Disappearing Acts

by Byars, Betsy

  “I am! I was! Look at my hair!”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s frizzling, Dad. This is the most my hair has ever frizzled in its life!”

  Her father glanced at her and U-turned the car. “Where are we going?”

  “Back to Funny Bonz.”

  “You think Meat’s there?”

  “My hair thinks so.”

  “Herculeah—”

  “And I do, too.”

  21

  A STAB IN THE DARK

  Meat staggered back and found himself against a wall. He was at the end of the hall. There was a door behind him. He fumbled for the knob. Locked.

  Meat was trapped.

  He held his trembling hands out in front of him to ward off the thrust of the knife. The thrust would be to the heart, and he had always cared about his heart. It was the one thing that really worried him about being big—straining his heart. And now...

  He got ready to struggle. Sure she had a knife, but he had—had what? Hands. In that split second before the stabbing, he decided it would be better to grab the knife in his hand. The hand could heal quicker than the heart. He groped for the knife, but now she was deliberately taking it out of reach.

  Her arms went around him. She pulled him away from the wall. She was going for the back! She was going to stab him in the back! You could get to the heart from either side! That was why the heart was so vulnerable!

  It was hopeless. And then, awaiting death, he felt something so unexpected he would have screamed if he could have.

  Her arms moved up and went around his neck. What was she doing? Going for the back of the neck? Was she going to choke him?

  He felt a body pressed against his. He felt cups size WOW being pressed against his chest, causing him, even in his moment of acute distress, almost to say the cup size aloud.

  Then he heard the most welcome sound of his life—the clunk of something metal being dropped to the floor. He felt wetness on his neck. Tears? Could those be tears? Blood? Could she have stabbed him and he didn’t feel the pain? Was he too far gone to—

  “I didn’t mean to do it.” It was Marcie who was crying. Those were her tears. “I didn’t mean to. You’ve got to believe that.”

  “I do. I do.”

  Meat’s hands felt stupid just sticking out in the air, trembling. He rested them on her back. She was fat, but not so fat that it was unpleasant to hold her.

  “I hadn’t planned it. I was just standing there with my purse on my shoulder and tears rolling down my face.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Bennie was still looking in the mirror over the basin after he said that word, ‘Anymore?’ I can still hear how terrible it sounded. And then I said, ‘You never did care about me?’ And he said, as if he were doing me a big favor, ‘Oh, at first, maybe. You were funny. You never gave a thought to your size.’

  “I said, ‘Now it’s all I think about.’

  “And then he smiled. It was kind of a nasty smile. The smile he uses on hecklers. ‘Well, in case you forget,’ he said, ‘there’s always my routine to remind you.’ And he started into his routine. His routine! ‘My girlfriend Mullet the Gullet is so fat, she—’

  “And something came over me and I took off my purse—it had a real long chain—and I slung the chain over his head and around his neck and pulled. I just wanted to shut him up. I had to shut him up. And—and I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

  “That happens,” Meat said. “That happens.”

  “He just fell down, and then I heard you coming and pulled him into the stall and hid in the next one. It’s just that I—like—realized what this man had done to me. I had been this happy person who liked myself and my size. I liked everything about myself, even the way I didn’t have to have all my clothes folded up in neat little piles in drawers and didn’t have to have my meals at exact times. And he had changed me. He had turned me into somebody different, somebody I didn’t even like, and I wasn’t sure I could change back.”

  Meat’s trembling hands patted her back.

  “You can. You can.”

  She sighed. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have hurt you. You’ve been really nice to me. You actually seem to understand how it is.”

  “I do. I do.”

  It sounded almost like a marriage vow. Meat was discovering that if you said something twice it sounded profound, even if the sentences themselves were quite simple.

  He was just getting ready to continue on the roll with a couple of there, theres when the side door to Funny Bonz burst open.

  Meat looked up, startled. Herculeah’s father rushed into the hall, his hand under his jacket on his gun. Meat’s arms tightened protectively around Marcie Mullet.

