The Fighter

Chapter 12

Two men drove the southbound QEW in a rattletrap Ford.

Paul Harris wondered at the chain of events that had brought him here. To him, it seemed life unraveled as a series of minor decisions. And it could begin almost without your knowing it: one moment your life followed a predictable path down well-lit streets, the next it was careening down dark alleyways. Momentum becomes unstoppable. A snowball rolling down an endless hill until it was the size of the world itself.

Lou asked Paul how he felt. Paul said he felt fine.

“Don’t look so fine.”

Paul’s face was as expressionless as the face on a coin. “Don’t worry about me.”

The dotted median strip flickered, a luminous white line in the side-view mirror.

Lou cracked a window — the kid plain stunk — to let the cool air circulate.

“What was it you said you did before this — something business-y, wasn’t it?” When Paul nodded, Lou said, “Ever think about heading back to that?”

“Are you kidding?”

Lou shrugged. “Let your body heal up, buy a nice set of false teeth. Figured you’d enjoy looking at your face in the mirror and not seeing a plate of dog food staring back.”

“Since when did you start giving a shit?” Paul asked him.

“Since never,” Lou said, honestly. “A temporary lapse on my part.”

Fritzie Zivic drove down narrow streets past boarded shopfronts and fire-gutted buildings. American flags hung from poles in rigidly frozen sheets; faded stickers covered rust-eaten bumpers: god bless the usa and support our troops and blessed be.

Staring from the passenger seat, Rob Tully was overcome with a consuming need to be different — different in every conceivable way — from all this. To be rich where all he saw was poverty. To find sophistication where all he knew was crassness.

Grace where all he saw was ignorance. Girls with platinum hair extensions and three-inch fingernails gabbing outside Sparkles Nail Boutique. An old black man wearing a snap-brim fedora behind the wheel of a shiny white Mustang 5.0 ragtop. Teenage boys passing brown bottles of Cobra malt on the curb outside Wedge Discount Liquors.

“Just so we’re clear,” said Fritzie, “if things get ugly, I’m stepping in.

I’ll wave that white towel. That’s the price of this ride.”

Murdoch cut a toneless fart in the backseat: a low wheezing groan like a bungling musician hitting a flat note on his accordion. The car filled with a reprehensible stench.

“You sour, ungrateful mongrel,” Fritzie said dourly.

The lights of the city faded. The Cadillac wended down dark country roads. Rob’s heart beat in a regular rhythm. His course of action was settled. Fritzie slotted an eight-track cassette into the player; Frank Sinatra sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

They pulled off the main road and parked along a barbed-wire fence. Bars of cold even light cut between the barn’s slats: in the darkness the light appeared to be slanting up out of the earth itself.

Manning stood beside the barn door. Ankle-length duster coat parted slightly, the butt of his Remington shotgun resting on the toe of one boot.

“Who you brung me, Fritzie?”

“Amateur fighter from out my way. Robbie Tully.”

Manning set his sharp eyes upon the young fighter. “I heard of you. You’re hot shit.”

“I just want a fight.”

“Plenty safer places to find one.”

Fritzie said, “He’s got a specific fight in mind.”

Manning nodded. “Big fella went down last time — that was a Tully, no? We run a blind draw here, so strictly speaking it’d be a beggary of the rules. But rules can be bent to clear room for a grudge.”

The space under the barn’s peaked ceiling was packed to capacity. The crowd was a mix of Canadian and American, their country of origin distinguished by the coffees in their hands: white Dunkin’ Donuts cups for Yanks, brown Tim Hortons for the Canucks. Some wore T-shirts bearing tough-guy phrases: pain is only fear exiting the body and yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i shall fear no evil, for i am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.

Rob made his way through the crowd to a shadowed corner. A lot of eyes on him: Is that Rob Tully, the top-ranked amateur? He found a hay bale and scanned the fighters. They stood on the fringes, some singly, others with their backers. All of them scarred or disfigured or broken in some way. And their eyes — the newer ones had this look of sheer psychic terror. The older and more mutilated showed no emotion at all: faces a fretwork of scars, eyes blank as a test pattern. Then there were those hovering in the middle ground, neither new nor old: they had the look of men who’d realized their lives were irretrievably lost and they could only await the inevitable passage into the final stage.

