The Fighter

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.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m only saying it doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Suffering for the sake of suffering — we didn’t raise you Catholic, did we? And you could have gone your own way at any time, but you were scared to. Like you said.”

“That’s true.”

“Scared of what, Paul?”

“Of everything.”

“And after all this what’s really changed?”

“Everything else.”

“Has it?” Jack slid the money across the desk; he pushed down on the stack with his fingertips, forcing Paul to pull it from under them. “Strikes me as a pretty familiar dynamic.”

“This is the last time. And I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry about it. This isn’t a loan.”

Jack had the air of a man who’d come to an awful realization: that nothing he might do for his son, here and now or tomorrow or the next day, would really matter.

The realization that a man could spend his whole life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, but nothing would ever change. And finally, the understanding that all human beings — even fathers, even sons — were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by one inch the terrible precision of their journeys.

“I’ll need my passport,” said Paul. “And something to wear.”

“Your mother holds on to passports. In her files upstairs.”

“I don’t want to wake her.”

“Your mom,” he said, “isn’t living with me right now. This… what’s been happening… hasn’t been easy on her.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be done for it now. She’ll be fine — your mom’s a strong woman.”

Jack led Paul upstairs. Signs of neglect abounded: a collection of neckties looped around the banister, a stack of dirty dishes at the top of the stairs.

“Maid’s got the week off,” he joked.

The bedroom was a pigsty. Heaps of soiled clothes. Greasy Chinese takeout boxes.

Jack hunted through Barb’s dresser, found Paul’s passport, and flipped it to him. He snapped on a light in the walk-in closet and found something to fit Paul.

“Might be the first suit I ever bought.” Jack held it up: cream-toned polyester with wide, winglike lapels, a black open-throated shirt, white vest, white pants. The sort of thing John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever.

“I think it’s what they call vintage.” Jack ran his finger down a lapel, yanked it back as though cut. “Get a load of those flares — sharp.”

“It’s spiffy,” Paul said. “I’ve got to go, Dad.”

“Places to go, people to see, uh? Can I ask you something, Paul? Was I… your mom and me…. were we…?”

“Whatever you may think, none of it is your fault. I don’t blame you for any of this, and I don’t think there’s anything you could have done to stop it. I am what I am because I made myself so. You did the best you could with me and that’s all I could have ever asked. I have no excuses for what I am or what I’ve done or what I’ve put you through.”

“Need to borrow a car?”

“That would help.”

“You know where the keys are. Can’t promise I won’t call the cops the second you’re gone to report it stolen.”

“You can’t save me, Dad.”

“And I know that, son.”