Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Hal had, in fact, heard of the show, as had nearly everyone in the country. Go Fish! was a phenomenon in the television industry, an incredibly corny game show featuring a hillbilly theme, impossibly difficult questions, and cruel stunts designed to humiliate the contestants who failed to answer correctly.

  The stunts were clearly the highlight of the show and the reason for its runaway success. From its beginnings as a local program in Birmingham, Alabama, TV audiences were entranced by the sight of middle-aged women and game old gentlemen wrestling with rubber cows or wading through vats of mud as punishment for failing to name the major weaknesses of the Weimar Republic. As the show went national, the stunts became more varied, although no less sadistic, and its regional host was replaced by a slick game show veteran carefully dressed and made up to look like a mountain man.

  The mishmash of elements in the show was weird but mesmerizing, and the fact that Go Fish! was broadcast live gave it an edge that shot it to the top of the daytime ratings almost immediately. Now, two years after its nationwide debut, it was already in syndication, and taped repeats of the show were aired several times a day.

  Hal could not have avoided seeing it if he'd tried. At 12:30 p.m., every television in every saloon in Manhattan was tuned to Go Fish! And now, he thought with a sigh, his degenerate ways had finally reduced him to sitting through an actual segment. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  Seconds later, he was awakened by the din of strummed banjos blaring over the loudspeakers to usher in the show's host, a toothy urbanite named Joe Starr whose manner was completely at odds with the overalls and tattered straw hat he was wearing. Despite the fact that audiences had watched him for years on a number of other shows, Starr affected a southern drawl while he explained the rules of the game.

  Participants, he twanged, were selected from the audience at random, their seat numbers having been placed in a device known as the Rain Barrel at the center of the stage. When their numbers were called, contestants were given the chance to win fabulous prizes by answering "some itty bitty questions ever'body ought to know." The audience laughed.

  "And if you don't answer 'em right, why then . . ." Joe Starr shrugged elaborately as the banjo music was replaced by the sound of chickens squawking. "You know what that means, folks."

  A dummy dressed in a man's suit flew across the stage behind Starr. The chicken squawks were drowned out by the sound of water splashing as the dummy landed offstage. The audience cheered. Starr pretended to wipe something out of his eye.

  None of the first three contestants answered even one question correctly and were smeared immediately with cream pies, forced to chase a pig through a vat of gelatin, and dunk one another in tubs of grapes in a quest for a brand new frost-free refrigerator and fifty square feet of parquet flooring.

  Hal settled back into his seat and folded his arms over his chest as he felt himself drifting. At least the music had stopped, and in his condition, the audience noise didn't disturb him much.

  "Doesn't look like we got too many geniuses in the audience today," Joe Starr said, shaking his head as if it were perched on the end of a spring.

  "Well, let's find a new contestant in the Rain Barrel, okey-dokey?"

  Hal half-heard the applause from the audience and the wobbling of some mechanical device onstage. He could smell himself, a combination of stale liquor and ancient sweat. His head felt as if bombs were exploding inside it. His hair, he thought briefly, hadn't been cut—or combed, for that matter—in weeks. His breath felt as if it were about to ignite.

  "Two fifty-one!"

  Benny's. That was where he would spend the evening. A few quiet hours, maybe watch the Mets on TV. No women. It was always too rough the morning after when a woman was involved.

  "Seat number two fifty-one?"

  Soskapolis owed him. That's the attitude. Hey, Dimitri, you rich Greek bastard!

  A hand touched his shoulder. He opened one red eye. A gorgeous redhead in a Daisy Mae push-up halter and a miniscule pair of denim shorts beamed at him.

  "Your seat number's been called, sir," she said through her immovable smile.

  "What?"

  "Here he is!" the redhead shouted cheerily, waving and bouncing up and down.

  Hal followed the movement of her bosom with interest. In another moment, an equally ravishing blonde was also in the aisle beside him.

  "No, no thanks," he said.

  They ignored him, pulling and prodding him with the expertise of downtown bouncers until he was on his feet.

  "Come on down!" Joe Starr called out. The audience applauded. A thousand banjos strummed.

