The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  "Your generation's got a lot to prove," Lou said during the next break. "Before, just staying alive was proof. My granddad with the Depression, then the war. My pops, Big Two. Me, Vietnam. And otherwise you were poor, which is a war of its own. You guys, though ..."

  Paul pounded the punch mitts. Lou winced.

  "All I'm saying is, how can you ever know sweet until you've tasted the sour? How can any of you quite know you're ... men?"

  Paul was irritated. He wanted to slip a fist past the punch mitts and crack Lou in the teeth but wasn't sure he could fob it off as an accident.

  "Go change up and meet me in the office."

  In the change room Paul doffed his sweaty top and stood before the mirror. The flesh of his chest was tight, pebbled, rough as pig leather. He'd gained an inch around his arms, two around his neck, and dropped two pant sizes. The steroids had done their job, but not without side effects. Paul's shoulders were pocked with greasy cysts, his scalp ringed with acne. He also suffered a case of grape-cluster hemorrhoids; the bleeding had gotten so bad he found himself browsing the pharmacy's adult diaper aisle.

  In the office, Lou beckoned him to a chair that looked to be held together with surgical tape. "Let me show you something."

  He set a framed print on the desktop. It was an etching of a muscular athlete approaching middle age. He had a thick beard, a flattened nose, and was balding around the crown of his skull. His breeches were held up by suspenders over his bare shoulders, which were rounded and enormous. He stood in the classic pugilist's stance: right foot forward and turned slightly inward, hands staggered before his chin. Thunderbird Layne, the caption read, Itinerant Bareknuckler.

  "Years ago, fighters traveled town to town like gunfighters," said Lou. "A whole class of men lived this way; also card sharks and mariachis and snake-oil salesmen. Drifters as far as most were concerned, crazed faces who came and went in the space of a single night. These fighters would stride into some town square, toe a line in the dirt, and challenge any man to cross it. If that town happened to be full of serious brawlers he might fight ten, twelve men—whole families, uncles and brothers and sons. If that town was wrathful it beat the fighter down and ran him out on a rail. And if that town was kind it gave him a warm bed and sent him on the next day.

  "They fought for money, yeah, enough to get them down the road— but that wasn't why they did it. Men like that, they were born for fighting, the way other men are born for the sciences or high finance. Alone on a dusty street, squared up against some burly native son with pissed-off townsfolk screaming for his scalp ..." A dramatic sigh. "But then along came the Marquis de Queensberry with his rules of fair play and soon nobody remembered the drifting bareknucklers. I got nothing against boxing—a more noble sport you will not find—but those men were gladiators, or the closest we've seen since those times."

  Lou opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of Bell's whiskey and a pair of waterspotted glasses. He poured a respectable two ounces into each and handed one over.

  "Guys like Thunderbird here," he tapped the photo with his glass, "they're still around."

  "I've never seen anyone like that." "Oh, you probably have. Just didn't know it." Paul thought of the boxer who'd come in that first day—the guy with his eggplant-colored head and anthill eyes—and remembered thinking no way could that damage have come from a legitimate boxing match. "There are places where you'll find them, still..." "You know any of those places?" "Oh," Lou said innocently, "so ... you're interested?" Paul felt springs coiled under his skin waiting to lurch out. "Do me a favor, Lou, and don't jerk me around."

  Lou's face changed like still water brushed by a breeze. "I know a place, yeah. It's illegal, obviously. Take you sometime, you want." "I'd like that."

  "We'll see." Lou leaned back in his chair. "Can't promise anything." He scribbled an address on the back of an unpaid hydro bill. "I noticed you're a bleeder. One little biff and you're gushing. That's gonna hurt you in the ring." He handed the address over. "The guy's name is Sandercott. A lot of my guys see him."

  The address led to a housing project in the Western Hill district.

  The house occupied the final lot on a treeless lane. Its faded paint was the color of boiled organ meat. A Datsun B-210 jacked up on blocks on the front lawn, windows smashed, interior gutted.

  Paul's knock was answered by a man in his late fifties. Balding and rotund, he wore a ratty housecoat cinched with a yellow extension cord.

  Paul said, "Lou sent me."

  Sandercott said, "Nose or brows?"

  Before Paul could answer Sandercott reached out and ran a nicotine- stained thumb over the curve of his eyebrow. "Brows look okay. So, by process of elimination, nose."

