David Driscoll
Every time it got real hot Earl’s ass would itch and he’d spend half
the summer with his hand stuck down his pants trying to get some relief. He tried
powders and walking bow-legged—he even tried wedging a sponge between his
cheeks. But not even Doc Billingsworth could figure out how to help and in the
end he told Earl that sometimes facts are facts and advised him to quit fighting
it. “We all got some things we got to live with, Earl,” Doc said. “You
understand that.”
Earl had been bald about as long as anybody could remember and his teeth kind
of looked like a smooshed picket fence. He also had a big mole on his lip and one
of the biggest mysteries in town was how Earl’s handsome folks left him as
their one and only contribution to the gene pool. True, he was big and strong like
his Ma and Pa, but you couldn’t tell it cause he hunched over and his arms
were so long it looked like he was melting towards the earth. His stomach, though,
it stood up. It was big and round and tight as a drum and stuck out of his unbuttoned
sleeveless flannel like a cannonball busting through a curtain.
And like a lot of odd looking fellas, Earl was the solitary type; but he did
have some friends. In fact, he’d get together a couple of times a week with
Saul and his boys to wrestle in the backyard. And Earl was the king of the Samurai
Rooftop Death Drop, a name he made up one time as he cracked open a Schlitz with
Carl, Saul’s youngest boy, the one with the manboobs.
That summer the thing to do in Jefferson was build a wrestling ring. It all
started a few days after Earl made an announcement at the plant.
“I thought you fellas, and you too Betty and Linda, might be curious to know
that these here W-390’s manufactured in this very plant,” and Earl held
up a self-tightening eye-hook, “is the selfsame ones used to keep the ropes
and turn buckles safely secured to the corner posts in all three major federations.” The
room was quiet, but Earl thought he saw a few nods, which helped him say the rest
of what he had to say. “I just thought everyone might like a reminder that
what we make in here is holding some important things together out there. Thank you.”
Nobody really said anything either way to Earl about his speech, but a week later
Joe McCovey used twelve W-390’s to put up a ring for his boys in the backyard.
Then Ron Tasker and BT started bringing fellas over from the Bait and Tackle Club
to wrestle on Sundays after church. Pretty soon enough fellas made it over there
that everybody started building rings. The first time Saul went over there he broke
his arm, but he called Earl that night and told Earl the two of them were going
to build the best damn ring in town.
And Saul helped but it was pretty much Earl that built the whole thing cause Saul
wasn’t so good with his hands and had a bad eye for geometry. But not Earl.
Even standing on top of a lumpy gopher hill Earl could hold out one long arm and
just by using his thumb he could level up anything under four hundred yards away.
Everybody in town knew Earl could build anything he felt like, and they knew he
could do it fast too and that the corners would be flush and the knots in the wood
would be lined up so they looked nice. But it was more than just that. The way everybody
thought about it was pretty well summed up by this story Walt Lemns told one time
during the Comments and Criticism portion of the Bait and Tackle Club meeting. The
story was about how he saw Earl on the Big Broken River at about five a.m. one foggy
morning, and Earl handed him a blue-winged olive mayfly that he’d tied himself.
According to Walt, as soon as he laid the thing down on the water fifteen or twenty
of the biggest rainbows he’d ever seen started leaping and fighting upstream
to get to it; and even though everybody knew Walt was exaggerating, there wasn’t
a soul alive who’d seen Earl’s handiwork that was going to call Walt
an outright liar.
That story came up a lot when folks saw the ring in Saul’s backyard.
“See this soldering job?”
“Earl do that?”
“Yup.”
“Member that time he gave Walt Lemns that fly?”
“Yup.”
Nobody built another ring after Earl.
The first day of August was
a Monday and cause of the No Feeling Shitty Rule, Earl came home with Saul after
work to share some of Lacy May’s beef and
noodles. The Libby County Testicle Festival had been held over the weekend and
the No Feeling Shitty Rule between Saul and Earl said no one spends any time
by themselves after three days of drinking all day.
Like usual, Earl helped Lacy May with the dishes after dinner and cause it was
still daylight, he decided to stick around and have a beer in the backyard with
Carl. But just as Earl was showing Carl the new technique he’d told him about
for crushing a can so it was easier to whip through the tire swing, Buddy and
BT came up on the lawn. Buddy was munching sheep balls out of a tin pan left over
from the weekend and both of them were still drunk.
