It was a brick building with white, scarred doors in the front. He was an hour and a half ahead of when the event was scheduled to begin and only two cars were in the parking lot. He went in the doors into a large open room. Foldout chairs were pushed against the walls and three old men worked to erect a stage made from plywood and two-by-fours. In the corner of the room were a roll of chicken wire and several metal poles.
Jack walked over to the men. They paused, looked up with red faces. Then they turned back to the job.
“I’m here to fight,” Jack said.
“Set this son of a bitch down,” one of the men said. They propped the corner of the stage on a short stack of cinderblocks and the three men raised up groaning and grabbing at their forearms or shoulders.
The man who spoke eyed Jack. Pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. A long ash hung from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth and the ash crumbled and fell like a tiny snowfall. “You ain’t old enough,” he said.
Jack removed the flyer from his pocket. Unfolded it and showed it to the man.
“I know what that is,” the man said. “I made it.”
“Says right there you don’t have to be but eighteen,” Jack said and he tapped his finger on the number as if to clarify.
The man cleared his throat. Tossed his cigarette onto the concrete floor. “Only problem being you’re no such thing.”
“Hell I ain’t,” Jack said.
“What you think, boys?” the man said to the others. “He look eighteen to you?”
“It all depends,” one of them said.
“On what?”
“On whether or not he’s got the entry fee.”
The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shook one free. “Well,” he said. “You heard him. You eighteen or not?”
Jack had the cash, his part from what Maryann gave him for his help each weekend. He held out a twenty and the man took it. He sized Jack up again and said you’re littler than most anybody we got. You sure about this?
“You just tell me when and where,” Jack said and he poked out his chest and cocked his pointed shoulders.
The men laughed and then focused again on raising what would become the floor of the makeshift fighting cage. Then the man with the cigarette said you’ll go first and get it over with. Bring a mouthpiece. I know it says bare knuckles but you need some athletic tape to wrap your fists. No crotch or eye shit. Three rounds. Two minutes each. And we can call it any second or if you holler quit it’s over.
“I won’t be hollering quit,” he said.
“You don’t know what you might do. Be here and ready at the start time. God knows I don’t want you to miss your bedtime and have your momma come looking for us.”
Ninety minutes later he fought a man who had five years, thirty pounds, and four inches on him. He fought a man he could not reach and he could not lift and he could not get away from. The sparse crowd sat close to the chicken wire cage and drank from pints of rye or gin. Hollered for him to keep running and maybe try to dig a hole to crawl into or if you got a gun stuck in them britches it might be a good time to snatch it out and make use of it.
Jack was strong but lean and his lanky arms and legs were easy to get hold of by the taller and stronger man and just when he was on the edge of crying mercy from an arm lock or leg bend, Jack would twist his slippery body and slide free. Just when a hard right and then another hard right landed he somehow managed to straighten his legs and get upright and wave the man across the plywood floor to come on. We ain’t done. The howls from the crowd growing louder but beginning to turn his way. The mockery gone from the voices and replaced with cries of encouragement. Cries of motivation. As he stood with his fists up, calling for the opponent to get back over here, he glanced out at the crowd. Surprised they were on his side and he began to feel something more than the need for surviving this fight. He felt the need to win it. The boy busted and swollen and the cigarette smoke like a staggered veil across the fluorescent lights and he heard his name being called. Come on, Jack. Don’t give up, Jack. Hit him, Jack. And the stronger man heard it too and the frustration of not being able to make the boy quit multiplied as the voices urged the boy to fight on and he charged Jack in what he thought to be a flurry of victory, but he was instead met with a quick slip and a straight hard fist that connected in an unexpected jolt between the nostril and cheekbone. A fist that put the man to sleep and the next time he opened his eyes a stick of smelling salt was crammed against his nostril and the boy was long gone down the highway with the windows rolled down and the music loud and a cash prize of fifty dollars stuffed into his sweaty shoe.
There was no way to hide from Maryann when he returned from Water Valley. He walked through the kitchen door and found her sitting at the table. She looked up at him and when she saw his battered face she dropped the magazine she had been reading.
“I’m okay,” he said.
And she started right up like he expected. What happened and where have you been. Who did this to you and what about the party and don’t you lie to me like that. How did they let you fight when you’re barely old enough to drive and I’m going to call the police in Water Valley right now and let me get you some ice though you don’t deserve it after pulling a prank like this.
“I’m sorry,” he said after he had answered all the questions. “I didn’t want to lie but I knew you wouldn’t let me go. I just wanted to see what it was like.”
“See what it was like?”
“Yeah. The fight.”
“You know what a fight is like. You’ve been in too many.”
“This is different. It’s a real ring and a referee sits there and stops it if it goes bad.”
“Did he forget? Because it looks like it went bad.”
“Not as bad as it did for the other guy. I won. And they cheered me.”
“Who cheered? People watch this?”
“Some.”
“This is bullshit, Jack. You look like you’ve been in a car wreck.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that because you’re not.”
“I am about the lying part. I only wanted to see what it was like.”
