The Fighter (26 page)

"I
want you to put this car in gear," the cop said evenly, "then I want
you to drive up to that main street there and get yourself home."

"But
I egged the almighty fuck out of that house."

"Just
a boy being a boy, s'far as I'm concerned."

"I'm
twenty-six!"

"Simmer
down. I'm doing you a favor." The officer headed back to his squad car and
pulled up beside Paul. "You drive safe, now. And tell your pops Jim
Halliday sends his regards."

With
a sunny smile and a toot of his horn, he drove away.

Paul
tightened his grip on the wheel and butted it sharply with his head; the horn
issued a strangled honk. His...fucking...
father.
He butted the wheel again and
again; blood trickled down the sides of his nose. He jerked the car in gear and
trod on the gas.

A
thump; a strangled yelp. The back tire skipped ever so slightly, then settled.

He
got out in time to see a little dog running frantic circles around its own
head, which had been flattened under the Micra's rear wheel. A teacup
Chihuahua; it must've gotten under the car while Paul and the cop were talking.

He
knelt on the street and looked around for its owner. The dog's legs got tangled
up and its body tumbled over its own head in a maneuver circus acrobats call a
"flic flac" and stayed that way.

The
streetlamp's acid glow was stark, merciless. The dog was mangy- looking, with clumps
of hair falling off; maybe it had been abandoned, maybe they weren't hot
fashion items anymore. Its head was intact only in the way a light bulb wrapped
in layers of masking tape before being stepped on could be considered intact.
The dog's eyes were closed; what looked like burst bath beads were pinched
between each eyelid. A quivering red worm poked from the soft beige skin of its
pelvis.

Paul's
guilt curdled into rage when no owner appeared: what sort of asshole lets his
little dog run around unattended? Rage soured into fear: what was he going to
do? He sat there in his sheath of muscles wondering what the hell any of it
mattered because he still felt terrified, weak, and worthless—he didn't even
know what to do about a
dead dog.

The
dog's body was as loose and warm as a boiled hen, its legs Tinker Toys wrapped
in moleskin. He pulled gently but realized that if he pulled much harder he'd
disconnect its head from the rest of it. Hunting through the trunk, he found an
ice scraper and tried to lift it off the cement, but he was crying by then and
the chest hitches made him so clumsy he ended up folding the dog's muzzle over
its eyes, folding the poor thing's head like an omelet, and the desecration
reduced him to racking sobs and his tears, pattering the cold street, were
yellow like his skin, yellow from the poisons he'd shoveled into himself, the
mashed-up fetal brains funneled into his veins, and then he realized he had
nothing to put the dog into and found himself back in the car hunting under the
seats until he located a crumpled Burger King bag.

He
returned to the dog, which he'd managed to scrape up without further damage. He
dropped it in the bag and felt a sadness that bordered on the existential to
discover that a dog's body could actually
fit
in a paper bag.

The
Chihuahua's collar lay on the street. Pink, no thicker than a shoestring. One
of the tags, shaped like a bone, read
killer
.
Another one said
if i am lost, please return me to
...
followed
by an address. He stared at the address for a long time before hurling the
leash into the bordering yard. He rolled the bag closed like a sack lunch and
set it on the passenger seat.

Ten
minutes later he was in the country. No streetlights, one headlight busted: he
hurtled through the night in near-total blackness. Fruit fields rushed past as
the car bounced along a corduroy road, wind howling through the windows and his
mind out of sync, destination forgotten until like a desert heat-shimmer the
winery appeared, dozens of security lamps fighting off the darkness. He sped
through the parking lot and hit a speed bump and the muffler finally tore loose
as the car crashed through a chain-link gate in a spray of blue sparks and shot
into the grape fields, flying between the tight rows as a re-energized Paul
Harris sang over the un-mufflered roar of the engine until an irrigation pipe
rose up and he had just enough time to picture himself on a hospital bed with
tubes running in and out of him before he hit the pipe dead-on, his body thrown
against the windshield.

He
came to dazed but remarkably unhurt. The windshield was smashed, webbed, but
still of one piece. A wave of cold nausea rolled through his chest and he
jerked forward and vomited between his legs. The crash jarred the tape from the
cassette player; silence except for a slow hiss of steam from the rad.

The
door was crimped shut. Paul wiped strings of bile swinging from his lips,
grabbed the tire iron and paper bag, and clambered out the window.

A
clean, still night, dark though he could still make out the contours of the
fringing hills. The Micra's hood was crushed halfway down the middle. The
headlights nearly faced each other.

From
summer through early fall the pickers bunked in shacks on the easternmost edge
of the fields. Small and spare—they reminded Paul of Boy Scout cabins. He made
his way to the nearest one and used the tire iron to pry the padlock off.
Meticulously winterized: mattresses wrapped in tarps, the stove's flue tightly
stoppered.

He
stoked a fire in the potbellied stove. The pickers had left a box of canned
food behind; Paul brushed away mouse turds and found a tin of sardines. His
hands were grimed with blood and dog fur but he shoveled the fish into his
mouth and licked the oil off his fingers. God, he'd never tasted anything so
good. The warmth awakened pain he hadn't felt all night. Shoulders and arms and
neck: every part of him ached.

The
shack creaked as fire-heat flexed the joists. He relished the isolation, miles
and miles from another human being. He sensed he was on a collision course,
though with whom or what he didn't yet know. There was no doubt about it.
Something
was
approaching. The tracks he stood on vibrated with the force of it, yet he was
powerless to move so much as a step.

