by Rick Bass
Some nights we didn’t find the right kind of bar until almost midnight, and during the lull Betty would fall asleep with her head in Don’s lap and Jason would drive so I could rest. The dogs curled up on the floorboard. Finally, though, there would be the glow of lights in the fog, the crunch of a crushed-shell parking lot beneath our tires, and the cinder-block tavern, sometimes near the Alabama state line and set back in the woods, with loud music coming through the doors, seeping through the roof and into the night. Between songs we could hear the clack of pool balls. When we went in the front door, the noise would come upon us like a wild dog. It was a furious caged sound, and we’d feel a little fear. Hostility, the smell of beer, and anger would swallow us up. It would be just perfect.
“We’ll be out in a while,” Don would tell Jason. “Pistol’s in the glove box. Leave the engine running. Watch after your mother.”
We kept a tag hanging from the truck’s rear-view mirror that told us how many fights in a row we had won, what the magic number was, and after each fight it was Jason’s job to take down the old tag and put a new one up.
Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight.
Driving home, back to Don’s little farm in the woods, Jason would turn the radio on and steer the truck with one hand, keeping the other arm on the seat beside him, like a farmer driving into town on a Saturday. He was a good driver. We kept rocking chairs in the back of the truck for the long drives, and sometimes after a fight Don and I would lean back in them and look up at the stars and the tops of big trees that formed tunnels over the lonely back roads. We’d whistle down the road as Jason drove hard, with the windows down and his mother asleep in the front.
When a road dipped down into a creek bottom, the fog made it hard to see beyond the short beam of our headlights, as if we were underwater. The air was warm and sticky. Here Jason slowed slightly, but soon we’d be going fast again, driving sixty, seventy miles an hour into the hills, where the air was clean and cool, and the stars visible once more.
I wondered what it would be like to drive my father and mother around like that, to be able to do something for them, something right. My parents lived in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and raised cattle and owned a store. I was twenty years old.
I wanted to win the one hundred fights and go to New York and turn pro and send my parents money. Don got to keep all of the bar-fight money, and he was going to get to keep a quarter of the New York money, if there ever was any. I wanted to buy my parents a new house or some more cattle or something, the way I read other athletes did once they made it big. My childhood had been wonderful; already I was beginning to miss it, and I wanted to give them something in return.
When I took the robe off and moved in on the bar fighter, there was Don and Betty and Jason to think of too. They were just making expenses, nothing more. I could not bear to think of letting them down. I did not know what my parents wanted from me, but I did know what Don and Jason and Betty wanted, so that made it easier, and after a while it became easier to pretend that it was all the same, that everyone wanted the same thing, and all I had to do was go out there and fight.
Don had been a chemist once for the coroner’s lab in Jackson. He knew about chemicals, drugs. He knew how to dope my blood, days before a fight, so I would feel clean and strong, a new man. He knew how to give me smelling salts, sniffs of ammonia vials broken under my nose when I was fighting sloppily, sniffs that made my eyes water and my nose and lungs burn, but it focused me. And even in training, Don would sometimes feint and spar without gloves and catch me off guard, going one way when I should have been going the other. He would slip in and clasp a chloroform handkerchief over my face. I’d see a mixed field of black and sparkling, night-rushing stars, and then I’d be down, collapsed in the pine needles by the lake where we did our sparring. I’d feel a delicious sense of rest, lying there, and I’d want to stay down forever, but I’d hear Don shouting, “… Three! Four! Five!” and I’d have to roll over, get my feet beneath me, and rise, stagger-kneed, the lake a hard glimmer of heat all around me. Don would be dancing around me like a demon, moving in and slapping me with that tremendous reach of his and then dancing back. I had to get my gloves up and stay up, had to follow the blur of him with that backdrop of deep woods and lake, with everything looking new and different suddenly, making no sense; and that, Don said, was what it was like to get knocked out. He wanted me to practice it occasionally, so I would know what to do when it finally happened, in New York, or Philadelphia, or even in a bar.
