Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories

  Behind him the door creaks, then from inches behind him: “Jeezus. You are a mess. I hope you brought a tent.”

  Petey doesn’t turn. His frustration always brings tears, and if she sees his face, his humiliation will triple. “My granddad told me when I have a problem, I need to face it.”

  “So turn around and face it.”

  “I didn’t know it would be so hard.”

  “I guess your granddad never had to carry his cauliflower ear home in a wrestling bag.”

  “Guess not.”

  A salty droplet melts a bullet-sized hole in the light skiff of snow on the step below Petey’s face. Chris’s voice immediately softens. “Jeez, c’mon, what’s the matter?”

  Petey hates it when the tears come. He can’t talk. What a wus.

  “What are you doing here?” Chris says. “You must have come here for a reason.”

  “I came to say I was sorry,” Petey says, “for the other day. You know, with my bigmouth friend. I was stupid. I thought you guys were laughing, I mean, because you thought he was funny. You’d be surprised how many girls like him. I was just trying to go along with everything. I didn’t know you were Chris Byers. I’m not usually like that; I mean, I don’t go talkin’ dirty to girls or anything like that. Anyway, I was talking to my granddad and—”

  Chris places a hand on his knee. “Breathe,” she says. “Take it easy. I believe you. I got a little out of hand myself. Everybody’s got some smartass thing to say to a girl wrestler.”

  “Yeah,” Petey says, thinking what a genius Granddad is, “I bet. They’ve got some pretty smartass things to say to anyone who wrestles a girl wrestler, too.”

  “Guess there are just a lot of smartass folks around, huh?” Chris says.

  “Yeah.” Petey hesitates then, but decides what the hell, he’s on a roll. Who knows how long it’ll be before he’s talking to a girl this pretty anywhere but in his dreams? “What did make you decide to be a wrestler?” he asks. “Not very many girls even watch wrestling. I mean there’s mud wrestling and Jell-O wrestling and—”

  “Watch yourself.”

  He bites down on his tongue like it’s a hot dog. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean you should do that kind of wrestling. I just meant that’s the kind you usually see girls doing, I mean if you have cable or go to really bad movies. I didn’t mean—”

  “Will you stop?” she says. “Boy, you do get cranked up, don’t you?”

  Petey blushes. Chris Byers isn’t the first person who’s said that. “Yeah, but why did you get into it? I mean, why wrestling? They have other girls’ sports.”

  “I liked it.”

  “Yeah, but how would you know that in the first place? I mean, something had to get you to wrestle the first time. You know, like cliff divers. I always wonder how they get themselves to do that the first time.” He imagines her discovering headgear in an old Dumpster behind Silver Creek High School when she was six, or looking into the mirror in junior high and thinking earrings would look better in cauliflower ears. Hard to figure.

  “Jeez. Does your mind run like that all the time?”

  Petey smiles and shrugs. “You mean, like my mouth?” The answer is yes, but he doesn’t say it.

  “Actually,” Chris says, “that’s a good question. I have three older brothers. Way older. I was an afterthought, though someone must have told my parents to think again, because there’s Cindy, too…. Anyway, two of my brothers were state wrestling champs before I was even in grade school, and wrestling was the way they played with me. I learned takedowns before I was in kindergarten. Then in junior high I got into a fight on the playground with this kid named Max Ingalls, who was supposed to be some kind of hotshot wrestler. Took me about fifteen seconds to kick his butt good, just using stuff my brothers taught me, and the coach recruited me to come out for the team. They let me wrestle in junior high, but then they tried to stop me in high school because”—she looks down at her chest and blushes—“because of obvious reasons. At first I agreed with them, but my principal was such a butthead about it—he said if I stayed with it, I could make my parents proud and grow up to be a lesbian, crap like that—and I got stubborn. Next thing I knew, I got my parents to take it to court and there was no backing out.”

  “Did you want to? Back out, I mean?”