Rob unzipped the duffel and removed tape, sponge, and gauze. He’d never actually taped his own hands — his father was always there for that. He ripped off lengths of tape and hung them off his trunks. He centered a strip of sponge on his hand but it kept slipping off his knuckles.

Fritzie materialized from the crowd. “Let me help with that.”

Rob pressed the sponge flat across his knuckles while Fritzie taped. “You go second, Robbie.”

“You’re up second,” Lou told Paul.

Paul held his hands out, palms up. Lou centered Paul’s left hand on his knee, flexed each finger, then began taping.

“Remember me doing this for you the first time you came by the gym?” Lou said.

“Just another silver spooner, I figured. Gave you a week, tops.” He shook his head. “This kid you’re fighting — Robert Tully. Only about the biggest thing to come out of Niagara Falls since. well, forever. He’s also the nephew of the man you knocked silly the last time out.”

“You don’t say.”

“I won’t build castles in the sky for you: godly intervention aside, he’s gonna kick your ass. Tell you another thing — I won’t be throwing in the towel.”

“That’s a good thing, Lou. I’d probably end up killing you, you did that.”

Paul stared at a dark knothole in the floor. He stared at that knothole, that cavelike spiderwebbing knothole, until he fell into it. Inside the knothole all was dark and quiet and calm. Inside he could think. I am a machine, he thought simply. A machine of unforgiving angles and unshakable geometries, titanium and bulletproof glass and ballistic rubber and dead metals. A machine assembled in a work area completely free of human presence, riveted together by preprogrammed robotic arms, altogether unfeeling. Without name or face, lacking a past, lacking dreams or memories. A machine feels no mercy. A machine cannot be broken by fear. I am a machine, he thought over and over, and over and over. A machine a machine machine machine machinemachinemachinemachine—

At some point Lou was saying, “You’re up.”

Two men stood in the center of the ring.

Between them stood Manning. He ran down the rules.

“Fight ends when one man goes down and stays there. One guy’s gotta go down to end the round. Keep it clean — no eye poking or biting. That’s sissy fighting.”

Manning stepped aside. The fighters came together. Their upper bodies were candle-white after the sunless winter months. Paul leaned forward until their faces nearly touched. Rob did not pull away.

Paul said, “I’m really sorry about all this.”

Rob’s first punch — a venomous straight right — struck Paul’s forehead, splitting the flesh between his eyes like the blow from a fifteen-pound hatchet to bring forth blood in needle-thin pulses. Rob saw it in slow motion: his fist rocketing from his chest shoulder-high to pass over his opponent’s guard, the flex of ligament and snap of tendon, impact sending a mild shiver down his arm and the guy’s face opening up, blooming like some bastard weed, a bone-deep trench cut down the middle of his forehead.

Rob watched the guy — his name, he remembered, was Paul — reel back, brain obviously scrambled, eyes wide. His knee had barely touched the pine boards before he was up. He shook his head, red drops flying every which way.

As Paul came on again, if anything, Rob felt vague disappointment: this guy hurt Tommy? Like Fritzie Zivic said: takes one lucky punch. Rob was also puzzled by Paul himself: what drove a man to seek out a place like this, to fight so maniacally, so recklessly — and to what end? They circled. The united voice of the crowd boomed like subterranean thunder beneath their feet. Blood coursed down the sides of Paul’s nose and off his chin. Someone tossed an empty mickey into the ring: it shattered with a glassy tinkle, silver shards sparkling the boards like chipped ice.

They met violently. Rob lashed out with a left hook. Exhibiting more grace than Rob would have credited him with, Paul ducked back and, rooting his left foot like a stump, threw a wicked right cross. The punch slammed Rob’s abdomen above the hip. A flash of white-hot pain exploded in his gut. He backed off, gagging, bile burning his sinuses. His vision was studded with shimmering dots; he retreated jelly-legged as Paul followed up with a crushing right hand, smoking it straight through Rob’s frail defense and smashing his mouth.

