Those Who Favor Fire (22 page)

Each day, after his early chores, after school, after his late chores, after supper, Ian would sit on the edge of his bed and read books without number. He knew about Kitty Hawk as if he had been born there. The Wright brothers were his own brothers by everything but blood. Lindbergh was his hero, and the
Spirit of St. Louis
history’s most heavenly vessel. There was nothing on earth, for Ian, to compare with the realm of the sky.

His father, a farmer with only one son and an ailing wife, knew that to farm, a man had to be tied to the land with a real bond, a sure commitment. Farming broke hearts and spirits. That’s what it meant to be a farmer. And only those who loved the land could bear it, whether they called the bond love or something else. So he did not insist that Ian farm. He expected his son to help with the chores, but he did not look for anything more and he was not bitter. When his wife died and as he grew older, he allowed more and more of his land to go to grass and clover, or rented it out to neighbors, or planted it in trees. He loved his son and, though he never admitted it to himself, envied him, too. There was such great enthusiasm in the boy, such determination. To fly had never been the father’s wish, but because it was the son’s, it fired them both. While Ian worked and studied and dreamed, his father saved every spare nickel, and though there weren’t many of these, there were enough to grant him one small wish of his own.

Living alone as they did, Ian and his father had learned to cook a dozen meals extremely well, exactly to their liking. They rarely fiddled with other possibilities. They saw no need. They had far too much to do to worry about what they ate, as long as it was good. On the third Friday in June 1935, they sat at the kitchen table eating oven-fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, baby limas, and store-bought bread. Ian’s father was drinking his Friday-night beer.

“School’s out next Friday,” he said.

“Don’t I know it,” Ian said, buttering his beans.

“Sounds like you’ll be glad to be out.”

“Not just out this time. Done.”

His father smiled. “Our first high school graduate.” He pronounced it “graj-e-at.”

“Soon to be a college man.”

“Soon to be a college man.” His father put a crust of browned pork fat in his mouth. “I don’t know if I’ve told you how proud I’ll be to have an educated son,” he said after a moment. “But I will be. Already am.”

“I know, Daddy,” Ian said, unabashed, grinning with his mouth full of mashed potatoes.

A week later, when Ian graduated from high school, his father gave him a compass. “So you’ll know it when you’re facing Belle Haven,” he said.

Two weeks before Ian was to leave for college, his father gave him a new suit of clothes and a small suitcase for his travels. “I’ve never in my life owned a suitcase,” his father said. “Never went anywhere.” But he said it without rancor.

Ian was touched by each of these gifts and was sincerely grateful, but it was what his father gave him on the eve of his departure that made Ian understand forever the mettle of his father’s love.

Ian was packing his new suitcase when he turned to find his father standing at his bedroom door, looking all at once sad and delighted. A rare look for his father.

“Hey,” the boy said.

“Almost packed?”

“Yessir. Not much
to
pack.”

“Well, lights out soon as you’re done, boy. Big day tomorrow.”

Ian glanced at the clock by his bed. “It’s only nine, Daddy. If I go to bed now, I’ll be up at four.”

His father nodded.

Ian had somehow thought that on the coming all-important morning he would for once be excused from his regular chores, but he corrected himself and returned the nod. “You’re right,” he said. “That’ll give me plenty of time to catch the eight o’clock bus.”

Ian’s father shook his head, never taking his eyes from his son’s face. “That’ll give you just enough time to catch the five-thirty plane.”

Ian straightened up. The shirt he’d been folding fell out of his hands.

“What plane?” he said. He did not appear to be breathing.

“Man named Stephens down in Bolton is making a cargo run to Pittsburgh. He takes a passenger whenever he can. Helps pay for the gas. Tomorrow he’s taking you.”

“Oh, God, Daddy,” was all Ian said, unable to move, for every part of him—heart and head and soul—had already, impatiently, taken flight.

“And oh, my, what a flight it was,” Ian said to Joe as the Schooner carried them toward the Last Resort that Thursday night, nearly five decades later. Ian tipped his head back and shivered briefly, all over. “Nothing I had ever read or ever heard or ever done prepared me for
that flight. Nothing even came close. I thought I knew what it would feel like to ride up into the sky, skim the clouds, split the wind. But, oh, dear Lord … it nearly killed me.”

