The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  "It's mostly meringue."

  She handed him the bags with a rueful shake of her head. "Hope you're not planning to bake this cake in my neighborhood."

  In the parking lot with his gonads kicking out toxic levels of testosterone some biological imperative made him drop to the tarmac and burn off push-ups; his mind whited out at two hundred reps and when his senses returned he was crouched behind the Micra with his hands gripping the bumper, straining to lift the rear wheels off the ground, but merciless pressure built up in his abdominal cavity and he feared a hernia or a prolapsed colon so he walked to a payphone at the lot's edge and dialed Lou Cobb.

  "That... that place you were ... talking about..."

  "You been out jogging, kid? Sound puffed."

  "...Gladiators ..." Paul was picturing arms and legs rupturing from excess mass, hyper-developed muscles splitting biceps and thighs."... Thunderbird Layne and all that..."

  "How's your schnozz?" Lou wanted to know. "Healed up yet?"

  Paul felt his own muscles twitching, the tendons hard and tight as a condom packed with walnuts. "My nose is fine. So, about that place—"

  Lou laughed for no reason: Bhar-har-har! Or was Paul hearing things; was it some odd distortion on the line? "We'll work something out. Sounds like you're ready."

  He hung up and drove to Bayside, a neighborhood strung along the banks of Twelve Mile Creek. In the dusky evening light he saw million- dollar homes, topiary gardens, pool houses. Paul stomped on the brakes and stepped out. The house was gaudy: ornate columns, three- car garage, his-and-her hunter green Range Rovers.

  He tucked the tire iron down the back of his pants—cold steel slid between the crack of his ass and he shivered—and grabbed a carton of eggs. He eased through the open gates up the drive and found a spot on the front lawn. Methodically, with great relish, he started chucking.

  Eggs broke over the mullioned windows and the stained-glass door. Eggs broke with the sound of brittle bones, so richly rewarding.

  A soft terrified face materialized in a second-floor window. Paul threw an egg and that face vaporized. Egg dripped off the eaves. Egg coated the Range Rovers.

  The mailbox was shaped like a dog: an Irish setter. Paul stared at this grinning dog with a metal pole shoved up its ass and found himself unsettled on a sub-cellular level. He drew the tire iron from his trousers and whacked the fucking thing's head and put a satisfying dent in it; another whack tore its mouth off its hinges. He jammed the tire iron down its throat and pried it off its moorings. A kick sent the mouthless thing skittering across the driveway into a flower bed.

  A buttery face poked out the front door. The face hollered that Paul was an unhinged crazyperson and that the cops were on their way.

  "I am the cops!" Paul screamed. "My name is Rex Appleby—part of that thin blue line separating you from the unadulterated scum out there!"

  "Get off my lawn, degenerate!"

  "Your mailbox was resisting arrest. I'm well within my rights!"

  When the guy reappeared at the door, relating Paul's physical description to 911 dispatch, it was time to hit the dusty trail.

  Back in the car he crushed Dianabols on the dashboard and snorted the pink powder. The Micra started with a shudder; he punched the accelerator and blatted down the street singing along to the stereo, slewing around a hairpin curve, getting the shitbox up on two wheels.

  He drove a few blocks before pulling up beside a gold Lexus SUV. Paul had once wanted one of these so badly—he'd planned on asking for one for Christmas. Now the very sight of it made him queasy with rage.

  He got out and checked the door: unlocked. He grabbed a handful of eggs and pelted the mahogany instrument panel. With the tire iron he stabbed holes in the fragrant leather seats and jammed Roman candles into the stuffing. He lit the fuses and slammed the door. The soundproofing was top-notch: only brilliant intermittent flashes behind the tinted windows. Acrid gray smoke seeped from the door seams.

  He hopped in the Micra. His heart trip-hammered wildly; he pictured aortic valves spun from carnival glass on the verge of splintering. He lit off some Magic Black Snakes on the passenger seat but they were unrewarding, dirty little turds, so he fired up a Screaming Devil and puttered down the street with gobs of shrieking orange fire spitting out the windows.

  At some point he noticed the flashing cherries in his rearview and pulled over.

  The cop was old, with the skittery-dodgy gait of a man clearly terrified of being shot or otherwise incapacitated so close to retirement. He scanned the car's interior. An arresting officer's wet dream: busted eggs, squashed tomatoes, the reek of gunpowder.

