The Fighter

Chapter 4

Paul Harris sat on bleachers overlooking an empty baseball diamond. Browned grass, sky the color of stone.

His face still bore evidence of the beating. Lingering yellow traceries ringed his eye sockets. No dentist, so still the open gaps in his smile. Paul hadn’t set foot in the winery for a while now; instead he’d spent his days in the field with the pickers.

He’d rise at four o’clock, dress warmly, and slip past his parents’ room out into the pre-dawn darkness. The pickers were up by the time he arrived: sitting around the tractor-hub fire, they kneaded tired muscles and wrapped their fingers in tape. The men cinched buckets to their waists and stepped out into the rows. Paul would thread a bucket’s nylon strap through his belt loop and grab a box cutter, testing its sharpness by running the blade over his thumb.

After finding a quiet row, he’d get to work.

He’d walk in darkness for a minor eternity before the sun rose over the vineyard.

The rows stretched on forever: a span of twisted vines and frozen grapes. His right thigh became one massive bruise from the constant bumping of bucket against leg. The pickers were baffled: Wey you looka da bubu, they’d whisper. Nice wa’am office, fine caa and suits — ees out ’ere workin wid us! Paul was looked out for as though he were an accident-prone child: the pickers shared their lunches and taught him to wrap hot embers in tinfoil, dropping them in his coat pocket to warm his hands.

Late in the first week his father had found him in the fields. “What the hell?” Jack Harris asked his son. “I mean, what… the… hell?”

Paul tugged a pair of ski goggles down around his neck; a figure eight of pale skin ringed his eyes. Jack Harris was puffing. Gobs of mud clung to his pant legs.

“This is goddamn ridiculous — mucking around in the slop.”

“Thought I’d try something different.”

“What’s so different about it? People have picked grapes for centuries — that is until a few of us wised up and hired someone else to do it for us.”

“It’s honest work. The great outdoors. Fresh air.”

“Fresh air? Have you been reading Iron John or something?” Jack looked ready to grab his son’s arm and drag him back to the office. Harsh and forcible: jerk the ball-joint from his shoulder socket, if need be. But some fresh element in his son’s bearing steered him off this course of action.

“I know what you’re trying to prove, but it’s all a bit silly.”

“Compared to what,” said Paul, “that art show Mom dragged us to?”

“Oh, what are you bringing up that nightmare for?”

“It’s the sort of thing I think about out here. Ridiculous stuff.”

A few months previous they’d attended a conceptual art exhibit at his mother’s request — the artist, Naveed, was the son of his mother’s Pilates instructor. The opening gala was a black-tie affair at a downtown gallery; the exhibit was tided “The Commercialization of Waste.” A huge vaulted chamber displayed various bodily wastes. Milk jugs filled with excrement. Jars of piss on marble colonnades. Egg cartons full of toenail clippings. A salt shaker full of cayenne pepper flakes — in actuality, scabs. Naveed was dressed in flannel jammies, the sort kids wear with the sewn-on booties. He made sure to clarify that every ounce of waste had been produced by his own body. The smell was ungodly. Everyone must have been thinking the same thing: Sperm in Ziploc bags and turds in milk jugs — this is art? Paul and his folks had left without a word.

“What I’m trying to say is,” said Jack, “this environment doesn’t suit you.” He lowered his voice, as though fearful the vines were bugged.

“What if someone sees you — a potential investor?”

Paul razored a grape cluster free and dropped it into his bucket. “No, I’ll stay. This is real life, right? This is good for me.”

“Vitamins are good for you. High colonics are good for you. This is idiotic.”

But Paul felt better than he had in years. Up before dawn, ten hours of backbreaking field labor, collapse into an oblivious, dreamless sleep. The air was so cold and the labor so demanding that its effect was to flatten out his mind. Hours would pass without a single concrete thought: just empty, static wind gusting and swirling through his head, snatches of songs repeating themselves in an endless loop. The seething anger that so often manifested itself in other forms — as cold nausea, as nameless dread — was, if not erased, at least temporarily buried under the weight of physical exhaustion.

Jack grabbed the bucket at his son’s waist and shook it violently. “I was out here when you were a baby,” he said. “It was not good. It was miserable and torturous but it needed to be done so’s I could get that.” He pointed at the winery. “A means to an end.”

“But you turned out all right, didn’t you? Who’s to say those days weren’t the reason?”