Fellas had been stopping by at all times with a six-pack and their elbow pads to
see if someone wanted to go, so Earl and Carl figured Buddy and BT were looking
for a tag-team match. But then out of nowhere, BT started saying stuff to Earl,
in front of Carl, about Lacy May. BT said he’d seen Earl’s nice new
Super Duty Ranch Edition parked out front quite a few times in the last few weeks
and said, “I was just wondering if maybe Macy Lay,” and when he said
it he nudged Buddy in the ribs, “needed some help ‘round the house that
clumsy ol’ Saul just couldn’t do himself.”
And Earl said, “No,” but he was already real defensive cause even though
he wasn’t sure he got all the parts of the joke, he was pretty sure BT had
just said something offensive about Mrs. Saul Peters. But right then, Carl made
this strange sound, kind of like a “moo,” and went over with his fists
up to BT.
BT didn’t budge. “Go away there She-Ra with them saggy tits before you
end up looking like Earl over there,” he said.
“Earl with boobs,” Buddy said, and then him and BT nearly laughed their
heads off.
Well, that was more than Earl needed to hear, and he jerked his hand out of his
overalls so fast it made BT and Buddy jump, but instead of taking a cut at BT, Earl
just pointed. “Get in the ring,” he said.
And since there wasn’t a man alive ever heard Earl really raring to fight
fight, BT just stood their blinking for a minute then looked at Buddy a few times
and then he started stammering and a second later he was hollering real loud about
how instead of settling this right now they’re going to build themselves a
steel cage to put over the best ring in town and everybody’s going to be there
to see him make Earl cry like a baby.
So the next day, Tuesday, Earl and BT took a trip to McCovey & Sons’ Fencing
after work. All Earl could think about was how much he hated the idea of building
the cage with BT, but he knew they had to do it together cause Earl was the best
post guy and everybody knew BT could stretch link tighter than anyone in Jefferson,
probably in Claimson and Jump Creek, too. So Earl decided at least he wasn’t
going to talk to BT the whole time only that turned out to be impossible cause BT
wouldn’t shut up. Ever. And no matter what you do you can’t avoid talking
to one of those guys if you’re around him all the time cause even if you don’t
talk to him you’re going to have to listen to him read the signs on stores
and billboards out loud when you’re driving in the truck. What’s worse
for Earl though, is that BT’s one of those guys who loves talking about how
wrestling is fake.
“
It’s just part of bein’ a grown up,” BT said, as they were pulling
out of the lumber yard. “I mean, you won’t find a bigger wrestling fan
out there than me, you really won’t. But in the end, I know compared to things
like nuculare war and that AIDS problem in them African tribes, wrestling don’t
mean squat.”
Earl didn’t say anything and kept staring at the road, but when BT took a
breath to keep talking, Earl reached forward quick and cranked the stereo. He was
sweating bad and working his chaw around in his lips real fast.
Earl watched wrestling every night and every morning and he brought a generator
with him to work so he could plug in his TV and watch wrestling videotapes on a
chair in the bed of his truck out in the parking lot every single day at lunch,
even when it was cold, even when it was deer season and all the other guys were
spending their lunch breaks shooting across the highway trying to fill their tags.
But BT wouldn’t leave it alone. He even told Earl to come over to Buddy’s
mom’s house that night and tricked Earl into watching a tape she’d recorded
from Sixty Minutes. It was all about how wrestlers still get hurt, even though wrestling
is fake. Earl knew about the tape from Larry Tasker and some guys at the plant,
but he never wanted to see it. Only once it started playing it was too late. If
he got up and walked out, Earl knew BT, Buddy, and probably Buddy’s mom would
have called him an ignorant baby for refusing to watch a TV news show so Earl just
sat there watching while BT jabbered on and on about how wrestlers were like actors
and how the whole thing was like a play and how them wrestlers were like big strong
artists compared to all the little pussy ones.
Earl was pretty upset after the show, and when he left Buddy’s mom’s
house he walked all the way home and headed straight out to the backyard. Earl had
a good piece of property a ways from town and on a nice hot night he’d put
on his water wings and just float around naked in his two hundred thousand gallon
handmade lazy river. The hounds were out there too, which Earl liked, cause after
shot-gunning three or four beers he could try out his ideas on them and they weren’t
going to say a single thing except to howl in support.
“What I cain’t figure out,” Earl said to his dogs—Bone Crusher,
Earlmeister, and Saul the Hound—who were swimming along behind him, “is
why I cain’t quit thinkin’ ‘bout it.” The four of them drifted
behind the waterfall and Earl paddled himself into the hot tub lagoon. “All
BT wants to do is cut wrestlin’ up into little bits and parts. He don’t
have no feelin’ for it.” Earl pulled another Schlitz out of the floating
cooler. “The thing is though, now I cain’t even watch without waitin’ for
someone to overdo a forearm smash, or stall on the ropes cause the guy who tossed
him cain’t get square fast enough to give a boot to the solar plexus.”
