In these mesmerizing, often visceral stories, Lee Henderson evokes a world both utterly strange and achingly familiar.
Pubescent boys lost in sumo wrestler costumes battle it out in a suburban yard as their parents stake the odds. A boy disappears from his home, taken by a man who looks exactly like his father. A young man spends a potentially heroic day with his wife at the new wave pool, while trying to save his marriage.
These are loopy, eerily engaging stories both afflicted and inspired by the profound isolation and psychic drift that are inherent in a world of talk-show television, mega-malls and suburban sprawl.
Two sumo wrestlers are in a ring staring each other down, their spines a length of Velcro. The sun is out and the sky is huge and it seems that everyone else is drunk. But the sumos must stay totally focused. It is the sumo way, probably. Their legs step apart. They hunch over. They put their hands on their knees. The bulges of fat along their beltlines look like half-melted nougat. Over their bowl-cuts each of them wears a black helmet that looks
like hair tied into a bun—helmets that keep slipping over their eyes. I can’t see! yelps one sumo. Neither can I! pipes the other. A teenage girl who’s refereeing tightens their chinstraps another notch and says, God, you’ve got small little heads. When her hands come up to their chins they can feel her fingernails scratch their necks and there is, for a wiggly instant, a new thrill that runs straight down into their legs. Your heads are too small, she says. They say nothing. For one thing she’s wearing a sports bra they can both see through her top, and for another they’re about to kick each other’s ass so they need to concentrate.
Around the ring adults are gathered clutching Mason jars of keg beer, cheap party beer and lots of it, slapping their knees at the sight of their kids inside those rented getups, a father saying, Kick his ass, as he sweeps away a glob of beer foam from his moustache. I’ve got twenty bucks on you, don’t embarrass your dad now. He shows his kid the bill in his hand and laughs. A nice crisp bank-machine twenty riding on him. Show your dad what kind of mettle you’re made of, he says, and shakes his sumo by the arms. Let’s hear your war cry.
Arr, says the boy.
Don’t be a wussy, his father says. Again, he says.
Arr, says the boy. He’s squinting. He had to take his glasses off and have his little sister protect them while he wrestled or he might’ve broken them otherwise. He hopes it looks intimidating. He hopes he looks vicious with his face all scrunched up like this, instead of just looking like a blind kid trying to keep his balance in a fat suit.
There in front of him he sees the indistinct fuzz of his father in a white Fruit of the Loom muscle-shirt doing a little shadowbox. Twenty bucks, right? Don’t forget that.
The mother of his sumo opponent, a woman with a curly runnel of hair down her shoulders and slick fingernails with a tendency to scratch the air as they approach a man, comes up beside his father and says, That little son of yours couldn’t wrestle his way out of a T-shirt.
Unlike you, I suppose, his father says.
Oh, nasty, she says, lip curled.
Everyone is looking forward to some meat. The scent of BBQ’d hot dogs and hamburgers passes over them in streamlets. A cardboard box full of white buns from Costco sits beside a row of three blazing propane grills. There are circular buns with sesame seeds bagged by the dozen so that you have to separate them from each other, and long tube-shaped buns with creases along their tops. A jar of relish fell to the ground earlier and has
become a sort of illicit rendezvous for bees.
Here is a short-sighted little boy about to wrestle the kid on his block he never even talks to, even though their parents are friends. A little boy who excels at book reports and math quizzes and province-naming. He learned to run fast thanks to certain larger boys. Now he’s number one in track and field in gym class. He is weightless, zoom, the speed of light. And yet he is still tormented by the same night terror he’s had since as long as he can remember. He awakes from a gasping dream with his heart door-knocking at his ribs. In the dream he’s being smothered by something large and unutterable, choking, almost killing him, almost. Little boy who is just establishing his first real crushes on girls, which, if he imagines these girls at night as he drifts off, brings the suffocating dream back almost the second he falls asleep. And suddenly he’s got a crush on this referee.
She stands in the middle of the ring with her legs apart, the referee, her Adidas tearaway pants tight against her thighs. She says, Bow.
The sumo wrestlers bow and fall over.
Afternoon’s sharp light catches on the folds and puffs of their costumes and exposes the hundreds of fabric dimples on their skin like yawning pores. Their legs are disproportionately short but they sure are fleshy. A cuff of tarp-skin at the bottom of each shin reveals sport socks underneath. Their dumpy inflated bodies are a bit elephantine, sacks of skin exploding with more skin. Strange suburban baby-monsters. And they’ve got those heavy
diapers on, the kind that real sumo wrestlers wear.
