Girl in the Arena (7 page)

Remind him constantly of his victories. Keep his heart warm even if you have to set the house on fire
, Bylaw 32.

I don’t know if Allison did that enough. She was kind of burned out by the time she married Tommy. Or she was just too taxed with Thad. I think they hooked up because of her position, the influence she could offer. I don’t know. I think she loved him. Probably more than I understood.

I open my phone now and use it as a flashlight, weak as it is, because Tommy told me you can run into false doors down here, that it’s easy to get lost, that you never know who or what you’ll find. And that thought has my skull pounding. I can feel a patch of sticky blood where I got hit in the back of the head. I remove my T-shirt, wad it up, and hold it there with my free hand.

I want to call Allison but the reception is worthless down here. I begin to take pictures with my phone. Not for the images but for the small pulses of light the phone throws off. I’m draining my batteries for light.

Water is coming off the pipes now, it’s drumming on my shoulders and head, dead water running down my back and chest and arms. That happens when they turn the fire hoses on the crowd in the stadium, so I know what’s going on up there. And I’m feeling sick wondering what they’ve done with Tommy. That’s something I’ve never wanted to know before—what they do with the people who die in the ring. Because we always left right away and the organization took care of all of the arrangements, and all we had to do was make it to the funeral in one piece. Allison has never talked about what happened to them and it’s possible she doesn’t know. But I suddenly feel guilty for not knowing if the caskets of her husbands, my fathers, were sometimes empty or missing parts. Thinking back on the succession of men Allison married, I’m convinced this was true: that there was a lightness to some of their caskets.

What I’m really worried about is that someone will steal Tommy’s hand and try to sell it on eBay, though I don’t know what it will be worth now that Caesar’s Inc. has begun the process of downgrading him.

The noise of the stadium crushes overhead, the vibration drills into my bones. I find a doorknob.

I’ve been in this room before.

A few pieces of stalled-out equipment. Old signs. I take a dozen phone shots, just as things start to settle down overhead.

I know what it’s like in the arena now. My fifth father, Larry, used to watch old news clips of the war in Vietnam. Guys in the jungle, blown to hell, yelling, 
Oh my God, I’ve lost my leg! 
I had to ask him to turn the sound down all the time. I couldn’t take it. 
Help me, somebody help me! 
Maybe he thought if he had us as crazy and grief-stricken as he was some score would even up. Larry knew a lot about chemical compounds. Napalm. He was always trying to figure out some legal way to hide explosives in his Glad weapons but he was taken out before he realized that dream. Tommy was different. He liked a clean weapon, a pure fight, no gimmicks. Maybe Tommy was the only one who made any sense.

Now I know where I am.

I crack the door open and peer into the locker room. There are two lines of benches and the floor is soaked, empty champagne bottles strewn about and the sound of a shower going. The cameras are gone and the paparazzi have disappeared. I remember to turn my phone off. My head still hammers but I’m not bleeding anymore, so I put my bloody shirt back on. If he’s anything like Tommy was after a match, Uber will be in the shower for hours.

It’s weird that no one’s around; typically there are handlers of some sort. I guess it’s possible Uber dresses his own wounds. Some guys do, but not many. Allison did all of Tommy’s until they had a big fight and he asked me to take over, which I didn’t want to do because I knew it would hurt Allison’s feelings. She’s the one who taught me how to stitch, how to wrap, which tinctures to use. Sometimes I feel all I do is hurt her.

I’m about to slip into the main room when two men come into view and I slide back just in time. I recognize the short one in the T-shirt and jogging pants, the thin buzz cut—one of the better trainers in town. —You need a rubdown! he calls into the shower area.

—I have someone coming over to the apartment. That woman who does Thai massage, Uber calls.

—You know I’m happy to stick around, the guy in the suit yells as he adjusts his shades.

—Just make sure the bodyguards stay put for a while! Uber says.

His voice is deep and resonant and full of shower room echo.

—We should be celebrating, the suit says.

I feel nothing but rage, yet I just have to keep my mouth shut.

—Yeah, well, that’s what you guys are for. We’ll talk tomorrow, Uber says.

