The Fighter (15 page)

On the second Thursday
of each month the thick-lipped, beetle- legged cattle farmer doffed his
cattleman's hat and donned his fight promoter's cap. Manning's arms were netted
with old razor scars and the tip of his nose was gone: depending on which
account you believed it'd been variously hacked, gouged, or bitten off his
face. Tonight he wore an ankle-length duster coat, sleeves rolled to the
elbows.

"Evening,
lads." Starlight bent upon the barrel of a Remington over- under shotgun
in his right hand. "Here to tussle or just catch an eyeful?"

"My
brother's feeling frisky," Reuben said.

Manning kicked
the barn door ajar with the heel of his boot. "Some fellas in there'd be
happy to take that frisk right outta him."

The space under
the peaked wood ceiling was as spacious as a dance hall, filled with light and
smoke and milling bodies. The crowd was clotted in groups distinguished by
their dress: suits and ties or flannels and work vests. Manning's buck-toothed
son sold six-packs of PBR from an ice-filled trough. Bales of hay studded with
pink blossoms demarcated the ring. Cows snuffled at gaps in the barn planks.

Spectators were
rowed along a wooden skirt circling the barn's upper level, legs dangling over
the edge. Tommy saw Fritzie Zivic standing beside a wheelchair-bound geezer
with a breathing mask strapped over his face. Zivic's scrofulous old dog was
chewing a wheelchair tire.

The fighters
huddled in corners beyond the light. Some were washed-up trial horses and
clubbers, others tavern toughs with cobalt fists. All bore the mistakes of
their trade: worn-out, mangled foreheads and split brows and pitcher lips and
eyes like milky balls socked into the pitted ruin of their faces.

Reuben scanned
the prospects. All regulars, at least. Every so often a vagabond fighter would show
up; he'd fight, collect his purse, and move on down the road. Reuben would
never forget driving home after a night at the barn and seeing one of those
vagabond fighters at the Niagara bus terminal: only hours ago that same guy had
pinned another man's skull between bales of hay and pounded until the floorboards
ran red, and now here he was stepping onto a Greyhound with blood on his hands,
moving on to another town and another fight while his opponent lay on a
hospital gurney with a pair of detached retinas. No remorse—everyone who
stepped into the ring knew the stakes.

Men born in the
wrong century,
Reuben had heard it said.
Put 'em in a coliseum, fighting with spears and nets. It's
all that suits 'em.
Men whose sole value lay in their
willingness to absorb punishment; men in whose faces could be glimpsed an
inevitability of purpose impossible to outrun. Some had no more intellect than
a child. Reuben had seen one eating soda crackers spread with axle grease: his
trainer insisted it thickened the blood. Later that fighter stood in the ring,
his face black with blood, calling his trainer's name in a high, childish
voice. Only his trainer wasn't there: he'd already hopped into his truck and
driven away.

Reuben motioned
his brother to a hay bale. "Gimme those mitts." He taped Tommy's
hands with great care, first winding clean white bandages around and around,
then placing sponge across the knuckles, then wrapping on the adhesive.

When the barn
was full Manning bolted the door and crossed the wide sawdust floor. He ran
down the rules, such as they were. "Fight goes until one man can't answer
the bell. A man goes down, both fighters take a rest. I won't accept no
outright foul play but whatever happens between two men in the course of a
tussle, happens. Those men ain't got nobody to stand by them, gypsy cab's
waiting to run ya to the medic need be—fare come out your purse, but."

Something
tightened in Reuben's chest to hear Manning's spiel. He knew his brother never
went out to make a show—he went out to get a job done. He was a boxer: a rough
occupation, yes, but one governed by laws of fairness and respect. There was a
refinement and cleanliness to it. You don't hit a man when he's down. You don't
punch after the bell.

Here, men fought
like weasels down a hole. It was dangerous and dirty and men were hurt in ways
they would never recover from. Here you might see a guy staggering to his
corner with his scalp split pink down the dark weave of his hair, his eyes
half-lidded and tongue hanging like a dog's. Here you might see an overmatched
fighter struck a blow so vicious it cracked the orbital bone and pushed his eye
from its socket, the blood-washed eyeball swinging on its optic nerve like a
lacquered radish. Reuben knew such things were a possibility because he had, in
fact, seen those exact things on past nights.

Top Rank
operated under laws. The barn was international waters.

Top Rank was for
boxers. The barn was for fighters.

Rob was watching
TV when Kate Paulson rapped on the door.

"Andale,
Tully, andale" she called. "Freakin' cold out here."

He opened the
door and smirked. As typical, she was overdressed: blue winter shell, scarf,
and mittens. "You must be looking for the polar expedition team. They're
two doors down."

"I walk all
the way over and you give me grief? May just go home."

"What, head
back out in that weather?" He clutched his shoulders and shivered.
"Brrrrr."

Kate lived three
blocks east on 22nd. Kate's mother, Ellen, had known the Tully brothers since
the first grade; they'd grown up in the same ten-mile radius, attended the same
schools, caroused the same bars. She worked in the florist department at
Topp's, where she and Reuben often chatted amid the daffodils and zinnias.

