Rust and Bone: Stories

LIFE IN THE FLESH

TWO MONTHS SHY of my twenty-eighth birthday I beat Johnny “The Kid” Starkley to death in Tupelo, Mississippi. A stiff right to the solar plexus sent him to the ropes, gulping for breath. I clubbed him a pair of overhand rights and a left just below the ear, where the jawbone connects. Brutal punches fired straight from the hip, subtle as a train wreck. The Kid—an apt nickname: sandalwood-smooth skin and clear green eyes, so light on his feet he seemed to float above the canvas— held his left arm out, that arm trembling, red glove bobbing like a buoy on a riotous sea. The Kid’s mouthpiece stuck to his teeth, the insides of his lips filmed with white lather, holding his left arm out as if to say, Please, I’ve had enough, but his body too stubborn, too disciplined, to buckle to the will of his mind. I hit him until his eyes glazed over like a dying animal’s, until that arm fell away, until the ref signaled for the bell. Starkley’s death hit me hard, but at the time I wouldn’t cop to it. The fight was sanctioned. Marquis of Queensbury rules—I’d done nothing wrong!

Started juicing on Ten High bourbon and Schlitz. Went from training five hours a day at Top Rank gym to closing out the Cyclone, the gin joint next door. I shed a sickening amount of weight, skin green and jaundiced, booze destroying the mitochondria in my guts. For a few months I didn’t know sobriety: sixpack for breakfast and a flask of mescal on the nightstand, brushing my teeth with apricot brandy. I saw Starkley trapped in the ropes, mouthpiece dangling out, blood filling his eyes. And, in this persistent vision, I knew he was dying, knew I was killing him, but I didn’t stop. The worst part was watching Starkley grow younger with each blow—now thirty, now twenty-five, now eighteen, finally my fists slamming into this kid, this skinny-legged, sparrow-chested child hung up between the red and blue ropes.

My manager, Moe Kundler, tried to salvage me. Stumbling back from the Cyclone I’d find AA schedules taped to the door, twelve-step brochures in the mailbox. Then Moe dropped by to find me zonked on the kitchen floor, shards of shattered bottle punched into my palms, pants filled with piss and shit. He filled a pot with water and dumped it on me. I came to sputtering, fists balled and ready to rumble. He slapped me hard and said, “Clean yourself up. I’m making the phone call.”

No way could I hack detox or the nuthatch, glimpsing Starkley in those Rorschach inkblots. I gathered up the money I’d ratholed and hightailed it. Thailand was my choice on account of an uninhibited sexual politic and stern non-extradition policy. I arrived in Bangkok twenty-five years ago, and have never left.

Yesterday Moe wired he’s sending a hardass. Time and distance have patched our old beefs. The kid arrives on the 9:40 Air Canada out of Vancouver. Late twenties, baggy board-shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt, eyes dark behind oversize wraparounds. Workably broad across the shoulders and chest, bull necked, narrow waisted, and small hipped. Underslung jaw and a nose busted eastward. His acute-angled brow would give any cutman the screaming meemies: heavy layers of scar tissue rim the curves beneath each eyebrow, and I know if he tastes the long knuckle the sharp ridges of bone will tear those scars to shit.

“Roberto Curry?”

“Welcome to Bangkok.”

He wipes at sweat beading his forehead. “Country this hot all over?”

“Hotter,” I say. “Airport’s air conditioned.”

Don Muang airport sits atop an arrow-headed promontory, the darkened city stretching out below. To the west: the meandering strip of Ko Sanh Road contoured in stark neon. To the southwest: Patpong a bright starfish, lit tendrils spreading from its central hub. Humidity’s intense: like breathing through boiled wool.

The taxi traces a route down Thanburi Road, skirting the Chao Phraya river. Oil-slicked waters dotted with coastal trawlers and derelict coalships, floating communes of tin-roofed sampans. Turn onto Ko Sanh Road. Almost every building converted into guest houses, every corner has long distance telephone booths with cooling AC, cafés screen Rush Hour II and Brokedown Palace on video. Sidewalks strung with stalls trafficking in pewter flasks and teak elephants, knock-off Reeboks, bootleg DVDs. A train of Thai women dressed in garishly colored sarongs walk down the side of the road toting various bundles on their heads: firewood, guavas in large porcelain bowls, sacks of kola nuts, stalks of plantains, volcano fish, deep-fried crickets in beaten tin pans. Their husbands walk in front of them carrying not a damn thing.