  The place stunk of deep-fryer fat. The carpet was so threadbare the nylon underweave showed through in spots. Paul had seen houses like this only in movies, desperately grim movies where unfit mothers nodded on heroin while their urchins splashed in the scummy gray water of a Mister Turtle pool.

  "Head on into the shitter," Sandercott said.

  The bathroom was bright and not particularly clean. A framed needlepoint slogan over the toilet read IF YOU SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE, BE A SWEETIE, WIPE THE SEATIE. Sandercott came in with a Piano tacklebox. When he opened it on the sink's edge, Paul saw that each compartment was stocked with gauze and iodine and burn salve.

  "What are you planning on?"

  "Lou didn't tell you? Typical." Sandercott motioned to the toilet. "Siddown."

  He showed Paul a slender brushed-aluminum tool. It looked like the soldering rod that'd come with Paul's Unger Industrial wood- burning kit.

  "Electric cauterizing wand," Sandercott told him. "A spark gun, in layman's terms. Fuses veins during emergency surgery."

  He pushed a silver button; a cold blue spark snapped between the conductors. The hairs on the nape of Paul's neck stood on end.

  "What I do is cauterize the soft tissue in your nostrils. Once you scar up you'll never bleed again, even if someone whacks your schnozz with a ball-peen hammer."

  "Can't this be done at a hospital?"

  Sandercott shook his head. "Falls under the umbrella of non-essential surgery. Plus there'd be questions—with me it's don't ask, don't tell." He considered Paul, his cheap white T-shirt and knocked-out teeth. "No offense, but you don't strike me as the type who's got much choice."

  He spread Paul's nostrils with a pair of nasal retractors. After trimming the bristly nose hairs, he took a leather thong from the tacklebox and rinsed it under the tap.

  "Bite down hard," he said. "Not going to lie, son: this'll sting like a motherfuck."

  Paul drove through a light snow, big flakes dissolving on the windshield like spun sugar. Plugs of blood-soaked gauze were shoved up his nostrils. His brain felt swollen and monstrous and threatened to split his skull.

  When Sandercott had eased the spark gun up his right nostril, Paul felt the contact points butt the ridge of cartilage, then—tsszzzapl! His mouth filled with an ozone taste; blue sparks spat between his fillings. His spine straightened as a rope of blood geysered from his nose. The spark gun tsszzzzapped again. His nose lit up like a Chinese paper lantern. Paul puked and passed out. When he came to, Sandercott was Q-Tipping his nostrils with petroleum burn salve.

  "All done," he said. "You did good. I'd give you a lollipop, I had one. Got Vicodin."

  "I'll take two." With Paul's nose swollen, this came out: I dake doo.

  He arrived home shortly after nine o'clock. The house was festooned with Christmas lights, thousands of them. Cars lined the horseshoe drive: Lexuses and Mercedes, Cadillacs and Porsches.

  He crossed the front lawn past a carved-ice nativity scene. Faint music from inside: Bing Crosby's "Silver Bells." The Harrises' annual Christmas function was in full swing.

  He crept in through the back door; his ambition was to slip down the hall into his room and avoid the party altogether. But his mother corralled him as he breezed up the back stairs.

  "Pau
l, dear." Barbara wore a strapless black dress with fake-fur trim; stuffed reindeer antlers were tilted askew on her head. She was distracted, her gaze lingering on the living room and her guests. "You must come in and mingle, darling."

  He realized he was dealing with Socialite Barb, an altogether different creature from his mom. Socialite Barb had her own lexicon— Darling and Oh my and Nonsense—and her every mannerism was exaggerated: privy to a juicy bit of gossip, Socialite Barb would flap a hand before her face and swoon like a silent movie actress. Socialite Barb wouldn't be caught dead uttering "Cold as a witch's tit."

  He sat on the stairs. Taking a seat beside him, Barbara flinched at the blood on his shirt, the toilet paper jammed up his nose. "Oh, Paul..." The socialite veneer slipped. "What have you done to yourself?"

  "I aw'ight."

  She smiled sadly and went to touch his face, but could not quite bring herself to. "You can't come in looking like that."

  "Why oo I hab to cub in a' aw?"

  "Paul, please. Your father and I want this to come off well." Worry strobe-lighted across her face. "We want everything to look nice."

