The Fighter (16 page)

One commonly
held theory in streetfighting is that you must get the first punch no matter
what the price.

Christ,
Tommy thought, staggering back on his heels,
I really should've known better.

The blow struck
him dead between the eyes—a poleax, in the same spot that a slaughterhouse
stunner aims his kill hammer. The air shimmered with darts of white light as
his mouth filled with the taste of cold lightning.

He'd been
matched against a young fighter, Caleb Kilbride. The Kilbrides were a clan of
ridge runners who made ends meet smuggling reservation cigs and booze across
the Niagara River. Shirtless, the kid was built like the butt end of a
sledgehammer. His neck and arms were mottled with burn scars; the falling light
picked out further scarring on his hips, a galaxy of pale white chips.

They'd met in
the middle of the ring. Tommy noted Kilbride's small, close-set eyes, the
slight upslope at their outer edges that bespoke inbreeding. He looked over at
the kid's corner, where Papa Kilbride swigged at a flask of triple-X; a black
eyepatch gave him the look of a landlocked, hillbilly pirate. He seemed the
sort of father who might force his mentally defective son into a fight, and
Tommy had been considering this very possibility when Caleb Kilbride came
forward and popped him in the face.

The blinding
sting in Tommy's eyes told him that Kilbride's work- gloves were soaked in
caustic, weed killer most likely, but it was too late for complaining and
besides, there was no ref to hear his grievance. Kilbride pressed in, bashing
Tommy about the head and arms; the ridge runner's breath was warm in Tommy's
ears, the excited exhale of his lungs like hickory wood cracking.

"Circle out
of there!" his brother called as the crowd hooted and catcalled.

Kilbride let go
with a flurry of haymakers, thudding them into the dense muscling of Tommy's
arms and shoulders. By then the canaries had flitted from Tommy's head and he
was able to step inside one of Kilbride's looping punches, set his shoulders,
and hook to the kidneys. Kilbride's breath escaped in a gust: a sweet pablum-y
smell.

He recovered
enough to smash a fist into Tommy's forehead. The shot lacked gas and Tommy
weathered it easily, but Kilbride followed up with another in the same spot,
planting his feet and dropping his fist like a guillotine blade. The blow
landed with the sound of an ax chopping into wet wood and split the skin over
Tommy's left eye along the socket ridge; he felt the buzzing X-ray contour of
bone beneath his skin.

He dropped to
one knee and Kilbride hit him going down, an uppercut fired straight from the
hip that flattened Tommy's lips against his teeth. He went down with the taste
of blood and Killex on his tongue. The bell rang but Kilbride kept slugging
until Manning dragged him off.

Reuben helped
his brother to the corner. The railbirds hubbubed and pumped their fists.
Fritzie Zivic sucked a toothpick beside the wheelchair-bound fogy who looked
either comatose or dead save his eyes, which were riveted on the ring above the
green plastic edge of his oxygen mask.

Reuben jammed a
hand down Tommy's trunks and splashed ice water on his groin. "What's the
matter? He's wide open."

"Something's
wrong with him. He's not all there upstairs."

Reuben cracked
the seal on a vial of adrenaline 1:1000 and dipped a Q-Tip. He jammed it into
the wound above Tommy's eye, down through the layers of meat, pinching the
flaps of skin over the cotton tip.

"How many
of these punch-drunk tomato cans do you figure are all there?"

"No, I mean
... slow." Tommy rinsed water around his mouth and spat. "His breath
smells like a baby's."

Reuben glanced
at the opposite corner. Kilbride was taking pulls from a flask while Papa
massaged his shoulders.

"You socked
him, all right," Papa crowed. "The ole Missouri soupbone!"

Reuben smeared
Vaseline over the burns left by Kilbride's gloves. "Slow or not, I
couldn't help but notice that kid's only too happy to hit you."

Two bungling men
in their mid-twenties, Reuben and Tom Tully's combined knowledge of child
rearing could have fit on the head of a pin. To spare infant Robbie the indignity
of newsprint diapers and herself the expense of a nanny, Kate's mother had come
up with a solution. Weekday mornings she dropped her daughter off with Tom, who
cared for Kate and Robbie until Reuben arrived home from his bakery shift;
Tommy then set off for the loading docks and Reuben looked after the kids until
Ellen returned from the floral shop.

