The Fighter (35 page)

"You're
up second," Lou told Paul.

Paul
held his hands out, palms up. Lou centered Paul's left hand on his knee, flexed
each finger, then began taping.

"Remember
me doing this for you the first time you came by the gym?" Lou said.
"Just another silver spooner, I figured. Gave you a week, tops." He
shook his head. "This kid you're fighting—Robert Tully. Only about the
biggest thing to come out of Niagara Falls since . . . well, forever. He's also
the nephew of the man you knocked silly the last time out."

"You
don't say."

"I
won't build castles in the sky for you: godly intervention aside, he's gonna
kick your ass. Tell you another thing—I won't be throwing in the towel."

"That's
a good thing, Lou. I'd probably end up killing you, you did that."

Paul
stared at a dark knothole in the floor. He stared at that knothole, that
cavelike spiderwebbing knothole, until he fell into it. Inside the knothole all
was dark and quiet and calm. Inside he could think.
I am a machine,
he thought simply. A machine of unforgiving angles and unshakable geometries,
titanium and bulletproof glass and ballistic rubber and dead metals. A machine
assembled in a work area completely free of human presence, riveted together by
preprogrammed robotic arms, altogether unfeeling. Without name or face, lacking
a past, lacking dreams or memories. A machine feels no mercy. A machine cannot
be broken by fear.
I am a machine,
he thought over and over, and
over and over.
A machine a machine machine machine
machinemachinemachinemachine—

At
some point Lou was saying, "You're up."

Two
men stood in the center of the ring.

Between
them stood Manning. He ran down the rules.

"Fight
ends when one man goes down and stays there. One guy's gotta go down to end the
round. Keep it clean—no eye poking or biting. That's sissy fighting."

Manning
stepped aside. The fighters came together. Their upper bodies were candle-white
after the sunless winter months. Paul leaned forward until their faces nearly
touched. Rob did not pull away.

Paul
said, "I'm really sorry about all this."

Rob's
first punch—a venomous straight right—struck Paul's forehead, splitting the
flesh between his eyes like the blow from a fifteen- pound hatchet to bring
forth blood in needle-thin pulses. Rob saw it in slow motion: his fist
rocketing from his chest shoulder-high to pass over his opponent's guard, the
flex of ligament and snap of tendon, impact sending a mild shiver down his arm
and the guy's face opening up, blooming like some bastard weed, a bone-deep
trench cut down the middle of his forehead.

Rob
watched the guy—his name, he remembered, was Paul—reel back, brain obviously
scrambled, eyes wide. His knee had barely touched the pine boards before he was
up. He shook his head, red drops flying every which way.

As
Paul came on again, if anything, Rob felt vague disappointment:
this
guy hurt Tommy? Like Fritzie Zivic said: takes one lucky punch. Rob was also
puzzled by Paul himself: what drove a man to seek out a place like this, to
fight so maniacally, so recklessly—and to what end? They circled. The united
voice of the crowd boomed like subterranean thunder beneath their feet. Blood
coursed down the sides of Paul's nose and off his chin. Someone tossed an empty
mickey into the ring: it shattered with a glassy tinkle, silver shards
sparkling the boards like chipped ice.

They
met violently. Rob lashed out with a left hook. Exhibiting more grace than Rob
would have credited him with, Paul ducked back and, rooting his left foot like
a stump, threw a wicked right cross. The punch slammed Rob's abdomen above the
hip. A flash of white- hot pain exploded in his gut. He backed off, gagging,
bile burning his sinuses. His vision was studded with shimmering dots; he
retreated jelly-legged as Paul followed up with a crushing right hand, smoking
it straight through Rob's frail defense and smashing his mouth.

A
cataclysmic
bang
filled Rob's skull, the sound of a .44 Magnum discharged in a broom closet. He
felt himself falling, but, as in a dream, was helpless to check himself.

He
came to slumped against a hay bale. Dry stalks itched the knobs of his spine.
The soft tissue inside his cheeks was badly cut, pink rags hanging in his
mouth. He couldn't hear anything and for a brief span was gripped with a
sickening surety he'd gone deaf.

