Nightmare Carnival

His wife must be fucking enormous, Chattopadhyay thought.

Gordon rang the bell. Work became shoot. Fraud transformed into battery. A flash tackle and college boy was on top. He rained punches down on to the Black Raja, trying to get a little claret going. Finally, the scarred-over skin on Raja’s head burst open and the blood started to pour. That’s when the Raja grabbed the college boy’s wrist, jerked it forward, swung his freed leg over the boy’s torso to get him into a scissor hold.

College boy crunched up and slid an arm behind the Raja’s neck, not to crank it but to whisper. “We’re gonna burn you out, so just lie back and count the fucking lights. My daddy and his friends just wanted to see the show first.” Then the college boy tightened his grip and went for the can opener neck crank, driving Raja’s chin to his chest.

Raja smiled. The college boy was strong, but not too smart. He let go of the scissor hold, and the pressure from the can opener all but vanished. He bumped the kid off him with a hip thrust, rolled to his side, planted a hand on the kid’s ass and shoved him onto his face. Raja took his back. This would be easy.

Except that the college boy did a press-up, then got to his feet, with the Black Raja hanging off his back like a child. The crowd howled with glee, and someone screamed, “Jack him!” and the boy did, smashing Raja under him.

Gordon, still outside the ring, reached under the bottom rope and slapped the mat twice but Raja jerked a shoulder up. Gordon was eager to slap the mat a third time anyway, to ring the bell, to make a mad dash for the shotgun under the ring if he needed to, but something stopped him.

The Black Raja stopped him, with a glare. Chattopadhyay was gone.

College boy didn’t try to rock his opponent back into a pinning position; he just pushed down on Raja’s knees and turned, looking to sneak in a few punches. Which is what Raja wanted.

Raja snaked his right arm under the college boy’s armpit and behind his neck, the other over the boy’s left shoulder. A three-quarter nelson — he owned the boy’s upper body now. The boy could take a pin, and get humiliated in front of the town. Or the boy could try a neck bridge, and Raja would just hook, making the hold so painful that the boy would have to submit.

Raja shifted his weight and drove the boy’s shoulders toward the mat. But college boy was smart after all. He put his fists together behind his head and flexed hard. Raja felt his grip being pried open. The boy thrashed and was free. He planted a knee on the Raja’s belly and sank near three hundred pounds into it. One paw swallowed the Raja’s neck. The boy’s right hand was a fist, held high, ready to come down.

Chattopadhyay thought it looked like the moon. The Black Raja was gone.

He wondered if he was going to die.

Here’s something to know about Chattopadhyay. Raja is a gimmick. Kalamatas is a gimmick. Chattopadhyay wished he was a raja, dressing in gold, riding in a palanquin. Sometimes he wished he was just a simple Greek moron, herding goats and spitting olive pits onto the table.

What was Chattopadhyay actually? He was a little boy. Chattopadhyay was placed in an akhara—like a gym, or a monastery dedicated to breaking bones — by his parents at age four, and did the work wrestlers do. Up before the sun to perform a thousand squats and a thousand dand pushups. Twenty-five matches in a row, real matches, with his fellow students. Endless swinging of Indian clubs, sometimes while wearing a stone gar nal around his neck to build up his bridge. As the gym’s own boy, he’d cook the food and clean up the messes and jerk off his teachers, who were barred by the traditions of the sport from handling themselves or lying with women.

Then came the war, and the Indian Army, the Italian campaign. Then on to London, which smelled like a fire, and on to Canada on his hard-earned passport. It was only a single midnight truck ride in the bottom of the truck to get him to the United States, where a man could make a living wrestling — especially a man who knew how to shoot as well as work. When Chattopadhyay wanted to win, he could pin pretty much any longshoreman or pituitary gland case the brass put up against him. That’s how the promoters used him, to cut young workers down a peg when they made the mistake of asking for more money, or threatening the boss with their big canned-ham fists. In the lingo of the field, Chattopadhyay was a stretcher. His job was to get in the ring and hook them but good, to make his opponents realize that wrestling was real, even when they were paid to fake it.