Rust and Bone: Stories

RUST AND BONE

TWENTY-SEVEN BONES make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird’s wing, a whale’s dorsal fin, a gecko’s pad, your own hand. Some primates got more—gorilla’s got thirty-two, five in each thumb. Humans, twenty-seven.

Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone’s sealed in a wrap of calcium so it’s stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline’s there to stay— looks like a crack in granite under the x-ray. Crush a metacarpal and that’s that: bone splinters not driven into soft tissue are eaten by enzymes; powder sifts to the bloodstream. Look at a prizefighter’s hands: knucks busted flat against the heavy bag or some pug’s face and skin split on crossing diagonals, a ridge of scarred X’s.

You’ll see men cry breaking their hand in a fight, leather-assed Mexies and Steeltown bruisers slumped on a corner stool with tears squirting out their eyes. It’s not quite the pain, though the anticipation of pain is there—mitts swelling inside red fourteen-ouncers and the electric grind of bone on bone, maybe it’s the eighth and you’re jabbing a busted lead right through the tenth to eke a decision. It’s the frustration makes them cry. Fighting’s all about minimizing weakness. Shoddy endurance? Roadwork. Sloppy footwork? Skip rope. Weak gut? A thousand stomach crunches daily. But fighters with bad hands can’t do a thing about it, aside from hiring a cornerman who knows a little about wrapping brittle bones. Same goes for fighters with sharp brows and weak skin who can’t help splitting wide at the slightest pawing. They’re crying because it’s a weakness there’s not a damn thing they can do for and it’ll commit them to the second tier, one step below the MGM Grand and Foxwoods, the showgirls and Bentleys.

Room’s the size of a gas chamber. Wooden chair, sink, small mirror hung on the pigmented concrete wall. Forty-watt bulb hangs on a dark cord, cold yellow light touching my clean-shaven skull and breaking in spears across the floor. Cobwebs suspended like silken parachutes in corners beyond the light. Old Pony duffel between my legs packed with wintergreen liniment and Vaseline, foul protector, mouthguard with cinnamon Dentyne embedded in the teeth prints. I’ve got my hand wraps laid out on my lap, winding grimy herringbone around the left thumb, wrist, the meat of my palm. Time was, I had strong hands—nutcrackers, Teddy Hutch called them. By now they’ve been broken so many times the bones are like crockery shards in a muslin bag. You get one hard shot before they shatter.

A man with a swollen face pokes his head through the door. He rolls a gnarled toscano cigarillo to the side of his mouth and says, “You ready? Best for you these yahoos don’t get any drunker.”

“Got a hot water bottle?” Roll my neck low, touch chin to chest. “Can’t get loose.”

“Where do you think you are, Caesars Palace? When you’re set, it’s down the hall and up a flight of stairs.”

I was born Eddie Brown, Jr., on July 19, 1966, in San Benito, a hardscrabble town ten miles north of the Tex-Mex border; “somewhere between nowhere and adiós,” my mother said of her adopted hometown. My father, a Border Patrol agent, worked the international fenceline running from McAllen to Brownsville and up around the horn to the Padre Island chain off the coast. On a clear July day you’d see illegals sunning their lean bodies on the projecting headlands, soaking up heat like seals before embarking on a twilight crossing to the shores of Laguna Madre. He met his wife-to-be on a cool September evening when her raft—uneven lengths of peachwood lashed together with twine, a plastic milk jug skirt—butted the prow of his patrolling johnboat.

“It was cold, wind blowing off the Gulf,” my mother once told me. “Mío Dios. The raft seem okay when I go, but then the twine is breaking and those jugs fill with water. Those waters swimming with tiger sharks plump as hens, so many entrangeros borricos to gobble up. I’m thinking I’m seeing these shapes,” her index finger described the sickle of a shark’s fin. “I’m thinking why I leave Cuidad Miguel—was that so terrible? But I wanted the land of opportunity.” An ironic gesture: shoulders shrugged, eyes rolled heavenwards. “I almost made it, Ed, yeah?”

My father’s eyes rose over a copy of the Daily Sentinel. “A few more hours and you’d’ve washed up somewhere, my dear.”

