Beamer
by Mitch Grabois
Clement Beecham sat at the top of the hard wooden bleachers and watched as his girlfriend, Molly Urquhart, took a pummeling.
Her opponent was thinner but taller, more muscular, and her eyes were fixed in a glare. She wore the white of Good. Her shorts and halter-top reflected the harsh ring lights; her moves were bright flashwork.
Molly wore the black. When she grinned, the jet mouthpiece made her look diabolical.
A grin was Molly’s favorite expression. She was like a baby, Clement thought, naturally tickled by life. She wore her light brown, wavy hair in unruly bangs, a style he hadn’t thought women wore anymore. Other than that, there was nothing remarkable about her German-Irish features-- there were probably thousands of women who resembled her on the farms and in the small towns of the upper Midwest. Her cheekbones weren’t high like the Scandinavians but they were strong, and her complexion was persistently flushed, as if she’d been working outdoors. He knew he was being unfair when he typed her as corn-fed. She was unique, her own person.
That was why he was sitting in the renovated barn of what he thought might qualify as a cult, watching her get beat up.
The bout had started fairly evenly. The women, as they’d been taught, had circled, sized each other up, tested, looked for openings. Molly had gotten in some good punches, but by the end of the first round her opponent, Lynn McNulty, had taken control.
Clement remembered meeting Lynn, in the Wal-Mart. He was looking at the stacked boxes of generic light bulbs, grateful for how much cheaper they were than name-brand, when he heard Molly say, “You buying anything today, or just being a tourist?”
He looked up to see a woman with an empty cart. She had a thin mouth, a straight nose, straight black hair, a face an artist might have drawn with a few quick pen strokes.
“Clement, this is Lynn McNulty,” Molly said.
He extended his hand and Lynn took it and squeezed hard. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were gray, like a cat’s.
She’s trying to hurt me, Clement thought.
Lynn squeezed harder.
He tried to take his hand back, but Lynn wouldn’t let him. He looked to find Molly; she was watching a man in an electric wheelchair rolling away from them down the aisle.
“It’s nice meeting you,” Lynn said.
The soft flesh between the bones of Clement’s hand compressed as Lynn added pressure. He believed he could have overpowered her grip, but it was too late to compete. Why had he responded so passively?
“Nice meeting you,” he said.
Lynn’s grasp was painful but exciting, with the sexiness of dominance and submission, as he imagined being handcuffed to a bed might be.
Molly was still watching the man in the wheelchair. She seemed fascinated by his swerving back and forth as he made his way down the aisle, a disabled man’s equivalent of skipping?
The boxes of merchandise piled on the shelves around them were vividly colored. Clement fleetingly thought of the yellow smiley-face in the Wal-Mart commercials that flew around knocking down prices.
Molly turned back toward them and Lynn released his hand.
“Lynn,” Molly said, “if you had to make a choice, would you rather be deaf or blind?”
Clement winced as, in the ring below, Lynn hit Molly with a right cross. It had snap, the quality of punch one saw in a good amateur fight.
Molly’s expression said, “How could you do that to me, my friend?”
Lynn punched her again.
He looked away for a moment as a large crow flew by one of the high windows to his right. By the date it was spring, but winter refused to release its grip and the rolling farmland of western Michigan was windswept and gray with persistent overcast. Clement was accustomed to Florida sunshine and his new home’s gloomy weather didn’t help his mood.
When Clement had been a success he hadn’t thought much about Success and Failure, but after he lost his job, three months earlier, he began thinking about it a lot. As he watched Molly fight, he found himself ticking items off a spontaneous mental checklist:
Molly’s a success because she has the guts to climb into the ring.
But she’s a failure because she hasn’t had the commitment to train hard enough.
She’s a success because she possesses a simple goodness.
But she’s a failure because she’s willing to play Evil for Potter Pettigrew in his Church of Personal Power.
She’s a success because she doesn’t expect much from life and is happy with what she has.
But she’s a failure for the same reason.
Clement stopped as Lynn belted Molly in the midsection and Molly went down on one knee. The referee, Potter Pettigrew himself, stepped between them and began an eight-count. Though these bouts weren’t choreographed, Pettigrew seemed to know that Molly would rise before the end of the count.
When she stood and lifted her head she was grinning, revealing a broad swath of the black mouthpiece.
Lynn’s face darkened, as if the grin were a taunt, and the cold light of the arena illuminated the involuntary flexing of her abdominal muscles, a “six-pack” in progress.
Above her shorts Molly had a small roll of baby fat; she’d imbibed too many six-packs of Old Milwaukee. As an employee of Steinberger’s Grocery, she could get thirty cans for less than eight bucks. While he and Molly sat around drinking beer, Lynn was doing crunches, turning softness into hardness, helplessness into power, Evil into Good.
Maybe his car would catch on fire, Clement thought, as he pulled into the parking lot of the video store, or a hunter would accidentally shoot him when he returned home. Or maybe his bad fortune had run its course and he’d win the lottery or stumble across a burning bush in the rolling dunes fronting Lake Michigan, an inexplicable miracle that would change his life. Even a fool knew that nothing in life was predictable or certain, but it was a truth Clement would rather not have learned first-hand.
