The Fighter

Chapter 2

Paul dreamed he was lying facedown in stinking mud. He rolled to a sitting position and saw he was in a bunker. He wore a cheap suit and shiny loafers and cufflinks shaped like golf balls. A decapitated head sat on a pole jabbed into the mud; the head was rotted or badly burned and a pair of novelty sunglasses covered its eyes. He peeked over the bunker and saw a field burst apart by artillery shells. Everything was blown through with smoke, but he could make out shapes draped over the razor wire and huge birds with boiled-looking heads pecking at the shapes. He was numb and sore and wanted to puke. A man stepped from the shadows and relief washed over him — it was John Wayne. The Duke wore a flak jacket and pisscutter helmet; a cigar was stuck in the side of his mouth.

“We’re going over the top. You with us, dogface?” Paul’s body went rigid. His nuts sucked into his abdomen like a pair of yo-yos up their strings.

“No, I have a… business lunch.” The Duke got salty. “We got a war to win, peckerwood.”

“I’d love to make a charitable donation,” Paul assured him. The Duke looked like he was staring at a piece of ambulatory dogshit. Paul got scared again. “Is there an orphan I could tend to,” he asked, “one who’s been wounded by shrapnel?” The Duke stuck his chin out and glared with dull disdain. He pulled a pistol from his holster and shoved Paul into a corner and told him to face it. That’s when Paul saw dozens of corpses stacked atop one another by the other wall; they all wore suits and their hands were clean and soft and they had very nice hair. Each had a frosted hole in the perfect center of his forehead. “Can’t trust a man who won’t fight,” the Duke said without much emotion. “This is a mercy.”

When the gun barrel pressed to the back of his skull, Paul woke up with a jerk.

Frail angles of rust-colored light fell through the Venetian blinds to touch Paul’s face. His head felt broken and weak, like it’d been smashed open in the night and its contents spilled over the pillow. His mouth felt blowtorched and the tendons of his neck stretched to their tensile limit, seemingly unable to support the raw ball of his skull. He lay in his childhood room in his parents’ house. Surfing posters were tacked to the walls. A glow-in-the-dark constellation decorated the ceiling.

In the bathroom, he consulted his reflection in the mirror: skin dull and blotched, right eye a deep purple, swollen closed like a dark blind drawn against the light. Elsewhere his skin was sickly pale, as though marauding bats had drained the blood from it while he slept. He spread his split lips. Two teeth gone: top left incisor, bottom left cuspid. He poked his gums with his pinkie until blood came.

He stood under the showerhead. The knobs of his spine were raw where he’d slid down the shopfront. He tried jerking off in hopes it might unknit the tension knotting his gut, but it was like trying to coax life out of a rope. In the blood-colored darkness behind his eyelids all he could see was this huge fist, this scarred ridge of knuckles exploding like a neutron bomb.

He carefully patted dry his various lumps and abrasions. He found an old pair of Ray Bans and adjusted them to cover his puffed eye.

The kitchen was a monotone oasis: white fridge and stove, alabaster tile floor, marble countertops. A bay window offered a view of Lake Ontario lying silver beneath a chalky mid-morning sky. The backyard grass was petaled with the season’s first frost.

He cracked the freezer door, relishing the blast of icy air that hit his face. In fact, he liked it so much he stuck his entire head in. Frozen air flowed over the dome of his skull.

He rummaged through the fridge. His mother was on the Caspian Sea Diet. Dieters must subsist upon edibles found in and around the Caspian basin: triggerfish, sea cucumbers, drab kelps, crustaceans. The diet’s creator — a swarthy MD with a face like a dried testicle — cited the uncanny virility of Mediterraneans, evidenced by the fact that many continued to labor as goatherds and pearl divers late into their seventies.

Paul’s search yielded nothing one might squarely define as edible: a quivering block of tofu, a glazy-eyed fish laid out across a chafing dish, what looked to be bean sprouts floating in a bowl of turd-colored water.

He shoved aside jars of Cape Cod capers and tubs of Seaweed Health Jelly.

“What the...fuck” He slammed the fridge door. On the kitchen island: Christmas cards.