The details of that boat ride were never revealed, so I’ll never know whether love blossomed or a sober deal was struck. I can picture my mother wrapped in an emergency blanket, sitting beside my father as he worked the hand-throttle on an old Evinrude, the glow of a harvest moon touching the soft curve of her cheek. Maybe something stirred. But I can also picture a hushed negotiation as they lay anchored at the government dock, maiden’s hair slapping the pilings and jaundiced light spilling between the bars of the holding cell beyond. She was a classic Latin beauty: raven hair and polished umber skin, a birthmark on her left cheek resembling a bird in distant flight. Many border guards took Mexican wives; the paperwork wasn’t difficult to push through. My sister was born that year. Three years later, me.

I finish wrapping my hands and stand, bobbing on the tips of my toes. Tug the sweatshirt hood up, cinch the drawstring. Half-circle to the left, feint low and fire a right cross, arm cocked at a ninety-degree L to generate maximum force. Torque the hips, still bobbing slightly, three stiff jabs, turning the elbow out at the end. A lot of people don’t like a jabby fighter, a pitty-patter, but a smart boxer knows everything flows off the jab: keeps your opponent at a distance and muffles his offense, plus you’re always in a position to counterpunch. And hey, if the guy’s glass-jawed or thin-skulled, a jab might just knock him onto queer street.

My father once took me on his evening rounds. August, so hot even the adders and geckos sought shade. We drove across the dry wash in his patrol Bronco, past clumps of sun-browned chickweed and pokeberry bushes so withered their fruit rattled like hollow plastic beads. He stopped to show me the vents cut through the border fence, chain-link pried back in silvery flaps.

“Tin snips stashed in a plastic bag tied to an ankle. Swim across the Rio Grande, creep up the bank and cut through.” A defeated shrug. “Easy as pie.”

The sky was darkening by the time we reached the dock. Walking down the berm to the shoreline, we passed a patch of agaves so sickly even the moonshiners couldn’t be bothered. Our boots stirred up clouds of rust-hued dust. Stars hovered at the eastern horizon, casting slivers of metallic light on the water.

My father cycled the motor, pulling into the bay. Suspended between day and night, the sky was a tight-sheened purple, shiny as eggplant skin. The oily stink of exhaust mingled with the scent of creosote and Cherokee rose. To one side, the fawn-colored foothills of west Texas rolled in knuckled swells beneath a bank of violet-edged clouds. To the other, the Sierra Madres were a finned ridge, wedges of terra cotta light burning though the gaps. A brush fire burned distantly to the north, wavering funnels of flame holding the darkness at bay. Stars stood on their reflections at the Rio Grande’s delta, a seam of perfectly smooth water where river met ocean.

My father fired a flare into the sky. As the comet of red light arced, he squinted at the water’s surface lit by the spreading contrail.

“They don’t understand how dangerous it is,” he said. “The pulls and undertows. Fighting a stiff current all the way.” He pulled a Black Cat cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. “Shouldn’t feel any responsibility, truly. Not like I make them take the plunge. Everyone thinks it’s sunnier on the other side of the street.”

I snap off a few more jabs as my heart falls into pre-fight rhythm. Sweat’s coming now, clear odorless beads collecting on my brow and clinging to the short hairs of my wrists. Twist the sink’s spigot and splash cold, sulfurous water on my face. A milky crack bisects the mirror, running up the left side of my neck to the jaw before turning sharply, cleaving my lips and continuing north through cheek and temple. Stare at my face split into unequal portions: forehead marbled with knots of sub-dermal scar tissue and nose broken in the center, the angle of cartilage obtuse. Weak fingers of light crawl around the base of my skull, shadowing the deep pits of my sockets.

Thirty-seven years old. Not so old. Too old for this.

On my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to Top Rank, a boxing gym owned by ex-welterweight contender Exum Speight. I’d been tussling at school and I guess he figured the sport might channel that aggression. We walked through a black door set in a flat tin-roofed building, inhaling air cooler but somehow denser than the air from the street. The gym was as spacious as a dance hall and dim, vapor lamps set in the ceiling. The ring erected in the center with a row of folding chairs in front. A punching bag platform stood between two dusty tinted windows on the left. An old movie poster hung on the water-stained wall: The Joe Louis Story. America’s Greatness was in his FISTS, the tagline read, The Screen’s Big Story in his HEART! A squat black man worked the speed bag in a ponderous rhythm while a Philco radio played “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” by A Taste of Honey.

A short thin man in his early forties exited the office. He wore a checkered blazer with leatherette elbow patches and a brown fedora with faded salt stains peaking the hatband. “How you doing, fellas?”

“You Speight?”

“Exum’s up in Chicago with a fighter,” the man told my father. “Jack Cantrales. I mind the shop while he’s gone.”