He would have been satisfied to merely read that little gobbet of wisdom in an old issue of Reader’s Digest. There were a lot of them stacked in the bedrooms and bathroom of the dilapidated farmhouse in which he now lived. He was nearly fifty years old, had degrees in Psychology, and every day he scanned old Reader’s Digests for helpful mental health tips.
Lynn had Molly against the ropes.
Lynn hit Molly in the face.
Molly wore a fixed grin. She was his lover, the woman who had become his crutch. It was all inexplicable.
Clement tried, without success, to imagine his wife, Claire, in a boxing ring, gloved up, “ready to rumble.” He remembered life as it had been when he was a college dean and his wife was alive, but that was always a bad indulgence, a sure producer of melancholy. Claire hadn’t even made it to her forty-sixth birthday before cancer had done its dirty work, and it was only a year-and-a-half later that the dirtiness of campus politics had completed the job of stealing everything important from him.
Clement remembered how Claire had straddled him on their bed. The bedroom was pleasantly cool, in contrast to the subtropical heat outside. Above the thin white blades of her shoulders the white wooden blades of the fan spun lazily. The grain of the ceiling’s pickled cypress, each board hand-picked by Claire, whorls and small tight knots lovingly examined, imparted a silent elegance, which was Claire herself. Of the fifteen years they’d spent together what he remembered best was her unpretentious elegance.
When she covered him with her body, sometimes Clement felt as if she carried no weight at all. She had the innate stylishness of a star of the silent screen. Her hair was a blond sheath.
She lowered herself to him and put the tip of her tongue to the top of his nose. “I’m going to lick these furrows away,” she said. They had deepened over the years.
“Worry, depart,” she said.
However, when she became ill furrows of her own appeared, then deepened, as in time-lapse photography. Clement kissed her gently on the brow, and massaged her disappearing body.
It was her most therapeutic regimen, she said, though no regimen proved therapeutic. All were failures and the only one without awful side effects were his kisses. Perhaps even his kisses conveyed unobservable side effects.
“Clement,” Claire had said one morning. Unable to eat, she sipped a malodorous medicinal tea. “Clement, I want us to buy a new BMW Roadster, a convertible, silver, with leather seats and a top-of-the-line stereo system.”
Clement held his spoon, milk dripping from granola, suspended in the air.
“Clement, I know this isn’t me, but I’ve been thinking-- billions of years ago there was an enormous explosion and the Universe came into being, matter hurtled outward never to stop, the solar system was born, the planet. Earth developed life, spirituality, art, German engineering….”
Tears came to her eyes and her furrows darkened.
“Clement. I don’t want to die without having had a really nice car, a work of art car, seamless, sleek, perfect, inviolate…”
Their eleven-year-old Honda sat parked in front of the house.
“I want you to drive me, Clement, because I know I can’t drive myself. I want to get a wig, hair longer than I’ve ever had, and I want it to fly in the wind as you drive me, at incredible speed, humming down the asphalt. I don’t care about tickets, about cops, hiding in their squad cars in the bushes with their radar guns; they’ll never catch us.
“I see the aerodynamics in my head. I see the light filter through the trees as we zoom along the forest roads, you taking the turns like a Grand Prix driver, thoughtless, reckless, biting off one thrill at a time, thrilling me. I see autumn leaves cascading around us --orange and bright yellow-- falling to the blue pavement and then, propelled by the rush of our acceleration, flying back into the trees.”
He listened to a Claire he didn’t know, a Claire more like her sister, a manic Claire fleeing her fear. She was taking a lot of medications. Maybe they were combining badly.
They couldn’t afford a car like that. The idea was insane. Claire’s materialism had always been based in growing gardens, in cooking and weaving. Her illness had made her an American, seeking to compensate for life’s damage with a larger or fancier automobile.
“A BMW Roadster,” he said. “Wow. You know I’ve always been more of a Studebaker…”
“Let me show you.” Her eyes were wide.
The barbed hook was set solidly in Claire’s decimated heart, and the BMW images that glowed through their computer screen were more real than he was. They illuminated her face with rich colors. Clement could not refuse her. The blades of Claire’s mortality, spinning ever faster, shredded common sense.
After the Beamer had broken the crust, the rest was an easy slide. He drove his charge cards like shifting through the Beamer’s gears. He sent yellow leaves shooting into the sky. Claire opened her door and vomited along the side of the road and rinsed her mouth with Dom Perignon.
Clement’s motto: Death or bankruptcy, whichever comes first.
The second round ended. Molly sat on her stool and wiped her face with a black towel. Pettigrew didn’t provide the fighters with corner men. In the moment’s respite between rounds, no one handed them water, or offered encouragement or advice.
“We dream our dreams alone and we struggle alone,” Pettigrew had preached, standing in the center of the ring before the bout began, the hard lines of his bodybuilder physique clearly visible through his tight clothing.
“God is strength itself,” he preached.
The women stood in the spot where Pettigrew had been and traded blows. Lynn’s eyes gleamed with each punch she threw, with each bit of damage inflicted, but Clement also sensed her fear. He sat on the bleachers, a stranger among disciples. The Everlast emblem on Lynn’s trunks glittered in the ring lights.