In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  Daniel came back into the living room. He too sunk in the couch and set the two bottles on the table and leaned in to open them. That was when Sarah reached down and lifted his pantleg up by the cuff. Daniel just sat there with his two hands holding either end of the beer bottle. Sarah studied the leg for a long time and then she let the cuff drop and checked the other. She let that pantleg go nearly right away and withdrew to her spot, pulled her hair back and tied it.

  “So, when were you gonna tell me you were on half-days at work?” she said.

  Daniel drank his bottle near empty.

  “I don’t know. Soon,” he said.

  She just looked at him.

  “I didn’t know how long it would be for,” he said.

  “How long’s it been?”

  He thought on it.

  “About two weeks. Give or take a day.”

  She nodded.

  “I figured that much,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “’Cause I’m the one that buys the bread and beer. I know exactly what amount of pennies we’ve got to spare.”

  Daniel put his arm around her and she let him.

  “I also figured it takes time to get your shins beat to shit like that,” Sarah said. “Time in a day that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

  “You remember Jasper?” he said.

  “Of course I remember him.”

  “He opened up a gym not too far down the road.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I been going there afternoons. Just to see.”

  Sarah reached up and scratched at her cheekbone, let her palm fall to his knee.

  “What did you find out?” she said.

  Daniel drank at his beer again. The TV screen flickered and Daniel cleared her from his shoulder and got up and turned it off. He came back and planted his ass at the edge of the couch cushions with his elbows on his knees. They sat there together listening to the blue, nautical lament from their daughter’s room. The drafts that likewise whistled in the dim coldness of their little kitchen.

  FOURTEEN

  They were more than a mile down the trail off the county highway when they stopped. Pretty clearing with wildflowers dotted around the place. Wallace sat the hood of the car near to Clayton’s ledger. At one end of the clearing stood the hanging tree with long, heavy branches that bent in all directions and some bent back upon themselves. Clayton’s nephew had strung a man to it in just his skivvies. Length of wire around his neck that worked back through a lasso and had gone taut enough to cut the skin. The man’s hands were tied and the balls of his feet were pushing at a milk crate set at the base of the tree. Tarbell had split him by the eyebrow and ear and then Clayton told him stop and he’d gone to work on the man’s body. The man was still cussing at them. He said he didn’t owe.

  Clayton went over to the car and Wallace handed him the ledger. He carried it over to the man and opened it to the right page, cloth band to earmark it.

  “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  The man didn’t say.

  “That’s your name. And that number here is what you owe,” Clayton said, finger dug into the one page. “This number to the right. What you paid. It’s not the same number.”

  “I got fuckin’ time still,” the man said.

  Clayton shook his head. He pointed to the crate. Tarbell came over and the man tried to kick at him as he neared, almost caught him about the head but Tarbell slipped by and booted the crate clear. The man dropped and the wire stretched him out. He’d got his tongue caught this time and bit into it deep. Wallace came over and moved Tarbell aside and took the weight of the hanging man, his shoulder to the man’s waist. He called for the stool. Clayton had gone back to the car to watch.

  “You pass me that fuckin’ thing right now,” he said to Clayton’s nephew.

  Tarbell took his time coming back with it. Dropped it sideways on the ground. Wallace told him to fuck off and righted the crate and lowered the man again. There was blood all over his lips and his chin. Wallace reached high and managed to loose the wire enough so the man could talk.

  “Last chance,” Wallace said.

  The man wheezed and moved his head all about like he might shuck loose. He’d plenty of fight left. He started his cussing again but none of it intelligible. Wallace cuffed him across the side of the head with an open hand. The sound of it carried through the place. Something skittered through the weeds near the treeline. He’d nearly turned the man sideways and the man was blinking hard and trying to move his jaw. Wide eyes on Wallace.

  “I’m doin’ you a favour,” Wallace said close.