He sat down at the table and held his head back as she examined the places where the fists and elbows had landed. One bloodshot eye and crusted blood in a nostril and a fingernail scratch running across the side of his neck. A swollen upper lip and bulbous cheeks. She shook her head as she studied his face and he said ouch as she touched a fingertip to tender spots. She filled a Ziploc bag with ice cubes and gave him a glass of water and a few aspirin. She poured herself a short glass of bourbon and they sat together at the table. He then reached down and pulled the fifty dollars from his sock. Unfolded the bills and laid them on the table and he looked at the prize in admiration.
“My first winnings,” he said.
“And your last,” she answered. He nodded and apologized again and she stared at him and didn’t know what to say. She only knew this was a beginning, a step toward something she could not understand.
After he won his first fight the changes came. Coming home after school and setting his books and workout bag on the kitchen table. Already sweating from using the weight room at the high school. Saying hey to Maryann if he saw her and if he didn’t see her he yelled it out and hoped his voice would find her. And then he would walk out of the house and to the road and run. He jogged along the straightline highway, waving at passing work trucks and watching the crop dusters rise and fall, leaving cloudy trails of insecticide across the valuable land. He did not wear a watch or mark his distance. He only ran until he felt like he had pushed himself far enough from the house to make it a struggle to get back and on the days when his young body felt the urge to go and go and go he would not return until the sun was beginning to set and burn across a fiery horizon.
Sometimes Maryann would stand in the yard and watch him run until he was out of sight.
Other times she would sit at the kitchen table and see what books he had brought home as he had recently discovered the library. He read about military history. About war and the strategies that had won or lost. He read about the martial arts and their philosophies and he read about the most effective ways to bend or break another man. He read the biographies of great warriors who had become leaders of men and of driven athletes who had come from nowhere and ended up somewhere. And he read the ancient tales of conquest, where mortals overcame the challenges of giants and demons to win the favor of the gods. He tore his favorite pages from the books and taped them on the inside of his closet door, which she discovered one day while hanging clean shirts. A single piece of tape at the top middle of each page and the corners curled and the pages waved in the movement of the opening door. On each page a single sentence underlined in red ink. Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. A thousand battles, a thousand victories. You can only fight the way you practice. No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.
She tried to detour him. She drove him to community colleges and sat with academic advisors and tried to sell him on working toward a degree or learning a special skill. Do something that not many other people do, she would say and almost before the words left her mouth she could see the reply in his eyes. I already am. He would sit politely and listen and fill out the applications. He would listen to Maryann compliment the cafeteria and dorms and brick buildings. She suggested he might like to study history because of what he had been reading and she went on about what all he might do if he went all the way through a four-year school and got a degree and he always nodded.
She could see him getting stronger. Harder. Taller. And she noticed the flyers lying around his room that announced the fights. He had promised he wouldn’t lie about his age anymore. And he hadn’t fought since the night in Water Valley. But he had been going to watch. To study the differences between success and failure. Hurting or being hurt. To figure out where to hold his hands or how to protect when it wasn’t going so well or how to duck and slide to keep your opponent off balance. He began to tape his fists before he went out to run. He brought home a mattress he found on the side of the road and tied it around a tree in the backyard. She worried as she listened to him grunting as he punched and kicked the mattress until he was lathered in sweat. She didn’t say anything when he let his hair grow longer because someone told him about the strength of the locks of Samson. She didn’t say anything to him about his eighteenth birthday approaching. Because she knew that was what he was waiting on. She wanted to make him promise not to fight. She wanted to make him promise he would not participate in a violent world. To become what he wanted to become. To try.
But she couldn’t make herself go all the way in her opposition. She discouraged him with suggestions of how a body breaks down when punished. She offered to help with tuition and told him he could live with her for as long as he wanted. This is your house as much as mine. She agonized over if she should protect him or let him follow this thing. Let him chase it. Allow him to find comfort in who he was. Like she had never been able to do. Tied to a place through the string of generations but never sure of her own self. Never able to be what she wanted in the land she loved and never strong enough to break free and go and try somewhere else. Be with someone who loved her in a way she had not known. She watched him in the soft light of the late afternoons as he chopped firewood or threw punches at the mattress. Listened to him talk about the art of war or the journey of Odysseus. Noticed that the expression in his young face was more peaceful and he never mentioned classmates or friends or the lack of those things anymore. He was finding solace in what he was doing and what he wanted to attempt. He was finding himself. And she admired him. She admired his grit and determination and his hellbent motivation toward this dangerous thing because she had stepped around her dangerous thing. Abandoned herself to hide from others and now her youth was gone. Her chances had disappeared. And his chances were before him and with each step he ran and each punch he threw into the mattress she could see him believing in himself. At night she lay awake and worried about him. Feared for him. But she could not make herself forbid him. No matter from which direction it had arrived.