  Chris looks back toward the house. “Sometimes. I haven’t told anyone that; but I get teased a lot, and it gets real old. All kinds of smartass comments like your friend made the other day, and I got pretty tired of it. If the truth were known, if I wasn’t so stubborn and if I hadn’t gone all through the court stuff, I’d pack it in. Sometimes you get yourself so far in there’s no way out. That’s why I get like I got when you came to the door. But then you cried….”

  Petey looks at the ground in embarrassment, partly because he cried and partly because he can’t get his mind off Chris Byers’s “obvious reasons.” All of a sudden the idea of rolling around on a wrestling mat—for lack of better opportunity—with this girl has become not such a bad one. He tries to wipe it out of his head because that’s just what Chris is talking about hating, but it does not go easily. He will keep it to himself.

  “You know what I like about it?”

  “About wrestling?”

  “Yeah. I like how you use strength and balance. I love working against muscle—using someone else’s strength to my advantage. I like the intelligence. When I wrestled in junior high, I was as strong as anyone I wrestled, but not anymore. I mean, I still need strength, but I have to be smarter to score points.”

  Petey knows what she’s talking about. He has beaten stronger opponents than himself with balance and touch, and other than fielding a red-hot grounder or gunning a runner down at home plate, there is no better feeling in the world of athletics.

  “So, I guess part of the reason I’ve put up with all the bullshit is I like the way it feels. But like I said, I’ve had about enough. I mean, it’s not how I want to be remembered. Anyway, when I get really tired of it, I do what I did to your friend at the mall.”

  Petey laughs, remembering. “Actually that was about the first time I ever saw Johnny without anything to say. Girls have had pretty bad reactions to his jokes before, but you’re the first one to put him on his butt. That was a great takedown. I think it was illegal, though.”

  She smiles. “I’ll use a legal one on you.”

  “You never know,” Petey says. “I’m tougher than I look. Wiry.”

  “You’d have to be, no offense.”

  Petey tries to think of a reason to stay; but he’s run out of words, and though it’s been a pretty mild winter by Montana standards, the chill of night creeps under his jacket. “So, I guess we just do it, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  He stands. “Look. It was really nice talking to you. I feel a whole lot better than I did driving up here. If I can just keep this conversation in my head, maybe I’ll be okay. I’m glad you’re not still mad at me.”

  Chris puts a hand on his shoulder, and Petey notices she’s almost as tall as he is. “Me, too. This should be an interesting experience. I’ve never wrestled somebody I knew before. Or liked.”

  If the tires on Petey Shropshrire’s Dodge Dart touch the road on the drive home, he is not aware of it.

  “Is Chris Byers there?”

  “Just a moment. Could I tell her who’s calling?”

  “Peter Shropshrire.”

  Silence.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Petey says. “It’s my name.”

  “Hello?”

  “Chris?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Petey Shropshrire. Remember me? We talked on your porch this afternoon. I was—”

  “Of course, I remember you. It was only two hours ago. God, you can be strange.”

  “Yeah,” Petey says. “Everybody says that.”

  “Really.”

  “Listen, if I came up with an idea that would get me off the hook fo
r wrestling a girl and helped you end your career with a flare, would you do it?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me—”

  “Would you consider it?”

  “Petey, I don’t know. Tell me—”

  “Just say you’d consider it.”

  She sighs. From her little experience with him, she already knows there is no derailing Petey Shropshrire. “Okay, Petey. I’d consider it.”

  The Coho Wolverines and the Silver Creek Grizzlies line up across the mat from each other in ascending order, lightest to heaviest. In accordance with tradition, each wrestler locks on to the eyes of his opponent directly across the mat and stares him down Mike Tyson style. The orange and yellow of the Wolverines’ warm-ups stand in bright contrast to the softer brown on brown of the Grizzlies. Johnny Rivers rocks imperceptibly from heel to toe, beginning his slow ascension to the frenzy that will overtake him moments before he steps onto the mat to devour his challenger. Locked in battle, he is devoid of his loony and often insensitive sense of humor, though the insensitivity remains. There is little question of the outcome of his match tonight, only question of its length.

  The result of Petey’s match is an equally foregone conclusion, though Petey is the only Wolverine who knows that.