Earl paddled himself into the current and tipped back the last of his beer, then
dunked his head, and when he stood up he spit a big jet of water up at the stars.
“Once you start looking at something like a grown-up,” Earl said to Earlmeister,
who’d paddled up beside him, “you cain’t never look at it any other
way again.”
Earl climbed the steps of the island oasis that parted the lazy river and got into
his hammock, still dripping wet. But try as he might, Earl couldn’t fall asleep,
and he ended up laying there for hours, staring up at the sky and digging at his
itching cornhole as he thought about the insult to Lacy May.
BT had told Earl at Buddy’s mom’s house that they’d better start
practicing moves. And since they were going to work on the cage in the evenings,
BT decided they’d meet in his basement before work. But on Wednesday morning,
before they even got their shirts off, BT took about forty-five seconds and told
Earl how the whole thing was going to go and he must have used the word “chor-e-o-graphed” a
dozen times. Then he told Earl a whole bunch of his ideas, like trying to get Larry
Tasker to fly over the town in his crop duster with big signs flapping from the
back to get people going. “On one day,” BT said, and held up his hands
to help Earl picture it in the sky, “it could say, ‘BT. The B is for
Big and the T is for Thunder.’ And on the next day it could say, ‘This
Sunday the Long Arm of Earl will be Layin’ Down the Law.’”
Everybody at the plant was fired up, Saul especially, and he kept bragging about
how Earl was going to open a whole keg of whoop-ass on BT. But every time somebody
brought up Sunday to Earl, he felt like there was a big frog jumping all around
in his belly and by Thursday, he pretty much stopped talking. Everything Earl saw—no
matter how good it used to look on the outside—seemed like a trick, like the
whole world was one of those cardboard cut-outs of a woman in an unzipped NASCAR
suit propped up in front of the Mini-Mart’s beer cooler. Then, Thursday after
lunch, when Earl was walking back to his machine, he looked up and saw he’d
walked right in front of a forklift whizzing along towards the exit. Earl jumped,
and he didn’t get clipped, but his momentum carried him face first into a
crate full of faulty W-390’s.
Buddy hopped out of the forklift yelling at Earl to watch where he was going and
some other folks came over asking if he busted himself up, but Earl didn’t
hear any of it. Sitting there, in a sea of those shiny self-tightening eye-hooks,
it hit Earl like a crack of cool thunder that a W-390 attaches a rope to a turnbuckle
and a turnbuckle to a post, but the post also holds up a steel cage, and the steel
cage is attached to a stadium that’s made to hold people, and people attach
to other people and to everything else and so it was like everything in the world
was one huge long thing.
“It’s like a landin’ net,” Earl said, staring at the W-390
in his hand, “and I’m a fish.”
The people standing around were quiet for a minute. Then Buddy said concerned, “That
was dumb,” and everyone nodded.
But Earl got up, adjusted his overalls, and went back to his machine. And when the
whistle blew, the only thing made Earl go over to the Peters’ house was this
feeling he had that he couldn’t do anything else.
Earl had a beer on the way over there hoping it would help him feel better and when
he parked, he just went straight to the garage to grab his tools before heading
out to the backyard. BT was already there working, but he had his back to Earl and
for fifteen minutes Earl sat on the grass and watched BT, hunched over by the kiddy
pool, going through the pain of reweaving twenty-five vertical feet of chain link
just so the tension bar wouldn’t seize up against the tension bands and look
funny. Earl could see BT’s hands were bleeding a little bit and he kept stopping
to massage his lower back like you do when it’s all tweaked up.
And all of a sudden, Earl was so angry sitting there with that hot afternoon August
sun blasting down on him that he shoved his hand down his pants and started off
on an agitated fit of scratching. And he was just about to stand up and tell everyone
to come out so he could call the whole thing off when Earl realized the sun wasn’t
blazing down on him anymore.
It was an eclipse, or that’s what Earl thought at first, but then he smelled
something like strawberries and when he looked up he saw a big sun umbrella in Lacy
May’s hand. And after she stuck the umbrella post into the lawn, she handed
Earl a Schlitz on the rocks. It had a straw in it and everything.
“This weather’s so hot,” she said, and arched her back so her tank
top rode up and showed her tan little belly button, “Makes me want to take
a nap.”
And there was this real long pause while Earl stared up at Lacy May.
