The Fighter (2 page)

The
other fighters lounge on benches or pace restlessly. Scars and welts and
bruises, missing ears, not a full set of teeth among them. My father once told
me to never trust the word of a man whose body was not a little ruined. If
there is any truth to that, these are some of the most trustworthy men on
earth.

I
check out their bodies. That guy's got a slight limp—his left side is weak.
That guy's wrist is bent at a peculiar angle—it's been busted once and could
bust again.

A
fighter known as Prophet comes in. A burn scar in the shape of a crucifix marks
his chest, self-inflicted with an acetylene torch. Tattooed above the crucifix:
cry havoc
. And below:
let slip the dogs of war.

This
is a rough place to fight, but not the roughest. In Brazil, this whippety
little bastard locked a jujitsu move on me and pulled my elbow apart—turned the
joint into oatmeal. I heard they were tough in Brazil but wanted to see for
myself. I won't be going back.

An
ancient ragman steps into the room. He's got a bale of hemp rope in his right
hand and a bucket of white powder hanging from his left. Nobody fights
barehanded here; you can watch a fistfight on any street corner in the city.
Spectators crave blood in torrents, disfigurement, death. We fighters oblige.

Concertina
wire. Pine tar and busted glass. Turpentine. Razor blades. Tonight our fists
will be dipped in
yaa baa
—Thai methamphetamine.

Numbers
are drawn. I get #5.

A
Spanish fighter sits at my side. His right eye is gone; a ball of knotted flesh
sits in its place. He killed the guy who took it, pounding with fists of barbed
wire until the other man's head was little more than red mush loosely moored to
a stump. £l estol6 mi ojo, was all he could say afterward.
É
l estol
ó
mi ojo.
He stole my
eye.
Sounds
so much more poetic in Spanish, don't you think?

On
the floor, between my spread legs: a ladybug. They look different on this side
of the globe: nearly the size of a dime and bright purple. It lies upon its
back, legs knitted like tiny black fingers. When I pick it up its legs unknit
and it hangs, weightless, from my thumb. The floor is scattered with dozens of
dead ones. What could have drawn so many of them? Whatever they were searching
for, it's not here to be found.

I
hold my thumb toward the Spaniard, who extends his cupped palm to catch the
insect as it tumbles off my ragged thumbnail. We trade smiles—the very nick of
time—and he sets it on the bench beside him, where it sits with a deathly
stillness.

"Numba
ei'!"

The
Spaniard stands.

"Numba
fi'!"

The arena is wide and
low-ceilinged and packed to capacity. Stands rise in tiers from the circular
arena floor in the style of a Greek amphitheater. Men in dark sunglasses and
silk suits sit beside street gamblers in madras shorts and baseball caps. A
blonde with cut-from-the-sky blue eyes sits in the front row; her face is
specked with blood.

We
fight on white sand trucked in from beaches to the south; it feels so soft
beneath my feet. I snap my neck to drain the sinuses and for an instant the
fear grips me—
I could die here
—but
the emotion is as undefined as bodies at movement in a darkened room.

Scars
tough as rawhide adorn the Spaniard's face; the surrounding skin is so tight a
few good shots will rip it all apart. He catches me looking and smiles.

There
are three signs you're up against a real fighter. They're not what you might
think; nothing to do with how big the guy is, or the size of his fists. The
three Harbingers are:

1.
     
A calmness,
almost a deadness, in his eyes.

2.
     
That he insists
upon shaking your hand and makes no effort to crush it.

3.
     
When he asks
your forgiveness for what comes next.

If
you find yourself outside a bar faced up with a guy who shakes your hand and
begs forgiveness before putting up his dukes, my humble suggestion is that you
run.

We
meet in the center of the ring. The Spaniard bows like a toreador. The crowd's
chant is familiar though I've never understood the words. It feels as if I'm
dreaming and the dream is also familiar: a dream shot through with the smell of
blood.

Sometimes
I'll think—often right in the middle of a fight, when I've made a mistake and
loosened my guard, in the instant before that fist opens up a part of me—I'll
find myself thinking, How? How did I get here? How does a man fall off the civilized
slope of the earth, and how far down does that slope go? I'll think of those
men I'd see every so often, nameless strangers stepping off a Greyhound bus in
the witching hours with nothing but a duffel bag, men with no family or friends
who must have made their way down to the factory that is constantly running
under the veneer of polite society. I'll think about how every factory needs
its workforce.

And
I often think about how it all flowed, so ceaselessly and unerringly, from
there to here and then to now. I marvel at how absolutely my life was guided
upon its new course and wonder: how close are any of us to those moments? How
near to our hearts do they lie—behind what doorways, around which corners?

The
Spaniard holds his hand out. I raise my own. We touch fists gently.

"Perd
ó
nam"

"And
you me."