  Owing to the unusual nature of Petey’s and Chris’s match, an agreement has been reached between the coaches. One-nineteen will wrestle out of turn tonight—wrestle the final match—to equal the import the local media have already heaped upon it.

  The two teams seem nearly equal in ability and sport identical win-loss records. It will be very close. The wild card is the Shropshrire-Byers match. Petey is an unknown, having labored most of the year and all of last down on JV. Byers is an unknown talent. She has wrestled two close matches, which she lost by one point, and surprised three other opponents with pins. Is she legitimate? Or did she get a quick drop on her opponents while they were figuring the “gentlemanly” way to take her down? Conventional wisdom indicates the former. Chris Byers has amazing natural strength for a person her size, male or female. Her 12 percent body fat is low even by standards set for youthful, well-trained male athletes, and she can crank out a hundred uninterrupted push-ups as well as fifty chins. She is likely not as quick as Petey Shropshrire, but Coach has warned him consistently he better not let her get ahold of him. Plus what Petey said to Johnny Rivers two weeks ago is true; Chris Byers has to gain on her natural weight to hit 119, Petey has to starve. He could be weak. If all goes as predicted, theirs could be the deciding match.

  Al Greer pins his man at 103 for Coho; but Brian Sears’s shoulder blades dig into the mat at 1:37 of the first round, and the score is tied. Petey and Chris skip at 119; the rest of the middleweights trade off all the way. Johnny Rivers pins his man at 160 almost before either of them steps out of his warm-up, but by the end of the heavyweight match, Coho is down two points on the strength of fewer pins.

  Within seconds of their match Chris and Petey slip away to their respective locker rooms. The buzz of anticipation fills the gymnasium, and opposing chants break out. “Petey! Petey! Petey!” is answered with “Byers! Byers! Byers!” and as the PA announcer calls them to the center of the mat, both explode from the locker room—instantly stunning the crowd to silence. Petey streaks across the gym floor in his bare feet, a thick imitation tiger skin strapped over one shoulder and a four-foot Fred Flintstone Nerf club in one hand. He bellows, “Bigfoot want woman!” as he steps onto the mat.

  Opposite him, decked out in a skintight leopard-skin-pattern leotard, Chris Byers slinks across the gym floor. She is Daisy Mae to Petey’s primitive Abner. Her long lashes drop, and she turns to the crowd, waving seductively. In the bleachers Petey’s grandfather slaps his knee and nods so hard his glasses nearly fall off his nose. The crowd begins to get it, and while the officials and coaches sit stunned, they resume their respective chants. Coach regains his composure first, steps onto the mat, and clamps down on Petey’s shoulder. “What the hell are you doing, Shropshrire?”

  “Bigfoot bring woman down,” Petey growls.

  “You get back into that locker and into your gear,” Coach says. “I’ll try to keep from having to forfeit. Move it.”

  “Come on, Coach,” Petey whispers. “It’s just a way to get rid of the tension for all the hype. It’s good for both of us. Just let us wrestle.”

  Coach thinks a moment, glancing across the mat to Silver Creek’s coach for guidance. The Silver Creek coach shrugs why not? “The foolin’ around better be over, boy,” he says into Petey’s ear. “You win this one or we lose the match. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Petey says. “Just like the big boys.”

  Petey drops the club off the edge of the mat and meets Chris Byers at the center, where they lock up hand to elbow in the traditional starting position. The roar from the crowd deafens them, and they barely hear the referee’s whistle, but when they do, each appears to work for the advantage. Her mouth close to Petey’s ear, Chris whispers, “One, two, three,” and steps back, clutching his forearm with both hands while turning away, and flips him. Petey performs a full airborne somersault, landing flat on his back, roaring like an injured animal. Chris holds her grip on his forearm, stomping the mat fractions of an inch from his head. Petey slaps his palm against the mat in the best Hulk Hogan tradition and bounces on his back as if his head is being kicked. The crowd rises to new decibel heights.

