The Web and The Root (9 page)

And yet it was true! These people—son and father both—seemed to have come straight from the heart of immutable and unperturbed
nature. Warmth they had, staunch friendliness, and the capacity for savage passion, ruthless murder. But they had no more terror than a mountain. Nerve they had, steel nerve; but as for the cold anguish of the aching and constricted pulse, the dry, hard ache and tightness of the throat, the hollow numbness of the stomach pit, the dizzy lightness of the head, the feeling of an unreal buoyancy before the moment of attack—they seemed to know no more about these things than if they had been made of oak!

Time after time on days when Mr. Crane was due to wrestle at the City Auditorium, the boy had watched him pass the house. Time after time he had searched the policeman’s square-cut face for signs of anguish or tension to see if the strange, hard features showed any sign of strain, if the square, hard jaw was grimly clenched, the hard eyes worried, if there were any signs of fear, disorder, apprehension in his step, his look, his tone, his movement, or his greeting. There was none. The policeman never varied by a jot. A powerful, somewhat shambling figure of a man, a little under six feet tall, with a thick neck, coarsely seamed and weathered with deep scorings, long arms, big hands, gorillalike shoulders, and a kind of shambling walk, a little baggy at the knees—a figure of an immense but rather worn power—he passed by in his somewhat slouchy uniform, seamed down the trouser-legs with stripes of gold, turned in at his house and mounted the front porch steps, with no more excitement than he would show on any other day of the week. And yet the male population of the whole town would be buzzing with excited speculation on the outcome of the match, and the hearts of boys would thud with apprehensive expectation at the very thought of it.

Later on, when dark had come, a half hour or so before the time scheduled for the match, Mr. Crane would leave his house, bearing underneath his arm a bundle wrapped up in a newspaper, which contained his old wrestling trunks and shoes; and with the same deliberate, even, bag-kneed stride, turn his steps in the direction of the town and the City Auditorium—and, Great God! his approaching and now terribly imminent encounter with the Bone-Crushing Swede, the
Masked Marvel, or the Strangler Turk!

A few minutes later Nebraska would come by Monk’s house and whistle piercingly; the Webber boy would rush out of the house and down the steps still gulping scalding coffee down his aching throat—and then the two of them would be off on their way to town!

What nights they were—the nights of smoke-smell, stillness, and the far-off barking of a dog, a fire of oak leaves at the corner, and the leaping fire-dance of the boys around it—great nights of the approaching contest of the wrestlers, the nights of frost and menace, joy and terror—and October!

Oh, how each step of the way to town was pounded out beneath the rhythm of the pounding heart! How tight the throat, how dry the mouth and lips! How could Nebraska walk on so steadily, and look so cool! Arrived before the Auditorium, and the press of people, the calcium glare of hard white lights, the excited babble of the voices. Then the inside, seats down front in the big, draughty, thrilling-looking place, the great curtain with “Asbestos” written on it, horseplay and loudmouthed banter in the crowd, the shouts of raucous boys, catcalls at length, foot-stamping, imperative hand-clapping, the bare and thrilling anatomy of the roped-in square. At last the handlers, timekeepers, and referees; and last of all—the principals!

Oh, the thrill of it! The anguish and the joy of it—the terror and the threat of it—the dry-skinned, hot-eyed, fever-pounding pulse of it, the nerve-tight, bursting agony of it! In God’s name, how could flesh endure it! And yet—there they were, the
fatal, fated
, soon-to-be-at-bitter-arm’s-length
two
of them—and Mr. Crane as loose as ashes, as cold as a potato, patient as a dray-horse, and as excited as a bale of hay!

But in the other corner—hah, now! hisses, jeers, and catcalls for the likes of you!—the Masked Marvel sits and waits, in all the menaceful address and threat of villainous disguisement. Over his bullet head and squat gorilla-neck a kind of sinister sack of coarse black cloth has been pulled and laced and tied! It is a horrible black mask with baleful eye-slits through which the beady little eyes seem to glitter as hard
and wicked as a rattlesnake’s; the imprint of his flat and brutal features shows behind it, and yet all so weirdly, ominously concealed that he looks more like a hangman than anything else. He looks like some black-masked and evil-hooded thing that does the grim and secret bidding of the Inquisition or the Medici; he looks like him who came in darkness to the Tower for the two young princes; he looks like the Klu Klux Klan; he looks like Jack Ketch with a hood on; he looks like the guillotine where Sidney Carton was the twenty-third; he looks like the Red Death, Robespierre, and The Terror!

