The Gimmicks Read online

  Dedication

  for Mairead

  Epigraph

  It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to get to be himself.

  —WILLIAM SAROYAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Voice from Parts Unknown

  One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Three

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Chris McCormick

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Voice from Parts Unknown

  You can’t explain pain, you can only feel it—a lesson I learned from the great Irishman Dave Finlay, who, after slamming opponents with his patented Celtic Cross, strolled the anonymous cities of the world in search of a peaceful pub. Most nights, though, no peace could be found. Some big-bellied dope or another would lumber toward him, barking insults about professional wrestling. The sport was a homosexual fantasy, they claimed, or a joke, or—most commonly—the sport was fake. That word alone would stir Finlay from his barstool. He’d grab the insulter’s thumb and say, Listen. You prove to your friends that I’m hurting you. I’ll just put a bit of pressure on your thumb. You prove to your friends that I’m hurting you. And he’d press the thumb back, stretching it far enough so that the thumb flopped pink as a tongue, and the thumb’s owner would mewl and beg to be released. But Finlay would hold on, and he’d start to whistle the happiest little song. Onlookers gathered and filled the bar with uncomfortable laughter. Even the crying man’s friends were confused by the collision of pain and good fun, and they surrendered in their confusion to disbelief, suspecting the entire ordeal to be pre-orchestrated. A gag. Fake. Only then would Finlay stop whistling and snap the man’s thumb—quick as a pulled tooth. And every time, in pubs from Cologne to Osaka, from Kansas City to Perth, the man who’d called wrestling fake would try to stuff his broken hand into his pocket. Maybe that’ll be Mr. Finlay’s greatest legacy: hundreds of dislocated thumbs slumped over denim, spindly bits of proof that his profession was legitimate, that he was nobody’s fool, that his life and his pain were real.

  One

  1

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1973

  A greasy lane of mud cut into the hills, splitting the pasture in two. The livestock, off to find dry bedding, had left the brothers entirely to themselves. Halfway to the village above the city, boots all sludge and muck, one of the brothers stopped to swallow a gulp of rain, letting the other catch up. One big, one small—it was impossible in the heavy staves of weather to say which brother was which. They were cousins of cousins, really, not brothers at all, but they were seventeen years old and the distinction seemed theirs to make. It was as if, in the two years since the big one had arrived to join the smaller one, they had spent all their multivariate powers soldering together their separate histories. Saying brother this, brother that. Making it so.

  In the village, an old woman shouted and waved them over. Even in the rain the brothers could see it was Siranoush, on account of her being the only redhead they’d ever known. When they joined her underneath her scrap-metal awning, one of the brothers said, “How is he?”

  “He’s still talking,” she said, meaning her husband, Yergat. The old man was eighty-eight and planted beside her under the awning in an armchair with worn brass buttons at the thumbs. One of the brothers—the big one—had dragged the armchair out of the house three days earlier, and since then, Siranoush had draped a scratchy-looking wool blanket over her husband’s legs and an ashy coat over his shoulders. One by one the brothers bent to kiss his cheeks. Yergat, ignoring them, started in on a story from his younger life, another story about the genocide. The jart, he called it.

  The shattering. Almost sixty years had passed, and Siranoush had heard these stories a thousand times, but she’d recently stopped telling him to shut up. He’d started telling the stories differently, she thought, more completely, because he was dying and, in his dying, remembered nothing so clearly as the time he’d bested death.

  Above them, the rain beat against the makeshift awning. Springtime in Kirovakan was loud with those beatings. The entire season was spent leaning in close to hear what the person nearest to you was saying. More preferable to the brothers was the winter, when the snow fell so silent and heavy you could almost climb the sky, when Party officials operated a ski resort nearby and the villagers gathered a dozen to a blanket to watch the distant adventurers pulleyed to the mountaintops like angels. Winter—when a group of Russian or Georgian skiers would file into the village after a day on the slopes and let the local children take turns sitting on the fronts of their skis. Now, though, it was spring, and the hills had turned green as a graveyard. Tall grass swelled where the skiers once fell. Webbed, hairlike moss rimmed the northern faces of outhouses and stumps. Long rows of mold blossomed in the mortar between the bricks of chimney stacks and henhouses, and little islands of algae frothed at the surface of puddles. Rain, every day. Springtime in Kirovakan.