  "Shit," Hall muttered. As if his life weren't bad enough, he was now about to be terrorized on national television.

  Onstage, Joe Starr clapped him on the back. "Howdy, pardner," he roared into Hal's ear. "What's your name?"

  "Woczniak," Hal said.

  "Whoa, Nellie. How's about a name old Joe can say?"

  "Hal," Hal said.

  "Now that's better. Where you from, Hal?"

  "West Side."

  "Oh, a real New Yorker, eh?"

  "'S'right."

  "I see we got a man of few words here," Joe Starr said. "Ready to play Go Fish!?"

  "I'd rather go back to my seat."

  Joe Starr led the audience in laughter. "This man looks like he's had a heck of a rough night, ladies and gentlemen." His head waggled precariously. "Okay, Hal, I don't want to get you riled up. Know how to play the game? A hundred dollars for every kee-rect answer. Five kee-rect answers, and you win the Grand Prize. And just what is that Grand Prize, you may ask?"

  At that moment, accompanied by "oohs" from the audience, a curtain opened to reveal a giant blow-up of Big Ben atop St. Stephen's Cathedral.

  "A fabulous two-week, all-expenses-paid trip to London!" Starr boomed. "How's that sound, Hal?"

  "Okay." He picked some mucus out of his eye.

  "I can tell you're all excited."

  "Yeah." Let's get this over with, he thought.

  "Think you can answer all five questions?"

  "Dunno."

  "If you can't, you're going to be doing some fancy stepping up here, you know that?"

  "Uh."

  "Want to check and see if your heart's still beating, Hal?"

  Laughter from the audience.

  "He's going to wake up any minute, folks."

  More laughter.

  "Can we get on with this?" Hal said.

  "He's alive!"

  Applause.

  "Okay, Hal, you're a good sport. Ready for the first question?"

  "I guess so."

  "Okay, then." Starr held up his hands as if conducting an orchestra.

  "Go Fish!" the audience shouted in unison as the two beautiful girls who had forced him out of his seat jiggled onstage. They were pushing what looked like a well. It was made of styrofoam and painted to resemble weathered wood, with the words "Ole Fishing Hole" scrawled across the front in antic letters. Inside was a wire mesh basket half-filled with little pastel plastic fish.

  Joe Starr handed Hal a fishing pole of sorts. On the handle was a lever that manipulated a clip at the end of a long steel tube which served as the line. "Now you just dip that in the Ole Fishing Hole wherever you want, Hal, and pull us up a fish. Got that?"

  Obediently, Hal extracted a pink fish. Joe Starr plucked it off the clip and opened it to reveal a small white envelope.

  "Here's the question, folks," he said as he pulled a card out of the envelope. He read it silently, then laughed and placed an apologetic hand on Hal's shoulder. "Now, before I do this, I just want you to know I don't write these, okay?"

  More audience laughter.

  "You ready, Hal?"

  "Yeah, yeah," Hal said wearily. "Go ahead." Unconsciously he squeezed his eyes shut in a grimace.

  Starr cleared his throat, then read: "According to Malory, who was the legendary knight of the Round Table who actually found the Holy Grail and died with it
in his possession?" He shook his head as if he were the clapper in a bell. "Well, I got to say that ain't something you read in the National Enquirer every day. Want me to repeat the question?"

  "Re . . . no," Hal said, his voice hoarse with wonder. Weird as it was, he knew the answer to the question. "Galahad."

  "Galahad is kee-rect!" Joe Starr shouted, slapping Hal on the back.

  Banjo music swelled to an ear-splitting level. The two buxom women ran onstage to kiss Hal. The audience cheered.

  "Now, how the Sam Hill did you know that, Hal?" Starr asked as the music died down.

  Hal shrugged.

  "Well, you just won yourself a hundred bucks, old buddy." He slapped a bill into Hal's hand.

  It was not a real hundred dollar bill. It was a certificate with a form on the reverse side. "Balls," Hal said, but his comment was drowned out by a new surge of music.

  "Well, that's all the time we got today, folks. Hal's going to be back tomorrow, though, so you make sure you're on hand to watch him . . ."

