Brawler

by Neil Connelly

  After the intern made it home with the help of a resourceful caveman ally, I decided to surrender to the lazy impulse that had been hounding me all day. I shut out the lights and pulled down the blinds, curled up on the couch, and plugged into Led Zeppelin III on my MP3. I made it through “Immigrant Song” and “Friends” but passed out somewhere in the middle of “Celebration Day.”

  During my nap, I was visited by uneasy dreams. In one, the Perkins building was on fire and I was in the parking lot, watching the firefighters douse the flames with streams of water that had no effect. Someone yelled, “There’s still somebody trapped inside. She’s burning!” In another, I was a toddler, at the mall with my father. It was crowded, and he held my hand to keep from losing me as people bumped into us. There was Christmas music playing, and everyone seemed very tall. To make way for a woman in a wheelchair, I let go of his hand and immediately got hit by a swinging bag of presents. This spun me around and just like that, I’d lost him. I stood still for a moment, then began rushing through the forest of legs, thinking I was heading in his direction but really not sure. Panic drove me sprinting blindly, and as I banged into shoppers they looked down at me with annoyance and anger. A man with a black hat tried to grab me by the wrist but I wriggled free. And as I ran on and began to weep, the terror of it all settled over me. I might never find him. I might be alone.

  I woke to the sound of Khajee coming in the front door, Rosie getting to her feet and woofing to greet her. “Hey girl,” Khajee said, rubbing her head. When she saw me on the couch, she added, “Sorry to wake you Sleeping Beauty. It’s three thirty.”

  I looked around the apartment, grateful to not be a lost child, and wiped a little sweat that had been gathering on my forehead, the back of my neck. I asked her how school was, and she told me it was fine. She dropped her backpack by the TV and set a white cloth bag on the ground next to it. It looked sort of like a knotted pillowcase.

  “How are your hands?” she asked as she stepped into the bathroom.

  I sat up, rubbing my neck and wiping the sleep from my eyes. Those dreams had seemed so real, and I was trying to remember if the one with me in the mall was purely fantasy or if, as I was starting to think, it was a lost memory that had resurfaced. I glanced at my knuckles, still swollen but not nearly as tight. “Better than they were.”

  Rosie seemed curious about that pillowcase pouch. She bent her nose to it and sniffed all around the base. Khajee emerged from the bathroom and yelled, “No, Rosie! No!” She yanked the bag up and the dog retreated, tail drooped. Khajee cradled the sack, and now I saw her puffy eyes and wondered if she’d been crying.

  I asked, “What’s up with the bag?”

  “It’s my uncle,” she answered bluntly. “All that’s left of him.”

  “Damn.” As soon as the word slipped out, I wished I had it back. “Sorry,” I added quickly. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting that answer.”

  Khajee carefully set the bag on the kitchen table, emptied the books from her backpack, and slid the sack into the largest pouch, zipped it tight. I stood and went to her side. I couldn’t decide if I should put my hands on her shoulder to offer some comfort or just leave her be. With some people, it’s hard to know. She turned into me and said, “So about that favor.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Right. Whatever you need.”

  “This is a little embarrassing,” she said, dipping her head. “The thing is, I never learned to swim. And I’m kind of afraid of water.”

  I pictured a kid Khajee in a life vest, bobbing on waves in the Atlantic. But I still wasn’t entirely sure what this had to do with Than’s remains and why she needed my help. I was about to find out.

  On the long walk to City Island, we didn’t talk much. I didn’t ask her why we were going there, though a pretty good guess gradually came to me. At one point, while we were waiting for the light at Harvey Taylor Bridge, she adjusted the backpack straps and I said, “I can take that for you.”

  She shook her head and said, “This is mine to carry,” then cut across the stream of traffic even though the light hadn’t changed. I followed her, and cars laid on their horns. She didn’t seem to notice.

