The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  Sure enough, a few minutes later, Leonard looked up from his book and said, “It’d be interesting if you met a real gangster someday, Corey.”

  20

  Springfield

  The next day, Corey drove to his mother’s hometown and weighed in. Saturday morning, he drove through Ludlow and looked for the house that she was born in. In the evening, he sat in the dressing room underneath the armory that had housed the original Springfield rifle and got his hands taped up.

  Upstairs, workers finished assembling the cage. They tightened turnbuckles under the canvas to achieve the proper balance of springiness and give. The black cage sat in the middle of a floor made of long, polyurethaned boards with an antique orange cast. The vast, churchlike interior of the armory rose up overhead. Giant banners, like models of blue whales in a natural history museum, hung suspended in the shadow up above, announcing basketball games and rock concerts.

  Then the music kicked on, the audience came in, the announcer came out, and down in the dressing room, under the stage, competitors started hearing their names. They went out one by one. A lightweight in camouflage shorts went out clapping his hands and screaming, “Let’s fucking do this!” The cheering echoed down into the subterranean corridor. Corey broke a sweat. An hour went by. Then it was time.

  He walked out to “Welcome to the Jungle,” wearing Bad Boy vale tudo shorts and a steel cup, swatting hands as guys high-fived him coming down the chute. He grimaced at the official. There were fangs painted on his mouthpiece. Veins stood out on his white biceps. He rapped his crotch. The towering bald man pointed him theatrically up into the cage as if it were a world of wonders.

  His opponent, Jack, had broad shoulders and a big face like a TV personality, an older man’s face, as if he had spent his young life working on an oil rig. His long shorts hid his knees and foreshortened his legs, making him an oversized barrel-chested torso planted onto a set of knotty calves and big feet like a cholo gangster.

  “Corey, you need this fight to be on the ground. You need to be on top,” Eddie shouted. “Don’t take bottom!”

  The bell rang, and the two men ran at each other, and Jack dropped Corey with his first punch. The audience saw a white body fall under Jack’s knee. Jack’s fist was rising up and swinging down on a blond head. The crowd realized what was happening and its screaming turned deafening. “Roll out!” Eddie bellowed. Corey turned himself upside down and tried to roll. He kicked his legs up and rolled out from underneath the knee. Jack fell on him. Their bodies looked like two logs bouncing up and down, hitting each other. Both logs flew straight up off the ground, against gravity, and Corey picked up Jack, said, “You motherfucker!” and body-slammed him. Jack dove up and took him down. Because the action happened so fast and Jack wound up on top, the spectators saw him body-slamming Corey. Corey opened his legs like a crab and shut them on Jack’s head and tied his legs in a knot. Jack stopped trying to hit him. The ten-second clapper sounded. Corey was straining to hold the knot shut. His leg came off Jack’s shoulder and hooked over the side of Jack’s face. Suddenly the ref ran over and grabbed Corey’s legs and pulled them off. The bell rang. Corey let go and Jack turned away, holding his arm. The capsule of his elbow joint had popped. Eddie was on his feet yelling and cheering. Corey jumped up and screamed with a bloody mouthpiece.

  The ref called him to the center of the ring and grabbed his wrist and lifted his arm. “The winner, by arm-bar submission,” the announcer said.

  Corey’s body ran with sweat. Sweat was gathering in his eyebrows. His face was sunken, and blood was running out his nose. He took the announcer’s mike in his gloved hand and said, “I want to dedicate this fight to my mother, Gloria. She’s the only real gangster I know.”

  He climbed down from the cage and went back to the locker room barefoot, carrying his pile of clothes and sneakers. Guys leaned out of the audience to slap him on the back. He went directly to the bathroom stall and threw up. There was blood in his ears. The medics came and looked at him. His eyes had red rings around the pupils as if he was turning into a werewolf. They took his blood pressure and held a bag of ice on his head. He told the female EMT she looked pretty. She seemed to have a negative opinion of anyone who would fight, on the grounds that it was an irresponsible risk to take. Eddie sat with him and took the ice from her and held it on Corey’s head. They asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital and he said no. Jack came in grinning, holding an ice bag on his swollen elbow, and shook his hand. Corey sat up for him. The EMTs packed up and left. Jack said goodbye: “I’ll be back to training soon,” and flexed his red wet swollen arm. He left too.