  "Go Fish!" the audience shouted.

  Joe Starr waved to the camera.

  "What do you mean, I'll be back tomorrow?" Hal asked crankily.

  "You want the hundred, don't you?" Starr said from the side of his mouth, still grinning and waving.

  "Yeah."

  The camera's red light went off.

  "You don't get the money till your run is over," Starr said without a trace of southern accent.

  He walked into the wings. Hal followed him.

  "How long's that going to take?"

  Starr turned to face him. "Tomorrow. Count on it. And for God's sake, take a shower." He jerked his thumb at a young man wearing a ponytail. "Tell our contestant the rules about coming on for a second day."

  The young man sniffed. "Got to change your shirt," he said.

  "All right, all right," Hal said. As he left the studio theater, someone handed him a paper bag. It contained a chicken sandwich with a strip of wilted lettuce and a plastic cup half-filled with Hawaiian Punch.

  "Enjoy," the security guard said.

  Hal ate his lunch on a bench in Rockefeller Center, reliving his small triumph. Who would ever have thought that jerk would ask him about the Knights of the Round Table?

  He almost laughed aloud. They had been his first love. Ever since two broken legs in the fourth grade had forced Hal to read for pleasure, his alternate universe had been populated by the likes of Sir Launcelot and Gawain the Green Knight and young Perceval. They had become like friends to him, and more. They were the men who raised him, with their code of Chivalry, their ideals of courage and faith.

  Hal's mother had died in the accident that broke his legs. A hit-and-run up on East 115th Street. She was spending the food money to see some fortune-teller in Spanish Harlem and had dragged Hal along, despite his protests.

  "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you she'd see that halo thing over your head, same as me?" she had asked him after they left.

  "Jeez, Ma," Hal whispered, blushing horribly as two pretty girls chattering in Spanish passed them crossing the street.

  His mother had laughed and swung her beefy arm around his neck, further mortifying him. "I seen it since you was a baby, Harold, and I always knew it was magic. Your life's going to be something special, believe me."

  "Will you cut it out?" He wriggled away from her grasp. "She's a phony, Ma. She tells that to everybody. That's how she gets you to give her money."

  "What do you know? You don't know nothing." She swatted him. “You're going to grow up to be President. Or a millionaire. Something. I seen it since you was a—"

  "Ma!"

  But the car was already careening toward them by then, moving too fast for either of them to get out of the way. Hal took a glancing blow that broke his legs, but his mother was hit straight on. Hal screamed as he watched her limp body, stuffed into its heavy black coat, fly in an arc to the other side of the street.

  The driver slowed down momentarily, then sped off again. He was never identified.

  Hal had spent most of his time alone in the Inwood walk-up he called home during the months that followed, while his father, known as Iron Mike to his cronies, spent his evenings getting into fistfights in neighborhood dives.

  Mike Woczniak wasn't a bad sort, Hal would begrudgingly admit years later. Sometimes, when he remembered, he’d brought home hot dogs for the boy, or a cheese sandwich, or a six-pack of soda. And on good days, when he wasn't snarling with a hangover, he sometimes took Hal with him by taxi to the garage where he worked. Weighted down by the double casts, Hal would sit on a couple of crates stacked together and watch as Iron Mike worked on a car's engine with the grace and precision of a surgeon, explaining as he went the intricacies of the internal combustion engine.

  If Hal hadn't graduated from high school, if he hadn't gone to CCNY or joined the Bureau, if he hadn't accomplished any of the things that had so astonished and pleased his cabbage-eating relatives, he would probably have made a first-rate mechanic. As it was, Hal's skill with cars was currently the only thing that stood between him and starvation.

  But the best things to come from the bleak months after his mother's funeral were the books. The first was T. H. White's The Once and Future King, dropped off by the school librarian. At first Hal had groaned at the size of the volume, but as the long days wore on and the images on the fuzzy black-and-white television in the apartment grew less and less visible, he began to read.

