Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  Another week or so, he told himself, and he’d get back into the heavy lifting. For now, he was happy to be climbing the stair machines, reading the classifieds.

  Crow checked the listings under Sports & Hi Performance Cars, looking for a ’69 GTO. Every now and then he saw one for sale, which made him feel good. Given his uncertain finances, he felt compelled to stay on top of the local GTO market. He never knew when he’d have to sell his. Crow squinted, trying to climb the Stairmaster while keeping his head still enough to read the classifieds. Very few GTOs for sale. A 1968 model with the notation “Eng. nds wrk.,” and a 1972 convertible which, in Crow’s view, didn’t really count, since GM had, by that time, abandoned their efforts to dominate the muscle car market. Main Street had been ceded to MoPar: Chargers, Road Runners, and Barracudas had ruled the strip from 1970 until the onset of the gas crisis.

  He closed the classified section and was about to drop it on the floor when an ad surrounded by a heavy black box caught his eye.

  For the past couple weeks, ever since Hyatt Hilton had fired the shotgun at him, Crow had been feeling particularly mortal. But his interest in the ad had nothing to do with any hopes he might have of retarding the aging process. He couldn’t seem to get Hyatt Hilton off his mind. Maybe it was getting shot at, or maybe it was the sense that Hyatt, through the medium of Carmen and her mother, had influenced Axel to call off the investigation. Sam might be right—maybe Axel secretly wanted the investigation to continue. Crow wasn’t sure about what Axel wanted, but as soon as he saw the ad he knew he was going to follow up, if only to satisfy his own curiosity about Hyatt Hilton and the Amaranthines. The “Free Anti-Aging Clinic” looked like a good way to get in the door, get a close-up look at these immortals. Besides, with Debrowski still in Paris and no card games scheduled, he had nothing else to do.

  Some nights Flo liked to get dressed up real nice and go out on the town. Walk over to the Luxe, sit at a table by herself, order a ginger ale, listen to some jazz, pretend she was waiting for somebody. See if some guy had the balls to move on her, get shot down. Or go eat at a restaurant, some place nicer than Solid Sam’s. One of those places with cloth napkins and free bread and a wine list with more than three kinds of wine on it where she could watch the waitresses without having to be one herself. Some nights she went to see a movie. Some nights she just got in her Miata and drove around with the top down, all dressed up and no place she had to go.

  Joe Crow lived on the second floor of a duplex on First Avenue just south of downtown Minneapolis. Sometimes she drove past his place, looking up at the windows, wondering what was inside. She tried to imagine what his life could be like. Did he sit inside reading books? Did he have friends? Did he watch TV, or listen to music, or fold his legs in the lotus position and do meditation? Maybe he had a family up there, a wife and kids that no one knew about. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he was an illegal alien, or a criminal mastermind, or a secret agent. She had seen cat hairs on his sweatshirt. Maybe he had forty cats.

  Sometimes Flo parked her car down the street from Joe Crow’s apartment and sat there for an hour or so. Once or twice she had seen him come out and get in his car. She had followed him, thinking that maybe he would go to some public place—a mall, or a nightclub. Something like that. A place where she could just run into him, a coincidence, dressed up and looking good, let him get a look at her without her goldfish necklace.

  It hadn’t happened yet, but Flo was hopeful. Friday night. Maybe he would go someplace tonight. Maybe he would go to the Luxe to listen to some jazz, and she would just walk in and sit at her usual table and order a ginger ale, and they would see what happened next.

  24

  To grow is to live, to live is to grow.

  —Second Maxim of the Amaranthine Church

  POLLY DESIMONE WAS JITTERY, as always, before going on. Once she got out there and started talking she’d be fine, but the waiting was always hard on her. She wished she had a cigarette. Beside her, Chip Bouchet stood at attention beside a large urn decorated with gold leaf. He was wearing his toga. Chip was nervous, too, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, his jaw muscles pulsing. It was his own damn fault. Ever since Chuckles had begun working the stage, Chip had insisted on doing something, too. The toga and urn routine had been Chuckles’s idea. Polly had mixed feelings about it, but as long as it kept her security force happy she was willing to go with it.