  “The smell,” Yergat was saying, and the brothers leaned in to hear him. He wanted to die outdoors, he said, with his nose full of the smell of rain. He wanted to live his last days in a place where he could tell the stories of his life, where passersby could catch bits of him like seeds in the wind.

  “Now he’s a poet,” muttered his wife.

  Over her husband she swayed, impatient as a flame. She looked like one, too. Orange hair and freckles—no one could believe she was a real Armenian. She’d once been a typical Armenian girl, went the story, hair as black as birds’ eyes, skin as plain as cream. Then one day in her youth, after her father—a mean man, a tyrant—cursed her for some petty crime and wished aloud that she’d never been born, little Siranoush disappeared. Three days she was gone, and even she couldn’t tell you exactly where she’d been. She could, however, remember who she was with. Angels, she maintained, who stole her in the night to punish her ungrateful father. The angels were teenagers, disappointed by the adults of the human race. Petty and vengeful. Who could blame them? Still, even her most faithful listeners had to admit the story was somewhat fishy. Impossible to prove. But the only person whose opinion mattered had already believed Siranoush, and that was her father. When she returned after three days, he cried and cried and held her and studied her. She told him the story and he believed her. She was the same girl she’d always been, but different. Freckled and red and irreversibly missed. From then on, her father worked hard to love her better.

  Enough. She’d leave the past to her husband, who was relishing his new role as the village historian. Everyone should hear, at least once, an old Armenian man lecture in his language. Operatic and stoic all at once—less a man talking than a vessel, delivering.

  “First,” Yergat told the brothers, “the Turks came for the guns.” Back then he’d been living with his first family—a wife and a little daughter—in a village near Van. It was 1915, when Yergat was thirty years old. That’s when the Turks came, he said, and why, at first. For the guns.


  The brothers—one big, one small, both the age of disappointed angels—leaned forward to hear him. Like all Armenians, they knew the genocide backward and forward. They felt that their own lives were only tendrils climbing the gate of it. Each unearthed memory from a survivor was a new bar in that gate.

  Yergat said he’d never owned a gun. Only cowards needed weapons, he thought, so while the other men in his old village hurried to deliver their weapons by the imposed deadline, Yergat—nothing to turn in, nothing to be confiscated—had stayed at home, smug, drinking coffee. He even asked his daughter, who was only ten years old, to pour his customary splash of cognac.

  The Turks, however, hadn’t believed him. They said they knew the truth, that Yergat had hidden a gun somewhere in the village and was refusing to turn it in. A gun he meant to use against them in the future. The Turks suspected Yergat to be one of those treacherous Armenians who preferred the Russians to the Ottomans. Yergat laughed. “I said, Fuck the Russians, and fuck you, too.” The Turks, however, did not laugh. They waited until the middle of the night, when the whole village was asleep, and knocked down his front door.

  Now Yergat was using a Turkish word that broke through their language like three gunshots: falaka. Foot-whipping. The Turks arrested Yergat and then tortured him that way, threatening his wife and daughter until he admitted that he had, in fact, stowed a gun someplace in the village. Under torture, Yergat promised to return the hidden gun—which he knew did not exist—to the authorities by noon the next day. He invented a gun to save his life. Temporarily satisfied, the Turks allowed him to return home. He crawled across the entire village. When he finally arrived, he was so tattered that his wife and daughter had to lift him to the armchair. “Just like this one,” he said now, to the brothers. He propped up his feet on an imaginary cushion. “Just like this.” He’d begged his wife for a mirror. The bottoms of his feet, she told him, looked like the feet of dogs—“Pouches, here and there, of padding, black with blood and blisters.”