Jack made me skip rope for a few minutes, then quoted a monthly training fee. My father shook his hand again and said, “Be back in a few hours, Eddie.”

For the next two years I spent every free minute at Top Rank. As Exum Speight busied himself with the heavyweights, my training fell to Cantrales. Jack was an amiable bullshitter, always joking and free with advice, but later I came to realize he was one of the milling coves known to haunt boxing clubs, the “gym bums.” Gym bums were pugilistic has-beens or never-wases—Cantrales’s pro record stood at 3-18-2, his sole attribute an ability to consume mass quantities of red leather—who hovered, wraithlike, around promising fighters. Gym bums were also known to squeeze a penny ’til it screamed, and Contrales was typical of the breed: he once slid his foot over a coin a kid had dropped, shrugged, and told the kid it must’ve rolled into the sewer.

It was a dime.

Near the end of high school Cantrales booked my first fight at Rosalita’s, a honkeytonk border bar. My parents would’ve never allowed it had they known, so I squeezed through my bedroom window after lights out and met Cantrales at the end of the block. He drove a Chevelle 454 SS—car had get-up like a scalded cat.

“You loose?” he asked as we fled down the I-38 to Norias. June bugs hammered the windshield, exoskeletons shattering with a high tensile sound, bodies bursting in pale yellow riots.

“Yeah,” I said, though I couldn’t stop shaking. “Loose.”

“That’s good.” Cantrales had recently switched his fedora in favor of a captain’s hat of a style worn by Captain Merrill Stubing on Love Boat. Dashboard light reflected off the black plastic visor, according his features a malign aspect. “You’ll eat this frito bandito up.”

Rosalita’s was a clapboard tonk cut out of a canebrake. Acres of cane swayed in the wind’s grip, dry stalks clashing with a hollow sound, bamboo wind chimes.

Inside was dark and fusty. Hank Snow growled about some woman’s cheatin’ heart from a heat-warped Wurlitzer. Off in the corner: a canted plankboard ring, red and blue ropes sagging from the ring posts. I bent between the ropes and shuffled to the four corners, shadowboxing. A rogue’s gallery of bloodsport enthusiasts swiveled on their bar stools. Someone called, “Looking sharp, kiddo!”

My opponent was a whippet-thin Mexican in his mid-thirties. White sneakers, no socks, a clean white towel around his neck. His hair plastered to his skull in black ropes. He looked exhausted. Mexican fighters often hopped the border on the night they were to fight, winding up at Rosalita’s soaked from the swim and gashed from razor wire, sometimes pursued by feral dogs roaming the lowlands.

I took a hellish beating. The fight was a four-round smoker, each round three minutes long. Those twelve minutes stretched into an eternity, especially the final three, eyes swelled to pinhole slits and gut aching from the Mexie’s relentless assault. The guy knew things about momentum and leverage I’d never learned in sparring sessions, how to angle a hook so it grazed my abdomen and robbed my breath, leaving slashes of glove-burned flesh. It was as though he possessed secret information about the exact placement of my organs, finding the kidneys and liver, drilling hard crosses into my short rib. I pissed red for days. Between rounds the bartender—who doubled as cutman— tended to my rapidly expanding face. He wore a visor, the kind worn by blackjack dealers, Vaseline smeared on the green plastic brim. He’d reach up and scoop a blob to grease my cheeks.

“You’re breaking him down,” Jack lied. “Stick and move, Eddie.”

By the final round the Mexican looked slightly ashamed. He ducked punches nimbly, sticking a soft jab in my face or tying me up in close. A chorus of boos arose: the shadowy bar patrons were anticipating a KO. The only damaging shot I landed all night was a right hook to the Mexican’s crotch. It wasn’t on purpose: my eyes were so swelled I couldn’t see what I was punching. He took the foul in good spirit, pulling me close until our heads touched, whispering, “Cuidado, lo blo, cuidado.”

Afterwards I sat on the trunk of Jack’s Chevelle pressing an icepack to my neck. There was a tinny ringing in my ears and the moon held a wavering penumbra. I concentrated on not throwing up. Contrales handed over my fight purse: five dollars, management fee and transportation surcharge deducted.

“You were tight. Gotta let go with a few bombs or you get no respect. He laid your ass on the canvas five or six times, but you stood up. Counts for something, right? Little bastard was sharp,” Jack admitted. “A dead game fighter.”

I nodded vaguely, not paying much attention, more concerned with how I’d explain my state to my folks.

