Gladiator-At-Law

Chapter Twenty-Four

Norvell tried the chummy approach with the ready-room manager. He was brushed off. Norvell tried entreaties, and then threats. He was brushed off. The ready-room manager droned, "You made yer bed, now lay in it. Alluva sudden you an' yer frenns get yella, it's no skin offa my checks. Derby audience ya stood up for, derby audience yer gonna be."

"What's the trouble, Kemp?" A fussy and familiar voice suddenly demanded.

It was Stimmens, strolling through the pits like an Elizabethan fop through Bedlam. Nome's ex-assistant, Norvie's Judas of an ex-assistant who had quietly and competently betrayed his boss into Belly Rave.

It would have been delicious to jump him, but the stakes were too high.

"Mr. Stimmens," Norvell said humbly.

"Why, Mr. Bluh—why, Norvie! What are you doing here?"

Norvie brutishly wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Trying to make a buck, Mr. Stimmens," he whined. "You know how it is in Belly Rave. I stood up for the Roller Derby audience, but—but Mr. Kemp here says I got yellow. Maybe I did, but I want a switch. From Derby Audience to High-Wire Heckler. I know it's only ten bucks, but you don't get one of those spiked-elbow girls in your lap. Can you do it for me, Mr. Stimmens? And a couple of friends of mine?"

Stimmens basked. "It's unusual, Norvie. It makes trouble. It creates confusion."

Norvell knew what he was waiting for. "Please," he wept.

Stimmens said tolerantly, "We can bend some rules for an old employee, eh, Kemp? See that he's switched."

"And my friends, please, Mr. Stimmens?"

Stimmens shrugged. "And his friends, Kemp." He sauntered on, glowing with the consciousness of a good deed done that humiliated his ex-boss and caused him no trouble at all.

"You heard him," Norvell snarled. "Switch!"

Kemp growled and reached for his cards.

Back on the bench, Norvell told the others briefly, "We're in. It ups his chances plenty. We might even fish him out if—"

"Nah," said Shep. "Excuse me. But nah. Tell you what, though. Any of you got money on you, real folding money? Pass some around to the other High-Wire Hecklers when we go on. Tell them to lay off."

"Or else," seconded Norvell, after a momentary resentment. "That's all right, Shep. Reward 'em if they lay off, into the drink if they don't. Hubble, you've got money?"

Hubble had. And then there was nothing to do but watch through the glass wall. Norvell inconspicuously pointed out the Wabbits, spotted throughout the ringside seats—trust Lana's gang to worm their way to the front. "Zip guns," he whispered. "She promised. The idea was, knock off the hecklers if necessary."

The Old Tuner's Battle Royal was on. They saw Ryan laid out by a vicious swipe to the groin by a lady of eighty or more. The clubs were padded, but there was a lot in knowing how to use them. He was carried past the wall, groaning, to the infirmary. Mundin and Norma glanced at each other with masked eyes; there simply was no time for sympathy.

It was a responsive audience, Norvell noted with dull technical interest, laughing, howling, and throwing things at the right time. He heard the familiar chant of the vendors, "Gitcha rocks, gitcha brickbats, ya ca-a-an't hit the artists without a brickbat—"

It would be a good show, all of it, even if they had to louse up the feature spectacle a little. Norvell shivered and took his mind away from the feature spectacle. He glanced at the others. He felt queerly alert, as though he were ready for something big and new—

But he wasn't, precisely, happy. Because he knew what he very probably might have to do.

Click, click, and the Scandinavian knife-fighters were on, and snip-snap, the knives slashed and the blood flowed; there were two double-kills out of the six pairs and the band blared from Grieg to Gershwin for the Roller Derby, which would last a good ten minutes. . . .

It was gory. Time after time, the skaters shot off the banked boards into the "audience" of old stew-bums and thrill seekers rather than get a razor-sharp elbow spike. And their own spikes worked havoc. Almost us, Norvell thought numbly. At a hundred bucks a lapful, almost us.