—I’ve never seen him like that, the suit says in a low voice to his friend.

—It’s tough when you take out your hero, you know? the trainer says just before he opens the main door at the far end of the room. As it widens I hear the paparazzi flame up, so many flashes going, I can’t really see anything except bright and dark shapes. The bodyguards push the crowd back. Slowly, the men make their way into the throng.

And before long, the room is almost quiet again, except for that lone shower thundering the concrete floor. I enter the stale air of the men’s locker room, where I met my fathers a hundred times after their matches.

Uber’s clothes are slopped over a bench. I go through his pockets. There’s an inhaler, a St. Christopher medal, and a small comb. Maybe this is the weakness of the Helmet Wearer? This anxiety that his hair is continually being crushed and deformed so he feels he needs a comb in the arena? The sign of an endlessly vain man?

The shower stops. I hear a loud sigh as if he’s decompressing. Then the sound of metal curtain rings whip along a steel rod. Wet feet slap against the painted floor. He looks awkward as he stoops to walk under an archway, a towel tied at his waist, his hair soaked. Finally he looks up and sees me standing there.

He’s wearing the bracelet.

Most of the Glow has washed off. None of my hatred. He studies me, cinches his towel tighter.

—Yeah? he says.

I’m surprised he doesn’t recognize me. It’s not that I’m famous or anything, but Tommy, at least, always knew about his opponents’ families. Some pictures of me circulate too, a lot more lately.

But Uber does look worn out. Tommy got that look at home sometimes, but then he suffered from bouts of melancholy and I always tried to take that into account and not feel like I had done something wrong. Maybe Allison’s right, that Uber doesn’t have the true gladiator look to his jaw. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy who pumps a lot of iron, someone who always feels a little down on his luck no matter how things go, his hair thinning in front, which could be the constant grating of the helmet. In any case, not the way Tommy used to look after a match, certainly after winning a title match. Tommy had a playfulness after he won a fight that drove Allison insane. He took us out to big dinners afterward, insisted everyone eat steak.

—You’re not allowed in here, Uber says, like he cares but doesn’t care.

I’m a little short on words for my father’s murderer. There should be something I could say to make him realize he’s the most pathetic man on Earth, but I can’t find it just now.

—What do you want me to sign? he asks, softening a little, as if I’ve been waiting for his autograph.

His autograph, his blood, his baby, his life—Uber doesn’t know what I want, and I’m not saying. I know what I want, but it’s like my whole body is iced. My mouth filled with cold.

His sex, his money, his interview, his aura—he doesn’t know.

The cuts on his arms and legs have started to bleed again on his still-damp skin. His wet hair drips down his shoulders, down his chest. Tommy used to look almost weightless after a fight, luminous.

Maybe Uber’s raking his fingers through his hair now to tame it, maybe it’s a nervous thing. Uber isn’t a bad-looking guy, but out of the arena he doesn’t seem very self-possessed.

—Look, I...  he starts to say.

And then it seems like, well, like the way to get this weary soldier is by surprise.

Caging 
happens when a woman rushes into a locker room and throws herself at a gladiator, slamming him for an imprint of his blood. She has to get him when he’s just come out of the arena all pumped and cut up, before his wounds are dressed. Some women imprint the blood on their clothes—that’s called 
shrouding
. One woman got Tommy like that. He had taken a blow to his brow so the blood had poured freely that day. She got a clear impression of his face in the middle of her T-shirt.

Other cagers hit the locker room with nothing on above their waists and if they succeed, if they get enough blood on their bare skin, that’s called 
contracting
. A woman who contracts will go back up to the stadium and get swarmed by cameras. Some women get married in that state, with the blood on their skin, in their hair. Others, if they’re beautiful enough, get modeling contracts, invitations to appear on TV shows. Or they contract some kind of blood disease and die eventually.

But I have all of my clothes on, my T-shirt back in place, and I just FLY at the man. I push through the air like I’m not moving at all. Suspended, really. Then I smack hard against his body, against his chest, his stomach so he’ll think I’m just there to cage him. I guess I hit him twice. Hitting, bouncing off, hitting again. Cars do that in accidents sometimes. They can hit the bumper and then the trunk.