A cataclysmic bang filled Rob’s skull, the sound of a.44 Magnum discharged in a broom closet. He felt himself falling, but, as in a dream, was helpless to check himself.

He came to slumped against a hay bale. Dry stalks itched the knobs of his spine.

The soft tissue inside his cheeks was badly cut, pink rags hanging in his mouth. He couldn’t hear anything and for a brief span was gripped with a sickening surety he’d gone deaf.

Then he caught his own shivering exhalations and came to realize that the crowd had gone silent in disbelief. He spat blood and touched his upper front teeth, unsurprised to find them loose in their moorings.

Fritzie helped him up. “Want me to stop it, Robbie?”

“You better not.”

Paul leaned forward on a bale, elbows balanced on knees. His overall demeanor was that of a dog, a fighting dog, pit bull or rottweiler, waiting for his trainer to release the fetters.

Paul waved Lou’s hands away from the forehead wound. “Let it bleed.”

“You’re gushing all over the place. That blood will blind you.”

“I don’t care. Leave it be.”

The crowd was absorbed in funereal silence. Manning’s son swept the busted bottle from the fighting surface.

Paul glanced at the other corner. The kid had regained his senses. He didn’t appear fazed or scared — surprised, was all. Paul came to confront what he’d known all along: he was going to lose this fight, lose it badly. That suited him just fine. It was beyond winning or losing now. It was about the desire and willingness to approach the world with fists raised, always moving forward. To give everything of yourself without hesitation or fear.

Rob came out cautious the following round. His guts ached and broken points of fire danced across his vision, but his legs were steady.

Paul came on like a dervish, throwing hook after hook, lunging after Rob with ungainly strides. Blood ran unchecked down his face, into his eyes and mouth.

Rob snapped left jabs at Paul’s upper arms, driving his knuckles into the solid flesh of the biceps. Paul’s arms dipped and Rob’s fists flashed, jabs peppering Paul’s brows, cheeks, nose. Paul couldn’t protect himself: he might as well try to shield himself against a sniper’s bullets fired from a faraway bell tower.

The rough adhesive on Rob’s fists left slashing burns on Paxil’s face. Rob wondered why he kept smiling. Or not a smile, exactly: an oddly blissed-out expression, as though he were in the midst of a pleasantly confusing dream.

The smell of cowshit and sawdust sweated up from the floorboards as Paul’s face swelled under Rob’s relentless assault. Blood vessels burst under the pressure of skin slamming bone, blood pumping from ruptured veins to collect in pouches like hard-boiled eggs inserted under his skin, erupting like oversize blisters under Rob’s fists. Paul tottered, he wove and stumbled, he refused to go down.

He threw punches blindly, not seeing Rob anymore, throwing for the doubtful possibility of contact or perhaps the sheer joy of it.

Rob only wanted Paul to go down and stay there. His hands were covered in blood and he didn’t know whether it was his own knuckles splitting and bleeding or if the blood was all Paul’s.

Voices in the crowd:

…never seen the likes of it…

…scrawny faggot’s gonna need a casket before long…

… drop that chickenhead, man! He’s neck-deep in hurt…

They collided in the middle of the ring and stood toe to toe, just winging. Paul felt like a man facing a barrage of rocks soaked in kerosene and lit on fire.

Rob finished with a vicious right hook that sent Paul down onto a bale. Brittle straw puffed up from under him and the bell rang while he struggled to find his feet.

Lou had never seen a face like it. A Sunday matinee horror show.

Paul’s lips were split so deep down the middle they were like four lips instead of two, the pink meat drooping in rags. Eyebrows broke open over the high ridge of bone, wounds so wide it was as though a pair of tiny toothless mouths were leering through the bristly hairs. One eye puffed completely shut, a fleshy ball the size of a baby’s fist.

How long had the round lasted: three minutes, three and a half? So little time, really, for such a sickening transformation.