His mother got cracking on them earlier each year. She sent off hundreds, licking envelopes until her mouth was syrupy with mucilage. The cards were pure white with gold filigree and the raised outline of a bell. A stack of pine-scented annual summations sat beside them: season’s greetings from Harris county!

His own summation read:

Paul is still living at home and we’re so happy to have him, but lately he’s been talking about finding his own place, leaving Jack and I empty nesters.

That was it? A year gone by and all his mother could say was that he was looking for his own place? A cowl of paranoia descended upon him; he considered scribbling something else, a flagrant lie if need be — Paul was voted one of Young Economist’s “Up and Comers Under 30” or Paul recently returned from a whirlwind seven-city business junket orPaul is in talks with Singapore Zoo officials to bring Ling Si, a giant panda, on an exhibition tour of Niagara’s wine region — anything, really, to prove to all the distant aunts and uncles, the unknown business acquaintances and second cousins twice removed, that he was going places.

He headed into the living room. The sofa was white, like the rest of the room and like most of the house. Soothing, artful white. His mother and father’s sofa in his mother and father’s living room in his mother and father’s house, where he still lived. The floors were new, the appliances so modern as to verge upon space age: no creaks or ticks or rattles. Paul sat on the sofa in the deadening silent white.

Closing his eyes, he pictured shitkicker Todd’s trailer — Paul wasn’t sure he lived in a trailer, but it seemed entirely plausible — aflame, the cheap tin walls glowing and bowling trophies melting like birthday candles until suddenly the bastard crashed through the screen door, a burning effigy. Next he saw the entire trailer park on fire — why the fuck not? — occupants smoked from their mobile shanties, their macaroni-casserole-TV-Guide lives, running around waving flame-eaten arms and the air reeking of fried hogback.

A flashback from last night tore the fragile fabric of his daydream: a huge fat fist the size of a cannonball, the skin black as a gorilla’s, rocketed at his face.

“God damnit!”

He struck the sofa cushion. The punch was weak but ill-placed: his wrist bent at an awkward angle and he yelped. He hopped up, shaking his hand; he booted the sofa but his kick was clumsy and he jammed his toe. Gritting his teeth, grunting, he lay upon the Persian carpet. His body quaked with rage.

Paul often found himself in this state: anger bubbling up from nowhere, a teeth-clenching, fist-pounding fury. But it was undirected and one-dimensional and lacking either the complexities or justifications of adult anger. More like a tantrum.

He nursed his hand and drummed his heels on the carpet. His cellphone chirped. One of his asshole friends calling to dredge the gory details of last night’s misadventure. Or his father, wondering why he wasn’t at work yet.

Paul headed to the kitchen, popped his cellphone into the garburator, and flipped the switch. The gears labored, regurgitating shards of shiny silver casing into the sink; a sharp edge of plastic shot up and struck Paul’s forehead. He twisted a spigot and washed everything down, then picked up the kitchen phone and dialed a cab.

Paul followed the cobblestone path alongside a boxwood hedge past a marble fountain: an ice-glazed Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle. Early autumn fog blew in off the lake, mantling the manor’s roofline. It was much too large for its three inhabitants, but Paul’s father held a tree-falling-in-the-forest outlook with regard to wealth: If you’re rich and nobody can tell, well, are you really rich?

The cab picked him up outside the estate grounds. Paul gazed out the window as they headed downtown to retrieve his car. They drove along the banks of Twelve Mile Creek, the squat skyline of downtown St. Catharines obscured by fog. Roadside slush was grayed with industrial effluvia pumped from the brick smokestacks of the GM factory across the river.

Paul’s car, a 2005 BMW E90, was parked around the corner from the club. The car was his father’s gift to him from last Christmas. There was a parking ticket on the windshield. He tore it in half between his teeth and spat the shreds into the puddle along the curb.

He stopped for a red light on the way to the winery, idling beside a Dodge pickup.

A junkyard mutt was chained to the truckbed. Paul locked eyes with the dog. The mutt’s muddy eyes did not blink. Its lips skinned back to reveal a row of discolored teeth. Paul looked away and fiddled with the radio.

He accelerated past big box stores and auto-body shops and gas stations out into the country. The land opened into vast orchards and groves. Peach and apple and cherry trees planted in neat straight rows, trunks wrapped in cyclone fence.

