The Man Game (56 page)

When I only ever see you so little …, he said, I'm sometimes … and from there Litz was bereft of words. His tongue was useless to him, capable only of uttering dull fragments of the timeless exalted poem that formed his wolfen soul.

I
do
love you, Litz. Please don't misunderstand me.

He wanted to say that a tingling fire rushed through his veins, and his eyes were stricken blind, and his ears were filled with nothing but a turbulent scream, and this feeling led to nowhere but blackness. He found instead that he was saying: I got to go.

Do you have to leave so soon? she asked.

Yes, Molly. He pleaded for attention with his hand this time, touching her arm, just to touch it, but also for the opportunity to brush past her breast. He gazed into her emerald eyes, the girl who'd found the game in the man, and inspired action from ardour.

Litz, please. Are you telling me the truth? Will Pisk lose his feet?

What? No. No. My ah, wife. Saving him from more amputation.

Good for her.

Yeah. That would sure be the end if he lost them. No more man game.

It
would
be simply terrible. I worried his bad circulation might be a problem. Strange, it was so warm that night. This circulation problem simply mustn't continue. But I have to tell you what I saw to-day—

Yes, and—

She didn't have to say anything to interrupt him. She lit a cigarette and took her first drag. Because I wouldn't be so sure, she said and exhaled, staring to the sky through the rim
of the trunk above where lichens grew in resplendence. I think the man game will survive. I saw Hoss challenge Campbell today down by the shanties. Oh, Litz, I didn't realize until it was happening. This was the first time I saw an actual game.

Litz's gorge rose. She was supposed to watch
him
. He suddenly realized that a great part of what drove him to play was imagining the day when she would see him and be so proud. And now for her first time, her first experience, all she'd seen was a couple mere imitators. Stammering with jealousy, he cried: What? You
saw
a man game? Molly, who? Where?

Hoss and Campbell played this afternoon, yes. I saw it all from beginning to end. How wonderful. My heart was pounding and my legs were weak. I sat on a staircase outside the tea factory. Such a dear sweet boy, that Hoss. I always knew he wanted to play. He's really and truly coming along as a player. I only feared that the law would scare him off.

How did it start?

She described how Hoss had pulled RD Pitt out onto the street in front of the Sunnyside, just as Pisk had challenged Daggett in the same spot so many months ago, and that Pitt looked to be just as unlikely to compete that day.

So how does Campbell fit into all this?

Out a nowhere he appeared, she said, and with almost no effort convinced Hoss to challenge him and suggested a more private location where the po-lice might not find them.

Say, how did you—?

I followed the pack, and found a hiding spot by the Blue Ribbon Tea Company. Watching from a seat on an old narrow rickety staircase. Litz, it was simply glorious.

Those two? I can't believe you saw them. Litz paused to fathom. Who won?

Campbell, a course.

Shit. Was Hoss any good?

Yes, he was fine.

I never thought he was practising.

Molly nodded. She said: Oh, yes, we've been practising
for the better part a the month. I approached him shortly after Pisk's accident. I saw that Furry & Daggett outnumbered us and might soon overtake us for good. I have coached Hoss almost daily since Pisk's injury in January. He is learning, not as quickly as my other new student, but now that Pisk is healing, I'll invite Hoss to train with us.

Hoss train with us, Litz said.
Other
new student? A moment ago he was going to ask sporting questions like what kinds of moves they did, but before he even found the spit to say the words, his heart plummeted. Hoss train with him. The darkest submarinal part of Litz, his inner beard, decided that if he must share her, then she should not exist at all.

The anger came from his stomach and hardened his knees and arms, flushed his face with blood. A flooded river's scream behind his eyelids told him he couldn't share her anymore. It was unfair. The message was so loud, the only way to imagine how to end the roar was to punch out. The hollow tree was red. As he scrambled to control his feelings his worst fear was that he'd already killed her.

When he sobered up he realized the blood in his eyes was from her knee in his face. The other knee was ground like a spike into his shoulder blade, and she had his left arm strained so far back that if he moved more than to breathe it would shred from its socket. And if he moved his pinky finger even an inch it would break in her fist.

I'm sorry, he said. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

It was not quite what he expected to hear, though she said very gently, modestly: I don't want you to ever forget. I love you, Litz. You mustn't try to
make
me love you. I already do. I love you more than you can ever imagine.

I'm sorry, he blubbered, insanely hurting. I'm so sorry, Molly. I love you, too.

Oh, darling, she said. You must be patient or we'll never succeed.

She wasn't heavy, but her knees were very bony, and the arm hold she was using meant that if he tried to move in any direction his shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingerjoints would all
simultaneously dislocate. Her thighs were spread across his back, her flowerpetal breath was in his ear, and the flowery frill-edges of her sepia skirts brushed against his swollen nose as if to mock him with their loveliness.

I didn't mean to lose my temper, he said, it's just that when you told me Hoss was—

Everything happens for a reason, Molly said. It's up to
me
to decide what that reason is.

