let daddy
She might have been the only girl in the audience. There were women, yes, women her mom’s age and older, but no girls. None that she could see anyway. And almost nobody as young as she was—just a few rowdy boys who’d come with their fathers. She picked them out of the crowd, their little faces bobbing in the smoky blue light. The girl stared at each boy for a long time and then looked up at the big man standing next to her. She wasn’t with her father. Her father was in the ring.
The girl’s mother worked two cities over, in Hillsboro, waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. She closed four nights a week, sometimes five, and always came home smelling faintly of the ocean. But the money was good. So good, in fact, that she’d left her previous job at a real estate office in downtown Portland and drove all the way out to Hillsboro four, sometimes five times a week to wait tables and collect tips. She was there now.
The girl went on looking at the man standing next to her. Bill, a friend of her father’s. Bill had given them both a ride to the arena. During the drive, she’d stretched out on the backseat and listened to the two men speak to each other in what seemed like a foreign tongue, English but not her English. There were a lot of things she didn’t know, she thought. Nobody paid her any mind until Bill had parked the car. Then her father turned around in his seat.
“Listen, honey,” he said, “your daddy’s gonna put on a show for all the nice people in there tonight. It’s gonna look like I’m getting hurt, but it’s not real. Nothing’s gonna hurt me. So don’t be crying to Bill here. Let daddy put on a show for all the nice people who came to see him.”
The girl said okay.
“And when you go to school on Monday, don’t tell anyone what I just told you. It’ll be our secret. Alright?”
The girl nodded.
“Swear,” her father said, holding out a gnarled finger. It was a gesture she knew well, and she hooked her pinky around his. Her father smiled. “Besides, I could take it even if it was real.”
She and Bill were in the fifth row. She was standing on her seat and could just see the ring between the heads of the men in front of her. Her father was circling it. At each corner, he climbed onto the lower ropes and waved his arms up and down at the crowd like an enormous bird, his face catching one or another spotlight, his body a mass of muscle and shadow. He wore blue trunks and high-laced boots. After the last corner, he moved to the center of the ring and stood looking toward the same dark gap in the bleachers he had emerged from during his own entrance. The crowd, gone quiet, looked with him.
The girl turned to Bill again. This time he noticed her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just buildup.”
While her father and the painted man grappled in the ring, the girl thought about other things. She thought about the year between her seventh and eighth birthdays, when her father went away. On tour, her mother had said, but the girl wondered how somebody could tour for such a long time and never once end up in Portland. He’d mailed her short, scrawled notes on the backs of postcards. Sending my love. Be good to your mom. Daddy misses you. None of them came from any place west of Texas.
That was the same year Joe Henry started coming around. Joe Henry was a rich, handsome Native man who wore lovely tan suits and slicked his hair back with pomade. People liked him and not just for his money. He first visited the girl’s mother a few weeks after her father left, and introduced himself as a friend. He came to the house with gifts, often for the girl and her mother both, and was fond of admitting that he had more cash than he knew what to do with. Usually, he arrived late in the evening and did not leave until morning. Sometimes he read the girl to sleep, and his voice sounded to her like the rumbling of thunder, however soft he spoke. He had a habit, too, of laying out her future for her. “I’m gonna marry your mother,” he’d say, “and when I do, I’ll send you off to a wonderful school like the one I went to, and your mother will come live with me on the ranch. Won’t that be nice?”
The girl would nod and wait for him to leave the room and then pull her covers over her head and cry until she fell asleep. But eventually, Joe Henry stopped coming around, and while the girl’s mother had other friends that year, they all kept more or less out of sight.
Watching the ring, the girl thought about these and other things because she didn’t like to see her father thrown around, laid out, stomped on. The painted man was tall, sheer white from the waist up, with black shadows around his eyes and mouth and long black hair streaming behind him like a pennant. Before this, the girl had never seen her father so much as bruise. But now he was being held against the ropes, and arching backward at a sinister angle, until the painted man crouched and grabbed him by the calves and lifted him so he was parallel with the mat, his shoulder blades balanced on the upper cable. The girl began to cry. She cried softly, to herself really, and Bill didn’t catch it. Like everyone else in the crowd, he was waiting to see what would happen.
She thought he’d broken his back when he struck the floor beyond the ring. It was a sound like nothing she’d ever heard before. Joe Henry, and all her mother’s callers, were very far away. She looked hard at the painted man and wished she could wish him dead. All around her they were cheering—the men, their boys—while her father lay writhing, while above him the painted man climbed onto the top rope and brought both hands together over his head like a diver.
He seemed almost to float. Under the spotlights and camera lights he was something more than human. The girl saw him bring out his arms and that was all she saw. She closed her eyes to it and her ears to it. There was no Bill or anybody. Her world was black, and she had never been born, and her hands made a tremendous roaring against her ears.
