Disappearing Acts (9 page)

Meat waited with growing horror.

“He stood by the basin. He was looking in the mirror. I was behind him. I said, ‘I'm really unhappy, Benny. I'm beginning to think you don't care about me anymore.'

“He said one word. ‘Anymore?'

“And the way he said that word made me realize he never had cared. It made me realize that the only reason he went out with me in the first place was for material.”

“Oh,” Meat said. It was a moan of sympathy and dread.

“And then I came closer to him.”

And as she said that, she came forward toward him—him, Meat!

She was moving carefully, as if she were trying to hold his attention with her eyes. Snakes did stuff like this before they struck. He glanced down and saw what was in her hand—the knife she had used to open the locked door of Funny Bonz.

He took a step backward, another. He remembered the small shiver of pleasure her compliment had given him and he tried the same thing. “Anyway, I don't think you're fat either,” he lied.

“Oh, yes, I'm fat. I'm so fat that when I tripped on Fourth Avenue, I landed on Twelfth.” Another smile. He hated it when she did that. “And when I play hopscotch, I go, ‘New York, L.A., Chicago.'”

The way she said Chicago chilled his blood, because it was the sound of a conductor calling the absolute last stop in the world.

He tried desperately to think of one last joke to distract her. The Bermuda Triangle, what was it, exactly? Kids run around me and what? Are lost forever?

Whatever it was, Meat was never to say it. His throat had closed as if by a hangman's noose. His mouth was dry. The blood pounded in his head so hard, he couldn't hear.

And then with a smile, a strange smile that showed she was both victim and killer, she raised the knife. Then she became all killer, and the smile on her face, the last thing he knew he would see in this world, was the smile of a crocodile.

“There's something wrong with Meat.”

Herculeah was beside her dad on the front seat of the car. They were on their way to Pizza House. She gave her dad a worried look.

“Well, anytime Meat turns down pizza, there's something wrong.”

“I'm serious. First, I was avoiding him, because of the pictures of his dad. Now he's avoiding me.”

“Meat's like a lot of people who are innocently involved in a crime. The world's not as steady as it used to be. Anything can happen. Their world's shifting beneath their feet. Meat will come around.”

“Turn around, Dad! Turn around!” Herculeah said.

“We're almost there. I drove three miles out of my way because you specifically wanted Pizza House.”

“Turn around.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“I thought you were so hungry.”

“I am! I was! Look at my hair!”

“What about it?”

“It's frizzling, Dad. This is the most my hair has ever frizzled in its life!”

Her father glanced at her and U-turned the car. “Where are we going?”

“Back to Funny Bonz.”

“You think Meat's there?”

“My hair thinks so.”

“Herculeah—”

“And I do, too.”

Meat staggered back and found himself against a wall. He was at the end of the hall. There was a door behind him. He fumbled for the knob. Locked.

Meat was trapped.

He held his trembling hands out in front of him to ward off the thrust of the knife. The thrust would be to the heart, and he had always cared about his heart. It was the one thing that really worried him about being big—straining his heart. And now...

He got ready to struggle. Sure she had a knife, but he had—had what? Hands. In that split second before the stabbing, he decided it would be better to grab the knife in his hand. The hand could heal quicker than the heart. He groped for the knife, but now she was deliberately taking it out of reach.

Her arms went around him. She pulled him away from the wall. She was going for the back! She was going to stab him in the back! You could get to the heart from either side! That was why the heart was so vulnerable!

It was hopeless. And then, awaiting death, he felt something so unexpected he would have screamed if he could have.

Her arms moved up and went around his neck. What was she doing? Going for the back of the neck? Was she going to choke him?

He felt a body pressed against his. He felt cups size WOW being pressed against his chest, causing him, even in his moment of acute distress, almost to say the cup size aloud.

Then he heard the most welcome sound of his life—the clunk of something metal being dropped to the floor. He felt wetness on his neck. Tears? Could those be tears? Blood? Could she have stabbed him and he didn't feel the pain? Was he too far gone to—

“I didn't mean to do it.” It was Marcie who was crying. Those were her tears. “I didn't mean to. You've got to believe that.”

“I do. I do.”

Meat's hands felt stupid just sticking out in the air, trembling. He rested them on her back. She was fat, but not so fat that it was unpleasant to hold her.

“I hadn't planned it. I was just standing there with my purse on my shoulder and tears rolling down my face.”

“I know. I know.”

“Bennie was still looking in the mirror over the basin after he said that word,
‘Anymore?'
I can still hear how terrible it sounded. And then I said, ‘You never did care about me?' And he said, as if he were doing me a big favor, ‘Oh, at first, maybe. You were funny. You never gave a thought to your size.'

“I said, ‘Now it's all I think about.'

“And then he smiled. It was kind of a nasty smile. The smile he uses on hecklers. ‘Well, in case you forget,' he said, ‘there's always my routine to remind you.' And he started into his routine. His routine! ‘My girlfriend Mullet the Gullet is so fat, she—'

“And something came over me and I took off my purse—it had a real long chain—and I slung the chain over his head and around his neck and pulled. I just wanted to shut him up. I had to shut him up. And—and I guess I don't know my own strength.”

“That happens,” Meat said. “That happens.”

“He just fell down, and then I heard you coming and pulled him into the stall and hid in the next one. It's just that I—like—realized what this man had done to me. I had been this happy person who liked myself and my size. I liked everything about myself, even the way I didn't have to have all my clothes folded up in neat little piles in drawers and didn't have to have my meals at exact times. And he had changed me. He had turned me into somebody different, somebody I didn't even like, and I wasn't sure I could change back.”