  It was a revelation. Here was a world of honor, of magic, of mystery and truth and bravery, and it had been real. From the first page, Hal had believed in Merlin's outlandish wizardry and young Arthur's special destiny to unite the world.

  In time, of course, he dismissed the more far-fetched legends, but he never lost his interest in the castles and heraldry of the Middle Ages and the feudal system which had saved Europe from chaos after the retreat of the occupying Romans. And he had continued reading about the knights of the Round Table long after other boys his age had turned their attention elsewhere. Gawain and Gaheris, Lucan and Bohort and Lionel, Tristam the lover, and Launcelot, the noblest and, in the end, most human of them all . . . These were the men who had shaped his life, and they never stopped being real to him. I make thee a knight; be valiant, knight, and true!

  Even now he remembered the words of the initiation ceremony that had so entranced him when he read them in his youth. To have grown up during those times! To have fought with the great men whom history had made into legend!

  Hal smiled. How ironic that the Ole Rain Barrel had coughed up the one question he'd been qualified to answer.

  "Be valiant, knight, and true," he said aloud.

  "What, mister?"

  A young boy stopped in mid-sprint in front of him.

  "Nothing." Hal took another bite of his sandwich.

  "Hey, watch me." Instantly, with the unselfconscious arrogance which only five-year-olds possess, the boy turned a somersault on the concrete walkway.

  Hal applauded as the boy thrust his arms skyward, a blob of chewing gum stuck to his hair.

  "Tyler! Tyler, come here this minute!" A young mother rushed up to the boy, brushed him off mercilessly, then wrenched him away, scolding loudly. "Don't you ever do that again, you hear me? You could have fallen into the ice-skating rink. And I've told you a million times not to talk to strangers."

  "But he was—"

  "He was a dirty man, that's what he was. It only takes a minute, Tyler . . ."

  Her voice faded away into the crowd.

  Hal finished his sandwich. Well, she's right, isn't she?

  Valiant and true . . . They were nothing more than words, read long ago by a boy who had never become a knight.

  He was just a dirty man now.

  He crushed the sandwich's cellophane wrapper into a ball and tossed it on the ground.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  "What was the medieval English name for Scotland?"

  "Albania," Hal said.

 
; Joe Starr did a double take. He looked back at the card in his hand. "You're right." He held the card up to the audience and shrugged. "He's right, folks."

  Wild banjo music played. Daisy and Mae, as Hal had come to think of the two generously endowed hostesses of Go Fish! slinked onstage to embrace him. The audience cheered, although not so loudly as before. They had come to watch zany sight gags, not an intellectual question-and-answer show. Joe Starr shot Hal a wary look out of the corner of his eye.

  After the noise quieted, Starr pointed Hal to the Ole Fishing Hole again.

  "Let's try this one," he said.

  "Go Fish!" the audience chanted obediently.

  After Hal went through the motions of retrieving an envelope from the styrofoam well, Joe Starr opened it and frowned momentarily before resuming his Amos McCoy persona for the camera.

  "Well, I'll be dipped," he drawled. "Looks like another question on medieval English history."

  "Great," Hal said.

  There was a mild rustle from the audience.

  "Now, I got to tell you, folks, this is one heck of a coincidence, and I ain't lying. We got questions in the Ole Fishing Hole about everything under the sun, believe me, and for the same category to come up three times in a row . . ."He looked offstage at his producer. "Well, it just goes to show that lightning sometimes strikes twice. Up where I come from, we got the stills to prove it."

  The producer waved him on. "Okay, Hal, old buddy. Here's the question: Before the Black Plague that devastated Europe appeared, there was another epidemic that raged through Britain. What was it?"

  A loud clock began ticking.

  "The Yellow Plague," Hal said.

  Joe Starr signaled for the clock to stop. "What's that, Hal?"

  "The Yellow Plague."

  "By gum, that's it!"

  "It came from Persia . . ." Hal began, but the raucous banjo music drowned him out.

  "Be right back after a word from our sponsors," Joe shouted, extending his hand to Hal.

  He dropped it as soon as the red light on the camera went out. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.

  "Hey, it's your show," Hal said. "You ask me the questions, I answer them."