There was no more fight left in him. The knee in his face was excruciating. The arm hold was everlasting. She leaned down close enough that he could smell the exotic fruit of her skin, and freed him from the lock. They stood together a moment longer inside the tree while she watched him regain his composure. He was getting tougher inside against the burns of love. She touched his cheek with the warm palm of her hand and said: Yes, go now. Go home. I'll be with you. I'm always with you. Go home and think aboot your wife who loves you.

At Mrs. Litz's recommendation Pisk left the bed and slowly made his way on crutches outside to cool off his soaring fever. While he sat there, steaming in the crisp air, he could smell the coffee she was brewing to warm him up again when he inevitably broke into unbearable chills. Clinging to the threshold, hardly aware of his own actions, he thumbed a punk of tobacco blended with opium mud into his pipe and struck a match, seeing and feeling in her silent ministrations that Litz's wife was trying not to say something. Whenever he wheeled around and looked at her through the open door she'd be looking back at him, never concealing it. She seemed to know not only his fate, but that it was tragic.

Litz knew. And so did Molly. And because Pisk could never bring it up, he couldn't force her to tell him. It is the Tragedy of Healing that the sick man most fears he is dying when his loved ones most fear having hope. And so the
sick man strives harder to live, and when he recovers everyone rejoices.

While the shag smouldered with a rustic cocoa scent he loved, he puffed, and finally let his stomach relax. Along with the sweat pouring off his nose, neck, arms, and legs, his stomach had been folded up tight for so many hours, always on the brink of unfolding in a spasm, bursting open and thrusting the worst bile up his throat. Now, as if unrestricted by fears of death, he was able to reach a peace with his organs, and this aided his fever as well. Smoke from his pipe went aloft in the still morning air, hovered there for a moment of poetic contemplation, Pisk imagining it as another of the sails he could hear distantly crack and flutter. She was right, he thought, all I needed was a breath of fresh air. And then, accepting that his impression of Mrs. Litz had been partly a feverish, emotional hallucination, and that her concern for him was no more or less than it should be, Pisk realized he might still have hope. This brought on his fear of death doubly strong, the anxiety screwing his stomach fourfold, the fever burning him another degree. Finally, when the sweat all over his body got so cold it was nearly a layer of ice, he lost all control of his senses, threw the pipe in the air, and collapsed into a pile of shivering limbs and chattering teeth, begging. She came and brought him in, wiped him off, set him in bed, and fed him the coffee. Eventually he came back to consciousness. The bandages were all but useless now, and she began to unravel them to clean the feet and swaddle them back up again. He looked at her with a kind of pity because no matter how much she helped him he couldn't tell her how it had happened. Tears came to his eyes.

Don't cry, she said, wiping away the streams down his face with the thick palm of her hand. Soon you be healed, she said.

How can you say that? said Pisk.

Look-see, she said, motioning at his feet. And despite their monstrous appearance, now that he looked more closely,
he could see she was right. The scars where his toes used to be were healing nicely. All the pain he was in meant that feeling was returning to the stumps.

Just then a giant boom shook the loose boards of the house, and that, along with Litz appearing in the doorway at the same moment, startled him so badly that he leaped to his unprotected toeless feet, screamed out in pain, and promptly fainted.

Litz saw his partner collapse and ran to his wife's side.

What happened to your nose? she said.

A branch.

Your neck, too? she said. All bruised.

Hit a branch, stumbled and fell.

He sat on a chair beside the bed and looked at Pisk lying flat on his back with the covers pulled up to his collar and his eyes sticky at the corners. He was swollen and pink and sour-smelling, dipsomaniacally breathing heavily as if he were running as fast as he could in a dream.

Is he going to be o-kay? He looks on the brink a—

Yes, she said. He will be o-kay. Where you been all these hours?

He quickly and deeply apologized and she fought him at every turn, raising her voice no higher than a whisper. Everything she said about what kind of person he was he saw was right, or that she was right about who he was to her, and this made him break into tears.

Don't cry, she hissed, and turned away from him to see if there had been any change in Pisk's condition. He was still out. She daubed his brow with a cold, damp rag. This seemed to soothe him.

Coming home, Litz hadn't been sure if he should tell Pisk that Molly had witnessed a man game, and that she was secretly training Hoss and some other fellow, but he'd made up his mind that he would. He planned to tell Pisk. Now there
was no question: the information would have to wait. This was not the time.

Today I must see my sister, she said.

We can't go and leave Pisk looking like this. What are you thinking?

There were already tears in her eyes, and he knew that hers were more honest than the ones he was wiping off his own face. Very cruel to me, she whimpered. I hate you, Litz. I hate you.

Shh, said Litz.

Take me see sister. You promise me many happinesses. I say o-kay to you. See how many months? Nothing. So lonely. Wa, wa.

What can I do? said Litz.

What you hide? What you lie aboot? You hide
wo
man. Wa, it is me, Litz,
me
you hide. She crouched at her husband's feet, sobbing, and she hugged him around the neck so that he had to look her in the eyes. I miss sister so much, Litz. Wa. We must go.

Yes, he said. Yes, we'll go.