“Look, look,” Bill said, but the girl couldn’t hear him over the roaring. She was jerked suddenly upwards and opened her eyes to find herself on Bill’s shoulders, high above the heads of the crowd. She looked down at where her father had been. In his place the painted man lay like a slain dove. He rolled over onto his back, leaving splotches of white behind him. Her father, the girl saw, was on his feet, in the ring again and taunting, while blood streamed from an invisible gash along his hairline. His face and hands were red with it. The crowd went on cheering as before.
But the girl couldn’t understand why her father didn’t climb the ropes and return the favor, return it ten times over. The painted man was still on his back, only she knew he wasn’t finished. She knew he would rise and return to the ring, and her father would let him do it because he was a coward or because they’d made some kind of agreement beforehand. And they would go on fighting until everybody had their fill and was tired of it. But she wanted her father to end it there, leave the painted man on his back for good. She could not believe how badly she wanted it. She wanted it like she’d wanted Joe Henry to be crushed in an earthquake or drowned in a flood. Like she’d wanted her mother to stop being what she was, for her father to come home and punish her. She wanted these things so deeply, she could not even begin to think them. It was beyond her to guess what getting her wish would mean.
By the time the painted man dragged himself back into the ring, her father’s taunting had given way to swaying. The girl knew this swaying. She’d seen him come into the house with it, rise from chairs with it, rocking softly on imagined waters. Like a dazed boxer in a cartoon, his head making slow orbits in the air. She’d seen her mother shout him down from it, so he crumpled at her feet. It usually ended that way whether her mother raised her voice or not, with her father crumpling. But now it was not drink but the bleeding, which ran down his neck and chest and dripped in fitful patterns on the mat. He was pink and flushed like a newborn, and he dipped and swayed while the painted man leaned on the ropes, collecting himself.
The girl’s father stood up straight and shook his head hard, loosing blood from his hair, spattering the referee’s shirt and the floor outside the ring. The girl, down from Bill’s shoulders, began to chew the inside of her lip, working the soft flesh between her teeth until she broke the surface and tasted her own sweet tinny blood. Her father and the painted man fell heavily on each other. Forehead against forehead, they circled an invisible point in the middle of the ring. Soon there were smeared red hand prints across both men’s backs and no unslick patch of skin to hold onto. They let their arms hang slack by their sides but kept their skulls pressed together, still circling, heads dipping lower and lower as they pushed, feet sliding on the stained mat.
If the girl had looked, she’d have seen that the boys in the audience were no longer bobbing but still and stiff and if they moved at all it was to turn from the ring to their fathers and then back to the ring. A few were seated, staring down at their laps. Bill kept wiping his hands on his pants. The level of noise in the stands dropped to something not much louder than the whirring of insects.
It was pulling back that did it, one red forehead removed suddenly from contact with the other. The painted man pitched forward, landed on his elbows, bounced his chin on the mat. It wasn’t clear whether he’d bitten his tongue or if he had his opponent’s blood in his mouth. He wore the blank, animal look of someone concussed, while the girl’s father got behind him and brought his left leg up off the mat, locking the ankle in the crook of his arm with a flexed bicep. With his free hand, he held the painted man’s booted foot and began to turn it slowly inward.
At first his screams were practiced, masculine. But then it was like the breath had been sucked out of them, like they rose from someplace deeper than the throat, climbing in pitch until they were high and shrill and almost weepy. The crowd’s murmuring tapered off and all you could hear were these high, breathless screams. They weren’t part of any show, the girl knew. She was taking in all the air she could but still felt closed off, choked, somehow. As though the painted man had drained the oxygen from the room, used it up for his shrieking. His foot was nearly parallel with her father’s chest.
The girl knew a foot could only bend so far in one direction before something in it snapped. She had tried once, with some of the other kids at school, to walk with both feet turned out as far as they would go, toes pointing at the walls on either side of her, and had done it for a few steps before giving up. But another, a boy, had gone up and down the entire hallway like that, and whined about pain in his legs for the rest of the day. The girl felt a certain tightness in her own knees and ankles.
Her father hadn’t stopped bleeding. His arms and neck were thick with straining, his face liquid and inscrutable. He let out sharp hyperventilated breaths, and though most of the crowd could hear them, the girl could not. To her, the painted man’s screams seemed to linger in the air even when he paused to suck in. There was no space in the room for any other noise. So when her father dropped to one knee, pivoted with his full weight, and brought the foot finally past its moorings, she was unable to make out the small sour popping sounds of ligaments tearing and bone fracturing. She only saw the outcome, hanging like a half-deflated balloon from the painted man’s ankle, still in the soft artificial leather of the boot but pointing at its owner’s back, almost.
Her father didn’t look down at the foot or ankle, but out ahead of him, into the crowd. The painted man didn’t look anywhere. He was unconscious. Or dead, the girl thought. Cameras flashed and winked out around her like expiring stars. The referee had disappeared from the auditorium. Nobody was going to do anything. “Oh, my God,” the girl heard Bill say. And as her father stood and replaced his grip on the boot and began again, she could not help but marvel at how little resistance he now faced.
Dylan Reber is a writer based in Georgia. His work has appeared in the Columbia Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, Hobart, BRUISER, and elsewhere.