  City Island sits in the middle of the Susquehanna River. Around that stadium where the Senators play semipro baseball, they’ve got all kinds of touristy activities sprinkled on the outside: a mini-golf course, a train ride, a steamboat, an old-style arcade. Along the bank on the western side, there’s a business that’ll rent you canoes and kayaks. This is where Khajee led me, crossing a parking lot loaded with commuters heading home.

  She approached a young guy in a booth scrolling through something on his phone. He looked startled to see us, and Khajee studied the prices on the board over his head. She asked me, “A tandem, okay?”

  I told her it sounded good, and the kid passed over two life jackets. “Federal regulations,” he explained. We also needed to sign waivers: We recognized that kayaking is a dangerous activity; we recognized that swift-moving waters can pose unforeseen hazards.

  It was uncomfortable watching Khajee put on her life vest, knowing for sure where her mind was trying to take her. As for me, I had to fiddle with the straps to get the extra-large vest secured across my chest, but once I did, we walked down to where a half dozen brightly colored kayaks waited like beached whales. One had two seats and Khajee and I each took an end, dragged it to the water’s edge. After removing the white sack, she tossed her backpack on the ground. When she settled into the front seat, she nestled the sack on her lap, cradled it like precious cargo. I passed her one of the double-edged paddles and shoved the kayak into the water, then hopped in and snagged my paddle from the dock. We were off.

  To our right, a couple folks strolled along a raised metal walkway, one that ended after fifty feet. Directly across from it on the western shore, a similar structure waited. From the gap in between, I’d always figured that some accident had wiped out the middle section. It looked like a small drawbridge with no middle, two disconnected dead ends.

  “Where to?” I asked her as we paddled into the river’s flow.

  “Away from people,” she said. “We need something like privacy.”

  On the far bank, three restaurants faced us, their decks filling with patrons. “That means south I guess,” I told her.

  We dipped our paddles and aimed away from the broken bridge and put ourselves out into the current. Because we were moving with the river’s gentle flow, mostly I just used my paddle to keep us straight, and almost right away Khajee lifted her paddle and set it across the boat. My hands were tender and puffy, but I could manage a decent enough grip.

  We drifted beneath the Market Street Bridge, one that supports power lines, and one that handles trains. Just before passing under the Capital Beltway, we had to navigate down some mild rapids, just enough white water to make the boat rock back and forth a bit. She grabbed the rim of her seat and I said, “You all right?”

  “Fine,” she spit out, though I hardly believed her.

  For about five minutes after that, Khajee didn’t say anything, and now and then I thought I heard her sniffling, but rather than pester her, I let her be.

  South of the beltway, the river opens up a bit, and there’s a series of smaller islands scattered across the waterway. Each one is home to a scraggly forest, and I remembered the rumors when I was a kid about such spots, that these were home to a pack of wolves that swam across the water at night and prowled the streets of the big city.

  I steered us into a wide lane between two strips of land, hiding us from any onlookers on either bank. A half mile behind us, traffic hummed from I-83, and to our south, the plumes of smoke from Three Mile Island billowed into the sky.

  “Do you think this’ll do?” I asked.

  Khajee was quiet, and I saw she was cradling the white sack. Finally she asked, “This water, it leads to the sea, right?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “The Susquehanna runs down into the Chesapeake, and that runs into th
e Atlantic. So yeah, I guess so.”

  Khajee didn’t reply.

  I asked, “Is this a Buddhist thing?”

  She turned around. Her cheeks were wet. “Loi angkarn is a Thai Buddhist tradition,” she said. “It means ‘floating the ashes.’ ”

  The kayak turned a bit, and Khajee shifted in her seat, making a space to work at her side. She unknotted the sack, withdrew a white plastic bag, and reached inside. Her hand came out with a fistful of white flower petals, and she tossed these into the open sack. Next she began to whisper in Thai. I couldn’t tell if she was communing with her uncle or offering a prayer. “Crap,” she said unexpectedly, shaking her head. “I forgot the incense.”