  "'Appy fambly."

  "Yes, a happy family. Aren't we?" She touched his shoulder; Paul thought she was going to hug him but instead she plucked a hair off his shirt. "You've been losing a lot of it, lately."

  Another side effect of the steroids. His shower soap was furred with so much shed hair it looked like some headless, amputee rodent. He went upstairs and changed, shoved fresh toilet paper up his nose, and soon found himself in a room full of people he didn't want to talk to.

  Tall, full blue spruces decked with twinkling lights and tinsel stood on either side of the fireplace—which, instead of an actual fire, contained a thirty-four-inch TV playing a DVD of a crackling fire. Rita MacNeil Christmas carols on the CD player. Guests milled about in sleekly cut dresses and dinner jackets, sipping martinis or Seabreezes or Danish beers. Broken conversations washed over him, so unlike the patter of the boxing gym it was nearly a foreign language.

  ...got my money in at 34¼ and got out at 56¾—zoom!...

  ...four hundred thread count. Anything less, you may as well sleep on sandpaper...

  ...Oh no. Can't do it Thursday. Herbal wrap. But how's Friday? ...

  ...East Timor. Who will consider the downtrodden shepherds of East Timor...

  His father tended bar, dispensing Chardonnay and Veuve Clicquot with typical Jack Harris swagger. Seeing his son with those racoon eyes and corkscrews of toilet paper jammed up each nostril, a flinching expression crossed his face.

  "Ah, god," he said. "Have you been boxing—seriously boxing?"

  By now Jack knew that his son had taken up the sport. The glove- burns on his face and the bruised state of his hands, the smelly boxing shoes in the front hall.

  "Whaa 'id oo 'ink?"

  "I thought you were training," Jack told him, "not actually fighting. Looks like you got popped one—how you feel?"

  "Grade," Paul said truthfully. "Riddy, riddy grade."

  "Great?" Jack touched his son's face, traced with thick fingers the slope of Paul's nose. "Keep it up, son, you're gonna wind up with a face like a catcher's mitt."

  "I'b 'ine."

  "Fine, he says!" Jack spread his hands in an appeal to some unseen jury. "Twists of TP up his nose and a pair of matching shiners—not to mention those teeth—this guy's telling me he's fine." A snort. "You're too old to be a fighter. You'll never earn a dime. Might as well teach Esperanto lessons!"

  Paul was unsurprised that, to his father, it came down to dollars and cents. He took his bottled water to a chair in a corner of the room. Guests roamed about in bovine patterns. Businessmen's laughs boomed like awkward thunder: Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak! Everyone was so fat and satisfied. Sausagey fingers grasped at canapés; fleshy goldfish lips sucked at cocktail glasses. The older men, the fathers, still bore traces of a hardened life: facial scars and roughened features, a certain tautness around the eyes indicative of past toil. But their sons' faces were scrubbed rosy and unmarked, their manicured hands smooth as glass.

  "Young master Harris. How do, how do?"

  He'd been accosted by Drake Langley, whom Paul had last seen the night of his beating.

  "'Ello, Drake."

  Tonight Langley wore a checkerboard-patterned jacket with a ludicrous bow tie flared beneath his jaw. His insubstantial frame was balanced on a walking stick with a silver dog's-head handle— a Dachshund—which Drake leaned on like a vaudeville performer at the cusp of a song-and-dance number.

  "You and I should set up a meeting..." Drake was saying,"... relative merits and demerits of corporate reconfiguration ..." he was saying, "... that new Porsche 911 Boxster made my dick hard just looking at the brochure ..." he was saying.

  Drake's thin lips formed a stream of inane jabber. Paul was amazed that Drake hadn't bothered to comment on his frightful appearance—he'd nearly forgotten how self-absorbed his old chums could be, with their spectacular ignorance of all things outside their tiny sphere of existence. He felt he was in the presence of an alien life form unsuited to existence on this planet: a creature to whom oxygen was poison and water acid.

  "... Asset allocation ... Cohiba coronas and their impact on bistro culture..."

  A wave of cold nausea ripped through Paul's guts. The room lurched, its reds and whites transposing so that, for an instant, the spackled ceiling became an expanse of curdled blood. An intense loathing welled up at the sight of these sons and daughters of privilege. He saw them all lying facedown in the mud with slugs riven through their skulls. He saw their bodies heaped pell-mell in a mass grave with a dusting of quicklime eating their bones. He saw them not as bodies but as vague unformed shapes, featureless faces smooth as eggshell.