  Instinct sent both sets of the brothers’ eyes to check the bottoms of Yergat’s shoes. As if almost sixty years and a pair of loafers hadn’t obscured the old man’s wounds. In Kirovakan there was a rumor that Yergat used to have a beautiful singing voice. He used to sing while Siranoush played the duduk, that ancient double-reed instrument. Now that he was dying, the only song Yergat wanted to share was the endlessly harrowing song of deportations, of forced marches through the Syrian desert, of rapes and tortures and beheadings, the discordant anthem of drowned and bloated bodies skimming along the Euphrates like flowers, like trash, like—depending on how much Yergat had had to drink—the wretched souls beneath the boat of Charon, wailing in the River Styx. These last few weeks of his life, the notes could change, but the song never did. Mothers around the village were hoping—and it was a sin, they knew—that the old man would give up the ghost sooner rather than later.

  “The hidden gun was fiction,” he told the boys. “The wounds on my feet had immobilized me, but I’d promised to return that fictional gun by noon. I needed a real gun to turn in. So at dawn I sent my daughter to purchase one. If God loved me, I would’ve had a son to send on that errand. My wife was packing our belongings, hiding our silver. Meaningless, I know now. I instructed my daughter to go to an old Turkish friend who lived in the next village. He would help us. I put money in her hands, and off she went. I imagine she held the coins so firmly that their imprint was on her skin the day she died. For many years, I dreamed of checking the palms of little corpses, hoping to find her by the marks in her hands.”

  A chicken wandered under the awning. Earlier that day, Siranoush had picked up another chicken by the neck and twisted it like a wet rag until the head lolled. She’d plucked it and then cooked it while Yergat made himself comfortable on the armchair. Now she disappeared inside the house and returned with a broiled chicken leg for her husband. His favorite. He chewed what little meat there was, and then savored the bone. He jostled the thing with his tongue against his cheek, making a broth in his mouth.

  Siranoush asked if the boys were hungry.

  “Tell the brothers about my teeth,” Yergat said. “Age eighty-eight. Never a cavity, never so much as a toothache. Perfect, perfect teeth.”

  The smaller brother cleaned his glasses on his shirt and asked Siranoush, “What do his teeth have to do with the Turks?”

  “I’m sure he’ll explain,” Siranoush said with a shrug. “He doesn’t tell stories, he explains them.”

  “Armenian stories require explaining,” Yergat said, chicken bone tucked into his cheek.

  “Even to other Armenians?”

  “These boys aren’t Armenians, they’re Soviets.”

  “We’re Armenian first,” said the smaller brother, the one in glasses.

  “Maybe,” Yergat said, taking the chicken bone out of his mouth and then waving it like a conductor’s baton. “Maybe not. Either way, here’s a lesson for you: Don’t throw out your bones. Eat them! Chicken, pork, beef—every stew my mother made, I begged her to toss me the bones. I ate more bones as a child than a cemetery. I taught my daughter to do the same. When the Turks imprisoned me, when they forced her and her mother on that death march into the desert, the only food my girl had to eat must have been the bones of dead animals. Maybe a grain or two from horse dung, I’ve heard, if she was lucky. But I hope I trained her teeth to be strong. Other children probably starved immediately, but because I had already trained her teeth, she probably gobbled those desert bones like a princess at a feast. Dogs, vultures, rodents—my daughter probably gnawed each bone to dough.”

  “If I can ask,” the larger brother said, “do you know what happened to her? Your daughter.”

  Yergat didn’t know. If she survived, she might have converted to Islam, might believe herself to be a Turk. Who knows? He could only guess the most likely story.

  “What was her name?”

  The old man breathed loudly through his nose, bringing the rain closer. Finally, he shook his head and said, “I don’t remember.” Then he sucked the bone dry.

  “And you survived how?” the smaller brother said. “I thought the Turks wiped men your age out of the picture.”