Ten minutes passed before it hit him.

He’d looked away. He’d broken eye contact first.

He’d lost a stare-down…

…to a dog.

The Ripple Creek winery was spread across fifty acres of land overlooked by the Niagara Escarpment. Paul’s folks had planted the vines themselves some twenty-five years ago.

Paul’s father, Jack Harris, had fallen in love with Paul’s mother, Barbara Forbes, the daughter of a sorghum farmer whom Jack first saw slinging sacks of fertilizer into the bed of a rusted pickup at the Atikokan Feed’n’ Seed, and whom he saw again at the annual Summer Dust-Off, where she danced with raucous zeal to washboard-and-zither music. He fell in love with her because at the time he felt this coincidental sighting was fateful — later both came to realize that they’d lived little more than thirty miles apart, but in northern Ontario it was possible to go your whole life and never meet your neighbor two towns distant. They had made love behind the barn while the Dust-Off raged on, in a field studded with summer flowers on a muffet of hay left by the baling machine. Afterward they lay together with hay poking their bodies like busted drinking straws, feeling a little silly at the unwitting cliché they’d made of themselves: gormless bumpkins deflowered in a haypile. Even the dray horse sharing the field with them looked vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.

After graduating high school Jack spent the next year tending his father’s cornfields. He married Barbara and she moved into the foreman’s lodgings on Jack’s father’s farm. Barely a month had passed before Barbara began to chafe under the deadening monotony.

One night Jack returned from the fields, filthy and itching from corn silk, to find his wife in the kitchen. The table was piled high with books on wine making.

“What’s all this?”

“What else would you have me do all day,” Barbara wanted to know, “crochet?”

Jack knew not a thing about wine. He favored Labatt 50 from pint bottles.

“You want wine, I’ll head to the LCBO and pick up a bottle.”

“I want wine, I’ll head to the LCBO and buy myself a bottle.” Barbara closed a book on the tip of her finger, keeping the page marked. “We might try making our own.”

She told him that the soil of southern Ontario, much like that of southern France, was well suited to grape growing. But wine… it conjured images of beret-wearing Frenchmen zipping down country lanes in fruity red sports cars.

An altogether foreign image, Jack thought, leagues removed from his tiny foreman’s cabin on the edge of the Ontario cornfields. Then again, why not? He knew how to grow corn; why not grapes? And a gut instinct told him that a curve might be developing; if they hopped on now they might land a few steps ahead of it.

One afternoon they headed down to the Farmers’ Credit Union and applied for a small-business loan. With it they purchased a homestead on fifteen acres in Stoney Creek, a farming community in southern Ontario. Fruit country: local farmers grew peaches, cherries, blueberries. Jack was the only one growing grapes; this incited a degree of neighborly concern. Concords? other farmers asked. Juice grapes? When Jack told them no, a Portuguese variety called Semillon, the farmers shook their heads, sad to see a young fool leading his family down the path to financial ruin.

Jack was in the fields every day that first spring, pounding posts and stringing vines. He was out in the cool dawn hours with scattered farmyard lights burning in the hills and valleys. He was out in the afternoon as the sun crested high over the escarpment, its heat burning through the salt on his skin to draw it tight. He was out in the evening with the wind wicking moisture off the soil until it was like tilling shale. Jack’s boots became so worn he padded them with newspapers; his feet turned black from the ink. For weeks they ate nothing but peaches: at night, Jack snuck into his neighbor’s groves to fill his jacket pockets. At night, they collapsed into bed, newlyweds too exhausted to do what might have come naturally.

That first winter Jack made the rounds of local bars and restaurants. Though many owners expressed skepticism at the idea of southern Ontario wine — What’s your next plan, one said, growing taters on the moon? — Jack’s salesmanship resulted in a flurry of orders. Springtime found them back in the fields. When Barb saw that first yellow bud flowering on the vine she broke into a giddy jig that collapsed her husband into reckless laughter.

It was a success from the outset. The wine was clean and crisp, made distinctive by the soil of a virgin growing region. The first vintage sold out by mid-winter; retail orders tripled. Word of their success spread, and the farmers who’d scoffed at Jack’s plan were soon selling their own farms to those hoping to copy Jack’s business model. Ripple Creek became the first, and was still the most successful, winery in Ontario.

