by Joseph William Frank

A few years before 1970 I met a nice white guy who gave me work driving lady wrestlers to Joe Arven Arena in the south end of Windsor. What’s now a suburb was then a bad area swollen with drunks and gamblers and married men. I know now that I was no better. I kept my nose down. I tried to stay out of trouble. But my problem was I fell in love with the circuit’s best fighter, a lithe white girl named Clara Noble. And for me, she felt nothing. God bless her.

I tried hard to get things going between us. While driving, I’d steer the conversation in a way that allowed me to ask her out. But she was getting over some Puerto Rican she married a few years earlier, when she was eighteen. It lasted three days for them before someone stabbed him dead.

One night in ‘67 I was late getting to the arena. Late buses drove extra slow that night. When I got there, a janitor sweeping up in the bleachers saw me come in and he called, “Ain’t you been sentenced yet?”

I ignored it and asked if Paul was in the locker room.

He shook his head, swept. “Try the office.”

When I went in Paul was against his desk with a hand down his pants. Some young girl I never saw before was sleeping on his sofa. Her t-shirt, her bra, they were pulled up so her little breasts stuck out in the open.

Paul froze when he saw me and said, “Give me a minute here.”

Ten minutes later I came back and knocked on the door.

He was behind his desk. The girl’s clothes were put back in a bad way.

“It’s on you to put Clara in a good mood tonight,” he said. “She’s going in the ring against Asta.”

“You’re a brave man,” I told him.

“Betting’s down. Something’s got to happen.”

Asta was second best to Clara. They were very good friends and had, in the past, always refused to fight one another.

He eyeballed me. Then he said it again, “Clara’s mood is on you tonight.”

I waited for him to give me the car keys. When he did, he was looking at the little girl on his sofa. She slept like a baby. Pink-skinned, blonde-haired, polka dotted all over with freckles. With gold unicorn studs in both ears.

I wouldn’t have guessed her a day past seventeen.

“Yankee,” he said. In one word giving me a bit of her history: teens from Detroit often crossed the Ambassador to drink underage in our town. On occasion, Paul got hold of one and made an easy night of it. This was her. Her face shinned with cold sweat. Paul tickled her naked heel and she curled the toes, frowning and groaning and moving just a little. “You hear about Detroit?” he said.

“Is she from Grosse Point?”

“I mean the riots.” His fingers played her toes like piano keys.

“What happened?”

“The way things are over there, she’s safer here with me.”

“What’s her name?”

“I forget. But she’s something else, isn’t she?”

“What’d you say’s up in Detroit?”

“You couldn’t pay me a million bucks to cross the bridge tonight,” he muttered, slapping the car keys into my palm.

I drove his blue Galaxie around for a while, picking up new girls and some regulars. Dropping them at the arena.

Across the river, fires made Detroit glow red in the night. The radio gave me the sum of what Paul had said: riots.

Clara was waiting on a bench by the curb outside her building. Touched by the yellow light of a street lamp. It did something to the blackness of her hair. I can’t explain it except to say it seemed more precious than usual, likely to stay that way forever. She had on a long brown coat, and beneath it, I knew, two bathing suits, one over the other. It was her way to dress at home rather than use the locker room. That pleased me then and the thought of it pleases me now. She saw value in herself. Self-respect.

I pulled up and let her in next to me. Her pale white face broke the night in half. And her eyebrows, her pupils, seemed made of it.

“Hey, Beautiful,” she said.

I asked her to see a movie with me. She said, “I can’t stand theatres.”

She pulled her smooth black hair into a tail and twisted it in a tight bun.

“The Halton has a balcony. We wouldn’t hurt our necks to see the screen,” I said.

She flared her nostrils. “You watching the road?” she said.

“I get it,” I said.

“I heard you raped some girl.”

“I said I get it. That’s a misunderstanding.”

“Watch the road.”

“All I’m saying is we should go out sometime.”

“I don’t do the black and white thing.”

“You married a Puerto Rican.”

“Who was no where near as dark as you. The darker the one and the whiter the other the worse it is in the eyes of God.”

“I go to church, and that’s bullshit.”

“I’m way too white and you’re the blackest person I’ve ever met.”

I thought, if I could just touch her knee, squeeze it, she’d swell up and the love for me I knew was in her would seep out her pours like juice.

She tuned the radio.

Across the water, Detroit burned. We traveled west of Riverside, the way I had taken the bus. Before we reached the bridge, when I figured we were equal with 12th Street, I slowed down and we had the best view of the shit you could ask for without actually crossing over. Smoke and flames. Helicopters staying in the sky like vultures.