Jack picked up a clod of earth and crushed it between his fingers. “Y’know, I said to myself, Let him go. I said, He’ll come around. But you’re out here all day and I may as well be living with a phantom for all I see you around the house. Your mother’s worried sick —”

“Is she really?” Paul hadn’t spoken more than two words to his mother in days; he wasn’t altogether sure how she’d taken to his new endeavor.

“Sure she is,” Jack said. “We’re all worried. And I don’t get it. Some shitkicker beat you up. Big deal. I never told you this, but I took a shit-kicking for a gas-n-dash years ago. This pump jockey whapped me over the head with a squeegee and had me seeing stars. Then he dragged me out behind the lifts and put the boots to me. I was in such bad shape he had to let me go: the cops would’ve booked me on attempted robbery, but I would’ve made damn sure he got booked for assault.”

Paul laughed. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Why the hell would I? It’s not my habit to go around telling stories that cast me in an unfavorable light.”

Jack looked at his son. In truth, the kid looked pretty good. He’d shed a few pounds and packed muscle onto his legs and shoulders; in all, he looked more like the son he’d imagined. Perhaps getting the stuffing knocked out of him had done him some good. Still, it was as if he’d taken a step down the evolutionary ladder — become stronger, harder even, but less cultured. Even now Jack could smell him: ripe and musky like the first whiff of a logger’s shack. Problem was, his son’s devolution was a threat to their shared futures. What self-respecting woman would marry a man who picked grapes all day and came at her with calloused, purple-stained fingers? How could he pass the business down to a son happy to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder when he’d been earmarked for the highest?

“Picking season’s over in two weeks,” he said. “I’m not sure what you plan to do then — run off into the forest and live off the land? Some hobo kick? Steal clothes off laundry lines and sleep in drainage ditches?”

“Maybe I’ll pack a bindle and ride the rails. King of the open road, uh?”

Jack was appalled. “You’re an infuriating little turd — do you know that? You’re like a kid who runs away but only makes it to the end of the block and sits in the bushes for a few hours, coming home when it’s dark and cold and he’s got the hungries in his tum-tum.”

His father’s temper was like a busted speedometer: it was impossible to tell how fast and hot his engine was running. He could go from zero to bastard in fifteen seconds flat.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” Jack’s temper downshifted. “If you’re fixed on staying out here, you’re getting paid like everyone else — by the bucket. Expect your next paycheck to be significantly smaller, old boy old chum.”

“Just pay me what I’m worth.”

“You’re worth a lot more than what you’ve settled for here.” Jack looked wretched, like a tank had run over him and left him lying there in the dirt. “And for god’s sake get your fucking teeth looked after.”

When the picking season ended the field workers went home to their wives and children to await the spring thaws. Paul did not return to the winery. He passed his days driving the city.

He would set out at dawn with the pale moon hanging over the lake and streets dark with night rain. He drove without motive or clear destination. He parked at the GM factory gates as the workers waited in line to buy coffee and Danish from a silver-paneled snack truck. He idled outside the bus terminal as drivers walked to their buses beneath strung halogens with newspapers folded under their arms.

He spied on janitors sitting on picnic tables behind the Hotel Dieu hospital, chatting and laughing, dousing cigarettes in soup tins filled with rainwater. Paul felt a huge sense of disassociation watching these men, floating, unattached to anything he understood. Men whose lives he’d never considered because they were unlike any he’d ever aspired to.

What had he ever really aspired to?

He drove to Jammer’s gym in his replacement wheels: a Nissan Micra, on loan from the dealership. Paul had expressly requested the crappiest loaner in the lot and the Micra fit the bill: raggedy and rust-eaten with a sewing machine engine, power nothing, K-Tel’s Hits of the 80s lodged in the tape deck. Even once his BMW was fixed, Paul stuck with the Micra.

He steered through the lights at Church and St. Paul. “Big Country,” by the Scottish group of the same name, blasted from the tinny speakers. He butted the Micra into a streetside parking spot, fed the meter, and headed into the gym.

It was sparsely populated: bored housewives going nowhere on the elliptical machines, university kids in the weight room. He donned his gym garb and hit the weights.

He’d started coming after picking let off. The only time he’d even considered working out before now was the time when, maudlinly drunk at three a.m., he’d ordered a Bowflex after watching an infomercial. But his existential despair had evaporated the next morning and the unassembled Bowflex, still in its box, was consigned to the role of mouse-turd receptacle in the backyard greenhouse.

