Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  “True that. Now take yourself to the other school.”

  ***

  By the time I turn down Baker Street to the other school, the bleeding has stopped, and the swelling has reached lobster tail proportions, so I dump the cloth in a trash can and just savor the lip that it is. I smile a little until I feel the lip tear a tiny bit and force myself to stop.

  And I stop again, when I see Sandy.

  I have been dodging her with every trick and excuse I can think of lately because . . . Why? I know right this instant that it isn’t that I don’t want to see her, because the sight of her here is making me ache so bad I want to run to her like a big oaf right in front of the whole school crowd milling about.

  I take two quick anxious steps toward her and I stop short again when a whole new smile splits the lip once again and I do know why I’ve been sneaking. I feel like I have had ten other girlfriends, and a drug addiction, and an international arrest warrant out on me. Because I know how she would feel, about what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, what I’m thinking about.

  I stand there frozen, stupid, cowardly, and I notice next to her as she sits on the low wall. On our low wall. Two tall coffees sitting, waiting for me. Like they waited for her all the way back when we started being us.

  She looks up in my direction and I take off, back in the direction I came from.

  The Fight Thing

  I wake up, well before dawn, feeling it. It’s so powerful. It is irresistibly powerful.

  I lie here, in the darkness slashed with yellow streetlight, looking at my hands. I have big, strong, gnarly hands. I flex and flex and watch them like they just grew there overnight. I am utterly fascinated. They are so strong. I’m so proud of my hands.

  And I have good bones. I’ve always known that much.

  The fight thing. It’s so, so powerful.

  Brutus and I are touching noses. When did I get up?

  “There’s nothing wrong with this,” I say to my punched-­up pal.

  He is a generous and nonjudgmental listener.

  I’m just feeling so strong, so in charge of it all. I can handle it.

  “It’s our thing,” I tell him with a brotherly head-­butt.

  My choice. My problem. Nobody’s problem.

  “You should stop thinking about it,” Lloyd says, shocking me. He’s seated in the kitchen when I get there, nothing but the microwave blue-­light clock illuminating him.

  “Jesus, Lloyd. What are you doing up? I thought you had your counselor.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  I go to the fridge, take out the two large plastic canisters of superfood shake I mixed the night before. I stuff one in my gym bag and start sipping from the other.

  “Don’t fight, man. Arlo, just don’t, okay?”

  “Who are you, my big brother or something?”

  “Used to be,” he says.

  “Well, don’t worry. Anyway, you’re probably just jealous because I can do it if I want and you can’t. I have the power and control you don’t have.” It’s a mean jab, but I don’t care. He has less than no right to talk to me about anything.

  When I close the refrigerator door we are again in blue shadowy nothing.

  “Power and control, big man?” he says as I head out. “How ’bout choices? You still have those, is the point. For now anyway.”

  I exit rapidly. I seem to be doing a lot of that lately. I just wish people would leave me alone. I know what I’m doing.

  Duckin’ And Divin’

  “I got a thing, Jamie.”

  After getting so familiar with Jamie McAlpine’s features, I still admire them every time, the way art students must look at great works over and over. He possesses both the world’s finest mashed-­potato nose and a laugh so generous I always feel like I owe him change.

  “Kid,” he gargles “have you never lifted your head once while you were working out here? Everybody got a thing. You point out one single person around here who ain’t got some kinda thing goin’ on about him and I’ll show you somebody who shouldn’a oughta be here.”

  I can’t point to any such person because I was waiting on the stoop when Jamie came to open up at five thirty.

  “Hey, I don’t got that kinda thing, Jamie,” I say, following him into the gym. “I’m no gimp, or fugitive, or bottom feeder or cracks-­of-­society head case.”

  He switches on the big overhead lights, illuminating the two rings, the heavy bags, speed bags, medicine balls, kettle balls, free weights, all sort of organized into workout neighborhoods but not really. The lights come up and I can see what I was only smelling. Leather and canvas and blood and rank heroic body odor and iron and somewhere somehow always the faint whiff of drinking alcohol mixing with the rubbing alcohol, even though one of those things is banned here, and Ben-­Gay and greasy meat. When I can breathe all that, anything is possible.