“You fight, you lose. You fight, you win. You fight,” Jack suggested, heading back inside for a fifth of off-sale Johnny Red.

The Mexican exited Rosalita’s. He moved out into the cane, clearing the razor-edged stalks from his path with still-taped hands. Spokes of heat lightning flashed behind a bank of night clouds, whetting the foothills in crimson light. The fighter walked gingerly, no wasted movement. He stopped at a grove of palmettos and glanced up at a low bronze moon, orienting himself to the land before melting into the trees. I thought about the coming hours as he hiked to the border and scaled the fence, where perhaps a boat was moored amidst the cattails. He’d battle the Rio Grande’s currents as they bore him to the far shore, then another hike would bring him to an adobe house in one of the fringing settlements. I pictured his wife and children: his wife’s oval face and fine-boned hands, shafts of dawn sunlight slanting lowangled and orange through an open window to touch his daughter’s sleeping eyes. The fantasy may’ve stood in sharp contrast to the abject reality—perhaps the man had nothing worth fighting for—perhaps all that waited was a lightless room, a bottle of mescal.

Looking back now, I do not believe that was the case. Reach a certain experience level, you don’t fight without reason. You’ve seen too many boxers hurt, killed even, to treat matches as dick-swinging contests. Fighting becomes a job, stepping into the ring punching a clock. It’s a pragmatic pursuit, opponents’ equations to be solved using the chimerical physics of reach, height, spacing, leverage, heart. You’d no more fight outside the ropes than a factory lineman would work a shift for no pay. I entered my first fight for no other reason than to see if I could, testing what I thought I’d known against the unknown reality. I lost because I was green, yes, but also because nothing was really at stake: my life wouldn’t’ve been substantially better or worse, win or lose. The Mexican stepped between the ropes with the subdued air of a man entering an office cubicle. When he realized it was going to be an easy day he leaned back in his chair, kicked off his shoes. He didn’t give the crowd what they wanted, didn’t hurt me without cause. His job was to defeat his opponent, and he did. But he wouldn’t be there without reason. He fought for the money, and for those he loved.

A family waited on the other side of that river. I know that now. I know what it means to fight for a reason.

The hallway’s lit by forty-watt bulbs set behind meshed screens. The cement perspires, as do the oxidized copper pipes overhead. Rivulets of brown water spill from the joists. The place is a foreclosed steelworks factory. Corkscrews of drilled iron crunch beneath my boots. The air smells of mildewed rock and ozone. Up through the layers of concrete and wires and piping the crowd issues a gathering buzz that beats against my eardrums.

We fight bare-knuckle, or nearly so. A nostalgic few see it as a throwback to the days when barrel-chested dockhands brawled aboard barges moored off the New York harbor. It’s not throwback so much as regression. A dogfight. No referees. No ten count. The winner is the man left standing. Rabbit punches and low blows, eye gouges, head-butts—I once saw a fishhook tear a man’s face open, lip to high ear. Fighters score their hand wraps with sandpaper, soak them in turpentine, wind concertina wire around their knuckles.

I fight fair. Try to, anyhow.

I graduated high school in the spring of 1984. Excelling at English and Languages, I was accepted to Wiley College on a scholarship. That August I moved north to Marshall and spent three years living in my sister Gail’s basement, studying and continuing to box. Gail’s husband Steve was a journeyman carpenter and drywaller; he converted the unfinished basement into an apartment: bedroom and kitchenette, a small training area to skip rope and practice footwork. I’d squirrel myself away during midterms and finals, but otherwise spent my time reading in the family room, shooting hoops on the driveway net, or raiding the fridge. Gail occasionally tripped over my gym kit or spied a pair of hand wraps laid over the armrest of her favorite chair and pitched a fit, but for the most part we got along. Steve was a long-haul trucker circuiting between San Antonio and Sioux Falls. On my twenty-first birthday he bought a case of Lone Star and we sat on the back porch until the flagstones were littered with empties and we were howling at the moon.

With Steve hauling and Gail landing a teller job at Marshall First Trust, babysitting duties fell to me. My nephew Jacob was ten months old when I moved in. An inquisitive boy with a sweet temperament. The kid was forever crawling out of sight, disappearing around corners or behind curtains, knees pumping so quickly I was sure friction would singe the carpet. We’d play this game where Jake stuck his fingers in my mouth and I’d curl my lips over my teeth and bite down gently, growling; Jake would shriek—a garbled string of syllables, “eepooo-ap!” or “yee-ack!” or “boo-ta-tet!”—and pull his hand away. This went on for hours, until I became slightly nauseated by the taste of Jake’s hand, a blend of sweat and mucus and the residue of whatever bacterial micro-sites he’d investigated that day. I remember the way Jake’s gaze locked with mine, fingers inches from my mouth, his eyes glowing, positively aflame, as though to say—

“Look at the runt. Gonna get creamed! ”

“Run along find your daddy, peckerwood!”

