In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  “Everything okay?” Sarah said.

  Murray stood up straighter when he saw her.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The kid’s fine. When are you headin’ out?”

  “Shortly,” Sarah said.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “Well, sure,” she said.

  Sarah came over to where he stood and turned.

  “Zip that,” she said, and he did so with some difficulty. Sarah told him to sit and asked if Murray would have a beer. He said he would. She checked the clock in the kitchen and then pulled two bottles from the fridge. She uncapped them and came back.

  They sat near to each other and drank. Murray tried to smile at her.

  “You seen Daniel today?” he said.

  Sarah shook her head no.

  “Do you think that he’s gone back to work for Clayton and those fellas?” Murray said plain.

  Sarah didn’t answer. She got up sudden and went down the hall into the bedroom. Murray stood. Then she came back with the rest of her joint and sat down. She lit it and took a pull.

  “He tells me that he’s not,” Sarah said. “That he’s at the gym.”

  “You believe it?” Murray said.

  “If I don’t then I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  Murray sat forward heavy in his chair.

  “Is he even fit to fight again?” he said.

  “We won’t know unless he actually fights,” Sarah said. “But, whatever he thinks, I don’t believe he’s the kind of man to just take this back up as a hobby.”

  Murray nodded. Sarah took a drag and offered the joint to the old man. He looked at it a second and then he pinched it away and smoked. Again. Handed it back to her.

  “I’ve lived in this county most of my life,” Murray said. “And I seen the railways and the grain elevators go. And the farms. Most of the factories.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Whatever reason a man has to outlaw, I understand,” he said. “But it’s gone to hell out there and you can’t be living in a house with a man who’s neck-deep in it. Not with a little girl.”

  Sarah slumped back into the couch cushions. She drank from her beer and let her dress wrinkle.

  “I knew what he could do when I married him,” she said. “I didn’t even think most of it was wrong, to be honest. But we were young then.”

  She looked spent where she sat. Murray leaned in and put a hand to her knee. Rough palms that picked at her tights. She didn’t care.

  “I love Daniel, and I will do whatever I can to help the boy,” he said. “But, if he takes up with Clayton again you need to have a plan to get clear of it.”

  Sarah nodded. She ran her hand hard across her brow. Put the rest of the beer away and set the empty bottle down. She stood and so did Murray. Sarah straightened the collar of the man’s shirt.

  “I’ll not tolerate him if he’s lied about all of that,” Sarah said. “Believe me.”

  “I know it,” Murray said.

  “As far as fighting goes, we’ll have to see.”

  Murray looked at her long. Smiled sincere this time.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  Sarah didn’t say anything. She stood there and watched him put his shoes on at the door. Forearm leant hard to the wall. Before he’d shod both feet, Sarah’s ride pulled into the driveway and laid on the horn.

  The streets were dark where she walked. Toward the brokedown tavern near the edge of town. The traffic lights were changing for nobody. When she got to the place there were two men smoking by the entryway arch. They shuffled out just enough to let her by. She went in through the heavy front door. Inside the barroom were tables of thick-hewn timber, the finish worn pale by the years under the shifting of glassbottoms and elbowbones. The heads of moose and deer hung high above the bar with their dead, glass eyes. All of it shown by the warm glow of lightbulbs burning in antique wall-lanterns and table lamps, prettier than it should have been.

  Sarah walked up to the bar and sat. She didn’t look at anyone direct. Only by the backbar mirror, and then just to make sure she saw nobody she knew. She wore jeans and a black tank top. The neck cut low and showed her collarbone. She wore very little makeup but she stood out all the more for it. She hailed the bartender with a raise of her eyebrows.

  “Scotch, please.”

  “What kind?”

  “A good one to start, and the very best of your cheapest after that.”

  The bartender smirked and went away. He stood tall with hair to his shoulders. Handsome face with a part-crooked nose, lean build under his collared shirt. He came back with a half-full glass of good scotch.

  “We’ll call that a single and the rest of it I spilt,” he said.

  “Okay,” Sarah said.

  “You got a tab here?”

  “I need to talk to Clayton.”

  The man took his hands off the bar and looked to the side. He turned back to her.

  “I know he’s here,” she said. “So you call him or call whoever is allowed to call him and tell him I’m out here. He won’t be mad. We go back.”

  “Miss…”

  She stopped him with a look.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  The man shook his head and went to the end of the bar where a decades-old wall-mounted phone hung without dial or digits. He picked up the corded receiver and covered it when he spoke. After a while he hung it up and came over to her again. Sheepish look on his face.

  “He says you can go back.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and got up off the stool, drink in hand.

  The bartender started to tell her the way to Clayton’s office.

  “I know where he’s at,” she said.

  She went around the bar to a corridor to the rear rooms. The bartender watched her go, polishing the same glass over and over while those men sitting at the bar tried to call him.

  Sarah knuckled the door twice. She’d not finished taking a sip of her drink before the door opened up. Wallace King filled the frame almost entire, his hand on the inside knob. Clayton sat in a chair across the room. He’d lately been watching TV but he shut it off and set the remote down on an end table to his side. The room smelled of cannabis and old leather.

