The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  "So this is all my fault?" Jack went on. "You're blaming me?"

  "Give me a break. Self-pity doesn't suit you."

  "I'm drunk." More shattering noises from inside. "And in a few minutes I have to go deal with that. So let me wallow, will you?"

  Paul softened. "It's not your fault. I don't think you gave it any thought, is all. You had a sense of how things should be, and I didn't make any waves, so ..."

  "And this is how you want it?"

  "I'm happier."

  "No you're not. You just think you are."

  Inside: stomping, another crash.

  "Good thing I got a snootful to keep me warm," Jack said dourly. "Conjugal bed's bound to be a mite frosty tonight."

  His father went inside. Raised voices, a spectacularly loud crash, what might or might not have been weeping. Paul shivered, coming down from the adrenaline buzz.

  "That was quite a performance."

  It was Callie, his father's receptionist. She wore a puffy parka over a peach blouse, short black skirt, nylons.

  She sat on the porch stairs. The smoke from her menthol cigarette mingled with the smell of jasmine perfume. "Haven't seen you around the office. Jack thinks you're having a breakdown. Quarter- life crisis."

  He reached out, suddenly, and set his hand on her face. She didn't flinch; her eyes did not release from his. He ran his thumb down the center of her face to her chin. Convinced she was not liable to split apart as Drake had, he let out a shuddering breath and smiled.

  "What was that all about?"

  Paid brushed her question off. "What do you think?" he said. "Am I having a breakdown?"

  "I can't say, exactly. You're... different. You've changed. Definitely."

  "For the better?"

  "I think so." The rapid beat of her heart pulsed her neck vein. "You really popped that poor guy. Never seen anyone hit so hard. It was ... wow."

  She butted her cigarette on the porch steps, leaning over to do so. Her blouse was sheer and low-cut, her breasts just bigger than medium and firm. They were about the most beautiful tits Paul had ever seen. This was his first sexual stirring since his steroid cycle began and it broiled through his veins in a galvanizing, all-consuming, full- barrel rush. She studied him with a knowing half-smile, a few wisps of cigarette smoke curling from the sides of her lips.

  The two of them in the greenhouse with its long dusty tables, trowels, and boxes of expired slug poison. Paul's hands clutched at Callie's ass as she bit his lower lip, small pink tongue slicing the gaps between his teeth. He tore her blouse off, buttons popping, his hands and mouth on her tits, groping her with all the subtlety of an orangutan. Their bodies glanced off the glass; a pane fractured in spiderweb cracks. She tugged his fly down and jerked his cock, her strong farm- girl hands pulling so hard it was as if she were trying to yank a stubborn weed; he shook her hand away and crushed his mouth to hers with such force he thought their teeth would splinter. They maneuvered amid sacks of cacao shells and blood-and-bone meal; Paul's toe struck the old Bowflex and he bellowed like a gorgon. She moaned unintelligible words as he picked her up and dropped her on bags of peat, the white plastic splitting in puffs of dust, and when their lips met again they could taste the earthy grit of it on their tongues.

  Callie's pussy sopping, wet satin molded to her labia, and Paul hiked her skirt up, hands and teeth shredding her panties and Callie's box neatly shaved, clitoris poking from its hood hard as a polished pebble and she gripped his cock but when she tried to contort her body to fit it into her mouth, panting ravenously, he pushed her down and rubbed his cock over her pussy, which was tight and hot and wet and when a flicker of dismay crossed his face she ignored it completely, impatient now, grasping his cock and digging her nails into his shaft—he went "Aaaah!"; she went "Come on, move it.. ."—she slipped him in and then Paul was pushing hard and fast, gasping and dizzy as tree pruners and Garden Weasels shook off their hooks, the two of them rocking together and Paul's fingers puncturing bags of peat—