As he sits there, bent forward brutishly, his thick, short fingers haired upon the back, an old bathrobe thrown round his brutal shoulders, the crowd hoots him, and the small boys jeer! And yet there is alarmed apprehension in their very hoots and jeers, uneasy whisperings and speculations:

“Good God!” one man is saying in an awed and lowered tone, “look at that neck on him—it’s like a bull!”

“For God’s sake, take a look at those shoulders!” says another, “look at his arms! His wrists are thick as most men’s legs! Look at those arms, Dick; they could choke a bear!”

Or, an awed whisper: “Damn! It looks as if John Crane is in for it!”

All eyes now turn uneasily to Mr. Crane. He sits there in his corner quietly, and a kind of old, worn, patient look is on him. He blinks and squints unconcernedly into the hard glare of the light above the ring, he rubs his big hand reflectively over the bald top of his head, scratches the side of his coarse, seamed neck. Someone shouts a greeting to him from the audience: he looks around with an air of slight surprise, surveys the crowd with eyes as calm and hard as agate, locates the person who has called to him, waves in brief greeting, then leans forward patiently on his knees again.

The referee crawls through the ropes upon the mat, converses learnedly across the ropes but too intimately for hearing with Dr. Ned Revere, compares notes with him, looks very wise and serious, at
length calls the two gladiators, attended by their handlers, bucket carriers, towel swingers, seconds, and sponge throwers, to the center of the mat, admonishes them most earnestly, sends them to their corners—and the bout begins.

The two men go back to their corners, throw their battered bathrobes off their shoulders, limber up a time or two against the ropes, a bell clangs, they turn and face each other and come out.

They come out slowly, arms bear-wise, half extended, the paws outward, circling, crouching, crafty as two cats. Mr. Crane in wrestler’s garb is even looser and more shambling than in uniform; everything about him sags a little, seems to slope downward with a kind of worn, immensely patient, slightly weary power. The big shoulders slope, the great chest muscles sag and slope, the legs sag at the knees, the old full-length wrestler’s trunks are wrinkled and also sag a little; there are big. worn knee-pads for the work down on the mat, and they also have a worn and baggy, kangaroolike look.

Mr. Crane shuffles cautiously about, but the Masked Marvel shifts and circles rapidly; he prances back and forth upon his bulging legs that seem to be made of rubber; he crouches and looks deadly, he feints and leaps in for a hold, which Mr. Crane evades with a shuffling ease. The crowd cheers wildly! The Masked Marvel dives and misses, falls sprawling. Mr. Crane falls on him, gets a hammerlock; the Masked Marvel bridges with his stocky body, squirms out of it, locks Mr. Crane’s thick neck with vicelike power; the big policeman flings his body backward, gets out of it, is thrown to the corner of the ring. The two men come to grips again—the house is mad!

Oh, the thrill of it! The fear and menace of it, the fierce, pulse-pounding joy and terror of it! The two-hour-long grunting, panting, sweating, wheezing, groaning length of it! The exultant jubilation of it when Mr. Crane came out on top; the dull, dead, hopeless misery when Mr. Crane was on the bottom! And above all the inhuman mystery, secrecy, and the sinister disguisement of it all!

What did it matter that the Terrible Turk was really just a muscular
Assyrian from New Bedford, Massachusetts? What did it matter if the Demon Dummy was really a young helper in the roundhouse of the Southern Railway Company? What did it matter if all this sinister array of Bone-Crushing Swedes, Horrible Huns, Desperate Dagoes, and Gorilla Gobs were for the most part derived from the ranks of able-bodied plasterers from Knoxville, Tennessee, robust bakers from Hoboken, ex-house-painters from Hamtramck, Michigan, and retired cow-hands from Wyoming? Finally, what did it matter that this baleful-eyed executioner of a Masked Marvel was really only the young Greek who worked behind the counter at the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents down by the railway depot? What did it matter that this fact was proved one night when the terrible black hood was torn off? It was a shock, of course, to realize that the Bone-Crushing Menace, the very sight of whom struck stark terror to the heart, was just a rather harmless and good-natured Greek who cooked hamburger sandwiches for railway hands. But when all was said and done, the thrill, the threat, the danger were the same!

