He returned to find his date in conversation with some townie asshole. The guy blocked the booth; he leaned over the table like a hillbilly tycoon buying up cheap real estate.
"Introduce me to your friend, Faith?" Paul said, slipping past the townie to sit down.
"We've barely introduced—"
"She's being coy." Paul offered his hand. "Paul Harris."
"Todd."
Todd was a stocky unshaven shitkicker. Paul hadn't bothered to look at his feet but assumed they were clad in steel-toed boots; when he moved on, Paul was certain he'd leave a pile of debris behind. He pictured Todd's home: a trailer jacked up on cinderblocks. Engine parts laid out on oil-sodden newspapers. It struck Paul that he was infinitely richer and more successful than this poor slob; the knowledge actually filled him with a bizarre kind of pity.
"You with her?" Todd wanted to know.
"That's beside the point, Todd."
"Paul—"
He raised his hand, shushing her. "Well, Todd—what were you two confabbing about?"
"That's between me and the young lady."
Paul smiled indulgently and drew Faith down to the far end of the booth. "You can't be serious. This troglodyte's got as much personal flair as an unflushed toilet."
She laughed and tugged at his lapel, pulling him close. "Shhh. He'll hear." She was so skinny: cheekbones were shards of flint. A Madison Avenue stick insect.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," he chastised, "for encouraging him. For shame."
Todd the Shitkicker stood there like a goon. As if in expectation that Faith might—what? Leave with him? The image of Faith with shitkicker Todd was so absurd that Paul could only visualize it as occurring in a Salvador Dali painting; in it, Todd's head would be replaced by a pocket watch melted over a tree branch.
"Hey," Todd said to Faith, "I was thinking maybe you'd—"
"Isn't there a toilet that needs snaking somewhere in this city?"
"Paul!"
"I'm kidding. He knows I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding, don't you, Todd?"
"Sure, Paul," the shitkicker said in a voice gone deathly soft. "I love a good joke as much as the next guy."
Paul raised his hands as if caught in a bank heist. "Listen, she's my date—what do you want? I saw you talking and got a little jealous."
A half-truth, if that. Faith was welcome to return tomorrow, find Todd, head back to his trailer, and fuck him senseless on a pile of discarded TV dinner trays.
"Us being buddies now and all," Todd told him, "figure I should tell you to watch your mouth. Otherwise, y'know, someone's liable to stuff a boot in it."
"Are you threatening me, Todd?"
"I'm saying words have consequences, Paul. Like, if I were to call you a faggot cocksucker—that would have consequences, wouldn't it?" He rapped his knuckles on the underside of the table; the sharp bang straightened Paul's spine. "Wouldn't it?"
It came then, fierce and unbidden: fear. It stole over the crown of Paul's head, moving under his scalp behind his eyes, cold and hollow. It oozed down his spine into his chest, his groin, pooling in his gut like dark dirty oil. He glanced about to assure himself of his location. Yes. Still this club, these people: his people. So why did he feel all shredded inside, shriveled and paralyzed?
Todd nodded to Faith in a way that suggested he'd lost all interest. "I'll leave you to it."
Paul was pissed to have it end on that note. But a larger part of him was just glad to have the shitkicker gone, relieved to find the fear dissipating.
"Why did you talk to him that way?"
Paul ignored Faith's question as one too obvious to merit a reply. He glanced over at the shitkicker's table. Todd and his pals looked like janitors who'd arrived early, waiting for the place to clear so they could break out the mops. He flagged down the waitress and ordered a round of Sex on the Beaches for Todd's table.
"—I'm sorry." He was dimly aware of Faith saying something. "What?"
"A teacup Chihuahua," she said. "I'm getting one."
"Is that so."
"They're adorable. And Versace makes this cute carry-bag for them."
Paul had seen the dogs. Frail, sick-looking things, all papery-eared and bulge-eyed. They looked delicate enough to die of a nosebleed and shivered all the time; perhaps being cooped up in handbags made them petrified of natural light. But if the cover of next month's Vogue featured a model with a ferret wrapped around her neck several women of Paul's acquaintance would soon be wearing one. Prada would probably design a ferret-tube to cart the silly fuckers about.
They finished their drinks and stood up. Faith excused herself to use the ladies' room. Paul deliberated whether he should fuck her. Conventional wisdom decreed he snap up whatever was on offer, never knowing when the opportunity might come around again; to do otherwise would be as stupid as a desert wanderer who passes over one waterhole in hopes of finding another when he's thirstier. But it would be the sexual equivalent of a lube job. Pure maintenance.
Such was the pattern of his thoughts when a hand fell upon his shoulder like a rough knighthood, a hand so insistent Paul had no choice but to obey and, turning, saw the shitkicker's face captured in clean profile, that calm and easygoing look on his face as his fist filled Paul's retinas, a flickering ball that burst like a white-hot firework to rock him back on his heels, his hands flying to his face, and when he looked down his fingers were clad in blood. He'd never been punched—maliciously, viciously punched—in his quarter-century- plus of life on this planet and all he could do was stare, with a stupid bovine look on his face, at the man who'd popped his cherry.
Todd hit him again. A blinding explosion went off just in back of Paul's eyes as though his brainstem had been dynamited. He had this terrifying sensation of his nose and cheeks crushed into an empty pocket behind the cartilage and bones, a fist driven so deep into his face the pressure pushed his eyes from their sockets to allow a frighteningly unhindered view of his surroundings.
His skull struck the padded leather door with its tiny brass rivets and he was outside, reeling onto the sidewalk.
And even now, with Todd slamming him against the aluminum shopfront, a vestigial part of him refused to believe this was actually happening. Desperately, like a bilge rat to a chunk of flotsam, he clung to the notion of some innate social mechanism whose function should be to prevent all this.
Paul was struck a blow that caught him on the neck; his head caromed off the shopfront. Two teeth thin and smooth as shaved ice pushed between his lips. He was terrified in the manner of a man with absolutely no frame of reference for what he was experiencing.
Run, he told himself. Just run away. But he couldn't even move. His mouth flushed with a corroded rusty taste and his bowels felt heavy, as if he'd swallowed an iron plug that was now forcing its way out of him.
His body slid down the aluminum, ribbed metal rucking his shirt up his spine. He spread his hands before his bloodied face.
"I give, okay?" A glistening snot-bubble expanded from his left nostril and burst wetly. "No more, okay? No more." Quietly: "Come on, man—please. I'm begging you."
Todd prodded his ass with the steel toe of his boot. "Aren't even going to try? Christ."
The look in Todd's eyes: as if he'd split Paul open and caught a glimpse of what lay inside and it wasn't quite human—everything gone soft and milky and diseased. Todd cleared his throat and spat. Gob landed on Paul's pants, sallow and greasy as a shucked oyster.
Todd strolled back to his buddies lounging at the bar door and exchanged rueful high fives. "Not much fun fighting when you're the only one willing." He was perspiring lightly, every hair in place save a blond lock fallen between his eyes.
Faith exited the bar and spotted him slumped against the shopfront. She reached out to touch him and he shoved her hand away. She studied his face, his lips bloated like sausages set to burst. "Your teeth," she said, casting her eyes about as though to retrieve them. Rock salt had been spread across the wet sidewalk:
everywhere looked like fucking teeth.
"We should call the police," she said.
"Don't be an idiot."
He spied a pale lip of fat hanging over his trousers—Jesus, was that part of him? Looked like the skin of a maggot. If he unbuttoned his shirt, would he spy his lungs and the pump of his own wasted heart through that rubbery, candle-white skin?
He wanted to find something sharp and go back into the club and slice the shitkicker. Slip up behind him and stab him in the neck. He saw the shitkicker's body laid out on the smooth stone floor of the bar, blood all over everything, over every shape, his face slashed to pieces and one bloodshot eye hanging out, withered like an albino walnut. But he could never do that and the realization served only to deepen his fear, so toxic now it coursed through his veins like battery acid.
"What are we going to do?" Faith asked.
Paul did the only thing that made sense. Standing on legs that trembled like a newborn foal's, sparing not a backward glance, he took off down the sidewalk. She called after him—he distinctly heard the word "chickenshit"—but he didn't let up or look back.
Chapter 2
Paul dreamed he was lying facedown in stinking mud. He rolled to a sitting position and saw he was in a bunker. He wore a cheap suit and shiny loafers and cufflinks shaped like golf balls. A decapitated head sat on a pole jabbed into the mud; the head was rotted or badly burned and a pair of novelty sunglasses covered its eyes. He peeked over the bunker and saw a field burst apart by artillery shells. Everything was blown through with smoke, but he could make out shapes draped over the razor wire and huge birds with boiled-looking heads pecking at the shapes. He was numb and sore and wanted to puke. A man stepped from the shadows and relief washed over him—it was John Wayne. The Duke wore a flak jacket and pisscutter helmet; a cigar was stuck in the side of his mouth. "We're going over the top. You with us, dogface?" Paul's body went rigid. His nuts sucked into his abdomen like a pair of yo-yos up their strings. "No, I have a ... business lunch." The Duke got salty. "We got a war to win, peckerwood." "I'd love to make a charitable donation," Paul assured him. The Duke looked like he was staring at a piece of ambulatory dogshit. Paul got scared again. "Is there an orphan I could tend to," he asked, "one who's been wounded by shrapnel?" The Duke stuck his chin out and glared with dull disdain. He pulled a pistol from his holster and shoved Paul into a corner and told him to face it. That's when Paul saw dozens of corpses stacked atop one another by the other wall; they all wore suits and their hands were clean and soft and they had very nice hair. Each had a frosted hole in the perfect center of his forehead. "Can't trust a man who won't fight," the Duke said without much emotion. "This is a mercy."
When the gun barrel pressed to the back of his skull, Paul woke up with a jerk.
Frail angles of rust-colored light fell through the Venetian blinds to touch Paul's face. His head felt broken and weak, like it'd been smashed open in the night and its contents spilled over the pillow. His mouth felt blowtorched and the tendons of his neck stretched to their tensile limit, seemingly unable to support the raw ball of his skull. He lay in his childhood room in his parents' house. Surfing posters were tacked to the walls. A glow-in-the-dark constellation decorated the ceiling.
In the bathroom, he consulted his reflection in the mirror: skin dull and blotched, right eye a deep purple, swollen closed like a dark blind drawn against the light. Elsewhere his skin was sickly pale, as though marauding bats had drained the blood from it while he slept. He spread his split lips. Two teeth gone: top left incisor, bottom left cuspid. He poked his gums with his pinkie until blood came.
He stood under the showerhead. The knobs of his spine were raw where he'd slid down the shopfront. He tried jerking off in hopes it might unknit the tension knotting his gut, but it was like trying to coax life out of a rope. In the blood-colored darkness behind his eyelids all he could see was this huge fist, this scarred ridge of knuckles exploding like a neutron bomb.
He carefully patted dry his various lumps and abrasions. He found an old pair of Ray Bans and adjusted them to cover his puffed eye.
The kitchen was a monotone oasis: white fridge and stove, alabaster tile floor, marble countertops. A bay window offered a view of Lake Ontario lying silver beneath a chalky mid-morning sky. The backyard grass was petaled with the season's first frost.
He cracked the freezer door, relishing the blast of icy air that hit his face. In fact, he liked it so much he stuck his entire head in. Frozen air flowed over the dome of his skull.
He rummaged through the fridge. His mother was on the Caspian Sea Diet. Dieters must subsist upon edibles found in and around the Caspian basin: triggerfish, sea cucumbers, drab kelps, crustaceans. The diet's creator—a swarthy MD with a face like a dried testicle—cited the uncanny virility of Mediterraneans, evidenced by the fact that many continued to labor as goatherds and pearl divers late into their seventies.
Paul's search yielded nothing one might squarely define as edible: a quivering block of tofu, a glazy-eyed fish laid out across a chafing dish, what looked to be bean sprouts floating in a bowl of turd-colored water.
He shoved aside jars of Cape Cod capers and tubs of Seaweed Health Jelly. "What the ...fuck" He slammed the fridge door. On the kitchen island: Christmas cards.
His mother got cracking on them earlier each year. She sent off hundreds, licking envelopes until her mouth was syrupy with mucilage. The cards were pure white with gold filigree and the raised outline of a bell. A stack of pine-scented annual summations sat beside them: SEASON'S GREETINGS FROM HARRIS COUNTY!
His own summation read:
Paul is still living at home and we're so happy to have him, but lately he's been talking about finding his own place, leaving Jack and I empty nesters.
That was it? A year gone by and all his mother could say was that he was looking for his own place? A cowl of paranoia descended upon him; he considered scribbling something else, a flagrant lie if need be—Paul was voted one of Young Economist's "Up and Comers Under 30" or Paul recently returned from a whirlwind seven-city business junket or Paul is in talks with Singapore Zoo officials to bring Ling Si, a giant panda, on an exhibition tour of Niagara's wine region—anything, really, to prove to all the distant aunts and uncles, the unknown business acquaintances and second cousins twice removed, that he was going places.
He headed into the living room. The sofa was white, like the rest of the room and like most of the house. Soothing, artful white. His mother and father's sofa in his mother and father's living room in his mother and father's house, where he still lived. The floors were new, the appliances so modern as to verge upon space age: no creaks or ticks or rattles. Paul sat on the sofa in the deadening silent white.
Closing his eyes, he pictured shitkicker Todd's trailer—Paul wasn't sure he lived in a trailer, but it seemed entirely plausible—aflame, the cheap tin walls glowing and bowling trophies melting like birthday candles until suddenly the bastard crashed through the screen door, a burning effigy. Next he saw the entire trailer park on fire—why the fuck not?—occupants smoked from their mobile shanties, their macaroni-casserole- TV-Guide lives, running around waving flame- eaten arms and the air reeking of fried hogback.
A flashback from last night tore the fragile fabric of his daydream: a huge fat fist the size of a cannonball, the skin black as a gorilla's, rocketed at his face.
"Goddamnit!"
He struck the sofa cushion. The punch was weak but ill-placed: his wrist bent at an awkward angle and he yelped. He hopped up, shaking his hand; he booted the sofa but his kick was clumsy and he jammed his toe. Gritting his teeth, grunting, he lay upon the Persian carpet. His body quaked with rage.
Paul often found himself in this state: anger bubbling up from nowhere, a teeth-clenching, fist-pounding fury. But it was undirected and one-dimensional and lacking either the complexities or justifications of adult anger. More like a tantrum.
He nursed his hand and drummed his heels on the carpet. His cellphone
chirped. One of his asshole friends calling to dredge the gory details of last night's misadventure. Or his father, wondering why he wasn't at work yet.
Paul headed to the kitchen, popped his cellphone into the garburator, and flipped the switch. The gears labored, regurgitating shards of shiny silver casing into the sink; a sharp edge of plastic shot up and struck Paul's forehead. He twisted a spigot and washed everything down, then picked up the kitchen phone and dialed a cab.
Paul followed the cobblestone path alongside a boxwood hedge past a marble fountain: an ice-glazed Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle. Early autumn fog blew in off the lake, mantling the manor's roofline. It was much too large for its three inhabitants, but Paul's father held a tree-falling-in-the-forest outlook with regard to wealth: If you're rich and nobody can tell, well, are you really rich?
The cab picked him up outside the estate grounds. Paul gazed out the window as they headed downtown to retrieve his car. They drove along the banks of Twelve Mile Creek, the squat skyline of downtown
St. Catharines obscured by fog. Roadside slush was grayed with industrial effluvia pumped from the brick smokestacks of the GM factory across the river.
Paul's car, a 2005 BMW E90, was parked around the corner from the club. The car was his father's gift to him from last Christmas. There was a parking ticket on the windshield. He tore it in half between his teeth and spat the shreds into the puddle along the curb.
He stopped for a red light on the way to the winery, idling beside a Dodge pickup. A junkyard mutt was chained to the truckbed. Paul locked eyes with the dog. The mutt's muddy eyes did not blink. Its lips skinned back to reveal a row of discolored teeth. Paul looked away and fiddled with the radio.
The Fighter Page 2
