The Fighter (32 page)

"PETA
is a little dog with a big bark," he said. "We're a little dog with a
mouthful of razor blades. We
bite"

Paul
was distressed at the mania in Drake's eyes: skull cored out like a
jack-o'-lantern, flickering candlelight dancing behind his eyes. Drake showed
him the contents of his shopping bag: boxes and boxes of Eddy matches.

"Do
you know," he said, "that if you stuff a PVC tube with enough
permanganate, Sweet'N Low, and match heads, you can blow up just about
anything?"

"I
didn't know that," Paul said. "No."

Drake
caught something in Paul's demeanor and got agitated. "Know how they skin
a fox at a commercial fur ranch? They slit it right here," his fingers
made slashes at his own crotch, "and pull its skin off. It's
alive
when they do it. When the skin's off they chuck the skinless body in a plastic
barrel. They don't even slit its throat. You know what a fox with no skin looks
like? A newborn baby. A bloody squirming baby. Picture a barrel full of babies,
Paul."

"I've
got to get going, Drake. Nice to see you."

Drake
grabbed his wrist. "Hey," he said softly, "thanks, man. I mean
it."

Now
Paul stumbled down a white-walled corridor with hospital beds lining the walls.
He was shivering, having walked fifteen blocks without benefit of a jacket. His
teeth hammered and clashed.

The
room at the end of the hallway was spare and antiseptic, its lone window inset
with steel mesh. Tom Tully lay on the nearest bed. Shirtless, white EKG disks
plastered to his shaved chest. The crown of his skull was swaddled in layers of
surgical gauze, below which his eyes stared, wide open, at a spot on the wall.

Tom
looked so small and frail, so badly—
shrunken.
His skin was drawn tight to the
bones of his hands, making them appear grotesquely clawlike. Paul pictured a
scarecrow with a tear in its belly, straw guts bleeding out in a blustery
farmer's field.

Gummy
matter had gathered at the sides of Tom's eyes. Paul took a Kleenex from a box
on the shelf and dabbed at the sticky accretion. Tully's eyes didn't blink.

A
wave of panic, near-hysteric in scope, washed over Paul. The skin tightened
over his head, stretched so taut he was sure it would split to reveal the
vein-threaded dome of his skull. He wanted to grab Tully and shake the
daylights out of him; wanted to scream
WAKE UP!
into his sweetly smiling face.

"I'm...
sorry," Paul whispered, his mouth so close to Tully's head that the downy
hairs of his inner ear quivered. "I never saw it happening like this. I
never meant to hurt you this way—it wasn't ever about that."

A
young man came in. He carried an orange cafeteria tray, setting it down.
Seventeen or so: a high school senior, maybe. Not that big, but a strong,
compact frame. Dark, short-clipped hair. Eyes the same cornflower blue as Tom
Tully's.

"Who
are you?" he asked Paul.

"I'm
nobody. Just visiting. Who are—?"

"Robbie.
Rob. He's my uncle."

"I'm
Paul. Were ... are you close?"

"He's
my uncle," Rob said again.

They
stood across Tom's body. An accordionlike breathing bellows rose and fell.
Narcotics dripped through a catheter into his spine.

Rob
said, "What are you doing here?"

"I
just wanted to see how he was faring."

"So
you've seen him."

Rob's
fists clenched and unclenched; brachial veins pulsed down his biceps. Paul set
himself in a defensive stance, figuring the kid might leap across the bed.

"You
look like shit."

Paul
picked at the crusted blood on his lips. "It's been a long night."

"You
crawl out of a Dumpster?"

The
kid was goading him—he had every right. Paul picked a condolence card off the
bedside table, skimmed it, and set it back.

Rob
shifted from left foot to right. Antsy, ready to explode. "Where are you
from? I've never seen you before."

"Across
the river."

"You're
a ...
Canadian? Were you fighting to make ends meet?"

"Would
that have been any better?"

"Were
you fighting for anyone?"

"I
was fighting for someone. Myself."

Paul
pictured the way Tom Tully had fallen: heedlessly, like a trench coat slipping
off its hanger to the floor. He pictured Tom Tully with blood coming out his
ears and recalled the rush of pure power that flowed through him at the sight;
power born of the knowledge he'd reduced another human being to a thoughtless
slab of meat, erasing every trace of history and memory and dream. And while he
couldn't quite reconcile the hideous selfishness of these thoughts, neither
could he deny he'd harbored them.

"So
you didn't need the money?" Rob asked.

"Money's
never been an issue for me."

Rob
looked at Paul and peeled away the new muscles, bruises, and missing teeth to
catch a glimpse of Paul as he'd once been: frail, monied, fearful.

"Can
I ask you something?" Paul nodded; Rob went on. "Are you rich?"

"I
was never rich. But my parents were."

"So
that, with my uncle ... proof of something?"