The kid pockets his sunglasses stepping from the cab. His eyelids are networked with scar tissue. So he’s a bleeder.

Blood ruins some fighters. Since the deaths of Johnny Owen and the Korean Duk Koo-Kim, both of whom were blood-blinded from cut eyelids, paranoid refs and ring docs are kiboshing fights at the first sight of red. Some fighters got tough bodies but weak skin—breathe on them hard, they cut. There’s nothing a guy can do about it, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can help being brittle. But if that claret keeps flowing—a bad cut above the eye, say, deep and wide and vein-severed, your fighter’s heart pounding merry old hell—forget it, the fight’s over even if your boy’s not really hurt. But Muay Thai matches are rarely stopped on blood, and trainers are permitted certain measures—double-strength adrenaline chloride, ferric acid—to handle the most vicious cuts. Of course, all the ferric acid in the world isn’t going to help with the detached retinas and crushed metacarpals, but that’s come what may.

We sit in a curry stall with a dining area open to the street. Green curry for me, red for the kid, plus pints of fresh guava juice. The kid axes the juice in favor of beer.

“So,” I say, “what’s your record?”

“Twenty-two and three. Two losses on stoppages.”

“Blood?”

“Blood.”

“Lose the other on a KO?”

“TKO my third fight. Soft count to some unranked tomato can.”

“Get cocky?”

“Little, maybe.”

“I can see that happening.”

The kid digs a chicken claw out of his mouth, grimaces, spits on the sidewalk.

“Ever watch Muay Thai?”

“Sure,” he says. “Bunch of skinny guys winging at each other.”

Consider telling him about the fight I watched last week, the one where the loser left with hemorrhage-thinned blood pissing from his ears. Consider telling him how Muay Thai fighters strengthen their shins by pounding sand-filled bottles against them, the sound a wooden huk-huk-huk, until their skin’s tough as boot leather. Instead I say, “How much weight you carrying?”

“Started middleweight, climbed to light heavy.”

“Any vision problems, those scars?”

“Peepers are twenty-twenty.”

“What kind of condition you in? Don’t bother bluffing, I’ll find out.”

The kid rolls up a shirt sleeve and flexes his biceps muscle, pumping the brachial vein. “And body fat less than ten percent. I’m gripped, stripped, ready to rip.”

“You’re sweating like a bastard.”

“It’s the food.”

“It’s the heat. You’ll get used to it. Training camp’s outside Chang Rai, two hours south. You’ll be doing road work on jungle paths. Sweat off ten pounds the first week—your cardio’ll skyrocket.”

The kid finishes his beer, signals for another. “Want one, coach?”

“I don’t drink.”

The kid nods as if he’d anticipated this weakness in me. A local woman stops beside our table. Three-quarters legs, decent tits but hatchet faced, wearing a miniskirt exposing the lower crescents of her can. Red silk skirt and scarf, gold hoop earrings, white frosted lipstick.

“Herro, boys.” To the kid: “Wha jo’ name?”

“I’m Tony, hon.”

She rests a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Oh, ju a stron’ boy, hah?” She sits on his lap. “Ju a strong, han’some big boy, hah?”

“Watch yourself with that one.”

The woman pouts at me. “Ju be quiet.” She wiggles her ass into the kid’s crotch. “Ju lie me, Tony?”

“Sure,” the kid says. “Me love you long time.” His hands knead her thighs. “Thass ni’,” the woman says.

I grab the fluttering brocade of the scarf and yank it off. “Adam’s apple is a dead giveaway. Now your top-quality ladymen get it surgically shaved down so’s you can barely tell. But this one here—well, she’s no top quality.”