  “Nice job, beautiful job,” Eddie said. “You can’t teach that.”

  Corey got his gloves cut off, leaving tape and gauze on the floor, and changed and left the dressing room and limped out to the bleachers and watched the rest of the fights with Eddie. Eddie said, “This is how it begins. You’ve got a career in the making.” Eddie was wearing a shirt that said For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother—the quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. “The promoter talked to me. He wants to see you back here. We’ll look at what he says. We’ll move you up the right way. Depending on what you want. If you keep working like you have been, you could go somewhere with this.”

  They went to an after-party at a bar—a dark, overcrowded scene of confusion and noise, backslapping and shouted conversation. Corey appeared carrying his gym bag on his shoulder, wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, parka, and black sneakers with white soles, which looked like black boats with rubber gunwales. His close-cropped blond head stuck up from the puffy navy and black padding of his coats. The thick column of his neck held up his bony cranium. He had a flare of blue under one eye as if he hadn’t slept with that one eye for quite some time or had applied vivid eyeshadow to it—a bruise. His ear, already cauliflowered from training, looked like a purple balloon tied in complex and painful knots. It shined with blood swelling. The bridge of his nose had a dark shadow on it. Had someone dipped a finger in charcoal and brushed it over the bridge of his nose? But this was another bruise. His nose had been fractured. His lower lip bulged. The red striations of his teeth and mouth guard had been imprinted on the inside of his lip. His cheekbone and forehead had the kind of marks you associate with rashes and acne. But they were a stippling of purple and red knuckle marks. The side of his head was swollen and mottled pink and purple from the temple to the jaw. The promoter came over in his slick gray suit and shook Corey’s hand.

  “I’m going to see you again, right?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

  “Wild horses? I like you. You did great, fantastic. Help yourself to whatever you want. We got vodka, booze, schnapps. It’s all on the house for you guys. Oh, you’re too young? Then Eddie, you drink up for him! Eddie, my man, the living legend.”

  * * *

  —

  Back at the motel, he slept for an hour before the pain in his head woke him up. He hobbled to the bathroom and checked his phone. He had a message from his mother. She had called him hours ago and he hadn’t heard it.

  “I hope it went well tonight. I’m praying for you.”

  In the background of the voicemail, a voice was saying, “Gloria, I’m telling you for the last time, get off the phone.”

  Corey listened to the message twice. Then he flipped on the room light and started gathering up his things. There was no aspirin that he could find anywhere. Stepping back in his shoes and grabbing his bag, he left the hotel room and pulled the door shut after him, leaving the card key on the dresser. The hatchback was cold. He started it and drove slowly around the parking lot until his headlights picked up the driveway leading out of the hedgerow. On the street, he put the clutch in and glided towards the black hump of the forested hills, looking around for a landmark. A green reflective sign appeared in his headlights. He took
the turn and came up on the highway. He let the clutch out and started speeding east.

  As he drove, he stepped outside himself mentally and said, “You’re getting yourself worked up for nothing. You want there to be a crisis with your father. There’s nothing going on. This is dumb. Don’t crash the car.”

  Twenty minutes later, the sky began to lighten. The hatchback was going east on 90 with trucks. He stopped for gas in Framingham as the sky was turning orange. He started to compose a text to Eddie—“I had to go…”—but deleted the words and got back on the highway.

  He drove through Watertown, passed a steak house, sped along the concrete channel under Fenway Park and into the amber-lit tunnel to 93 South.

  When he popped out of the tunnel, the flaming sunrise that should have been there had disappeared. The shore was gray. The sun was up in the heavens somewhere. Different ships could see the sun from different latitudes by spying into the heavens from other points on the surface of the earth, but it was invisible from this latitude and longitude at this time of the morning on this date in Quincy, Mass.

