The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  When he emerged, Lou beckoned him over to the ring apron. "So, ready for that grand tour?" He swept his hand in an ironic, all- encompassing fan. "Ta-daa."

  It was impossible for the place to look like anything other than what it was: the basement below a paint store, with a boxing ring and a few punching bags hung from exposed girders. Paul judged its Spartan nature suitable to the sport.

  A new boxer made his entrance. The guy wasn't big; his limbs jutted in raw bony oudines through his track pants and sweatshirt. His hood was pulled low to obscure his face. Only his hands were visible and they looked awful: curled into talons and terribly swollen, knuckles gone black.

  "What are you doing here?" A tiny vein throbbed at Lou's temple; a note of nervous tension picked at his face. "Supposed to be home, in bed."

  The guy shuffled over to a heavybag. He moved with obvious difficulty—Paul couldn't help noticing that his left leg dragged behind him like an invalid's—and set himself in a pugilist's stance, a posture he found painful judging by the grunt he let out. Paul had the uncomfortable feeling he was watching a zombie or automaton, some brainless creature driven by mere impulse.

  Lou spread his hands in an embarrassed, despairing gesture. "Some guys just can't get enough of training. Like say an addiction."

  He excused himself and walked over. When he set his hands on the boxer's shoulders, the guy drew away.

  "Cool down," Lou said. "No need to get punchy."

  The guy threw a few venomous shots at the heavybag. The bag jerked on its chain. His knuckles split open and made meaty sounds when they struck. Blood flew off the bag and splattered the scuffed floor tiles.

  "No training today," Lou told the guy. He turned to offer Paul a smile that suggested such things occurred frequently in boxing clubs. For all Paul knew, they did. The guy mumbled something.

  "I don't give a crap you want to," Lou told him. "Murdering your body, all this is. You're heading home and hitting the sack."

  But the guy's hands flew. Blood flew. Lou's own hand snaked out and snagged the guy's wrist. After a few seconds trying to twist free, the guy relented.

  "Think I'm letting you put yourself through this? Then you don't know me too well at all. You're gonna go lay your head down."

  The boxer lifted his head. Light hit his face slantwise. Paul got his first real look.

  The guy's eyes were swollen over, two plum-colored anthills separated by a split bridge of nose. The top portion of his head had gone dark and shiny as eggplant, impossible to tell where skin gave way to the dark roots of his hair. Strips of adhesive tape glued his broken lips together. He held one twisted hand out, tentative like a blind man or an infant reaching to touch Lou's face. Lou lowered it for him. "Ease down, Garth," he said. "You did good last night. Real good."

  Laying an arm over the guy's shoulder, Lou made a clicking sound with his tongue, the sort you might make to guide a horse onward. Glancing back over his shoulder, he appeared chagrined to discover that Paul was, in fact, still present.

  "I'll have to ask you to come back tomorrow. Bring your togs; I'll show you how we do things."

  It was near dark when Paul left the gym. When he arrived home his parents were sitting at the kitchen table. Early-arriving Christmas cards ringed an empty bottle of Merlot. His parents' teeth had that dead-giveaway mulberry stain.

  "Look who," his father said, "the goddamn wraith. Ooooo-ooo-ooo" he went, like a cartoon ghost.

  Paul was ravenous but found the fridge stocked with the usual unappealing foodstuffs: a bag full of periwinkles, an eel wrapped in cling film, a crustacean with a price tag skewered on one spiny appendage. The damn fridge housed a bizarrely misplaced Sea World exhibit.

  "Doesn't this family eat normal food anymore?"

  "We figured with the way he's been acting lately, our son must be an extraterrestrial. We suspect he rocketed to Earth as an infant, moments before his world exploded." Jack tossed a swallow of wine down his neck. "We wish to cater to his alien diet. Or don't they eat that sort of stuff on your planet?"

  "Alien food," his mother said derisively. "Is it alien that people should eat healthfully? I can whip you up something—how about an eel wrap?"

  To Paul this sounded more like a creepy spa treatment than anything he might want to put in his mouth. "You know, I'll pass."

  "Fine, mister grilled cheese sandwich."