  After this, she took a deep breath and retied the cloth, then held it gently over the side, gripping it by the knot. The current tugged on the bag, and for a second I wondered if she might not change her mind, bring the remains back. But just then her hand opened and the sack slipped away, bobbing along the surface as it began to take on water. She shook out the plastic bag and the remaining petals flitted through the air like tiny butterflies. They settled on the rippling water and drifted with Than’s remains. After a hundred feet I couldn’t see the petals or the cloth sack anymore, though I can’t be sure if it sank or I just lost it in the tiny whitecaps.

  “There’s supposed to be incense,” Khajee said, chastising herself again. “At least I think there is.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “All this is perfect.”

  Throughout the ceremony, I’d been steadily back-paddling to keep us where we were. I let the silence hang for a while, then asked, “Okay, what now?”

  “Now we go home,” Khajee said, and she grabbed her paddle. But before she dipped it into the water, without facing me, she said, “Mac. These last weeks. Today. I’m not sure I could’ve done this alone. I owe you.”

  “We’re even,” I said, believing it.

  Together, we turned the kayak north and began rowing against the trickling current. It wasn’t easy, fighting against the flow. We had to cut diagonally across the rapids and even after that, we had to dig and strain to gain ground. But I was glad for the distraction of the exercise, happy to have my mind on a task I could complete. When we were almost back, we hit an easy patch, and ahead of me, Khajee began to hum, a song both soft and low.

  At City Island, we settled up with the kid in the rental shack and gathered Khajee’s empty backpack. We hadn’t walked far before Khajee sat on a bench and said, “Maybe we could just rest a minute. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “All good.”

  A horse-drawn carriage with no passengers clip-clopped past us. The driver wore a black top hat.

  “You okay?” I asked Khajee.

  She inhaled and let out a long breath. “I feel guilty for being angry at Than.”

  “Angry?” I asked.

  She nodded. “For the dumb choices he made. All the money he lost. Not taking care of himself. He didn’t have to die like this, not now. It’s just messed up that my sadness is mixed up with being so upset with him, you know?”

  “It’s not messed up,” I said. “It’s human.”

  She went on. “For a long time, I knew he wasn’t well. But I never really thought about life without him, what I’d do. I just wanted to focus on taking care of him like he always took care of me.”

  “You were a good niece,” I said. “A good daughter, really. Nobody could’ve done better, especially with the attitude he had.”

  Khajee shook her head. “He was strong-willed, that’s for sure.”

  “Stubborn,” I offered.

  “Bullheaded.”

  I thought for a second. “Uncompromising.”

  “Intransigent.”

  I raised my hands. “I surrender,” I said. “I bow before your superior SAT preparations.”

  It was good to see her start to smile, but she blocked the pleasant expression before it took full bloom. Abruptly, she stood up and starting walking, and I followed. She led us over the walking bridge, which had a slim stream of late afternoon joggers and parents pushing baby strollers. A concrete sidewalk lines one side, but the bridge surface itself is made of these tight metal grates, so you can see down to the water passing below. The current tugged along tree branches, swirled in eddies around the pillars, flowed south.

  About halfway across, Khajee came to a stop and held the railing, looking downstream. I was sure that bag of ashes was on her mind, and it seemed clear she was thinking about Than’s spirit, or his consciousness, or whatever it was we’d call what he’d been, and what he was on his way to becoming. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “I feel strange.”

  “Strange in what way?”

  “Hard to say. I just thought I’d feel different than this, after I did that. You know, more at peace, less upset.”

  Together we watched the waters roiling beneath us. Without looking at me, Khajee said, “You haven’t said anything about the prison. All I know is your hands are swollen.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Did you really get what you wanted?”

  “No,” I said right away. “Not really. Not at all.” I remember my father on his knees, urging me to punish him. “I think I feel kind of like you do now. Like I was due some big release or something. I thought it would be an ending.”

  All this made me think about Mrs. DJ’s class, how the books we read always had some big moral at the conclusion, a clear lesson the main character learned. I could feel my story taking shape, but I had no sense of impending enlightenment.

