The Fighter (18 page)

"... aul...
Paul..."

The burn of
ammonia filled his nostrils. He opened his eyes, blinked, squinted. The ring
lights were set in steel lattices, a spot of total blackness at their centers.

He tried to sit
up but couldn't. It was like someone had taken a heavy mallet and nailed his
gloves and boots to the mat. His opponent— Everett, a tattooed black kid—stood
with his arms draped over the turnbuckle.

Lou said,
"What's your name?"

Paul worked his
jaw. "Did I get... knocked out?"

"What's
your name?"

"Paul
Harris. How long was I out?"

"Long
enough. Can you see my fingers? How many am I holding?"

He'd been
training six or seven hours a day, including a good deal of sparring. He'd
taken bodyshots that filled his mouth with bile and clubbing blows that dropped
him to one knee, but this was a fresh twist.

"Sneak
uppercut," Lou said. "Tickled you right on the knockout button."

Everett came
over and, in a belated gesture of concern, asked was Paul all right.

"You hit
pretty hard." Paul's tone was gleeful. "Let's get back at it."

Lou stepped back
through the ropes. "Go to it, then."

The buzzer
sounded. Everett streaked across the ring to catch Paul moving hesitantly out
of his corner. Everett boasted an accurate jab, throwing it out on the end of
his long left arm.

"Get down
on your haunches!" Lou called at him. "You're boxing like
Frankenstein!"

The morning
after his first training session Paul had awakened near-paralyzed, his tendons
so tight he could barely walk. But he dragged himself back to the club and,
after some crass ribbing from Lou—
You look like
twice-pounded shit
—kept at it. He took to running a
five-mile circuit each morning, following a path along the train tracks to the
Welland Canal where great shipping cranes slanted against the sky. He ran the
steps connecting the club and paint store with a medicine ball; he hit the
heavybag until his hands looked like ground chuck. Pushing his body, he found
that it possessed limits beyond his reckoning. Muscle groups presented
themselves: ice-cube-tray abs and a cobra's hood of latissimus muscle; a
trickledown map of blue veins running under skin gone translucent as rice
paper.

Everett's hand
flashed and a polar whiteness expanded inside Paul's skull. He gagged on his
gumshield but got his gloves up; Everett's punches glanced off his elbows.

"Keep your
head down. You're holding it out there like a lantern in a storm!"

Paul had been
surprised at how quickly his body accommodated itself to pain—not only the
mediated pain of training, but the immediate and unavoidable pain of the ring.
He'd been hit with such force that blood leapt from his nose like a grisly
magic trick, yet he gathered himself and fought back. He discovered the miracle
of adrenaline.

They circled,
feinting and juking. Paul saw the curve of Everett's torso, the smooth ladder
of his ribcage. His fist could fit into that space, he reasoned, into the
bundle of organs below Everett's short rib.

When he threw
the punch, turning on his lead foot and twisting his hips, the coiled momentum
released his fist like a boulder from a catapult. The punch landed solid and
the shock rebounded down his arm like the kickback of an elephant gun.

Everett made a
small sound like a sigh and fell away from Paul's glove.

"Whoa!"
Lou hopped up on the apron and ducked through the ropes.

Everett gulped
for breath on the mat. Lou took the kid's arms and held them up. A dark patch
spread over the crotch of his boxing trunks. "Breathe, now, Ev. Find those
lungs."

Paul felt pretty
damn pleased with himself. He envisioned Everett's blood stunned in his veins,
hardening like ice. He felt the displacement of Everett's guts through his
glove, the organs shifting in deference to his fist.

Lou helped
Everett back to the change room. "That was some punch," he said upon
his return. "Like to bring down the walls of a city."

"Just doing
like you taught."

Lou scratched
under the brim of his paisley porkpie, lips pursed in an effort to recall what,
if any, advice he'd offered Paul. "Well, you're a good kid—you're a
listener!'
He whistled.
"Hit a guy that bad, you steal a piece of him forever."

"It was a
lucky punch."

"Some of my
prospects had half your hustle, they'd be champs. Hop in the ring."

Lou shrugged on
punch mitts and worked with Paul. The kid was raw as hell, a hundred and
eighty-odd pounds of flailing flesh and bone, but the sting in Lou's hands
signaled one-punch power. That overhand left could scramble anyone's brain.

"What was
it you said you did?" Lou asked during a break. "Businessman of some
sort?"

"Worked at
a winery. I quit, though."

"So why
boxing?"

Paul spat on a
blotch of blood marking the canvas. "I can't say," he said, scuffing
the spot with his boot. "I needed to be stronger."

"Muscles?
Will power? How do you mean?"

He wanted to
tell Lou about a World War I documentary he'd seen, these veteran soldiers
talking about mercy kills. Back then, they said, if a man in your unit was a
liability, you put a bullet in his brain and made it look like an accident. The
murdered men were officers, silver spooners; the killers were working-class
enlisted men. Out in the trenches the degrees on your wall didn't matter, they
said, nor that your father played tennis with the Duke of York. Out there it
was, Do I trust this man with my life? Dog eat dog, the basic law of man, and
the refinements of civilization a million miles away. The vets were not the
least bit shamed by their actions—they considered it an act of mercy.