Paul slapped a pair of weight plates on the bench press. He watched an anorexic-looking chick with fake tits run treadmill laps. Boobs bouncing, lathered in sweat, her face contorted into a look of desperate intensity unique to Olympic hopefuls and women of a Certain Age. An old dude with a toxic tanning-bed tan — his skin the diseased orange hue of a boiled tangerine — was rowing to Jehovah on an erg machine. Paul glanced away, mildly revolted, and caught the proprietor making a beeline for him.

Stacey Jamison struck the casual observer as a man who’d been given a girl’s name at birth and had spent his life trying to outrun the association. At five-foot-four and nearly three hundred pounds, there was nothing on the guy that wasn’t monstrous. His legs and arms and neck were like a telephone pole chainsawed into five sections. His body was networked in thick veins pushed to the surface of his skin by the sheer density of muscle tissue.

He was once a professional bodybuilder, but three consecutive heart attacks had forced him off the pro circuit. The cause of the attacks wasn’t openly stated, but gym scutdebutt had it that Stacey would pop anything that could be crammed into a syringe, including powdered bull testicle. Once he’d loaded himself up on Lasix before a show, leaching all the moisture from his body for that ultra-cut look; unfortunately the racehorse diuretic left his organs so desiccated that his kidneys tore like a tissue paper Valentine when he nailed a Double Crabbed Biceps pose during a heated pose-off segment.

“Harris, you pansy.” Stacey wore a shirt with a snarling cartoon rottweiler over the legend don’t growl if you can’t bite. “You got a hollow chest like a puffed-up paper bag. I seen ten-year-old girls with more definition.”

Stacey’s shtick was to stalk the gym belitding his customers’ physiques: You got driftwood arms; A butcher wouldn’t take those stringy legs as stewing beef; I could fry an egg on that flat ass of yours. While this initially struck Paul as an ideal way to alienate one’s clientele, he’d grossly underestimated the average gym member’s tolerance for abasement. More than a few appeared to crave Stacey’s brutal assessment of their physiques, as if he were a mirror that reflected the physical deficiencies they’d long ago glimpsed in themselves. And though most of Stacey’s assessments were of the critical variety, he was infrequently known to deliver faint praise: You’re not looking quite as sickly as I recall or You’re less skeletal; I guess I’ll have to tell those body farmers to look elsewhere. Such backhanded compliments were enough to lift Stacey’s regulars to a state of mild euphoria.

When Stacey wasn’t berating his cowering clientele, he acted as spotter for some of the more grotesque gym denizens. These juiced-up muscleheads could bench cart-oxen weight, the bar bowed under a mass of steel plates as finger-thick veins stood out on their corded necks. Einsteins of the Body, Paul dubbed them. Some were so huge their heads looked comically small in relation. It amused him to consider the possibility that they were, in fact, fantastically tiny men who zippered into a hulking coat of meat and muscles each morning; at night they unzipped and hung their muscles on a peg. Every few weeks they got their meat coats dry-cleaned.

“Get your ass under that bar,” Stacey told Paul, adding a few extra ten-pound plates. “It’s go time.” He slapped Paul’s face, slapped his own. “Do this, motherfucker.”

Paul braced his arms on the bar and jerked it off the pegs. His arms trembled; he entertained a giddy vision of his forearms snapping and the bar crushing his windpipe. He lowered the bar, felt it touch his chest, and pushed.

“You’re in it to WIN it, baby!”

Stacey jabbered. “Go hard or go HOME!”

Muscles tore across Paul’s chest, fibers snapping like over-tuned piano wires. Stacey’s crotch hovered above Paul’s face: stuffed into lime-green spandex shorts, his package looked like a plantain and two walnuts jiggling in a grocery sack.

“Lift, bitch! Be a MAN for once in your life!”

Paul’s strength ebbed as the bar locked inches above his chest. His muscles fluttered and bands of white fire stretched across his eyes. The strain coursed down his arms into his gut, knotting into an agonizing ball he expelled in the form of an oddly toneless fart. Stacey guided the bar onto its pegs.

Paul heaved with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry about that.”

But Stacey was pleased. “Only means you gave a hundred and ten percent to your lift.

You’re not farting, you’re not jerking enough iron. First time I squatted a thousand, I crapped my pants.”

Paul couldn’t tell what Stacey was more proud of: the fact that he’d squatted half a ton or that he’d shit himself in the process.

He finished his workout and hit the showers. He’d noticed how two distinct groups of men spent far more time naked than was strictly necessary: those in terrific shape and those too old to give a damn. A few struck show poses stark naked before the change room’s floor-length mirror. Paul found himself scoping out their bodies: chests and arms and abs, the symmetry or lack of it, the freakish mass of the Einsteins. Lately he’d taken to picturing how elements of other men’s bodies might look adorning his own: he’d take that guy’s pecs, that guy’s delts, that guy’s pipes, that guy’s soup-can cock and cobble together an idealized version of himself. Franken-Paul.