  Barbara Harris wore a black silk kimono embroidered with dragons. Paul wondered if she'd set foot off the estate all day. Years ago she'd bred Great Danes for show but quit after her prize bitch, Sweet Roses, ran off with a feral short-haired schnauzer who'd roamed the banks of

  Lake Ontario. She recovered to sit on the boards of several charitable committees, but quit them and upped her Pilates and Billy Blanks Tae Bo workouts to twice daily; she'd since scaled back in favor of Thai cookery and Japanese Tea Ceremony classes—hence the kimono.

  She had not always been this way. Years ago, when they'd lived on the vineyard, she'd played Nana Mouskouri or Roger Whittaker records and sang along while puttering about the house. Friends would come down from Atikokan and stay for weeks, calling her "Babs" or "Bo-Bo." They drank Blue Nun on the weathered front porch and pored over old photographs: Barbara sitting in the bleachers at a football game in scarf and mittens; at a bush party, the fire making her skin shine like Krugerrand gold. She used to laugh all the time—mildly disconcerting, as his mother's laugh sounded like a poacher machine-gunning a walrus. But Paul loved her laugh: it was a sound expressive of life and unrestrained joy, though he couldn't recall the last time he'd really heard it. Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.

  "Where were you today?" Jack wanted to know. "Working the high steel, driving a steamroller, digging ditches?"

  Paul found a loaf of multigrain bread and a jar of organic peanut butter. "I was around."

  "Around what—the unemployment office? Or maybe you were called back to the mothership to report to your leader."

  "I'm here now, so what does it matter?"

  "Hear that, Barb? Our son's off god-knows-where sticking his nose in god-knows-what and he wants to know why it matters!"

  "Jack, please." Barbara's manner was that of a society doyenne calming a rowdy dinner guest.

  Jack ran a hand through his hair: wild, sticking up in icicle spikes. "The other day a shipment of Cabernet bottles arrived—pink. What the hell do you think we're bottling here, I said to the delivery guy, Asti Spumante? Baby shampoo? The guy kept flapping the goddamn order sheet and the next thing I knew I had him in a headlock!" He tightened his tie—then, realizing what he'd done, tugged it loose. "I could use you back."

  But Paul couldn't see himself back at the winery in his Organizational Adviser role, writing memos to his father (Subject: Cost Breakdown of Kill vs. No-Kill Rat Traps for Supply Room) and telling the bambino joke.

  "You ought to hire an assistant."

  "Who, some stranger?"

  "Who the hell cares? There's a million guys like me, and Mom doesn't give two shits what I do—"

  "I do," Barb cut in. "I do give two ... shits. And much more. I just wasn't aware it was your aspiration to be a fruit picker."

  "Guess I should have sent you to the fuckin' fruit-picking academy!" Jack roared, zero to stone-cold sonofabitch in ten point six seconds—a new record.

  "Didn't know there was one, but that would've been swell," Paul said as he made for the back door.

  The backyard described a shallow decline to the shores of Lake Ontario. A snowy owl perched on a tree bough, its flat phosphorescent eyes big as bicycle reflectors. The water was a frozen gunmetal sheet; the lights of Hamilton and Toronto shone upon it.

  "Paul, slow up."

  His mother traced a path down to the shoreline. She wore a mink coat Paul had thought flattered her, but now all he could think about was how many minks had been anally electrocut
ed to make the ridiculous thing.

  "Can we walk a bit?" she asked.

  "We can."

  Wind whipped over the ice pan, tossing up fans of crystallized snow. Barbara used to walk the lakeshore for hours, calling out for her truant show dog—"Here, Sweet Roses! Here, Sweet, Sweet Roses!"— in hopes of coaxing it away from the renegade schnauzer.

  "I'm not too sure what's been happening lately." Barb's face bore a wounded expression. "You were in a fight, you've picked grapes. So I guess I know what you've been up to—but I can't see why."

  "You wouldn't get it."

  "Care to try me?"

  Paul shrugged. "Okay, say you got in a fight—"

  "Man or a woman?"

  "Say this she-bear of a woman kicked the snot out of you. What do you do?"

