The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read online

  I stepped off the train and waltzed up to the junkyard with a dry knot stuck like a hairball in the heart. I couldn’t believe that I was about to finally meet my long-lost father. That I had made it here on my own. Most of all, I was relieved to have finally escaped the confines of the Old Ursine School for Orphans, its endless laundry chain, and the nuns with their arthritic charity. Even Mom in her last days of fighting TB was more chipper than Sister Patricia.

  My father, it turns out, is pink-jowled and hog-necked. His pants are usually held up with twine suspenders tied with multiple knots because he doesn’t bother to undo when he goes to bed at night; he just cuts his way out with a knife. Pauley told me soon after I arrived that my father downs a daily spoonful of brandy mixed with strychnine, his old manager Blumenkranz’s prescription for broken collarbones and bent knuckles.

  That first time we met he looked at me through milky eyes, perplexed, his forehead wrinkles lapping the shore of his balding head. He smelled like old Mr. Armchair Antoni from the front lobby of our last apartment. And he must have seen it in my face—the sheer disappointment. I tried, unsuccessfully, to mask its presentation. Oh great, I thought. Then again, who did I think would ever marry The Poo-Bah?

  “It’s your long-lost daughter,” I chirped, spreading my arms.

  “Daughter?” he grunted, stroking his chin with knuckleless fingers.

  I grinned, but even to me my smile felt rubbery and huge and my eyes red. Despite my efforts, I could feel one eye twitching wildly under the weight of his stare. There I was, one tiny moment away from jelly-lipped. I grinned a little harder.

  “What’s wrong with your face, kid?”

  I get the feeling that there aren’t many moments in life where what you think is going to happen works out exactly like how you’d plan it. That by the time you comprehend the sinkhole reality of it, it’s generally too late. It wasn’t like I thought my father would appear in a golden glow and sweep me into his arms. But I didn’t think the first thing he’d do after he met me was reach down and grab a 200-pound yard sow snuffling around his feet like a puppy, and then, in some sort of potential display of mentorship, jack it over his head.

  “This pig’s been here since she was just a two-pound runt,” he slurred. Underneath the mass of his brow, his eyes looked small and sad. He did a slow, shaky turn and, as if to affirm that doggedness is the main key to worldly success, said, “I’ve just made it a habit of lifting her a little every day.”

  And then there’s that devastating moment when you see that you may have based a choice on shaky foundations.

  Pauley and I live a life of routine. We slop the hogs, meet the weekly train, separate scrap, and every night after dinner, warm in the heat of the potbelly stove, we practise wrestling. My father is astonished Mom never taught me the trade. He tells me about when they used to wrestle in theatres and how, afterwards, men in lapels lingered about in lobbies, twisting their moustaches about the most recent article in the New York Times Sports section.

  “It’s a shame and a pity,” he says, “that wrestling has become about gimmicks: the mud, the rings full of fish.”

  “Wrestling is the oldest sport in the world.”

  “Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was once a pro wrestler?”

  My father’s erratic.

  He’ll spend a full day teaching Pauley and me how to do a flying mare and then the rest of the week out in the wallow by the tire pile, checking his precious pigs for drooling ear, snot balls, and hoof sunburn. He teeters in late for dinner, knocking over cutlery with his elbows.

  And it’s true Mom rarely let me watch her wrestle. Instead, I’d spend the entire time down in the dressing room, where I could prance around some made-up ring in a spangled outfit with knee-high slipper boots. Mom used to say I had a rich fantasy life.

  My father tells me wrestling is more than carnival entertainment, or even good versus evil, or Chief Chewchiki versus Cowboy Bill, or the Red Skulls versus the Flying Frenchmen, or Clops Cannibal versus the Alaskan Strongman. There’s no limit, my father insists, to physical development. Pauley slurps up this information like it’s sweetened cornwater.

  Daily exercise, he says, should be as regular as eating. A high degree of physical development can lead to a real pleasure in the mere act of living. He appears to be completely blind to the spectacle of his own strength; the tricks and shows of grandeur he submits Pauley and me to on a regular basis. “Look at me tear this deck of cards in half.” “Look at me scissor this bag of grain in half with my thighs.” “Look at me drive this iron spike into a railway tie with the sole of my foot.” Yet, I admit, there is something wondrous about learning to leverage my weight, and my muscles, I can tell, are sticking firmer to my bones than ever before. Wrestling might be in my blood, but there’s still a lot to perfect. I have my mother’s small compact body, which my father says may have once won her the Women’s Championship, but only because of her savage temperament.

