The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  The next punch struck him square in the face and skidded him back on his heels. He took a knee, balancing on his knuckles; then, with a great shuddering breath, he stumbled in Rob's direction again.

  He swung and missed as another blow spiked the knot of nerves where his jawbone met his skull and shocked the upper left half of his body into mute numbness. Another blow, then another and another, so fast his body could register the pain only after the fact, the way you'll hear the crash of thunder moments after lightning has split the sky. He took a murderous shot in the gut and his bowels let go with a mordant note like the groan of a ship's hull. "You reeking prick!" someone yelled and Paul was surprised at how quickly he'd moved beyond frustration or shame...

  …as Rob's rage built, cyclical and combustive, firing like the pistons of a supercharged engine. The thing facing him was nothing but a bag of skin and bone and gristle and blood and Rob wanted to inflict as much damage upon it as was humanly possible—as was inhumanly possible—smash and bash and crush and wreck until nothing of value remained.

  The sack of meat shambled forward. Rob rained blows upon it. The air shimmered with blood. A few spectators looked away...

  . . . Paul came on awkwardly. Equilibrium shot, he moved as though his knees and hips were packed with rusted ball bearings. He couldn't tell if he was smiling. He sort of hoped he was.

  Rob's fist found his jaw and a cherry bomb exploded in the tin cup of Paul's skull. Warmth ran down the inside of his leg and he had no idea what it was but still it was oddly comforting. He was hit again and orange lights burned like sunspots before his eyes, initiating wild riots in his head until one of these spots mushroomed, bright as an A-bomb, blinding and beautiful and so incredibly alive and as he fell a claustrophobic blackness replaced that light, the airless dark of a deep sea cavern, then he came to on a bale of hay with spring stars shining through holes in the barn roof.

  Lou's face swam above him. His features were a mask of wild panic. His mouth formed words but Paul couldn't hear anything on account of the cycling roar that filled his skull.

  Lou started waving his arms. "No," Paul said, though he couldn't hear his own voice. Lou's lips moved; he might have been saying Crying blood. "Don't care." Lou's lips moved again: Skull filling with blood.

  "Don't care."

  Shit yourself—

  "Don't care."

  Die here—

  "Don't ..." Spit a sac of blood."...care." "This guy ..." Fritzie was baffled. "I never seen anything like it. What is that guy anymore—a punching bag, that's it."

  "He's got to quit," Rob said. "He's got to cry uncle."

  "He's not gonna do that. There's something the matter with him."

  "Then we keep going."

  "And you're sure you want to? Don't exactly look it." Fritzie wiped under Rob's eye. "That's not sweat."

  Rob swiped his cheeks furiously. "Tell someone to ring the bell."

  A profound sense of peace settled over Paul. The workings of his mind flattened out; his thoughts disintegrated. Like he was on a plane on a clear cloudless day, staring out the porthole window as earth ceded to ocean: the houses and roads and buildings, the patchwork quilt of farmers' fields, all that variation giving way to a smooth blanket of water—green closest to shore, the white curls of Queen Anne's lace turning to deepest blue and, where the water ran deepest, flat ongoing black ...

  ...while Rob's was consumed with visions of slaughter. His hands felt hardened, lumps of rock, and his wish was to drive them into Paul's face, across the bridge of his nose or into his mouth, dislodge the rest of his teeth and slam his fist, the whole of it, deep into Paul's mouth, down his throat, choking him, or instead cleave his skull, crack it open like a fleshy nut and destroy the core of his brain. To step through those barn doors was to enter a realm of violent imperatives and so he let his fists go, beating a merciless tattoo on this creature who stared balefully with his blood-filled eyeball ...

  ... Paul could no longer feel his arms or legs. He felt isolated from the fight: as though another man was taking the punishment while he stood nearby, watching. He saw two men in a series of frozen moments, the sort of stylized postures glimpsed in ancient Greek friezes. It resembled less a fight than an aggressive coupling, yet there was an odd deference: May I place my hand here? May I set my leg here, between yours? May I, May I, May I and their bodies melding, fists enveloped by the other's chest or face, arms and legs and heads uniting, flesh bonding until they became a united whole, this faceless sexless creature that might haunt a lunatic's dreams ...