  "First I'd call the police—"

  "See, Mom, that's where we must part ways."

  "Will you let me finish? You never let me finish. I think I might..." She sighed. "No, I'd call the police. God, Paul, what do you expect me to say? I'd embark on a province-wide killing spree?"

  "You don't go to the police."

  Barb's wounded expression persisted. "What you said about me not giving a shit—"

  "Two shits."

  "Two, even ... that wasn't fair."

  "I'm sorry," he said, meaning it. "But it's nothing to do with you."

  She shook her head and shivered. "Cold as a witch's tit."

  Though many things about his mother had changed, her diction had not. She still said I could've dropped cork-legged! when something surprised her; when Paul was young she'd tell him Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire when it was time for bed. As a kid he'd purposefully misbehave to hear her holler For two pins I swear I'd thump you!, safe in the knowledge she'd never actually thump him.

  "So what's this big problem of yours?" she asked after they'd walked for a while.

  "It's bigger than one thing, more complex. I can only tell you some of the symptoms."

  "Symptoms, okay."

  "Okay. Last summer I was driving home dead drunk." Barb was shaking her head. "Mother, dear—did you, or did you not, ask? So I'm driving. If I hit a check-stop I knew I'd blow over the limit and I already had that DUI—"

  "The one your father cleared up."

  "Can I tell the story? I came across an accident scene. That hairpin curve—"

  "At the bridge over the regatta course?"

  Paul nodded. "Two cars. One crashed through the guardrail into the pond; its headlights were submerged and they looked like lights at the bottom of a swimming pool. The other one slammed into the bridge. A compact Suzuki—"

  "Oh, god." Barbara drove a Lincoln Navigator, comforted by its stellar front-impact safety rating.

  "—and all accordioned up. The driver had rocketed through the windshield and was laid out over the hood. His head—her head, his head; who knows?—the head was flattened against the bridge abutment."

  His mother looked ill. "You know, I sat on a traffic safety committee years ago and that same curve came up. I voted to widen it, but the road crews were threatening a strike and ... well, go on."

  "There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks, those megawatt accident- scene spots. Everything was focused on the accident. I could have popped my trunk and rolled a headless corpse into the weeds and nobody would've said boo."

  "But you didn't cause the accident. And you weren't thankful for it happening—were you?"

  "Not thankful." He stomped a crescent of ice off the shoreline. "But I thought the only reason it happened was to distract the police. So I wouldn't get arrested."

  "You've lost me."

  "I'm saying that when I saw that person flung through the windshield the first thing that leapt into my head was that my, I guess you could say existence, was so vital that some god or universal force had rigged the whole accident for my benefit—a human being had been killed, just to get me off the hook. And I drove away smiling." He gave her a look: hopeless, cored out. "Smiling, Mom. Really."

  "They're only thoughts, Paul. You didn't make those cars collide; you didn't hurt anyone."

  "And that's basically it, Mom. I haven't done anything, ever. Good or bad."

  "Nonsense. You've graduated university—"

  "Whoopee. Only took six years."

  "What about all those trophies in your office?"

  "Dad bought them at a thrift store! Didn't you know that?"

  Barb looked confused. "Really? I could have sworn ..."

  "Nothing!" The enormity of the understanding rocked Paul like a blow. "Even vicious murderers go to their graves knowing they've changed the world somehow. Murdering takes initiative; it takes drive. You got to get up off your duff to murder someone."

  "Paul!"

  He calmed down. "It's just, sometimes I feel like ... a nonessential human being. I could be replaced with a robot that looked and dressed like me, that'd been programmed to run through the basic routines of my life, and nobody would ever know the difference." "And you think picking a few grapes will make those thoughts go away?"

  He gave a sigh. "Other suggestions?"

  "Therapy, for one—"

  "Jesus please us."

  "—or medication. My Pilates partner told me that Stelazine brought her son back from the brink. He's grinning like a cherub all day long, never been happier. Paul—?"

  He peeled away from her and walked out onto the ice. He caught his reflection in a boil of dark water: eyes as wide and scared as a horse in a barn fire.