  And there, under the tepid glow of a sixty-watt bulb with soil crumbling in his bruised hands, Paul Harris saw a sleepy hillside village. Clapboard houses, horses and mules yoked to hitching posts. He stands alone in the street, warm breeze scrolling dust and dry leaves across the lane. With the toe of his boot he drags a line in the dirt. Men come from the saltbox shacks rolling shirt-sleeves to their elbows, swiveling their arms and cracking their necks. The first man is huge but slow: Paul ducks his ponderous fists, answering with stinging rights and lefts to his boxlike face, splitting it open until the man goes down and is dragged away. The next guy fights fiercely, crushing blows to Paul's liver and pancreas until Paul catches him a sneaky right on the temple and he goes down twitching. He fights another, then another and another and another; log-boom stacks pile up in the gullies. They fight in a ring of blood and Paul breaks noses and crushes eyeballs from sockets. Hot blood coats his hands the way nacre forms around a speck of grit and soon his fists are the size of bowling balls, hard and heavy, yet he swings them with ease, crushing ribcages and cracking skulls, pulverizing spinal cords and splattering faces like rotted fruit, the men reduced to sticky pulp, to horrible wet noise, but they keep coming, dozen upon dozen, and Paul dispatches them all without mercy, reducing their bodies to chunks, to gristle and bone, sunk knee-deep in gore and he's screaming for more, Bring it on, Bring it on, Bring.. .It... On.

  Chapter 7

  The Upper New York Golden Gloves qualifying tournament was held in the basement of St. Michael's cathedral at the corner of Niagara and 12th. The day was December 31, 2005.

  The dressing room boiled with voices and bodies, bodies of men and boys, naked chests and shoulders, black, white, brown, beige, yellow. Altar boy smocks and votive candle holders were hung on hooks beside the weigh station.

  Rob stripped to his underwear and took his place in line. Irish guys with freckled arms, Mexican flyweights who looked made of braided rope, black cruiserweights with superhero bodies—muscles where there shouldn't be muscles—Cuban street kids with scars marking their faces, Italian bruisers with marbled forearms and squashed noses. They'd come from all over the region: Lockport and Erie, Lackawanna and Tonawanda, a few driving north from New York City looking for softer brackets. They eyed one another cagily, sizing each other up, laying their own private odds.

  Rob stepped onto a scale. His torso shone blue in places, the shaped muscles touched with shadow. An official scribbled "164" on the cover of his boxing book. A fight doc shone a penlight in his eyes and listened to the thack-thack of his heart.

  Rob's US Boxing book was tossed upon the heap at the matchmakers' table. Three officials were tasked with matching fighters according to weight and experience. As they sorted through books, the trainers assembled on the sidelines voiced their opinion:

  "Make it fair, boys, make it fair ..."

  "Aw, no, man! That boy's dead for a ringer—no waaaay we taking that match!"

  "We'll fight anybody. AnyBODY!"

  Rob was matched against a twenty-five-year-old amateur from Bed-Stuy: Marty "Sugar" Caine. Caine had recently qualified for a berth on the Olympic squad.

  Reuben and Rob sequestered themselves in the temporary trainer's quarters: a rubdown table bookended by flimsy hospital screens. On either side could be glimpsed the shadows of trainers wrapping their fighters' hands, massaging necks and shoulders.

  "Won't be a cakewalk," Reuben said. "Caine's got skills. But his knockout ratio's piss-poor. You gotta get inside his head, Robbie. I want him thinking, This kid's got bricks in his chin. I want him thinking, This kid drinks kerosene and breathes nitrous oxide flames. Got it?"

  Tommy poked his head through the hospital screen.

  "Where've you been?" Reuben said.

  "Bus broke down on the side of the highway." He smiled at Rob. "How you feeling, champ?"

  A boxing official stopped by to watch Reuben tape Robbie's hands; New York boxing commission rules stipulated that an official must observe the
pre-fight hand wrap to ensure it was done by the book, no lead slugs or mustard-seed oil. The official initialed Rob's wraps and Reuben had his son lie down on the training table, working winter- green liniment into the muscles of Rob's back.

  "How you feeling?"

  "Nervous," said Rob.

  "Hey, if you don't have butterflies, there's something the matter with you. Just remember: cowards and heroes feel the same fear. Heroes react to it differently, is all."

  But his father didn't understand. Rob wasn't scared of being hit or even getting knocked out. Rob was scared for Marty "Sugar" Caine.

  "Fear has been around for centuries," Reuben said. "It's old, and it's good."

  The basement of St. Michael's cathedral was cloaked in shadow save for a halo of spotlights above the ring. Rows of folding chairs hosted mothers and fathers, local fight enthusiasts, boxers and coaches, the odd talent scout. The canteen was staffed by the nuns of St. Francis. Fighters skipped rope or shadowboxed in darkened corners. A folding table behind them supported a glittering cargo of trophies, each crowned with a brass boxer with arms upraised.

