Or, in his case, webbing.
“I didn’t start that fight,” Peter said defensively.
“Something new is happening to you,” Ben pushed on. “You’re changing.”
That froze Peter in his seat. How much did Ben know? How much had he and Aunt May figured out? He thought he’d cleaned up all the webs … but … but there was no way they could have figured it out, right? No way … right?
“How would you know?” asked Peter, very cautious.
“Because,” was Ben’s knowing answer, “when I was your age, I went through exactly the same thing.”
It was all Peter could do to stifle a laugh. For a moment he had a mental image of Ben Parker scurrying along a wall or vaulting rooftops. “Not exactly,” he said. Then he took a deep breath to steady himself and fight down any other laughter. “I have to go.”
But Uncle Ben wasn’t ending it that quickly. “These are the years when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into. You’re feeling this great power, and with great power comes great responsibility.”
And Peter started to get angry. Here Uncle Ben was lecturing him about stuff, and he had no clue, absolutely no clue, what was going on. Sure, sure, everyone was entitled to their opinions, but the truth was that everyone was entitled to their informed opinions. And Uncle Ben simply wasn’t informed on the matter. Plus … he could have trusted Peter just a little. Even if Peter had been inclined to tell him what was going on, Uncle Ben didn’t seem the least bit interested in hearing it. He’d already made up his mind. Didn’t all these years of hard work, of good grades, of staying out of trouble, mean anything?
“What are you afraid I’ll do, become a criminal?” Peter demanded in irritation. “Stop worrying about me, okay. Something is different, but I’ll figure it out. Stop lecturing me!”
Ben hesitated a moment, and Peter took that hesitation as an opportunity to push the door open and get out onto the curb. “I know I’m not your father, Peter … ,” Ben began.
And then came the words that Peter would, in later years, wish that he could call back before Ben heard them. The words that, if Peter could go back in time and throw a gag around his mouth to prevent him from uttering them, he would have done so in a heartbeat. Instead they emerged, hostile and hurtful.
“Then stop pretending to be!”
Ben’s face grew cold then. Peter had never seen him look that way. So angry, so hurt, so . . . so old. “I’ll pick you up here at ten,” he said frostily, and then eased the car into traffic.
Feeling contrite, Peter shouted, “I’m sorry!” But he wasn’t sure whether Ben heard him as the Oldsmobile drove away.
His shoulders sagged. That shouldn’t have happened, that fight. He should have been more honest, should have told Uncle Ben what was happening. But if he had, he knew that Ben and May would never have let him do what he was planning to do. Instead they’d probably just try and take him to doctors and specialists and clinics to expunge these abilities from him. And then it really would have all been pointless.
Well … he’d make it right. That was all. He’d make it right. He’d make sure that Uncle Ben and Aunt May knew he was sorry, and he’d make it up to them. Hell, if everything worked out this evening, he’d make it up to them in a big way. He’d hold up the three thousand dollars in Uncle Ben’s face when Uncle Ben came to pick him up, and the expression would be worth everything. “Money problems solved, Uncle Ben,” he’d tell him, and when Uncle Ben was positive that Peter was involved dealing drugs or something—because how else could one come by that much money that fast?—why, Peter would just bend a lamp post or climb up the side of a building.
It would all work out. Things always did.
X.
THE
SECOND FIGHT
Every so often at school, someone would accidentally drop a tray in the cafeteria. At those times, shouts, catcalls and all-around bellowing from the students would serenade the unlucky clumsy individual. Up until this moment, it had been the loudest group noise Peter Parker had ever heard.
It was nothing compared to what he was experiencing now.
The arena was wall-to-wall sound, unending, feeding upon itself and just building and building, and Peter thought that he was going to start bleeding out his ears. The place was huge, packed with more drunk people than Peter had ever seen in one place in his life, and they all wanted the same thing: to see some guys get their heads kicked in.