Clara watched and chewed skin off her bottom lip.

“I don’t want to do this shit anymore,” she murmured.

I slowly pressed the gas.

A line of men with grey fish faces extended from the arena’s front door. We floated past them to the rear. I wanted to apologize to her. And I turned to do it but I could tell her mind was somewhere else. She was fusing with the neckline of her swimsuits. The way her hand moved under the breast of her big coat, I imagined her heart was outside her body and she had to massage it to keep the blood moving through her.

Inside, Asta owned the locker room. She wore boots, unlaced, and nothing else. It was a tactic Clara and I knew well – Asta meant it to advertise her daring and every muscle. She once told me the reason she had her hair cut so short was to show off the muscles that beautified her back.

This tiny joint stuck out of her mouth like a loose tooth. And as soon as she saw Clara come in, Asta offered it over to her.

Clara took it, breathed in the fumes, and gave it back.

After that, Asta pulled Clara away from me, into the small crowd of young girls warming up for their fights. They were mostly in bad places in life. So many were alcoholics or young mothers or worse. The fronts they put up were transparent. They were childish and terrified. You saw it best when they first stepped in the ring. But backstage they fed off each others efforts to believe otherwise. Faking love, behaving as sisters.

I knocked on Paul’s office door. He let me in. The young girl was still out like a light. Paul sat behind his desk, drinking chicken soup from a thermos, paperwork spread out before him.

“How is she?” he asked, chewing.

“She’s okay,” I said.

“Happy?”

“She’s alright. Happy. But maybe she’s not feeling it.”

“You tell her she’s fighting Asta?”

“No. Just seems like it.”

“She sick?” Drinking. Chewing.

“I think maybe tonight’d be a good night to give her a new girl so she can finish early and go home.”

“I spread the word. Bets are coming in.”

“Well,” I said, looking over my shoulder at he girl on the couch, “maybe she’ll be alright after all.”

He put his soup down and rubbed his forehead and shut his eyes. When he opened them they were already fixed past me, on the girl. “Looks good, doesn’t she.”

“She’s a beautiful girl. Is she okay?”

“How should I know. She’s burned out. She’s sleeping.”

“Looks like she’s had better days.”

“I’ve had better days. She looks great compared to me,” he said, and he shuffled the mess of papers, pushing some to the floor.

Someone in the locker room started knocking at his door. He was on the ground, on all fours like a dog, when Clara and Asta shouted through that it was them. When they came in, Asta was stretching an extra small red bathing suit up over her powerful chest. Clara went right up to Paul and said, “My cape in here?”

He looked up at her. She looked back at Asta. Asta smiled at me and I looked back to Paul. Like a dog. Thinking. Considering Clara’s question. When it came it him, he got up and went to a row of small lockers behind his desk, looked in a few, then found the right one. Pulling it out, he folded the flowing gold sequenced cape over his forearm.

“Who’m I against tonight. I feel walked over. I want to go home and go to bed.”

“Bets are in. I can’t change a thing,’ said Paul.

“My mind’s not in it tonight.”

“I sign the cheques, Clara. I make the rules.”

“I get it,” she put her hand out to take the cape from him. “But I want to go to bed early tonight.”

Paul stepped back. He held up the cape, showing that he wanted to tie it around her neck himself.

Clara sighed. She didn’t want formalities or games. Not tonight. She’d made clear what she needed. But she knew, like I knew, that Paul would play it like a bastard if she didn’t give in just a little. So she turned around to let him, but as he put his hands on her collar bones, Clara saw the young girl on the couch.

“What’s this, Paul,” she said.

Then Asta looked too, and she whispered, “Jesus.”

The two of them, Clara and Asta, went and crouched beside the couch to look at the girl up close. Asta sniffed her lips. “Hello?” she said, but the kid was a stone.

“What’d you do to her, Paul?” said Clara.

“We partied. It’s nothing. She’ll sleep it off is all.”

Asta layed her hands on the girl’s forehead, then her ears, then her neck.

“You two have fights to get ready for,” he said. “You hearing me?”

Asta pinched the girl’s cheeks and the girl showed little signs of base life. Scowled. Something she’d eaten that day bulged up through her throat and dribbled out her mouth.

“Shit,” Paul said.

“What’d you give her?” said Clara.

Then some pink blood filled in around the girl’s bottom teeth.

“Bets are in,” Paul shouted, dropping Clara’s cape on the floor, gold falling in a heap. He marched behind his desk and sat down. “You’re fighting each other tonight. Clara? Asta? You hear me? You’re fighting each other tonight.”