  Chuckles had been warming up the audience for ten minutes. He wore a rose-colored suit over a black silk shirt. Polly had frowned at the black shirt—she disliked all things black—but she said nothing. Chuckles had his own style. As long as he kept that tattoo of his covered up, she would make no complaint.

  The turnout was their best ever. The ads had attracted an unprecedented number of Pilgrims, 90 percent of them women between the ages of forty and sixty, the perfect demographic. Every seat in the auditorium was occupied; a few latecomers stood against the walls. They’d never had a full house before, at least not since they’d moved into their new headquarters with this nice big auditorium, two hundred sixteen seats.

  A few weeks back, when Chuckles had first asked to participate in the program, Polly had resisted. She’d feared that the very large, very black Head of Security would alarm her largely suburban, white, female audience. Rupe, however, had loved the idea, and Rupe had been right. Chuckles was a natural. His soft but powerful voice soothed the Pilgrims while his imposing physical presence commanded their respect from the moment he took the stage. They had used him to open the last two Anti-Aging Clinics, and were thinking of enlarging his role, perhaps one day letting him conduct his own Extraction Events.

  Chuckles’s story was compelling. He spoke of his impoverished Alabama childhood, dropping out of school to support his mother, getting mixed up with a bad crowd, getting in trouble with the law, hopping a train up north, more bad companions, drugs, crimes, landing in the penitentiary at Stillwater, and nearly dying in a cafeteria knife fight. He told it all in a liquid, rumbling voice, sorrowful and soulful, with occasional touches of humor. He spoke of himself as a man who’d had nothing—no prospects, no hope, no friends—a man who expected to die before his thirtieth birthday. But then he had discovered the Amaranthine Principles. By the time Chuckles concluded his tale of hope and redemption, the Pilgrims were tender as pounded veal.

  Rupe took the stage next, starting out with a few jokes, telling them about his early life, about how he had used drugs and abused his body with red meat, alcohol, stress, and self-destructive belief systems—a sort of a middle-class version of Chuckles’s story. He painted a picture of himself as a man in search of death, which was not, Polly recalled, far from the truth.

  “I believed in death,” he confessed. “My life was a toilet, a toxic spinning whirlpool draining all its energy into a bottomless pit, creating nothing but my own doorway into oblivion, rushing toward it with my arms spread wide as if death and destiny were one and the same. I was a hundred fifty pounds overweight, I had ulcers, a chronic cough, blurred vision, and gout. My hair was falling out by the handful. Fifty-six years old and I was ready to die like an animal, ready to give up my life force and let my body rot like a three hundred-pound sack of garbage. I was all but compost, my friends. Fifty-six years and I was ready to throw it all away. Today, three years later, you see me at fifty-nine. Do I look like a dead man?”

  Led by the handful of Faithful scattered amongst them, the audience applauded. Polly, watching from the wing, felt a pang of concern. The last time they’d done a clinic, Rupe had claimed to be fifty-six—also not true, but at least it had been in agreement with their literature.

  Rupert Chandra had, in fact, been born forty-six years ago. The liberties he and Polly took with their claimed ages were a bit of stage fiction designed to make a point, but consistency was important. Rupe was not a detail guy. That was Polly’s job. She’d have a talk with him later.

  Rupe raised his right hand. “Let’s see a show of hands. How ma
ny of you expect to be alive and in good health five years from now?”

  Nearly every hand in the audience came up.

  “How many of you expect to be alive in twenty years?”

  Most of the hands stayed in the air, a few dropped out.

  “Fifty years?”

  About two-thirds of the audience dropped their hands. Rupe’s remained pointed toward the lights.

  “One hundred years?”

  All hands but Rupe’s fell.

  “That’s what I thought.” He dropped his hand. “It is a very sad thing, this belief in the Death Program. Let me ask you something else. How many of you would like to halt or even reverse the aging process? Yes, of course you would. Well, ladies and gentlemen, age reversal is more than a theoretical possibility. This evening you will witness proof that the fountain of youth has been found. Too late for Ponce de Leon, I’m afraid, but not too late for you! This evening you are going to take your first step outside the tautological murk of the Death Program and into the clean, clear light of the soul. Aging is not an inevitable process, but rather an outmoded evolutionary device. This evening, you will witness incontrovertible proof of this simple fact. There was a time in human history when the gradual disintegration of the human form served the greater purposes of our race. That time is past.

