Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  “Mmh,” it murmured beside him. “You think I’m gonna buy that?” it said.

  The voice crouched next to Messenger. Its heavy, putrid breath moved down like a heavy mist, and Messenger felt like he had to cover his mouth with both hands not to vomit.

  “You think I’m gonna buy that?” it said. “He barely touched you… and you’re down? Knocked out?”

  Messenger was grabbed by the shoulder and pulled up. He remembered how his knees had felt, and he now felt it once more, and he swayed for a moment, uncontrollably, and it was as if he could hear a very distant laugh from very distant people. He tried speaking, not knowing who to face, and so he just kept swaying and swaying. A pair of hands grabbed him by the shoulders, and Messenger was now staring into a pair of cold, colorless eyes.

  “He won, dad,” mumbled Messenger. His one eye was beginning to swell, and the many cuts on his one cheek had formed together into one big, pumping wound. “He punched me, and I’m down.”

  “What the hell are you on about?” asked De Gracy. He shook up Messenger. “He almost won, but you got up, and the round’s over. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I…” said Messenger while trying to focus on understanding De Gracy’s words. He saw Holden in the opposite corner, who was still panting, looking tired, but with a wide smirk painted all across his cut-up face.

  “He beat you down, but then you got up again. You swayed a bit, but he couldn’t get any more hits in on you.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” said Messenger, moistening his lips with his tongue. “I know, I know…”

  “Sure as hell don’t look like it. Now, only a few rounds left,” said De Gracy,” and if I were you, I’d try to go for the long haul. Just live through all the rounds.”

  Messenger nodded, but he hadn’t heard a word.

  “I got it,” he said, and De Gracy leaved him alone.

  As soon as the next round commenced, the two fighters moved in close to the center of the ring, only putting in a few weak punches at one another. Messenger tried placing some blows under Holden’s parades, aiming at the sides of his stomach, but he was only able to graze the tip of Holden’s elbows. Holden, however, was lunging his entire upper torso at Messenger, hoping to get some quick punches in that way, but his strategy wasn’t good either, and the whole match seemed entirely diluted. The only sign of any fury, of any bestial tenacity at all, was in the eyes of the two of them and in the way they leered at each other; and it was in the gulf of Holden’s intense, blue eyes that Messenger once more saw the soft contours of the little child. The little boy was crying, and the voice was back, yelling at Messenger.

  “One of you has to win!” it said, and Messenger closed in on the boy. “If you wanna be something in this life, you have to win!”

  The boy was still crying, and Messenger threw in a punch that hit him right in the face. The boy squealed.

  “That’s it!” said the voice. “Like that!”

  The barrage of blows and fury, the sounds of which made the entire Pit quiver and shake with alarming noises of euphoria and malicious glee, was unlike any that these spectators had ever seen. Paul ‘The Messenger’ was driving punches in left and right, seemingly ignoring Holden’s desperate tries to fend off the many attacks; it was as if Messenger’s fists just flew through his parades like two finely edged scythes, searing through his defenses.

  “More, more!” roared the voice, and Messenger continued his aggression. His eyes were closed, and for every punch he threw, he desperately wished for none of the blows to happen, but the v oice was persistent, and he kept hearing it again and again, and it was only calling for more strikes, and it was coarse to the ears, and it was disgusting, and Messenger secretly cried.

  Holden’s bloody face flew into the ropes and hit one of the corner posts. He collapsed onto the floor, battered and unmoving, but Messenger continued to punch him.

  “Hey Messenger, what the hell?!” cried De Gracy. He hurried in and grabbed Messenger, who quickly unshackled himself, sending De Gracy into the ropes like a ragdoll. Messenger then took off his one glove, and, with his bare, glowing fist, he started flailing down on Holden’s face, the crunching sound of every punch resounding throughout the Pit, bone grinding bone.

  “More, more, more, more!” it screamed inside Messenger’s head, and he continued to hit, and he continued to punch, and he closed his eyes, and his fist was clenched so hard that his veins popped like ridges threatening to burst. But then, like a buoy at sea in the eyes of a drowning man, suddenly glinting in the dark, surfacing like a little white light inside of Messenger’s head, another voice called, but this voice was calm and with intent.

  “Paul,” it simply said.

  Messenger held his hand, slowly letting it drop down to his knee.

  “Paul,” said Stone as he walked through the crowd and up through the ropes. “Paul, stop.”

  Messenger started nodding frantically. He looked down at Holden’s lifeless face, but he didn’t see the child anymore, and he realized the silence that had entered his mind.

  “De Gracy! Get him out of here,” said Stone and pointed at Holden. He grabbed Messenger by the arm and pulled him up. Messenger put a hand across his face. Some of the already dried blood started flowing anew from the tears that were squeezed through his fingers.

  “Out of here, now!” said Stone at the crowd.

  “Stone, we might as well—“

  “I want them out of here, now! And I said to get him out of the ring!”

  Messenger collapsed, but Stone still had a firm grip around his arm.

  “Get up,” he whispered.

  Messenger tightened the clasp around his face, and his hand was like the tight steel of a knight’s visor.

