Slot Machine by Chris Lynch Page A

wrestling team, and they are not some kind of accumulation of points in some imaginary standings. It is an educational exercise for all, and as such, I don’t want anyone getting overzealous at this early stage of the game.”
    That speech, I realized, was for my benefit. Not that my zeal was a threat to anyone. On the contrary, Coach was fearing for me as a victim . My man Axe did not appear to have any modulation control anywhere on his finely tuned thresher of a body, and his matches the first couple of days—against some pretty decent athletes—were wars. Wars he didn’t lose.
    My first two wrestling days, on the other hand... well, Coach put it generously when he said we were starting from scratch and building very slowly. The plan seemed to be to find my appropriate level of competition. For practice purposes all the “big ’uns,” the junior heavyweights, heavyweights, and super heavyweights, did a lot of intermingling. Working my way down, I was thankfully allowed to go my first match against Eugene. A sport, a gentleman, a humanitarian, and a mentor, Eugene carried me through that whole match. He was good at making it look almost like a legitimate fight, taking the opportunity to show me a few new maneuvers along the way. He let me get to the second round before my inability to move him in any direction at all became just too obvious, and he finished me mercifully. He was even polite enough to whisper, “I’m going to have to pin you now,” just before grinding me finally into the mat.
    Eugene was the only super heavy, but there were two legitimate heavyweights. One was a real wrestler, so Coach bypassed him and matched me with the other guy, Bellows, a track-and-field washout who was cut for refusing to learn any kind of form in the shot put. Apparently he just kept heaving the thing like a lead softball and placing second or third anyway. Then he’d sit, a little Skoal Bandit pouch of tobacco under his lip, to shamelessly razz the opposition and spit brown streams across their line of vision. He was a jolly enough guy, in a menacing way, but he had pretty much the same approach to wrestling that he had to putting the shot. Form was an imposition; brute force was enough.
    This much Bellows appreciated about the rules of wrestling: Get that sucker down, and flatten him there.
    He achieved part A in ten seconds, meeting me head-on, taking a hugging grip of both of my thighs, lifting me up and tackling me down. Hard. I felt the cartilage between my ribs crackle when we crashed together.
    I wasn’t giving up part B so quickly.
    He didn’t let go of my legs. He held and pushed, his feet digging in behind him as he drove me like a wheelbarrow farther into the floor. I twisted one way, flipped all the way over on my belly. With a vicious twist, he pulled me back. I leaned up, as if I were trying sit-ups, and he stood, still holding my legs, forcing my upper body to the mat again.
    He let go of my legs when I wouldn’t stop squirming side to side. He climbed up my body like a tree. Climbing horizontally up a felled tree. If he couldn’t pin me with leverage, he was going to pin me with might. He grabbed the balls of both shoulders in his claws, and he squeezed. Squeezed and pushed.
    I had no chance this way. I never had any chance of winning, but I never expected to. What was important, to me, was to not get pinned. I couldn’t fight off this press, but I could writhe. I let him pin my left shoulder, giving it up so easily that all his weight fell to that side, and I lifted the other one. When he tried to compensate, I lifted the right.
    “Predicament!” Coach called. “You’re in a predicament, Elvin. Get out of it.”
    “Well, no shit,” I grunted, as I strained to achieve zero improvement of the situation. I hadn’t yet been told that a predicament in wrestling was when you were not quite pinned, but you might as well have been. And if you don’t break out of it, they blow the whistle to stop the