On his way out he caught Stacey behind the front desk, bent over a plate piled with skinless chicken breasts.

“Good work today, fag.”

“…Thanks.”

Paul nodded to the shelves at Stacey’s back: tubs of protein powder with names like Whey Max and BioPure HyperPlex. Each tub featured a wraparound photo of a tanned, overdeveloped, confidently smiling Einstein.

“Which do you recommend?”

“These?”

Stacey jerked a thumb at the tubs. “All shit. Chalk dust and pigeon crap.” He shoveled chicken into his mouth. “No substitute for hard work, Harris.” He paused with his mouth open; rags of masticated chicken swung from his teeth. “Well, that’s not the literal truth.”

He gave Paul a look, its shrewdness suggesting that Paul’s suitability and trustworthiness were currently the subject of intense scrutiny. Later Paul would realize that Stacey gave everyone this look; his customer criteria was no narrower than a convenience store’s.

Stacey rooted through a drawer and set an ampule on the desk. “Testosterone ethanate. We’re talking the Rolls-Royce of performance enhancement.”

The Einsteins made no secret of their steroid abuse — why bother, when your body was a walking billboard? — and Paul had overheard horror stories: hardened knots forming in their asses from the deep-tissue injections, excess body hair and cysts the size of corn kernels, penile atrophy. Stacey had himself developed a serious infection in his right bicep; he’d performed meatball surgery on himself in the men’s bathroom, piercing the infected tissue with a heavy-gauge needle and filling a Dixie cup with a broth of blood and pus.

Paul rolled the vial between his fingers. A quarter-ounce of yellow fluid. Piss, was all it looked like. A squirt of dirty yellow piss.

“Is it safe?”

“Nothing’s one hundred percent safe. You walk outta here, get hit by a bus.”

Paul had always despised the well-trodden bus rationale. He asked what company manufactured the stuff. Stacey told him that medical-grade steroids were for pussies; he said Paul would be better off chugging the pigeon crap. None of this answered Paul’s question, however, leaving him to wonder if it had been brewed in Stacey’s bathtub.

“I hear it shrinks your dick.”

“That can happen,” Stacey admitted. “But here’s the thing: every guy’s got an extra three inches of cock rolled up in his hip cavity.”

“Oh, come on with that.”

“I shit you not. Rolled up in there like a chameleon’s tongue. There’s this operation where a surgeon makes a slit at the base of your cock and yanks out the extra bit. I got it done; my dick’s not bent or anything and I piss and fuck like a champ.”

Clearly Stacey had tendered this pitch a few times. Not that his salesmanship was at all necessary — despite any minor misgivings, Paul’s mind had been set the moment Stacey placed the vial on the countertop.

“How do I get it into me?”

“Injection to the tushie. I’ll do it for you.”

“Is that the only w—?”

Stacey cut him off. “Please don’t be a pussy, Harris. I was just starting to dig you.”

And so it transpired that five minutes later Paul found himself in a cramped stall in the men’s room at Jammer’s gym, bent over the toilet with his pants wadded around his knees and Stacey Jamison’s hairy caveman hands clapped to his buttocks.

Stacey kneaded roughly. “Spongier than a loaf a bread.”

Paul braced his hands on the stall wall. By now sickened at his impulsiveness — why couldn’t he just inject himself? — he was convinced it was too late to back out. Stacey gave his ass a rough slap.

“Christ — jiggling like Christmas pudding.” He was genuinely revolted. “How can you cart those lumpy sandbags around all day? It’s just… gross. Look at it — look!”

Paul craned his neck, angling for a glimpse of his own ass. “It could do with some work,” he said helplessly.

Stacey’s sigh suggested that whipping a specimen as pitiful as Paul into shape would be a mammoth chore, requiring the labor of thousands.

“Don’t move. If I jab too deep you’ll get a knot like a monkey fist.”

A steel wire of stark terror pierced Paul’s heart. What if Stacey hit a vein and pumped this junk directly into his bloodstream? What if he went into anaphylactic shock and — died? He was horrified by how Stacey might deal with the situation; he pictured Stacey seating his dead body on the can, wrapping his dead hand around the syringe, then calling the cops and saying one of his clients had perished while geezing in the shitter. Paul pictured his body laid out on a morgue slab, raisin-testicled with a twig for a penis.