The aggrieved he-she snatches the scarf back. “Ju a horr’ble ma’,” she says to me. The kid shoves him-her away, beating his palms on his shorts as if they’re coated in flaming oil. Got a look on his face like he ate a handful of rat turds he mistook for Raisinettes.

“Ah, Christ, no!”

“I’d be inclined to blame it on the beer goggles, kid, but you’ve only had two. Got to watch out for the scarfed ones.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before I let it bounce on my dick?”

“You didn’t seem keen on listening.”

“You’re a real peach, coach.”

AN OPEN-TOP ISUZU drops us off at the training camp shortly after 5 a.m. It is a fine, clean morning, the kind of morning that, as they say, makes you wish you got up early more often. A scarred dirt path leads through the trees alongside a fast-running stream. The path leads into a large dusty clearing fringed by tall palms and dotted with bamboo-and-tin Nissen huts. At the far end is a long-house. The sounds of men in training are audible through its open doors.

“Stow your gear,” pointing to one of the huts, “and throw on your road kit.”

The kid comes out wearing gray jogging shorts, cross-trainers, a hooded sweatshirt. I retrieve a rusted bicycle leaning against the long-house and say, “Let’s go.”

The kid starts out in a stiff-legged trot but, warming up, his strides lengthen, smooth out. The path is too narrow for us to navigate side by side so I fall in behind him on the bike. Soon a skunk-tail of perspiration darkens the back of his sweatshirt as we follow the path east into the rising sun.

“Give me that shirt.” The kid doffs the sweatshirt and drops it in the bike basket. At the 3K mark his chest is heaving, arms hanging from his shoulders. When the path finally rounds back to the camp he sprawls out in the dirt, sucking wind.

“Piss-poor conditioning, kid, but you got heart. Wind we can work on.”

“Fucking country. Can’t breathe the air.”

“You’ll get used to it. Get home, your lungs will feel double-size. Throw on your training kit and meet me in the gym.”

“Fucking country.”

He comes into the long-house wearing a pair of shorts and his ring shoes, a towel draped around his neck. The tattooed face of a dog, blue and grinning, covers one shoulder. On the other shoulder a crude imp or demon brandishes a pitchfork beneath the words Li’l Devil.

The long-house is equipped same as any North American boxing gym. In the ring, Khru Sucharit, the legendary Muay Thai trainer, instructs Bua, a rising fighter. Bua’s eighteen and has been fighting since infancy. His body is perfectly shredded, each muscle group distinct and visible beneath rough, dusky skin. He’s drilling textbook hook-kicks into punch-mitts snugged over Sucharit’s hands, transferring his weight to rock the old trainer back a step with every blow.

“Know what I see?” The kid points at Bua. “Skin and bones and arms and legs.”

“Then you’re only looking, not seeing.”

“Let me know when it’s time to snatch the pebble out of your hand, sensei.”

Set him off on the speed bag. Hand speed’s decent, and the kid’s got power: the leather bag snaps hard against its ringed-iron mooring. He starts mugging, beating a rat-a-tat rhythm on the bag, bringing one knee up and then the other, two pistons in perfect cadence, lisping, “I’m the champeen, the greatest, the king.”

“Pop the bag.”

The kid stalks over to a tan-colored heavy bag suspended from a crossbeam and tees off. He rips a half-dozen body shots into the two-hundred-pound bag, causing it to buck on its chain. He sways at the hip in bob-and-weave style, shouldering the bag, throwing hooks and short right hands, falling in line with its rhythm before stabbing four left hooks and following with an overhand right.

The kid forces a yawn. “Okay, boss?”

“It’ll do.”

After a half-hour of rope skipping and shadowboxing I tell him to stop. Brew a pot of oolong tea and pour cups with lemon. We sit on the ring apron and watch Bua run footwork combos in front of a full-length mirror.

“Moe only sends me hardasses,” I say. “What’s your story?”

The kid wipes his face with the towel. “Moe thinks I’m a hardass?”

“You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Well,” the kid says, “could be he thinks I don’t train hard enough.”

“Why would he think that?”

“No idea. I win fights.”