Then
he caught his own shivering exhalations and came to realize that the crowd had
gone silent in disbelief. He spat blood and touched his upper front teeth,
unsurprised to find them loose in their moorings.

Fritzie
helped him up. "Want me to stop it, Robbie?" "You better
not."

Paul
leaned forward on a bale, elbows balanced on knees. His overall demeanor was
that of a dog, a fighting dog, pit bull or rottweiler, waiting for his trainer
to release the fetters.

Paul
waved Lou's hands away from the forehead wound. "Let it bleed."

"You're
gushing all over the place. That blood will blind you." "I don't
care. Leave it be."

The
crowd was absorbed in funereal silence. Manning's son swept the busted bottle
from the fighting surface.

Paul
glanced at the other corner. The kid had regained his senses. He didn't appear
fazed or scared—surprised, was all. Paul came to confront what he'd known all
along: he was going to lose this fight, lose it badly. That suited him just
fine. It was beyond winning or losing now. It was about the desire and
willingness to approach the world with fists raised, always moving forward. To
give everything of yourself without hesitation or fear.

Rob
came out cautious the following round. His guts ached and broken points of fire
danced across his vision, but his legs were steady.

Paul
came on like a dervish, throwing hook after hook, lunging after Rob with
ungainly strides. Blood ran unchecked down his face, into his eyes and mouth.

Rob
snapped left jabs at Paul's upper arms, driving his knuckles into the solid
flesh of the biceps. Paul's arms dipped and Rob's fists flashed, jabs peppering
Paul's brows, cheeks, nose. Paul couldn't protect himself: he might as well try
to shield himself against a sniper's bullets fired from a faraway bell tower.

The
rough adhesive on Rob's fists left slashing burns on Paxil's face. Rob wondered
why he kept
smiling.
Or not a smile, exactly: an oddly blissed-out expression, as though he were in
the midst of a pleasantly confusing dream.

The
smell of cowshit and sawdust sweated up from the floorboards as Paul's face
swelled under Rob's relentless assault. Blood vessels burst under the pressure
of skin slamming bone, blood pumping from ruptured veins to collect in pouches
like hard-boiled eggs inserted under his skin, erupting like oversize blisters
under Rob's fists. Paul tottered, he wove and stumbled, he refused to go down.
He threw punches blindly, not seeing Rob anymore, throwing for the doubtful
possibility of contact or perhaps the sheer joy of it.

Rob
only wanted Paul to go down and stay there. His hands were covered in blood and
he didn't know whether it was his own knuckles splitting and bleeding or if the
blood was all Paul's.

Voices
in the crowd:

...
never seen the likes of
it...

...
scrawny faggot's gonna need a casket before long...

...
drop that chickenhead, man! He's neck-deep in hurt
...

They
collided in the middle of the ring and stood toe to toe, just winging. Paul
felt like a man facing a barrage of rocks soaked in kerosene and lit on fire.
Rob finished with a vicious right hook that sent Paul down onto a bale. Brittle
straw puffed up from under him and the bell rang while he struggled to find his
feet.

Lou
had never seen a face like it. A Sunday matinee horror show.

Paul's
lips were split so deep down the middle they were like four lips instead of
two, the pink meat drooping in rags. Eyebrows broke open over the high ridge of
bone, wounds so wide it was as though a pair of tiny toothless mouths were
leering through the bristly hairs. One eye puffed completely shut, a fleshy
ball the size of a baby's fist.

How
long had the round lasted: three minutes, three and a half? So little time,
really, for such a sickening transformation.

"Paul,"
Lou said carefully. "You need to listen to me. You can't go on fighting
this way. Let me clean you up a bit, at least."

Lou
wet a towel and wiped. When Paul's face was clean Lou saw it was hopeless: the
cuts were too deep, too long, too numerous. Adrenaline chloride wouldn't do it,
ferric acid wouldn't do it, a goddamn
staple gun
wouldn't do it. He could debride
the deepest ones and razor the puffed flesh around that eyeball to give him
some relief, but why bother? The kid didn't want to be helped.