  “We had a kid in here one time, only name he ever gave us was that—Crackso Society. Couldn’t fight for shit, but he could take a punch like a crash test damn dummy.”

  We walk to Jamie’s office, where we sit across the desk he almost certainly stole from school when he left three or four decades ago. Beige-­gray metal block of a thing. He opens up his breakfast from McDonald’s, aims the bag at me with a grunt of generosity.

  “I ate, thanks,” I say, a lie I believe any good god would forgive me for. “And I don’t have that kind of a thing, Jamie, like I was saying.”

  “Like you was sayin’,” he’s saying while he’s chewing. “I keep forgettin’ you ain’t like the rest of us lowly gonks around here.”

  “Hey,” I snap. “Jamie, c’mon, you know I don’t feel that way about people here. Not at all.”

  “Shut up, will ya. This place is my life, and even I feel it. Some of the creatures that pass through them doors, they make pond scum go euwww.”

  “Well, I don’t see it. Anyway, my point is I want to fight.”

  “Do ya?” he says, chewing some meat McSomething.

  “Yeah. I really feel it.”

  “You break up with a girl or somethin’? I love it when guys quit with a girl, especially if it was boxing that split ’em up, which it usually is. They always come in extra angry and ferocious after that.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So, girl’s gone now, and you want to take it out on somebody other than the heavy bag. Classic.”

  “She’s not gone. I’m just kind of avoiding her a little. And lying a little when I’m not avoiding her . . .”

  “Duckin’ and divin’.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “What, you suddenly come to your senses and decide this”—he gestures with the straw of his orange juice at his beautiful atrocity of a nose—“is the most attractive appendage a guy can wear outside his clothes?”

  It feels like answering him just keeps getting me further away from both the beginning and the end of this conversation, so I stop.

  “Okay, okay,” he says. “So you want to fight. You figure you had the potential to be good. Coulda got somewhere with it if you didn’t waste away your prime on football and whatnot, right?”

  “Jamie, I’m not even eighteen yet.”

  “Old maid. Old maid. Time waits for no one, junior, don’t ever forget that. Even six months at your age is a whole lot of development and experience that other people have been gaining at your expense.”

  “I am well aware.”

  “Well aware, well. Still, you could get someplace maybe, that’s what you’re thinkin’. That story is as old as the hills. Guys a lot older than me walking the streets carryin’ that coulda been a contenda shit around with ’em. I seen your balance, strength, speed, reflexes. Sure, you could make a few bucks even. An undercard here and there, maybe work as a sparring partner for some dogmeat journeyman pugs.”

  “Sweep me off my feet, why dontcha.”

  “Ha,” he says, rising to his feet, two-­thirds of his breakfast waiting. “You want me to sweep you of
f your feet? You mean knock you on your ass? You’re asking to spar with me?”

  “I . . . wasn’t, actually, but . . .”

  He’s already happy-­bouncing to the nearside ring.

  “You’re gonna be dancin’ with an expert while you’re a complete novice, remember,” he calls as he climbs through the ropes, pulling on a pair of big puffy practice gloves.

  “I guess that’s why it’s good I start with an old punching bag like you,” I say, following him in. I am strapping on headgear, which he’s not even bothering with. “Anyway, I’ve been working out hard.”

  He actually blows raspberries at me.

  “I know, I know,” I say, “not the same.”

  “Not the same at all. Not even close.”

  He’s maybe a little older than fifty. Nobody knows exactly because he refuses to say, and any old fight info available on him lists six different birthdates because he was always lying to suit the situation. As I watch him loosen up, however, I am reminded who he was, and is, as a fighting man. But he is smart, tough as an angry dog, and wily. He bounces in a circle, flicking jabs, ducking phantom punches, throwing combinations that a fifty-­something cannot throw.