Paul was four years old when the family moved from their tiny home in the field — which was really no longer a field but rather an estate — into their massive gated manor.

The winery offices were built on the foundation of Paul’s childhood home: his father, no teary-eyed nostalgic, had had it bulldozed. The foyer was paneled with oak slats bellying outward: visitors often remarked that they felt as though they were inside a wine cask — indeed, the intended effect.

Their receptionist, Callie, was pale with long blond hair, skinny but in a good way and cute. Her perfume held the bracing aroma of a car air freshener. Paul often fantasized about her: passing each other in the narrow hallway, their bodies brush accidentally-on-purpose and next thing they’re on each other, kissing and clutching, ducking into the supply room where he gives it to her bent over the photocopier.

“Mr. Harris,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Not to worry. A mild misunderstanding.”

“You were in a fight?”

Paul didn’t care for her tone of voice: incredulous, as if he’d told her his night had been spent spinning gold out of hay.

“There was a… an altercation.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to say fight. The word implied an exchange of blows, mutual bloodshed. Beating better expressed the reality. Mauling. Shellacking.

“Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing much. You should see the other guy.”

“Is that so?”

Paul was filled with a sudden dreadful certainty that Callie had been there last night. She’d witnessed the whole sad affair and now could only smile as he stood there lying through his teeth.

His office was located off the lobby. On the desk: Macintosh computer and blotter, German beer stein, three high school rowing trophies bought at a thrift store.

These were his father’s idea, whose own trophies — for wrestling, and legitimately won — sat on his own desk in a much bigger office down the hall. His father thought athletic trophies accorded a desk, and by proxy its owner, that Go-Get-’Em attitude.

The nameplate on his desk read paul Harris, and under his name, in small engraved letters, his title: organizational adviser. When he’d questioned his father regarding the precise duties of an OA, he was told it was crucial that he “keep his fingers in a lot of pies, organizationally speaking.” But since his father had his own fingers in every important pie at Ripple Creek, Paul’s were relegated to inconsequential ones: the “Refill the Toner Cartridge” pie; the “Reorder Staff Room Coffee but Not the Cheap Guadeloupian Stuff Because It Gives His Dad the Trots” pie.

His nameplate may as well have read tour guide.

Every so often a buyer happened by and Paul was ordered to show him around.

He’d lead a tour through the distillery with its high cathedral ceilings and halogen lights, pointing out the presses and pumps and hissing PVC tubes, rapping the stainless steel kettles and commenting on their sturdy craftsmanship. He’d lift the lid on a boiler and stir its dark contents with a stained wooden paddle, remarking how the process had come a long way from some Sicilian bambino stomping grapes with her dirty feet. This usually elicited a laugh and soon the tour would wind back to the foyer, where his father was waiting to usher the buyer into his office.

How was he expected to learn anything — osmosis?

When bored — this was every day, vaguely all day — Paul would shut his eyes, lay his head on the blotter, and craft elaborate fantasies. Most frequent was the one where his mother and father were slaughtered by vicious street thugs, spurring Paul to embark upon a Death Wish-style killing spree. Except instead of affluent winery owners his folks were hardworking firefighters, and Paul became Rex Appleby, a tough-as-nails cop hardened by the mean streets of his youth. In the final and most satisfying scene, Paul/Rex staggers from the gang’s hideout with a switchblade sticking out from his shoulder and his shirt torn open to display his totally buff abs. He’s carrying a gas can, trailing a line of gasoline across the lawn. A thug crawls to the front door, his face bashed to smithereens, and, snarling like a dog, he aims a pistol at Rex’s back. Rex flicks the flywheel on a burnished-chrome Zippo and drops it in the shimmer of gasoline. A line of fire races toward the house and the thug screams Nooooo! as a fireball mushrooms into the twilight. A cinematic pan shot captures Appleby striding from the wreckage in super-slow motion, unblinking and ultra-cool.

“Son, oh son of mine.”

Jack Harris stepped into the office. He paused in the doorway, a framed daguerreotype: tall and thickly built, dressed in a suit that hung in flattering lines, jaw and cheeks ingrained with a blue patina of stubble.