For the first time in his life, he found himself wondering when and where it all had started. Bone-crushing football? Those hockey games featured by concussions? Impatient sidewalk crowds that roared "Go-go-go" to a poor crazed ledge-sitter? Those somewhat partisan Chicago fans who flipped lighted firecrackers at the visiting team outfielders as they raced for a fly? "We don't take no prisoners in this outfit, kid"? White phosphorus grenades? Buchenwald? Napalm?

And then before he knew it Kemp was shaking his shoulder and growling, "All right, ya yella punk. You an' yer frenns, yer on. Take yer basket." Numbly he took the basket and looked at the noisemakers and the "gravel"—three-inch rocks, some of them. He followed the section as it moved out onto the field. He became aware that Hubble and Mundin were half-carrying him. Shep was staring open-mouthed.

"Don't flake out on us, damn it," Mundin was begging. "We need every man, Norvie!"

He gave Mundin a pale grin and thought, Maybe I won't have to, anyway. Maybe I won't have to. That's the thing to stick with. Maybe I won't have to.... But if I do—

"Ladies and gentlemen!" the M.C. was roaring as they assumed their places around the tank, as the riggers hastily finished setting up the two towers and stringing the wire. "Ladies and gentlemen, Monmouth Stadium is proud and happy to present to you for the first time in this arena's distinguished history a novel and breath-taking feat of courage and dexterity. This young man—"

Don had been hustled atop one of the towers. Norma was weeping uncontrollably. Hubble and Mundin were passing among the hecklers handing out bills, Shep looming ominously behind. "No heckling, understand? Shut your lip. I said no heckling. Just keep quiet. You'll get this much more after it's over—if the kid makes it. Anybody crosses us up, we'll throw him to the fish. Understand? It's your life if he goes. No heckling, understand?"

"—this young man, utterly without previous experience in the gymnastic art, will essay to cross the fifteen feet from tower to tower against the simultaneous opposition of these sixteen energetic hecklers. They will be permitted to jeer, threaten, sound horns, and cast gravel but not to shake the towers—"

Audience identification, thought Norvell. The sixteen "opponents" would be there to do exactly what the audience wanted to do but was too far away to do. Still, a good strong arm with a favoring wind and a brick—or a zip gun, if someone besides the Wabbits had smuggled one in—

"The special feature, ladies and gentlemen, of this performance lies now in the tank above which this young daredevil will essay to cross. At enormous expense, Monmouth Stadium has imported from the headquarters of the Amazon River in far South America a school of the deadliest killers, the most vicious fish known to man, the piranha. Your binoculars, ladies and gentlemen! Don't miss a single second of this! I am about to drop a fifty-pound sheep into the tank alive, and what will ensue you shall see!"

In went the bleating, terrified animal—shaved and with a few nicks in its side for the scent of blood. Then they pulled on the rope and hauled out—bloody bones. There were still ghastly little things flopping and wriggling, dangling remorselessly from the skeleton. The stagehands beat them off into the water as the crowd shrieked in delight.

Just like you, you bastards, Norvell thought. But maybe I won't have to do it—

Shep was looking at him curiously again, and Norvell instinctively moved away. He glanced up at Don Lavin, waiting immobile for the signal, unmoved—at least outwardly unmoved—by the spectacle below. Twenty-two years old, thought Norvell. A moment of absent-minded passion, between bouts at the drawing board and the stockholders' meetings, and he was conceived. Nine months of nausea and stretching pains and clumsiness climaxed with agony, and he was born. Two A.M. feedings. Changing diapers. Fondling and loving and dreaming over him; planning for the great things he would do. And the foetus becomes an infant, and the infant a child, and the child a man.

And the man—here and now—a scrap of bloody bone, unless someone pays a Mosaic price. But perhaps I won't have to do it, Norvell told himself desperately.

The earpiece of his hearing aid had slipped a bit. He looked around, still shyly, and prepared to readjust it. Then he didn't readjust it.

He didn't need it.

The shrieking crowd, the gloating, smacking voice of the M.C., the faint creak in the wind of the tower guys, even—it all, all came through.

He could hear.