The five of them
knit into an odd, but oddly workable, unit. The sight of Ellen Paulson flanked
by lumbering Tom Tully and Reuben in his peaked fedora became a familiar one:
at the park, in the supermarket aisle, pushing prams up Niagara Street. Tommy
and Reuben often took Robbie to Loughran's Park on their own; those newly
arrived to the neighborhood had been overheard remarking upon the raffish
homosexual couple and their adopted Serbian baby. Tommy made a joke of this
perception at his prudish brother's expense: he'd grab Reuben's hand at
inappropriate times, or rub his shoulder with the tender fondness of a lover.
"So help me
god"
Reuben would seethe.

Kate and Rob had
grown up almost as brother and sister; for the most part, they treated each
other with the brusque affection of siblings. But lately Rob had been reminding
himself that she was not, in point of fact, his birth sister.

"You're
hopeless," she said when Rob told her his haiku began with the line
My toenail is split.
"Of all
the poetic topics in our vast universe, you settle on the most revolting
feature of the human body."

"You're
forgetting something," he said. "The duodenum."

They were covering
anatomy in biology class; everyone agreed the duodenum was one ugly organ.
"Fine, second most revolting. Come on—what sort of things excite
you?"

Like a lot of
guys his age, Rob twigged on stories tinged with a note of morbid irony—like
the newspaper article about a frozen ball of shit that was accidentally
discharged from the hull of a Swiss Air flight from Geneva to New York; the
pinky-brown boulder had rocketed into a house in Rochester, crushing its owner,
who happened to be relieving himself at that very moment.

"Frozen
balls of turd?" Kate said, after he'd been foolish enough to tell her. She
put the base of her palm of the flat of her forehead and held it there for
several seconds. "Roll over, Basho."

"Then give
me guidance, O Poetic Spirit."

"Look
around you. And a bit farther than your toenail."

"Busted
syringes on the basketball court at Loughren's?" he said, after brief
consideration. "The god-awful stench from the rubber plant as you cross
the bridge over the polluted river, before you hit the burned-down strip mall
and pass into factory outlet wasteland? Is that poetry?"

"Probably,"
Kate said, "to some people. But why concentrate on that? How about
something you know a lot about? How about boxing?"

"No,"
muttered Rob. "Not boxing."

Kate was pleased
to hear this. They sat for a while in silence, then Rob stood up and tapped the
windowpane. "How about that?"

"What, Mr.
Cryptic—the curtains?"

"The view.
The maple tree, the fence, the sky. I've grown up, so my perspective has
changed. But tree, fence, sky. Those have always stayed the same."

Kate clapped her
hands. "Grab a pen, son—strike while the iron is hot!"

When he sat down
with a pen she plucked it from his grip. She took Rob's hand, flipped it so his
palm showed, and pressed it flat to the table. She licked the pen tip and
touched it to a big blue vein where his wrist met the meat of his palm.
"So—how does that make you feel?"

A trapdoor
opened in Rob's head, dumping endorphins into his brainpan; it felt like
getting hit in a sparring session, his pain centers bombed with peptides. No
pain now, only the pressure of Kate's fingers on his hand. A surge of power
flooded him, the kind that made him a terror in the ring, but here, now, he had
no idea where to go with it.

"How about
..." He flushed; his eyeballs must be bulging like grapefruits. Why? She
was only touching his
hand.
"... The view out of my kitchen window—"

Her fingertip
tapped beats on his wrist like a second heartbeat. "The view out of my ...
okay, that's your first line ... kit-chen window. Three more syllables."

"Remains
the same ... no,
is
the same ..."

She wrote across
his palm in smooth cursive. "... Is the same ... one more line. Five
beats."

"... since
I..."

"... since
I..."

"... was a
child—no, boy."

She contemplated
the words spread across his palm. "Simple, but I like it."

Looking at her,
he thought of a night months ago. He'd stopped by on his way home from the club
and she'd been on the porch— waiting for him, or so he'd felt for a moment. She
stepped into light thrown by the porch bulb and the scent of her—vanilla,
remarkable only in that he'd never known her to smell this way—fell through the
light, melding and bonding so that for Rob the light itself smelled of her.

Kate flipped
Rob's other palm over and, with quick strokes, wrote her own haiku.

When the bell
rang to start the second round Caleb Kilbride tear-assed across the ring
windmilling his fists. Tommy got on his bicycle and circled away, taking a few
harmless shots to the arms and brisket. Kilbride was in no kind of shape:
greasy sweat shone under his eyes and where his nose met the rest of his face.
The kid was used to fighting scratch-ass hill people who folded at the sight of
those flatiron fists.