“Paul,” Lou said carefully. “You need to listen to me. You can’t go on fighting this way. Let me clean you up a bit, at least.”

Lou wet a towel and wiped. When Paul’s face was clean Lou saw it was hopeless: the cuts were too deep, too long, too numerous. Adrenaline chloride wouldn’t do it, ferric acid wouldn’t do it, a goddamn staple gun wouldn’t do it. He could debride the deepest ones and razor the puffed flesh around that eyeball to give him some relief, but why bother? The kid didn’t want to be helped.

“How do I look?”

Lou said he looked like an elephant had shit him out sideways. “And you’re gonna lose the fight to boot. No other way this ends.”

In a voice so low Lou had to strain to hear, Paul said, “And you think I didn’t know that from the start?”

Fritzie yanked Rob’s trunks open and splashed cold water over his groin. Rob saw all the sweaty, booze-flushed faces standing like flowers in morbid arrangements and behind those faces the fighters waiting in pockets of shadow, their bodies shivering with terror or anticipation, and beyond them the discolored barn walls rising to a rotting roof through which he glimpsed the vaulted emptiness of the night sky.

“Just go in there and put him away, quick,” said Fritzie.

“I hit him as hard as I’ve ever hit anybody. He’s not going away.”

“Then hit him harder.”

Rob gazed across the ring. Paul stared back. Rob was repulsed by the damage he’d inflicted. Paul smiled — a gruesome sight — and his eyelid closed over his working eye: a wink.

For a moment Rob thought Paul had been blinking blood out of his eye, but no: a wink.

The revelation was startling in its clarity: none of this had been about Tommy, or about him, and never had been — this was something else entirely. Tommy lay on a hospital bed, fighting for his life — and why? To afford this guy a means of restoring some semblance of purpose to his pitiful fucked-up life. Fury settled, a small black stone behind Rob’s eyes. Spoiled selfish brat, winking at him. Spoiled selfish brat with his purposeless, futile, fucked-up life.

“Cut the tape off my hands,” Rob told Fritzie.

“Why the hell you want that?”

“Because I want to feel it.”

I’ll kill him. The notion arose from nowhere. It’s what he wants. So give it to him.

“He wants to feel it, too. I owe him that.”

“You don’t owe this guy a thing.”

“No,” Rob said softly, “I owe him that.”

When the bell rang for the third round, Paul was thinking about his last vacation.

He and a few university friends had stayed at a five-star resort outside Havana.

They’d lain on the beach drinking mojitos served by nut-brown cabana boys, laughing at their silly white outfits that made them look like plantation butlers. At night they’d gone to discotheques and hit upon the local women, pinching asses or grabbing tits until one reared upon Paul and slapped his face, but he’d only laughed thinking the sting on his cheek would be gone the next morning but her life would unfold in the same sad unremitting pattern until one day she died. He thought of such episodes, the indulgence and cruelty and extravagance and wastefulness. It seemed his whole life was a patchwork of similar events, one callous escapade stitched onto the next. He did not know how to make amends for any of it, to balance the karmic scales — was it possible? But the throbbing ache of his hands, the swollen fiery confusion of his face: this was good. If a man were to give enough, suffer enough — maybe. And so he craved this pain, the knowledge and atonement only pain could bestow, particular, intimate, and entirely personal, that pain washing over him, washing away his every wrong.

The next punch struck him square in the face and skidded him back on his heels. He took a knee, balancing on his knuckles; then, with a great shuddering breath, he stumbled in Rob’s direction again.

He swung and missed as another blow spiked the knot of nerves where his jawbone met his skull and shocked the upper left half of his body into mute numbness.

Another blow, then another and another, so fast his body could register the pain only after the fact, the way you’ll hear the crash of thunder moments after lightning has split the sky. He took a murderous shot in the gut and his bowels let go with a mordant note like the groan of a ship’s hull. “You reekingprick!” someone yelled and Paul was surprised at how quickly he’d moved beyond frustration or shame…

…as Rob’s rage built, cyclical and combustive, firing like the pistons of a supercharged engine. The thing facing him was nothing but a bag of skin and bone and gristle and blood and Rob wanted to inflict as much damage upon it as was humanly possible — as was inhumanly possible — smash and bash and crush and wreck until nothing of value remained.