Paul couldn't
help but wonder: if it ever came to it, would he be facedown in a bunker with a
bullet in his skull? He'd never know, and that was the worst part—the
wondering.

All he said was,
"I've had it pretty cushy so far."

Lou nodded.
"First time I saw you, I said give this guy a week. You had the look of a
lot of guys your age—a lily. I don't quite get the things you boys get up to.
Building superhero bodies at the gym and hurling yourselves off high rises with
a parachute on your back." Lou snorted. "John Wayne never lifted a
barbell in his life. Put Jack La Lanne and the Duke in a cage and see who comes
out alive."

Lou worked Paul
another round. Lordy, this kid could
hit.
His power reminded Lou of another fighter he'd trained, the young son of a
carnival barker. Years back Lou had taken the kid down south of Rock Springs,
where he'd fought in a dirt bowl at the base of the Rockies. July or early
August and they'd fought like dogs, the barker's kid and a lanky Mexie who'd
ridden boxcars up from Ciudad Obregon. Between rounds the idiots in charge had
laid down a sheen of lamp oil to keep the dust down. Maybe it had been the
righteously burning sun or a cigar ember—this low
whoomph,
then greasy
orange fire licking from the earth. The spectators backed away but inside the
bowl the Mexie and the barker's son kept swinging, their eyes bruised shut and
blood coming out of them all places. Flames crawled up their arms in glittering
sleeves but they kept punching as though the fight was the only thing keeping
them alive or was the only thing worth dying for.

"Your
generation's got a lot to prove," Lou said during the next break.
"Before, just staying alive was proof. My granddad with the Depression,
then the war. My pops, Big Two. Me, Vietnam. And otherwise you were poor,
which is a war of its own. You guys, though ..."

Paul pounded the
punch mitts. Lou winced.

"All I'm
saying is, how can you ever know sweet until you've tasted the sour? How can any
of you quite know you're ... men?"

Paul was
irritated. He wanted to slip a fist past the punch mitts and crack Lou in the
teeth but wasn't sure he could fob it off as an accident.

"Go change
up and meet me in the office."

In the change
room Paul doffed his sweaty top and stood before the mirror. The flesh of his
chest was tight, pebbled, rough as pig leather. He'd gained an inch around his
arms, two around his neck, and dropped two pant sizes. The steroids had done
their job, but not without side effects. Paul's shoulders were pocked with
greasy cysts, his scalp ringed with acne. He also suffered a case of
grape-cluster hemorrhoids; the bleeding had gotten so bad he found himself
browsing the pharmacy's adult diaper aisle.

In the office,
Lou beckoned him to a chair that looked to be held together with surgical tape.
"Let me show you something."

He set a framed
print on the desktop. It was an etching of a muscular athlete approaching
middle age. He had a thick beard, a flattened nose, and was balding around the
crown of his skull. His breeches were held up by suspenders over his bare
shoulders, which were rounded and enormous. He stood in the classic pugilist's
stance: right foot forward and turned slightly inward, hands staggered before
his chin.
Thunderbird Layne,
the caption read,
Itinerant
Bareknuckler.

"Years ago,
fighters traveled town to town like gunfighters," said Lou. "A whole
class of men lived this way; also card sharks and mariachis and snake-oil salesmen.
Drifters as far as most were concerned, crazed faces who came and went in the
space of a single night. These fighters would stride into some town square, toe
a line in the dirt, and challenge any man to cross it. If that town happened to
be full of serious brawlers he might fight ten, twelve men—whole families,
uncles and brothers and sons. If that town was wrathful it beat the fighter
down and ran him out on a rail. And if that town was kind it gave him a warm
bed and sent him on the next day.

"They
fought for money, yeah, enough to get them down the road— but that wasn't why
they did it. Men like that, they were born for fighting, the way other men are
born for the sciences or high finance. Alone on a dusty street, squared up
against some burly native son with pissed-off townsfolk screaming for his scalp
..." A dramatic sigh. "But then along came the Marquis de Queensberry
with his rules of fair play and soon nobody remembered the drifting
bareknucklers. I got
nothing against boxing—a more noble sport you will not
find—but those men were gladiators, or the closest we've seen since those
times."

Lou opened a
drawer and pulled out a bottle of Bell's whiskey and a pair of waterspotted
glasses. He poured a respectable two ounces into each and handed one over.

"Guys like
Thunderbird here," he tapped the photo with his glass, "they're still
around."

"I've never
seen anyone like that." "Oh, you probably have. Just didn't know
it." Paul thought of the boxer who'd come in that first day—the guy with
his eggplant-colored head and anthill eyes—and remembered thinking no way could
that damage have come from a legitimate boxing match. "There are places
where you'll find them, still..." "You know any of those
places?" "Oh," Lou said innocently, "so ... you're interested?"
Paul felt springs coiled under his skin waiting to lurch out. "Do me a
favor, Lou, and don't jerk me around."

Lou's face
changed like still water brushed by a breeze. "I know a place, yeah. It's
illegal, obviously. Take you sometime, you want." "I'd like
that."