The Fighter (3 page)

The
bathroom attendant was black. Why were they always black? Dressed in a faded
olive-tone suit, the guy's skin looked like cheap chocolate—like a fine layer
of chalk dust had settled over it. His eyes were yellowed and Paul felt he
ought to be home in bed. He looked like an Uncle Tom. Not that Paul would ever
call him that; he only meant that if you put the bathroom attendant in a lineup
with a bunch of other black guys and asked anyone to pick the one who fit the
stereotype, well, this poor guy hit about every note. After pissing he felt
poorly for thinking this and left ten bucks in the tip jar.

He
returned to find his date in conversation with some townie asshole. The guy
blocked the booth; he leaned over the table like a hillbilly tycoon buying up
cheap real estate.

"Introduce
me to your friend, Faith?" Paul said, slipping past the townie to sit
down.

"We've
barely introduced—"

"She's
being coy." Paul offered his hand. "Paul Harris."

"Todd."

Todd
was a stocky unshaven shitkicker. Paul hadn't bothered to look at his feet but
assumed they were clad in steel-toed boots; when he moved on, Paul was certain
he'd leave a pile of debris behind. He pictured Todd's home: a trailer jacked
up on cinderblocks. Engine parts laid out on oil-sodden newspapers. It struck
Paul that he was infinitely richer and more successful than this poor slob; the
knowledge actually filled him with a bizarre kind of pity.

"You
with her?" Todd wanted to know.

"That's
beside the point, Todd."

"Paul—"

He
raised his hand, shushing her. "Well, Todd—what were you two confabbing
about?"

"That's
between me and the young lady."

Paul
smiled indulgently and drew Faith down to the far end of the booth. "You
can't be serious. This troglodyte's got as much personal flair as an unflushed
toilet."

She
laughed and tugged at his lapel, pulling him close. "Shhh. He'll
hear." She was so skinny: cheekbones were shards of flint. A Madison
Avenue stick insect.

"You
should be ashamed of yourself," he chastised, "for encouraging him.
For shame."

Todd
the Shitkicker stood there like a goon. As if in expectation that Faith
might—what?
Leave
with him? The image of Faith with shitkicker Todd was so absurd that Paul
could only visualize it as occurring in a Salvador Dali painting; in it,
Todd's head would be replaced by a pocket watch melted over a tree branch.

"Hey,"
Todd said to Faith, "I was thinking maybe you'd—"

"Isn't
there a toilet that needs snaking somewhere in this city?"

"Paul!"

"I'm
kidding. He knows I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding, don't you, Todd?"

"Sure,
Paul," the shitkicker said in a voice gone deathly soft. "I love a
good joke as much as the next guy."

Paul
raised his hands as if caught in a bank heist. "Listen, she's my date—what
do you want? I saw you talking and got a little jealous."

A
half-truth, if that. Faith was welcome to return tomorrow, find Todd, head back
to his trailer, and fuck him senseless on a pile of discarded TV dinner trays.

"Us
being buddies now and all," Todd told him, "figure I should tell you
to watch your mouth. Otherwise, y'know, someone's liable to stuff a boot in
it."

"Are
you threatening me, Todd?"

"I'm
saying words have consequences, Paul. Like, if I were to call you a faggot
cocksucker—that would have consequences, wouldn't it?" He rapped his
knuckles on the underside of the table; the sharp
bang
straightened Paul's spine. "Wouldn't it?"

It
came then, fierce and unbidden: fear. It stole over the crown of Paul's head,
moving under his scalp behind his eyes, cold and hollow. It oozed down his
spine into his chest, his groin, pooling in his gut like dark dirty oil. He
glanced about to assure himself of his location. Yes. Still this club, these
people:
his
people. So why did he feel all shredded inside, shriveled and paralyzed?

Todd
nodded to Faith in a way that suggested he'd lost all interest. "I'll
leave you to it."

Paul
was pissed to have it end on that note. But a larger part of him was just glad
to have the shitkicker gone, relieved to find the fear dissipating.