The sack of meat shambled forward. Rob rained blows upon it. The air shimmered with blood. A few spectators looked away…

Paul came on awkwardly. Equilibrium shot, he moved as though his knees and hips were packed with rusted ball bearings. He couldn’t tell if he was smiling.

He sort of hoped he was.

Rob’s fist found his jaw and a cherry bomb exploded in the tin cup of Paul’s skull.

Warmth ran down the inside of his leg and he had no idea what it was but still it was oddly comforting. He was hit again and orange lights burned like sunspots before his eyes, initiating wild riots in his head until one of these spots mushroomed, bright as an A-bomb, blinding and beautiful and so incredibly alive and as he fell a claustrophobic blackness replaced that light, the airless dark of a deep sea cavern, then he came to on a bale of hay with spring stars shining through holes in the barn roof.

Lou’s face swam above him. His features were a mask of wild panic. His mouth formed words but Paul couldn’t hear anything on account of the cycling roar that filled his skull.

Lou started waving his arms. “No,” Paul said, though he couldn’t hear his own voice. Lou’s lips moved; he might have been saying Crying blood. “Don’t care.” Lou’s lips moved again: Skull filling with blood.

“Don’t care.”

Shit yourself—

“Don’t care.”

Die here—

“Don’t…” Spit a sac of blood. “…care.”

“This guy…” Fritzie was baffled. “I never seen anything like it. What is that guy anymore — a punching bag, that’s it.”

“He’s got to quit,” Rob said. “He’s got to cry uncle.”

“He’s not gonna do that. There’s something the matter with him.”

“Then we keep going.”

“And you’re sure you want to? Don’t exactly look it.” Fritzie wiped under Rob’s eye. “That’s not sweat.”

Rob swiped his cheeks furiously. “Tell someone to ring the bell.”

A profound sense of peace settled over Paul. The workings of his mind flattened out; his thoughts disintegrated. Like he was on a plane on a clear cloudless day, staring out the porthole window as earth ceded to ocean: the houses and roads and buildings, the patchwork quilt of farmers’ fields, all that variation giving way to a smooth blanket of water — green closest to shore, the white curls of Queen Anne’s lace turning to deepest blue and, where the water ran deepest, flat ongoing black…

…while Rob’s was consumed with visions of slaughter. His hands felt hardened, lumps of rock, and his wish was to drive them into Paul’s face, across the bridge of his nose or into his mouth, dislodge the rest of his teeth and slam his fist, the whole of it, deep into Paul’s mouth, down his throat, choking him, or instead cleave his skull, crack it open like a fleshy nut and destroy the core of his brain. To step through those barn doors was to enter a realm of violent imperatives and so he let his fists go, beating a merciless tattoo on this creature who stared balefully with his blood-filled eyeball…

… Paul could no longer feel his arms or legs. He felt isolated from the fight: as though another man was taking the punishment while he stood nearby, watching. He saw two men in a series of frozen moments, the sort of stylized postures glimpsed in ancient Greek friezes. It resembled less a fight than an aggressive coupling, yet there was an odd deference: May I place my hand here? May I set my leg here, between yours? May I, May I, May I and their bodies melding, fists enveloped by the other’s chest or face, arms and legs and heads uniting, flesh bonding until they became a united whole, this faceless sexless creature that might haunt a lunatic’s dreams…

…until a hard stroke finally sent Paul to one knee. He could not see the boards under his feet. Blood dripped from his face, dripped from all parts of him. He raised one hand, that hand trembling uncontrollably, and touched his face. He felt something beneath the skin, incredibly hard. Harder than bone, even. He pushed three fingers deep into the most gaping wound and touched these alien contours. New ridges and planes that did not feel human — not entirely so. If his body were to be hit hard enough, long enough, if it absorbed enough punishment, maybe this soft outer layer would slough away to reveal whatever lay beneath. Imagine a cocoon, a pupating bug. The prospect entombed itself in his mind. If he could just weather the storm he would emerge as something infinitely stronger, harder, more meaningful. No weakness, no fear, no misery or rupture or death.