Meat's trembling hands patted her back.

“You can. You can.”

She sighed. “Anyway, I wouldn't have hurt you. You've been really nice to me. You actually seem to understand how it is.”

“I do. I do.”

It sounded almost like a marriage vow. Meat was discovering that if you said something twice it sounded profound, even if the sentences themselves were quite simple.

He was just getting ready to continue on the roll with a couple of
there, theres
when the side door to Funny Bonz burst open.

Meat looked up, startled. Herculeah's father rushed into the hall, his hand under his jacket on his gun. Meat's arms tightened protectively around Marcie Mullet.

Then he saw Herculeah. She was right behind her father.

Together they stared at him. Herculeah's gray eyes were thundercloud-dark and wild.

Meat barely had time to whisper two sentences, different this time, to the sobbing girl in his arms. Maybe they wouldn't comfort Marcie Mullet, but they sure sounded good to him.

“I really do understand. Once I was fat, too.”

“So you have something to tell me,” Meat said.

Herculeah sat across the table from him. The pictures of Meat and his dad were in a pile on the table, facedown. She had practiced her introduction to the pictures many times.

Now she surprised herself by saying, “I cannot believe that I was so, so worried about you—my hair was actually frizzling—and there you were hugging some woman.”

“I can hug women if I want to.” Despite the unpleasantness of the situation, the actual hug had been sort of enjoyable.

“And a cold-blooded killer at that.”

“She may be a killer, but she certainly is not cold-blooded.”

His voice had the ring of authority.

“Well, you ought to know,” Herculeah said, pretending interest in the pictures.

“Is that what you called me over here for,” Meat asked, “to discuss my hugging women?”

“No.”

Meat could tell from her expression that it was something more serious than that. The episode with Marcie Mullet, though momentarily exciting, had left him with the feeling he'd had enough serious things to last a lifetime. This, then, was the bad news she had been putting off for so long.

Herculeah turned over some pictures from the pile in front of her. “Meat, do you remember my getting that camera from Hidden Treasures?”

“Yes, but—” He groaned. “Don't tell me you're going to show me pictures of myself. Herculeah, at this moment in my life, I'm just not up to it.”

“Meat, these are pictures of you when you were probably three or four years old.”

“What?”

“The camera came from your house, Meat. Your mother took the camera, along with a lot of other stuff, to Hidden Treasures. She didn't check to see if there was film inside, but there was.”

He looked at the snapshots in Herculeah's hand. “Pictures of me?”

“Of you and your father.”

The hand he held out was not completely steady. “My father?”

He took the pictures and spread them out in front of him. He peered down at the faces. He recognized his own—it hadn't changed that much—but his father's face... He didn't recognize that at all. He bent closer.

She said, “Meat.” A more serious tone this time. He looked up. There were more snapshots in her hands.

“There's more?”

“Yes.”

He waited. His throat was dry.

“Meat,” she said quietly. She had practiced this part. “Meat, your father is a professional wrestler. He's known as Macho Man.”

She kept her eyes on the pictures as she laid them out on the table, because she couldn't bear to see the disappointment on Meat's face.

She knew that he had at one time imagined his father as the conductor of a symphony orchestra, at another time as a great writer, a poet. And here he was in black leather with boots that laced to his knees and a black tattoo on each shoulder.

Meat drew the pictures closer. He slid aside those of him with his father to make room. He glanced at them one by one with an intensity that seemed to make all the goings-on in his body grind to halt. He wasn't even breathing.

“I'm sorry, Meat,” she said, real regret in her voice, “but you had to know.”

“Sorry?” He looked at her in amazement. “Sorry?” His eyes shone.

He glanced down. Here spread out before him was the father of his dreams—a man bigger than life—not a shoe salesman in Belks as he had once feared, not the elderly man who marked receipts with a Magic Marker at Wal-Mart. Here was a hero.

“Why didn't my mother tell me?”

“Maybe she was a—” Herculeah swallowed the rest of the word “ashamed.”

“Look, did you see this one? He has his cape thrown back. He's big, Herculeah, like me, but it's all muscle.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I could be like that.”

“A wrestler?” she asked, trying without success to hide her horror.

“No, muscle. I mean this gives me something to shoot for. With him as my example, I can turn all this,” he indicated himself, “into muscle!”

Meat sat between Herculeah and her dad at the Sky Dome. He couldn't believe he was here and about to see his father for the first time in years. And in action! And his father knew he was here. And! He had agreed to meet him after the show.

He had Chico Jones to thank for this wonder. One week ago Chico Jones had knocked at the front door and Meat's mother had let him in.

“Have you got a minute?” Chico had said.

“For you, Mr. Jones—”

“Chico,” he reminded her.

“For you—all the time in the world.”

“Good. I wanted to talk to you because I want your permission to take Herculean and Meat on a little trip.”

“Why, how nice. You know, Mr. Jones, Chico, ever since you saved my brother Neiman from that gunman, you can do no wrong in this household.”

“Thank you.”

“Now tell me. What kind of trip?”

Meat was hanging over the banister, listening to every word. Chico and Meat's mom moved into the living room. Meat moved down three stairs. Herculeah had alerted him to what was going on, and he didn't want to miss a word of it.

“A trip will do Albert good,” his mother was saying. “He's been nervous after that horrible thing at Funny Bonz.”

“I agree that a trip's in order.”

“So where are you taking them?”

There was a pause. Then Chico Jones cleared his throat and said what to Meat was a beautiful word. “WrestleMania.”