  “I’d like to introduce to you now a person without whom I might never have discovered the anti-aging secrets, which are about to be revealed to you. My wife and Eternal Companion, Polyhymnia DeSimone.”

  Polly took a breath, thrust her chest forward, and bounced out onto the stage. She greeted Rupe with a kiss, flashed her teeth at the audience, and took the microphone. Rupe sat in a canvas-backed chair at stage right. Polly glided forward to the lip of the stage and leaned out over the audience.

  “Can anyone here tell me what cellulite is?”

  One of the Faithful raised his hand and shouted, “Fat!”

  Polly shook her head. “Wrong. It may look like fat, but it’s a scientific fact that doctors do not actually know what cellulite is, where it comes from, and why it appears. Let’s try another question. Who knows what causes wrinkles? The sun? Then why do dolphins, who have skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and whose lifespans have yet to be measured by modern science, spend hours on the surface of the sea basking in the sun’s rays?” She scanned the audience, letting her point sink home. “How about liver spots? Osteoporosis? Cataracts? Arthritis?

  “The fact is, every one of these are symptoms of the disease we call aging, a disease that until recently was thought to be inevitable, incurable, and unavoidable. Well tonight, ladies and gentlemen, you are going to witness the literal, actual, genuine reversal of the aging process. One of your names will be drawn, and that individual will literally have twenty years stripped from his or her age. This is no trick. This is no illusion. The results will be immediately apparent and, if our lucky subject follows the Amaranthine Principles, the changes to his or her appearance will be permanent.

  “Before we proceed, I want to be completely honest with you. The process is not easy. It is not free. And it will not work for everyone. It requires commitment, faith, and a lot of hard work. The miracle you are about to witness—and it is indeed a miracle—shall be performed at great personal cost to Mr. Chandra.” Polly turned to look at Rupe, who was sitting hunched forward in his chair, hands steepled in front of his mouth, his face stony with concentration. A blue spotlight highlighted the beads of sweat on his knitted brow. “He is able to do this once or twice a year only. If, in the process, he should lose consciousness, do not be alarmed.” Polly crossed the stage and whispered in Rupe’s ear, “You ready, big boy?”

  The weirdest part of the show so far, Crow decided, was the swinish drill sergeant with the toga. The last time he’d seen him he’d been riding in a yellow Corvette, along with the big black guy in the pink suit. Why a toga? Why all of a sudden introduce this Greco-Roman flavor to the proceedings? Crow looked around. No one else seemed surprised by the fact that a crew-cut Roman senator had just carried a golden urn onto the stage.

  There is no understanding any of this, Crow thought. There is only watching it unfold, the way one might watch fish in an aquarium. The whole experience had a psychedelic quality.

  Dialing LLL-LIFE had provided instructions—spoken over a background recording of Thus Spake Zarathustra—on how to get to the Anti-Aging Clinic. The address had sounded familiar to Crow. He had thrown on a pair of jeans and an old, striped referee shirt—the only two clean articles of clothing in his closet—and headed out. When he pulled his GTO into the parking lot, he had realized that the Amaranthines occupied the same gray brick structure that had once been known as Fitzgerald Elementary School, where he had attended the third and fourth grades. Filing into the small auditorium had brought a flood of disjointed memories. The last time he’d been there he had watched a film titled Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land.

  The drill sergeant in the toga knelt and presented the open mouth of the urn to the woman with the platinum wig, Polyhymnia DeSimone. Polly. Crow remembered her from Ambrosia Foods, before she’d gone with the big hair.

  Tonight she wore solid white, from her jutting, low-cut bodice to her four-inch heels. Her dress clung to her upper body like paint. From her hips down it became a diaphanous, veillike structure that clung to her long legs, or floated free, depending on how she moved. Crow found the effect to be stimulating and far more interesting to watch than the twenty-minute rant he had just endured from Rupert Chandra, a.k.a. Rupe.