  Pauley, I am told, was abandoned on the hood of a gutted Model A parked by the lean- to off the kitchen. My father said Pauley’s parents must have seen the cross-like gold-mining derrick, thought the lean- to was a church, and left him thinking that nuns would flock out and coo over a baby. Right. I guess he hasn’t noticed that the yard is the only place for miles with electricity. The derrick is clotted with creatures my father welded together during some sort of artistic flare-up. There’s a half-horse with radiator ribs and a monkey with flattened bean-can feet. Years ago he found a hubcap with a face-like rust pattern so he made a crankshaft body, stuck the hub on, and pulled his “dazzling masterpiece” up the rotting 100-foot-tall derrick using nothing but a pulley and the strength of his 26-inch biceps. Now it dangles from the boom chains in the middle. Pauley says it looks a bit like a bearded Jesus; I think it looks more like Abdullah the Turk. But it does tower like a beacon over the pines that grow on anything not water-swamped around here.

  Pauley’s one of those quiet types who is always angry. He does jackrabbit jumps to conclusions. The minute I mention anything about Chicago, he says, “If you hate it here so much, why don’t you just leave?” I’m pretty sure that by living with my father, Pauley has been home-schooled in nothing but everlasting solitude. I can’t even imagine what it was like around here when he was a baby and my father had to look after him.

  And he’s wrong. I actually like it here. Sure, the town is boarded-up storefronts with dandelions growing out of concrete cracks. When it rains, discharge from a nearby flume runs down Main Street, creating a muddy stream that Pauley calls “The Gran’ Canal.” But behind the junkyard is a forest with sunny patches of billowing trees and bushes of ripe berries. The morning air is thick with mist and if I walk close to the flood-line below Sandy Mountain, chunks of shoreline break off and sink slowly into the water where it melts into a sugary cloud. A few weeks after I arrived, I took the rowboat out and looked down into the reservoir. I expected a graveyard of dead trees, with stuff bubbling at the top like on the Chicago River below our old airtight apartment behind the meat-packing plant. But the water was clear and the submerged trees green, their branches waving with the lapping of the lake as if in a breeze. I cupped my hands for a drink: pine perfume! That night I stayed awake until I heard the morning chatter of palm-sized chipmunks.

  On windy nights, the breeze comes in off the lake, howls through the junkyard, and starts my father’s Jesus rocking against its chains like it’s trying to get bucked off. Pauley and I train, but it’s hard not to get distracted. Ghost-Mom’s hanging out in the corner, oblivious to the grunting aspects of Pauley’s internal massage exercises, swaying to the screeching effigy as if it’s music. Pauley’s got his mouth cinched tight, his puny fists are balled up, and he’s trying to force a big breath of air out of his abdomen while resisting at the same time. Around the time his face turns red and his eyeballs pop out, he starts rubbing and squeezing his stomach muscles with both hands.

  “This is the key to controlling the intern
al organs,” my father told us during our lesson last week. “The best way to train for a punch to the stomach.”

  I generally don’t look forward to one-on-one matches against Pauley. Even though we are about the same age and he’s smaller than me, he thrashes like an animal afraid of water, and he’s hard to pin down. Plus, last night I told him about Ghost-Mom. Now, every time I look at him he pretends he’s rubbing a lamp, then purses his lips, lets out a poof like a dry fart, and his eyes get all big and round like there’s a genie bobbing in the air somewhere in front of him. I guess what can you expect from someone whose own mother left him on the hood of a Model A? It’s the most common car in the yard; my father once told me it was possibly the biggest junker of all time.

  “Seen anything phantamtastic today?” Pauley grins, his face still flushed from the exercises.

  “You’re going to regret that.”

  Halfway through, Pauley’s almost got me into a Lesson 4: a Beell’s Waist Hold. I’m on my hands and knees and he’s behind me with both arms wrapped around my middle. I can feel his scrawny ribcage pressed against my lower back—he’s too far forward. Then my father lurches in and starts clapping from the sidelines. He stomps his feet on the floor and slurs, “Mercy! Get up and fight.”