He
stirred the fire and set the paper bag on a bed of embers and shut the grate.
The shack filled with the stink of burning hair. Sizzlings and spatterings; a
sharp pop.

Paul
lay on the planks and shut his eyes.

He
dreams he is in a cave with another man. There is a sense of being miles
underground; above is a vast and empty darkness. He sits on a wooden chair,
lashed at the wrists and ankles with copper wire. The other man is huge, three
hundred fifty, four hundred pounds, not fat but thick-gutted; he's wearing a rubberized
butcher's apron and a belt hung with delicate tools like dentist's instruments.
He dances forward awkwardly, as though he isn't in control of his own limbs;
the effect is shocking and awful because he is so large. "Are you
scared?" The pitch of his voice is breathy, babyish. Paul says no and so
the man plucks a sharp tool from his belt and reaches two fat sluglike fingers
into Paul's mouth, taking hold of his tongue, and Paul bites the man's fingers
only to find they're hard as wood, then the tool is in his mouth, the taste of
metal at the back of his throat, and his tongue is severed deftly and the man
stares at it with fleeting curiosity before casting it into the darkness.
"Are you scared?" he asks. "Oo," says Paul. The man looks
confused or even scared but he reaches to his belt and picks a long steel rod
and, setting a hand on the side of Paul's head to steady it, pushes the rod
into Paul's ear until a stereophonic crunch fills his skull, followed by
silence. He does the other ear, too, until Paul can hear only a soft hiss
inside his head, the sound you'd hear on a cassette tape between songs. The
man's lips move:
Are you scared?
Paul shakes his head. The big
man's look of confusion deepens as he unhooks a walnut-handled meat cleaver
from his belt and hacks Paul's legs off with a few brisk strokes, sawing
through strings of gristle, and there's no blood, not a single drop. The
insides of Paul's thighs are full of dark coils, like age rings on a tree.
Are you scared?
Paul
says he is not—and he
is not,
none of this scares him—and when
the man shakes his head Paul sees there are filament-thin strings attached to
the man's skull and arms and legs, to his fingers and every joint, strings
threading up into the darkness, and the man is moving under their influence
like a marionette in a dumb show. With a tool like a sharpened spoon he slits
the skin around Paul's eyes and draws Paul's head down until his eyes fall from
their sockets and Paul feels something for the first time—a bracing icy
coldness all along his optic nerves—and just before the man snips the nerves
with a pair of silver scissors Paul sees his own fingers, sees the thin black
threads tied around each fingertip moving the huge man to his bidding. The
world goes black and though he cannot see the man's mouth he knows what words
are being spoken because he is making the man say them, and his answer is
unflinching:
No, No, No, No,
No ...

Paul
awoke in the shack. Cold and dark, the fire dead. When he tried to sit up,
fishhook spiders seized his spine; he gasped and curled up again. Parts of his
body hurt so badly he wondered if they were ruptured. He dragged himself to the
stove and hugged its cast-iron belly, grateful for the warmth.

A
hesitant edge of light skirted the hills to the east. Clutching the sardine tin
into which he'd swept the fire's ashes he made his way up the nearest rise.
Dawn broke over Lake Ontario, tinting gold the undersides of low-lying clouds.
The sun provided no warmth yet was beautiful in a way he could not recall ever seeing;
light clung to frost- glazed pussy willows as it poured over the flattened
grass. Were he a painter, he might have spent his whole life in search of such
a scene.

The
lake was a few miles away, and while the possibility of ashes traveling quite
that far was remote, he figured, Why not? But the wind shifted when he shook
the tin and the ashes blew back into his face, up his nose and into his mouth.
He sneezed and spat dirty gray gobs, shaking his head at this dismal failure.
Then he saw that some ashes were still stuck to the oil at the bottom of the
sardine tin and resolved that they would receive a proper burial.

He
set off across the plateau, away from the winery, down toward the lake.

Fi
ght night.

Tommy
Tully bounded down the stairs into the kitchen, pushing off the bottom stair to
glide awkwardly across the worn linoleum in his sock feet. Reuben and Rob sat
at the kitchen table. The black valise lay open at Reuben's elbow; he inspected
rolls of gauze and white tape, strips of sponge and vials of adrenaline
chloride. Rob sat with a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a cup of lemon tea.

Tommy
stalked over to the Amana fridge and threw jabs at its white unmoving bulk. He
hooked to the icebox, puffing through his nose,
"Yip! Bing! Thwack!"
shuffling his feet Muhammad Ali
style,
"Biff, Bing, Pow!"
raising his arms, dancing,
grinning. "You better check the warranty, 'cause the fridge is
toast!'

"Stop
clowning," said Reuben.

Tommy
grabbed a loaf of his beloved Wonder Bread off the counter and hefted it above
his head like a trophy. "I dedicate this win to

Gummy
Sue and Stinky Mulligan and ol' Armless Joe down at the VFW hall—we did it,
guys!"

Rob
found a wooden soup spoon and put it to his uncle's mouth, assuming the folksy
bearing of an interviewer. "Gee golly, Tom Tully, that was some fight. You
and the Fridge exchanged heated pre-fight words—you remarked that the Fridge
didn't have the legs to make it through the late rounds. The prediction seems
to have rung true."