  ...until a hard stroke finally sent Paul to one knee. He could not see the boards under his feet. Blood dripped from his face, dripped from all parts of him. He raised one hand, that hand trembling uncontrollably, and touched his face. He felt something beneath the skin, incredibly hard. Harder than bone, even. He pushed three fingers deep into the most gaping wound and touched these alien contours. New ridges and planes that did not feel human—not entirely so. If his body were to be hit hard enough, long enough, if it absorbed enough punishment, maybe this soft outer layer would slough away to reveal whatever lay beneath. Imagine a cocoon, a pupating bug. The prospect entombed itself in his mind. If he could just weather the storm he would emerge as something infinitely stronger, harder, more meaningful. No weakness, no fear, no misery or rupture or death.

  Paul came forward again, not protecting himself at all, walking straight into punches. The smack of meat on bone snapped off the high wooden beams and a queasy fan yelled, "Stop it. God, just ... stop" The two men in the ring heard nothing: not the fans, not the lick of fists or the sound of their own breathing. For a crazed instant Paul wanted to simply touch Rob, to hold and breathe against him, to taste his wounds and know his skin.

  And when neither man could punch anymore they stood at arm's length, strength sapped, holding on to each other: from a distance, it looked as though Rob was teaching Paul how to dance a slow waltz.

  Paul's mouth opened. A single word passed over his broken lips:

  "Please ..."

  Rob did not understand what he was asking.

  Was it:

  Please, stop.

  Or:

  Please, more.

  Paul's eyes rolled back in his head as he slipped through Rob's arms, falling senselessly the way a toppled mannequin falls. Rob made an instinctive grab for him, but Paid was too bloody and Rob too exhausted and so he simply fell.

  The bell did not ring; there was no need. Men climbed over the bales and bent over the stricken fighter with something approaching reverence. When they rolled Paul over, the shocking bloody imprint of his face remained on the boards. He was unconscious but his eyes were wide open. Someone might have placed two fingers upon his lids and drawn them shut but nobody did.

  Lou lifted Paul's head and hooked his hands under his armpits.

  "Careful," he instructed Fritzie, who'd taken hold of Paul's heels. "Get him out to my car."

  The night was still. A low white fog rolled across the fields, thickening toward the tree line. Rob moved over sedge grass stamped flat by cattle hooves. His fury had evaporated as rapidly as it had risen, and in its place remained sickness and self-loathing. He was horrified by his actions—the savagery of them. He'd seen the bloody imprint of Paul's face stamped on the raw pine boards. The sight had provided no solace or peace, only emptiness and desolation more incurable than he'd ever known.

  A fine cool night and Rob walked between heads of cattle, their heaving flanks, the pungent animal smell of them. He had glimpsed in himself a malice of purpose he'd never known and it terrified him. I'll kill him. It's what he wants.

  The fence post was the circumference of a dinner plate. Rotting at the top, slim wooden stalactites he could snap off with a finger, but going solid toward the middle. Moonlight winked off the rusted points of barbed wire twined around it.

  Rob asked himself: Can I break them all?

  The first punch was tentative: it wasn't the pain that frightened him,
but the finality of his actions. The next punch was harder; the post vibrated like a tuning fork. Wire tore skin. He threw his fists with as much venom as he could summon, dug his feet into the cold earth. The crisp tok tok tok of fist on wood gave way to mushier, meatier sounds until at some point his right hand—the dynamite right, his father called it—crumpled, delicate jigsaw bones shattering, and though the pain left him gagging he did not stop. His hands became a blur of ever-expanding and ever-darkening red, blood in the air, blood and skin stuck to the post and the bones of his left hand splintering with a tensile shriek and bone visible now, thin glistening shards jutting through sheared flesh, but he kept hurling them.

  He dropped to his knees as the sound of his blows echoed across the field. His head rested against the post. The cool wood felt so good on his skin. His hands looked like bags of suet tied to the ends of his wrists. A few fingers hung on strips of skin at lewd angles. Rob curled them under his chin and cried. Softly at first, then with building intensity.