  Polly reached deep into the urn and extracted a slip of paper. She read it, smiled, rested a hand atop the kneeling man’s bristly head, and faced the audience.

  “Mrs. Veronica Frank?”

  An ear-piercing squeal came from a few rows behind Crow.

  “Would you like to join us on the stage?”

  Crow turned to see, two rows behind him, a woman erupt from her seat. She made her way clumsily toward the aisle, holding her voluminous purse high, creating an eddy of commotion as she stepped on feet, tripped on purse straps, and grabbed at people’s shoulders and arms for support.

  Leaving behind a row of excited, disheveled women, Mrs. Veronica Frank reached the aisle. She was a woman in her sixties with uniformly gray hair, excited eyes, and too much makeup. Her baggy cotton print dress, featuring multicolored overlapping tulip outlines on a navy field, fluttered around her ample waist as she jogged toward the stage.

  The toga man lifted her up onto the stage, producing another delighted squeal. Polyhymnia embraced the woman and led her to the microphone.

  “Congratulations, Veronica. One God.”

  The woman nodded vigorously. “One Way!” she squeaked.

  “One Life. Before we begin, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself, starting with your age, please. How old are you?”

  Mrs. Frank leaned in close to the microphone. “Sixty-four!” she shouted, spontaneously breaking into applause for herself.

  “And you live here in the Twin Cities?”

  Mrs. Frank nodded eagerly.

  The interview went on for a few minutes longer. Crow shifted in his seat, feeling trapped. The novelty of the event was wearing thin. This wasn’t his idea of what a Friday night should be, but he was determined to stick it out. He told himself that, if nothing else, he would be exposing himself to a reality he had never before sampled. Maybe it would make a funny story to tell Debrowski, or to fill the time between hands at the next poker game.

  Having given her vital statistics, a compendium of her physical ailments, and the names of her six grandchildren, Mrs. Frank was led by Polly to a padded stool, which the toga man had placed at center stage. The lights dimmed, and a low-wattage spotlight waxed directly above her gray head. Rupert Chandra rose from his seat and approached the woman, his dark suit shimmering. He stood behind her, his face in shadow, placed his hands on either side of her neck and began to massage her shoulders as he chanted in a low voice. The chant sounded lik
e “Wonga wanna wolf, wonga wanna wolf.” The tulip dress bunched and wrinkled under his fingers, the woman’s expression went from excited and eager to uncomfortable and concerned. Her hands came up from her lap; Rupert Chandra grabbed them and gently forced them back down, whispering something in her ear. He continued his massage, moving out to the points of her shoulders, then down her back, then up her neck. Mrs. Frank’s expression changed every time he moved his hands—her face went from agonized to orgasmic to grieving to joyful.

  The massaging and chanting continued. Crow did not know what was supposed to be happening and, after watching closely for the first few minutes, his attention drifted. He noticed that the majority of the people around him were deeply absorbed in the process. A few appeared to be excited, as if they were seeing some change in the woman on stage. A distinct minority looked, like Crow, bored. He amused himself by picking out individual faces in the crowd and trying to guess their religious background, ancestry, and socioeconomic class. Most were easily placed as protestant, Germanic, and upper-middle class. The faces that drew his attention were those that contrasted with the Waspish majority. He saw signs of Irish here and there, and a significant number of bejeweled, Jewish-looking women. He saw no Africans, Asians, or Hispanics, but one woman, sitting a few seats to his left, defied categorization. Perhaps she had come from the West Indies, or Polynesia. Whatever her ancestry, it had produced a remarkable-looking woman. She had strong but regular features, olive-gold skin tone, golden-brown eyes, and thick slabs of long, rippling, jet black hair framing her forehead and her firm, square jaw. Her lips were full and prominent and painted an odd shade of maroon, matching her long nails. She wore a metallic gold, faux-snakeskin jacket with cartoonishly exaggerated shoulders. Ribbed black capri pants clung to muscular thighs. Her lime green pumps displayed exceptionally high, sharp heels.