The Tullys and
Paulsons might have existed like any two families in the Love Canal district of
Niagara Falls—that is to say, distantly— if not for a pair of coincidences, one
happy, the other not so. The happy coincidence was the near-simultaneous births
of their first, and only, children; Robert Thomas was born Monday afternoon,
Katherine Harriet during the witching hours Tuesday morning. The infants spent
their first night together in the Mount St. Mary nursery, side by side in
transparent plastic tubs. Tommy, the most whimsical member in either family,
believed they had imprinted on each other like baby chicks; this he held
accountable for their enduring closeness.

The other
coincidence was that, shortly after the births, both Ellen's husband and
Reuben's wife had realized parenting wasn't in their blood. Phil Paulson
stepped out for a pack of Kools days after his daughter's birth and never did
manage to find his way home. And speculation had it that Phil's itchy feet
must have been highly contagious, spreading all the way down to Carol Tully's
house; one afternoon Reuben came home to find baby Robbie at the next-door
neighbor's and a note from his wife informing him she'd moved to Nashville to
pursue a music career.

Following from
the initial, heart-defibrillating shock of abandonment, Ellen Paulson
recovered rather quickly. Her husband was a contract handyman whose keenest
aspiration was to lose a digit in a work-related mishap and live off the settlement;
as Ellen saw it, now she had only one child to care for instead of two. Every
so often she'd receive a postcard from deadbeat Phil; these she read aloud to
Reuben and Tommy in a deft imitation of her husband's voice:
I still love you, don't think for a second I don't, but the
aloor of the open road, that freedum... its got me in its spell.
She'd point out all the misspellings and clichés and finally, cathartically,
burned each postcard in the fireplace. After a year she didn't bother to read
them anymore, just pitched them in the trash.

"So."
Kate clapped her hands. "Where's that leftover spag?"

In the kitchen
Rob set the pot of sauce on the stove. She sat at the table rubbing the cold
from her hands. Her pageboy-style hair stuck up in wild spikes. She had green
eyes, like her mother:
cat's eye
green,
Reuben called that color.

"You want noodles,"
he asked, "or on toast?"

"You're
kidding."

Rob shrugged.
"Tommy likes it that way."

Which was true.
Tommy ladled spaghetti sauce on top of bread— and not any old bread: Wonder
Bread. This caused friction in the household, since Tommy preferred it to the
bakery loaves his brother brought home.
Why,
Reuben harped,
would you fill your face with that crap? I doubt it's even
bread; I bet it's labeled "food substitute."

Rob set another
pot on the stove and dumped in a handful of spaghetti. Kate, who'd been
watching with a critical eye, asked what the heck he was doing.

"You didn't
sound keen on toast."

She joined him
at the stove, hip-checking him out of the way. "Got to boil the water
first, dummy. Then the noodles." It was hot over the stove top and she
pulled off her school sweatshirt, rucking her undershirt up. Rob caught bare
skin, the dip under her ribcage, a groove of muscle down her stomach.

He was unruffled
that she'd taken over the kitchen; Kate had always been alpha to his beta.
Their easy acceptance of these roles was one of the reasons they got on so
well. And since Rob had never seen his own father and mother interact, he'd
always wondered if, in their way, he and Kate behaved as a married couple
might.

She sprinkled
the cooked spaghetti with Kraft Parmesan—"Cheese in a canister," she
said disapprovingly, "that's what you get in a house full of men"—and
slid Rob's plate across the table. He'd eaten only two hours ago, but most
boxers existed in a more or less permanent state of appetite.

"Where's
your pops," Kate said, "or Tommy?"

Rob kept his
eyes on his plate. "Busy tonight."

Kate arched her
eyebrows. "Second Thursday of the month. I didn't think your uncle was
mixed up in that anymore."

Most people in
the neighborhood knew of the barn; a few, desperately strapped for cash, had
even tried their luck there. For all but Tommy, once had been enough.

"Tommy's
shifts at the warehouse got cut back," Rob said. "He's in some to
Fritzie Zivic and hasn't been drumming up much sparring work—"

She cut him off.
"The supermarket's looking, and nobody's gonna try and knock his head off
there—or if so, some turkey-armed fogy because he cuts the salami too
thick."

Rob laughed, but
he was shaking his head. "It's not the money so much..."

"So much
as?"

All Rob could
think was that boxing got into people's blood like a poison, except that the
poison was the only thing that kept them alive, or at least made them feel that
way.

"I mean
it's a tough life for a man to leave behind, is all."

Kate looked up
at the ceiling, scanning for bits of Rob's brain that clearly must have drifted
out his ears. "Women find it hard to leave things, too—shitty marriages,
and boyfriends, and degrading jobs. We can be every bit as pigheaded as
men."

"Let me get
this straight," said Rob. "You're defending a woman's right to act as
stupidly as a man?"

"I'm saying
men don't have a hammerlock on weakness. But it's still no excuse."

In their
neighborhood, gender roles were pretty well defined. Men did this; women, that.
There wasn't a lot of friction over it—just the way things were.

"Hey,"
he wanted to know, "are we having an argument?"

"No, Tully.
We are having a discussion." "... Oh."