  "And how are you tonight, sir?"

  "Feeling jim-dandy fine, officer."

  "I'll ask you to put both hands on the wheel... yup, like that."

  The officer walked around front of the car. "You've got a busted headlight. And what looks to be a ..." He hunkered down for a better look."...bird lodged in the grille, here."

  "That came with the car."

  "Funny option, I'd say." He returned to the driver's side. "We received a call about a disturbance. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that?"

  Paul scraped at a shard of eggshell stuck to his chin. "I did see a suspicious fellow—a prowler, you might say—a few blocks back. He was tall and skinny, with rolls of fat hanging off his squat frame. And he was sitting astride a gryphon."

  The cop sighed heavily. "A gryphon, huh?"

  "Yes, the mythical creature. Half lion, half eagle. Quite rare, I can assure you."

  "And you haven't been making mischief tonight—throwing eggs, batting mailboxes, and the like? Nothing illegal?"

  "My understanding of the law is fuzzy, officer—is driving drunk illegal nowadays?"

  "Telling me you're intoxicated?"

  "Yo ho ho and a bottle of r-r-r-r-r-ruuum!"

  The cop looked as though he'd dearly love to drag Paul to the precinct and interrogate him with a phonebook. "You've got some restitutions to make, son—though by the looks of this heap here, the offended parties may have to satisfy themselves with an apology. License and registration."

  Paul rooted through the glove compartment and handed them over. The officer's brow wrinkled. He glanced at Paul, the license, back at Paul.

  "You're not ..." confused, "... Jack Harris's son? The winery owner?"

  Paul nodded.

  The officer leaned down to get a better look. "Lord," he said, "it is you."

  Paul tallied up his offenses over the past hours: assault, petty larceny, attempted vehicular manslaughter, drug abuse, vandalism, tendering false statements to an officer—how many years in the hoosegow was he looking at here?

  "I want you to put this car in gear," the cop said evenly, "then I want you to drive up to that main street there and get yourself home."

  "But I egged the almighty fuck out of that house."

  "Just a boy being a boy, s'far as I'm concerned."

  "I'm twenty-six!"

  "Simmer down. I'm doing you a favor." The officer headed back to his squad car and pulled up beside Paul. "You drive safe, now. And tell your pops Jim Halliday sends his regards."

  With a sunny smile and a toot of his horn, he drove away.

  Paul tightened his grip on the wheel and butted it sharply with his head; the horn issued a strangled honk. His...fucking...father. He butted the wheel again and again; blood trickled down the sides of his nose. He jerked the car in gear and trod on the gas.

  A thump; a strangled yelp. The back tire skipped ever so slightly, then settled.

  He got out in time to see a little dog running frantic circles around its own head, which had been flattened under the Micra's rear wheel. A teacup Chihuahua; it must've gotten under the car while Paul and the cop were talking.

  He knelt on the street and looked around for its owner. The dog's legs got tangled up and its body tumbled over its own head in a maneuver circus acrobats call a "flic flac" and stayed that way.

  The streetla
mp's acid glow was stark, merciless. The dog was mangy- looking, with clumps of hair falling off; maybe it had been abandoned, maybe they weren't hot fashion items anymore. Its head was intact only in the way a light bulb wrapped in layers of masking tape before being stepped on could be considered intact. The dog's eyes were closed; what looked like burst bath beads were pinched between each eyelid. A quivering red worm poked from the soft beige skin of its pelvis.

  Paul's guilt curdled into rage when no owner appeared: what sort of asshole lets his little dog run around unattended? Rage soured into fear: what was he going to do? He sat there in his sheath of muscles wondering what the hell any of it mattered because he still felt terrified, weak, and worthless—he didn't even know what to do about a dead dog.

  The dog's body was as loose and warm as a boiled hen, its legs Tinker Toys wrapped in moleskin. He pulled gently but realized that if he pulled much harder he'd disconnect its head from the rest of it. Hunting through the trunk, he found an ice scraper and tried to lift it off the cement, but he was crying by then and the chest hitches made him so clumsy he ended up folding the dog's muzzle over its eyes, folding the poor thing's head like an omelet, and the desecration reduced him to racking sobs and his tears, pattering the cold street, were yellow like his skin, yellow from the poisons he'd shoveled into himself, the mashed-up fetal brains funneled into his veins, and then he realized he had nothing to put the dog into and found himself back in the car hunting under the seats until he located a crumpled Burger King bag.