“
Killed you
?”

Ian chuckled. “Nearly messed my pants before he even had that thing in the air. An old bucket of bolts, it was. I still think it’s the ninth wonder of the world that I didn’t throw up all over western PA.”

“What, you were scared?”

Ian snorted. “You could say that.”

“I guess you changed your mind about being a pilot, then.”

Ian nodded. “Didn’t give it too much thought while I was in the air. I think every circuit in my brain had blown. But after we landed and I’d spent half an hour breathing into a paper bag, I made a vow that I’d never get on one of those damned things ever again. Not ever. Amen.”

“But you did, of course.”

“Nope. Never. I hitched back and forth from home to school for the first three years. Then my daddy died and I drove his truck until it died, too. And then I came back to Belle Haven to teach school, and I’ve never gone so far afield that my own two feet or four Goodyears wouldn’t get me there.”

As Joe eased the Schooner into town, he wondered how different the wheel under his hands would feel if he ever decided to forego the world’s mightier machines.

Joe had never seen a bar like the Last Resort, except maybe in the movies. He’d gone slumming before, but the Last Resort was in a class by itself. This place was, he realized, no different from thousands of other bars in thousands of other tiny towns across the U.S. of A. (as they called it around here), but it was something new to him. Without Ian by his side, he never would have entered such a place. Its walls were unpainted cinder block, its windows glass brick, its roof warped and rotting tiles, its parking lot mud, refuse, and slag. It seemed intentionally ugly, unforgivably squalid, unconditionally decrepit.

“Are we really going in?” Joe whispered as they approached the door.

“Well, of course we are,” Ian said, clearly surprised. “That’s what we came for.”

“But what kind of music could they possibly have that’s worth spending time in a place like this?”

“Probably the worst music you’ve ever heard in your life.” Ian was laughing as he pushed Joe into the one bar in the world that he would come to love, heart and soul.

It was smoky inside the Last Resort. The floor was bare plywood, the walls unadorned. The horseshoe bar left little room for the unseated patrons who clotted the corners, drinking beer out of long-necked bottles. In a far corner of the room was a large doorway leading to a second room. Several people stood by this doorway, looking in and laughing at something that Joe could not see. He could hear the music coming from the other room: a guitar, a piano, some brass, an unlikely fiddle. And then someone began to sing the opening bars to the most appalling rendition of “Rambling Man” he’d ever heard.

“Jesus God,” he gasped. “That’s horrendous. Even I can sing better than that.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that,” Ian said, and led the way into the crowd.

Most of the men were a good deal bigger than Joe, with heads that sat directly on their shoulders. They wore jeans, short-sleeved work shirts, belts with big buckles, dusty boots, and, a few of them, Stetsons. There was, as well, a leaner breed among them: smaller, with slim hips, arms that were brown and beautiful to look at, hairless faces, colorful eyes. The women had clean, shining hair, ironed jeans, crisp cotton blouses, too much makeup, and a few of them, too, Stetsons. No one seemed to mind the smoke, the mournful music, the bare-bones decor. As Ian had said, the beer was cold, the music terrible, the opportunity to become acquainted with a few Belle Haven natives too good to pass up.

“We’ll just see about what?” Joe shouted into the din.

“It’s amateur night, my boy,” Ian fairly chortled as they finally reached the doorway into the back room. “One giant shower stall. Ain’t it grand?”

Along two walls of the back room, twenty, maybe thirty people sat around narrow tables that were draped in long sheets of thin, white paper anchored with the biggest ashtrays Joe had ever seen. Everyone had either a beer in a bottle or something stronger in an uncomplicated tumbler. There was not a lime or a lemon or a swizzle stick in sight. There were baskets of pretzels on the tables, the air was
awash with smoke, and a stupid breed of moths wandered through a propped-open fire door.

At the far end of the room a quartet of sweating musicians struggled valiantly to keep pace with a young man in a big hat who was singing so badly that many of those listening winced and writhed in their chairs. One older man covered his eyes with his hands. The musicians swayed in their folding chairs and thought about the beer and ashtrays tucked behind their heels. Spare instruments lay about, an empty guitar case doubled as a footrest, and in the shadow of an old upright piano, a little girl lay curled up on a blanket, impossibly asleep. There was a small patch of bare floor in front of the band, but no one was dancing.