  He spun down the off-ramp and wheeled past Grumpy White’s. The sky had invaded the town with its dreariness. Going downhill to the water, he saw the houses sitting in their beds of marsh grass, an unfinished carpentry project in a yard, a board across a sawhorse, a circular saw left out.

  Then he saw his mother’s house and Leonard’s car, and he drove up behind the Mercury right on its bumper and pinned it in. He threw the brake, jumped out and jogged up the wooden stairs of his home. The stairs were painted robin’s-egg blue like the ladder of a boy’s bunk bed. He was trembling and light-headed with fear as if he were getting into the cage. Without any good reason, he knew something terrible was happening. The fear was so stupid that he stopped where he was with his hand on the doorknob and took a breath to control himself.

  Another part of his brain was anticipating how embarrassed he was going to feel explaining his sudden disappearance to his coach.

  When he opened the door of his home, he knew something was wrong after all because the Buddhist tapestry had been ripped down off the fake wood wall. His hope died instantly, and after that he stopped thinking entirely.

  He ran into her room and saw Leonard shouting at her. His mother was lying on the floor. Her walker had been thrown across the room. Her TV lay on its face, having dropped headfirst off the shelf. Its screen was smashed. Leonard was calling Gloria a bitch. He was telling her over and over to make sure she heard it. Gloria was lying on the bathroom floor, her head towards the toilet. She was crying. Her head was next to the toilet brush.

  Corey advanced on Leonard, shouting, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Leonard was in an entranced state of anger with Gloria. When Corey shouted at him, he twitched and appeared to come out of it. He walked out of the room.

  Corey picked his mother up. He asked her if she was hurt. “Just my head. I hit my head.” He picked her up and looked for somewhere to put her. The only place was her bed. “What are you doing?” “Nothing.” He kept his voice calm. He set her in the bed, put pillows behind her. “Are you okay? Would you excuse me?” He began to leave the room. “Corey!” she said. “What are you doing?” “I’ll be right back.” “Corey, no!” He ran outside and shut her door. He saw nothing. The house was empty. He ran to the kitchen. He ran to the front door and looked outside. He saw no one towards the water. He looked up Sea Street and saw a figure going up the hill. He ran after him. Halfway to him, Leonard looked over his shoulder. “I’m warning you. If you get anywhere near me, you’re going to jail. Right to jail.”

  Corey caught him up. “Hey, buddy. Going somewhere?”

  “Do you know what would happen to you in jail? It would be like putting you in a meat grinder.”

  “I figure you and me have got to talk.”

  “The only talking you’re going to do…Don’t play with me.”

  Corey put his hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “Hey, old pal.” He gripped the back of Leonard’s neck. “You gonna try and stab me? You want to scare my mom? Look in my eyes, bitch. I’ll fucking murder you. Yeah, I’ll fucking murder you. Test me. Test me, bitch. Bitch. Youse a bitch. Not her. You. Bitch. Punk ass. Punk-ass motherfucker. Give me a reason. Give me a reason. Touch me, you bitch-ass motherfucker. Dude, you ain’t shit. You pick on women. What does that make you? I’ve dealt with men out here. Men. You ain’t nothing. Yo, the only reason I’m not murdering you right now is I gotta get home and take care of her. But you and me ain’t done. If I see you, if you come here again? I’ll kill you without a second thought. Pussy motherfucker. Pussy. Yeah, eyes down, bitch. Pussy-ass cop. Fake-ass scientist. Loser.”

  Leonard kept his head down.

  Corey jogged back down the hill to his house. He told his mother he was home. She had somehow crawled out of bed and gotten to her walker and was standing on her walker in the middle of her room. She had urinated in her pajamas and she was crying.

  “Everything’s okay, Mom,” he told her in a strangely bright sunny tone as if he were taking mood drugs and there was nothing behind his eyes but high-tech chemistry acting on his neurons. “Everything’s okay. It’s just me. He’s not coming back.”