To a boy of twelve they
were
mysteries, they were Marvels, they were Menaces and Terrors—and the man who dared to meet them was a hero. The man who met them without a flicker of the eye was a man of steel. The man who shambled out and came to grips with them—and heaved and tugged, escaped their toils, or grunted in their clutches for two hours—that man was a man of oak, afraid of nothing, and as enduring as a mountain. That man did not know what fear was—and his son was like him in all ways, and the best and bravest boy in town!

Nebraska Crane and his family were recent-comers to this part of town. Formerly, he had lived out in “the Doubleday Section” perhaps this was one reason why he had no fear.

Doubleday was a part of the town where fellows named Reese and Dock and Ira lived. These were ugly names; the fellows carried knives in their pockets, had deadly, skull-smashing fights with rocks, and grew up to be hoboes, poolroom loafers, pimps and bullies living off a whore. They were big, loutish, hulking bruisers with bleared features,
a loose, blurred smile, and yellowed fingers in which they constantly held the moist fag-end of a cigarette, putting it to their lips from time to time to draw in on it deeply with a hard, twisted mouth and lidded eyes, a general air of hardened and unclean debauchery as they flipped the cigarette away into the gutter. Then they would let the smoke trickle slowly, moistly from their nostrils—as if the great spongy bellows of the lungs was now stained humidly with its yellow taint—and then speak out of the sides of their mouths in hard, low, knowing tones of bored sophistication to their impressed companions.

These were the fellows who grew up and wore cheap-looking, flashy clothes, bright yellow, box-toed shoes, and loud-striped shirts, suggesting somehow an unwholesome blending of gaudy finery and bodily filth. At night and on Sunday afternoons, they hung around the corners of disreputable back streets, prowled furtively about in the dead hours of the night past all the cheap clothing stores, pawn shops, greasy little white-and-negro lunchrooms (with a partition down the middle), the pool rooms, the dingy little whore-hotels—the adepts of South Main Street, the denizens of the whole, grimy, furtive underworld of a small town’s nighttime life.

They were the bruisers, brawlers, cutters, slashers, stabbers, shooters of a small town’s life; they were the pool-room thugs, the runners of blind tigers, the brothel guardians, the kept and pampered bullies of the whores. They were the tough town drivers with the thick red necks and leather leggings, and on Sunday, after a week of brawls, dives, stews, the stale, foul air of nighttime evil in the furtive places, they could be seen racing along the river road, out for a bawdy picnic with their whore. On Sunday afternoon they would drive along as brazen as you please beside the sensual, warm, and entrail-stirring smell, the fresh, half-rotten taint and slowness of the little river, that got in your bowels, heavy, numb, and secret, with a rending lust each time you smelled it. They they would stop at length beside the road, get out, and take their woman up the hill into the bushes for an afternoon of dalliance underneath the laurel leaves, embedded in the
thick green secrecies of a Southern growth that was itself as spermy, humid, hairy with desire, as the white flesh and heavy carnal nakedness of the whore.

These were the boys from Doubleday—the boys named Reese and Dock and Ira—the worst boys in the school. They were always older than the other boys, stayed in the same class several years, never passed their work, grinned with a loutish, jeering grin whenever the teachers upbraided them for indolence, stayed out for days at a time and were finally brought in by the truant officer, got into fist fights with the principal when he tried to whip them, and sometimes hit him in the eye, and at length were given up in despair, kicked out in disgrace when they were big brutes of sixteen or seventeen years, having never got beyond the fourth grade.

These were the boys who taught the foul words to the little boys, told about going to the whore houses, jeered at those who had not gone and said you could not call yourself a man until you had gone and “got yourself a little.” Further, Reese McMurdie, who was sixteen, as big and strong as a man, and the worst boy in the school, said you couldn’t call yourself a man until you’d caught a dose. He said he’d had his first one when he was fourteen years old, boasted that he’d had it several times since then, and said it was no worse than a bad cold. Reese McMurdie had a scar that turned your flesh sick when you looked at it; it ran the whole way from the right-hand corner of his mouth to the corner of his ear. He had got it in a knife-fight with another boy.