After a final, prolonged yelp, the young man in the hat surrendered the microphone, bowed to a bit of belated applause, and took his seat. He was flushed, exultant, mortified. With one arm tucked across his belly, the other busy with his drink, he moved his head this way and that, careful not to look around at his neighbors but not at all sure what to do, where to look, how to settle himself. He took a long drink and calmed down a bit, leaning back in his chair, as a woman wearing jeans and rhinestones stepped up to announce the next performer.

“That’s Amelia,” Ian said. “Plays the organ at my church. She and her husband, Jim, own this place. Their son—the one with the fiddle—got together with three of his friends and started playing here Thursday nights. For beer money, you know. They’re not too good, and they’ve all got day jobs, but we like them well enough. For a buck, they’ll play backup. Pick a song from the list on the table there, and they’ll give you lyrics and a microphone. The whole thing works out great.”

“Ed?” Amelia called, peering through the smoke. “You out there?” When Ed sidled up to the microphone, staring at it in terror, Amelia turned to the band. “ ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ ” she said.

“Ah, shit,” said the guitar player. “Not again.”

“One of my all-time favorites,” Joe said, grinning, his thumbs in his belt loops, chin in the air.

As he looked around at the patrons of the Last Resort, watched the man named Ed falter and fumble through his song, Joe wondered how many of them had ever been more than a hundred miles from Belle Haven, ever seen a ballet, ever read
To Kill a Mockingbird
, ever learned the exact configuration of the fifty states.

“These are the diehards,” Ian said, waving an arm at those seated in the back room. “They’re on deck. You in good voice tonight?”

“Not bloody likely.” Joe snorted. “Come on. Let’s get something to drink.”

A few minutes later, not paying much attention to the onslaught of sound from the back room, Joe suddenly noticed that the bar had become quite still. People were turning toward the back room and around again. Then the stillness was gone and the din back, as before, but Joe, curious, got up to have a look at the man who was taking a turn with the band.

He was not a young man, not an old one. Neither plain nor fancy. He had a hard face, a hard body, clean clothes, lots of sun. He was bowed a bit with drink. Joe could see the weave of his shoulders and the lazy slide of his eyelids. But there was nothing sloppy or weak about this man. And the way he was singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home” made Joe think that maybe he had someplace he’d rather be.

“Who’s that?” he asked Ian back at the bar.

“That,” said Ian, “is Mendelson. The man I told you about this afternoon.”

“The firefighter.”

“The firefighter,” Ian sighed. “After a fashion.”

Mendelson had a good voice. He put the rest of the singers to shame. But he sang with his eyes closed, clearly unconcerned with the reaction of the audience, attentive only to the words he was singing and, perhaps, the way the microphone trembled in his hand, the way the sound came back to him from the walls, the way it feels to sing a song you love.

Later Joe watched Mendelson return to his stool at the bar, pick up his drink, light a cigarette, and stare into the middle distance. He was alone. He talked to no one and no one talked to him. After a while he got up, put some money on the bar, and walked out. Before the door had shut behind him, his drink had been cleared away, his stool occupied, and the sound of his voice purged by a fat man who had a twang like a banjo and could barely sing for hiccups.

Anthony Mark Mendelson had at one time been known as the Centurian, the finest wrestler in his corner of Kentucky and for a hundred
miles beyond. Had he been an indifferent competitor, less able, less ambitious, he might have spent some of his youth exploring other arts. But he was a great wrestler, and that was enough.

Wrestling is an odd sport, not quite fighting, not quite not. A quiet sport, but for the grunting and the slap of flesh. An unflattering, unglamorous business, memorable for the sight of buttocks, of tendons rigid as machinery. But to wrestlers, it is a sport like no other. Its roots twine back through the ages, touch Olympia, blend the salt of dead champions and live boys, herald the unaided, unadorned, unqualified virtue of might. Throw in nicknames like Gibraltar, Pretzel, the Centurian, and wrestling becomes, to even its youngest and its most ungainly participants, a secret society, closed to outsiders, sacred and sublime.