“People think you win a fight in the ring,” I tell him. “But you know where the big fights are won? Right here. In the gym and on the road.”

“I know, I know.” The kid’s heard it all before.

“Moe says you brawl like a Viking. Says you fight with your dick instead of your head.”

“He told you all this already, what you asking me for?”

I nod over at Bua. “That kid’s won over a hundred fights. Started when he was thirteen, fights twenty times a year. He’s not a crowd favorite—he’s too smart for that. He doesn’t go out to make a show. He goes out to get a job done and absorb the least punishment possible.”

Bua’s feet flicker across a vulcanized floormat, body circling to the left, feinting, ducking away, back to the right. The squeak of his shoes on the rubber and his breath coming into an even rhythm. The boy’s so quick he could fight in a rainstorm and stay bone dry.

“I don’t know where Sucharit found him,” I say. “Probably on the streets. He doesn’t fight for glory. He fights for a paycheck. The boy trains hard and fights for the money because he knows, even at his age, it could all be taken away.”

The kids sips tea, wipes his neck. “I don’t fight for the money, exactly.”

“Then why?”

“I got anger.”

“At who?”

“Don’t know. Everyone. Not all the time, you know, but sometimes … it builds up. This need to hurt, even if it means getting hurt myself. And that’s okay, the way I see it, because everybody stepping into the ring knows the stakes. You accept those stakes, you accept the risk—maybe you’re going to get fed. No, it’s not the money. Fighting, it’s like, therapy.”

Fighters like him are the hardest to train. On one hand, he’s managed to inhibit his natural instinct for survival: he understands he will get hurt, bleed, and doesn’t run from it. Stifling the survival instinct—to continue fighting after being knocked down, to wipe blood out of your eyes and wade back into the fray—is a trick some fighters never master. On the other hand, his anger is dangerous: it’s useless, not to mention foolish, carrying too much fury into the ring. Successful fighters learn to see their opponent as a faceless thing whose weight roughly equals their own, something vertical that must be laid horizontal. But successful fighters respect their opponents: respect their power, their stamina, their will to win. Lack of respect leads to a cocky fighter blinking up into the ring lights as the ref counts him out.

Bua completes his drills and he and Sucharit walk over to the ring. The boy’s body is slick with clean, healthy sweat. He smiles. The bottom front teeth have been punched out.

“Your fighter’s looking good,” I tell Sucharit.

Sucharit frowns: trainers never admit the worth of their fighters, especially in their presence. “He slow,” Sucharit says. “Like he eat lead.” He slaps the boy’s toned stomach. “Hah? You eat lead, hah?”

“I thought he looked slow,” says the kid.

“When’s his next fight?”

“Two wee’,” Sucharit says to me. “Ban’kok.”

“Tell him I say he’s a weak puncher,” the kid says. “Girl arms.”

“He understands fine,” I say. “Quit making an ass.”

“Tell him I got two friends I want him to meet,” the kid goes on, grinning. He holds up his right fist: “Bread.” He holds up the left: “And Butter.”

Sucharit puts his arm around Bua’s shoulder and guides him away. “Goo’ luck training.”

“Why’d you say that?” I say after they’ve gone. “Something in the air?”

“Air’s fine.”

THE MOST WIDESPREAD MISUNDERSTANDING surrounding the death of Johnny “The Kid” Starkley is that I killed him purposefully and maliciously because he questioned my sexuality, called me faggot at the weigh-in. But it had nothing to do with vengeance: I’d been trained to fight until my opponent dropped or the bell went or the ref stepped in. The bell didn’t ring and Ruby Goldstein didn’t step in and Starkley refused to go down so I did as I’d been trained. I didn’t want to kill him. My only intent was to defeat Starkley completely, leave him lying there on the canvas. I wanted him dead to me, dead as a threat. Nietzsche wrote, Every man unfolds himself in fighting. Well, that night in Tupelo, in a ring smelling of sweat and spit and cold adrenaline, I unfolded.