  Rob sat between his uncle and father in a black robe. In the ring a pair of middleweights went at it. That they were the same weight seemed insupportable: one a thick-necked fireplug, the other a lanky beanpole. The fireplug pursued the beanpole, hoping to blow a hole through his willowy opponent with one solid punch. The taller fighter kept him at bay, snapping hard jabs, avoiding those bullish charges as smoothly as a toreador.

  When the bell rang, the judges scored unanimously in favor of the beanpole. The decision received scattered boos, most of them coming from the fireplug's cheering section. The beanpole's supporters jeered back and before long two women—the boxers' mothers, in all probability—were screaming hysterical threats at each other. "Hold me back!" the fireplug's mother cried, "or else I'll pound her!" She took her husband's arm, braced it across her chest, and again cried, "Hold me back, so help me god!" Once things settled down, Reuben said, "We're up."

  Marty "Sugar" Caine was lean and tapered, his every muscle visible under a thin stretching of flesh. Rob noticed a pair of star-shaped welts on Caine's torso, one between the second and third rib, another above his right nipple. Gunshot wounds. When Caine turned around in his corner, kneeling to bless himself, Rob saw the exit wounds on his back: scar tissue like lumps of bubblegum smoothed across the underside of a table.

  The fighters touched gloves over the referee's arm. The bell rang.

  Caine skipped lightly, appearing to float a half-inch above the canvas. Rob stalked, hands low, gloves poised and rotating. Caine snapped out a pair of jabs, fast but merely pestering; they glanced off his headgear. Rob bulled in and, as Caine hooked behind a left jab, slipped the second punch and threw his own hook, a submarine right to the body.

  Caine managed to take a piece of Rob's punch on his arm, but the shot was thrown with such force it drove the point of his elbow into Caine's abdominal wall. Caine bent sideways at the hip, lips skinned back from his gumshield. The ref—dressed in white trousers and a vest like an English estate butler—hovered nearby to call the mandatory eight-count.

  "Follow up!" Reuben hollered. "Get on it!"

  But Rob did not get on it. He threw another hook but pulled short, feinted left for no reason at all, and drew away.

  Caine recovered enough to throw a series of jabs coming off the ropes. Rob held his hands low and let the punches hit him flush in the face. Caine came through with a wrecking-ball right that caught Rob under the chin; his head snapped back. He closed his eyes and ... wished. But when his eyes opened a split-second later he was still standing. He'd taken Caine's best shot and knew—right then, knew— that Caine didn't have the oomph to put him away. This cold fact filled Rob with a measure of desolation the likes of which he'd rarely known.

  The bell rang.

  In the corner Reuben slapped his face.

  "What the hell? You had him. Christ, Robbie—had him."

  Reuben offered instruction but Rob's attention was focused on the opposite corner: Caine sat on a stool, face shiny with Vaseline, gumshield socked in the crook of his mouth. Caine's eyes darted into the crowd. Rob followed his gaze to a slim, beautiful woman in the third row. Girlfriend? Wife? Someone who cared for him, obviously— Rob could see the lines of worry on her face. An infant girl sat on the woman's lap.

  For an instant the fighters' eyes met across the hunched backs of their trainers. Caine nodded, a nearly imperceptible motion of his head.

  The bell rang.

  Caine sprang in slugging, was jolted by a flurry and backed off, dancing high on his toes. They came together again, Caine pepper- potting jabs until a right cross sent sweat flying from his headgear. Spurred by the crowd, he followed two precise jabs with a straight right that Rob slipped by an eighth of an inch, Caine's hand finding only empty air above Rob's shoulder. Pivoting on his lead, Rob ripped a body shot under Caine's ribcage that sent the other boxer into a flutter-legged swoon.

  "Go on! You got him!" Reuben yelled.

  Caine's eyes were unfocused; yellow bile foamed the edges of his gumshield. Rob saw the gunshot wound on Caine's chest, a tight pink asterisk spread like the petals of an ice plant. Where had he gotten it? Here was Marty Caine with a wife and a kid and dreams of big paydays and here was Rob fucking it all up—what earthly right did he have to fuck it up for anyone? He knew Caine would fight until his eyes filled with blood and his arms grew numb, until he was a senseless wreck on the canvas. Caine would fight until there was nothing left because he was fighting for more than just himself, and because the complete sacrifice of his body was everything he could possibly surrender.