The spectators hurl other insults, but these two I pick up clearly. There looks to be a hundred or more, ranged around a barricade of sawhorses stolen from a construction site: bright orange, flashing halogen discs screwed to the horizontal beams. The intermittently blinking lights brighten the spectators’ faces in ghostly yellows: a pack of bloodhungry crazies waving dollar bills. Moonlight pours through holes rusted in the roof, silver shafts gilding the crossbeams and glossing feathery shapes roosting in the latticework. A hypnotic sound underlies the hollering crowd: a distant, nearly sub-audible clash and cycle, the sound of long-derelict machinery shuddering uneasily to life.

My opponent is a dreadlocked kid two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me. Goes by Nicodemus. Bare-chested, his arms are swelled, monstrous. Tribal tattoos crisscross the ribbed musculature of his stomach; ornate curlicues encircle his extruded bellybutton, giving it the look of a sightless eye. He turns to his cutman and says, “Who this, the shoeshine boy? Mus’ be my birthday.”

We meet in the center of the ring, where the cigarillo-smoking promoter runs down the stakes: a thousand cash to the winner, five hundred to the loser.

Nicodemus dry-gulches me while the guy’s still laying out the stakes, a hard sucker punch glancing off the high ridge of cheek, splitting bone. The blow drops me to my knees. Chill static wind pours through my skull, electric snakes skating the bones of my arms and legs. Nicodemus shrugs and smiles, as though to say, Hey, you knew the score when you stepped up, then wades in swinging. Guess the fight’s started without me. It’s not uncommon.

I graduated in ’87 and moved north to Pennsylvania. Having trained and fought steadily through college, I’d amassed a Golden Gloves record of 13-1. Teddy Hutch, an Olympic boxing coach, caught one of my fights and invited me to his training facility in Butler. The welterweight division was thin, he said; I could earn a berth on the qualifying squad. The program covered food and accommodation. His prospects worked at a local box factory.

I arrived in Butler late September. The trees and water, even the sky: everything was different. The Texas sky was not completely blue; its colour, I’ve come to realize, was more of a diffuse lavender. The skies of Pennsylvania were a piercing, monotone blue; they pressed down with a palpable weight. The tattery, see-through clouds I’d known since childhood were replaced with thick cumulus formations. And the cold—me and a Hawaiian boxer named David Tua bundled ourselves in sweaters and jackets on the mildest of fall days, much to the amusement of the Minnesotans and Dakotans in training.

The prospects were billeted in a ranch house. The land behind fell away to a lake ringed by hemlocks and firs, rising to a wooded escarpment. We roused at five o’clock each morning and ate breakfast at long tables before donning road gear to run a three-mile circuit around the lake. Afterwards we herded into a school bus bound for Olympia Paper, where we spent the next nine hours ranged along canvas belt lines, driven half-mad by the pneumatic hiss of the fold-and-stamp machines. When the shift whistle blew we were driven to the Cyclone, a downtown boxing gym. We trained until eight o’clock before dragging ourselves to the bus, bolting dinner, and flopping into bed for lights out.

It was a rough life, and a lot of fighters couldn’t stomach it: prospects came and went with such frequency Teddy considered installing a turnstile. But the regimen yielded results: I packed on ten pounds of muscle in eight months, and my cardiovascular endurance shot through the roof. My sparring partner was a Dixieland welterweight named Jimmy Carmichael. Jimmy had a peacemaker of a left cross; we beat each other black and blue in the ring but spent our days off together, catching the Sunday matinee and wolfing thick wedges of pecan pie at Marcy’s on Lagan Street.

Jake visited that March. Steve was hauling a load up to Rochester and brought Jake along to visit. Steve dropped him off mid-morning, and we arranged to meet later for dinner. I was surprised how much Jake had grown. His cheeks, framed by the furred hood of a new winter jacket, were flush and rosy.

“How ya been, jellybean?” I said.

“I been fine, pal o’ mine,” he said, repeating the greeting I’d taught him.