  Fritzie found him hunched there. "We loaded that guy into the car. He's beat up pretty bad, but he'll be okay."

  Rob's chest hitched; his body shook. Fritzie knelt beside him.

  "What's the matter, Robbie?"

  Rob uttered a wail of such resonant grief that it shocked Fritzie. Rob kept his broken hands curled under his chin: Fritzie could not see what he had done and so could find no sense in his despair.

  "The hell's the matter with you?" Fritzie was truly perplexed. "You won, Robbie. For Christ's sake, you won."

  Chapter 13

  Lou swung onto Highway 406 and exited off Geneva Street. He wound the car down Queenston, through staggered sets of stoplights and into the Emerg drop-off at St. Catharines General.

  "Hey," he said. "Hey, man."

  Paul cracked his good eye, saw the well-lit bay and the glowing red cross above the sliding glass doors. "No."

  "Be sensible. You need stitches—your face is....it's fucked up."

  "No...hospital."

  "Fine, if you want to be an idiot. But we are doing something about those cuts."

  Lou parked in a shadowed alcove near some medical waste bins. He opened his medic's kit and pulled out a roll of Steri-Strip, a 24 mm surgical needle, two packs of Ethicon braided sutures, and a vial of high-viscosity Dermabond.

  "Never met a fighter more obstinate." He cut lengths of Steri-Strip and stuck them to the dashboard. "I got no anesthetic, either—they only give that stuff to, y'know, licensed practitioners, the type you'd find twenty feet back that way."

  Lou gripped Paul's chin and angled his face into the dome light. Pinching split lips of meat together, he moved the needle through Paul's cheek. Fresh blood rolled down Paul's chest and onto the upholstery.

  When the gashes were closed he ran beads of Dermabond over them; the torn flesh met in thin red crescents, like the stitching on a pocket. They would scar up, but Paul would never look quite right again. His face was pulled out of shape, skin tight in some places and slack in others.

  Lou said, "Should I take you home?"

  "Where's that?"

  Lou sighed, said, "So where am I taking you?"

  "I don't care."

  Lou put the Steri-Strip and Dermabond away. The air between them was thick and warm like in a tent.

  "I was riding my bike home one time," said Lou. "This was as a kid. I saw this accident: a pickup truck hauling one of those mobile stables or whatever—those things you truck livestock around in. Both were smashed up. It was late, but a few cars had pulled over. There was a horse; must've been riding in the stable when it crashed. One of its legs was broken and almost torn off. It moved down the embankment between the trees and it stood there. People went to their cars and found whatever—chips and crackers, sugar packets, apples—and crept after the horse, making the stupid sort of noises people make." Lou made a clicking sound with his tongue: cluk cluk cluk. "But when they got close, the horse would bolt. This kept on for some time: the pack creeping after the horse and the horse bolting, busted leg swinging. I was young, but even then I knew what it wanted. Do you know what that was?"

  "Don't tell me," Paul croaked. "That little horse grew up to become...Black Beauty."

  "That horse didn't want to live anymore. Not all creatures want to die in the light, surrounded by friends and loved ones. Some just want to crawl into a dark quiet space away from everyone and die alone."

  "Do you think you're being subtle?"

  Lou turned the key and gunned the engine. "I don't want to see you around my gym again, Paul. You're not welcome anymore."

  Jack Harris's study was a large oak-paneled chamber off the sunroom. It was furnished according to a clichéd Better Homes and Gardens ideal: a huge mahogany desk, bookshelves lined with imposing hardcovers, a pipe rack without a single pipe—bizarre, as his father didn't smoke. As a kid, Paul once spent the better part of an afternoon tilting the spines of each and every book, convinced one would spring a door leading to a hidden chamber; his childish suspicion had been that his dad was a superhero. Now Paul moved as quietly as possible, not wanting to wake his parents; he was shirtless and bloody, having nearly impaled himself while scaling the estate's spiked wrought-iron fence.