Stacey pig-stuck him and pushed the plunger. As testosterone shot through him, Paul felt… nothing. It might as well be vegetable oil — hell, maybe it was vegetable oil.

He yanked his trousers up and out of sheer habit flushed the toilet — that, or he wanted to convince anyone in the change room he’d merely been taking a piss.

“Work those glutes!” Stacey hollered as Paul escaped through the change room.

“Tone that saggy caboose of yours!”

Paul drove down Highway 406 following the frozen river, took the mall exit, and turned left at the lights. On Hartzell Road he passed pool halls and bars with neon signs, a foreclosed Bavarian restaurant, a train yard where boxcars rusted in the nettles.

He yanked down his pants at a red light and gave his ass a good clawing. An itchy red bump had risen at the injection site. His heartbeat was all out of whack, weird yips and baps. Reeking sweat poured from his body, soaking his shirt and running down the crack of his ass. His fingers came away bloody but the bump still itched like a bastard. He stuffed McDonald’s napkins down his trousers to sop up the blood.

At the end of Hartzell a white-brick shopfront occupied the space between a knife shop and a tattoo parlor. A sign above the door read Jensen’s paints.

Below that sign a smaller one, reading, in clipped red letters, impact boxing club.

Paul wrenched the wheel and cut across the road, narrowly avoiding a T-bone collision with an oncoming Buick. He skipped over the curb — some vital portion of the undercarriage tore off with a shriek — into the paint store lot. The engine rattled and conked out.

He sat with his hands gripped to the wheel, wondering how he’d managed to pass these shops a hundred times without ever noticing them. He heard that up north in the provincial parks most of the trees had been clear-cut by logging companies; what they left was called a “veneer”: the pines went twenty or thirty feet deep along the hiking paths and riversides, but beyond that only miles of stumps. Paul thought that if someone clear-cut this city, gutted the office buildings and homes and stores, he’d never know — so long as the veneer remained.

But he’d noticed the shops this time. Why? It wasn’t like he was in dire need of a carving knife or a tattoo. What caught his eye was the small sign with its clipped red lettering.

The boxing club entrance was around back. A worn linoleum staircase and bare concrete walls taped with posters advertising a local fight card: brawl in the basement, December 5. At the base of the staircase was another door: thick steel with an inset combination lock, the sort of thing you’d see fronting a bank vault. It was wedged open.

A short hallway hung with boxing photos in gold-edged frames: Panama A1 Brown and Nigel Benn, Baltazar Sangchili, Fighting Harada, Sixto Escobar. A Spanish beer poster:

Oscar De La Hoya hoisting a Budweiser over the words salud-respecto-contro.

The famous George Bellow oil painting: Louis Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocking “The Manassa Mauler” Jack Dempsey through the ring ropes.

The hallway led to a tiny unlit office. A shape was sprawled out on a couch. Paul knocked. The shape snuffled. Paul said, “Hello?” The shape stirred.

“I low much do I owe?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t play silly buggers. Joke’s on you, asshole. I can’t pay.” A mirthless chuckle. “Can’t squeeze water from a stone, jackass.”

“I saw your sign.”

“Oh.”

The voice brightened. “So you want to join?”

The voice assumed the aspect of a man: short and barrel-chested and wearing rumpled slacks, a short-sleeved pearl-button shirt, crack-soled Tony Lamas. Bald with deeply furrowed cheeks and a bloated nose. There was a blob of dried food on his chin.

“Caught me in the middle of naptime.” His face had the haunted look of a man who’d crawled to daylight from a caved-in mineshaft. “Lou Cobb. I own the place.”

Paul introduced himself.

“Ever box before, Paul?” Lou asked. “Looks it — got the build all right. You work with Ernie Riggs over at Knock Out?”

Paul said he hadn’t.

“Good, that’s good. Riggs is a bum. Riggs has abused more boxers than Inspector Number Twelve. He stinks. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“I won’t lie — bit old for a rookie. We like to get kids in the ring at twelve, thirteen tops, parents allow it. But a young twenty-six — now that we can work with. Sure you’re not a fighter? Got that fighter’s smile.”

“I fell down a flight of stairs.”

“We must be talking some mean-ass stairs.”

Lou scraped the blob of dried food off his chin and studied it, as though straining to recall what meal it had been a part of. “Paul, you can join yearly, bi-yearly, or monthly. But you can’t expect to learn anything in a month.”

“Can I take a look around?”

“Not much to see.” Lou seemed disappointed his spiel had not earned a quick sale.