  "Do they make a drug called Chrysalis, Mom? You swallow one and hang from a tree branch until a cocoon forms, and two weeks later you crawl out, a whole new person. Pharmaceutical reincarnation—some egghead should get cracking on that!"

  "Paul, come on in. You got me fluttering."

  The ice pan boomed as a long fault line split its surface. Ice shattered under Paul's feet; his leg plunged in up to the crotch. His heart hammered so hard it threatened to tear his chest apart.

  "Do they make pills for people who don't want to be themselves anymore, Mom?"

  The water was probably fifteen feet deep beneath him, currents running swift; they wouldn't dredge his carcass up until next spring, which by then might have floated halfway to Cornwall, but he didn't give a damn and he laughed like a bastard.

  I work hard so you won't have to. Parents tell their children this, Paul thought. I will sweat and toil and bleed so you never will.

  All for love, but still, they miss the point entirely.

  Chapter 5

  Reuben Tully worked in the bakery department at Topps Friendly Market. He rose at two a.m. weekdays, showering and dressing in the dark so as not to wake his son and brother. He caught the 2:30 Portage Express and nodded to the bus driver, who always touched the brim of his cap in reply. A woman who collected border tolls hopped on two stops later; she always sat four seats from Reuben with a coffee thermos and a lurid tabloid magazine. At the next stop the doors admitted a man in a threadbare suit who worked as night auditor for a strip of border motels; he always sat ramrod-straight— stiff as a bishop's pecker, the gym bums would say—with a briefcase on his lap.

  Reuben had traveled with these people for twenty years. They'd all put on weight together and lost hair together, their eyesight had waned and their faces had furrowed together. They'd ridden through marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. Reuben rarely spoke to them, yet felt an odd kinship. On those rare occasions when he'd spot one on the street he'd raise a hand and they would respond with a nod or smile.

  At the supermarket he'd buy coffee from an Italian with his steam cart; he'd mill with the butchers and florists and forklift drivers in the pre-dawn darkness. When the shift whistle blew he'd wheel a barrel of Red Star yeast down a row of industrial mixers. Over the years a yeasty, breadlike smell had sunk into his flesh. No amount of granulated pink industrial soap or frenzied scrubbing could erase that smell, and in his most maudlin moods Reuben could hear mourners at his funeral whispering that h
is corpse held the odor of fresh-baked bread.

  Every few years a new man was hired fresh out of high school. Reuben wondered what he'd do if Robert chose to quit boxing and work here—a prospect that filled him with an intractable, deep-seated fear. His son was better than this town, with its crumbling tenements and bulletproof shop windows, its rusted cars and malt liquor bottles lining front stoops.

  Robert Tully was destined for mythical things. Reuben Tully's only son would not die in upstate New York with the stink of bread on his hands.

  The number twenty bus dropped Reuben off a block from Top Rank. He carried a grease-spotted bag of day-old bearclaws for his son. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but Rob's metabolism ran hotter than a superconductor; he'd burn through them before lunch.

  In the gym two heavies were training for an upcoming card at the armory. A pair of nightclub bouncers, they were set to square off against a couple of garrison Marines. Reuben pictured the matches: two pug-uglies in the dead center of the ring, bashing away like Rockem Sockem Robots. The war vets and jarheads on furlough would gobble it up.

  Rob was up in the ring with bespectacled Frankie Jack, a retired welder who hung around the gym drumming up cut work. Frankie, with a pair of leather punch mitts over his hands, instructed Rob to turn through on his right cross, make it sing.

  "Frank, ya fool," Reuben called, "you filling my fighter's head with nonsense?"

  "Not at all, just warming him up for you." As if Rob were an old Dodge on a winter morning. "He's in fine shape, Reuben. Tip-top shape."

  Rob spread the ropes so that Frankie could step down. Frankie jammed the punch mitts into his armpits and tugged them off; he rubbed his hands, wincing.

  "I'll tell you, this kid can hit. He hurts just to breathe on you." Cotton swabs were pinned behind Frankie's ears like draftsman's pencils. "Hope this ain't out of line, but if you ain't yet settled on a cutman for Robbie's next fight I'd gladly step in."