“
Thank you,” he said.
Lacy May smiled. “It wasn’t nothin',” she said shrugging, and
hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of her jean shorts.
Earl watched her walk across the bright green lawn until she’d slid the screen
door shut behind her and for a good bit he sat there staring into his frosty hurricane
glass of beer. Then, Earl shook his head, took a sip, and started counting out the
carriage bolts so he could fix the brace bands to the posts.
Friday was the day they
were supposed to finish, but BT showed up at the Peters’ with
a truck full of lumber and told Earl they needed to build themselves some bleachers
cause so many people were coming to watch on Sunday that Jefferson cancelled church.
Earl said they didn’t have enough time, but BT said they did so long as they
didn’t sleep on Friday or Saturday and when he said it, Earl looked at BT
with his mouth wide open and shook his head cause he couldn’t believe what
he was hearing.
“BT,” Earl said, “why the hell are we doin’ this?”
And BT turned around looking like he was confused cause it was such a stupid
question.
“To be famous,” he said, and opened the rusty tailgate of his Chevy C10.
BT grabbed a stack of planks and started pulling them out, then looked at Earl for
some help. “Okay, Earl,” BT said, and pushed himself up to sit on the
tailgate. “Now I admit on Monday I wormed outta gettin’ whooped by you—and
I shouldnt’ve said what I did about Lacy May—but you ain’t even
mad ‘bout that no more.” BT started working on a booger. “And I
know I was a dick by sayin’ those ideas about wrestlin’ like I was puttin’ ‘em
in your face all week, but that ain’t it neither. So clue me in, Earl. What’s
the problem?”
Earl took off his cap and started scratching the back of his head. “I’m
gonna look like an asshole in front of all them people,” he said.
BT was quiet for a minute and then he flicked his booger into a bush and when he
looked back at Earl his jaw was sticking out and he was pissed. “You know
what, Earl?” BT said. “I know gettin’ up in fronta people ain’t
your thing, and maybe you don’t give a shit ‘bout gettin’ laid ‘cause
of this like I do, but it’s time to step up. Jefferson expects a show, and
it’s a Goddamn gift from God that me and you get to be the ones givin’ it
to ‘em.”
Earl was staring at BT and chewing on his bottom lip.
“All you got to do now,” BT went on, “is put all that fire you
got for wrestlin’ into everything we made up and if you can do that, if you
can own it, then Earl, by the time you deliver that Samurai Rooftop Death Drop—”
“Atomic Death Drop,” Earl interrupted.
“Right,” BT said. “And I agree it’s better with the ‘Atomic’ part—you’re
gonna be a hero, Earl. You’re gonna be a hero ‘cause for a few minutes
there won’t be a soul in Libby County ain’t too busy watchin’ us
kick ass to worry ‘bout bats crappin’ in their grain elevators, or affordin’ the
suspension upgrade for their snowmobiles, or any of the other bull-shit they spend
the rest their lives thinkin’ ‘bout.”
And then Earl heard a sound in his brain, like a motor turning over, and after a
second there was a little bitty click and a big smile came across Earl’s face.
“Good,” BT said. “Now put away them teeth, Earl and help me build
some bleachers.”
When the sun rose over Jefferson on Sunday morning Earl was dead tired, and all
the way up to the match he couldn’t eat anything or think straight. But he
put on a real tough face in front of Saul and said to Saul while Saul was taping
up his wrists, “Saul, I never did touch Lacy May. I know you know it, but ‘case
you didn’t, I didn’t, and I wouldn’t, but if I did . . . well
. . . you probably couldn’t do nothin’ ‘bout it anyhow ‘cause
I’m bigger than you . . .” Earl knew it didn’t come out quite
right, and Saul did too, but he gave Earl a real emotional grip on the shoulder
anyway.
Joe McCovey had named himself the official for the match on account of his being
so tall and thin that he could see around every elbow and illegal grip just by leaning.
And cause he was the official, his boys got to work the clock and the bell. And
when Sam McCovey rang the bell so the wrestlers would come out, Earl came running
out of the cellar steps, busting into the backyard like a cowboy in a saloon. This
was Saul’s idea and it did look pretty good, except Earl stopped and stared
like an idiot when he saw how many people had shown up.
Everybody in Jefferson was there, and so was everybody from Claimson, but five people
showed up from Jump Creek and there were two people he’d never seen before.
The backyard was full of people and about half of them had signs with his name,
EARL, right across the front. There was a little girl holding a big balloon on top
of Walt Lemns’ shoulders, Maxine Carson was selling brittle to people in the
stands, and two kids with ferrets on leashes were in front of the ring kicking the
ferrets into each other so it would look like they were wrestling.