  Siranoush swung an open palm at him, barely missing. She said it was time for her husband to nap. “We’ll save the rest for tomorrow.”

  Did she know her husband wouldn’t live that long? Maybe. She ended his story anyway. He was tired, and she knew better than he did. They’d met in a refugee camp in 1917. She’d wound her red hair in a head scarf to avoid strange looks, and he’d covered his head, too, had dressed like a woman to save himself. Shameful, he knew, but she didn’t see it that way. It was his life. She knew it and no one else did. Now that he was dying, he was telling everyone everything. She wouldn’t allow him to arrive again at that shame. Plus, he was tired. She knew better than he did. See? Already he was beginning to snore, the chicken bone dangling in his fingers just above a puddle. Nearby, a stray and patient dog paid close attention, licking his chops.

  The smaller brother sulked. He wanted to hear how Yergat had escaped the Turks.

  Siranoush whispered, “Tomorrow he’ll tell you.” And then, as a penance, she offered something better than history. She would tell the brothers—cousins of cousins, really—a story about the future. “Let him sleep,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” Then she disappeared again into the house and returned with a bowl of milk. She peered longingly into the bowl. She crossed herself. She blew little ripples onto the milk’s marble surface.

  “I see a couple things—I’m very good at this, one of the best still doing it, it’s a dying skill, shame. First I see that you both will love the same woman—good luck to her!—but when I picture who she’ll love in return, I see only one of your names. Ofe, that sounds messy—glad I won’t be around to see that! What else. Ah, this one’s big. I see that only one of you—only one!—is a real Armenian. The other will prove to be a phony.”

  “Says the woman wit
h red hair,” snapped the smaller brother.

  The old woman laughed. She set down the bowl for the cats who’d come sniffing. Feeling bad for that old patient dog in the rain, Siranoush plucked the chicken bone from her snoozing husband’s hand and tossed it in the mutt’s direction. The dog caught it in the air and seemed to do a slight curtsy before trotting off to enjoy the one thing he’d been waiting for all this time.

  The brothers studied each other. They were the same as they’d always been, but different, as if they’d been stolen and replaced, as if the milk and the bone had been wrenched from inside their own bodies. On the walk back to the city, the larger one joked about how the angels should have dumped the old red lady off in Ireland or America, where she might have fit in better. But as they approached the city square in Kirovakan, the smaller one took off his glasses, cleaned them with the hem of his shirt, and said, “I wouldn’t have let them arrest me, I wouldn’t have let them whip my feet, I wouldn’t have let them take my daughter.” When he put the glasses back on, his eyes turned enormous behind the lenses. A stray eyelash languished beside his nose. His brother, the larger one, noticed. He reached out to swipe it away.

  2

  King County, Washington, 1989

  It’s a marvel how memory works on the road, how it holds its shape like smoke in the cold. I bet there are people in the world who appreciate that, who find the power of a long drive to undo the process of forgetting a divine gift. But most of my best forgetting is done on purpose, after many years of dedicated work, so as far as I’m concerned, the power of the road is a danger. A threat. That’s why I retired all those years ago, I think, and why I’m dreading so gravely the trip I’m embarking on now.

  Clearly, the journey was not my idea. After a lifetime on the road for the wrestling business, driving across the country from territory to territory, I’ve chosen to lead a steady life with my cats out where my brother and I grew up, just on the verge of Seattle. Aside from a meet-and-greet convention here and there, when old-timers from the territory days—Buddy Rose and Dutch Savage and all us lesser gods—are corralled into high school gymnasiums for fifteen dollars a photograph, or aside from a biennial phone call from folks I used to manage or manage against—Mickey “Makeshift” Starr, for instance, or the vulgarian Johnny Trumpet—my life in wrestling hardly ever enters my mind. Those years feel waxen to me, that part of my history, decades and decades of a life I hardly recognize as my own. Waxen and contained, road stories told so many times they might as well be myths.