My popularity skyrocketed after the fight. Everyone wanted to ink the “sanctioned murderer” to their card. But by then all the fight had drained out of me. I stared at myself in every passing mirror: nose busted so many times over it couldn’t rightly be called a nose anymore, right eyelid hanging half-masted due to nerve damage, cheeks so scarred they looked like carnival taffy. I understood the same thing could’ve happened to Starkley in a bar or back alley for no payday at all. It’s just, that way it wouldn’t have been on my conscience. I started juicing hard, haunting the Cyclone with the washups and fight bums, stripping down everything I’d built.

My second week in Bangkok I drifted into the Royal Jubilee Palace arena, drawn by crowd buzz and frantic ocarina music, to see my first Muay Thai match. I was mesmerized by the pre-fight rituals, the lean tan bodies, the thrill of men in close combat. The pureness of it all. I knew then I’d never escape. Marvin Hagler spoke for all of us when he said, If they cut my head open, they would find one big boxing glove. That’s all I am. I live it. You can’t outrun this life. Sounds weak, I know, but it’s the truth. Whether it was bred into me or whether I’d always harbored the bent has long ceased to matter.

This morning I’m watching the kid shadowbox in a wash of hot, dusty sunlight pouring through slats in the long-house roof. The kid’s a bully: in sparring sessions he’ll remind you of a vintage Foreman, shoving his partner around before tagging him with jabs, then a hook to the body, finishing with an uppercut flush on the knockout button. Shots so hard the other guy’s eyes fog despite the headgear and oversize gloves.

Problem is he can’t leave his fight in the ring. Type of alpha male who’ll walk into a bar and knock the bouncer’s teeth out to prove he’s the toughest bastard in the place. He’s got serious heart: takes sparring shots so wicked they’d cripple a bear, eats up mile after mile of road like he’s starving, punches a dent in the heavy bag. But there’s too much of the animal in him.

The kid’s sharing the ring with Bua, shadowboxing. Sucharit’s in with his boy, pointing up, down, to the side, Bua following Sucharit’s pointing finger with a punch, kick, or sweep. The kid’s working the opposite corner, wearing ring shoes, red trunks, and wrist wraps, flashing hard combos—double-up jab, feint, hook, hook, straight right, bob back, jab-jab, uppercut—exhaling short puffs with each punch.

“Hey, Boo-boo.” He’s taken to calling Bua “Boo-boo” or “Boo-hoo.” Sometimes he’ll creep up behind the boy and holler, Boo! “Why don’t we go a few rounds?”

“Take a break,” I call from the apron. “Don’t have to be a prick every day of your life.”

The kid dances across the canvas, peppering jabs at Bua’s back, coming within inches.

“Come on, Boo-boo, show me what you got.”

I say, “Back off. Now.”

“What’s the matter?” Dancing on the balls of his feet, shuffle-step, pittypat jab-jab-jab. “Is Boo-hoo scared? Boo-hoo a puss?”

Bua doesn’t reply, eyes never leaving Sucharit’s moving finger. I slide between the ropes and push the kid away. “The hell’s your problem?”

He brushes past me and shoves Bua between the shoulder blades. “Let’s do this. Let’s do it up, baby.”

I hook my fingers inside his trunks but, as he’s a legit light heavyweight and I never fought past welterweight, I can’t haul him away. “Keep this up and you’re on the next steamer home.”

Bua turns to face the kid. Nothing in his eyes speaks to anger— still smiling that gap-toothed smile—but his arms hang loose and ready, thigh muscles fluttering.

Sucharit steps between the fighters. “You wan’ fie my boy, hah?” he says to the kid.

“What was your first clue?”

“He fie you, okay, okay. Baa no’ here.”

“Why not?”

“Who watch? Who pay? ”

“Over here it isn’t about who’s swinging the biggest dick,” I say. “The boy’s not gonna fight, nobody’s paying.”

“Cool.” The kid’s throwing jabs that stop inches from Bua’s unblinking eyes. “Make a few bucks kicking his ass.”

“When were you thinking?” I say to Sucharit.

“Nex’ wee. Ban’kok.”

“We’re gonna get it on, ’cause we don’t get a–long! ”

The kid raises his arms and dances in the center of the ring like Ali.