  The man whispered to him. With his bit tongue it took a few tries for Wallace to hear him plain. Wallace backed up and looked deep into the man. Then he got hold of him again and hefted him all the way up. Anchored the man against the tree trunk as he reached up as he had before and made enough slack in the line to get it over the man’s head. The man dropped heavy over Wallace’s back and bled on his shirt. Wallace let the line swing. He hoofed the milk crate hard enough that it took air and went end over end into the near brush. He carried the man over to the car. Clayton had already got in and fired the ignition and popped the trunk. Plastics fixed there to cover the all of it. Wallace laid the man down in the hole and made sure he wasn’t dead or dying. Then he closed him in.

  When he came around to the front, Tarbell was sitting in the passenger seat. Wallace stopped short and spat to the clay. He opened the back door and got in behind the blonde. Knees high and drove into the seatback.

  “Move the seat forward,” Wallace said. “Right Fuckin’ now.”

  Tarbell eventually found the switch.

  “He’s got the rest at his squat in the boonies,” Wallace said.

  Clayton put the car into reverse and swung it around to face the trail. He drove the road reckless and the man in the trunk could be heard yowling and bashing against the liner.

  FIFTEEN

  In weeks to come Daniel went to the gym every afternoon and each time he went he found his rhythm a little bit more. The near-crippling soreness that came in early days was gone and now he felt but a steady ache, telltale signs of muscle brokedown and rebuilding. His hands throbbed when the weather changed, when humid air hung fog through the fields and forest hollows. The skin of his knuckles had dried and split. He’d dents up and down his shins. He started to spar light with Jasper’s assistants and some of their prospects. If there were things he couldn’t do he still had a knack for teaching them to the younger fighters. He went to work at the jobsite with his cheeks purpled, slight swelling under his eyes, his forehead scraped up and gone red. Daniel worked hard and every day at noon he drove off the site-lot while men stood around in hardhats smoking and talking to each other, watching the rear of his truck with their faces gaunt and haggard.

  Jasper had an assistant coach called Jung Woo that Daniel worked with plenty. Jung Woo had been a boxing prodigy in South Korea but his trainers put him in a tournament too young and in the semi-finals his nose was flattened by a punch and the surgeons that put it back together had called colleagues into the operating room one after another to shake their heads at it. They told Jung Woo that he wouldn’t be able to box for a very long time but he still had fight in him and had to find somewhere to put it. He found Jiu-Jitsu classes in his town and then he went to Japan and learned to grapple and wrestle and when his nose healed he trained Muay Thai and took fights throughout Thailand, Australia, the Philippines. He’d scraps in Burma that he didn’t like to talk about. He fought and studied chemistry at the university in Kyoto. He met a girl there and when he graduated he married her and fought three more times before he had his nose shattered again and had to retire. He won a scholarship to work on a graduate degree at the University of British Columbia and he moved there with his wife. Jung Woo found a gym in Vancouver
that Jasper’s cousin ran and he worked there while he studied. He spent more and more time at the gym and then he took another fight and tore a man’s arm out of the socket with a Kimura lock. He didn’t spend much time at home and within a year his wife left him for another man and moved to Seattle. Jung Woo took a job at the gym and he quit school and that was where Jasper had found him, penniless and smiling while he turned men inside out as they rolled on the mat. Where he plastered men to the ringropes with body shots and afterward explained how he had done it in timid half-English while they kneeled on the canvas, wheezing and nodding at him.

  Daniel stood maybe four inches taller than Jung Woo and outweighed him by thirty pounds. But Jung Woo’s head was built right into his shoulders and he had thick legs and powerful hips. The two men worked hard and landed heavy shots but they were precise and their hands and shoulders and elbows were always there to muffle or parry punches. They were also both ex-fighters who saw men nearly half their age come into the gym and train. So they threw hands with speed and ill-intent but they didn’t go in for the kill and they didn’t brawl nor let the sparring devolve into the brutal practice rounds that an active fighter might use to get ready for his next bout. They spoke in the breaks and gave each other pointers and when Jasper called time one man always held the ringrope for the other as both men went back down to the gym-room floor.

