How Angel Peterson Got His Name (8 page)

Then he would get a bottle of Coca-Cola, which his trainer would open and hold up to his mouth. Bruno would drain it and emit a huge belch before getting ready for the next farm boy.

Of course we were too cool to try wrestling the bear. Or too chicken. It amounts to the same thing. We would watch and cheer the bear and
tease the farm workers—although not excessively, considering how strong they looked—but we didn't really think of climbing into the Circle of Death.

One day we were watching the bear wrestle, and laughing, and when I happened to glance at Orvis I saw a strange look come into his eye. It was very similar to the look Carl had after viewing the newsreel about breaking the speed record on skis.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded. “I'm fine, why?”

“You looked at the bear kind of funny….”

“Not the bear so much as the sign. Did you see that sign?”

“What about it?” “It doesn't say anything about actually beating the bear at wrestling. It just says you have to stay in the ring with him for one minute.”

“Orvis …”

“I think if you just hung on to the bear—”

“Orvis, that's a bear. A real bear. One minute is
a long time. There's farm boys here who could pinch your head like a pimple and they can't stay in there with Bruno.”

“Loan me a quarter. I'll pay you back when I get the twenty-five dollars.”

All right, I know what you're thinking; that twenty-five cents was a lot of money to waste, that Orvis wouldn't make a good bicep on those farm boys, let alone be a problem for a bear. But, remember, I still had that scientific curiosity and I was starting to wonder just what
would
happen if Orvis took a try at the bear.

So I gave him a quarter.

And he stepped into the ring and took the stance with the bear.

Orvis came out of the ring a little faster than he went in—of course the bear tossed him out— but he got up and dusted his pants off. I said a permanent goodbye to my quarter and had started to walk away when I heard soft giggling and looked up to see Elaine, Eileen and Margaret watching Orvis and laughing. I thought, Oh no, and turned
to pull him away. Too late. Orvis had seen the girls.

“Give me another quarter.”

“Orvis …”

“Now.”

“I don't think it's a good idea.”

“
Now!
”

It was as if I weren't there. It was just Orvis and the girls.

And, oh yeah, the bear. Let's not forget the bear.

I talked to the trainer later while we were bandaging Orvis. The trainer was a nice guy, and so was the bear, who really did love to wrestle. “But he has his pride, too,” the trainer told me. “Bruno has his pride.” The thing is, the bear had trained himself after countless contests to match the strength of his opponent; he would kindly feel the other person out, then just apply enough extra strength to win the match.

But he hated it if they came back a second time. “It's like they don't believe him,” the trainer said. “Like he was being nice and they didn't be-
lieve it, so when they come back he makes it a little worse for them.”

That would begin to describe what happened to Orvis: The bear made it worse for him.

I still do not believe you can do those things to a human body without breaking it.

Orvis took the stance, the bear took the stance, the handler pocketed his quarter and looked at Orvis and asked, “Are you ready?”

Orvis nodded, the trainer said, “Go!” and the fight was on.

Well, it wasn't a fight so much as Orvis just trying to stay alive. Initially the bear decided to make it just a little worse, and with one paw on Orvis's shoulder he used the other paw at Orvis's stomach to bend him in the middle, pound his butt down to the ground, fold him over like he was folding a piece of paper and slam Orvis's face down between his own knees on the canvas so hard I saw snot fly out of Orvis's nose. Whereupon the bear held him flat that way and calmly used his other paw to scoot Orvis out of the ring under the bottom rope. Kind of like a big hockey puck with legs.

Except that Orvis didn't go.

As the bear tried to push him out Orvis grabbed a back leg and held on. (“I looked up and through the haze I saw the girls watching,” he told me later.) This new tactic surprised the bear and he danced back into the center of the ring.

Dragging Orvis back with him. Which could be a good thing, as Orvis thought much, much later. Or a very, very bad thing, as Orvis thought at the moment.

He was still in the ring and I heard somebody say, “The kid's made twenty seconds.”

For a beat—actually it was three seconds; I had started counting, thinking I might somehow get my quarters back—the bear looked down, as if studying him, at Orvis hanging on to his back leg.

Then the bear bent down and, using both paws, picked Orvis up, fashioned him into something like a ball and shot-putted him out of the ring.

Or tried to.

Just as Orvis was leaving the bear's paws his
hand reached back and grabbed a chunk of fur on the bear's shoulder and hung on. Orvis swung up and over in a tight arc and landed on top of the bear's head.

Big mistake, I thought.

“Thirty-five seconds,” the same man yelled, and then they all began chanting, “Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight …” And I looked over and saw that the girls weren't giggling any longer, and they were counting too. “… Thirty-nine, forty …”

For the bear, having Orvis land on his head was the last straw, and what followed were the longest twenty seconds in Orvis's life.

The bear bundled Orvis into a ball and virtually dribbled him around the ring, batting him back and forth, flipping him in the air like a toy, catching him, dropping him to the ground and flipping him up again, at one point sitting on him while he braided Orvis's legs together. Orvis wouldn't admit it later but I swore that, girls or no girls, at one point he tried to crawl out of the ring.

But the bear dragged him back and kept working on him until finally the trainer, pulling on the leash, got him off Orvis and the man next to me yelled, “He made it! Give the kid twenty-five dollars!” and we were all cheering and the girls were jumping up and down and waving and even Bruno looked happy as the trainer gave him a Coke.

