The two girls beside me had fallen into a sisterly embrace, one consoling the other. One girl, her face awash in sweat and tears, peered over her friends’ shoulders at me. “Were those the Proud Brothers?” I asked her.
She squeezed her eyes shut in misery and nodded. Her friend turned around to me fully in an odd shoulder-back posture and pulled her T-shirt down tight in what I thought was a gesture meant to display her nubby little breasts, but then she pointed beneath the distorted portrait on the shirtfront to the name below: TOM. Her friend, the bereaved, stood and showed me her breasts too, which were much larger and still heaving from the residual sobs so much that it was difficult to recognize the face on her shirt as human, but I finally read the name underneath: TIM.
“And it was Tim who was just killed?” I asked. She collapsed into her friend’s arms again.
Betsy nudged me sharply. “What’d you say to her?” She tapped my arm with her knuckle. “You’re going to get arrested. These are children.”
By now they had carried the body of one brother away and the other brother had finished his prancing, and the announcer, a little guy in a tux, crawled into the ring with a bullhorn.
“Ladies and gentlemen…” he began and before he had finished rolling gen-tull-mn out of his mouth, Betsy turned to me and I to her, the same word on our lips: “Mitch!”
We both sat up straight and watched this guy very carefully. It was Mitchell all right, but they had him in a pompadour toupee, a thin mustache, and chrome-frame glasses. What gave him away was his voice and arrow posture and the way he held his chin up like William Tell. He had a good minor strut going around the ring, blasting his phrases in awkward, dramatic little crescendoes at the audience. “Wee are pleeezd! Tooo pree-zent! A No! Holds! Barred! Un-Ree-Strik-Ted! Marr-eeed Cupples! Tag-Team-Match! Fee-chur-ring Two Dy-nam-ic Du-os! Bobbie and Robbie Hansen! Ver-sus. Mario and Isabella Delsandro!”
Evidently these were two new dynamic duos, because the crowd was quiet for a moment as people twisted in their seats or stood up to evaluate the contestants. And both couples looked good. Bobbie and Robbie Hansen, I never did find out which was which, were a beefy though not unattractive blond couple who wore matching blue satin wrestling suits. The Delsandros were very handsome people indeed. Mario nodded his beautiful full hairdo at the fans for a moment before dropping his robe and revealing red tights. But it was Isabella who decided the evening. She also had curly black hair and a shiny red suit, but when she waved at the audience, they quieted further. There were some gasps. The girls next to me actually covered their mouths with their hands; I hadn’t seen that in real life ever. This was the deal: there was a tuft of hair under each of her arms. It was alien enough for this crowd. Mormon women shave under their arms; it’s doctrine. The booing started a second later and when the bell sounded, the fans had made their choice.
When Mitchell ducked out of the ring, Betsy said, “Announcer. That’s not bad.”
“They’ve got him up like Sammy Davis, Jr.”
“But,” she added, “where does an announcer get a black eye?”
I was having trouble taking my eyes from the voluptuous Mrs. Delsandro, who now as the unclean woman was getting her ears booed off.
“You’re right,” I said. “We better stay around, find out what he’s up to.”
I won’t detail the match (or the one after it featuring the snake and the steel cage), but in a sophisticated turn of fate, the Delsandros won. I bounced in my chair the whole forty minutes watching Robbie and Bobbie have at the luckless Mario and Isabella. They were pummeled, tossed, and generously bent. Then, late in the match, Robbie or Bobbie (Mr. Hansen) was torturing Mrs. Delsandro, twisting her arm, gouging her eyes, rendering her weaker and weaker. Mr. Delsandro paced and wept in his corner, pulling his hair out, praying to god, and generally making manifest my very feelings for the woman in the ring. Finally Mr. Hansen climbed on the turnstile and leapt on the woozy woman, smashing her to the mat. He was going for the pin. He lay across Mrs. Delsandro this way and that, maneuvering cruelly, but every time the referee would slap the mat twice, she’d squirm away. Robbie Hansen or Bobbie Hansen, whatever his name was, was relentless. Mr. Mario Delsandro prayed in his corner of the ring. Evidently his prayers were answered, because about the tenth time the referee slapped the mat twice, Isabella Delsandro bucked and threw Mr. Hansen clear and in a second she was on him. It was such a relief, half the fans cheered.
What she did next sealed the Hansens’ fate. She whomped him a good one with a knee drop and then ducked and hoisted him aloft, belly to heaven, in a refreshing spinal stretch. Well, it took the crowd, who thought they were rooting for the home team, less than a second to spot Mr. Hansen as a sick individual. His blue satin shorts bulged precisely with the outline of his skewered erection, and Mrs. Delsandro toured him once around the ring for all to see and then dropped him casually on his head. By now they were urging her, in loud and certain terms, to kill Mr. Hansen. Wrestling is one thing. Transgressing the limits of a family show is entirely another. I heard cries which included the phrases decapitate, assassinate, and put him to sleep.