  Jung Woo taught Jiu-Jitsu to young fighters and in the quiet afternoons he would roll with Daniel. At first those sessions were maulings where Daniel tried to power out of holds and chokes and poor positioning, Jung Woo clinging fast to him and shifting position with ease, always moving and making near imperceptible adjustments. If Daniel fought off a submission he would already be fighting another and in the end he would be caught and tap and he would sit there hauling air, his shirt turned wet rag. Jung Woo would be across from him, giving instruction, breathing gentle and often wearing only Daniel’s sweat on his rashguard. Daniel had a decent ground game when he’d fought, but his Jiu-Jitsu was mainly defensive, used to prevent submissions and to get back to a dominant position where he could thump a downed man with punches and elbows or get back to his feet and box. Jung Woo could win fights with submissions or with strikes, but he didn’t have Daniel’s power and he was a bleeder. He cut too easy and his ruined nose had broke in all his later fights and he’d had trouble breathing and seeing clear.

  During those weeks of training Daniel started to get his timing back and he became calm and fluid again in the ring. He took shots well and never staggered and his heavy hands were feared in sparring, even half-thrown. Jung Woo would call out to Jasper between rounds to watch them spar as if he were not already studying it. He would call out and he would talk very seriously to Jasper afterward while Daniel stretched on the gym floor.

  During a bleak late-winter afternoon the two men warmed up and then wrapped their hands for sparring. Jung Woo had been waiting for Daniel and when Daniel came out into the gym in his gear Jung Woo was already shadowboxing and dancing the mats on the balls of his feet.

  “What?” Daniel said. “You win the lottery or somethin’?”

  Jung Woo smiled. Kept throwing light punches. He did that for a while and then he let his arms drop and shook them out at his sides.

  “Today real sparring,” he said. “Hard sparring.”

  Daniel had wrapped his hands. Started stretching his arms.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Okay?” Jung Woo said.

  Daniel looked at him awhile and then he nodded.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Just hands.”

  “Okay.”

  Daniel sucked wind in the third round. He kept his hands up but his arms were heavy and his punches had lost some of their snap. The canvas was spotted with blood from Jung Woo’s nose and the Korean had plugged his nostrils with tissue, since turned maroon. Even with the headgear on he couldn’t hold his mud. Jung Woo moved as well as he had in the beginning, stepping light and strafing Daniel with jabs and combinations as he moved out of range. Daniel kept his hands high. Jung Woo went to the body. Daniel ate short hooks to the stomach and ribs and he took them well but knew they would slow him and sap his energy. He took chances and came over the top as Jung Woo went low but those punches came late or were blocked and then Jung Woo would be gone. By the last half of the round Daniel looked to ringside for the clock and Jung Woo stood him up with a jab and he didn’t look for the clock again. Daniel could hear his heartbeat in his ears and little else. He breathed and he breathed and now he backed up and bounced on the balls of his feet and tried to get his legs to work again. He stalked Jung Woo and paid for it with a right hook to the cheek and then he tied Jung Woo up against the ringropes for a second and heard the one-minute warning from the timeclock.

  Bedlam in that final minute. Daniel shoved Jung Woo clear and bombed him with punches. Jung Woo came off the ropes swinging and Daniel ate a left hook as he ripped Jung Woo to the body. Jung Woo grunted and stepped back, threw a right hand as he went that clipped Daniel on the forehead but had no power behind it. In the dying seconds of the round Daniel walked Jung Woo down and threw wild. He took shot after shot from the quicker man and still he chased. Eventually Jung Woo planted his feet and attacked. The two men stood in the pocket and traded. Blood and sweat sprayed the canvas and their feet atop it. Daniel landed heavier shots but Jung Woo landed more and his hands were faster and Daniel had to cover up. Jung Woo pushed forward but Daniel would not give and then he came untethered and drilled the Korean with hooks and an off-angle uppercut that sent the man sideways with his legs stiff and his glove drawing in the air as it came up late to block. They each ate the other man’s right hand as the buzzer rang to call the round.