A PRIZEFIGHTER IS A FREAK. He’s got maybe ten years in the roughest business in the world, a business ruled by a strict hierarchy: winners and losers. He’s not a paperhanger, a lawyer, a beancounter. He doesn’t put on his galoshes, grab his briefcase, catch the trolley, the same daily grind for thirty, forty years. He gives it all now, or never.

Moe Kundler told me that. Moe was a fighter himself, cruiserweight, never held a belt or scored a big payday, a crippling right hook but a weak chin led to three consecutive canvas naps and eliminated him as a contender. The ring turns fighters into freaks by aging them prematurely: that twenty-two-square-foot expanse is a time warp.

The Royal Jubilee Palace arena’s prep area is located in the building’s bowels. Me and the kid in a shoebox-sized room, low ceiling, pipes rattling overhead. Six or seven shattered chicken coops in one corner, floor crusted with plaster flakes and dead roaches. Above, the dim babble of the crowd cheering the semi-main.

I called Moe and asked was it okay the kid fought Bua. I said, “The only way this kid’s going to progress is to take a rude beating. Only way he’ll learn.” Moe was wary when he heard it was a mixed-discipline bout, Muay Thai versus boxing. “Will his record be affected?” I said no, since the fight wasn’t sanctioned. Moe said, “So the other guy can kick?” I said yes, and headbutt, and elbow. Moe said, “Could the kid get hurt bad?” I said, “A chance. What he needs.” Moe said, “Then go for it.”

The kid’s perched on the edge of a prep table. I’m taping his hands. Wrap adhesive gauze around his wrists to protect the eight interlocking carpal bones, across the meat of his palms, his thumbs, fingers to the second knuckle. The wrap’s got to be tight, but not too tight: a fighter with blue hands is bound to break bones and not even know it.

“Flex your fingers,” I say. The kid curls his hands into tight fists. “Okay. Now the gloves.”

I help him on with the gloves—ten ouncers instead of WBA-sanctioned sixteens—and tape them to his wrists. The kid hops off the table, high-stepping, rolling his shoulders loose. Then the sweat comes and he’s shadowboxing, holding his gloves up, juking his head to the right of them, to the left, cracking hard jabs from the guard.

“Stand back in your stance,” I tell him. “Otherwise he’ll kick your thighs into ground chuck.”

The kid’s dressed Tyson chic: black trunks, black ring shoes, no socks or robe, just a black terry-cloth towel with a hole cut in the center to pass his head.

“Remember your elbows,” I say. “Legal in Muay Thai. Headbutts, too.” Like every pro fighter, the kid’s been taught how to fire elbows and butt heads. Only this time he doesn’t have to worry about the DQ.

“For the thousands in attendance, and the millions watching around the globe,” he intones, slamming his fists together. “Let’s get ready to rum–buuuuul! ”

The kid looks pale under the hot ring lights, skin glowing against his dark trappings. Bua’s wearing green trunks fringed with gold, yellow shoes, the traditional Muay Thai headpiece of braided hemp. Although the kid outweighs him by twenty pounds, Bua’s arms and legs are long, rangy, his hands huge—tack hammers, Moe’d call them. Judging by the stare-down it seems probable one or both will leave the ring on a stretcher.

The Royal Jubilee Palace—nicknamed “The Pail”—is a three-tiered arena: its levels, instead of extending outwards, are stacked one atop another, giving fighters the impression they’re fighting at the bottom of a bucket. Ten-foot-high chicken-wire barriers ring each tier to discourage fans from hurling Singha beer bottles and other trash into the ring. The place is rife with chattering voices, like a forest full of monkeys.

I water the kid, grease his cheeks and brows, remove his mouthpiece from the ice bucket and slip it into his mouth. Sucharit is massaging Bua’s shoulders and whispering in his ear. The ref, a tiny balding Thai in a sweat-stained zebra get-up, calls the fighters together, makes them touch gloves. The ocarina quartet place their lips to their wide-bellied instruments. The bell rings.