  He returned to the dog, which he'd managed to scrape up without further damage. He dropped it in the bag and felt a sadness that bordered on the existential to discover that a dog's body could actually fit in a paper bag.

  The Chihuahua's collar lay on the street. Pink, no thicker than a shoestring. One of the tags, shaped like a bone, read KILLER. Another one said IF I AM LOST, PLEASE RETURN ME TO...followed by an address. He stared at the address for a long time before hurling the leash into the bordering yard. He rolled the bag closed like a sack lunch and set it on the passenger seat.

  Ten minutes later he was in the country. No streetlights, one headlight busted: he hurtled through the night in near-total blackness. Fruit fields rushed past as the car bounced along a corduroy road, wind howling through the windows and his mind out of sync, destination forgotten until like a desert heat-shimmer the winery appeared, dozens of security lamps fighting off the darkness. He sped through the parking lot and hit a speed bump and the muffler finally tore loose as the car crashed through a chain-link gate in a spray of blue sparks and shot into the grape fields, flying between the tight rows as a re-energized Paul Harris sang over the un-mufflered roar of the engine until an irrigation pipe rose up and he had just enough time to picture himself on a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of him before he hit the pipe dead-on, his body thrown against the windshield.

  He came to dazed but remarkably unhurt. The windshield was smashed, webbed, but still of one piece. A wave of cold nausea rolled through his chest and he jerked forward and vomited between his legs. The crash jarred the tape from the cassette player; silence except for a slow hiss of steam from the rad.

  The door was crimped shut. Paul wiped strings of bile swinging from his lips, grabbed the tire iron and paper bag, and clambered out the window.

  A clean, still night, dark though he could still make out the contours of the fringing hills. The Micra's hood was crushed halfway down the middle. The headlights nearly faced each other.

  From summer through early fall the pickers bunked in shacks on the easternmost edge of the fields. Small and spare—they reminded Paul of Boy Scout cabins. He made his way to the nearest one and used the tire iron to pry the padlock off. Meticulously winterized: mattresses wrapped in tarps, the stove's flue tightly stoppered.

  He stoked a fire in the potbellied stove. The pickers had left a box of canned food behind; Paul brushed away mouse turds and found a tin of sardines. His hands were grimed with blood and dog fur but he shoveled the fish into his mouth and licked the oil off his fingers. God, he'd never tasted anything so good. The warmth awakened pain he hadn't felt all night. Shoulders and arms and neck: every part of him ached.

  The shack creaked as fire-heat flexed the joists. He relished the isolation, miles and miles from another human being. He sensed he was on a collision course, though with whom or what he didn't yet know. There was no doubt about it. Something was approaching. The tracks he stood on vibrated with the force of it, yet he was powerless to move so much as a step.

  He stirred the fire and set the paper bag on a bed of embers and shut the grate. The shack filled with the stink of burning hair. Sizzlings and spatterings; a sharp pop.

  Paul lay on the planks and shut his eyes.