  Daniel stopped and stood full while Jung Woo let himself go against the ringropes. Rocked back and grinned through his mouthguard. Blinked hard while thin lines of blood ran through the pluggings in his flat and boneless nose.

  Jung Woo reached up and spat his mouthguard into his glove. Daniel put his hands up over his head, one wrist held in the opposite mitt. His jaw hung open and he blew hard over the black, fitted mouthpiece that covered his upper teeth. He took his hands off of his head and pulled at the strap under his chin and then wrested the headgear off and let it fall to the canvas. His hair stood up crazy, sweat-drenched and matted into clumps. Jung Woo had his gloves off when he came over and they were pinned under his armpit while he took his own headgear off with his free hand. Bloodspots on his shirt by his chest and left shoulder. They bumped fists through their wraps and kept trying to get their wind back.

  Daniel stood under the hot water in the gym shower for a long time. He could tell that the shower wouldn’t take so he turned the water cold and let it chill him through. His head felt three sizes too big. The skin of his face and neck and arms was warm to the touch. He knew what kind of soreness would come that night, the next morning. He turned the cold tap wide-open.

  When Daniel came back out of the changeroom Jung Woo and Jasper were sitting on the edge of the ring, legs dangling. Jung Woo had lately been skipping and the rope lay on the ground below him, his handwraps in a pile beside the rope. He spoke to Jasper and articulated by throwing different punches and combinations in the air. Jasper listened. Daniel walked over to the men with his duffel bag slung at his side, wet spots on his clean T-shirt. Jung Woo got up and shook Daniel’s hand and sat back down again.

  “This guy,” Jung Woo said. “Real fighter. Good body. Punches like nuclear bombs. Getting very good on the ground.”

  “Real fighter?” Jasper said.

  “Real fighter,” Jung Woo said. “Still.”

  He drove home slow and when he got there Sarah was waiting for him. She sat on the steps by twilight and blew smoke. The wind carried it on. Daniel saw her before she saw him and when she did see him coming she tried to drop and bury the joint with her foot in the dirtied snow beside the steps. Daniel
turned into the driveway. The rear wheels of the truck spun some as he pulled up to the house. Sarah didn’t get up. Just sat there brushing her hair clear when the breeze laid it across her face.

  Daniel got out of the truck with the duffel bag in hand. He shut the door.

  “Your head is all red. It looks like someone plugged you in,” she said.

  “It’s alright,” he said.

  Sarah stood and came over to him. She reached up and took his head in her hands, felt his forehead, his cheeks, the underside of his jaw.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Could be permanent by the looks of it.”

  Daniel took her hands away.

  “You got a phone call this afternoon,” she said. “I heard the message on the machine.”

  “What’s the story?” he said.

  She took her hands back and put them in the pockets of her coat.

  “They want you to go back on full-time at the jobsite. They got some big contract they didn’t think they’d get.”

  “No shit?” Daniel said.

  “You’ll have to give it a listen yourself. But it sounds like they weren’t jerking you around after all.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “See,” he said. “I knew it’d work out.”

  Sarah hugged him around the waist. He dropped the bag so he could get both arms around her. When they broke he told her he’d be in shortly. She ran her hand down his hand and reached for the duffel bag, carried it on into the house. Daniel turned the handle on the garage door and pulled. He had to force it up and around the rails to get it all the way open. He went inside and came back with a bag of road salt and set about scattering it on the driveway. At the base of the drive he stopped long enough to take a chill. Dirt road there that ran past their house and led to lakewater and marshland. The country-run plough had built a massive snowbank where the road ended, humped some ten feet high and full with grit and gravel.

  Later that night they lay together in their bed and Sarah held his hands in hers. She ran the pads of her fingertips over his knuckles and over bonespurs that sat thick in the middle of his hands.