Every so often, Uncle Ben would watch wrestling on television. It was one of the few things he did despite knowing it drove Aunt May completely nuts; indeed, that might have been one of the reasons he did it. Just to keep his hand in, to let her know he was the man of the house, darn it. And sometimes Peter would join him, which would send the tsk tsking from Aunt May to an entirely new level. But seeing it on TV, nice and safe on a couch back home, had done absolutely nothing to prepare Peter for the reality of actually being there.
He was standing on a line behind other amateur wrestlers, most of them wearing remarkably garish outfits. At the front of the line sat a bored-looking blonde with too much makeup and a bad perm, checking them in and taking down vital information …
. . . like next of kin, he thought bleakly. The hallway he was standing in, along the outer perimeter of the arena, was cramped and smelled like mildew. A pipe overhead dripped water steadily into a bucket that needed to be emptied, and soon. When Peter heard another massive roar, he took a step back and peered through an exit door into the arena itself.
The wrestler in the middle of the ring was known as Bone Saw McGraw. Peter had never seen him in action during any of the fights that he’d watched alongside Uncle Ben. That might have been a good thing, because if he had, he might never have screwed up the nerve to come. McGraw was at least six-feet-nine-inches tall and three hundred pounds of pure muscle. His massive chest was glistening with sweat, he had long, dark, messy hair and a dark beard, and he had a look on his face of such dementia that Peter couldn’t help but wonder whether McGraw might not be overdue for a distemper shot.
At that moment, McGraw was busy polishing off an opponent who had been billing himself as Battling Jack Murdock. He had flaming red hair and some muscle of his own, and he was dressed in a costume of yellow and dark crimson. But if he’d ever had a prime, he was clearly past it, and McGraw was making short work of him. He slammed Murdock to the ground and delivered a crushing flying-elbow to his opponent’s chest so hard that Peter thought he could feel it from where he was standing.
“Down the hall, to the ramp,” said the check-in woman to the man immediately ahead of Peter. The man was tall and lean and dressed like Robin Hood. “And lose the hat,” she added sourly. He reluctantly removed it but gave her a nasty look, which only succeeded in earning him a derisive chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, nice tights, tough guy,” she said. “Next!”
Peter pulled himself away from the exit door and turned to face her. She looked him up and down once and said briskly. “There’s no featherweight division here, small-fry. Next!”
Watching the three thousand dollars evaporating before his eyes, Peter said quickly, “No, no … I know.”
She stared at him as if trying to figure out—not whether he was insane—but just how insane he was. “Ooookay,” she said slowly. “You understand the NYWL is not responsible for any injuries you may …” She looked him over one more time and continued, “and probably will sustain while participating in said event, and that you are at sub one hundred and fifty pounds, indeed participating under your own free will.”
“Yes,” he replied.
Sighing as one would when saying farewell to a condemned man, she said, “Down the hall and up the ramp. May God be with you.”
Behind Peter, a man dressed as Xena waited his turn. The blonde rolled her eyes and said, “Let’s go, princess.”
Aunt May, drawn by crowd shouts from the TV, walked into the living room to find Ben sitting there, sta
ring at the screen. She gave a low moan as she realized he was watching wrestling. She hadn’t even heard him come home. “How did the talk with Peter go?”
He grunted.
“That doesn’t sound good.” She stood in front of the TV. “Do you want to discuss it?”
“No,” he said. “I want to watch large men pound on each other.”
“Why?” she asked him, for what seemed the thousandth time in the course of their marriage.
“It vents frustration. One side, May, please.”
With an extremely loud tsk tsk, she stepped aside. Then, after a moment, she walked primly over to the couch and sat down next to him. Ben looked at her as if she’d just dropped down from Mars. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“If you can take it, I can,” she replied. “You’re not the only frustrated one here.”
Ben moaned softly, then picked up the remote and turned the volume up, hoping the noise would drive May away. Instead she simply sat there, watching, shaking her head slowly to display her obvious disbelief that anyone—much less she—would watch this voluntarily.
“Who is this person?” asked May after a moment.