  He is doing his job. I find my body moving more in tune to what Jamie McAlpine is doing than what my own brain is telling it to do. Autopilot, glorious, abandon to the thing, autopilot is moving me around the ring.

  “I’ll give you three minutes,” he says, gesturing up at the big clock with the orange Day-­Glo sweep second hand. “That’ll be a good enough test to judge where you’re at without givin’ my breakfast enough time to coagulate. I almost can’t eat it when that thick filmy stuff starts to settle, y’know?”

  “Three minutes it is,” I say, smacking my gloves together.

  Three seconds it is, when I realize how raw I am. Jamie wades in, peekaboo style, and right away slams two body shots into my left and right sides. Right away, my ribs ache, my organs feel the bruise. My arms come down, like body shots’ll do, and he comes for my head. I block, I block. He’s got me backpedaling. Cripes, he is dominating me for the first forty seconds, not beating me up but dictating where I go, where the fight goes, and at what pace. My elbows are at my sides, my hands alongside my cheeks, as I protect as much of myself as I can.

  “The frickin’ heavy bag puts up a better fight than you do,” he says, laughing, and still coming after me.

  He’s too frickin’ right. Look at me. Look at me, cowering. I’m not afraid to get hit. I was never afraid to get hit. What’s wrong with me? I’m better than this, a lot better.

  “What’s wrong with ya?” he asks, in a voice that’s far more irritated than concerned. He presses harder, pressuring me into the corner and hammering me with one body shot after another until I feel my hands coming lower and lower, and I know what comes next, I know it. Bring the hands down with the punishing body shots, then take the head. I know this. I know this.

  Doesn’t stop those hands coming, though.

  He goes right after my head with a vicious leap out of his crouch.

  I slip the punch almost effortlessly just as it sails by. I remember that from every fine fighter I watched on TV. Good—no, great—upper body movement. Snaky. Slick.

  “Good,” Jamie says as I slither out of the corner and he’s left there looking a little awkward. “There it is. I was starting to wonder if there was anything there at all. . . .”

  I am dancing now, on the balls of my feet. Good movement. I snap a jab, and when the jolt of connecting with his chin travels up my arm, it’s like fifty thousand volts coming up and spreading right through to my torso, my heart. I hit him again with the jab, and again.

  “Wonder away, old timer,” I say, peppering him with the jab.

  He can just manage single words now, but I can put them together for myself. “More . . . to . . . it . . . than . . .”

  “Yeah,” I say, getting into the rhythm, “uh-­huh.”

  He makes a noise that sounds positive, but he’s breathing heavy. I pop a left hand uppercut, then follow up instantly with a cracking straight right hand.

  The voltage goes up. I feel it, it coming to me, and I am close to invincible.

  Bam.

  I am not invincible. I am flat on my ass.

  “A slip,” I say, getting right up, shaking my head, and getting after him.

  “Bullshit,” he wheezes.

  It is mine now. No more stupid. Get cute, get overconfident, and anybody in the place will have you floored in a heartbeat. Don’t be stupid, Arlo. You’re not stupid.

  Three minutes can be an ungodly long time.

  The voltage is decreasing as I plow in, put together very nice jab-­jab-­cross, jab-­jab-­hook combinations. I have Jamie in the corner and am about to unload when, wily thing, he sneaks a choppy hard right uppercut through my gloves and to my forehead, but I am there, I am in it, answering with an uppercut of my own and another right hook, before he yells, “Time!”

  There is applause from the five other guys in the gym as Jamie ’Pine and I head wheezing and sweating back toward his office.

  He hasn’t even stopped panting when he is already back at the breakfast. He drops into his chair, sips his juice, then chomps, pants, chomps.

  I can’t stop pacing around the office.

  “That’s what I have to do,” I say, prowling the nine-­foot-­wide room like a big caged cat in a too small cage.

  “Is that what you have to do?” Jamie says, grinning, wheezing, chewing.