I
breathe deep, hold it, and exhale.

And
waiting. As ever, waiting.

For
the bell.

Paul
Harris turned to catch a fist that smashed the left side of his face along the
angular ridge of jaw and rocked him through a padded burgundy door tacked with
tiny brass rivets. Busted hinges, a shower of toothpicked wood, and he was
reeling out into cold early autumn air.

Wiry
weeds touched with frost jutted from sidewalk cracks. Streetlight reflected off
office windows, windshields, and beer caps sunken in opaque puddles along the
curb. Paul grasped the stalk of a parking meter and hauled himself up.
Shock-sweat fused his hand to the chilled metal: when he pulled free, pinpricks
of blood welled on his palm.

A
pair of rough hands gripped the back of his camel-hair coat and shoved him up
against the canopy of a late-model Jeep. His face mashed to the translucent
window, Paul's nose filled with the antiseptic, plasticky smell of inflatable
pool toys.

A
clubbing blow sent him to the ground again. He backed away on his palms and
heels, skittering like a sand crab. The world acquired a pinkish tinge, the
buildings and streets and cars spun from cotton candy.

His
attacker's shoulders were broad and dense with muscle, tapering to a supple
waist and lean hips. His boots boomed like hooves on the broken cement.

"Gonna
split your wig, bud."

Paul
struggled to understand how all this had happened. He'd been to the club
before; it was as classy as could be found in his hometown of St. Catharines, a
depressed shipbuilding community sprawled along the banks of Lake Ontario. He
and his date had come from a production of
The Tempest
in Niagara-on-the-Lake; neither
had enjoyed or even quite understood it, but everyone they knew had seen it and
they felt compelled. Faith, his date, was skinny, her eyes cored too deeply
into her face; the pair of sunken pits between her collarbones were deep
enough to collect rainwater. He found her about as interesting as an outdated
periodontal health brochure, the sort he might have flipped through in his
dentist's waiting room, and he was certain she felt the same about him—not that
it mattered, as she was the daughter of one of his father's business cronies.
Like feudal times: a sack of gold coins and ten head of cattle to take my
daughter off my hands. Except nowadays you got forty percent equity in a chain
of gelato parlors and the summer place on Lake Muskoka. How did it all end?
Paul could guess: with the bloodlines all fucked, with runny- nosed mongoloids
kicking big red balls around the offices of Fortune 500 companies. That's how.

Point
being: the club was upscale. A well-stocked wine cellar. A tastefully
understated tapas menu: Oysters Rockefeller, Wild Mushroom Croustades with
Fennel. And yet here he was being slammed up against an aluminum shopfront,
water trickling off the eaves and soaking his hair. This bastard's knuckles
pressed into his throat, this asshole's knee driven into his crotch so hard he
puked a gutful of single-malt scotch.

And
here were heads popping from apartment windows, people occurring in shadowed
doorways and from bars.

"Gonna
bash your face to fucking pulp."

Strung
together into a single word:
Gonnabashyafacetafuckinpulp.

How
the hell did this
happen
? Walk it back to the beginning.

After
he and Faith had secured a booth Paul excused himself to take a piss. He ran
into Drake Langley, an old prep school classmate. Drake wore a suit of lush
dark fabric—padded velour?—that made him look like a sofa cushion. Drake worked
for his father, same as Paul worked for his father, same as just about all the
guys from school worked for their fathers.

"Hey,
hey, hey..." Blasted, Drake pawed Paul's jacket like a needy golden
retriever. "Did you hear the one," he gulped, "about the
guy?"

Paul
replied that no, he hadn't heard the one about the guy.

Drake
slopped half a mouthful of Macallan down his shirtfront; no matter how
expensive the liquor, Paul thought, a cheap drunk is still a cheap drunk.
"So this guy, he's living at home with his sickly widower father and he
needs a woman to keep him company. Okay?"

Paul
nodded, irritated. Did Drake think he was giving a lecture on astrophysics and
needed to pause so that Paul could absorb this complex information?

"So
he goes to this bar and sees this chick with a rack like—
bam
!
"
Drake
held his hands out a goodly distance from his chest. "And an ass like a
Polynesian dancer. So the guy goes up to her and he says,
Right now I'm not much to write home about. But in a month
or two my old man is going to kick the bucket and I'm gonna inherit millions.
So the woman goes home with him
that night—and four days later she becomes his stepmother!"

Paul
managed a weak chortle. Drake's face froze with mortal fear: it was as though
he'd come to understand the full implication of the joke and it terrified him.
He grabbed Paul's elbow. "You know what I'm gonna do tonight, Harris? I'm
gonna take one of these slags home"— the liberal sweep of his arm
suggested that the club was brimming with said slags—"and I'm gonna eat her
ass like French vanilla ice cream. What do you think of them apples?"