  Then he saw Herculeah. She was right behind her father.

  Together they stared at him. Herculeah’s gray eyes were thundercloud-dark and wild.

  Meat barely had time to whisper two sentences, different this time, to the sobbing girl in his arms. Maybe they wouldn’t comfort Marcie Mullet, but they sure sounded good to him.

  “I really do understand. Once I was fat, too.”

  22

  MACHO MAN

  “So you have something to tell me,” Meat said.

  Herculeah sat across the table from him. The pictures of Meat and his dad were in a pile on the table, facedown. She had practiced her introduction to the pictures many times.

  Now she surprised herself by saying, “I cannot believe that I was so, so worried about you—my hair was actually frizzling—and there you were hugging some woman.”

  “I can hug women if I want to.” Despite the unpleasantness of the situation, the actual hug had been sort of enjoyable.

  “And a cold-blooded killer at that.”

  “She may be a killer, but she certainly is not cold-blooded.”

  His voice had the ring of authority.

  “Well, you ought to know,” Herculeah said, pretending interest in the pictures.

  “Is that what you called me over here for,” Meat asked, “to discuss my hugging women?”

  “No.”

  Meat could tell from her expression that it was something more serious than that. The episode with Marcie Mullet, though momentarily exciting, had left him with the feeling he’d had enough serious things to last a lifetime. This, then, was the bad news she had been putting off for so long.

  Herculeah turned over some pictures from the pile in front of her. “Meat, do you remember my getting that camera from Hidden Treasures?”

  “Yes, but—” He groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re going to show me pictures of myself. Herculeah, at this moment in my life, I’m just not up to it.”

  “Meat, these are pictures of you when you were probably three or four years old.”

  “What?”

  “The camera came from your house, Meat. Your mother took the camera, along with a lot of other stuff, to Hidden Treasures. She didn’t check to see if there was film inside, but there was.”

  He looked at the snapshots in Herculeah’s hand. “Pictures of me?”

  “Of you and your father.”

  The hand he held out was not completely steady. “My father?”

  He took the pictures and spread them out in front of him. He peered down at the faces. He recognized his own—it hadn’t changed that much—but his father’s face... He didn’t recognize that at all. He bent closer.

  She said, “Meat.” A more serious tone this time. He looked up. There were more snapshots in her hands.

  “There’s more?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited. His throat was dry.

  “Meat,” she said quietly. She had practiced this part. “Meat, your father is a professional wrestler. He’s known as Macho Man.”

  She kept her eyes on the pictures as she laid them out on the table, because she couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on Meat’s face.

  She knew that he had at one time imagined his father as the conductor of a symphon
y orchestra, at another time as a great writer, a poet. And here he was in black leather with boots that laced to his knees and a black tattoo on each shoulder.

  Meat drew the pictures closer. He slid aside those of him with his father to make room. He glanced at them one by one with an intensity that seemed to make all the goings-on in his body grind to halt. He wasn’t even breathing.

  “I’m sorry, Meat,” she said, real regret in her voice, “but you had to know.”

  “Sorry?” He looked at her in amazement. “Sorry?” His eyes shone.

  He glanced down. Here spread out before him was the father of his dreams—a man bigger than life—not a shoe salesman in Belks as he had once feared, not the elderly man who marked receipts with a Magic Marker at Wal-Mart. Here was a hero.

  “Why didn’t my mother tell me?”

  “Maybe she was a—” Herculeah swallowed the rest of the word “ashamed.”

  “Look, did you see this one? He has his cape thrown back. He’s big, Herculeah, like me, but it’s all muscle.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I could be like that.”

  “A wrestler?” she asked, trying without success to hide her horror.

  “No, muscle. I mean this gives me something to shoot for. With him as my example, I can turn all this,” he indicated himself, “into muscle!”

  23

  THE EARTHQUAKE

  Meat sat between Herculeah and her dad at the Sky Dome. He couldn’t believe he was here and about to see his father for the first time in years. And in action! And his father knew he was here. And! He had agreed to meet him after the show.