Paul came forward again, not protecting himself at all, walking straight into punches. The smack of meat on bone snapped off the high wooden beams and a queasy fan yelled, “Stop it. God, just… stop” The two men in the ring heard nothing: not the fans, not the lick of fists or the sound of their own breathing. For a crazed instant Paul wanted to simply touch Rob, to hold and breathe against him, to taste his wounds and know his skin.

And when neither man could punch anymore they stood at arm’s length, strength sapped, holding on to each other: from a distance, it looked as though Rob was teaching Paul how to dance a slow waltz.

Paul’s mouth opened. A single word passed over his broken lips:

“Please…”

Rob did not understand what he was asking.

Was it:

Please, stop.

Or:

Please, more.

Paul’s eyes rolled back in his head as he slipped through Rob’s arms, falling senselessly the way a toppled mannequin falls. Rob made an instinctive grab for him, but Paid was too bloody and Rob too exhausted and so he simply fell.

The bell did not ring; there was no need. Men climbed over the bales and bent over the stricken fighter with something approaching reverence. When they rolled Paul over, the shocking bloody imprint of his face remained on the boards. He was unconscious but his eyes were wide open. Someone might have placed two fingers upon his lids and drawn them shut but nobody did.

Lou lifted Paul’s head and hooked his hands under his armpits.

“Careful,” he instructed Fritzie, who’d taken hold of Paul’s heels. “Get him out to my car.”

The night was still. A low white fog rolled across the fields, thickening toward the tree line. Rob moved over sedge grass stamped flat by cattle hooves. His fury had evaporated as rapidly as it had risen, and in its place remained sickness and self-loathing. He was horrified by his actions — the savagery of them. He’d seen the bloody imprint of Paul’s face stamped on the raw pine boards. The sight had provided no solace or peace, only emptiness and desolation more incurable than he’d ever known.

A fine cool night and Rob walked between heads of cattle, their heaving flanks, the pungent animal smell of them. He had glimpsed in himself a malice of purpose he’d never known and it terrified him. I’ll kill him. It’s what he wants.

The fence post was the circumference of a dinner plate. Rotting at the top, slim wooden stalactites he could snap off with a finger, but going solid toward the middle. Moonlight winked off the rusted points of barbed wire twined around it.

Rob asked himself: Can I break them all?

The first punch was tentative: it wasn’t the pain that frightened him, but the finality of his actions. The next punch was harder; the post vibrated like a tuning fork. Wire tore skin. He threw his fists with as much venom as he could summon, dug his feet into the cold earth. The crisp tok tok tok of fist on wood gave way to mushier, meatier sounds until at some point his right hand — the dynamite right, his father called it — crumpled, delicate jigsaw bones shattering, and though the pain left him gagging he did not stop. His hands became a blur of ever-expanding and ever-darkening red, blood in the air, blood and skin stuck to the post and the bones of his left hand splintering with a tensile shriek and bone visible now, thin glistening shards jutting through sheared flesh, but he kept hurling them.

He dropped to his knees as the sound of his blows echoed across the field. His head rested against the post. The cool wood felt so good on his skin. His hands looked like bags of suet tied to the ends of his wrists. A few fingers hung on strips of skin at lewd angles. Rob curled them under his chin and cried. Softly at first, then with building intensity.

Fritzie found him hunched there. “We loaded that guy into the car. He’s beat up pretty bad, but he’ll be okay.”

Rob’s chest hitched; his body shook. Fritzie knelt beside him.

“What’s the matter, Robbie?”

Rob uttered a wail of such resonant grief that it shocked Fritzie. Rob kept his broken hands curled under his chin: Fritzie could not see what he had done and so could find no sense in his despair.

“The hell’s the matter with you?” Fritzie was truly perplexed. “You won, Robbie. For Christ’s sake, you won.”