“Go take a peep round the change rooms. After I’ll give you the grand tour.”

The dingy change room was lit by a single bulb. Headgear and leather foul cups hung from wooden pegs. A showerhead dripped. Paul considered himself in the mirror. He’d lost fifteen pounds in the grapefields. He shed his shirt and stared dejectedly at his chest: despite the gains at Jammer’s, he still looked like a human boneyard covered in a quivering layer of flab.

When he emerged, Lou beckoned him over to the ring apron. “So, ready for that grand tour?” He swept his hand in an ironic, all-encompassing fan.

“Ta-daa.”

It was impossible for the place to look like anything other than what it was: the basement below a paint store, with a boxing ring and a few punching bags hung from exposed girders. Paul judged its Spartan nature suitable to the sport.

A new boxer made his entrance. The guy wasn’t big; his limbs jutted in raw bony oudines through his track pants and sweatshirt. His hood was pulled low to obscure his face.

Only his hands were visible and they looked awful: curled into talons and terribly swollen, knuckles gone black.

“What are you doing here?” A tiny vein throbbed at Lou’s temple; a note of nervous tension picked at his face. “Supposed to be home, in bed.”

The guy shuffled over to a heavybag. He moved with obvious difficulty — Paul couldn’t help noticing that his left leg dragged behind him like an invalid’s — and set himself in a pugilist’s stance, a posture he found painful judging by the grunt he let out.

Paul had the uncomfortable feeling he was watching a zombie or automaton, some brainless creature driven by mere impulse.

Lou spread his hands in an embarrassed, despairing gesture. “Some guys just can’t get enough of training. Like say an addiction.”

He excused himself and walked over. When he set his hands on the boxer’s shoulders, the guy drew away.

“Cool down,” Lou said. “No need to get punchy.”

The guy threw a few venomous shots at the heavybag. The bag jerked on its chain. His knuckles split open and made meaty sounds when they struck. Blood flew off the bag and splattered the scuffed floor tiles.

“No training today,” Lou told the guy. He turned to offer Paul a smile that suggested such things occurred frequently in boxing clubs. For all Paul knew, they did. The guy mumbled something.

“I don’t give a crap you want to,” Lou told him. “Murdering your body, all this is. You’re heading home and hitting the sack.”

But the guy’s hands flew. Blood flew. Lou’s own hand snaked out and snagged the guy’s wrist.

After a few seconds trying to twist free, the guy relented.

“Think I’m letting you put yourself through this? Then you don’t know me too well at all.

You’re gonna go lay your head down.”

The boxer lifted his head. Light hit his face slantwise. Paul got his first real look.

The guy’s eyes were swollen over, two plum-colored anthills separated by a split bridge of nose. The top portion of his head had gone dark and shiny as eggplant, impossible to tell where skin gave way to the dark roots of his hair. Strips of adhesive tape glued his broken lips together. He held one twisted hand out, tentative like a blind man or an infant reaching to touch Lou’s face. Lou lowered it for him. “Ease down, Garth,” he said. “You did good last night. Real good.”

Laying an arm over the guy’s shoulder, Lou made a clicking sound with his tongue, the sort you might make to guide a horse onward. Glancing back over his shoulder, he appeared chagrined to discover that Paul was, in fact, still present.

“I’ll have to ask you to come back tomorrow. Bring your togs; I’ll show you how we do things.”

It was near dark when Paul left the gym. When he arrived home his parents were sitting at the kitchen table. Early-arriving Christmas cards ringed an empty bottle of Merlot.

His parents’ teeth had that dead-giveaway mulberry stain.

“Look who,” his father said, “the goddamn wraith. Ooooo-ooo-ooo” he went, like a cartoon ghost.

Paul was ravenous but found the fridge stocked with the usual unappealing foodstuffs: a bag full of periwinkles, an eel wrapped in cling film, a crustacean with a price tag skewered on one spiny appendage. The damn fridge housed a bizarrely misplaced Sea World exhibit.

“Doesn’t this family eat normal food anymore?”

“We figured with the way he’s been acting lately, our son must be an extraterrestrial. We suspect he rocketed to Earth as an infant, moments before his world exploded.” Jack tossed a swallow of wine down his neck. “We wish to cater to his alien diet. Or don’t they eat that sort of stuff on your planet?”

“Alien food,” his mother said derisively. “Is it alien that people should eat healthfully? I can whip you up something — how about an eel wrap?”

To Paul this sounded more like a creepy spa treatment than anything he might want to put in his mouth. “You know, I’ll pass.”