  “Sarah,” Wallace said.

  “You make a better door than a window, buddy,” she said.

  Wallace stepped back and waved her in. She went by. He shut the door behind her and she watched him turn a handle to a mechanism that bolted the door on either side. After that he walked by her and leaned against a naked brick column deep in the room. Sarah saddled up half-assed on the top of a nearby couch. She took another drink.

  “You haven’t seen him tonight, have you?”

  “Who?” Clayton said.

  She frowned at him.

  “I’ve not seen your man. Not since he quit,” Clayton said.

  Sarah looked him up and down. She nodded. Finished her whiskey. Clayton turned to Wallace and pointed to the corner bar. Wallace got up off the pillar and took a bottle from the counter.

  “Hey,” Clayton said.

  Wallace stopped and put that bottle down and picked up another one.

  “Fuckin’ choosy,” he said, and went over to Sarah. She didn’t lift her glass at first. Wallace shook the bottle at her.

  “This is the good stuff,” Wallace said.

  Sarah stuck her glass out. Wallace filled it and went back to the bar.

  “I heard he visited with the police,” Clayton said. “That true?”

  “You hear a lot for someone who’s not keeping tabs on him,” she said.

  “Well.”

  “He wouldn’t tell them a thing. You know better, Clayton.”

  He nodded.

  “I know.”

  “You sure you d
on’t know where he is?” she said.

  “I heard that he’s been working his way back to a fight.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He might even get one, I hear.”

  Sarah took another swig. She ran a hand through her hair.

  “Nobody ever gave him a decent job in his life,” she said. “Can you believe it? A good man like that. It makes you wonder…”

  Wallace chuckled. Sarah shifted so she was square with him.

  “I didn’t know you traded in fine art, Clayton,” she said.

  Clayton had his glass halfway up from his knee and it stopped right there. Over by the bar Wallace stood up tall. A series of paintings rested tarp-covered against the brick wall behind him. The oilcloth covered the all of them but she knew anyhow. Sarah raised her eyebrows at Wallace and then turned back to his boss.

  “I’m a busy man,” Clayton said. “But I’ve got hobbies. You wouldn’t want to hear about a lot of them.”

  She nodded.

  “I know a bit about paintings,” she said.

  “Sure you do.”

  “They still sell art private through private auction houses, in cash,” she said. “As far as I know there ain’t many other businesses in the world still run like that. Probably somebody could use a painting like a chit to move a shitload of clean money from one fella to another.”

  Clayton grinned at her. He drank slow and watched her all the while over the rim of his glass.

  “How in the fuck d’you know any of that?” Wallace said.

  “I read a lot when I work nights.”

  “Will you go out on a date with me?”

  She looked him up and down.

  “I don’t date art buffs,” she said.

  The men laughed strange. The air in the room seemed to get thinner at once. Sarah downed her whiskey and raised the glass as a goodbye. She got up and went to the door. When she tried the handle to the lock it wouldn’t turn. The muscles aside her spine went cold and then Wallace came over. He flipped a latch and wrenched the handle. Pulled the door open for her. It took everything she had to not flee. She turned around.

  “You swear to me you’ve not seen Daniel?” Sarah said.

  In the back of the room Clayton shook his head no. Sarah said okay and turned to leave. Wallace was still there.

  “Will you walk me out?” she said to him.

  Wallace turned to his boss and Clayton waved him out.

  They walked out of the room and kept on and on and after an eon of hallway Sarah heard the office door clack shut. Wallace stopped by the exit door and waited.

  “What?” he said.

  “You got a family too,” she said. “What happens to them if you’re gone?”

  Wallace leaned back against the wall.

  “They’d be fine,” he said.

  “How can you say that?” she said. “With the fathers you and Dan had. How they ended up.”

  “Not the same.”

  “How?”

  “They did it to themselves.”

  “But you know how that feels,” she said.

  “Sure, I found them both. Didn’t I?”

  Sarah took hold of Wallace by his shirtsleeve. He’d not look at her.

  “His was purple when I found him,” Wallace said. “Mine was yellow.”

  He cleared her hand off his arm. Went into his pocket and came back with a little metal canister. He gestured to her with it. Sarah just pushed the empty whiskey glass to his stomach. She shoved the door open and left Wallace there with the tumbler in his hand.

  Then she was outside in the night, warm air on her shoulders. The moon shone full and far too close with shadow in its skullhole craters. She did not follow the road but rather went alleyward, her shoes barely visible under that orange flowermoon. She walked fast and her eyes kept trying to adjust. Sarah weaved through side streets to where she knew of a taxi stand. When she could make out the shape of highgrass in the bordering field she followed that line and made sure that no one else did.

  She opened the door to silence. Small light from the kitchen. She couldn’t see Daniel’s shoes and then she saw them. Sarah wobbled on one leg and pried her own shoe off. When it fell she loosed the other one. Then she sat right down in the entryway and stared at Daniel’s shoes. She’d thoughts of his never coming home again and of him buried shallow in the hills and even of her killing him. Let the worry and the fear wash over her, dread that couldn’t be explained away. She let it take her under and turn her until it had run its course. When finally she stood she had to wipe her eyes and wait for her legs to work proper.