"I
needed to know what I was capable of," Paul told him. "To know I
could walk into a room and know that nobody in that room could... fuck with me,
I guess."

Rob
gave a look of such seething hatred it shocked Paul. "I've heard spoiled
rich kids do a lot of self-centered things, but that takes it."

He
went to the door and shut it. After a brief hesitation he dragged the chair
over and lodged it under the doorknob. He crouched on the floor, his posture
that of a baseball catcher. For a full minute he sat that way.

"My
uncle was a solid fighter," he said finally. "This shouldn't have
happened." He raised his head and stared at Paul with those blue eyes of
his. "I want to hurt you, Paul. I think... I think I more or less have to.
And I think you want to be hurt."

"We
both know a place. How old are you?"

"Old
enough."

"If
you think it'll answer anything. Maybe I owe you." Paul smiled sadly.
"I don't want to hurt you." Then, with perfect honesty: "Or
maybe I do."

Robert
Tully dreamed he was in Sharky's on Pine Street. The bar was dirty and dark and
narrow, jammed between an off-license bettor's and the Pine Street theater,
where a roll of dimes bought you a half-hour in the peepshow booths.

The
bartender finished polishing a glass and faced Rob and Rob was surprised
because the bartender was him, Robert Tully, only twenty years older.

"Heeeey,"
Old Rob said, recognizing his younger self. "Look at you, Champ."

Old
Rob was fat in the way a lot of ex-athletes were fat: grossly and awkwardly so,
as if after the years of training their bodies ballooned up out of sheer confusion.
He set a glass of soapy draft before his younger self.

"God,
it's good to see you. Me." He smiled. "Us."

"I
can't drink this," Rob said.

Old
Rob dumped it down the well. "Not old enough, are you? And still training.
Stupid, stupid me."

Rob
thought something was the matter with his older self: the shambling gait, the
slurred speech like a man kicked awake in the middle of the night. And somehow
childlike: it was as though his ten-year-old self was trapped in the body of
his forty-year-old self.

Old
Rob said, "Will you look at our hands."

Their
hands were the same size; evidently, Rob did not have another growth spurt in
him. Old Rob ran his finger over a scar running the length of his own left
index finger.

"Hey,
hey, hey," he said excitedly, "remember where we got this? South
Korea; they flew us over to fight the Asian champ. The water gave us the trots
so Dad filled the water bottles with chrysanthemum juice. God, that taste—
flowers.
We knocked the champ out but split our finger to the bone. Remember that?"

Old
Rob saw his younger version's left index finger was as yet unscarred.
"Oops. Let the cat out of the bag, didn't I? Stupid, stupid me."

"Please,
stop saying that."

A
pained expression came over Old Rob's face. "I'm sorry—I mean, I'll
stop." He reached out to touch Rob, but he couldn't quite bring himself
to. "You look so good. Strong, you know? And all that hair."

"You
look good, too."

"You're
not just saying it?" Old Rob was pleased. "I like to keep myself in
the mix."

"You're
still fighting?"

"Not
professionally." He touched the side of his right eye. "Detached
retina. First time my sight came back; second time, too. Third time..." He
shrugged. "My license got revoked, but I found other places."

"I
don't want to know about them," Rob said.

Old
Rob wiped away the ring of condensation left by the glass. He was so goddamn
servile.
"No saying you have to," he said. "Maybe this life, my life,
isn't yours."

"I
hope not."

His
older self got that pained look again; he wrung the rag out and folded it into
a neat square. "The fight's a tough thing to leave behind." His shrug
indicated that this was not an excuse, this was the plain fact of it.
"They say every fighter dies twice: once when he takes his last breath,
the other when he hangs up the leathers. And that first death— that's the
bitch."

"But,"
Rob said, "I don't like fighting."

"You
get to like it." Old Rob smiled in a confused way. "Smart too late
and old too soon, huh? Everything passes so quickly."

The
telephone woke him up. Probably his father, calling from Top Rank wondering why
he was late for training. But Rob hadn't really trained for weeks. Not since
Tommy.

He
threw on sweats, grabbed his jacket, and set off down the street. A machine-gun
wind hammered his body. He did not know where he was headed: an aimless
trajectory through deadeningly familiar streets, no terminus or friendly port
of call. All he saw were the hard, unflinching angles of a city he now wandered
as a stranger. A sense of unremitting hopelessness descended upon him. The realization
that other families suffered tragedies on such a scale as to reduce the
sufferings of his own to a pitiful dot did nothing to allay his sense that a
cosmic injustice had been perpetrated. His family asked for so little: a little
house, a little money, a little respect, a little, ordinary life huddled
together as an odd but workable unit.

Others
had so much. Their wants were modest. Was it too much to ask?

He
wound up at Kate's house. Seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, the neighborhood
still asleep. He packed a snowball and hurled it at the transformer box bolted
to a power pole.