“I call it, ‘Frank’s Surprise.’”
“Oh yeah?” Chuck looked disappointed.
“I’ll have some for you tonight. Same amount, same price. Tomorrow morning at the latest,” Frank said and that seemed to cheer Chuck up a little.
* * * * *
The first few notes of the national anthem lurched out of the loudspeakers, and everyone took that as the signal for the fight and started inside. Frank let the current carry him into the cinderblock walls. He swept past the front office, the entrance to the changing rooms and toilets, and the shower, until it threw him against the shallow end.
To the left, Chuck and Pine had done a good job sealing off the deep end. Chicken wire, reinforced every four feet with a stout pole anchored in a five-gallon bucket of cement, stretched across the shallow end. Men climbed down the three-foot ladders and lined up along the fence, wanting to see the fight up close and personal. Black, brittle leaves were scattered across the dull white paint like dead scales against a fish’s white belly. Most of the men lined up along the edges of the deep end.
A stainless steel box, at least six feet long and four feet high, hung on the edge between the low and high diving boards from a series of ropes and pulleys. The box was nearly solid, with only a single row of holes the size of quarters along the top; it was tilted at such a steep angle that the line of holes pointed up at the high board. A separate rope led to a catch on the gate.
Fourteen feet below, the bottom was covered with six inches of murky water, choked with algae. And even that water was disappearing fast. When Frank, Sturm, and Girdler had visited, the water was around two feet deep. Next week there would be nothing but algae, spread thin and dying under that relentless sun. Week after that, dust.
Someone threw a bottle into the deep end. It shattered and Frank saw the previously hidden Komodo Dragon tear away from the corner up near the shallow end and zigzag across the thin pool of water, moving faster than Princess and Lady going after a sheep. It circled around in the corner under the high board and sank back into the water.
Sturm hit the record as he burst out of the doorway of the front office, sending the needle skipping and tearing across the vinyl.
The guy was looking up at the speakers and joking with his buddies and had no idea Sturm was about to come down like a hammer striking the primer of a shell. Sturm went in low and jerked the guy’s boots out from under him with his left hand while grabbing hold of the guy’s belt with his right and pushing down. All the guy really felt was his legs get yanked from under him and the gritted surface of the pool deck smash into his face, shattering the cartilage in his nose, cracking the bone above the eyes, and breaking his upper two front teeth.
Sturm was so mad he jerked one of his pistols out and shot the guy’s hand. “Throw another fucking bottle!” he hollered, letting everyone around the pool hear him loud and clear. He clicked the hammer back in the sudden quiet and aimed at the back of the guy’s head. “What’s that? What?” Sturm tilted his head.
The guy whimpered something.
“You’re sorry? You fucking ought to be.” Sturm eased the hammer up and put the pistol back in its holster. He stepped up to the edge, let his voice bounce around the hollow concrete. “Anybody else feel like interfering with this fight? This establishment has rules, and anybody thinks these rules don’t apply to him, then he’d best be thinking hard about this decision. In fact, he best be thinking about it so hard he leaves. Right fucking now.”
Frank trailed Sturm at a distance as men crowded the edge, climbed up on the roof of the front office, hung off the two lifeguard towers. The clowns sat along the high board, the best seats in the house, except for the shallow board, which was reserved for Sturm and Theo only. Frank slowed, watching faces, clothes, gestures.
And there was Mr. Noe, still in his white suit, one leg hooked around the ladder bars by the deep end’s lifeguard tower, taking pictures with a cheap, disposable camera.
Frank wished he hadn’t left the shotgun in the car.
* * * * *
Sturm climbed up on the low diving board and everyone cheered. He let the applause build, then nodded to Jack. Frank figured he must have missed all the speeches, because Sturm wasn’t wasting any time. Jack swiftly pulled the gate up, releasing the tiger. It came out backwards, clawing at the smooth metal of the box in a blur of white fur. But it couldn’t catch hold, and slid along the wall all the way down, splashing into the water, turning the white coat quite green.
The Komodo watched the tiger for a moment, tongue sliding greasily in and out as it tasted the air, and turned back to clawing at the wall. The tiger scampered out of the water and coiled itself at the edge of the shallow end, near the chicken wire. After that, the two animals refused to look at each other.
Frank didn’t want Sturm to see him, so he kept his head down and worked his way around behind Sturm. Men shouted, screamed at the tiger and the Komodo Dragon, but neither animal moved much. Frank overheard someone say, “I’ve seen better fights at my son’s school, and he’s in fucking third grade.”
Frank eased his way around the diving boards, avoiding Jack and Pine, who were lowering the tiger box and dragging it back away from the edge. Billy was right there, saying, “Maybe it’s still cold. Shit, I dunno.”
“Thought you said it was mean,” Pine said.
“Oh it is, you betcha. But this, this I dunno,” Billy said.
Frank hung back, near the fence, and rounded the corner. Mr. Noe was still taking pictures. Frank slid between men until he was directly behind the white suit. He let his eyes flicker up to Sturm, who was busy stomping back and forth on the low diving board. Frank knew Sturm was looking for him, wondering how in the hell to get these two animals to fight. Frank didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was hunched over in front of him, clicking away at the bottom of the pool.
It was easy. He waited until Mr. Noe leaned out one more time to take a picture, peeled Mr. Noe’s hand off the ladder handle and simply pushed at the same time. Gently. In the small of the back. Mr. Noe’s center of gravity shifted unexpectedly, and almost in slow motion, before he realized that he was too far out, before his balance had a chance to sound the alarm bell, he slowly toppled over and fell.
He shrieked, an anxious, desperate bleat. Frank wished he had seen the man’s eyes when he had finally realized that he was about to fall into the empty pool, but Frank was already slipping backwards through the cluster of men.
Mr. Noe, for some reason, held onto the camera the whole way down. He landed on his shoulder in the water and the flash went off. The impact cranked his head sideways and forward; if he’d hit a slightly different angle, if his head had gone backwards instead of crushing his chin into his chest, and the fall would have snapped his neck instantly. But Mr. Noe wasn’t that lucky. His ribs collapsed into his collarbone and his pelvis settled over his face, leaving his bony legs jutting limply into space, like trees that had snapped in half in a high wind. They flopped back and forth, eventually slapping against the edge of the wall, not five feet from the Komodo Dragon.
Frank caught Sturm staring at him.
The men laughed, cheered. Everyone had simply assumed that Mr. Noe had leaned out too far, and lost his balance, but Sturm knew better. Frank met those ice-cold eyes for a moment, and shrugged. Sturm nodded imperceptibly, telling Frank that they would be speaking later.
The tiger’s ears swiveled and froze as they locked onto Mr. Noe, and it collected itself, lowering the front shoulders and tensing its rear haunches.
The Dragon’s tongue shot out, retracted.
Mr. Noe struggled to lift his head out of the water with his good shoulder, the left one, since the right shoulder and upper arm had been broken in the fall, just enough to grab a breath. He pushed himself around and managed to wriggle over to the edge of the water. He still hadn’t seen the Dragon yet, and this brought him even closer, to within a yard of the giant lizard.