  “Get up,” repeated Stone, and there, among the fleeting flood of the many people that were leaving and De Gracy carrying Holden down, Messenger stood, let his hand fall from his face, and left the ring.

  Through the slit that his one eye had become, Messenger couldn’t well see how the tiles on the opposite wall of the locker room were separated, and so they appeared like one big, white wall. He tried rubbing the wound, putting pressure on it, but it was impossible to gain any focus. He was holding a big, cool towel to the other side of his face. Stone was sitting next to him on the bench. He had taken off his coat.

  “It looks like a cloud,” said Messenger, hinting at the wall in front of him. “Like one big cloud.”

  Stone slowly shook his head and didn’t comment on anything Messenger said at first.

  “You’d think I’d see better, with my eye squinting like this, but I don’t see shit,” said Messenger, grinning. “I saw you took off your coat, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do that. Always with the fucking coat.”

  They were both quiet for a while after that. The locker room was moist and cold, the air stagnant with friction, running across Messenger's bare chest like a vibrating chain.

  “When I saw Eckleburg shoot himself…” said Stone. “…I was sure that no one would ever get hurt around me again. I’ve told myself that so many times… but something always comes up. I knew you’d be trouble. I’ve always known that, even before what happened at Bishop's mansion, I’ve always known. And then I saw you box for the first time, and I knew I wanted you in the Pit, and we signed you… Watching you fight…. it was like watching a locomotive,” said Stone. “You had this… you had like this fire inside of you, this heap of burning coal that kept you warm and going, kept you sharp. It heated you up to the very tips of your fingers, and then BAM!” Stone swung a right hook into the air. “Someone else got to feel that heat. Ever since then, ever since I saw your first knockout, I knew you’d be trouble.”

  “Have I been trouble?” asked Messenger.

  “All the time since, and yet not before today. The day you let yourself be knocked out on purpose, I must admit it felt like someone was tearing at me and my body, but today… what I saw you do to that kid… I knew I shouldn’t have
arranged the fight.”

  “Holden provoked me,” said Messenger. “He--”

  “I don’t care,” said Stone calmly. “I don’t care what he did, because after that, after… God damn it!” roared Stone and stood. “What the hell were you thinking?! Mauling someone like that in there. What were you thinking?”

  Messenger dropped the towel from his face and looked up at Stone. “My brother…” he said, his lips quivering.

  “What?”

  Messenger swallowed. “I was thinking about my brother. You just asked…” he snorted, interrupting himself, not knowing if he should continue what he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop. “You just asked what I was thinking.”

  Stone sat down. He looked flabbergasted.

  “I didn’t know you have a brother,” he said. “Where’s--”

  “He’s dead,” said Messenger. “He died long ago.” Messenger felt he needed time to think, as if something inside of him had been opened and he needed some cause, any cause, to let it out for the first time in his life. “Do you remember,” he started, “that night when you told us all about your parents and about how--”

  “Yes,” added Stone quickly, as if he feared to hear the ending of Messenger’s sentence. “I remember.”

  “I actually went home and thought about it, and… I thought about how lucky you were to be able to tell something like that, and that you had someone to tell it to, and no one laughed and no one made fun, and no one asked about anything.”

  “Paul, I was drunk then. I almost don’t remember telling anything. I didn’t mean to tell anyone anything. ”

  “I don’t care. I just remember thinking how I owed you something for knowing that about you, you know?”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to come clean to me. I don’t need to know the--”

  “My brother’s name was John,” said Messenger.

  “Like I said, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Yeah, well now I want you to know. I’ve been reminded of him ever since we were at the mansion, and we were digging and… I mean, I’ve always thought about him, but this last month I’ve been feeling like he was there with me, and his name keeps coming up in my head, you know? John, John, John, John.” Messenger bowed his head and looked at the floor. ”My… my father, he was a boxer too, and he’d make us fight each other when we were very small. Sometimes he’d even make us fight over scraps of food, and we were often hungry, so we went at it, but one day…” Messenger squinted at the wall ahead, but removing the towel hadn’t erased the milky haze of clouds that swam across his vision. He felt his other eye, now completely blocked of sight, the flesh of his eyelids clasped together as if glued. He squinted some more, but the wall remained nothing more than a blurry cloud to him, like a slice of heaven that someone wanted him to see. His lips were still quivering as he talked, his voice shaking and raspy, leaving some of his words poorly spoken and unfinished.

  “One day he made us fight, and we didn’t really want to, and he told us to do it, and that the world wasn’t a place for losers. I punched John, and I secretly whispered to him that he should punch me some more, and he did, and I faked a knockout, but he saw right through it. He put his foot on my neck, right here, and said that if I didn’t get up and finish it that I’d end up like my ‘whore mother, who had to suck cock to keep living her whore life.’ I stood up, and I was furious, but not at John, but there stood John, and John was… John wasn’t furious, and…”

  “You don’t have to tell me anymore, Paul,” said Stone.

  “I took his body to the cemetery that evening and buried it, right behind a little crack in the wall.”

  A brief pause. The pipes from within the walls rustled with the water that rushed through them.