Sighing, knowing that she wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon, but not wanting to give in to the unspoken pressure to change channels, Ben said, “That’s Bone Saw McGraw.”
“Oh. I wonder if that’s his given name.”
“No, May, his birth name was Bone Saw Liebowitz, but he wanted to avoid possible anti-Semitism.”
“My,” she sniffed, “someone is in a mood.”
Bone Saw McGraw, possibly née Liebowitz, was in the process of dispatching an unfortunate-looking fellow dressed in a clown suit. Bone Saw hurled the clown into the ropes, which sent him careening back into the middle of the ring. For the coup de grace, Bone Saw then picked the clown up bodily and tossed him into the stands.
The crowd went insane with enthusiasm as McGraw roared with rage.
“How brutal,” said May.
“It’s rehearsed, May. It’s … it’s like a big show,” Ben assured her. “It’s all fake.”
It was obvious that someone in the audience concurred with Ben, because a fan standing a couple of rows back from the ring shouted, “Hey, Bone Saw! You big fake! You suck!” And he kept shouting it, over and over. The camera zoomed in on him, the TV screen filling up with his sneering face.
Abruptly the contempt in his expression disappeared, to be replaced by panic Laurence Olivier wouldn’t have been able to fake on his best day. The TV camera whipped around and focused on the infuriated Bone Saw as he lurched toward the fan. People, trainers, the referee, a guy with earphones, were all trying to hold him back, and he was shaking them off as if they didn’t exist.
The camera stayed with him as he caught the heckler, who was just trying to make a break for it. Bone Saw swung him around, leered with a distinct lack of sympathy into the heckler’s face, and hit him just once. The heckler’s nose became a geyser of blood and he let out a shriek as he collapsed to the floor.
Bone Saw then grabbed up the heckler’s folding chair, waved it over his head like a trophy, and bellowed into the camera, “Fake my ass!” He turned and stormed back toward the ring, pausing just long enough to notice that the fallen clown was trying to crawl away. He smashed the folded chair over the clown’s head before climbing back into the ring.
Slowly Aunt May turned and fixed a gaze on a speechless Uncle Ben.
“That man,” she opined, “has some serious issues.”
Hidden from view by a black scrim, which in turn hung behind a large curtain, Peter was trying not to panic.
He was starting to get a feeling for what it was like for the Roman gladiators when they were about to be marched into the center of the Coliseum. Hearing all those spectators howling for blood—their blood—would have undermined the most experienced and confident of warriors. And Peter didn’t have a lot going for him in either category.
He heard the ring announcer shout, “Are you ready for more?” And, when he apparently wasn’t satisfied by the audience’s shouts of bloodlust, he bellowed even louder, “I said, are you ready for more?!”
The crowd gave him what he wanted. “More, more, more!” they shouted, over and over, stomping their feet rhythmically until the whole place was shaking. Peter started to wonder if the arena was going to collapse, rendering this entire harebrained stunt completely moot. He noticed a monitor mounted nearby that had the ring on the screen. Bone Saw was sitting on a stool in the corner, where he was being tended to by his bikini-clad ring maidens who were collectively known as the Bonettes. They were sponging him off, giving him water, massaging him.
He sat there with a smug expression on his face that reminded Peter of Flash Thompson, and the fear within Peter began to burn away, to be replaced by an overwhelming desire to smash that grin into the ground.
Bone Saw, apparently having had enough pampering, rose and started flexing. The crowd went nuts. Peter rolled his eyes. “Bone Saw’s ready!” the wrestler announced, his voice so loud that it carried even over the barely controlled pandemonium of the spectators. Then the image on the screen changed, and the announcer reappeared.
“Will the next victim please enter the ring at this time!” he called dramatically. Then he was gone again from the TV monitor, and Peter realized it meant he was heading up the ramp toward the curtain. He was, however, momentarily distracted when he saw two girls on the screen, with breasts the size of ham hocks. They—the girls, not the breasts—were marching around the ring with a banner reading 3:00 FOR $3000.
