The Fighter (11 page)

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."