  The safe was hidden behind a Robert Bateman painting. The combination was Paul's birthday: 07-22-79. He'd looted it many times, figuring his father would never know—though of course he had, just as he had known about his drunken forays in the winery and a dozen other indiscretions.

  The light snapped on. His father stood in the doorway in a brown housecoat.

  "What are you doing?"

  "What's it look like?"

  "Like you're stealing." "Better call the cops."

  "Don't think I won't."

  Paul turned to face his father. Jack Harris recoiled at the sight. That face—like a rotted mummy risen from its sarcophagus.

  Jack walked past his son and sat in the overstuffed chair behind the desk. Whoever had stitched his child possessed no more skill than a deli butcher. When he could not look anymore he laid his arms on the desk and rested his head upon them.

  "We can't do this anymore."

  Paul's knees buckled; his body slid down the wall until his butt hit the carpet. The study was warm and smelled of his father. He could fall asleep right here.

  "This whole situation is destroying us, Paul. Your mom and me. And I know it's not your intent—maybe you think what you're doing is justified or that you have no other option. But we can't go down this road anymore."

  "You shouldn't feel that way, Dad. Not your fault."

  When Jack looked up, his eyes were swollen but he wasn't crying. "Oh, no—whose fault is it, then? It's never been my practice to pass the buck, but at least it's easier than admitting you fucked up your son's life."

  Paul dearly wished he could somehow console his father but the answer was too big and required too much of him so he said nothing.

  "At first I was scared for you," Jack said. "Now I'm scared of you. Never thought I'd be scared of my own kid."

  "The point was for me to stop being scared."

  Jack nodded, as though this answer at least made sense to him. "The world is hall of hard men—a lot harder than you'll ever be. And you're bound to run across a truly hard man—then what?" When Paul did not reply, Jack said, "It's like anything else in life: a ladder, but those rungs, they keep going up. You'll never find any peace until you come to grips with your place on it, or else kill yourself trying to climb to the top."

  "I need money," Paul said flatly.

  Jack rose from his chair and spun the safe's dial. He grabbed two stacks of bills and tossed them on the desk.

  "Get on up," he told Paul. "Take a seat."

  Paul dragged himself up and sat in the chair opposite his father. Jack poured scotches from a decanter and set one in front of his son. Scotch dribbled down Paul's split lips onto his chest.

  The money lay on the desk between them. Two crisp stacks. Jack sipped his drink, tapped the
crystal rim against his teeth.

  "Ten thousand enough?"

  "It'll do."

  A few years ago a worker's arm had been torn off by a tilling machine. By the time Paul and his father arrived on the scene the young worker was lying on earth gone dark with blood. Jack had made a tourniquet of his belt and held the man until medics arrived. He'd saved the man's life—and yet Paul never forgot that look on his face. Under the obvious care and worry, he'd glimpsed a mind calculating how this accident might affect his enterprise. A look of bottom-line pragmatism.

  And was that same pragmatism at work now? Paul thought of how lizards will sever their own tails when attacked, forfeiting some vital part of themselves in order to survive.

  "You know, I have to laugh," Jack said, "because in a lot of ways you're a better man than you were. I'm sitting here looking at you all... mulched, and still I think that. Not that you were ever a bad kid. Ineffective, I'd say. But then I looked at your buddies, sons of guys I did business with, and you all sort of came off that way. You weren't ahead of the curve, or behind it. You were just..."

  "One of the pack."

  "I guess as much as you want your kid to distinguish himself, you're happy enough to see he's the same as everyone else."

  Jack poured another scotch. Paul noted the sunken bags under his father's eyes and a three-day beard furring his jowls. "I don't guess you realize how..." Jack searched for the right word."... how insulting all of this is, do you?"

  "Insulting to who?"

  "To me. To every man who goes down the traditional path."

  "That's not the point at all—"

  Jack cut him short. "You're saying the only way to be a man is your way. Throw yourself into a meat grinder and claw your way out. You're saying my way of being a man—work a steady job, support a wife, a kid, try to carve out a life for all of us—you're saying it's useless and proves nothing."