Jake was antsy following the long drive. We walked down to the lake. A low fog rolled across the frozen water, faint ripples thickening into groundmist at the tree line. We held hands. Every fir looked dusted in powdered sugar. Jake’s hand slipped from mine as he ran ahead. He said, “I’ve never seen so much white.”

The lake was a flat opaque sheet. A murder of crows congregated on a tree shattered under a weight of snow. The northern boys skated here on weekends; I saw the ruts their blades had left in the ice. Jake ran out, falling, sliding, getting up, running faster.

“Hey,” I called. “Hey, slow ’er down, big guy.”

I was raised in a part of Texas where the only ice was of the cubed variety. I’d only seen snow in Christmas movies. I mean, what did I know of ice? I knew it felt good pressed to the back of my neck between rounds. My five-year-old nephew ran heedlessly, hood tugged down around his shoulders, fine sandy hair and clean tanned skin brightened by the sun. What did he know of ice? Perhaps that it melted quickly on a summer sidewalk. Did he even know that much? We were both ignorant. But I should’ve known.

Nicodemus rushes across the ring, jackhammering his fists. He throws a series of haymakers so slow he might as well have telegraphed them last week; I feint from a kneeling position and hammer a left hook into his ass, nailing the sciatic nerve. Shrieking, he limps back. I struggle to my feet and bicycle into the open ring. From time to time someone shouts Nicodemus’s name, and under that the distant hum of machinery.

He throws a looping right that I duck, rising with a short-armed cross to the midriff. He bulls me into a corner. I juke, try to circle clear, but he steps on my foot and hits me with an overhand right. Lips flatten against teeth, mouth filling with the taste of rust and bone. The air shimmers, shards of filigreed light raining down like shiny foil in a tickertape parade. I go down heavily under a sawhorse, staring up at a dark forest of legs.

I can no longer consciously recall the sound that ice made as it broke. Sometimes I’ll hear another noise—the low crumple of a beer can; the squeal of an old nail pried from a sodden plank—similar in some way, timbre or pitch or resonance, and realize it lives somewhere inside me now. I remember the fault line racing out to meet him, a silver crease transecting the ice like a cracked whip. It seemed to advance slowly, a thin sluggish snake zigging and zagging; it was as though I had only to holler “Step back!” and it would rip harmlessly past.

Water shot up in thin pressurized needles from hairline cracks under Jake’s feet. He lurched sideways, outflung arms seeking balance. The ice pan broke in half, plates levering up, a V of frozen water with Jake plunging through the middle.

I laughed. Maybe Jake looked silly going down, mouth and eyes wide, hands clutching at the broken border of ice that crumbled like spun sugar in his grasp. Maybe I could not conceive the danger: I pictured the two of us sitting before the fireplace in the big safe house, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, a mug of hot chocolate, tendrils of steam rising off Jake’s wet pants as they dried.

“Hold on, big fella,” I said. “Do the eggbeater!”

My boots skidded along the ice. I overbalanced, fell down. Jake churned foam, clothes plumping with water. Everything seemed all right until I saw the fear and confusion, deep thin creases out of place on a face so young; I saw, with the dreamlike clarity that colors all memories of the event, molecular beads of water clinging to his cheeks and nose. I crawled forward, outspread hands distributing my weight. Jake splashed and kicked and called out in a reedy whisper, nose and mouth barely above water. Ice crackling under my hands and chunks of ice floating on the water and the trees of the near shore wrapped in transparent icy layers. So much ice.

He stopped struggling abruptly, just hanging there, eyes closed, water trickling into his mouth. Only his chin and the tips of his fingers floated clear. I reached the edge and extended a hand. The supporting ridge broke away and my chest and head slipped below the surface. Cold black water pressed against my eyeballs. I caught movement through the brown water and grabbed something—smooth and slim, perhaps a jacket sleeve—but the cold made my fingers clumsy and it slipped through. The lake shoved me back and forth, currents stronger than I’d imagined. Sinewy shapes turned over in the murk, shapes like seal pups at play.

I broke the surface snorting streams of water, wiping away cords of snot. I stared into the swirling blackness in search of movement, a leg kicking, fingers grasping. I plunged my arm in, stirring around, hopeful: a few strands of eelgrass draped over numb fingers. Not knowing what to do, I called his name. “Jake!” The word echoed uselessly across the flat expanse.

When my voice died away I heard it: a sustained resonant thump. I couldn’t tell where it came from. The ice trembled. A dark form was pressed to the chalky sheet a few feet to the left, trapped beneath the surface. It twisted and thrashed, beating the ice.