"Why
did you talk to him that way?"

Paul
ignored Faith's question as one too obvious to merit a reply. He glanced over
at the shitkicker's table. Todd and his pals looked like janitors who'd arrived
early, waiting for the place to clear so they could break out the mops. He
flagged down the waitress and ordered a round of Sex on the Beaches for Todd's
table.

"—I'm
sorry." He was dimly aware of Faith saying something. "What?"

"A
teacup Chihuahua," she said. "I'm getting one."

"Is
that so."

"They're
adorable. And Versace makes this cute carry-bag for them."

Paul
had seen the dogs. Frail, sick-looking things, all papery-eared and bulge-eyed.
They looked delicate enough to die of a nosebleed and shivered all the time;
perhaps being cooped up in handbags made them petrified of natural light. But
if the cover of next month's
Vogue
featured a model with a ferret
wrapped around her neck several women of Paul's acquaintance would soon be
wearing one. Prada would probably design a ferret-tube to cart the silly
fuckers about.

They
finished their drinks and stood up. Faith excused herself to use the ladies'
room. Paul deliberated whether he should fuck her. Conventional wisdom decreed
he snap up whatever was on offer, never knowing when the opportunity might come
around again; to do otherwise would be as stupid as a desert wanderer who
passes over one waterhole in hopes of finding another when he's thirstier. But
it would be the sexual equivalent of a lube job. Pure maintenance.

Such
was the pattern of his thoughts when a hand fell upon his shoulder like a rough
knighthood, a hand so insistent Paul had no choice but to obey and, turning,
saw the shitkicker's face captured in clean profile, that calm and easygoing
look on his face as his fist filled Paul's retinas, a flickering ball that
burst like a white-hot firework to rock him back on his heels, his hands flying
to his face, and when he looked down his fingers were clad in blood. He'd never
been punched—maliciously, viciously
punched
—in his quarter-century- plus of
life on this planet and all he could do was stare, with a stupid bovine look on
his face, at the man who'd popped his cherry.

Todd
hit him again. A blinding explosion went off just in back of Paul's eyes as
though his brainstem had been dynamited. He had this terrifying sensation of
his nose and cheeks crushed into an empty pocket behind the cartilage and
bones, a fist driven so deep into his face the pressure pushed his eyes from their
sockets to allow a frighteningly unhindered view of his surroundings.

His
skull struck the padded leather door with its tiny brass rivets and he was
outside, reeling onto the sidewalk.

And
even now, with Todd slamming him against the aluminum shopfront, a vestigial
part of him refused to believe this was actually happening. Desperately, like a
bilge rat to a chunk of flotsam, he clung to the notion of some innate social
mechanism whose function should be to prevent all this.

Paul
was struck a blow that caught him on the neck; his head caromed off the
shopfront. Two teeth thin and smooth as shaved ice pushed between his lips. He
was terrified in the manner of a man with absolutely no frame of reference for
what he was experiencing.

Run,
he told himself.
Just run away.
But he couldn't even move. His mouth flushed with a corroded rusty taste and
his bowels felt heavy, as if he'd swallowed an iron plug that was now forcing
its way out of him.

His
body slid down the aluminum, ribbed metal rucking his shirt up his spine. He
spread his hands before his bloodied face.

"I
give, okay?" A glistening snot-bubble expanded from his left nostril and
burst wetly. "No more, okay? No more." Quietly: "Come on, man—
please.
I'm begging you."

Todd
prodded his ass with the steel toe of his boot. "Aren't even going to try?
Christ."

The
look in Todd's eyes: as if he'd split Paul open and caught a glimpse of what
lay inside and it wasn't quite human—everything gone soft and milky and
diseased. Todd cleared his throat and spat. Gob landed on Paul's pants, sallow
and greasy as a shucked oyster.