  I back up and grasp Pauley’s foot, pulling it forward even more. My father’s leaning in expectantly, his stomach straining desperately against his twine suspenders. It’s difficult to believe that his signature Little Lew Double Leg Takedown once pinned the best heavyweights in the territories. He was once an undefeated champion! He had a Triple-A card!

  And then somewhere deep inside of me, I sense a cache of strength, wiggling and faint. I grab Pauley’s wrist and raise his foot at the same time; he pitches ahead and lands face down on the dirt floor. A classic roundabout! I throw my head into his armpit and secure him in a half nelson. With one hand wrapped under his arm and the other around his neck from behind, I can feel his shaky intake of breath. He’s started crying. Pauley’s snot-whistling into the ground, his back quivering. I ease up and he jumps free and runs out of the room.

  —

  It’s about a half-hour walk up to the powerhouse chamber that controls the water flow into the turbines and Ghost-Mom is trailing me the entire time, puffing through the trees and picking up speed like a steam engine. The chamber was blasted into the heart of Boer Mountain. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust so I can make out the engraved aluminum plate screwed just inside the entrance: 110 ft. long, 80 ft. wide, 118 ft. high parabolic arch. A wonder of modern engineering. It’s generally empty except for a couple of times a year when workers from Smeltersite come to Bodie for an inspection. Pauley always comes here when he wants to be alone. Ghost-Mom never ventures past the chamber mouth; she must know what’s going on downstream. I think ghosts are like tiny drops of water clinging to a riverbank, waiting for gravity to push them in. She must sense the penstocks, the 900-metre vertical drop, and the dark 16-kilometre tunnel out to the wide-open ocean on the other side.

  I walk in and spot Pauley lying on his back in the dirt, staring up at the smooth ceiling covered in spiderweb veins of dusty quartz. The wind is dead in here, with a cotton-ball silence, an airtight egg-ness like an ear-change in pressure.

  “Your dad says your mom thought her shit smelled like roses,” he says, sitting up. His voice is tough, but it’s hard not to notice there’s envy in it too.

  Ever since I got here, Pauley’s been telling me variations on the same theme. I’m pretty sure he has some sort of care-meter going on in his mind and that I’m coming out on top. And I just haven’t got around to explaining to him that I already know all about my mom, that it’s impossible to be with someone your entire life and not be cognizant of every tiny thing—like how Mom hated umbrellas and always said “No” when she actually meant, “It’s all right.”

  When Mom used to catch me sneaking out, she’d make me stand with her hardcover Bible held out in front of me, the one with at least four thousand extra Polish verses, until my arms fell off. I think she thought that just by holding it I’d catch something, like the bums who skimmed the river by our apartment for lard floaters. She’d slap at it with her calloused palm so I’d almost drop it. “Dis,” she would say. “Dis is love letter. To you, from Him.” Then she would motion up with her cigarette butt to somewhere beyond the yellowed ceiling, the knocking water pipes, and the thousands of pigeons that spent their day crap-shellacking the roof of our complex, where the wild blue yonder was. Mom did everything with a purpose that reeked of faith. And she made it her job that I should never stop knowing the sacrifices she made for me. She didn’t seem to notice that I was just a kid and I was always rushing to keep up.

  “Father says Blumenkranz is coming in tomorrow,” I say to Pauley.

  “I know. I can already smell his breath.”

  The air in the chamber smells a lot like Blumenkranz’s halitosis. Years ago, Mom told me how he left Europe by hiding in the boiler room of a theatre-company ship heading to the U.S. Then he used his contacts to deliver the greatest wrestling villain of all time, the Russian Ogre.

  “THE UGLIEST WRESTLER IN THE WORLD! WOMEN FAINT! MEN SHOUT! CHILDREN CRY!” Pauley yells into the chamber like he’s reading my thoughts.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” he says.

  “Fresh air.”

  Pauley snorts and we both laugh.

  I put my arm around Pauley and squeeze. He freezes, his breathing stops like he’s so confused his only response is to play dead. I squeeze harder, but there’s nothing worse than trying to hug someone who is trying to tell you with every muscle to bug off.

  “Pauley,” I croon into the empty chamber. “You unfortunate child.”