  “I’m glad you told me that,” said Stone. “I guess there’s always a reason why people tell each other the things they do.”

  Messenger nodded, oddly unaffected by his own story.

  “What was your reason then?” he asked softly.

  “I told you, I didn’t have any. I wasn’t myself that night, and I’m not sure you’re yourself now either, but…”

  Stone stopped to clear his throat. “I think of myself as an old man. Not old in the way that my bones ache, or that I’m tired all the time. I’m just afraid that death is always too close for me to ever live. It’s like a curse of living in the now. I need substitutes for things that every other Joe out there takes in vain, and… that’s what makes me so angry because of all of this, because of you, when I see you do things like that. You could have killed him, Paul!”

  “I didn’t try to kill him.”

  “Oh no? Because you could have fooled me, and De Gracy, and the almost hundred people out there. They thought they were witnessing an execution for crying out loud.”

  “Look, I know it must’ve looked bad, but I couldn’t help it.”

  “You could’ve helped it plenty. You think I’ve never been in a fight, huh? You think I never felt the urge to off someone, beat them to a pulp? Well I had, but I never let the urge get the better of me. Never killed a man in my life.”

  Messenger breathed heavily, the air being forced through his flaring nostrils as his heart raced his lungs. He stood up and crossed a few benches.

  “I just told you that I killed my own brother!” he screamed, smashing his already bruised foot into one of the benches. “And you give me shit like that?! As if I need your life stories to know when not to kill a man, is that it? Well, I’ve killed worse, and you’ve seen it, because you were there too.” Messenger paced back and forth. He suppressed his limp, but the pain was still traveling like ripples in his body and out through his mouth in quick, short bursts of dull, hoarse moans. “Remember the kid I snubbed, Stone? There, right there in the dark. With the monkey wrench, you remember? The blonde one, the first one? Top of the stairs, BAM!”

  Stone stood up, picked up his coat and put it on.

  “Do you even remember any of it?” continued Messenger, clenching his teeth in rage. “Were you even the hell there, you piece of--”

  “I was there!” roared Stone. “Don’t you dare tell me I wasn’t there.”

  “You’re just lucky De Gracy was there, ‘cause otherwise, you’d--”

  Stone rushed towards Messenger. He grabbed him, and pushed him up against the wall.

  “You think I’m the lucky one?” he sneered. ”You think that I was any less there than any of you? De Gracy and any one of you would be nothing if you didn’t have me. See all this? See it? It’s here because I made it happen.” Stone pushed his elbow up against Messenger’s neck and held firm. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be stealing from people down at the railroad station. Grundy would be cleaning the streets, people yelling at him, spitting him in the face. Eckleburg would be stuck at any office, struggling to feed his family with the pathetic wages that he’d desperately accept, and De Gracy would… De Gracy…”

  Stone loosened his grip a little.

  “You know what else?” said Messenger. He wrestled free from Stone and stepped away a few feet. “Eckleburg would be alive. Yeah, his wife would be fucking the priest, and yeah they would be poor, but they’d still be alive. Death might be close to you, Stone, breathing into your face like a devil, but you’re throwing and shoving everyone but yourself into it. Pile enough people in front of yourself and just escape, right?”

  Stone’s body was shaking rapidly, and his eyes were on fire, beaming with a poisonous gaze. Messenger shook his head and limped towards the door, shaking his head, and for a moment he didn’t feel any pain. Any pain at all.

  CHAPTER 17

  The bright and colorful lights of the carnival seemed alien in the black and dense surroundings of the Plissbury docks. The evening air between the stands was filled with children’s joyful screams and the sticky smell of all kinds of sweets melting together. In the middle of the lot the citizens of Plissbury had erected a tall Ferris wheel, and it was slowly rotating, stopping every o
nce in a while to let people on and off, letting the top basket hang close to the night sky.

  Noah Stone and Julia Sedgewick were walking between the stands, maneuvering through the throng of uncontrolled kids, and sometimes a group of people would go in between them, separating them for several yards before they could walk next to one another again.

  “Maybe,” said Julia, “if we held hands, then those rude people wouldn’t just separate us like that.”

  Stone tried pulling a smile. He gave Julia his hand, and she wrapped her soft, pale fingers around it.

  “What’s the matter?” she then asked. “You look so sad tonight.”

  “It’s nothing, really,” lied Stone. “Work wasn’t exactly easy this week.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “I don’t really wanna talk about it.”

  “Why not? I don’t even know what it is you do, so you could start by telling me that.”

  “Really, it doesn’t matter. I just want to have a nice time with you, that’s all.”

  “Ok then,” she said.

  Stone looked at Julia and noticed that she was nonchalantly facing the other way, bobbing her head in a slow rhythm, and he couldn’t decipher if she was faking offense or not. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t say anything.

  “OK,” sighed Stone. “I work at a place that arranges boxing matches. I’m one of the managers there, and I had an argument with one of the young boxers, our main talent.”

  “See, was that hard?” said Julia. “I really don’t understand why you didn’t tell me sooner. That sounds like a perfectly decent occupation. And a perfectly good reason to be upset.”

  “No, well, I’m kind of private when it comes to things like that.”