21
SMOKE CAME FROM THE ENGINE OF THE TRUCK AND IT HAD stalled out on him as he slowed on the highway to look for the turnoff, but cranked again. The dirt road was a quarter mile from the house. Jack drove between the endless rows of soybeans, following the map in the notebook that led to the antique furniture. A tire tool he dug out from behind the seat of the truck against his leg, the tool he would use to try and pry open a window or a corner of the tin roof. In a couple of hundred yards the road made a lazy curve to the right and past a ridge of hardwoods he came to a levee. The map read TURN LEFT AT THE LEVEE and he did, following a path now instead of a road, the grass worn down where the drivers of large tractors with large tires drove underneath the shade of trees to eat lunch or steal short naps. He followed the path alongside the levee and then he saw the shack ahead. The leaning chimney and the walls fortified with ten-inch-wide wooden planks. The shutters closed and nailed shut. He stopped and got out, leaving the engine running and hoping it wouldn’t die. He walked around to the side of the shack and the ground was littered with beer bottles and an empty gas can and he knew already.
The chain and the combination lock that kept the front door secured remained in place. But then he walked around to the back and scattered across the ground were more beer bottles and a left behind crowbar. Several of the wooden planks had been pried apart and a chainsaw had cut a rough rectangular hole in the back wall wide enough for the largest of the desks or armoires or handcrafted headboards to pass through. He leaned his head in. Stepped up and into the empty shack. Sawdust sprayed across the floor. The decaying corpse of a rat in the corner. THANKS spraypainted on the wall. A smiley face next to it.
Annette parked in the shade of a silo. She had lost him when he turned off on the dirt road, getting caught behind a lethargic eighteen-wheeler, and by the time she was able to pass, the busted truck was no longer on the highway. She knew it didn’t have the get-up-and-go to speed away and she noticed the random dirt roads that split the acres and figured that was where he had gone. Except for a big white house with a little house behind it there was nothing but farmland in all directions. So she parked and waited.
It only took a few minutes for the truck to reappear. Smoking and rattling as it came past her. Moving slowly. She shifted into drive but paused when the truck turned into the gravel driveway at the great house. She watched it creep along and roll to a stop at the little house in the backyard. She wanted him to be alone when she approached him so she held for a moment, waiting to see if someone else may appear.
He opened the door to the potter’s barn. A stranger staring at the past of another. One of the windows had blown open and a cluster of birds scattered when he pounded his foot. There was bird shit splattered on the floor and tables and he kicked over a stool as he made his way to the back corner where he had hung a punching bag years ago after Maryann could no longer work the wheel.
This is where you started, he thought. This is where you’ll end.
He moved to the bag and went to work. Straight lefts and then straight rights. Then fists to the body and puffs of dust from the bag with each blow. The sweat coming on. Breathing hard so quickly but he did not stop. He shoved the bag and it swung at him and he dodged and countered. The skin of his knuckles breaking as he grunted and gasped and ignored the throbbing behind his eyes. He imagined his own face on the swinging bag and he tried to knock himself out and then he hugged the bag and bit at his own throat, the sweat and saliva blending with the dust as he pressed his face into the bag and when he couldn’t get his teeth into it he stepped back and hit it with more quick jabs and a roundhouse right but he could not knock himself out and he punched and punched until he had no more and he dropped to a knee. Sweat dripped from the t
ip of his nose and his heartbeat hurried in quick, hard thumps. He grabbed at his chest and then he made a fist and punched himself in the forehead.
Get up. Fucking get up. You take a knee tonight and you’re fucking dead. Get up because this is the last time you’ll be in this place you never deserved anyway. All you did was prove them all right. You proved what a fucking problem you were and always have been and you proved that you’d ruin her if she signed it all over to you. All you did was everything everybody expected of you now get the fuck up. You won’t ever surprise anyone and they’re all laughing at you and nobody gives a shit about your headaches but you better not go down to a knee or whoever she has lined up for you will fucking beat you into the dirt and the crowd will cheer while your blood is being spilled. You better not fucking die before she does now get up. You can’t get the fucking house back and you can’t pay Big Momma and you’ll never see Maryann again if you go down to a fucking knee. All you have left to give is your stupid fucking life for another day or week or however long she needs and you better not fucking die. Now get the fuck up.
He raised his head. In the corner he saw the iron poker he long ago used for the kiln and the kiln was what he had loved the most. Tall and rectangular and made of brick the color of sand. He would help Maryann build and stoke the fire and when the day disappeared he would stare at the burning orange of the inside of the kiln against the coming night and imagine it to be a fiery beacon. The last light of the world. He picked up the iron poker now and then he attacked the bag and his disgust was fueled when the bag would not split so he turned the weapon on everything else. The dustcovered pottery on the dustcovered shelves, small explosions of terra cotta and clay as he attacked and screamed. And then the light bulb and the old porcelain sink and when he had busted all he could with the iron he then used his hands to overturn tables and throw stools and kick over the potter’s wheel. Blood came from a cut on his hand and he was lathered in a polluted sweat and when he had nothing left to destroy he dropped to the floor. On his back and panting and he knew once he caught his breath and the adrenaline died away he would look around and have one more thing to regret. But he would not let some stranger have the things they had made together in the days of youth and trustfulness.
The Fighter Page 13