  Khajee was quiet, but I felt certain she understood. A fishing boat puttered below, just one guy at the wheel. “There are no endings,” she said. “Only transformations. Only changes.”

  I recalled the monk’s words. For an instant, my tumbling thoughts came into alignment — a couple of those unlikely schemes merged — and I saw what was meant to come next. “Yeah,” I said. “Changes sounds like the way to go.”

  Khajee turned to me. “What does that mean?”

  “Do you have your phone with you?”

  “My phone?” She shook her head. “It’s back at the apartment.”

  “Let’s go,” I told her, leaving the railing and starting across the bridge. “I need to make a few calls.”

  That day when we floated Than’s ashes, I ended up making three phone calls from Khajee’s apartment. The first was to Shrimp. The instant he heard my voice, he began firing off questions like a machine gun, and it was hard to get him to shut up and just listen. Lured in part by the promise of a free Happy Meal, I convinced him to meet me at the McDonald’s in Camp Hill late that night, where I saw it’d been a while since he dyed his hair that electric blond. Dark roots showed. We ordered and sat at a table like nothing strange was taking place. On the bench between us, I casually set down a shoe box with thirty-five thousand in cash, this the total of my winnings, the advance on my rematch, and the bonus money Sunday paid me for my “side work.” In a low, clear voice, I explained to Shrimp exactly what I needed him to do, and he stopped dipping his nuggets in barbecue sauce. With his mouth half stuffed with processed chicken, Shrimp said, “Too risky.” After he finished swallowing, he continued. “Even for you, Mac. Too much can go wrong.”

  “Nothing’s gonna go wrong,” I assured him, then I stood to leave. “I’ve got everything under control.”

  Shrimp agreed because he’s a good and loyal kid, but the truth is, my scheme was riskier than even he knew. I hadn’t told him about Grunt, who I didn’t think would hesitate to pull that gun and put it to use if there was trouble, which was very much what I was inviting into my world.

  The second call was to my mom. I timed it so I knew she wouldn’t be home and I could just leave her a message, which I thought would be easier for all involved. How do you apologize for putting someone you love through hell? I told my mom how much I appreciated everything she’d ever done for me, believing in me when I didn’t a
lways deserve it. I told her not to worry about me. I told her I’d found a way to fix everything.

  Just like with Shrimp, I tried to sound more confident than I really was. There were too many variables, something Khajee pointed out from minute one when I explained my plan to her, asking for her help too. She knew the risks, though just like me, she couldn’t resist the rewards.

  But with my third call, I set in motion a series of events that couldn’t be stopped. It was the same as any move you make on a wrestling mat — the instant the decision happens, you need to commit 100 percent. In a match, half-assing it can get you crushed. In a scheme like I was plotting, it could get you legit killed.

  The next day, Blalock arrived right on time to bring me and Khajee to the rematch with Badder, just around sundown. Khajee sat in the back, and I climbed in up front. “So where we headed?” I asked casually, hoping for a heads-up.

  “Due south,” Blalock answered, cagey as always.

  I glanced in the rearview, trying to make eye contact with Khajee. We both understood how important her role was in all this, and I knew I could count on her.

  Cruising down 81, Blalock described a series of investment opportunities he wanted me to be aware of. One was a vape shop in Mechanicsburg, another was some sort of Internet security start-up. Clearly he pictured me as fat with cash and having no prospects. “The only way to ensure your future is to invest wisely. Sow your seed well so that you might reap the rewards.”

  “You sound like a preacher in need of a tent,” I said. “I’ll think about your offer.” The truth, of course, was that all my money was tied up.

  We drove for longer than usual, almost an hour, and this made me worried about the timing of the drama I was trying to orchestrate. In the back seat, Khajee was silent.

  Finally we pulled off just north of Chambersburg, and we made our way to a mega-mall from the ’80s. The parking lot was the size of a golf course, and there were a half dozen anchor stores, but all the names had been stripped from the sides. Judging from that, the cracked asphalt of the lot, and the weeds sprouting up, the place had been a ghost town for years.