In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  Sarah got up and went out of the room. Daniel started to stand but she was already coming back with more beer. He sat again and she settled back in beside him.

  “You need to stay away from him now,” she said. “You understand me?”

  Daniel just stared at the TV. She took him by the chin.

  “Whatever problems we got, they won’t be fixed that way,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “It all just sort of got away from me,” he said. “I didn’t see it coming.”

  “It’s different now from when you started working for him,” Sarah said. “You’ll get yourselves killed, the way this is going. I could tell from talking to Clayton.”

  Daniel nodded once.

  “I know I don’t want to end up like him,” he said.

  “Good,” Sarah said, and she took his face whole and kissed him. Daniel kissed her back but that was all.

  She blinked hard and then she swung her feet up so that her legs rested atop his legs while she lay back against the far couch-arm. He put his forearms over her ankles and held her gentle at the calf by his heavy fingers.

  “Somebody died tonight at the home,” she said. “And I was with him not long before. No sign of it at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “I liked him very much.”

  Sarah drank at her beer and set it on the floor. She put her hands on her chest and they rose and fell slow. She told him about the old lady who’d gone looking for the dead man.

  “You see anything?” Daniel said.

  “I don’t know. It was late and I didn’t know what was happening anymore.”

  There were stirrings in the girl’s bedroom partway down the hall. Sarah sat up again. They both waited quiet to see if the girl was awake. Nothing more. Sarah took up Daniel’s hands so that she could better what he’d had to do with them. They would not rest.

  “What are you thinking about right now?” she said.

  “Those men I helped kill gave up no ghosts. Not that I could see.”

  She kept on studying him but he’d say no more. He seemed to take a chill. He shuddered against her and she gathered him up tight. When he’d settled Sarah kissed him and pressed his head to her heart. Then she loosed him and pushed him down so that he lay back full on the couch. She rested atop him and held him until he slept. She didn’t sleep for a long time and then finally she did. Sunlight speckled her long pale legs and the scarred musculature of his arm where it rested low. Shadow on their sleeping faces.

  PART TWO

  He fought nearly thirty fights all told. He lost two by decision and he was never knocked down in the cage. There were few gyms to train at but more fights to be had out west and he drove sometimes hours in a day to have boxers try to kill him in sparring and to have wrestlers smash him into worn floormatting and against padded cinderblock walls where he would battle to get back on his feet. He broke fingers and toes and had a maxillary fracture that made him spit blood for a month, gobs of maroon clot, red-streaked phlegm. When he touched his eyeball his front teeth hurt. Daniel didn’t know if it would heal but it did and he sparred again at gyms by the edges of cities and in most places the men eventually wouldn’t spar with him anymore. His elbows were chipped and the nerve-endings in his shins had long stopped complaining. He took less and less damage and his once-broken nose stayed straight, so rarely did it take a clean shot.

  Sarah stayed home with the baby and then she went back to work and Daniel spent as much time at home as he could. Sarah had friends and they watched the child sometimes. When he would take the baby from them they always seemed not to want to give her up. They’d cringe as he picked her up, as if he would crush her head in his monstrous hands. They had never shook the hand of a fighter and they were always taken aback by the careful way he took their grip in his ruined fingers.

  The man he fought next had been trained in northern California and he had heavy hands and caught Daniel but he didn’t drop him. Late in the third round Daniel hit the man with an uppercut and a combination of hooks and the man dropped and then shot back up and tried to tackle Daniel. He stuffed the man’s takedown and could feel that the man was not right and he got him into the Thai clinch and threw knees to the man’s belly and ribs and when the man dropped his hands he took a hard knee to the mouth and the fight was over. Daniel went back to his corner trailing blood on the canvas. The cutman came over to him quickly and went to work on his eye. In the final exchange he had taken a headbutt to the ridge of brow above his right eye but he hadn’t felt it. The doctor came over after they had raised the other fighter and set him on his stool and the doctor looked at Daniel and asked him questions and then he left. Daniel put his hands in the air and hugged his cornermen and then he went to the hospital to have his eyebrow stitched back together.

  That spring they moved east. The prairies were not his home and Sarah wanted to see water and the plains winter got longer and harder every year. Daniel knew people in the east and there were fights aplenty there now and he needed only a win or two more to get the call for bigger shows and more money and the right to quit when the time came. They settled just south of the city and were to move into the city proper when he earned enough. Daniel saved his winnings and put a deposit on a small semi-detached house in the far west end.

  In the last week of training camp for a televised fight Daniel’s right eye stopped working. He saw sudden flashes of lightning and objects floating that he tried to swat at first before he realized they weren’t there. He knew he had not been concussed. They took him to the doctor and the doctor studied the eye and told him that he had a detached retina. Before the end of that week they performed surgery to seal the retinal tears and Daniel didn’t fight and his opponent was submitted by a replacement fighter.

  He had fought twenty-nine men and knew he would never fight a thirtieth. When he healed he hit pads and haunted the gym and helped train young fighters. He got there less and less and then one day he left with his gear and they never saw him there again. There was no work for the man and he lost the deposit on the little house. In July of that year Daniel got into a car with his wife and his child and they went north to the town where he was born, to the house where he grew up and where his father had lived his whole life.