Todd
strolled back to his buddies lounging at the bar door and exchanged rueful high
fives. "Not much fun fighting when you're the only one willing." He
was perspiring lightly, every hair in place save a blond lock fallen between
his eyes.

Faith
exited the bar and spotted him slumped against the shopfront. She reached out
to touch him and he shoved her hand away. She studied his face, his lips
bloated like sausages set to burst. "Your teeth," she said, casting
her eyes about as though to retrieve them. Rock salt had been spread across the
wet sidewalk:
everywhere
looked like fucking teeth.

"We
should call the police," she said.

"Don't
be an idiot."

He
spied a pale lip of fat hanging over his trousers—Jesus, was that part of him?
Looked like the skin of a maggot. If he unbuttoned his shirt, would he spy his
lungs and the pump of his own wasted heart through that rubbery, candle-white
skin?

He
wanted to find something sharp and go back into the club and slice the
shitkicker. Slip up behind him and stab him in the neck. He saw the
shitkicker's body laid out on the smooth stone floor of the bar, blood all over
everything, over every shape, his face slashed to pieces and one bloodshot eye
hanging out, withered like an albino walnut. But he could never do that and the
realization served only to deepen his fear, so toxic now it coursed through his
veins like battery acid.

"What
are we going to do?" Faith asked.

Paul
did the only thing that made sense. Standing on legs that trembled like a
newborn foal's, sparing not a backward glance, he took off down the sidewalk.
She called after him—he distinctly heard the word "chickenshit"—but
he didn't let up or look back.

Paul
dreamed he was lying facedown in stinking mud. He rolled to a sitting position
and saw he was in a bunker. He wore a cheap suit and shiny loafers and
cufflinks shaped like golf balls. A decapitated head sat on a pole jabbed into
the mud; the head was rotted or badly burned and a pair of novelty sunglasses
covered its eyes. He peeked over the bunker and saw a field burst apart by
artillery shells. Everything was blown through with smoke, but he could make
out shapes draped over the razor wire and huge birds with boiled-looking heads
pecking at the shapes. He was numb and sore and wanted to puke. A man stepped
from the shadows and relief washed over him—it was John Wayne. The Duke wore a
flak jacket and pisscutter helmet; a cigar was stuck in the side of his mouth.
"We're going over the top. You with us, dogface?" Paul's body went
rigid. His nuts sucked into his abdomen like a pair of yo-yos up their strings.
"No, I have
a ...
business lunch." The Duke
got salty. "We got a war to win, peckerwood." "I'd love to make
a charitable donation," Paul assured him. The Duke looked like he was
staring at a piece of ambulatory dogshit. Paul got scared again. "Is there
an orphan I could tend to," he asked, "one who's been wounded by
shrapnel?" The Duke stuck his chin out and glared with dull disdain. He
pulled a pistol from his holster and shoved Paul into a corner and told him to
face it. That's when Paul saw dozens of corpses stacked atop one another by the
other wall; they all wore suits and their hands were clean and soft and they
had very nice hair. Each had a frosted hole in the perfect center of his
forehead. "Can't trust a man who won't fight," the Duke said without
much emotion. "This is a mercy."

When
the gun barrel pressed to the back of his skull, Paul woke up with a jerk.

Frail
angles of rust-colored light fell through the Venetian blinds to touch Paul's
face. His head felt broken and weak, like it'd been smashed open in the night
and its contents spilled over the pillow. His mouth felt blowtorched and the
tendons of his neck stretched to their tensile limit, seemingly unable to
support the raw ball of his skull. He lay in his childhood room in his parents'
house. Surfing posters were tacked to the walls. A glow-in-the-dark
constellation decorated the ceiling.

In
the bathroom, he consulted his reflection in the mirror: skin dull and
blotched, right eye a deep purple, swollen closed like a dark blind drawn
against the light. Elsewhere his skin was sickly pale, as though marauding bats
had drained the blood from it while he slept. He spread his split lips. Two
teeth gone: top left incisor, bottom left cuspid. He poked his gums with his
pinkie until blood came.