She hoists them back up again. Careful, she says, this sweet teenage girl, the oldest kid on the block, the daughter of an entertainment lawyer currently sitting on an extendable Kmart lawn chair made of white and green vinyl weaving and an aluminum frame, with his legs crossed, with his hair creamed back, wagging an Italian leather espadrille at the end of one toe, talking steadily on his cellphone and jabbing his index finger like a rapier.
Aren’t you gonna watch, Dad? she screams over the crowd that has formed.
He puts a hand over the phone, In a minute in a minute.
Mawashi. Sumo diapers are called mawashis. Also shimekomis, after the way they’re wrapped.
Well, she says to the two kids, then are we ready or whatever?
I’m ready, the boy without his glasses says.
I’m totally ready, the other boy says, the little punk with the mole on his chin who lives next door in the house with the biggest yard. There’s always a few hundred toys of different shapes and sizes on the lawn and myriad action figures meticulously burned and maimed left on the roof of the one-storey house. I am so fucking totally ready, he says.
Don’t cuss, his mother says, and smiles at the other boy’s father. It’s not appropriate.
He’s sweating, this short-sighted mini-sumo. He’s getting seriously hot inside the suit. There’s sweat purlingdown his temples. Even his ankles are sweating. Body inside a body. The sun has blanched the sky, the tops of cars burn white-hot, the siding on houses is soft to the touch, the grass on lawns is a dry sienna from its tungsten glare. Sprinklers make supplicating arcs. The heat does not yield. How long, he wonders, can he take the heat like this? Wrapped up in so much flesh like this?
Orbiting the sumo ring the fathers are getting quite inebriated, laughing and waving and yelling at them to, Go at it, go at it! They siphon out beers and debate the merits of their children and families. What did you call my wife? I didn’t say nothing. I think you did. Well, I think you think wrong, buddy.
The block party will conclude with American fireworks, but for now this will do to entertain. The neighbourhood’s own pintsized Takanahana, its own little Akebono.
Dust piles up along the edges of houses from the wind. The half-blind sumo’s sister performs an imitation of a car alarm being activated. She’s got it down to the pitch and volume and everything and she’s only seven.
Why did he agree to this? he wonders. The little boy didn’t look too pleased when he saw the suits. To get inside his sumo outfit he had to lie on his back in front of the costume and slide feet first into the meat of the sumo, inching his legs through the dermis to the ankle like a ghost creepingly taking possession of a body. Oddly the inner padding of the sumo suit was sleeping-bag plaid. His arms had to squeeze through the plaid blubber until his
hands passed through elasticized wristbands and then were immediately slipped into mittens. Mitts, not gloves—these sumos have only one huge plump finger on each hand and the requisite opposable thumbs. The referee sealed him in from the spine—by way of Velcro—and then folded over a flap to conceal the seam (for verisimilitude). Then she hoisted him up to his feet and said, Looking good, sweetie. His legs buckled. He wasn’t sure if it was the weight of the suit or some kind of erotic feebleness. He waddled over to his place at one side of the ring, facing the other boy. Now he is ready to wrestle.
You kids look pretty adorable, the referee says.
Ha! his sister squeaks. She wants to be their girlfriend!
Haw haw, says everybody. The fathers, the mothers, their grade-school friends, even the teenage referee laughs, the whole block party laughs. Their girlfriend. Not only funny because she’s a teenager and they’re just boys, but because of what they’re wearing. All that mallowy flesh and those cute-as-hell kid cheeks squooched out from their chinstraps.
He looks at the punk kid standing across from him. Two idiotic cartoon fat men being laughed at by a whole cul-de-sac. Something in the angry humiliated stare of that kid tells him he’s in trouble.
My kid’s gonna whup yours’s ass, his father says.
Care to put some money where your mouth is? the other kid’s mother answers.
I’ll put something where my mouth is.
Oh, nasty.
More keg beer is siphoned improperly into jars, big head for a little blonde. And everyone drinks too fast, not thinking about tomorrow’s hangover.
The girl has a palm up at each of them, holding them back. The short-sighted boy sees a scoop of cleavage as she leans down to straighten his helmet again. The punk kid can see into the sleeve of her shirt all the way to her smooth armpit. Are you ready now? she asks.
I said I was ready, the punk kid says.
Are you okay without your glasses? she asks the little boy. He can smell berries when she’s this close to him. He’s so red in the face it’s a wonder he hasn’t melted, and he can only answer her with a timid nod.
They’re ready! she says.
The neighbourhood cheers. A makeshift bookie works the numbers; tens and twenties pile up in a sweat-ringed ballcap. A Dalmatian barks. A balloon is let go from the fist of a small child. The sun winks away with the passing of a scant cloud. The contours of shadows change ever so slightly and only for a moment. The wind calms down. More bets are made.
Don’t mess this up, his father calls out, and then he stumbles over to his kid’s side, puts an arm around his upholstered son, leans down to whisper, And I mean do not mess up.