  NINE

  Daniel spent late autumn welding aluminum bleachers. By the time snow began to fall he’d been farmed out to cut apart the carriages of buses and vans and make structural welds to hold the new vehicles together. Daniel worked on finish carpentry and he upholstered vehicles and installed plumbing and fixtures. His welds were all sound and he had a reputation for his skill in it. The company was scraping up work for him as a favour and he took whatever work they found.

  He’d come home with marks on his arms and wrists where hot metals burned holes through his heavy jacket or went into his sleeves. Sometimes he’d come in late with the skin of his neck sootblacked where his helmet and visor couldn’t protect it. Sarah and Madelyn waited for him if he were late for dinner. Or sometimes Sarah would let Madelyn eat in front of the TV and she would wait for him. Other times Sarah worked and Madelyn went down the road to Murray’s house where he and his wife near spoiled her for everyone else. On those nights Daniel came home to an empty house and sat there filthy on the couch and drank beer. He microwaved his dinner or forgot entirely after a half-dozen drinks. When Sarah worked the graveyard shift Daniel made sure Madelyn went to bed and then he sat out on the deck in the cold night that told of coming winter and he watched the starlit sky. He was exhausted and tried to turn in early on those nights but he couldn’t sleep without his wife beside him. If he did sleep it was the shallow kind that comes behind drink, and in the morning to follow he often felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

  Snow fell on the first Friday in December while Daniel stood on the roof of their house with a borrowed powerwasher, blasting clumps of rotten leaves from
the eavestrough. He’d finished his shift not long before sundown and had the powerwashing rig set up in the back of his truck. Sarah hadn’t come back from work yet. Madelyn was at a friend’s after school and had plans to stay the night. He’d climbed a ladder and got onto the roof with the gun in his hand at the end of the long hoseline. There he stood in the grey evening, truck-radio blasting over the high growl of the washer-engine, white flakes falling heavy to the shingles where he’d set his feet.

  He was still up there when Sarah got out of her co-worker’s car and walked up the driveway. He couldn’t see her plain until she was right under the house. White in her hair and her coatshoulders already wet.

  “Just what in the hell are you doing up there?” she said.

  He blasted a pocket of mulch out of the corner troughing and they watched it fly into the yard.

  “You think you could grab me a beer and toss it up,” he said.

  “How about you just get down before you break your neck?”

  Daniel squatted at the edge of the roof so that she could see him and the washergun.

  “You gonna have a shower inside, or you just want to get it over with here and now?” he said.

  She put her hands to her hips, didn’t move a step.

  “You’d live the rest of your days on that roof,” she said.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” he said.

  Sarah went up the steps and into the house and closed only the screen door behind her. Interior light shone to the wet decking. Daniel went back to the place he’d been. He opened up on the last segment of eavestrough, aimed into the metal half-pipe until the backlogged leaves were flung clear or washed out through the drainpipe to the yard below. Then he stopped and stared up at the moonless sky. The snow fell hard. He raised the gun vertical and a jet of water tore up toward the heavens.

  They ate supper together and afterward Sarah showered while he changed out of his wet jeans and sweatshirt. When she went into the living room he was sitting on the couch, working the cork out of a bottle of wine. Two glasses on the table. She passed behind and got her arms around his shoulders.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Neither of us have got to work tomorrow, and the kid took off.”

  “Almost unbelievable,” Sarah said.

  She came around the end of the couch and sat with him. He poured the tumblers nearly full and handed the one to her. Sarah sipped the wine and Daniel downed a mouthful. He’d put an old CD of hers into the crappy stereo that rested on a table across the room. It played Bruce Springsteen for a time and then a bunch of Nirvana tracks. There seemed to be no clear design to it.

  “You didn’t say much about work,” Sarah said.

  “There’s nothin’ worth saying,” he said. “They got me on all the shit jobs.”

  Sarah asked no more about it. They sat drinking and listening to the tunes until the CD started skipping and stammering out the same line of In Bloom over and over. Sarah took up a pillow and chucked it across the room. It clipped the speaker and the song kept on and ended. Queen started playing. Sarah took and drink and swayed a little to the melody.

  “Murray and Ella asked us down the road to their place if you want to go,” Daniel said.

  Sarah brushed her hair back behind her ear, straightened the hem of her dress.

  “Yeah, we should head down for a drink,” she said.

  “They’d be pretty happy to have us by the sound of it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But we’ll go in a little while.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She lifted her bare feet and pulled her knees up under her so that she was looking at him right in the eye. She took a big drink, emptied the glass and set it down. She flicked at his glass with her fingernail. It rang small. Daniel smiled and drank the wine. Sarah took the glass from him and turned and set it behind her on the table. When she turned back she had her chest up against his shoulder. She shifted her knee over his legs and got on top of him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She kissed him and he got hold of her firm by her lower back. She held him close and then bit at his neck and his ear and leaned back with his face in her hands. He dropped his hand down under her skirt and grabbed her bare ass. She shifted and then took the whole dress off over her head and let it drop. She stared down with her dark eyes. Cheeks gone very red. He stared back at her and he could barely gather air fast enough to breathe.