I crawled towards the shape—crawled on my hands and knees like a fucking infant. Ice pocked with craters and boils from thawing and re-freezing. I saw a dim outline down there, a creature of crude lines and angles. The ice shuddered; fresh-fallen snow jumped off the surface, resettling. My fingers spread across the milky whiteness and ears plugged with frozen lake water, a frantic buzzing between.

I made a fist with my right hand and brought it down. The ice buckled, splintered, but held. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, a white-hot bolt. I raised the right again—my lead hand, the dynamite right—smashing the ice. It broke and my fist plunged into the darkness, grasping frantically, closing on nothing. A powerful current caught hold of Jake and he drifted sideways, beyond my grasp. Something passed through my fingers—a bootlace?

I tracked the shape beneath the ice. The freezing water on my arms crackled like dull metal. My teeth chattered and I called his name. Maybe I was screaming.

Passing beneath a patch of perfectly clear, glasslike ice, I caught his face through the scalloped sheet. Lips and nostrils robin’s egg blue, the rest a creamy shade of gray. Cheek flattened to the ice, the buoyancy of flesh pushing him up. Eyes so blue, luminously blue, pearlescent air bubbles clinging to the dark lashes. A sinuous white flash below, silky curve of a trout’s belly.

My right hand was badly broken: knuckles split and flesh peeled to the wrist, a lot of blood, some bones. I slammed my left hand down. The ice fractured in a radiating spiderweb. Water shot up through the fissures. My hand shattered like a china plate. Didn’t feel a thing at the time. Jake stopped clawing, stopped thumping. His eyes open but rolled to the whites beneath the fine network of cracks. I hammered my left hand down once more, breaking into the icy shock of the lake. I snagged his hood but the hole was too small so I clawed with my free hand, breaking off chunks, razored edges gashing my fingers to the bone.

Finally the hole was wide enough for me to pull him through. A long swipe of mud on Jake’s forehead, hair stuck up in rapidly freezing corkscrews. His nose broken and me who’d done it, smashing ice into his face. I gathered him in my arms and stumbled uphill to the house. “Please,” I remember saying, over and over, a breathy whisper. “Please.”

Ernie Munger, a flyweight mending a broken rib, had spent a few summers as a lifeguard. He administered CPR while the cook rang for help. Munger’s thick hands pumped the brackish water from Jake’s lungs, pumped life back into him. Jake was breathing by the time the paramedics arrived. They snaked a rubber tube down his throat. Afterwards I stood by a large bay window overlooking the lake. The hole, the size of a dime from that distant vantage, was freezing over in the evening chill; tiny red pinpricks represented my bloody hand prints on the ice. The splintered bones pulsed: I’d broken forty-five of fifty-four.

I push off the floor and lean against a sawhorse, waiting for the teeth to align and the gears to mesh again. Nicodemus circles somewhere to the left, dancing side to side, weaving through blue shafts of shadow like animate liquid. Some bastard kicks me in the spine, “Get up and fight, you pitiful son of a bitch.” Standing, I wonder how long was I down. Eight seconds? No ref, so nobody’s counting. A pair of hands clutch my shoulders, shoving, the same voice saying, “Get out there, chickenshit.” I strike back with an elbow, impacting something fleshy and forgiving. A muted crack. Those hands fall away.

Nicodemus advances and hits me in the face. He grabs a handful of hair and bends me over the sawhorse, pummeling with his lead hand. The skin above my eyes comes apart, soft meat tearing away from the deeply seamed scar tissue. Blood sprays in a fine mist. I blink away red and smack him in the kidneys. He pulls back, nursing his side. Knuckling the blood out of my eyes, I move in throwing jabs. Nicodemus’s skull is oddly planed, a tank turret, deflecting my punches. His fists are bunched in front of his mouth, arms spread in an invert funnel leading to the point of his chin: a perfect opening, but not yet. Reaching blindly, he entangles my arms, pulling me to his chest. He rubs his hand wraps across my eyes and I wince at the turpentine sting. I snap an uppercut, thumping him under the heart.

The hospital room walls were glossy tile, windows inlaid with wire mesh. Jake lay in an elevated hospital bed, shirtless, chest stuck with EKG discs. Outside a heavy mist fell, making a nimbus around the moon and stars. Teddy’d visited the emergency ward earlier, taking one look at my hands and saying I’d never box again. I was on Dilaudid for pain, Haldol for hysteria. My mind was stark and bewildered. A machine helped Jake breathe. His father sat beside the bed, gripping his hand.