And in the center of it all—covered with the six black tarps Earl and BT laced
together with bright white rope in Friday’s moonlight—was the cage.
On the opposite side of the lawn from where Earl came from, BT ran around a corner
of the house wearing a shimmery black cape and a gold mask. He had on a green sweat
suit with gold trim and his long hair and black moustache made him look like Zorro,
but he called himself “The Mexican Avenger” instead. And after “The
Mexican Avenger” finished his lap around the ring and did some exhibition
pushups for the fans, Buddy hit the throttle on his four-wheeler and the rope behind
it pulled tight and ripped the tarps off the cage.
And beneath the big blue sky the cage sparkled there in the sun like a diamond castle
on TV. And everyone in the crowd took a huge breath at once while Earl and BT looked
one another in the eye. “Destiny,” BT mouthed and Earl mouthed, “What?” so
BT just nodded and Earl nodded back.
Duston Krebs was in the ring along with Joe McCovey cause Duston was going to announce
the match. BT told Earl it would be a good idea since Duston had a huge loud voice
and plus he’d been married to BT’s sister, who was dead. Katie drowned
three years before when she fell out of BT’s boat. And she probably would
have been fine, except she scared up a bunch of ducks when she went over and between
BT and Duston they brought down three of them, only they got into an argument over
who hit what and BT got so mad he kicked the oar handle and the paddle came up out
of the water and caught Katie square in the face.
Duston shouted, “In this corner is big ol’ fat Earl!” and he pointed
to Earl. Duston made up what he was going to say by himself. “And in the other
corner is ‘The Mexican Avenger,’ who is really BT. They is gonna wrestle ‘cause
BT said Earl’s been playing hide the salami with Lacy May Peters.” Duston’s
voice wasn’t really all that loud, BT just said it cause he kind of felt like
he should do something nice for Duston every now and then.
Earl walked to the center of the ring where they listened to the rules from Joe
McCovey and when it was time to shake, Earl held out his hand and closed his eyes
while BT told his joke. “Hot dog, pig-in-a-pog,” BT shouted, and pointed
to Earl’s stomach. “You sure you wanna wrestle pregnant?”
Some folks laughed and some booed, but when Earl got back to his corner, he looked
up and saw four guys from the plant, plus Betty and Linda, standing in a line with
letters painted on their bellies that spelled FUCK BT. And before he even knew what
he was doing, Earl stood up straight, sucked his gut into six square knots of muscle,
and threw up his huge long arms to flex.
The men shouted and held up their beers, the women whistled, and when the bell rang,
Earl and BT came flying out of their corners like crazed bulls. Their moves were
clean, their timing was dead-on, and after a few minutes the crowd was in a rage.
Everyone was screaming and yelling and cheering and booing and when Earl eventually
climbed up to the top of the cage and looked down into the bleachers, everything
just kind of slowed down. Out past the fence he could see out into the valley, even
past the lake, and below him was the whole world. And then all Earl could hear was
the wind, and up that high he started thinking about all the folks he knew, and
dead folks. He was thinking about Aunt Kelly and Uncle Joe, and Cousin Masie, and
his Ma and Pa, and Grandpa Red, and Louise from the diner, and his brother Larry
and up that high with the wind in his ears, Earl thought he was seeing them. Not
really seeing them though, but expecting to see them, like they were right where
you just looked and were about to look but never right where you were looking. He
could feel them though, and they were proud, they liked his shorts, they were telling
him to jump on ol’ BT with everything he had.
And when Earl went flying off that cage, spinning through the air like a lopsided
football, and dropped an elbow just next to BT’s head, the crowd went ape-shit
wild. People were pumping fists and hugging and jumping up and down and kept getting
louder and louder while BT and Earl were lying on the canvas and moaning like they
didn’t have the strength to budge another inch.
“
Goddamn it, Earl,” BT hissed. “Hurry up and pin my ass.”
“
I cain’t move,” Earl said.
“ What?”
Earl’s cheek was smooshed on the mat and he was on his knees so his big can
stuck up in the air. BT looked into Earl’s eyes and his pupils were huge black
holes.
“
Shit . . . ” BT said, and pushed himself onto all fours. “Okay, Earl,
jess relax. You jess got to stay there real calm and I’m gonna go for Doc
Billingsworth. Everything’s gonna be jess fine.”
“
I love Lacy May,” Earl said.
“
I know,” BT said, “and I’m sorry. I cain’t imagine nothin’ worse.”
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