“Fine, mister grilled cheese sandwich.”

Barbara Harris wore a black silk kimono embroidered with dragons. Paul wondered if she’d set foot off the estate all day. Years ago she’d bred Great Danes for show but quit after her prize bitch, Sweet Roses, ran off with a feral short-haired schnauzer who’d roamed the banks of Lake Ontario.

She recovered to sit on the boards of several charitable committees, but quit them and upped her Pilates and Billy Blanks Tae Bo workouts to twice daily; she’d since scaled back in favor of Thai cookery and Japanese Tea Ceremony classes — hence the kimono.

She had not always been this way. Years ago, when they’d lived on the vineyard, she’d played Nana Mouskouri or Roger Whittaker records and sang along while puttering about the house. Friends would come down from Atikokan and stay for weeks, calling her “Babs” or “Bo-Bo.” They drank Blue Nun on the weathered front porch and pored over old photographs: Barbara sitting in the bleachers at a football game in scarf and mittens; at a bush party, the fire making her skin shine like Krugerrand gold. She used to laugh all the time — mildly disconcerting, as his mother’s laugh sounded like a poacher machine-gunning a walrus. But Paul loved her laugh: it was a sound expressive of life and unrestrained joy, though he couldn’t recall the last time he’d really heard it. Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.

“Where were you today?” Jack wanted to know. “Working the high steel, driving a steamroller, digging ditches?”

Paul found a loaf of multigrain bread and a jar of organic peanut butter. “I was around.”

“Around what — the unemployment office? Or maybe you were called back to the mothership to report to your leader.”

“I’m here now, so what does it matter?”

“Hear that, Barb? Our son’s off god-knows-where sticking his nose in god-knows-what and he wants to know why it matters!”

“Jack, please.” Barbara’s manner was that of a society doyenne calming a rowdy dinner guest.

Jack ran a hand through his hair: wild, sticking up in icicle spikes. “The other day a shipment of Cabernet bottles arrived — pink. What the hell do you think we’re bottling here, I said to the delivery guy, Asti Spumante?

Baby shampoo? The guy kept flapping the goddamn order sheet and the next thing I knew I had him in a headlock!” He tightened his tie — then, realizing what he’d done, tugged it loose. “I could use you back.”

But Paul couldn’t see himself back at the winery in his Organizational Adviser role, writing memos to his father (Subject: Cost Breakdown of Kill vs. No-Kill Rat Traps for Supply Room) and telling the bambino joke.

“You ought to hire an assistant.”

“Who, some stranger?”

“Who the hell cares? There’s a million guys like me, and Mom doesn’t give two shits what I do—”

“I do,” Barb cut in. “I do give two… shits. And much more. I just wasn’t aware it was your aspiration to be a fruit picker.”

“Guess I should have sent you to the fuckin’ fruit-picking academy!” Jack roared, zero to stone-cold sonofabitch in ten point six seconds — a new record.

“Didn’t know there was one, but that would’ve been swell,” Paul said as he made for the back door.

The backyard described a shallow decline to the shores of Lake Ontario. A snowy owl perched on a tree bough, its flat phosphorescent eyes big as bicycle reflectors. The water was a frozen gunmetal sheet; the lights of Hamilton and Toronto shone upon it.

“Paul, slow up.”

His mother traced a path down to the shoreline. She wore a mink coat Paul had thought flattered her, but now all he could think about was how many minks had been anally electrocuted to make the ridiculous thing.

“Can we walk a bit?” she asked.

“We can.”

Wind whipped over the ice pan, tossing up fans of crystallized snow. Barbara used to walk the lakeshore for hours, calling out for her truant show dog — “Here, Sweet Roses! Here, Sweet, Sweet Roses!” — in hopes of coaxing it away from the renegade schnauzer.

“I’m not too sure what’s been happening lately.” Barb’s face bore a wounded expression. “You were in a fight, you’ve picked grapes. So I guess I know what you’ve been up to — but I can’t see why.”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Care to try me?”

Paul shrugged.

“Okay, say you got in a fight—”

“Man or a woman?”

“Say this she-bear of a woman kicked the snot out of you. What do you do?”

“First I’d call the police—”

“See, Mom, that’s where we must part ways.”

“Will you let me finish? You never let me finish. I think I might…” She sighed. “No, I’d call the police. God, Paul, what do you expect me to say? I’d embark on a province-wide killing spree?”

“You don’t go to the police.”

Barb’s wounded expression persisted. “What you said about me not giving a shit—”

“Two shits.”