The boy just tries to stay upright—it’s all he can do.
Beyond the ring and the parents, past the tables and condiments, beer kegs, and bowls of mashed potatoes, the lawyer, the referee’s father, is still on the phone, and his gestures have gotten worse: simple but intense karate, on the verge of fullfledged kicking.
No, he says. No, is what I said. No. Did I not say no?
The referee counts to three, slicing an arm down at the ring with each number. ONE, she yells. TWO, she yells. And then, after a coy pause in which she looks to each boy and gives them both a little wink, THREE!
The sumos lunge at each other—stumbling tripping practically falling, and still they feel nothing when their chests collide with an airy plap. It’s like two pillows battling for a place on the bed. Soft combat. They raise their arms, as if that’ll help. The blind kid gets a mitt in the face, and when he bites the hand it tastes like the underside of a wig.
The block party goes wild, amused as hell by the two kids as they paw and slap at each other. Like a Walt Disney cockfight right here in the road in front of all their houses, during the first heat wave of the summer on a torpid long weekend meant to celebrate this country’s birthday or something.
Use his weight against him, someone suggests.
Pull him out of the ring, a father yaps, spills beer all down the front of his shirt.
Kill him! someone screams.
The referee dances around them looking pretty and it’s the worst thing ever for this half-blind kid, who wishes he could make this whole scene suddenly stop. Everything posed in a stillness he’s produced with his own superheroic mind. The first thing he’d do would be to go over and stand on his toes and kiss that girl right on the lips. He could do that and no one would ever find out. Then the next thing he’d do would be to beat the crap out of this stupid kid in front of him, because he can’t seem to get this punk’s little mitts out of his face. Every time he pushes him away the kid comes back even harder with the mitts up. And the world hasn’t come to a standstill at all, no, everything is moving faster and faster, with his father wagging two twenties and a ten in his face, and in fact at any moment he’s sure he’s going to lose his balance.
The other kid, the punk with the mole on his chin, it’s obvious from the way he scrabbles and claws with all the childhood mania he can muster that he just wants to get this over with. He wants to whup this shrimp and get out of this costume and end the humiliation. His mother is more impressed with the kid’s father’s muscles than with how quickly he’s going to slam this four-eyes to the mat, and a teenage girl (human kinetics, she once told him, that means I’ll get to work with bodies) skipping around and reminding him not to bite, or head-butt. It’s awful. He feels sick and stupid.
So he whups the kid, the blind kid. Takes him by the arm and heaves, sends them both caroming towards the edge of the ring.
They fall on each other like lovers, the blind kid on his back with the boundary of the ring beneath him.
I win, he tells the blind kid as they lie there waiting to be picked up.
Big whoop, says the boy.
Loving it, the audience is loving it. Half of them whine and put their hands over their eyes and the other half howl and make cha-chingnoises, their fists pumping the arms of invisible slot machines. Money is doled into people’s palms all crumpled and hot. They stand the sumos back up again. Suddenly the fathers are acting like trainers, trying to fill their sons with renewed confidence, rubbing their bellies and patting them on the cheeks.
All right, his father says. Next time go for the legs. You can see the legs, right? Without the glasses? That’s the key next round. Legs.
Next round?
His father gives him a sip of beer from the jar. Cheer up, he says, this is great.
He wonders if he might faint. Monsoon-like waves of nausea pass through him, and he needs to be held up by his father to keep from collapsing. His sumo helmet has been dislodged and is pinching one ear and chafing the skin around his jaw.
Please, Dad, the boy says. I feel sick to my stomach.
Not now, okay. At least win one round.
Please, Dad.
But his father has already sunk back into the sudsy crowd of parents surrounding the ring, boozy and demanding and weird, and he’s left alone again to fight his way free. Everything is blurry, a big nebulous haze of embarrassment. He watches all the parents, all these adults with full-time jobs and bills that come in the mail in brown envelopes with plastic windows, all of these people here in front of him, jumping up and down, poking each other in the ribs, barking and spitting, laughing over losses and wins, pinching each other in places they shouldn’t, and talking in flirty artificial voices (that’s not the way his father talks to his mother)—and he realizes that even once he’s left the ring it’s not going to be any different.
And the teenage girl is doing somersaults around her dad, and he covers his cellphone again and says, That’s great hon’, I’m on the phone.
Everyone has their wallets pried open to dig for bills. They smooth out wrinkles in old fives, sift through change for loonies and toonies. Their palms are moist. They cry out bets to the bookie and stuff their money into the ballcap. Everyone is watching the boys and no one is watching the parents.
His sister makes the sound of a car alarm going off.
The sun is very hot.
They wrestle again. And again.