  TEN

  Come Christmas that year and they didn’t suffer as they thought they might. They spent little on themselves and wanted little to begin with. Madelyn wanted less than she should have and they got her more. They had a Christmas tree that Daniel had cut from the outlying woods. That he’d brought down with a shortaxe and hauled across the fieldsnow on a wooden sled. They had turkey and wine and heat and electricity. And they had two days together without work. Those hours were sweet and they went quick and then Sarah had to go back to the nursing home in the evening on Boxing Day. Daniel lay in bed alone and slept thin, meagre sleep and then the morning showed. He waited by the door in his steel-toes and coveralls while his wife pulled into the driveway and got out of the truck. Left it running. He kissed her as she passed by and handed him the keys. Then he got into the vehicle and drove it back down the road over deep ruts of sand-spackled ice.

  He pulled into the jobsite and saw few other trucks on the lot. The office was no more than a line of joined trailers sitting on blocks in the hard earth. Daniel got out and went up the makeshift stairs and knocked on the office door. The site foreman came out from behind his desk and unlatched the door without looking. Daniel went in and watched the man go back to his desk.

  “We got you on that steel fencing today,” he said.

  “Alright. Where the other guys at?” Daniel said. “They call in hungover?”

  The site-boss smiled crooked. He took off his glasses and let them hang around his neck by the tether.

  “We gave a few extra days off to the more senior guys,” the site-boss said. “They got projects coming up in the new year. So they could afford a day or two extra. Give that work up to some of the newer fellas like yourself.”

  Daniel put his hands in his pockets and looked down at his boots. Back at the boss.

  “What’s that mean for us?” Daniel said. “We gonna have work in January?”

  “It ain’t that bad yet,” the site-boss said, and set his elbows on the desk. “Nobody’s gonna be let go or nothin’ like that. But work gets harder to come by this time of year. Some fellas’ll lose hours for a while.”

  “All the ones who got their trucks out there in the lot?” Daniel said.

  The boss started to say something and stopped. He leaned back in the chair. Then he nodded.

  Daniel couldn’t look at the man anymore so he stared out of the crossbarred office window. Acre upon acre of frozen ground with great muddied swaths in the white and cavernous pits dug out and waiting for foundations to be set within them. Miles of metal stacked in pieces or assembled already into half-built things. Ten-ton diggers and backhoes and bulldozers without their drivers. If you didn’t know how that work was done or how many were offering to do it you would think it would last forever.

  “Don’t worry,” the boss said. “It’s only temporary. We get to the other side of winter and see what the spring has for us.”

  Daniel studied the site-boss in his chair. Brick of a man once, gone soft at the belly. Ill-fitting workshirt and a wedding band sunk permanent into his gnarled finger.

  “I better get to it,” Daniel said.

  The site-boss waved and went back to his paperwork. Daniel left the office and shut the door behind him and went slow down the steps. When he got to his truck he opened the door and stood with one hand on the window frame and the other on the ridge of the truckbed. He felt the torn boltholes in the siding and squeezed
until the metals broke the pad of his middle finger and his palmheel and then he squeezed a little harder and let go.

  At the end of his shift Daniel was back in the lot taking off his gear and stowing it in the truck. He’d lost a metal fragment down his sleeve during a weld and it had burned a narrow ditch into his forearm before he could shake it loose. He examined the arm. The hair singed in a wandering line from wrist to elbow. It still stunk and so did his workshirt.

  As he was searching the cab for antiseptic ointment, a huge welder called LeBlanc came out of the site-­office and let the door swing. He had an envelope that he stuffed into the pocket of his coveralls. He walked past Daniel’s truck on the way to his own. The man seemed to be talking to himself. LeBlanc, like Daniel, had been born and raised in the area, though he’d gone to the French high school and was a few years younger. Daniel applied the salve but he had nothing to cover the site of the burn. He rolled up his shirtsleeves to the elbow. LeBlanc got into his truck and it shifted under his weight and then shifted again when he got back out.

  “They fuck you too?” LeBlanc said.

  “Yeah,” Daniel said.

  LeBlanc shook his head.

  “You want to go for a beer?” he said.

  Daniel thought on it. He looked at his wrist by instinct but he’d not worn a watch in some years. He stared stupid for another second and then dropped the arm.

  “I’ll follow you,” Daniel said.

  They’d taken stools at the bar and nobody would sit close to them on either side. LeBlanc was nearly a full head taller than Daniel. He had the kind of hands you might see on a horror movie monster. Massive digits that had been broken and healed wrong and broken again. All of his fingernails were bitten down so that they were just calcified bumps. LeBlanc had cashed a paycheque through the bar and he seemed to be trying to drink his way through a fair chunk of it. Above the backbar there was a TV showing some kind of downhill skiing championships. LeBlanc took a peanut up from a near bowl and flicked it whole at the TV screen.