Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Sallow nodded placidly. The referee looked at me. I nodded.

“All right. Are there any questions? Reaper? Playboy? Okay. Return to your corners and when the bell rings, come out to wrestle.”

I had just gotten back to my corner when the bell rang. I whirled around expecting to find Sallow behind me. He was across the ring. I moved toward him aegressivelv and locked my arms around his neck. Already my body was wet. Sallow was completely dry.

“Don’t you even sweat?” I whispered.

He twisted out of my neck lock and pushed me away from him.

I went toward him like a sleepwalker, inviting him to lock fingers in a test of strength. He ignored me, ducked quickly under my outstretched arms, and grabbed me around the waist. He raised me easily off the floor. It was humiliating. I felt queerly like some wooden religious idol carried in a procession. I beat at his neck and shoulders with the flats of my hands. Sallow increased the pressure of his arms around my body. Desperately I closed one hand into a fist and chopped at his ear. He squeezed me tighter. He would crack my ribs, collapse my lungs. Suddenly he dropped me. I lay on my side writhing on the canvas. I tried to get to the ropes, moving across the grainy canvas in a slow sidestroke like a swimmer lost at sea. The Reaper circled around toward my head and blocked my progress. I saw his smooth, marblish shins and tried to hook one arm around them. It was a trap; he came down quickly on my outstretched arm with all his weight.

“Please,” I said. “Please, you’ll break my arm.”

The Reaper leaned across my body and caught me around the hips. He pressed my thighs together viciously. I could feel my balls grind together sickeningly inside my jock. Raising himself to one knee and then to the other he stood up slowly, so that I hung upside down. He worked my head between his legs. Then, without freeing my head, he moved his hands quickly to my legs and pushed them away from his body, stretching my neck. I felt my legs go flying backwards and to protect my neck tried to force them again to his body. I pedaled disgustingly in the air. He grabbed my legs again.

“Please,” I screamed. “If you drop me, you’ll kill me,” I whined.

Again he forced my legs away from his body. Then suddenly he loosened his terrible grip on my head. I fell obscenely from between Death’s legs. Insanely I jerked my head up and broke my fall with my jaw. My body collapsed heavily behind me. It was like one of those clumsy auto wrecks in wet weather when cars pile uselessly up on each other. I had to get outside the ropes. I had a headache; I could not see clearly. I was gasping for air, actually shoveling it toward my mouth with my hands. Blindly I forced my body toward where I thought the ropes must be. Sallow saw my intention, of course, and kicked at me with his foot. I could not get to my knees; my only way of moving was to roll. Helplessly I curled into a ball and rolled back and forth inside the ring. Sallow stood above me like some giant goalie, feinting with his feet and grotesquely seeming to guide my rolling. The crowd laughed. Suddenly I kicked powerfully toward the ropes. One foot became entangled in them. It was enough to make the referee come between us. He started counting slowly. I crawled painfully under the ropes and onto the ring’s outer apron. “Seven,” the referee intoned. “Eight.” Sallow grinned and stepped toward me. He came through the ropes after me. The referee tried to pull him back, but he shrugged him off as I got to my feet. “Nine,” the referee said. “Ten. One for Reaper. Eleven for Playboy. Two for Reaper. Twelve for Playboy.”

The Reaper advanced toward me. I circled along the apron. He pursued me.

“Missouri rules, Missouri rules,” I said plaintively.

“Natural law, natural law,” he answered.

“Three for Reaper. Thirteen for Playboy.”

“Not by default, you bastard,” I shouted. I jumped back inside the ropes.

“Four for Reaper.”

“Famine, Flood, War, Pestilence,” I hissed.

He came through the ropes and the referee stood between us. When Sallow was standing inside the ring the referee clapped his hands and stepped back.

I held out my hands again. I was ready to bring them down powerfully on his neck should he try to go under them. He hesitated, looking at my long fingers.

“Games?” he said. “With me?”

Slowly he put one hand behind his back. He thrust the other toward me, the fingers spread wide as a net. He was challenging me to use both my hands against his one in a test of strength. The crowd giggled.

“Both,” I said, shaking my head.

He slid his arm up higher behind his back. He looked like a cripple.

I shook my head again. The crowd laughed nervously.

He bent one finger.

“No,” I said. “No.”

He tucked his thumb into his palm.

I stepped back angrily.

He brought down another finger.

“Use both hands,” I yelled. “Beat me, but don’t humiliate me.”,

He closed a fourth finger. The crowd was silent. The single finger with which he challenged my ten pointed at me. He took a step backwards. Now he was not pointing but beckoning.

“Don’t you like the odds?” someone shouted. The crowd applauded.

“You stink like shit,” I yelled at The Reaper.

“Take my hand,” he said quietly. “Try to force it down.”

I lost control and hurled myself toward Sallow’s outstretched finger. I would tear it off, I thought. He stepped back softly, like one pressing himself politely against a wall to allow someone else to pass through a door. The crowd groaned. I looked helplessly at The Reaper; his face was calm, serene, softly satisfied, like one who has spun all the combinations on a lock and can open it now at his leisure. I braced myself too late. My body, remiss, tumbled awkwardly across the ring. The Reaper had brought his fisted hand from behind his back and now smashed my unprotected ear. I fell against the rope with my mouth open. My teeth were like so many Chicklets in my mouth. I bled on the golden canvas. The Reaper stalked me. He took my head under his arm almost gently and held my bleeding ear against his chest. “I am old,” he whispered, “because I am wily. Because I take absolutely nothing for granted — not the honor of others, not their determination, not even their youth and strength.”

He would kill me. He had no concern for my life. It was all true — the legends, the myths. Until that moment I hadn’t really believed them. He had killed the man in South Africa — and how many others? In all those years how many had he maimed and murdered? He wrestled so that he could demonstrate his cruelty, show it in public, with the peculiarly desperate pride of one displaying his cancerous testicles in a medical amphitheater. His strength, his ancient power, was nothing supernatural. It was his indifference that killed us. And it had this advantage: it could not be shorn; he could not be talked out of it. Our pain was our argument. In his arms, my face turning and turning against the bristles in his armpit, I was one with all victims, an Everyman through loss and deprivation, knowing the soul’s martial law, its sad, harsh curfew. Our pain was our argument and, like all pain, it was wasted. What was terrible was his energy. He lived arrogantly, like one who you know will not give way coming toward you down a narrow sidewalk. To live was all his thought, to proliferate his strength in endless war. The vampire was the truest symbol in the give and take of the universe.

I screamed at the referee. “Get him off.”

The referee looked down at me helplessly. “It hasn’t lasted long enough,” he said. “You’ve only been at it ten minutes. You can’t quit now.”

“Get him off, God damn it!”