  He had Chico Jones to thank for this wonder. One week ago Chico Jones had knocked at the front door and Meat’s mother had let him in.

  “Have you got a minute?” Chico had said.

  “For you, Mr. Jones—”

  “Chico,” he reminded her.

  “For you—all the time in the world.”

  “Good. I wanted to talk to you because I want your permission to take Herculean and Meat on a little trip.”

  “Why, how nice. You know, Mr. Jones, Chico, ever since you saved my brother Neiman from that gunman, you can do no wrong in this household.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now tell me. What kind of trip?”

  Meat was hanging over the banister, listening to every word. Chico and Meat’s mom moved into the living room. Meat moved down three stairs. Herculeah had alerted him to what was going on, and he didn’t want to miss a word of it.

  “A trip will do Albert good,” his mother was saying. “He’s been nervous after that horrible thing at Funny Bonz.”

  “I agree that a trip’s in order.”

  “So where are you taking them?”

  There was a pause. Then Chico Jones cleared his throat and said what to Meat was a beautiful word. “WrestleMania.”

  There followed a silence so long and so terrible, Meat closed his eyes. He could see in his mind the tight line his mother’s mouth made at the mention of anything to do with his father.

  “Excuse me?”

  “WrestleMania ... it’s a pro ... professional wrestling event.” The expression on Meat’s mother’s face was evidently enough to make even a police detective stutter.

  Then, while Meat’s hopes sank, his mother sighed. It seemed to Meat a sign of surrender, as if all the air in her body was given up to the universe. His hopes rose.

  “I guess it’s time,” she said.

  Now Meat leaned over to Chico Jones and said, “Thanks again.”

  A man in a tuxedo was in the ring. “From the Sky Dome,” he said, “the World Wrestling Federation welcomes you to WrestleMania!”

  The crowd roared. The lights flashed. Blue lights flashed over the jam-packed arena.

  Meat sat forward.

  “Coming down the aisle from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, weighing in at two hundred and twenty-eight pounds is Koko B. Ware, the Bird Man!”

  Music blared as the Bird Man came down the aisle. The Bird Man had a parrot on his shoulder, and he danced something that might have been the Chicken, pausing every now and then to slap hands with the fans leaning over the railing. The Bird Man slipped between the ropes and continued to dance in the ring.

  “And his opponent, what a great athlete, weighing in at three hundred and twenty pounds, the Big Boss Man!”

  Big Boss Man was in a policeman’s uniform, beating a nightstick in one hand.

  “Are you going to pull for your fellow officer?” Herculeah asked her dad.

  “I haven’t decided,” Chico Jones said, smiling.

  “I’m going to pull for the Bird Man because of Tarot,” said Herculeah.

  The bout itself was so quick, so violent, Meat’s mouth hung open. His throat was dry.

  During the next bouts, Meat got into the mood of the crowd. He booed Andrew the Giant and the Russian Tag Team. He cheered for Dusty Rhodes, the Lion King, and the Million Dollar Man. He was mad when a wrestler named Stealth stole the bag containing Jack the Snake’s boa. Then, before he knew it, actually before he was ready, it was time for his father.

  “And now for the championship event of the evening,” the announcer said.

  “Here he comes!” Herculeah said. She grabbed Meat by the shoulder. “There he is! There he is, Meat!”

  “I just wish he wasn’t wrestling the Earthquake,” Meat said.

  Then Meat saw him too, and he thought he would burst with pride.

  “Now, coming down the aisle,” the announcer said, “from Muscle City, U.S.A., weighing in at three hundred and seventy-five pounds, one of the longtime superstars, the World Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Champion—Macho Man McMannis!”

  The music that brought his father to the ring was “Macho Man,” and the crowd took it up. Meat thought, That man in the black cape and helmet and black boots laced to his knees, the man everyone is yelling Macho Man at and clapping for, is my father. Mine!