  Brent Edwards, the referee, runs the local department store in Coho. His store sports the most complete novelty section anywhere in the state. Brent Edwards loves a good joke. Chris and Petey couldn’t have counted on this; both expected to be stopped after their first wild antics, but Brent slides into his role as if he works after midnights on weekends for Turner Broadcasting. With the dramatic flair of a man aced out for the lead villain in his senior class play, he pushes Chris back to the edge of the mat and kneels beside the fallen Petey, lifting, then shaking him. Petey falls back to the mat as if deceased. “I hope you’re ready to face Coach,” Brent whispers. “I wrestled for him. You’ll run bleachers for this.”

  Petey smiles. “I’m ready.”

  Brent smiles back. “You’re in love.”

  A hand grips the referee’s shoulders, and he’s pulled back on his butt, as Chris steps back and leaps, executing a perfect knee drop, followed by a patented Gorgeous George Eye Gouge. A guttural roar escapes Petey’s lips, and he stumbles to his feet, pawing at his eyes as if that will return his sight, then falls again to his knees, groping toward the edge of the mat where the club lies. Meanwhile, Chris Byers circles the mat, arms extended above her head, welcoming her beloved fans to the world of real wrestling. “Men…are…scum!” She repeats it like a mantra until the female sector of the audience screams it back, stomping the bleachers with each word.

  She remains facing her adoring followers as Petey, silently and with great stealth, creeps up behind her with the club.

  “Men…are—” Whack! and Chris Byers stands glassy-eyed a full three seconds before dropping to the mat like a rock.

  Petey slings the club over his shoulder, reaches down, and clutches a handful of her hair, dragging her a few feet across the mat. Now the male voices in the crowd erupt.

  “Far enough!” Chris says through clenched teeth. “You’re pulling it out!”

  “It’s for the cause,” he whispers back, ventriloquist style.

  “Far enough,” Chris says again, “or the cause will be new teeth for Petey Shropshrire.”

  Petey stops and drops her head to the mat, standing with one wrestling shoe lightly just below her chest. “Woman…kneel!” He starts the chant and is joined by the male population. As their collective voice rises, he steps forward to lead the cheer, and Chris slowly rises behind him. Though his crowd screams their warning, Petey is obviously too wrapped up in their adulation to care. Suddenly he stares into the eyes of Chris Byers, formidable female opponent who was, only two weeks ago, going to make his entire wrestling season a humiliation. She smiles, take
s his cheeks in her palms, and executes a World Wrestling Federation textbook head butt. Both wrestlers silently count to three, then fall backward to the mat. Brent Edwards slaps his hand down for the double pin.

  Petey Shropshrire is running the bleachers. Bottom to top, down, bottom to top. He started as practice began, and he will finish long after practice ends. His legs will be molten mush. His shenanigans last weekend cost his team the match since Silver Creek led going into it, and no points were awarded for their memorable double pin. Chris and he had agreed before the match that no matter what the score, they would go through with it.

  None of that matters. It’s Friday. He has run bleachers every night this week, and his punishment will probably end sometime after his thirty-fifth birthday if Coach has his way, which he usually does. He’s permanent JV now and won’t wrestle another match until Coach thinks he’s learned his lesson about letting down teammates, though to his teammates he’s a bona fide hero. Chris Byers is no longer a wrestler and therefore has more leisure time. In about an hour or so, even if he needs a wheelchair to reach his Dodge Dart, he’s headed to Silver Creek to see a movie with Leopard Lady, the female wrestler of his dreams.

  Goin’ Fishin’

  PREFACE

  GOIN’ FISHIN’

  There is a case to be made that from the time of birth, when we lose a warm, enclosed safe place to be, our lives are made up of a series of losses and that our grace can be measured by how we face those losses and how we replace what is lost. Lionel Serbousek lost his parents in a boating accident when he was fourteen years old. Though he continues to explore his passions—athletics and art—with the fervor of the brash Stotan he is, he remains haunted by his memories of that day on the lake and “what could have been….” Like most of us, when his pain is the greatest, he covers it with anger, anger approaching rage. That rage has the power to consume.