The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner
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his bag to the floor of the closet and lowered himself to the bed. Garfield was the girl’s name downstairs. Not exactly his type, but she might prove interesting on a temporary basis. He wondered why the old girl had rented the room to such unfair competition.
CHAPTER FIVE
Grace Hill and Martha Greber pushed their way along an aisle through the temporary wooden chairs that were set up around the Beaver Gardens ring. The Gardens was a gigantic indoor hockey arena, its permanent seats rising tier on tier to the upper reaches of its hangar-like walls. Besides hockey it afforded the city a building which housed in bewildering succession, winter and summer, such sports, spectacles, and exhibitions as professional basketball, ice revues, boxing, grand opera, Billy Graham, rock-’n’-roll, and wrestling.
Until it became frowned on by the government, the Gardens had also been used at times for giant bingo games, in which hundreds of elderly and middle-aged drabs had placed small plastic markers on numbered cards to the exhortations of a transplanted midway talker who had moved to town for the carnival off-season. In exchange for their devotion, determination, and dexterity, plus an entrance fee and payment per game, a small number of these women had carted home individually expensive prizes, the value of which came to almost five percent of the total take.
It was the belief of some Gardens habitués that after the bingoes were banned a number of the game’s devotees switched their allegiance to the Thursday evening wrestling matches. This was never proved, but a casual glance along the “ringside” seats showed a majority of tongue-chewing old women gazing with the same concentration at the wrestlers in the ring that they had once given to the magic cards of the bingo era.
Grace bared her false teeth at a pair of acquaintances as she and Martha neared their regular seats. It was cooler inside than it had been on the street, but both women were overheated from their hurried walk east from the subway station.
“Hello, Goldie!” shouted Martha at a friend sitting a few rows behind them. “How is Charley?”
Goldie, a grandmotherly little woman, smiled and nodded and held up a circled thumb and finger to show that Charley was all right.
“Oh, I’m glad we got here!”Grace said as she plopped down into the second chair from the left end of their row. Martha pushed her bulk past her and sat on the outside chair.
To the left of them was a fairly wide open space leading from the ringside to the front of the permanent seats. Built above this space was a temporary wooden ramp along which the wrestlers came from the opening to the dressing rooms. The two women always sat on the same numbered chairs, separated from their ambulant wrestling idols and enemies only by the narrow no man’s land of empty space. They were good seats, for they offered an uninterrupted view of the ring, an easy exit from the Gardens at the end of the show, and an unblocked view of the performers during their arrival and departure.
Martha had crossed the forbidden space on several occasions to shout and spit at her enemies following a bout, but Grace had only run across it once, to pound at the legs of a hated Italian with her purse. The Italian, who had gazed down at her in laughing astonishment, had bested Grace’s god, a fellow German called King Koenig.
That incident, which had almost got her barred from the Gardens, had placed her briefly before the gaze of hundreds of thousands of wrestling fans, as a quick-witted TV cameraman had zoomed his lens on the fracas for all the television audience to see. The incident, which was relayed to her by Martha on the following Saturday night when the film was telecast locally, had given her quite a bit of prestige among the Gardens fans. It had also almost broken down her resolve never to buy a TV set, but she had resisted the lure. To Grace a TV antenna on the roof was a built-in lightning conductor, and her fears for her safety from thunderstorms overrode her wish to see herself on the TV screen.
“It’s going to be a small crowd tonight, Gretchen,” Martha said in German, “Except for the tag-team match there’s nobody on the card but bums.”
“I wish King Koenig was here,” Grace answered in the same language. She had read that Koenig was on a circuit through several American cities and wouldn’t appear for several weeks.
“The main bout’s got that good-looking young fellow in it, Jumping Jimmy Jones,” Martha said. “I could love him if I didn’t know what a coward he is in the ring. Always backing away and pushing that cute little ass of his through the ropes. Still, I wouldn’t shove him out of bed.”
Grace laughed at her friend.
A few minutes after their arrival the communications system gave a few preliminary squeaks, followed by the recorded sound of a long drum roll that introduced the national anthem. Grace and Martha stood up with the rest of the crowd, and collapsed gratefully into their chairs again when it was over. Then all the lights other than those above the ring were turned off.
The first match on the card was a slow-moving affair between a local wrestler and a heavy-set Negro, who seemed afraid to let himself go.
Once when the Negro had his white opponent pinned with a full nelson in the middle of the ring, Martha turned to Grace and whispered in German, “Did you ever have a black man Gretchen?’
Grace laughed. “No, did you?”
Martha winked. “After the war there was lots of them in the old country, in the American army.”
“Did you try one?”
Martha winked again, and both women giggled.
The second match was between a pair of Gardens unknowns. Though it had been advertised as a grudge fight, neither wrestler aroused much interest in the crowd. The third match was a tag-team affair between four dwarfs (called “midgets” on the program), who did a lot of clowning around in the ring, but engendered more laughter than partisan interest.
During the intermission preceding the main bout, Martha bought herself a hot dog and two paper cups of orangeade, one of which she gave to Grace. They sat there with their orange drinks, chattering to each other about the events of the week, even those they had already discussed on the telephone.
Then the lights went out and the crowd fidgeted in its seats.
“My beautiful blond boyfriend is next,” Martha said, slapping Grace on the knee. “I hope he murders that dirty schtunk tonight.”
“Here they come,” Grace said, swinging around and staring at the dressing room entrance. Martha also turned, and along with several others began to boo lustily as a fat man with a shaven head and a black moustache swaggered into sight and stood on the ramp midway to the ring. He looked about him with a sneering grin, raising his arms in a victory clasp, taunting his enemies. He was wearing long pliable leather boots that came halfway up his muscular calves and a shabby black silk gown that bore the name Krosniac in white lettering on its back.
“You dirty Russian bastard!” Martha shouted in German. “You’re a stinking cheater!”
Her words were drowned out in the general uproar, and Krosniac swept the Gardens with his supercilious grin, knowing he was the master of them all, daring them to hate him. Grace watched him closely, her mouth opening slightly, a feeling of weakness overcoming her as she gloried in his size and strength.
“Pig! Russian pig!” shouted Martha, her big red face glistening.
The big man ambled slowly to the ringside and with a movement quick but dainty for a man his size parted the ropes and stepped inside. Without another glance at the crowd he walked to his corner, grabbed the ropes and flexed his knees.
Grace took her eyes off him long enough to notice a small woman sitting three rows ahead of her who was waving in her direction and trying to catch her eye. It was Mrs. O’Brien, at least temporarily cured of her gall bladder trouble.
“Hello, Lil!” Grace shouted at her over the intervening heads, “How’s your — how’s everything?”
“Fine,” answered the little Irish woman. Cupping her hand to her mouth she added, “They didn’t have to operate! I’m on a diet.”