  They went two more rounds. Though Rob controlled the tempo, Caine kept busy and landed some flashy shots. The judges ruled it a split-decision draw. The decision split the crowd: half cheered while the other half booed.

  Rob and Caine fell into a loose embrace in the middle of the ring. "Lordy, did you ever hit me," Caine whispered in Rob's ear. "Nobody should have to be hit like that."

  "I'm sorry," Rob said.

  "No sorries, man." Caine patted Rob's head. "Never sorries."

  Reuben was at the judges' table, vowing to challenge the decision. "Hung from the highest bough!" he yelled. "The ... highest ... bough!"

  From the ring Rob watched his opponent walk to the locker room. Supported by his trainer, Caine stopped beside the woman. His taped hands moved tenderly on her shoulder, tenderly over the infant girl's cheeks and hair.

  It was dusk when they left St. Michael's. The dark air quivered in funnels of light cast by gooseneck streetlamps.

  Reuben and Rob sat in the idling car while Tommy brushed snow off the windows. Rob drank from a liter bottle of bubblegum-flavored Pedialyte to jack up his electrolytes; a jar of Gerber's baby food sat between his legs, the only stuff his system could tolerate after a fight. A warrior twenty minutes ago, now he ate like an infant.

  "Tully's Record Sullied," Reuben said. "That's what the headline'll read in the Sports section of the Gazette. They'll love the goddamn alliteration."

  "That's not alliteration," Rob said from the backseat. "Just rhyming."

  "Don't get smart. I don't get it," Reuben went on. "You had him, and not once—three, four times. The hell happened?"

  Rob wanted to tell his father how, when he had Caine staggered, he'd thought of his first knockout—those teeth winking like bloody pearls in a black rubber gumshield. He wanted to tell his father that he couldn't hate a stranger, even for the short time they shared a ring together, even when that stranger's intent was to inflict harm.

  "We might not make it out of the preliminaries." A mystified shake of the head. "Robbie, you were the favorite. The odds on ... favorite."

  Nine o'clock, New Year's Eve.

  Rob skipped lightly down the stairs. He wore workboots, faded blue jeans, a clean white T-shirt. Reddened slashes marked his cheeks and chin: burns from Caine's gloves.

  "I'm heading o
ut."

  Reuben sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jim Beam. He stared at the Formica tabletop as though, were he to fixate his gaze long enough, the random mica chips might disclose some earth-shattering epiphany.

  "Go on, then." He flicked his hand. "Home no later than twelve- thirty or I'll be dragging you home by the scruff."

  The party was hosted by Felix Guiterrez—Felix, the guy whose jaw Rob had broken a year and a half ago. He answered Rob's knock wearing a shiny costume top hat.

  "Tully, my man." Rob noted the dimple scars on Felix's jaw and felt a pang of regret. To Felix's credit, he didn't hold a grudge. "Come on down. My folks are partying upstairs."

  Thirty-odd people filled the unfinished basement, standing or sitting on lawn chairs. Earlier in the night the place had been decorated but now all that remained were shreds of crepe paper and rubber balloon-rings taped to the beams. Bottles of rum and vodka liberated from parents' liquor cabinets passed amongst the throng.

  He spotted Kate with Darren Gregory. Darren was a willowy senior who favored ripped jeans and Goodwill corduroy; thick dark hair fell over his handsome features. His mother was a border toll-taker who, unbeknownst to Rob, had ridden the same bus as his father for the better part of twenty years. Last month Darren had won a poetry competition; his love sonnet had appeared in the Sunday Gazette. He and Kate sat on lawn chairs, knees touching. Darren made flourishes with his hands as Kate's mouth formed words—"Yes! Absolutely!"—and she laughed. Watching them, Rob felt strangely cold, gutted, blood running thin as copper wire in his veins.

  Felix sidled up with a jug of Comrade Popov's potato vodka. "Heard about the draw at the Gloves. Who the hell did you fight— King Kong?"

  "Could have gone either way," Rob told him. "I could've lost."

  Felix appeared upset, or let down. Rob wondered if, sometime in the future, Felix had wanted to tell people he'd had his jaw broken by a world champion. He drank from the jug and winced.