  She trod soft on old carpet and groaning floorboard as she went to the bedroom. She flipped the light on and saw the bed he’d made that morning. Nearly as neat as she might make it but different. Sarah went back down the hallway to the girl’s room. There he slept, sitting on the floor and leant against the foot of her bed. The girl in a ball on the mattress. Her arms hung off the bed to the elbow. Daniel wore his jeans yet and a T-shirt pulled askew as if he’d moved odd in sleep. The moon had followed Sarah home and it shone a column of pale grey over the sleeping man. She watched his chest swell and recede by that moon as if he were but another sea or body ran with tides.

  Sarah could only see stars in the sky by her bedroom window, standing plainly drunk in her shortsocks and underthings. By and by she thought about a star and what it was and she didn’t want to look at them anymore. She got onto the bed and lay back against the headboard and sipped at a bottle of beer from her sidetable. The bottom came to rest against the meat of her thigh, cool glass on her skin. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again Daniel was standing in the doorway. She closed her eyes again and soon she listed left with the mattress and all that side of the world got warm and smelled of him.

  “Where did you go?” he said.

  Sarah took another drink but she didn’t open her eyes. The base of the bottle found her leg again.

  “I went into town with some of the girls. Then I left.”

  “What for?”

  “Stopped by Clayton’s bar. Make sure he hadn’t seen you.”

  “Jesus, Sarah.”

  “It was two days ago the last time we were both in this bed together. I guessed where you probably were or weren’t but I needed to know for sure.”

  Daniel shifted heavy and faced her sidelong. He’d stripped down to his shorts and had the makings of a black eye along with scrapes and bruises frequent from his forehead to his toebones.

  “I asked if they could get me a fight,” he said.

  “I was wondering when you were gonna say that,” Sarah said.

  She took a last pull from the beer bottle and slid it gentle across the night table. Folded her hands atop her stomach.

  “What if I say no?” she said.

  “Would you?”

  “I fucking well should.”

  He reached out and held her far hip in his hand. Rough fingers pressing into her outside thigh, the back of her knee, her stockinged foot. A sock slid loose and flew. She shook her head.

  “When did you get the kid home?” she said.

  “Picked her up about ten. She fell asleep inside an hour, but Ella called to say she’d left her books at the house, so I went back,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t gone three minutes and that was three minutes too long.”

  Sarah opened her eyes.

  “What d’you mean?”

  Daniel told her how he’d come back down the road and saw the front door open. Half of their shoes on the steps and on the driveway. He nearly let the truck roll off by how quick he’d left it and ran through the house. The girl was not in her bed and she was not in any of the other rooms. He blew out of the place with a hammer in his right hand. Hollered the girl’s name and searched the front and sideyards. No sign of her anywhere. He tore up damp, black
soils as he made for the fields in back of the property. There she walked in her bare feet and shorts and her nightshirt. She didn’t stop when he called and when he got to her she was talking and not to him. He didn’t know if he should wake her but he did.

  “She didn’t flip out like they say,” he said. “But the look of her coming back probably cost me some years.”

  Sarah reached over and corralled her husband, eased him down and put his head in her lap. She stroked his short hair and the sunburnt skin at the back of his neck.

  “I never seen anythin’ like that,” he said. “Scared the living shit out of me.”

  “You did everything right,” Sarah said.

  “She ever done that before, when I wasn’t home?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “But I heard you were the same, when you were a little boy.”

  Daniel tried to sit up but she held him and settled his head down into her lap again. She ran her hand up and down the middle of his back.

  “At least that’s what I was told.”

  After a minute Sarah moved him and swung her feet down from the bed. He tried to stand but she told him stay. She crossed the room and went out and closed the door gentle behind her.

  TWENTY-NINE

  He had his hands taped in the dressing room for visiting singers and visiting comedians. Mirrors ringed in lightbulbs and signed pictures of celebrities put out to pasture on the casino circuit. There were some eight hundred people in folding chairs in the banquet room where they staged the fights. Daniel could hear the chatter of them through the open door. He had Jasper and Jung Woo there and they both wore shirts with Jasper’s gym insignia on the back. Face of a tiger wreathed in the woven rope of the Mongkhon. Thai script above. Daniel wore nothing but his shorts and shoes and the silver cross that stuck to his neck by the sweat from his warm-up. A few officials from the band that ran the casino were in the room to supervise. They weighed him up all the while.

  Daniel made his walk and partway he thought about turning back around. He was glad for the nerves. If he didn’t have them he’d have known that he was doomed. There was no cage built for the fight, just a standard boxing ring with ropes and four cornerposts. Mixed Martial Arts and Muay Thai fights were made legal in the province the year before and had been fought sparely on reserve land until then. In the states or out of province. The officials and his cornermen took Daniel to the staging area at the edge of the ring and the cutman assigned to him daubed Vaseline on his nose and eyebrows and rubbed it even through his cheeks. Another official checked his cup and the fingerless four-ounce gloves and the signature on the tape around them. They had him show his mouthguard and then waved him up the steps. He put his arms around Jasper and Jung Woo and the Korean told him to kill.