  The minute I say it, I know that I’m mimicking the Old Ursine nuns. And I realize that Pauley’s following my father’s ideas about fundamental defense. You never know, he says, when you might take a chair to the back of the head. Suddenly Pauley’s at me, pinning me to the ground. I tap out but he ignores it and presses me harder against one of the rock walls. I know I could flip him over and pin him in a clutch, but I just let him hold me there until he quits doing noodle-arm swings at my body, lets out a big rough wad of air, and stomps out of the chamber. My teeth are coated in dust. I can hear the skeletal clack of bare aspen branches outside the entrance. I roll toward it and above the purple mountain ridges spot the full moon, its surface bare like a calloused palm. I think about the stories Mom used to tell me. Like the one about Jacob staying up all night to wrestle the angel and how all he wanted was for the angel to tell him that it was okay, that everything was going to be all right.

  Blumenkranz is outrageously glamorous. He dresses like an opera singer and when he makes an exceptional point, he snaps the elastic bands that hold his ruffled shirt cuffs at the wrists.

  “Wrestling has chutzpah,” he says. “It’ll never die.” Snap!

  My father’s eyes sparkle in agreement. For the first time since I met him, he looks almost alert.

  About halfway through the night they start hatching a tagteam father-daughter duo. But first, Blumenkranz says, he needs to see me in the ring. The closest place is in Smeltersite and there’s only one woman on the bill: Paula Pocahontas. My father says they’re a bunch of barn gladiators, and he and Blumenkranz start arguing about it.

  Blumenkranz’s hands in their dirty white gloves flutter around like doves, stopping mid-flight only to snap at his wrist-elastics. They remind me of the songbirds that used to drop dead after running into the fresh scrubbed windowpanes at Old Ursine.

  It seems to me that this is another one of those moments: those sinkhole realities. And even though I can see the noose, the possibility of a noose and the shaky foundation, it doesn’t help. I look over at my father, he’s wildly reminiscing, torturing his chair.

  Ghost-Mom puffs through the pantry wall.

  I decide to wrestle Pocahontas.

  Blumenkranz’s gold bodysuit is too big in the top and it
’s hard not to notice the sweat stains under the armpits. He says that I’m supposed to pretend that I’m rich and snooty: a sure way to get the workers at Smeltersite to turn against me. “It’s the heels that are the moneymakers,” he tells me. “People bet far more against the people they hate than for the people they love.”

  Pauley’s acting strange. He sulks around my father while we practise, pretending to comb the pigs for hock mites. He eyes me sideways in my golden suit and flushes. He sits on the tracks waiting for hours for the train to come in, with this look that I recognize from my final days at the orphanage. But I can’t help but think he has nowhere to run to.

  It’s a full house at the Smeltersite Pub. A bare light bulb sheds its light on the ring: a thick strand of hairy rope strung between posts stuck into floorboards sprinkled with beer-soaked sawdust. Ghost-Mom’s by the referee and then over by Blumenkranz and then back to my father. She’s a dark shadow except for the red glow of her cigarette, which jitters about the crowd, fidgeting through men’s chests at lightning speed.

  I step through the ropes and Pocahontas starts circling the ring, blowing fat kisses at the crowd. People are whistling and clinking their glasses together. Hooting wildly, they chant her name. Blumenkranz said I should pretend like I don’t care, I should check my nails or something. Maybe roll my eyes. But I feel like I’m deep in the powerhouse-chamber egg. Somehow, its cotton-ball silence has returned like a case of swimmer’s ear, a muffled silence that’s strangely comforting. My feet are wadded up in yoke and I can’t move. Somewhere by the counter, Blumenkranz starts taking bets.

  Pocahontas comes at me. She’s a horror of wild hair, black eyes, and feathers. My heart’s hammering and there’s nothing, nothing in the world except this giant of a woman and her flaming red lips. Until Mom. Ghost-Mom throws her fer shit sake stick on the floor, flows right through Pocahontas and like water down a drain, twirls down my throat, legs kicking. I feel the back of my neck rise, an old carapace lifting plates of fossilized armour. I can hear the crowd cheer as I take the first punch, the sound of fist on bone so much louder inside my own body than hearing one land long ago, the dull thud of the fight through the dressing-room wall, when my mother was in the ring. I can tell that the match will be nothing but a series of drop kicks and heart punches, and try as I might I will walk into a fist, probably over and over. I search the crowd for my father but he’s gone, I can’t see the living for the dead.