For a moment he was almost terrified. It was the decision, he told himself, not quite knowing what he meant. He hadn't wanted to hear any of it. He hadn't dared hear any of it. He punished himself by not letting himself hear any of it—as long as he was a part of the horror.

But his resignation had been turned in.

Had he ever, really, been deaf? he puzzled. It felt the same as always. But now he could hear; and before he couldn't. He went to Norma Lavin and put his thin arm around the shaking shoulders. "It's going to be all right," he said. She cowered against him wordlessly.

"I've got a boy coming, you know," he told her. She gave him a distracted nod, her eyes on the tower. "And if anything happens," he went on, "it's only fair that they should be taken care of. Isn't it? Sandy and Virginia, and the boy. You'll remember?" She nodded without hearing. "There was this Field Day I heard about in Bay City," he chattered. "There was a high wire with piranhas, just like this. There was a judge up on the ladder to one of the perches, a little drunk, I guess, and he missed his footing; or something—" She wasn't paying attention.

He got up and joined Mundin. "If anything happens," he said, "it's only fair that Sandy and Virginia and the boy should be taken care of."

"What?"

"Just remember,"

Shep was looking suspicious again. Norvell walked away.

The drumroll began and the M.C. fired the platform on which Don Lavin stood like a stone man. The crowd howled as the flames licked up and the boy hopped convulsively forward, his balance pole swaying.

The M.C. yelled furiously at the hecklers, "What the hell's the matter with you people? Toot! Chuck gravel! What are you getting paid for?"

One of the young toughs at the far end of the pool began to swing his rattle, glancing nervously at Shep. Hubble, beside him, snapped, "A hundred more, buster. Now calm down!" The tough calmed down and gasped at the wire-walker.

A foot, two feet, the pole swaying.

He has special slippers, Norvell thought. Maybe it'll be all right, maybe I won't have to do anything. And then I can go back to being comfortably deaf again, buying batteries for an act of contrition, turning this nausea, these people molded from blood-streaked slime, off at will.

Three feet, four feet, and the M.C. howling with rage. "Get in there and fight, you bastards! Blow your horns! Plaster him!"

Five feet, six feet, and the crowd noise was ugly, ugly and threatening. In one section a chant bad started, one of those foot-stomping, hand-clapping things.

Six feet, seven, and the M.C. was breaking down into sobs. "We paid you to heckle and this is the way you treat us," he blubbered. "Those fine people in the stand. The reputation of the Stadium. Aren't you ashamed?"

Eight feet, nine feet, ten feet. Two-thirds of the way to the second tower.

Norvell hoped. But somebody in the stands, somebody with a mighty arm and a following wind, had found the range. The half-brick at the end of its journey sailed feebly plop into the tank, and white-bellied little things tore at it and bled themselves and tore at one another. The water boiled.

Suddenly ice-cold, all business, Norvie said briskly to Mundin, "They'll have him in a minute. Be ready to haul him out, fast. Remember what I said."

He strolled over to Willkie, who was watching the stubbornly silent hecklers in numb despair.

Another half-brick. This one hit the tower. Much flailing of the balance pole and a shriek from Norma.

"No nervous breakdown this year, Willkie," Norvell said chattily to the M.C.

"What? Bligh? Bligh, they won't listen to me," Willkie sobbed.

Twelve feet, almost there, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole, too hard; and the hecklers were out of control. Hubble and Mundin shouted and screamed and pleaded, but the "gravel" was in their hands, and they weren't listening; it was not only the piranha that were maddened at the first taste of blood.

Norvell took one last agonized look around the arena. But there was nothing. No chair, no table, no cushion, nothing to throw to the fish, but—

"NO!" bellowed Shep from behind him, and Norvell, startled, half-turned. Just for a moment. But the moment meant that it was Shep, not Norvell, who wrapped the sobbing Willkie in his arms; Shep, not Norvell, who lunged into the tank for an eternal instant; Shep—who had an "inpounding debt worry." And who paid his debts.

First the water was cool. And then boiling.

At the far end, the quiet end, of the tank, Mundin and Hubble yanked Don out in one heave.