He tapped the Rolex Submariner strapped to his wrist. “Make sure the damn thing’s still ticking,” he said. “Or perchance you’re operating on Pacific Standard time, in which case you’re hours early and I applaud your dedication. But if, like me, your watch reads eleven-thirty, you, child of my loins, are late.”

It was laughable, the very suggestion that it mattered whether Paul arrived early, late, or at all. What was the point of his being there — were break-room coffee supplies running at dangerously low levels?

Paul removed the Ray Bans. “Extenuating circumstances.”

“Yee-ouch. That’s a beaut.”

Jack tilted his son’s head up and poked the blackened flesh with the tip of a blunt, squared-off finger.

Paul pushed it away. “Lay off, will you? I’m not a grape — don’t need to squeeze the juice out of me.”

“That’s a blue ribbon winner.” Jack set a haunch on the desk’s edge. “How’d it happen?”

“Fell down a flight of stairs.”

“Those stairs knock your teeth out, too? That’s one mean-spirited staircase; tell me where it is so I can avoid it.”

Jack, veteran of many a low-county barfight, was evidently unmoved by his son’s state. Sometimes a man needed to get out there and chuck a few knuckles — it was cathartic. Afterward the winner bought the loser a pint.

“You planning to see a doctor?”

Paul waved the question off. “I possess inner resilience. I am Zen.”

Jack nodded. “Well, it’s like they say in poker, son: can’t win them all, otherwise it’d be no fun when you did.”

“Who says I lost?”

Jack laughed. Over the years he’d developed what Paul thought of as his Businessman’s Laugh: boisterous and patently phony, it began as a Kris Kringle-ish chortle before segueing into an ongoing staccato hack that sounded like a Nazi Sten gun. Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak! His father turned it on and off at will, like a faucet. On those rare occasions when Paul found himself among businessmen with everybody’s fake laughs ricocheting off the walls, he got the feeling he was deep in the forest primeval surrounded by screeching monkeys.

Jack’s mirth subsided. “Well, if the other guy lost I guess the police’ll be showing up any minute now — you must’ve murdered him.”

“You’re a laugh riot.”

“Speaking of laugh riots, that client you showed around yesterday, did you say that bambino line — the dirty feet thing?”

“I guess.”

“Well then that was awful dumb. The guy’s Italian.”

“He say something?”

“Yeah, he said something — why’d I bring it up, he didn’t say something?”

Paul shrugged. “Some people like the joke.”

“Who, some people?” When Paul didn’t reply: “Idiots, that’s who. It’s a lead balloon.”

Paul was getting pointers from a man who trafficked heavily in knock-knock jokes and dried-up puns: Hey, did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now. Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak!

“Ah, what does it matter?” Paul wanted to know. “Some pissant buyer who owns a pissant boozer in Welland.” He snorted. “Who drinks wine in Welland? Grape juice cut with antifreeze is more like it. I fail to view it as a big loss.”

His father kept his gaze on the floor for several seconds before tilting his chin toward him. His eyes were a pair of hard wet stones.

“We exist but for the grace and patronage of our buyers. Whether it’s a hotel chain or a family-run restaurant, we treat them all with the same respect — you get me?”

Paul nudged his Ray Bans down over his eyes. “I get you.”

“Take those off while I’m speaking to you.”

Paul leaned back in his chair and knitted his hands behind his head.

“Take those … off”

Paul took the sunglasses off. “There. Satisfied?”

Jack’s expression attested he wasn’t at all satisfied. “Now tell me: who do we work for?”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Who do we work for?”

“The buyer.”

“You got it, Pontiac.”

They stared at each other across the desk. Paul saw a man who had never grown into his wealth; a man who’d never forget how his feet looked stained with newspaper ink. What did Jack see? Perhaps something he couldn’t quite reconcile: his own flesh and blood, yet at the same time a deeply mystifying creature who stood outside his understanding. A son who’d been given everything — higher education, a life of the mind — and yet frequently struck him as frail and useless. And while he loved Paul deeply, Jack couldn’t help but think this was not at all the son he’d envisioned.

“How was your date last night?”

