She tore her eyes from him as the Gardens became filled with the ragged cheers of the crowd. Jumping Jimmy Jones was walking towards the ring, his short blond crewcut giving him a boyish appearance. He looked neither to right nor left as he climbed into the ring, his manner almost insolent.
Martha turned to Grace. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she whispered. “I hope he fights tonight.”
Jones handed his white terry cloth bathrobe to an assistant and smiled and nodded to an acquaintance at the ringside, showing off a mouthful of perfect white teeth.
“Gott verdammt!” exclaimed Martha, staring at him hungrily.
The two wrestlers came together in what the announcer called a twenty-minute one-fall exhibition. For the first five minutes they sparred around the ring, sizing each other up, loosening their muscles. The crowd began to boo, and there were shouts for Jones to stop backing away.
“Look! Didn’t I tell you he had the cutest little ass in the city,” Martha said, turning her wet red face to her companion. “He can put his shoes under my bed anytime he wants to.”
Grace smiled and glanced dutifully at the blond young man’s backside as he backed away from Krosniac. Her glance was momentary however, for her eyes were drawn back to the big Russian, who was stalking the younger and leaner man like an avenging killer. Once he grabbed hold of Jones and threw him expertly to the mat, stamping on the young man’s throat as he held him with a wristlock
“Stop him! Stop him!” screamed Martha, her words hurled at the unhearing referee who had his back to the wrestlers.
“How can that dumkopf let him get away with that?” Martha asked. “Do you see what he’s doing!”
Grace was too intent on the sight of the big man to care. It was as though she were the one lying on the mat, suffering exquisitely from his stamping foot, writhing in an agony of expectation for what was to come. She was crying out weakly, but there was no one to hear her cries. The foot on her throat was the heel of her master grinding her protestations into sobbing silence, robbing her of her strength and exciting her for the degradations he would make her commit. Above her she could see the heavy bulge of his loins and the sweat-streaked hair on his cruel crushing belly, while his unshaven face, twisted with depravity, grinned down at her and mocked her.
With a sudden twist Jones sprang to his feet, and the crowd roared its approval. He faced his opponent warily, pointing to his throat and saying something to the referee.
“Tell him, Jimmy! Tell him what the bastard did!” Martha cried in English. Slipping into German again she said, speaking about the referee, “He’s blind, that fool! Look at him shaking his head!”
From the seats behind them came a loud murmur of protest at the imagined foul. The voice of an elderly woman, hysterical and phlegm-choked, screamed in Grace’s ear. Two men stood up in the rows ahead and shook their fists at the ring.
Shouting into the face of his opponent and kicking at his shins, the fat Krosniac stepped forward, grabbed him in a wristlock, and pushed the blond man’s arm up behind his back. They turned this way and that, the younger man’s face strained from the pain of what had now become a hammerlock, stepping up on his toes to relieve the pressure.
Grace’s eyes were caught by the fat man’s cruel grin, as he forced his opponent’s arm higher along his back. As they faced in her direction Krosniac seemed to be looking straight at her, his clenched teeth locked in a promising smile, taunting her with the expectation of what was to come. Hardly able to stand the feelings she got from his grin, Grace tuned her head away and let her eyes sweep along the row of out-thrust heads to the right. The man in the next seat was chewing gum, taking in the sight with a smirk of disbelief. Next to him his wife, or at least the woman who accompanied him to the wrestling every week, had her eyes half shut and seemed to be invoking God to step in on the side of Jimmy Jones.
Suddenly the blond young wrestler lifted his foot and brought it down crushingly on his opponent’s instep. Krosniac, pulling an agony-filled face, dropped his grip on the others arm and ran away, lifting his injured foot in a pitiful limp. The large auditorium filled with delighted screams and cries. Mrs. O’Brien was standing up, her flowered hat askew, cheering on her gladiator with curses and imprecations aimed at the injured villain.
“Now’s your chance, Jimmy boy!” yelled Martha.
“Jimmy! Jimmy!” the crowd cried, beginning to stamp its feet in unison.
In the ring the two men circled each other warily, Krosniac emphasizing his limp and Jones working his arm to rid it of its stiffness. Around them, from the rows of ringside chairs and back into the tiers of permanent seats, there was a constant stamping of feet and a bubble of excited advice. The wrestlers, seemingly impervious to the noise around them, circled each other with concentrated awareness as if taking part in a ritual dance.
Suddenly the lithe young form of Jumping Jimmy, no longer retreating from the bigger and heavier man, made a feint in his direction, but danced out of the way as the large hairy arms of the other reached out to clutch him. Then, quickly, like a boxer’s counterpunch, he leaped in again and this time caught the slower man in a flying scissors, his strong smooth legs gripped around the sagging torso of the big Russian. The big man grunted as the youthful body struck him, but recovering quickly he began to turn slowly, dragging the younger man with him, Jones’s blond head held just above the canvas of the ring. As he accelerated his macabre pirouette his mouth twisted with the strain of his movements and the pressure of the young legs locked around his middle.
Grace saw the heavy calf muscles bulge above his high-top boots, and his heavy thighs and buttocks straining from the weight they bore, as Krosniac gathered momentum in his spin. The crowd, which had screamed its approbation a moment before, now subsided into silence as the big man spun faster and faster on his straining legs, dragging the bouncing body of the hero around the ring, the blond head hitting the canvas with every revolution.
“Let go! Let go!” Martha cried, the sweat running unnoticed down her flaming cheeks, half crouched now in the open space beside her chair.
With a mighty roar from the crowd the body of the blond man separated itself from that of the spinning Krosniac and slithered across the mat, to be brought up with a heavy thud against a cornerpost.
Martha screamed, standing on her feet now in the open space beside her chair. A sympathetic moan rolled down from the hidden seats at the sides of the smoke-filled auditorium and was carried forward to the ringside.
The big Russian, left standing dizzily in the middle of the ring as Jones was thrown away from him, hesitated only long enough to find his way to the other’s side. With a wild grin he threw himself on the supine form of the blond young man, straddling him with his legs, and pulling him clear of the ropes. Then he grasped both of the other man’s arms and forced them back beyond the young man’s head. The referee ran over and bent low to catch the touching of Jimmy’s shoulders to the canvas to signify the fall.
The crowd went wild, standing up on its feet, shouting, screaming, cursing. The woman two seats away from Grace turned on her disinterested male companion and berated him openly for refusing to get to his feet and protest. Grace looked across the head of the man in the next chair to the figure of his insignificant wife, slightly amazed at the way she had switched her hatred from the villain in the ring to her husband.
Then she strained to the left into the space vacated by Martha, who was now three or four feet out from