“Is he—will he be all right?”

“He’s alive, Ed.”

Steve’d never called me that before. Always Eddie.

“Is he … will he wake up soon?”

“Nobody can say. There was … damage. Parts shutting down. I don’t know, exactly.”

“We were … holding hands. He broke away. He’d never done that before. It was so strange. We were holding hands, then he didn’t want to do that anymore. It’s only human. I let him go. It was okay. I thought, He’s growing up, and that’s okay.”

Steve smoothed the white sheets over Jake’s legs. “The golden hour. It’s … a period of time. Three minutes, three-and-a-half. The amount of time the brain can survive without oxygen. Only a few minutes, but the doctor called it the golden hour. So … stupid.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Steve didn’t look at me. His hands smoothed the sheets.

I stalk Nicodemus, keeping left, outside his range. His eyes shot with streaks of red, their wavering gaze fixated on the darkness beyond me. I stab forward, placing weight on my lead foot and twisting sharply at the hip, left hand rising towards the point of his chin.

When I was a kid, a rancher with a lizard problem paid a dime for every one I killed. I stuffed geckos in a sack and smashed the squirming burlap with a rock.

When my fist hits Nicodemus it sounds an awful lot like those geckos.

The punch forces his jawbone into his neck, spiking a big bundle of nerves. My hand shatters on impact, bones breaking down their old fault lines. Nicodemus’s eyes flutter uncontrollably as he falls backward. He falls in defiance of gravity, body hanging on a horizontal plane, arms at his sides, palms upraised. There’s a strange look on his face. Not a smile, not exactly, but close. A peaceful expression.

Jake’s twenty years old now. Comatose fifteen years. Were it not for a certain slackness of features he’d be a handsome young man. He grows a wispy beard, which his mother shaves with an electric razor. I’ve visited a few times over the years. I sat beside the bed holding his hand, so much larger than the one I held all those years ago. He smiled at the sound of my voice and laughed at one of our shared jokes. Maybe just nerves and old memories. Every penny I make goes to him. Gail and Steve take it because they can use it, and because they know I need to give it.

There are other ways. I know that. You think I don’t know that?

This is the only way that feels right.

Nicodemus rises to one knee. He looks like something risen from its crypt, shattered jaw hanging lopsidedly, bloodshot eyes albino-red. Pain sings in my broken hand and I vaguely remember a song my mother used to sing when I was very young, sitting on her lap as she rocked me to sleep, beautiful foreign words sung softly into my hair.

He makes his way across the ring and I dutifully step forward to meet him. We stand facing each other, swaying slightly. My eyes swelled to slits and he moves in a womb of mellow amber light.

And I see this:

A pair of young-old eyes opening, the clear blue of them. A hand breaking up from sucking black water, fist smashed through the ice sheet and a body dragging itself to the surface. A boy lying on the ice in the ashy evening light, lungs drawing clean winter air, eyes oriented on a sky where even the palest stars burn intensely after such lasting darkness. I see a man walking across the lake from the west, body casting a lean shadow. He offers his hand: twisted and rheumatoid, a talon. The boy’s face smooth and unlined, preserved beneath the ice; the man’s face a roadmap of knots and scar tissue and poorly knitted bones. For a long moment, the boy does not move. Then he reaches up, takes that hand. The man clasps tightly; the boy gasps at the fierceness of his grip. I see them walking towards a distant house. Squares of light burning in odd windows, a crackling fire, blankets, hot chocolate. The man leans down and whispers something. The boy laughs— a beautiful, snorting laugh, fine droplets of water spraying from his nose. They walk together. Neither leads or follows. I see this happening. I still hold a belief in this possibility.

We circle in a dimming ring of light, feet spread, fists balled, knees flexed. The crowd recedes, as do the noises they are making. The only sound is a distant subterranean pound, the beat of a giant’s heart. Shivering silver mist falls through the holes in the roof and that coldness feels good on my skin.

Nicodemus steps forward on his lead foot, left hand sweeping in a tight downwards orbit, flecks of blood flying off his brow as his head snaps with the punch. I come forward on my right foot, stepping inside his lead and angling my head away from his fist but not fast enough, tensing for it while my right hand splits his guard, barely passing through the narrowing gap and I’m torquing my shoulder, throwing everything I’ve got into it, kitchen-sinking the bastard, and, for a brilliant split second in the center of that darkening ring, we meet.