“How do you figure?”

“That Faith is pretty sweet, isn’t she? Her dad’s done well for himself. She’ll inherit quite a fortune.” Jack lowered his voice on the last word, as though he were detailing some seductive quality of her physique. “Nice ass, too.”

Paul groaned. “Don’t talk to me about her ass.”

“Take a bite out of it, like a juicy apple — rowf!”

“Oh, my … god.”

Jack chuckled, easing himself off the desk. “Ah, come off it — your old man’s married, not dead.” He frowned. “Get your damn teeth fixed, will you?

Look like you ought to be offering hayrides through Appalachia.”

The offices connected to the distillery down a stone corridor.

Paul walked down rows of gleaming steel tanks. Back in high school he’d snuck in here with his buddies; they tapped the spigots and guzzled Merlot until their teeth were stained the color of mulberries before stumbling out into the vineyard to reel through the darkened rows. The evidence was damning — smashed glasses on the distillery floor, vines trampled by clumsy drunken feet — and surely his father had known, but his only comment was that the Angel’s Share had been uncommonly high those seasons.

A door gave onto a small portico overlooking the vineyard. In the summertime it was a spectacular view: vines unfurling over the gullies and rises in lines planted straight as the hairs on a doll’s scalp. On early spring nights you could actually hear them growing: a faint creaking like worn leather stretched over a pommel.

A group of men moved along the trellis lines at the vineyard’s far edge.

Every spring Paul’s father hired a crew of Caribbean fieldworkers. He wasn’t the only one: most Niagara wineries hired crews from Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Ecuador, supplementing this core with university students who were generally shiftless and unreliable, prone to begging off on sunny days better spent at the beach.

Paul once accompanied his father to Pearson airport to pick up a crew of pickers. They’d shared the Arrivals lounge with the owners of several local wineries, and as the pickers disembarked, calls of Pillittieri crew, here! and Stonechurch, over here! rang out while the workers stood around, dazed and jet-lagged, trying to recall the name of the winery that had hired them.

Today they were picking frozen grapes for ice wine. Winemakers waited until frosts hardened the grapes into withered purple pellets before harvesting.

“I thought you guys might like some help,” he told them.

Nervous glances passed between the pickers. The owner’s kid standing there in his eight-hundred-dollar suit. Was he joking? White folks had such an odd sense of humor.

Paul cinched a red kidney-shaped bucket to his hip. The black nylon strap, crusted with dirt and crushed grape skins, left muddy streaks on his jacket. A picker with a mess of dreadlocks pinned atop his head said, “Is okay, okay,” a gentle dissuasion, “go on back, mahn.”

The cold drew Paul’s face in, thinned it down, tightened the skin to the bone.

Anger twined around his brain, a thread fine as catgut slowly tightening. What the hell were they looking so damn sullen for — he was offering help. His father owned the goddamn place, he’d flown them up here and wrote their checks, and if Paul wanted to pick a few grapes he could fucking well pick grapes.

“Where should I start?”

The guy glanced at the others, shrugged, pointed to a far row.

Paul worked his way down the trellis line, stumbling over the frozen earth, knocking his bucket with a knee, wincing. Grapes hung in shriveled clusters, touched with a glaze of frost that looked like powdered sugar. They landed in the bucket with a metallic clink. Some broke open: their insides resembled a geode, all those sparkling sugars. The sweat on his back and chest cooled, sending a chill through his body. Vine ends punched through his fingertips like blunt needles.

A picker crossed over the rows and gave Paul his toque: bright orange with sunoco woven across the front, topped with an orange and white pompom. It stunk of dirt and sweat and of the picker himself. Paul couldn’t recall the last time he’d worn clothes that weren’t solely his own; he’d never worn a black person’s clothes, not once. The picker made Paul hold out his hands while he wrapped strips of duct tape around his fingers to protect them from the sharp vines. He wrapped with his head down:

Paul glimpsed his shaven head pitted with gouges and dents and a scar that curled halfway round his skull. He wondered how the man acquired those wounds: accidents, surgeries, fights? That night, before falling asleep, he would pass a hand over his own scalp, dismayed to find it smooth and featureless as an egg.