My body hair was shaved before each fight. I’d sit on a chair by the lake in my shorts while the three of them, with razors and buckets of soapy water, shaved my legs, back, chest, and arms so the blows would slide away from me rather than cut in, and so I would move faster, or at least feel faster—that new feeling, the feeling of being someone else, newer, younger, and with a fresher start.
When they had me all shaved, I would walk out on the dock and dive into the lake, plunging deep, ripping the water with my new slipperiness. I would swim a few easy strokes out to the middle, where I would tread water, feeling how unbelievably smooth I was, how free and unattached, and then I would swim back in. Some days, walking with Don and Betty and Jason back to the house, my hair slicked back and dripping, with the woods smelling good in the summer and the pine needles dry and warm beneath my bare feet—some days, then, with the lake behind me, and feeling changed, I could almost tell what it was that everyone wanted, which was nothing, and I was very happy.
After our bar fights, we’d get home around two or three in the morning. I’d nap on the way, in the rocker in the back of the truck, rocking slightly, pleasantly, whenever we hit a bump. Between bumps I would half dream, with my robe wrapped around me and the wind whipping my hair, relaxed dreams, cleansed dreams—but whenever I woke up and looked at Don, he would be awake.
He’d be looking back at where we’d come from, the stars spread out behind us, the trees sliding behind our taillights, filling in behind us as if sealing off the road. Jason would be driving like a bat out of hell, and coffee cups and gum wrappers swirled around in the truck’s cab.
Sometimes Don turned his chair around to face the cab, looking in over Jason’s shoulder and watching him drive, watching his wife sleep. Don had been a good boxer but the headaches and double vision had gotten too bad. I wondered what it would take for me to stop. I could not imagine anything would. It was the only thing I could do well.
On the long, narrow gravel road leading to Don’s farm, with the smell of honeysuckle and the calls of chuck-will’s-widows, Jason slowed the truck and drove carefully, respecting the value of home and the sanctity of the place. At the crest of the hill he turned the engine and lights off and coasted the rest of the way to the house, pumping the squeaky brakes, and in silence we’d glide down the hill. From here the dogs could smell the lake. They scrambled to their feet, leapt over the sides of the truck, and raced to the water to inspect it and hunt for frogs.
I slept in a little bunkhouse by the lake, a guest cottage they had built for their boxers. Their own place was up on the hill. It had a picnic table out front and a garage—it was a regular-looking house, a cabin. But I liked my cottage. I didn’t even have a phone. I had stopped telling my parents about the fights. There was not much else to tell them about other than the fights, but I tried to think of things that might interest them. Nights, after Don and Betty and Jason had gone to bed, I liked to swim to the middle of the lake, and with the moon burning bright above me, almost like a sun, I’d float on my back and fill my lungs with air. I’d float there for a long time.
The dogs swam around me, loyal and panting, paddling in frantic but determined circles, sneezing water. I could feel the changing currents beneath and around me as the dogs stirred the water, and could see the wakes they made, glistening beneath the moon—oily-black and mint-white swirls. I loved the way they stayed with me, not knowing how to float and instead always paddling. I felt like I was their father or mother. I
felt strangely like an old man, but with a young man’s health.
I’d float like that until I felt ready again, until I felt as if I’d never won a fight in my life—in fact, as if I’d never even fought one, as if it was all new and I was just starting out and had everything still to prove. I floated there until I believed that that was how it really was.
I was free then, and I would break for shore, swimming again in long, slow strokes. I’d get out and walk through the trees to my cottage with the dogs following, shaking water from their coats and rattling their collars, and I knew the air felt as cool on them as it did on me. We couldn’t see the stars, down in the trees like that, and it felt very safe.
I’d walk through the woods, born again in my love for a thing, the hard passion of it, and I’d snap on my yellow porch light as I went into the cottage. The light seemed to pull in every moth in the county. Homer and Ann would stand on their hind legs and dance, snapping at the moths. Down at the lake the bullfrogs drummed all night, and from the woods came the sound of crickets and katydids. The noise was like that at a baseball game on a hot day, always some insistent noises above others, rising and falling. I could hear the dogs crunching June bugs as they caught them.