Then the announcer finished his trek and ended up standing just outside the curtain as he continued, “If he can withstand just three minutes in the cage with Bone Saw McGraw, the sum of three thousand dollars will be paid to …” Then he peeked around the curtain, cupping his hand over the mike for some momentary privacy, staring at Peter with open skepticism. “The Human Spider? That’s it? That’s the best you got?”
Peter, already feeling uncomfortable, graduated to ridiculous. “Yeah.”
Making an annoyed huffing sound, the announcer said, “Nah. You gotta jazz it up a little.” Then, without hesitation, he started speaking into the mike again, continuing as if he hadn’t left off. “… the sum of three thousand dollars will be paid to …”
The curtain started to open. Peter took a deep breath, steadying himself, trying to calm his pounding heart.
“… the terrifying … the deadly … the amazing … Spider-Man!”
The black scrim, which had been revealed by the curtain, rose perfectly on cue, and Peter Parker didn’t feel the least bit terrifying, nor deadly, and certainly not amazing. When the crowd’s reaction combined laughter with … well … more laughter … what he felt was still, quite simply, ridiculous.
Uncle Ben guffawed at the sight. “Big overture, little show,” he snorted.
Bone Saw’s challenger apparently was nothing more than some undersized idiot dressed in blue sweatpants, a red sweatshirt with a spidery design on it, and …
“What’s that stretchy hat thing he’s wearing?” asked Ben. It looked like some sort of hooded garment, covering his neck, face, and head. Only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible.
“It’s a balaclava,” May told him promptly. “You remember. I gave Peter one for his fourteenth birthday. Looks a bit like that one, actually. Maybe his mother gave it to him.”
“Well, she didn’t do him any favors, that’s for sure. ‘My mother dressed me funny.’ There’s a battle cry for you. Humph. Wrestlers who dress like teenagers. Pitiful. Pitiful. Gorgeous George, now there was a wrestler with fashion sense.”
Aunt May looked at Ben with an arched eyebrow. “I’m starting to worry about you, Ben. I really am.”
The challenger, meantime, didn’t seem pleased with his introduction. “That’s ‘The Human Spider,’ ” he said.
“Get out there, dipstick,” said the ring announcer, who apparently didn’t realize the
microphone was on.
The masked figure walked slowly toward the ring, looking right and left, clearly overwhelmed by what he was seeing. The Bonettes were waiting for him on the ramp, like a pack of hungry wolves. They mercilessly heckled him as he went, made as if they were feeling his muscles and yawning while doing so. They taunted him and berated him, and as they did so they egged on the crowd to join them, and the crowd did so with gusto.
The clown contestant was wheeled by, and the camera’s microphone picked him up saying, “I can’t feel my legs … I can’t feel my legs …”
“Oh, Ben, enough is enough. Turn this off. It’s grotesque.”
“I know, I know, but … damn,” and Ben shook his head, “I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor guy. Maybe I’m hoping a miracle will happen.”
“What, that he’ll have the sense to turn and run? I wouldn’t count on it,” said May.
The challenger, meantime, had crawled into the ring with McGraw and was looking around in bewilderment as the chant “Cage! Cage! Cage!” arose from the crowd. Obviously he didn’t know what was about to happen. It made Ben pity him all the more.
Abruptly, from overhead, a flat structure with metal bars appeared. The challenger stepped back in surprise as the cage dropped down around him and hit the padded floor of the ring with a muffled thump.
“Will the guards please lock the cage doors!” came the voice of the ring announcer, and stagehands promptly wrapped huge metal chains around the corners of the cage, locking the combatants in.
The challenger was yanking at the bars when Bone Saw, who was standing in the middle of the ring, caught his attention. “Freak show!” bellowed Bone Saw, and the crowd roared its approval. “You’re going nowhere! I’ve got you for three minutes. Three minutes of playing with Bone Saw!”
Ben stared at the TV screen. “He’s going to get his head handed to him,” he said, realizing the inevitable.