  The gym is coming alive, with the grunts of weight lifting, the thumps of heavy-­bagging.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “You did okay there, once you shook off that ring rust. Course anybody younger than Jack Dempsey woulda taken your head off before you got to that point.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but you saw. I shook it off, and I got there. Not bad for an old maid. Not bad. Better than I expected even.” My heart is racing. I go to the picture window that looks out on all the activity that is McAlpine’s world. “That,” I say, pointing emphatically. “I want to do that.”

  I twirl back to him, and a blackness comes up like a shade pulled upside down from the floor to the ceiling. I feel like my head is baking at about 450 degrees, and the rushes of blood to the surface of my face feel like hot bloody surf.

  “Jesus, Arlo, sit down,” Jamie barks.

  Somehow I manage, through flashes, to make my way to a chair.

  “I’m okay,” I say, leaning over with my elbows on my knees. “Bit of a head rush, you know how it is. Too much adrenaline, caught up to me. Fine now, man, fine.”

  “Good,” Jamie says, and I hear him chewing again, which calms me some. I blink away the black flashes and the searing white till the normal midtones return. In all it’s only a minute or so. To be expected, though.

  I lift my head slowly to find him finishing his juice. He makes a loud burbling noise through the straw, and then looks at me, nodding, like he’s finally decided to take me on.

  “Um, Jamie? I have another favor that’s kind of from the other end of the scale.”

  “That being?”

  “That being . . . like you were saying earlier, about my girlfriend . . .”

  “Ah, you still wanna be a sneaky lyin’ sonofabitch about this.”

  “Jamie.”

  “You think you invented this dodge?”

  “Seen it before?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Okay, then you have experience. And it’s not about a girlfriend, to be honest, it’s about a mother. I can’t be showing stuff, scuffs, cuts, swelling, that kinda thing.”

  “Extra padding.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He nods. “One lying-­cheating-­bastard-­package coming up.”

  “Jamie.”

  He laughs hard and waves me out of his office. “What do you think you’re gonna achieve by keepin’ sayin’ my name like that?”

  I fold my hands and half-­bow my head, giving him note-
­perfect altar boy that we would both know well. “Mr. McAlpine, please, sir?”

  “There ya go,” he says. “My guy comes in about lunchtime today. I’ll have your happy hat after that, any time you wanna come in and give it a shot.”

  “Great,” I say, full of new. That’ll be the missing something. Perfect. “Great.”

  Helmet

  I’m back eight hours later.

  “Is that it?” I ask Jamie as I point to the big red globe of leather sitting on his desk, which is strewn with the remains of his latest McDonalds feast.

  “What else would it be?” He chucks the thing at me like a medicine ball.

  It’s a little heavy, though not nearly as weighty as it looks. It has a lot of padding. I slip it over my head and the first thing I notice is the reduced vision. There’s protection for over and under the eyes, all the way down the nose bridge, well below the ears to the jawline and around the back of the neck. And the padding all around is probably twice the thickness of the standard headgear. It looks and feels designed more for gladiator battles with those great big pummeling bars or training giant police dogs.

  All that considered, the sight lines are good.

  “Arr-­arr-­arr,” Jamie snickers as I try to get a look at myself in the window glass. “You look like one of them little kids who needs to be protected from hurting himself.”

  “Well,” I say, turning from my awful image to his, “I guess I should just go out and hurt somebody else then.”

  “By all means,” he says, staying at his desk.

  “Anybody got a minute?” I’ve left his office and am yelling, over the racket of two rings. There is medium-­intensity sparring going on in the boxing ring and lighter business going on in the kickboxing one. The boxers ignore me, but the two kickers come to the rope.

  “What’s up?” says a guy looking to be about thirty hard ones old. He must be schooling the other guy, who looks about half that. The kid suddenly notices my lunar headgear and starts laughing behind his fist.

  I’m taking a risk. Extra padding will mean extra punching. It’s a provocation and, frankly, an admission of some kind of weakness, fear, vulnerability. I know it looks stupid, and exposes more than a guy wants to expose in a place like this. Nobody wants to stand out as any kind of special here. Unless the specialness is fearsomeness.