she assured us. “You’re in good hands.”
When the girl left, it was as if she took some part of Bruiser Mahoney with her. Dunk and I watched in silence as he popped the glovebox and recovered a bottle of pills. He shook a few out and dry-swallowed them and jammed the bottle into one of the many pockets of his coat. Then he drove on. The only sounds were the loose muffler rattling against the undercarriage and the muted
clink
of bottles.
“Ah, Jesus,” Mahoney said hoarsely, mopping his brow as a man with a high fever might. “Ah, Jesus, Jesus.”
Dunk leaned forward to touch Mahoney’s slouched shoulder. Mahoney flinched.
“God damn it.” He unrolled the window, cleared his throat and spat. “I’m not perfect. Never claimed to be. Made mistakes—who hasn’t? Look at you two. Your fathers get in some silly brawl and let a monstrous stranger walk away with their kids.
That’s
good parenting? Smelling like damn cookies, the pair of them. What in hell’s
that
about?”
“They work at a cookie factory,” I said.
Mahoney’s head rocked back on the stump of his neck. Maybe he was picturing it as I once had: a tree full of lumpen cookie-making elves, like in the commercials.
“I bet your dads have never taken you camping, have they?”
Dunk said: “We went to a cottage once.”
“Great galloping goose shit!” Mahoney said. He pawed through the case for a fresh beer, opened it and swigged deeply. It clearly rejuvenated him. “Never gone on a camp-out? A couple of fine nellies you’ll turn into.”
“What’s a nelly?” Dunk said.
“A pansy. A goddamn bed-wetter! That tears it—I’m taking you boys to the woods. It’ll put some bark on your trees!”
We pulled onto the highway. Mahoney fled down the two-lane stretch, hair whipping round his head like snakes from the wind through the window. His face crept closer to the windshield; he crouched over the wheel, and I imagined him squinting at the yellow broken lines blurring under the hood.
A police car fled past in the opposite lane, lights ablaze and sirens blaring. When it was gone Mahoney laughed, a creaky-hinge sound.
In some dimmed chamber of my heart I realized I ought to be terrified. Yet I wasn’t. Dunk grinned into the wind that screamed through the van, tugging at his clothes and stirring the drifts of soda cans behind us.
“Ever pitched a tent, boys?” said Mahoney.
Dunk said: “Never!”
“Ever baited a trap?”
“We lit a one-match fire in Cubs.”
Mahoney snorted. “Your fathers should be bloody ashamed of themselves.” He wrenched the wheel. We were off the main road—off pavement entirely—bouncing down a rutted dirt path. Long
grass glowed whitely in the headlamps. I may’ve seen lights burning in the distance, the lights of an isolated farmhouse maybe, but soon those vanished.
We drove over the crest of some empty land, very flat, the path running as straight as a yardstick, and then came a stand of apple trees hung with winter-withered fruit that shone like nickels at the bottom of a well. Next came pine trees that dropped and kept on dropping. I was sure the van would rattle to pieces. My teeth chattered in my mouth. Bushes whacked up under the frame.
Mahoney remained hunched over the wheel, his face lit up by the dashboard’s greenish glow. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” His voice possessed the mad certainty that the leaders of doomed polar expeditions must have held.
The path kept eroding. Soon it was only the phantom of a road; the woods loomed. Stones pinged off the frame. Branches yawned over the trail, raking the windows like skeletal fingers.
The van hit a lip. Metal shrieked as we bottomed out. I was thrown forward, shoulder striking the passenger seat before I slumped to the floor, dazed. Dunk helped me back onto the seat.
“Buckle your seat belt, man.”
But we weren’t moving anymore. Mahoney mashed the gas pedal, snarling through skinned-back lips. The wheels spun until the sound of smoking rubber reached the pitch of a gut-shot animal. Steam boiled from under the hood. Mahoney climbed out, stumbled in front of the headlights to survey the damage.
“We’re here,” he said, as if this had been our destination all along. He popped the van’s back doors and flung out an army surplus tent, a blackened cooking grill, sleeping bags.
“You boys find some firewood,” he said merrily. “Beat the ground in front of you, though—snakes out at this hour.”
We explored the clearing that fringed the woods.
“Wait!” Mahoney called us back, removing a collapsible Buck knife from his pocket. After considering us at length, he handed it to Dunk. “Just in case,” he said.