  His dad stepped into the ring and threw back his cape in one motion, revealing that strong chest, those two shoulder tattoos.

  The announcer said, “What a confrontation this is going to be ... power against power with a championship belt at stake. And now, coming down the aisle, weighing in at four hundred and sixty-eight pounds is the Earthquake!”

  “That’s not fair.” Meat was suddenly alarmed. “He’s bigger than my dad.”

  “This guy has sent twenty-four challengers to the hospital,” the announcer said, “but that’s what happens when you have an earthquake!”

  “Hospital?” Meat said.

  There was thunder and lightning as the Earthquake entered the ring. He began jumping up and down, causing the floor to tremble so violently Macho Man almost lost his footing.

  Chico Jones said, “The world hasn’t seen thighs like that since the brontosaurus died out.”

  Macho Man went to the corner and put one foot on the ropes to check his boots. The Earthquake rushed forward and jumped him from the rear.

  “Unfair! Unfair!” Meat cried. “The match hasn’t even started yet.”

  “I think it has,” Chico Jones said.

  “A right over the back! There’s another right! And another! Macho Man’s in trouble!”

  “Oh, no,” moaned Meat.

  The Earthquake threw himself against the ropes and knocked Macho Man to the floor. Just as Macho Man struggled to his feet, the Earthquake did it again.

  “Big trouble,” the announcer said.

  Meat was on his feet, his hands clasped prayerlike over his heart.

  Macho Man struggled to his feet, making an obvious effort to shake off Earthquake’s blows. The Earthquake was strutting around the ring.

  Macho Man recovered. The announcer said, “And Macho Man gets off a standing drop-kick. A back drop! What a beauty.”

  But then the Earthquake had Meat’s father’s face down on the floor, his huge knee digging into his back. The referee, slapping his hand to the canvas, was counting: “One! Two
!”

  Before he could give the final “Three,” Macho Man twisted one shoulder free. Enraged, Earthquake pulled his father’s head back, one arm around his throat. His father groaned.

  Macho Man grabbed Earthquake’s foot and a woman shouted, “Look out, Earthquake!” Meat glanced around in astonishment. How could anyone pull for Earthquake? That was his father! His father!

  Meat turned back to the ring in time to see that Earthquake was in agony, one leg in some sort of hammerlock. Earthquake beat the floor in pain.

  The announcer said, “It’s a good thing that floor’s reinforced!”

  The crowd caught the announcer’s excitement.

  “Macho Man’s setting him up. A beautiful back flying-drop.” Earthquake fell with such force the ground seemed to tremble.

  “One, two, three!” the referee counted. “It’s over! The winner and still champion—Macho Man!”

  He was holding Macho Man’s hand in the air for victory when the Earthquake got to his feet. With a rumbling that sounded like a real earthquake, he attacked.

  Within seconds, both men were out of the ring, on the floor, fighting. Other referees tried to break up the fight, but it continued up the aisle.

  Meat turned to Herculeah. “He won! My dad won! He’s still—what was it?” he asked Chico Jones.

  “The World Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Champion.”

  “Yes, he’s still that,” Meat said.

  24

  THE GOTTA-GO GENE

  In the dressing room, Macho Man held out his arms and Meat went forward.

  “Lemme see you. Lemme see what you look like.” He turned Meat around and studied him. His grin broadened, showing two gold teeth.

  “Am I glad to see you. And look at you. You’re like me. This is my boy, Al. Come meet my boy. Al here’s my manager.”

  “He does look like you. Hey, maybe you could form a tag team—father and son. That’s never been done.”

  “My boy’s for better things, Al.”

  Meat’s dad was so pleased, it was as if he’d arranged the whole thing himself. But then he said, “Ah, Albie, Albie. Thank God you found me, son. How’d it happen?”

  “Herculeah ... that’s her—” Meat nodded to the doorway where Herculeah stood with her father—“she bought an old camera and it had pictures of us in it, you and me, and you were in your outfits in some, standing in front of a poster. Mr. Jones did the rest. You know about that.”