Somehow I get my legs around his waist, one arm around his neck. Twisting around, I try to wedge the bracelet off with my free hand but he makes a fist so I can’t get it off. We stick together because he’s so damp, my skin burns as I try to pull away. My hand around the bracelet, I feel the design etched into the metal. He won’t give it up. He thinks he has some of Tommy’s power now, but what he’s got is my fetish—my worry, my memory, loss—everything you can pour into metal.

His free hand circles my back. Now he’s holding me as much as I’m holding him. Like a ride at a carnival, I’m trying to find the safety release because I’d rather sail into the air than stay on. I start pounding on Uber, pounding against the dumb muscles that won’t unlock. And then I do the stupidest thing. And not because I want to—it’s the last thing I want. But I’m crying.

tommy
.

Tears sheet my face. My insides sting as if there are thin slices cut across my lungs, over my heart, a million small cuts. There are rules against a gladiator’s daughter crying: how, when, where. I’m breaking eleven of those rules. My head could be shaved for this, my tattoos erased—certainly the one with Tommy’s name—I could be exiled to some lowland that floods constantly, a place where the Red Cross never lands. And I just don’t care.

Uber’s body slackens. And then, like he needs to be some kind of rescue man and pull a building off me, he guides me to a seat on one of the benches. I’m hyperventilating. As soon as my breath slows, I push him away.

He goes to his locker and gets out a pair of glasses. His lenses are thick like jar bottoms. His eyes trapped in jars.

—Jesus. You’re Tommy’s girl, he says, seeing me for the first time.

Tommy always said you have to get curious about your opponent if you plan to beat him. So I study the way Uber moves. He brings me a wad of toilet paper to blow my nose. I notice the way he favors his left side when he walks. And when he holds out a cup of water, I see the big thing, that his right arm doesn’t extend fully. Probably a surgery that fell short.

The way his hand shakes holding that cup of water, maybe he thinks I’m fragile or delicate. And that thought makes me laugh. I laugh so hard I drop the cup. It hits the lip of the bench and the water soaks his legs.

—Don’t worry about it, he says, and sits down on the opposite bench about three feet away. He leans in toward me. And I wonder if that’s tenderness to a guy like him. He looks like he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. There’s something almost clumsy about him, really. He’s busy trying to keep his towel in place, adjusting it carefully. I see his ears redden. He has earlobes like Tommy has—like Tommy had—the unattached kind. But one of them is split in two. I guess someone yanked an earring out once.

We both consider the blood on my T-shirt. He gets up and walks around behind me to see the back of my head, though I don’t make it easy the way I keep turning to make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy.

—I could do something with that if you’d let me, he says, indicating the gash.

—I’m okay.

I notice that his second toes are longer than his big toes, and my grandmother, my mother’s mother, told me that’s a sign of stupidity. He has young feet, not callused or corned, but I finally take another look at the thing I’ve been trying to avoid, my bracelet. I point as if I’ve forgotten how to speak. His wrist is pretty raw from my work.

He says, —Listen, I know this won’t help to hear, but...

I cover my ears.

He stops.

I take my hands down.

—It’s just that Tommy, I worshipped...

I cover my ears again.

He stops.

Sometimes I think I’ve inherited the silence of gladiators because I can do silence for hours if I have to, though there are people I could talk with all night—it was like that with Tommy sometimes.

I finally say, —I don’t care what you thought about Tommy. But the bracelet, that’s... my family’s.

—I’m sorry. I should never have...

He slides the bracelet off and holds it up to the fluorescent lights for a moment, like he’s got possession of something otherworldly and he’s trying to memorize all of its features before it shape-shifts. He starts to turn it around, to read the inscription.

—
I change, but I cannot die
, he says, repeating the words.

He puts it back on.

—They said—the officials said—since it belonged to my opponent, I’m required to keep it on, at least through my next title match. It has to do with some new rule. The thing is, if I don’t, one guy said, they might add another year to my contract. As soon as I can take it off, I’ll be relieved to give it back to your family.