The kid rushes out, gloves held over his mouth, elbows out, head down, looking at Bua out of the tops of his eyes. Bua circles out of his corner to the left, standing high on his toes, hands low, wrists rotating. They meet near the ropes, Bua stabbing two quick jabs.

The kid takes the first one high on the forehead. The second one he slips over his left shoulder and, stepping in with his right foot, brings his left hand up in a tight arc. The uppercut catches Bua on the throat under his chin. His legs jelly a little. Kid goes low, knees flexing, fires another submarine shot. Bua grabs him, pulling their bodies flush. The kid’s gloves are high on Bua’s chest but he can’t push him off. He brings them up into the boy’s face, rubbing the laces across the cheeks and eyes. He’s looking to the ref for a break.

“No breaks!” I holler over the crowd noise. “Fight out! Fight out! ”

Bua brings his left knee up into the kid’s side beneath the kidney. The kid lets out a grunt. Bua knees him again, putting all his weight into it. The crowd rises to a quick roar. In close, the kid shoves against Bua’s face, gets some separation and brings an elbow up into the gap, shearing it across Bua’s chin. Bua reels into the ring’s center.

The kid comes on, stance switched to southpaw. He jabs once, twice, again, setting up the overhand right. Bua’s still groggy, stepping to his left with the left foot and throwing a left hook over the jab. The kid turns under it and, as he takes the punch above the ear, fires his own right return into the short rib, carrying his weight onto the left foot, ripping another hard right into the same spot.

Bua fires a side-kick into the kid’s thigh, the sound of meat on meat a bullwhip’s crack. The kid staggers but Bua overbalances, too much weight on the back right leg, and the kid recovers to step in low, rising with a powerful right cross.

The boy goes down. He goes down on his butt and the back of his head hits the canvas.

The crowd becomes very still. The ocarina musicians, whose playing had risen to a fever pitch, cease. The boy rises to his knees, gloves pressed to the canvas. Shaking his head violently, shaking the cobwebs off.

“… t’ree … fo’ …”

He reaches for the rope and pulls himself up. Still shaking his head. The kid’s standing in a neutral corner, mugging to the crowd. “It’s all over but the crying, coach,” he says. But it’s not. If he knew anything about anything, he’d know that.

“… si’ … seben …”

The kid can crack; that cross would’ve crumbled most fighters in his weight class. But Bua’s up by the ref’s count of eight. His face is red and glove burned.

The kid charges out of the neutral corner throwing a right-lead haymaker aimed to take the boy’s head off. Bua ducks low and brings a sharp left up into the stomach. The kid caves at the waist and grunts in pain. Swiveling to the outside, Bua vises his arms on either side of his opponent’s head and, thrusting forward, drives first the left knee, then the right, into his gut.

The kid’s tough. But the boy lives tough. The kid fights to remind himself he’s still breathing. The boy thinks about enduring, surviving. They haven’t grown up the same: one has never gone hungry, never watched a man die or fought for his life. All this matters in the ring.

Bua steps back and, as the kid straightens himself, attacks the right leg with three roundhouse kicks. The kid gasps. His knee buckles. Bua feints another roundhouse and, when the kid drops his guard hand, sets both feet and leaps, right arm cocked like a pistol’s hammer, fist smashing into the kid’s face, opening a deep gash over the eyebrow.

Not knowing what to do, the kid bear hugs Bua, tying his arms up. Blood’s pissing out the side of his face and he’s spat the mouthpiece. They butt foreheads and, like magic, the other eyebrow opens up. The kid’s squirting blood all over the damn place.

They break the clinch. The kid must be seeing black from the blood: he’s wiping at both eyes to clear his vision. He’s seeing only the outline of Bua, dark arms and legs. He’s backing away, staring around at nothing. Now he moves forward, but uncertainly, no strength or conviction in his movements. It happens very quickly.

Planting his left foot on the canvas, Bua pivots forward on his heel. His right arm uncurls like a whip as it comes around, arcing up, a textbook spinning backfist that hits the kid on the left temple and he goes down, eyes closing. He hits the canvas open mouthed—I hear his teeth click shut. The referee kneels, counting, the kid’s body lying there, writhing, trying to get up, unwilling to surrender consciousness.