Just before daylight, Betty would ring a bell to wake me for breakfast. Don and I ate at the picnic table, a light breakfast, because we were about to run, me on foot and Don on horseback.
“You’ll miss me when you get up to New York,” he said. “They’ll lock you in a gym and work on your technique. You’ll never see the light of day. But you’ll have to do it.”
I did not want to leave Betty and Jason, did not even want to leave Don, despite the tough training sessions. It would be fun to fight in a real ring, with paying spectators, a canvas mat, a referee, and ropes, safety ropes to hold you in. I would not mind leaving the bar fights behind at all, but I could not tell Don about my fears. I was half horrified that a hundred wins in Mississippi would mean nothing, and that I would be unable to win even one fight in New York.
Don said I was “a fighter, not a boxer.”
He’d had other fighters who had gone on to New York, who had done well, who had won many fights. One of them, his best before me, Pig-Eye Reeves, had been ranked as high as fifth as a WBA heavyweight. Pig-Eye was a legend, and everywhere in Mississippi tales were told about him. Don knew all of them.
Pig-Eye had swum in the lake I swam in, ate at the same picnic table, lived in my cottage. Pig-Eye had run the trails I ran daily, the ones Don chased me down, riding his big black stallion, Killer, and cracking his bullwhip.
That was how we trained. After breakfast Don headed for the barn to saddle Killer, and I whistled the dogs up and started down toward the lake. The sun would be coming up on the other side of the woods, burning steam off the lake, and the air slowly got clearer. I could pick out individual trees through the mist on the far side. I’d be walking, feeling good and healthy, at least briefly, as if I would never let anyone down. Then I would hear the horse running down the hill through the trees, coming after me, snorting, and I’d hear his hooves and the saddle creaking, with Don riding silently, posting. When he spotted me, he’d crack the whip once—that short, mean pop!—and I would have to run.
Don made me wear leg weights and wrist weights. The dogs, running beside me, thought it was a game. It was not. For punishment, when I didn’t run fast enough and Killer got too close to me, Don caught my shoulder with the tip of the whip. It cut a small strip into my sweaty back, which I could feel in the form of heat. I knew this meant nothing, because he was only doing it to protect me, to make me run faster, to keep me from being trampled by the horse.
Don wore spurs, big Mexican rowels he’d bought in an antiques store, and he rode Killer hard. I left the trail sometimes, jumping over logs and dodging around trees and reversing my direction, but Killer stayed with me, leaping the same logs, galloping through the same brush, though I was better at turning corners and could stay ahead of him that way.
This would go on for an hour or so, until the sun was over the trees and the sky bright and warm. When Don figured the horse was getting too tired, too bloody from the spurs, he would shout “Swim!” and that meant it was over, and I could go into the lake.
“The Lake of Peace!” Don roared, snapping the whip and spurring Killer, and the dogs and I splashed out into the shallows. I ran awkwardly, high-stepping the way you do going into the waves at the beach. I leaned forward and dropped into the warm water, felt the weeds brushing my knees. Killer was right behind us, still coming, but we would be swimming hard, the dogs whining and rolling their eyes back like Chinese dragons, paddling furiously, trying to see behind them. By now Killer was swimming too, blowing hard through his nostrils and grunting, much too close to us, trying to swim right over the top of us, but the dogs stayed with me, as if they thought they could protect me, and with the leg weights trying to weigh me down and pull me under, I’d near the deepest part of the lake, where the water turned cold.
I swam to the dark cold center, and that was where the horse, frightened, slowed down, panicking at the water’s coldness and swimming in circles rather than pushing on. The chase was forgotten then, but the dogs and I kept swimming, with the other side of the lake drawing closer at last, and Jason and Betty standing on the shore, jumping and cheering. The water began to get shallow again, and I came crawling out of the lake. Betty handed me a towel, Jason dried off the dogs, and then we walked up the hill to the cabin for lunch, which was spread out on a checkered tablecloth and waiting for me as if there had never been any doubt that I would make it.