Clara turned to Asta and said, “She needs a doctor?”

Paul leaned forward. “It was a little coke. She’ll get over it.”

“She needs the hospital.”

“Let her sleep it off.”

I was against the wall.

“She looks like shit,” Asta said.

The young girl burped and whimpered. Her teeth were pink. Starting with her shoulders, she tried to move, but couldn’t. It looked painful. She sunk deeper. Her skin paled and her freckles reddened in contrast.

Clara squeezed the girl’s elbow.

Paul’s voice crept up as if out of a mouse hole: “Is she dead?”

Asta put her ear on the girl’s chest. “I think her heart’s beating.”

Nothing.

“Wait,” Asta whispered, “I think that’s it. Like, ba-dum—ba-dum—ba-dum.”

“Well?”

“It’s very weak.”

Clara stood up. “I’m taking her to the emergency room.”

“Calm down, Clara,” Paul said, standing again. “Beautiful’ll take her.”

“I am,” Clara said. One of her feet was squarely on the cape, pressing it into the dusty concrete floor.

“You got to fight,” Paul shouted.

Clara ignored him. “Get the car, Beautiful. Asta, help me move her.”

“Her heart is so weak,” Asta whispered.

Now Paul pushed all his paperwork onto the floor. “Everyone stop. Beautiful can take her. Calm down. She’ll be fine.”

“I’m taking her,” Clara contended. “Now get the car, Beautiful.”

Suddenly I existed again. I squeezed the keys in my fist. I looked at Paul. He said, “Not my car,” making fists and grinding his knuckles on the desk.

“His car,” Clara ordered me.

She glared at me.

I squeezed the keys so tight they should have disappeared into the flesh of my palm.

I heard Paul say it again – “Not my car” – but by then I was already pushing through the girls in the locker room.

The car was running when Clara and Asta pushed through the back door, the girl slung between them like a hammock between trees. From the driver’s seat, I reached back and swung open the door.

Asta crawled in backwards, pulling the girl’s jeans. Clara got in behind me and nested the girl’s head in her lap.

He didn’t follow us. Paul. Some people called him Saint Paul. A nickname I later heard he started himself. I doubt he left his office. I never saw him come out the building as we drove away. The arena just shrunk in the rearview mirror, and that was that.

I listened to Clara and Asta in back: Asta said, “She one of Paul’s American girls?” Clara said, “She’s in horrible shape.” Then they said nothing for a few minutes, until we came into view of Detroit again. Then Clara said, “This whole thing’s got me charged. I could’ve gotten in the ring and taken on anyone.”

I looked at them in the mirror. Asta dipped down to listen to the girl’s chest. “There it is,” she whispered, “ba-dum—ba-dum—”

Clara was looking out the window. Chewing her lip. Some hair had come loose from her bun. Light reflections off the river moved over her face.

“You watching the road, Beautiful?” she said.

“We’re almost there,” was all I could think to say back.

Detroit was experiencing something ancient. I thought of that movie Spartacus.

At the hospital, I pulled right up to the emergency doors. Clara and Asta, these muscular girls in swim suits, hauled the unconscious girl out of the car. Nurses came to them. One cupped her hands on the car’s tinted windows and tried to peer in at me. Clara spoke to others. I knew what it would look like to the police to find a black man bringing in three women like this. So I left.

That was a moment when I could have disappeared to another country and become a new man and the world would have been better for it, I’m sure. A farmer maybe. Somewhere far away. But no.

I saw her thirty years after that. I worked in a hospice. Made beds for the dying. A whole family or late twenty-somethings admitted their mother, who was too young to be there. I knew soon as I saw her that this woman was Clara. She was blind and she wore hearing aids. One twenty-something, I assume her daughter, pulled her mother’s hair into a bun and sang to her.

I said nothing to them. Perhaps they knew nothing of her past. Perhaps for their sake she became a new person.

I got hold of her records. She was indeed Clara Noble.

The night she died I was making the bed a few rooms away. Her daughter found me and she said, “I can’t find anyone.”

I told her I could radio the councilor.

She pushed her hair back. She picked up a pillow and a pillow case and began helping me make the bed. It was the type of thing I once wished Clara and me could have done together. Make bed and babies. But a life with me would have included the life before me she never wanted. This way was okay. Her daughter did another pillow. Then she pulled her hair into a pony tail, and if you were me you’d have seen it too. The likeness.

Joseph William Frank is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Masters program in English Literature in the field of Creative Writing. For his writing, Joseph’s received scholarships from the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and the Humber School for Writers. He lives with his wife, their son, and dog, and is at work on his PhD.