“… ni’ … ten …”

At one minute and thirty-six seconds of the first round the ref signals for the bell.

The boy walks to his corner and sits on a stool. Sucharit removes the mouthpiece and waters him, smoothing an iced metal swell-stop over the mouse on his forehead. The crowd chants his name but he doesn’t acknowledge them. His face shows no emotion. He looks so old.

Helped by two attendants, I get the kid down to the training room. Crack a smelling salt and wave it under his nose. Five seconds later he regains consciousness and sits up on the table. He stares at me with cloudy blue eyes, face sweat-stung and flecked with dried blood. I flush the cuts with hydrogen peroxide, press split meat together and apply butterfly bandages, make him swallow a few vitamin K tablets.

“You came out like a house on fire,” I tell him. “Had him dazed but went for too much too soon.”

I cut the tape and pull the gloves off. The kid looks at his hands, at his legs, hands again, up at the ceiling. As if he has no idea where he is, as if he cannot quite believe he’s here. Quiet in the room, just the kid breathing. His eyes are unfocused and he raises his left hand in front of them, that hand shivering a little.

“You’ll rebound from this,” I say. “Maybe the best thing for you.”

The kid shoots me a look. Feral, that look. Cold. He lowers his hand to his lap. His index finger points at the floor. I look where his finger is pointing, thinking I should call the doctor because nothing’s on the floor, the floor is bare—

I never see the dummy right uppercut that catches me flush on the knockout button. My legs crumple beneath me and blackness pours in.

I COME TO SOMETIME LATER. The kid’s gone. So is my wallet and training kit. Don’t know how long I’ve been out because my watch is missing. Upper lip split to the septum and jaw not working properly. I don’t know what to do. A lot of blood. Pick myself up and walk out to the street.

The city is alien in a way I’ve never known. Small torn-eared dogs fight over knots of gristle flung behind a curry stall. A figure passes whose sex I cannot determine; he or she smells of cocoa and lemongrass and something else and carries a small colored parcel. I lean on the wall of the Royal Jubilee Palace beneath a scrawl of graffiti, a battle cry or revolutionary slogan. Blood soaks the front of my shirt and something is broken on the left side of my face. From an open window of a nearby tenement I hear the last notes of “Let It Be,” by the Beatles. A shoeless boy stares at the old farang shivering in the heat.

The night Starkley died, a writer of no small eminence eulogized: As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone within psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, “I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,” and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe around him. None of this happened, though somehow I wish it had. Nothing reached out. I saw no smile, regretful or otherwise. Starkley’s mouth was slack, mouthpiece hanging halfway out, saliva-stuck to his upper teeth on the left side, eyes rolled back in his skull. I didn’t feel his death breathe around me. He died twelve hours later at Cedars-Sinai of a ruptured blood vessel in his brain. He’d been clear-headed, chatty I’m told, until, complaining of a little headache, he lay down and never got back up. It was an accident. It happens.

But, those last few punches—I knew something very ugly was happening. I was fully aware. I see it all so clearly now. His left arm held out, trembling, Please. My arm swiveling smoothly in its shoulder socket, the pressure of his face against my gloves, the shockwave coursing through the bones of my fingers, wrist, arm—I feel it to this day. And it felt good. Christ, it sickens me to say, but there it is. Good. Where did it come from, that urge? Starkley never did a thing wrong. He was a fair fighter. A professional. In the training room afterwards, Moe said, “Those uppercuts you landed near the end … the Kid couldn’t protect himself.” I said, “I know.” Moe said quietly, “I think you mighta killed him.” I said, “I think so.” The fact Starkley stayed up gave me all the license I needed. Why wouldn’t he just go down? It seemed so strange. Why did he give me the chance? I never wanted that chance.

To my left the mouth of a narrow alleyway runs between the arena and the burnt-out building beside it. The brick of the building is charred and words are scratched into the blackness. In the alleyway’s dim light men ring an oildrum fire, passing a bottle of Mekong. They are laughing and I wonder at what. One reaches across the flames to touch another’s laughing face.