The trainer and I pulled Orvis onto a stool in the corner and wiped the dust out of his eyes and the trainer gave him a towel to use to clean himself up a little. Orvis looked as if he'd been pulled through a knothole backward. Then the trainer got out some bandages and we started covering the scrapes and minor cuts from hitting various things around the ring, like the floor, and the corner posts, and the floor, and again the floor. Then the trainer gave Orvis two tens and a five and right then the girls came up to him.

“That was great—you were great!” they said, surrounding him, and they smiled and laughed and they were laughing with and not at him but it didn't matter. He didn't say a word, couldn't say a
word, and they walked off shaking their heads and Bruno, I swear, put out a paw and gently ruffled the hair on Orvis's head.

“Nice girls,” the trainer said, but Orvis was just staring down at the floor, his head wobbling only a little as he tried to focus on his feet. Then he looked up at me and in a plaintive little puppy dog voice he asked:

“Wasn't I wearing shoes when we came?”

We had to make our own skateboards.

I know that sounds ridiculous but there was no such thing then.

We took a three-foot-long piece of two-by-six board, hopefully with no knot in the middle because—as Wayne found out when he tried a small jump at near-terminal velocity—the board will break where the knot is if you come down on it hard. We nailed skate wheels at each end with roofing nails. Roller skates were these god-awful four-wheeled metal monster things that you clamped to your shoes with a wrench called a
skate key—a lot of fun if you were wearing tennis shoes, or, as we called them then, PF Flyers, the brand name. There were wonderful cartoon ads in comic books and
Boys' Life
magazine about how a boy could run fast and do heroic things, like warn people of a flood or run to save a train by telling the engineer the bridge was out, and all because he was wearing PF Flyers.

The skates had miserable bearings that filled with sand very fast and the only good thing about them was that they came apart easily and had little holes where you could drive the roofing nails into the wood.

And so, a skateboard.

At first we tried to nail a box to one end and make a kind of scooter, but that almost always blew up in our faces when we'd hit a bump and wind up wearing the box over our heads.

Now, it's one thing to have a skateboard—it's something else to have a place to use it. This is obviously still a problem, judging by the numbers of boys destroying their groins on handrails. Back
then there was no such thing as a skateboard park, there were no malls with large parking lots, and sidewalks were full of people and were badly cracked and broken from frost heaves anyway. That left just one place.

The streets.

We spent most of our time in the summer skateboarding in traffic, or hopefully in and
out
of traffic, and that led to what we called hitching.

There we were on the boards, and cars were going by, and it was just a matter of time before one of us grabbed on to one of the car bumpers and hitched a ride.

We thought we were being clever but it's difficult to describe just how stupid this was; the cars weighed about a ton, we weighed about a hundred pounds, the cars were made of steel, we were made of flesh—or, as Alan said, dumb meat—the cars couldn't feel pain, we could, the cars could go fast….

And we wanted to go fast. We would grab bumpers and crouch down so the drivers couldn't
see us, because there were no outside mirrors then on cars, and most trunks humped up and blocked any view of the back end of the car from the rearview mirror inside. We'd ride a block, then two—sometimes four or five blocks across our small town.

And if one guy went two blocks, naturally somebody else had to do three, or five, or seven….

Which is how Wayne came to establish the distance record for skateboarding.

Well, there came a Saturday morning in August when the sun was hot and the sky was clear and blue and Orvis pulled a classic double right in front of us. We were standing on a corner, our scabby boards hanging at our sides, when Orvis jumped out, caught a Hudson (a favorite car because it had a huge humped trunk and tiny rear window), hitched half a block while we watched, let go of the Hudson and, still coasting in a crouch, caught a '51 Buick coming back toward us and wheeled to a standing stop right in front of us—an absolutely perfect double hitch.

“Big deal,” Wayne said. He was still smarting over the fact that Orvis had won twenty-five dollars with the bear, and Wayne needed money because he wanted to buy a new bow before bow-hunting deer season. “Watch this.”

And he picked a car going by, crouched down, and grabbed on. We watched him leave, heading into the distance. We were on the edge of town and in moments he was out of sight, moving down the highway and around a curve into the country.

We waited, and waited, and finally we hitched back into town and went to the drugstore to have Coke glasses filled with ice cream covered with chocolate sauce and peanuts which were called, I swear, Little Dicks. There was a sign that we could not look at without smiling that read:

Then we hitched back out to the edge of town by Black Hill. They had recently asphalted the hill
road for about an eighth of a mile and we were learning to kind of lie back on our boards and race each other down the hill. It was a crude attempt at what would later be called luge racing and would have been a lot of fun except that at the bottom of the hill the road was coarse gravel and at high speed it was like running into a giant electric belt sander.

We had been there an hour or so and were comparing road rashes when Wayne appeared at the top of the hill and whipped down into the gravel next to us.

“I went to Hutchinson,” he said, “and back.”

Hutchinson was a town seven miles away. He had only been gone two hours or so.

“There's no way,” Alan said, “that you could have hitched the distance to Hutchinson and back in two hours.”

“Yeah, really. I took the car you saw me with all the way over and hung around and had a Coke and then caught a chicken truck back. Here, smell my arm.”

He
did
smell like chicken manure, but even so, fourteen miles down a highway on a skate-board …

I figured he hitchhiked back and caught a ride on a chicken truck. Orvis thought he just went a little way out of town and then hitchhiked back.

But somebody on the sidewalk in Hutchinson had taken a picture of him catching the back end of the chicken truck. In the background is a perfectly clear picture of Hutchinson Hardware.

And because Wayne has the worst luck in the world and fame always has a price, the picture appeared on the front page of the Hutchinson
Clarion
under the headline: