The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  "Picking season's over in two weeks," he said. "I'm not sure what you plan to do then—run off into the forest and live off the land? Some hobo kick? Steal clothes off laundry lines and sleep in drainage ditches?"

  "Maybe I'll pack a bindle and ride the rails. King of the open road, uh?"

  Jack was appalled. "You're an infuriating little turd—do you know that? You're like a kid who runs away but only makes it to the end of the block and sits in the bushes for a few hours, coming home when it's dark and cold and he's got the hungries in his tum-tum."

  His father's temper was like a busted speedometer: it was impossible to tell how fast and hot his engine was running. He could go from zero to bastard in fifteen seconds flat.

  "I love you, Daddy."

  "Shut up, why don't you?" Jack's temper downshifted. "If you're fixed on staying out here, you're getting paid like everyone else—by the bucket. Expect your next paycheck to be significantly smaller, old boy old chum."

  "Just pay me what I'm worth."

  "You're worth a lot more than what you've settled for here." Jack looked wretched, like a tank had run over him and left him lying there in the dirt. "And for god's sake get your fucking teeth looked after."

  When the picking season ended the field workers went home to their wives and children to await the spring thaws. Paul did not return to the winery. He passed his days driving the city.

  He would set out at dawn with the pale moon hanging over the lake and streets dark with night rain. He drove without motive or clear destination. He parked at the GM factory gates as the workers waited in line to buy coffee and Danish from a silver-paneled snack truck. He idled outside the bus terminal as drivers walked to their buses beneath strung halogens with newspapers folded under their arms. He spied on janitors sitting on picnic tables behind the Hotel Dieu hospital, chatting and laughing, dousing cigarettes in soup tins filled with rainwater. Paul felt a huge sense of disassociation watching these men, floating, unattached to anything he understood. Men whose lives he'd never considered because they were unlike any he'd ever aspired to.

  What had he ever really aspired to?

  He drove to Jammer's gym in his replacement wheels: a Nissan Micra, on loan from the dealership. Paul had expressly requested the crappiest loaner in the lot and the Micra fit the bill: raggedy and rust-eaten with a sewing machine engine, power nothing, K-Tel's Hits of the 80s lodged in the tape deck. Even once his BMW was fixed, Paul stuck with the Micra.

  He steered through the lights at Church and St. Paul. "Big Country," by the Scottish group of the same name, blasted from the tinny speakers. He butted the Micra into a streetside parking spot, fed the meter, and headed into the gym.

  It was sparsely populated: bored housewives going nowhere on the elliptical machines, university kids in the weight room. He donned his gym garb and hit the weights.

  He'd started coming after picking let off. The only time he'd even considered working out before now was the time when, maudlinly drunk at three a.m., he'd ordered a Bowflex after watching an infomercial. But his existential despair had evaporated the next morning and the unassembled Bowflex, still in its box, was consigned to the role of mouse-turd receptacle in the backyard greenhouse.

  Paul slapped a pair of weight plates on the bench press. He watched an anorexic-looking chick with fake tits run treadmill laps. Boobs bouncing, lathered in sweat, her face contorted into a look of desperate intensity unique to Olympic hopefuls and women of a Certain Age. An old dude with a toxic tanning-bed tan—his skin the diseased orange hue of a boiled tangerine—was rowing to Jehovah on an erg machine. Paul glanced away, mildly revolted, and caught the proprietor making a beeline for him.

  Stacey Jamison struck the casual observer as a man who'd been given a girl's name at birth and had spent his life trying to outrun the association. At five-foot-four and nearly three hundred pounds, there was nothing on the guy that wasn't monstrous. His legs and arms and neck were like a telephone pole chainsawed into five sections. His body was networked in thick veins pushed to the surface of his skin by the sheer density of muscle tissue.

  He was once a professional bodybuilder, but three consecutive heart attacks had forced him off the pro circuit. The cause of the attacks wasn't openly stated, but gym scutdebutt had it that Stacey would pop anything that could be crammed into a syringe, including powdered bull testicle. Once he'd loaded himself up on Lasix before a show, leaching all the moisture from his body for that ultra-cut look; unfortunately the racehorse diuretic left his organs so desiccated that his kidneys tore like a tissue paper Valentine when he nailed a Double Crabbed Biceps pose during a heated pose-off segment.

  "Harris, you pansy." Stacey wore a shirt with a snarling cartoon rottweiler over the legend DON'T GROWL IF YOU CAN'T BITE. "YOU got a hollow chest like a puffed-up paper bag. I seen ten-year-old girls with more definition."

  Stacey's shtick was to stalk the gym belitding his customers' physiques: You got driftwood arms; A butcher wouldn't take those stringy legs as stewing beef; I could fry an egg on that flat ass of yours. While this initially struck Paul as an ideal way to alienate one's clientele, he'd grossly underestimated the average gym member's tolerance for abasement. More than a few appeared to crave Stacey's brutal assessment of their physiques, as if he were a mirror that reflected the physical deficiencies they'd long ago glimpsed in themselves. And though most of Stacey's assessments were of the critical variety, he was infrequently known to deliver faint praise: You're not looking quite as sickly as I recall or You're less skeletal; I guess I'll have to tell those body farmers to look elsewhere. Such backhanded compliments were enough to lift Stacey's regulars to a state of mild euphoria.

  When Stacey wasn't berating his cowering clientele, he acted as spotter for some of the more grotesque gym denizens. These juiced- up muscleheads could bench cart-oxen weight, the bar bowed under a mass of steel plates as finger-thick veins stood out on their corded necks. Einsteins of the Body, Paul dubbed them. Some were so huge their heads looked comically small in relation. It amused him to consider the possibility that they were, in fact, fantastically tiny men who zippered into a hulking coat of meat and muscles each morning; at night they unzipped and hung their muscles on a peg. Every few weeks they got their meat coats dry-cleaned.

  "Get your ass under that bar," Stacey told Paul, adding a few extra ten-pound plates. "It's go time." He slapped Paul's face, slapped his own. "Do this, motherfucker."

  Paul braced his arms on the bar and jerked it off the pegs. His arms trembled; he entertained a giddy vision of his forearms snapping and the bar crushing his windpipe. He lowered the bar, felt it touch his chest, and pushed.

  "You're in it to WIN it, baby!" Stacey jabbered. "Go hard or go HOME!"

  Muscles tore across Paul's chest, fibers snapping like over-tuned piano wires. Stacey's crotch hovered above Paul's face: stuffed into lime-green spandex shorts, his package looked like a plantain and two walnuts jiggling in a grocery sack.

  "Lift, bitch! Be a MAN for once in your life!"

  Paul's strength ebbed as the bar locked inches above his chest. His muscles fluttered and bands of white fire stretched across his eyes. The strain coursed down his arms into his gut, knotting into an agonizing ball he expelled in the form of an oddly toneless fart. Stacey guided the bar onto its pegs.

  Paul heaved with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry about that."

  But Stacey was pleased. "Only means you gave a hundred and ten percent to your lift. You're not farting, you're not jerking enough iron. First time I squatted a thousand, I crapped my pants."

  Paul couldn't tell what Stacey was more proud of: the fact that he'd squatted half a ton or that he'd shit himself in the process.

  He finished his workout and hit the showers. He'd noticed how two distinct groups of men spent far more time naked than was strictly necessary: those in terrific shape and those too old to give a damn. A few struck show poses stark naked before the change room's floor- length mirror. Paul found himself scoping
out their bodies: chests and arms and abs, the symmetry or lack of it, the freakish mass of the Einsteins. Lately he'd taken to picturing how elements of other men's bodies might look adorning his own: he'd take that guy's pecs, that guy's delts, that guy's pipes, that guy's soup-can cock and cobble together an idealized version of himself. Franken-Paul.

  On his way out he caught Stacey behind the front desk, bent over a plate piled with skinless chicken breasts.

  "Good work today, fag."

  "...Thanks." Paul nodded to the shelves at Stacey's back: tubs of protein powder with names like Whey Max and BioPure HyperPlex. Each tub featured a wraparound photo of a tanned, overdeveloped, confidently smiling Einstein.

  "Which do you recommend?"

  "These?" Stacey jerked a thumb at the tubs. "All shit. Chalk dust and pigeon crap." He shoveled chicken into his mouth. "No substitute for hard work, Harris." He paused with his mouth open; rags of masticated chicken swung from his teeth. "Well, that's not the literal truth."

  He gave Paul a look, its shrewdness suggesting that Paul's suitability and trustworthiness were currently the subject of intense scrutiny. Later Paul would realize that Stacey gave everyone this look; his customer criteria was no narrower than a convenience store's.

  Stacey rooted through a drawer and set an ampule on the desk. "Testosterone ethanate. We're talking the Rolls-Royce of performance enhancement."

  The Einsteins made no secret of their steroid abuse—why bother, when your body was a walking billboard?—and Paul had overheard horror stories: hardened knots forming in their asses from the deep- tissue injections, excess body hair and cysts the size of corn kernels, penile atrophy. Stacey had himself developed a serious infection in his right bicep; he'd performed meatball surgery on himself in the men's bathroom, piercing the infected tissue with a heavy-gauge needle and filling a Dixie cup with a broth of blood and pus.

  Paul rolled the vial between his fingers. A quarter-ounce of yellow fluid. Piss, was all it looked like. A squirt of dirty yellow piss.

  "Is it safe?"

  "Nothing's one hundred percent safe. You walk outta here, get hit by a bus."

  Paul had always despised the well-trodden bus rationale. He asked what company manufactured the stuff. Stacey told him that medical-grade steroids were for pussies; he said Paul would be better off chugging the pigeon crap. None of this answered Paul's question, however, leaving him to wonder if it had been brewed in Stacey's bathtub.

  "I hear it shrinks your dick."

  "That can happen," Stacey admitted. "But here's the thing: every guy's got an extra three inches of cock rolled up in his hip cavity."

  "Oh, come on with that."

  "I shit you not. Rolled up in there like a chameleon's tongue. There's this operation where a surgeon makes a slit at the base of your cock and yanks out the extra bit. I got it done; my dick's not bent or anything and I piss and fuck like a champ."

  Clearly Stacey had tendered this pitch a few times. Not that his salesmanship was at all necessary—despite any minor misgivings, Paul's mind had been set the moment Stacey placed the vial on the countertop.

  "How do I get it into me?"

  "Injection to the tushie. I'll do it for you."

  "Is that the only w—?"

  Stacey cut him off. "Please don't be a pussy, Harris. I was just starting to dig you."

  And so it transpired that five minutes later Paul found himself in a cramped stall in the men's room at Jammer's gym, bent over the toilet with his pants wadded around his knees and Stacey Jamison's hairy caveman hands clapped to his buttocks.

  Stacey kneaded roughly. "Spongier than a loaf a bread."

  Paul braced his hands on the stall wall. By now sickened at his impulsiveness—why couldn't he just inject himself?—he was convinced it was too late to back out. Stacey gave his ass a rough slap.

  "Christ—jiggling like Christmas pudding." He was genuinely revolted. "How can you cart those lumpy sandbags around all day? It's just... gross. Look at it—look!"

  Paul craned his neck, angling for a glimpse of his own ass. "It could do with some work," he said helplessly.

  Stacey's sigh suggested that whipping a specimen as pitiful as Paul into shape would be a mammoth chore, requiring the labor of thousands. "Don't move. If I jab too deep you'll get a knot like a monkey fist."

  A steel wire of stark terror pierced Paul's heart. What if Stacey hit a vein and pumped this junk directly into his bloodstream? What if he went into anaphylactic shock and—died? He was horrified by how Stacey might deal with the situation; he pictured Stacey seating his dead body on the can, wrapping his dead hand around the syringe, then calling the cops and saying one of his clients had perished while geezing in the shitter. Paul pictured his body laid out on a morgue slab, raisin-testicled with a twig for a penis.

  Stacey pig-stuck him and pushed the plunger. As testosterone shot through him, Paul felt... nothing. It might as well be vegetable oil— hell, maybe it was vegetable oil. He yanked his trousers up and out of sheer habit flushed the toilet—that, or he wanted to convince anyone in the change room he'd merely been taking a piss.

  "Work those glutes!" Stacey hollered as Paul escaped through the change room. "Tone that saggy caboose of yours!"

  Paul drove down Highway 406 following the frozen river, took the mall exit, and turned left at the lights. On Hartzell Road he passed pool halls and bars with neon signs, a foreclosed Bavarian restaurant, a train yard where boxcars rusted in the nettles.

  He yanked down his pants at a red light and gave his ass a good clawing. An itchy red bump had risen at the injection site. His heartbeat was all out of whack, weird yips and baps. Reeking sweat poured from his body, soaking his shirt and running down the crack of his ass. His fingers came away bloody but the bump still itched like a bastard. He stuffed McDonald's napkins down his trousers to sop up the blood.

  At the end of Hartzell a white-brick shopfront occupied the space between a knife shop and a tattoo parlor. A sign above the door read JENSEN'S PAINTS. Below that sign a smaller one, reading, in clipped red letters, IMPACT BOXING CLUB.

  Paul wrenched the wheel and cut across the road, narrowly avoiding a T-bone collision with an oncoming Buick. He skipped over the curb—some vital portion of the undercarriage tore off with a shriek—into the paint store lot. The engine rattled and conked out.

  He sat with his hands gripped to the wheel, wondering how he'd managed to pass these shops a hundred times without ever noticing them. He heard that up north in the provincial parks most of the trees had been clear-cut by logging companies; what they left was called a "veneer": the pines went twenty or thirty feet deep along the hiking paths and riversides, but beyond that only miles of stumps. Paul thought that if someone clear-cut this city, gutted the office buildings and homes and stores, he'd never know—so long as the veneer remained.

  But he'd noticed the shops this time. Why? It wasn't like he was in dire need of a carving knife or a tattoo. What caught his eye was the small sign with its clipped red lettering.

  The boxing club entrance was around back. A worn linoleum staircase and bare concrete walls taped with posters advertising a local fight card: BRAWL IN THE BASEMENT, DECEMBER 5. At the base of the staircase was another door: thick steel with an inset combination lock, the sort of thing you'd see fronting a bank vault. It was wedged open.

  A short hallway hung with boxing photos in gold-edged frames: Panama A1 Brown and Nigel Benn, Baltazar Sangchili, Fighting Harada, Sixto Escobar. A Spanish beer poster: Oscar De La Hoya hoisting a Budweiser over the words SALUD-RESPECTO-CONTRO. The famous George Bellow oil painting: Louis Firpo, "The Wild Bull of the Pampas," knocking "The Manassa Mauler" Jack Dempsey through the ring ropes.

  The hallway led to a tiny unlit office. A shape was sprawled out on a couch. Paul knocked. The shape snuffled. Paul said, "Hello?" The shape stirred.

  "I low much do I owe?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Don't play silly buggers. Joke's on you, asshole. I can't pay." A
mirthless chuckle. "Can't squeeze water from a stone, jackass."

  "I saw your sign."

  "Oh." The voice brightened. "So you want to join?"

  The voice assumed the aspect of a man: short and barrel-chested and wearing rumpled slacks, a short-sleeved pearl-button shirt, crack- soled Tony Lamas. Bald with deeply furrowed cheeks and a bloated nose. There was a blob of dried food on his chin.

  "Caught me in the middle of naptime." His face had the haunted look of a man who'd crawled to daylight from a caved-in mineshaft. "Lou Cobb. I own the place."

  Paul introduced himself.

  "Ever box before, Paul?" Lou asked. "Looks it—got the build all right. You work with Ernie Riggs over at Knock Out?"

  Paul said he hadn't.

  "Good, that's good. Riggs is a bum. Riggs has abused more boxers than Inspector Number Twelve. He stinks. How old are you?"

  "Twenty-six."

  "I won't lie—bit old for a rookie. We like to get kids in the ring at twelve, thirteen tops, parents allow it. But a young twenty-six—now that we can work with. Sure you're not a fighter? Got that fighter's smile."

  "I fell down a flight of stairs."

  "We must be talking some mean-ass stairs."

  Lou scraped the blob of dried food off his chin and studied it, as though straining to recall what meal it had been a part of. "Paul, you can join yearly, bi-yearly, or monthly. But you can't expect to learn anything in a month."

  "Can I take a look around?"

  "Not much to see." Lou seemed disappointed his spiel had not earned a quick sale. "Go take a peep round the change rooms. After I'll give you the grand tour."

  The dingy change room was lit by a single bulb. Headgear and leather foul cups hung from wooden pegs. A showerhead dripped. Paul considered himself in the mirror. He'd lost fifteen pounds in the grapefields. He shed his shirt and stared dejectedly at his chest: despite the gains at Jammer's, he still looked like a human boneyard covered in a quivering layer of flab.