  "... Cambodian sweatshop sanctions ... tennis elbow...

  Then Drake's body swelled and bloated until his face tore in two like sun-rotted fatback to reveal the head of a massive quivering maggot. Paul's eyes went big; he choked, averting Drake's gaze, and saw that all the children had turned into maggots. Giant greasy tubes sheathed in Donna Karan dresses with nautilus-whorl hairdos and redwood-framed glasses and clutch purses, tubes peristaltic-flexing across the lush white carpeting. A guest leaned down and kissed his maggot-daughter and his lips came away with taffy pulls of mucus clinging to them. A guest fed her maggot-son a stuffed olive canapé, fingers disappearing into the dilated asshole of its mouth. Drake the Maggot stood on its tail like a cartoon worm, body curled like an S and, revoltingly, it continued to speak.

  "...white-chocolate truffles ..Maggot-Drake said. "... Jerry's Kids..

  The puckered balloon-knot of Maggot-Drake's mouth blurped and blorped and spewed snotlike goo that stuck to Paul's face like gobs of gelatin.

  "Yakka-yakka-yakka," Maggot-Drake laughed, "Hohohohohoho HOOO!"

  Paul's own hysterical laughter ricocheted off the walls, so deafening all other conversations ground to a halt as he gagged HO-HO-HO like a demented Pere Noel. The toilet-paper plugs rocketed from his nose and his body quaked and the television fire crackled and Rita MacNeil sang "O Tannenbaum"—

  Paul punched Maggot-Drake in its butthole mouth. His arm sunk in to the elbow and Drake's maggot body went sssssss, deflating like a ruptured parade balloon. Paul blinked and there was Drake Langley, crumpled up on the hearth.

  The DVD skipped. The TV fire went black.

  Paul sat on the back porch. He'd broken Drake's jaw. The sound of young Drake moaning, the sight of those strings of saliva dribbling from his unhinged puppet-mouth—it spoiled the seasonal joie de vivre. The party broke up quickly, despite Socialite Barb's best efforts: "Please, everything's fine! Let's all roast chestnuts!"

  He'd watched Drake Langley transform into a maggot. The Vicodin Sandercott had given him—blotter acid? That, or he'd gone temporarily delusional. At this point, either scenario struck him as completely possible.

  His father joined him with a bottle of scotch. "Well, thank god that kid's da
d isn't the litigious type." He sat, took a pull from the bottle, and set it between his legs. "Maybe I should consider it lucky you didn't punch him, too."

  "It may end up being the best thing anyone's ever done for him."

  "You know," Jack said, peevishly, "most people who get beat up aren't changed for it. Blake will ice his jaw tonight and go to work in the morning."

  "His name is Drake."

  "I've been calling him Blake for years. Drake. Isn't that a sort of bird?" Another gulp. "So why'd you do it?"

  Alas, dear Drake had turned into a quivering blubbery maggot.

  "How's Mom?"

  "How would you figure?"

  Paul reached between his father's legs for the bottle. Inside, some china shattered.

  "I should sleep somewhere else tonight."

  "Tonight? Think more like a week," said Jack. "So, figured out how all this is benefiting you yet?" When Paul said nothing his father persisted. "Why you're decking party guests?"

  Paul took a swig. If there was one thing he missed lately, it was good scotch. "Dad, did you ever think, even for one fleeting moment, that maybe I didn't want the life you'd staked out for me?"

  Jack looked like he'd been knifed in the guts. "Staked out for you? Is that what you think? I only wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to go to a good school—you did. I wanted you to go to university—you did. I wanted you to work at a job you'd be happy with ..." He trailed off, confused. "I thought you'd found that." Jack slugged scotch, breathed deep, another slug. "But... you never showed the slightest ambition. Sports, academics, jigsaw puzzles, ships in bottles—nothing."

  "Fair point. I'm a late bloomer."

  "Blooming into what? Into something that belongs up in a friggin' bell tower. Jesus, and now you're..." Jack hung his head."... bleeding."

  Paul wiped under his nose; his fingers came away bloody. He thought about the cleanliness of Sandercott's instruments and considered the prospect of staph infection.