  “Did you do anything?”

  “What? To him? No!” he exclaimed, as if the idea were unthinkable. “I’m just gonna change the locks. You’ll be fine.”

  He took her to the bathroom, walking by her side as she took slow steps, her toe in its small white sneaker hanging down like a pointer dog every time she raised it. They moved at a processional pace to the bathroom. He sat her on the toilet and changed her pants. She needed to be showered. But they had never gotten the shower seat that would allow her to clean herself. She smelled strongly, his mother. He helped her on with her new pants and asked her where she would like to spend the day. She asked him to take her to the futon. He used pillows to build up a seat for her and support her back, because it was becoming difficult for her to sit normally without support. She couldn’t hold herself upright anymore. He got her comfortable and put the laptop on her lap on top of a book so that the heat from the computer wouldn’t cook her legs.

  But she had seen the ripped-down Buddhist weaving. “Give me a second, I’ll hang that up again.” She tried to tear it the rest of the way off the wall. “Get rid of it! I don’t care. Throw it out.” He couldn’t calm her, so he took the hanging down and folded it and put it in his room, telling her he’d hang it up for her later.

  She cried again when she saw the TV was broken. He picked up the glass and vacuumed the rug. It was noon, and it was gray. Her hair was unwashed and needed combing. She asked for her glasses. She sat reading on her laptop and radiating severity and silence.

  He spent the rest of the day making things right, cleaning up. He made macaroni and cheese and served his mother. She said she wasn’t hungry. He ate the entire pot himself. Long-suppressed cravings hit him. He had been dieting for his fight for the past six weeks. He went out and bought a twenty-two-piece chicken nuggets and a block of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and a Coca-Cola at the general store and had them for a midafternoon snack. A friend called him on his phone to congratulate him on his fight.

  “What’s the matter, man? You don’t sound happy.”

  “Oh, I’m happy. How’re you?”

  “I’m fine!” The caller laughed.

  Corey hung up. He began trembling all over again with fury. He began looking around the house for anything that belonged to Leonard to destroy it. He spied Leonard’s cop bag. “He’s not getting that back.” He took it to his room and dumped it out. There were several pairs of uniforms in it. Corey tore the clothes apart with his bare hands. His mother asked him what he was doing from the other room. He carried on a calm conversation with her. “I’m making rags for the gym,” he said. He strained, pulling at Leonard’s collar, and the th
reads popped and the shirt ripped in half down the back, leaving Corey with rags in each fist. She heard the ripping in the other room. Neither of them spoke. He stepped on the trousers and pulled the legs apart. He wished he could burn them. He had an overwhelming desire to obliterate anything that had ever touched his father and absorbed his smell. If his mother hadn’t been here, he would have started a fire and burned everything, he knew.

  There were other items in the bag—two large nightsticks of different sizes, two sets of handcuffs locked together.

  “You ain’t getting none of your shit back, you motherfucker,” Corey said. He spat on the bag, but he did it silently so his mother wouldn’t hear the telltale infuriated sound of someone spitting.

  He went to the kitchen and pulled open every drawer and cupboard until he found everything that had come from Leonard: the items of designer kitchenware—skillets, pots, several kitchen knives. They bore antiseptic ceramic coatings in interior decorator colors of dandelion yellow, sage green—Ikea colors. He put them in the gym bag with the truncheons. The bag was now so loaded with wood and steel it made for heavy carrying. He opened the kitchen window and lifted the heavy bag, filled with sharp implements, over the sill and set it outside the window. He crawled out after it and took it across the backyard to the marsh grass, which stood nine feet tall, the hollow stalks dry and yellowed, the chlorophyll leaching out, the leaves turning to the texture of corn husks. He tossed the bag into the rustling weeds, which snapped and broke when the bag fell into them.

  Back inside, he kissed his mom on the head. “Everything’s fine. Just getting organized.”