Don would still be laboring in the water, shouting and cursing at the horse now, cracking the whip and giving him muted, underwater jabs with his spurs, trying to rein Killer out of the angry, confused circles he was still swimming, until finally, with his last breath, Killer recognized that the far shore was as good as the near one, and they’d make it in, struggling, twenty or thirty minutes behind the dogs and me.
Killer would lie on his side, gasping, coughing up weeds, ribs rising and falling, and Don would come up the hill to join us for lunch: fried chicken, cream gravy, hot biscuits with honey, string beans from the garden, great wet chunks of watermelon, and a pitcher of iced tea for each of us. We ate shirtless, barefoot, and threw the rinds to the dogs, who wrestled and fought over them like wolves.
At straight-up noon, the sun would press down through the trees, glinting off the Lake of Peace. We’d change into bathing suits, all of us, and inflate air mattresses and carry them down to the lake. We’d wade in up to our chests and float in the sun, our arms trailing in the water. We’d nap as if stunned after the heavy meal, while the dogs whined and paced the shore, afraid we might not come back.
Killer, lying on the shore, would stare glassy-eyed at nothing, ribs still heaving. He would stay like that until mid-afternoon, when he would finally roll over and get to his feet, and then he would trot up the hill as if nothing had happened.
We drifted all over the lake in our half stupor, our sated summer-day sleep. My parents wanted me to come home and take over the hardware store. But there was nothing in the world that could make me stop fighting. I wished there was, because I liked the store, but that was simply how it was. I felt that if I could not fight, I might stop breathing, or I might go down: I imagined that it was like drowning, like floating in the lake, and then exhaling all my air, and sinking, and never being heard from again. I could not see myself ever giving up fighting, and I wondered how Don had done it.
We floated and lazed, dreaming, each of us spinning in different directions whenever a small breeze blew, eventually drifting farther and farther apart, but on the shore the dogs followed only me, tracking me around the lake, staying with me, whining for me to come back to shore.
On these afternoons, following an especially good run and an exhausting swim, I would be unable to lift my arms. Nothing mattered in those suspended, floating times. This is how I can give up, I’d think. This i
s how I can never fight again. I can drop out, raise a family, and float in the bright sun all day, on the Lake of Peace. This is how I can do it, I’d think. Perhaps my son could be a boxer.
Fights eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one: I tore a guy’s jaw off in the Body Shop. I felt it give way and then detach, heard the ripping sound as if it came from somewhere else, and it was sickening—we left without any of the betting money, gave it all to his family for the hospital bill, but it certainly did not stop me from fighting, or even from hitting hard. I was very angry about something, but did not know what. I’d sit in the back of the truck on the rides home, and I’d know I wanted something, but did not know what.
Sometimes Don had to lean forward and massage his temples, his head hurt so bad. He ate handfuls of aspirin, ate them like M&M’s, chasing them down with beer. I panicked when he did that, and thought he was dying. I wondered if that was where my anger came from, if I fought so wildly and viciously in an attempt, somehow and with no logic, to keep things from changing.
On the nights we didn’t have a fight, we would spar a little in the barn. Killer watched us wild-eyed from his stall, waiting to get to me. Don made me throw a bucket of lake water on him each time I went into the barn, to make sure that his hate for me did not wane. Killer screamed whenever I did this, and Jason howled and blew into a noise-maker and banged two garbage can lids together, a deafening sound inside the barn. Killer screamed and reared on his hind legs and tried to break free. After sparring we went into the house, and Betty fixed us supper.
We had grilled corn from Betty’s garden and a huge porterhouse steak from a steer Don had slaughtered, and lima beans and Irish potatoes, also from the garden. It felt like I was family. We ate at the picnic table as fog moved in from the woods, making the lake steamy. It was as if everyone could see what I was thinking then; my thoughts were bare and exposed, but it didn’t matter, because Don and Betty and Jason cared for me, and also because I was not going to fail.