Wind kicked up from the west, blowing grit across the fields. The pickers bundled up in scarves and tattered parkas; one drew a pair of ski goggles down over his eyes.

He dragged his body down the rows, arms and legs and joints aching, socks glued to his feet with blood and burst blisters. He emptied his bucket into a hopper and stumbled back into the field, momentarily relieved from the constant burden at his hip. But soon the bucket filled and though he felt his will deserting he pushed on, whiting out his mind, thinking not of pain or relief or other options.

Didn’t every organism by nature seek the easiest pathway to survival? Then what of the organism reared in an environment without predators or obstacles, its every need provided? Paul pictured a flabby boneless creature, shapeless, as soft and raw as the spot under a picked scab.

In some religions it was a sin for a man to die without the knowledge of how much suffering he could endure.

When the sun dipped behind the pines of the escarpment, Paul carted his final bucket to the hopper. His shoes were ruined, his pants caked in mud. He became aware of the powerful funk of his body and relished that smell.

The pickers sat around a fire stoked in the rusted rim of an old tractor tire. An urn of coffee perked on a charred grill above the flames and one of them poured Paul’s measure into a beaten tin cup. They sat in the lengthening twilight enclosed by flat autumn fields. The coffee was so strong it stung his gums where they no longer moored teeth. He gave the toque back to the young man who’d lent it, then took the Ray Bans from his shirt pocket and handed them over too. It no longer concerned him who saw his pulped eye or busted mouth.

He waved goodnight and set off across the cool evening rows. Reaching the winery he found the doors locked. Callie and his father had gone home for the night.

Paul keyed the BMW’s ignition and pulled onto the road. He drove past orchards and sod farms and cows sleeping along barbed-wire fences. For a two-mile stretch all light vanished as he drove under a moonless sky. The eyes of feral night creatures flashed in roadside gullies.

He drove on across a one-lane bridge spanning the QEW, over the isolated headlights of travelers driving south into the city, a trail of taillights twisting north to Toronto. The heater’s warmth restored feeling to his fingers.

Driving too fast, Paul slewed into the shale of the breakdown lane. He tromped the brake pedal but the front end slid over the culvert and slammed into an iced-over ditch. The airbag deployed: a moon-white zit exploding into his face.

Paul sat with his face buried in the silken skin of the airbag. Something was burning, wiring most likely, the smell like a blazing iron scorching linen. He considered going to sleep: the airbag made a comfortable enough pillow. But then he considered the possibility of a ruptured gas tank, pictured a greasy orange fireball billowing into the night.

He gave the door a boot and stepped out. His loafers slipped in the ditch. He went down on his ass, cracking his head on the doorframe. He sat in the frozen mud with his feet in ditch water. A rime of ice slashed his trousers and cut into the backs of his calves. The air reeked of engine coolant. The BMW’s grille butted a patch of crushed cattails.

Craning his neck, he saw amidst the cattails the squat outline of the tree stump that had decimated his car. He had no means of calling for a tow truck and felt mildly regretful for having garburated his cellphone.

On the other side of the ditch lay a cornfield. He recalled a movie where the characters walked into a cornfield and into new life. It was a pleasant thought. To become something else, a whole new person. No money or name or past or worries or hunger — a solitary wanderer upon the country’s heat-shimmered highways, its open-topped boxcars filled with chicken feed and baled pulp, its slashes of wilderness, its lightning storms and lost spaces. He’d befriend a dog with two-tone eyes and together they could fight small-town corruption….

Then it dawned on him what a stupid notion it was. Walk into a cornfield and vanish.

Ride the rails with a crime-fighting dog. What was he, an idiot?

He hauled himself from the ditch. It couldn’t be more than a few degrees above freezing. He considered the possibility of dying somewhere along this isolated country lane. He pictured some gormless dirt farmer coming across his body tomorrow morning: Paul Harris in his dirt-caked suit and two-hundred-dollar loafers, frozen stiff in mid-stride with a rigor-mortis boner tenting his trousers. Ole Popsicle Paul Harris with a snot icicle hanging from his schnozz.

Shoving his hands deep in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, he set off. He had only a vague notion of how far it might be. But, if not resigned to his fate, he was at least accepting of whatever it might hold.