  He dreams he is in a cave with another man. There is a sense of being miles underground; above is a vast and empty darkness. He sits on a wooden chair, lashed at the wrists and ankles with copper wire. The other man is huge, three hundred fifty, four hundred pounds, not fat but thick-gutted; he's wearing a rubberized butcher's apron and a belt hung with delicate tools like dentist's instruments. He dances forward awkwardly, as though he isn't in control of his own limbs; the effect is shocking and awful because he is so large. "Are you scared?" The pitch of his voice is breathy, babyish. Paul says no and so the man plucks a sharp tool from his belt and reaches two fat sluglike fingers into Paul's mouth, taking hold of his tongue, and Paul bites the man's fingers only to find they're hard as wood, then the tool is in his mouth, the taste of metal at the back of his throat, and his tongue is severed deftly and the man stares at it with fleeting curiosity before casting it into the darkness. "Are you scared?" he asks. "Oo," says Paul. The man looks confused or even scared but he reaches to his belt and picks a long steel rod and, setting a hand on the side of Paul's head to steady it, pushes the rod into Paul's ear until a stereophonic crunch fills his skull, followed by silence. He does the other ear, too, until Paul can hear only a soft hiss inside his head, the sound you'd hear on a cassette tape between songs. The man's lips move: Are you scared? Paul shakes his head. The big man's look of confusion deepens as he unhooks a walnut-handled meat cleaver from his belt and hacks Paul's legs off with a few brisk strokes, sawing through strings of gristle, and there's no blood, not a single drop. The insides of Paul's thighs are full of dark coils, like age rings on a tree. Are you scared? Paul says he is not—and he is not, none of this scares him—and when the man shakes his head Paul sees there are filament-thin strings attached to the man's skull and arms and legs, to his fingers and every joint, strings threading up into the darkness, and the man is moving under their influence like a marionette in a dumb show. With a tool like a sharpened spoon he slits the skin around Paul's eyes and draws Paul's head down until his eyes fall from their sockets and Paul feels something for the first time—a bracing icy coldness all along his optic nerves—and just before the man snips the nerves with a pair of silver scissors Paul sees his own fingers, sees the thin black threads tied around each fingertip moving the huge man to his bidding. The world goes black and though he cannot see the man's mouth he knows what words are being spoken because he is making the man say them, and his answer is unflinching: No, No, No, No, No ...

  Paul awoke in the shack. Cold and dark, the fire dead. When he tried to sit up, fishhook spiders seized his spine; he gasped and curled up again. Parts of his body hurt so badly he wondered if they were ruptured. He dragged himself to the stove and hugged its cast-iron belly, grateful for the warmth.

  A hesitant edge of light skirted the hills to the east. Clutching the sardine tin into which he'd swept the fire's ashes he made his way up the nearest rise. Dawn broke over Lake Ontario, tinting gold the undersides of low-lying clouds. The sun provided no warmth yet was beautiful in a way he could not recall ever seeing; light clung to frost- glazed pussy willows as it poured over the flattened grass. Were he a painter, he might have spent his whole life in search of such a scene.

  The lake was a f
ew miles away, and while the possibility of ashes traveling quite that far was remote, he figured, Why not? But the wind shifted when he shook the tin and the ashes blew back into his face, up his nose and into his mouth. He sneezed and spat dirty gray gobs, shaking his head at this dismal failure. Then he saw that some ashes were still stuck to the oil at the bottom of the sardine tin and resolved that they would receive a proper burial.

  He set off across the plateau, away from the winery, down toward the lake.

  Chapter 9

  Fight night.

  Tommy Tully bounded down the stairs into the kitchen, pushing off the bottom stair to glide awkwardly across the worn linoleum in his sock feet. Reuben and Rob sat at the kitchen table. The black valise lay open at Reuben's elbow; he inspected rolls of gauze and white tape, strips of sponge and vials of adrenaline chloride. Rob sat with a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a cup of lemon tea.

  Tommy stalked over to the Amana fridge and threw jabs at its white unmoving bulk. He hooked to the icebox, puffing through his nose, "Yip! Bing! Thwack!" shuffling his feet Muhammad Ali style, "Biff, Bing, Pow!" raising his arms, dancing, grinning. "You better check the warranty, 'cause the fridge is toast!'

  "Stop clowning," said Reuben.

  Tommy grabbed a loaf of his beloved Wonder Bread off the counter and hefted it above his head like a trophy. "I dedicate this win to

  Gummy Sue and Stinky Mulligan and ol' Armless Joe down at the VFW hall—we did it, guys!"

  Rob found a wooden soup spoon and put it to his uncle's mouth, assuming the folksy bearing of an interviewer. "Gee golly, Tom Tully, that was some fight. You and the Fridge exchanged heated pre-fight words—you remarked that the Fridge didn't have the legs to make it through the late rounds. The prediction seems to have rung true."

  Tommy said, "First of all I'd like to thank God almighty, without whom no things are possible. The Fridge put up a hell of a fight. I respect the Fridge as a fighter. But this was Tom Tully's night." He hugged the loaf of bread to his chest. "If the Fridge wants a rematch, okay, fine, but it'll have to get in line. The Stove's my mandatory challenger, and the Toaster Oven's been flapping its gums. Tom Tully don't duck no appliance! None!"