“Two, even … that wasn’t fair.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. “But it’s nothing to do with you.”

She shook her head and shivered. “Cold as a witch’s tit.”

Though many things about his mother had changed, her diction had not. She still said I could’ve dropped cork-legged! when something surprised her; when Paul was young she’d tell him Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire when it was time for bed. As a kid he’d purposefully misbehave to hear her holler For two pins I swear I’d thump you! safe in the knowledge she’d never actually thump him.

“So what’s this big problem of yours?” she asked after they’d walked for a while.

“It’s bigger than one thing, more complex. I can only tell you some of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms, okay.”

“Okay. Last summer I was driving home dead drunk.” Barb was shaking her head.

“Mother, dear — did you, or did you not, ask? So I’m driving. If I hit a check-stop I knew I’d blow over the limit and I already had that DUI —”

“The one your father cleared up.”

“Can I tell the story? I came across an accident scene. That hairpin curve—”

“At the bridge over the regatta course?”

Paul nodded.

“Two cars. One crashed through the guardrail into the pond; its headlights were submerged and they looked like lights at the bottom of a swimming pool.

The other one slammed into the bridge. A compact Suzuki—”

“Oh, god.” Barbara drove a Lincoln Navigator, comforted by its stellar front-impact safety rating.

“—and all accordioned up. The driver had rocketed through the windshield and was laid out over the hood. His head — her head, his head; who knows? — the head was flattened against the bridge abutment.”

His mother looked ill. “You know, I sat on a traffic safety committee years ago and that same curve came up. I voted to widen it, but the road crews were threatening a strike and… well, go on.”

“There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks, those megawatt accident-scene spots. Everything was focused on the accident. I could have popped my trunk and rolled a headless corpse into the weeds and nobody would’ve said boo.”

“But you didn’t cause the accident. And you weren’t thankful for it happening — were you?”

“Not thankful.” He stomped a crescent of ice off the shoreline. “But I thought the only reason it happened was to distract the police. So I wouldn’t get arrested.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“I’m saying that when I saw that person flung through the windshield the first thing that leapt into my head was that my, I guess you could say existence, was so vital that some god or universal force had rigged the whole accident for my benefit — a human being had been killed, just to get me off the hook. And I drove away smiling.” He gave her a look: hopeless, cored out. “Smiling, Mom. Really.”

“They’re only thoughts, Paul. You didn’t make those cars collide; you didn’t hurt anyone.”

“And that’s basically it, Mom. I haven’t done anything, ever. Good or bad.”

“Nonsense. You’ve graduated university—”

“Whoopee. Only took six years.”

“What about all those trophies in your office?”

“Dad bought them at a thrift store! Didn’t you know that?”

Barb looked confused. “Really? I could have sworn…”

“Nothing!”

The enormity of the understanding rocked Paul like a blow. “Even vicious murderers go to their graves knowing they’ve changed the world somehow. Murdering takes initiative; it takes drive. You got to get up off your duff to murder someone.”

“Paul!”

He calmed down.

“It’s just, sometimes I feel like… a nonessential human being. I could be replaced with a robot that looked and dressed like me, that’d been programmed to run through the basic routines of my life, and nobody would ever know the difference.”

“And you think picking a few grapes will make those thoughts go away?”

He gave a sigh.

“Other suggestions?”

“Therapy, for one—”

“Jesus please us.”

“—or medication. My Pilates partner told me that Stelazine brought her son back from the brink. He’s grinning like a cherub all day long, never been happier. Paul—?”

He peeled away from her and walked out onto the ice. He caught his reflection in a boil of dark water: eyes as wide and scared as a horse in a barn fire.

“Do they make a drug called Chrysalis, Mom? You swallow one and hang from a tree branch until a cocoon forms, and two weeks later you crawl out, a whole new person. Pharmaceutical reincarnation — some egghead should get cracking on that!”

“Paul, come on in. You got me fluttering.”

The ice pan boomed as a long fault line split its surface. Ice shattered under Paul’s feet; his leg plunged in up to the crotch. His heart hammered so hard it threatened to tear his chest apart.

“Do they make pills for people who don’t want to be themselves anymore, Mom?”

The water was probably fifteen feet deep beneath him, currents running swift; they wouldn’t dredge his carcass up until next spring, which by then might have floated halfway to Cornwall, but he didn’t give a damn and he laughed like a bastard.

I work hard so you won’t have to. Parents tell their children this, Paul thought. I will sweat and toil and bleed so you never will.

All for love, but still, they miss the point entirely.