The Fighter (4 page)

He
stood under the showerhead. The knobs of his spine were raw where he'd slid
down the shopfront. He tried jerking off in hopes it might unknit the tension
knotting his gut, but it was like trying to coax life out of a rope. In the
blood-colored darkness behind his eyelids all he could see was this huge fist,
this scarred ridge of knuckles exploding like a neutron bomb.

He
carefully patted dry his various lumps and abrasions. He found an old pair of
Ray Bans and adjusted them to cover his puffed eye.

The
kitchen was a monotone oasis: white fridge and stove, alabaster tile floor,
marble countertops. A bay window offered a view of Lake Ontario lying silver
beneath a chalky mid-morning sky. The backyard grass was petaled with the
season's first frost.

He
cracked the freezer door, relishing the blast of icy air that hit his face. In
fact, he liked it so much he stuck his entire head in. Frozen air flowed over
the dome of his skull.

He
rummaged through the fridge. His mother was on the Caspian Sea Diet. Dieters
must subsist upon edibles found in and around the Caspian basin: triggerfish,
sea cucumbers, drab kelps, crustaceans. The diet's creator—a swarthy MD with a
face like a dried testicle—cited the uncanny virility of Mediterraneans,
evidenced by the fact that many continued to labor as goatherds and pearl
divers late into their seventies.

Paul's
search yielded nothing one might squarely define as edible: a quivering block of
tofu, a glazy-eyed fish laid out across a chafing dish, what looked to be bean
sprouts floating in a bowl of turd-colored water.

He
shoved aside jars of Cape Cod capers and tubs of Seaweed Health Jelly.
"What the ..
.fuck"
He slammed the fridge door. On the
kitchen island: Christmas cards.

His
mother got cracking on them earlier each year. She sent off hundreds, licking
envelopes until her mouth was syrupy with mucilage. The cards were pure white
with gold filigree and the raised outline of a bell. A stack of pine-scented
annual summations sat beside them:
season's greetings from Harris county!

His
own summation read:

Paul
is still living at home and we're so happy to have him, but lately he's been
talking about finding his own place, leaving Jack and I empty nesters.

That
was it? A year gone by and all his mother could say was that he was looking for
his own place? A cowl of paranoia descended upon him; he considered scribbling
something else, a flagrant lie if need be—
Paul was voted
one of Young Economist's "Up and Comers Under 30"
or
Paul recently returned from a whirlwind seven-city business
junket
or
Paul is in talks with Singapore Zoo officials to bring Ling
Si, a giant panda, on an exhibition tour of Niagara's wine region
—anything, really, to prove to
all the distant aunts and uncles, the unknown business acquaintances and second
cousins twice removed, that he was going places.

He
headed into the living room. The sofa was white, like the rest of the room and
like most of the house. Soothing, artful white. His mother and father's sofa in
his mother and father's living room in his mother and father's house, where he
still lived. The floors were new, the appliances so modern as to verge upon
space age: no creaks or ticks or rattles. Paul sat on the sofa in the deadening
silent white.

Closing
his eyes, he pictured shitkicker Todd's trailer—Paul wasn't sure he lived in a
trailer, but it seemed entirely plausible—aflame, the cheap tin walls glowing
and bowling trophies melting like birthday candles until suddenly the bastard
crashed through the screen door, a burning effigy. Next he saw the entire
trailer park on fire—why the fuck not?—occupants smoked from their mobile
shanties, their macaroni-casserole-
TV-Guide
lives, running around waving
flame- eaten arms and the air reeking of fried hogback.

A
flashback from last night tore the fragile fabric of his daydream: a huge fat
fist the size of a cannonball, the skin black as a gorilla's, rocketed at his
face.

"God
damnit!"

He
struck the sofa cushion. The punch was weak but ill-placed: his wrist bent at
an awkward angle and he yelped. He hopped up, shaking his hand; he booted the
sofa but his kick was clumsy and he jammed his toe. Gritting his teeth,
grunting, he lay upon the Persian carpet. His body quaked with rage.

Paul
often found himself in this state: anger bubbling up from nowhere, a
teeth-clenching, fist-pounding fury. But it was undirected and one-dimensional
and lacking either the complexities or justifications of adult anger. More
like a tantrum.

He
nursed his hand and drummed his heels on the carpet. His cellphone chirped. One
of his asshole friends calling to dredge the gory details of last night's
misadventure. Or his father, wondering why he wasn't at work yet.

Paul
headed to the kitchen, popped his cellphone into the garburator, and flipped
the switch. The gears labored, regurgitating shards of shiny silver casing into
the sink; a sharp edge of plastic shot up and struck Paul's forehead. He
twisted a spigot and washed everything down, then picked up the kitchen phone
and dialed a cab.

Paul
followed the cobblestone path alongside a boxwood hedge past a marble fountain:
an ice-glazed Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle. Early autumn fog blew in
off the lake, mantling the manor's roofline. It was much too large for its
three inhabitants, but Paul's father held a tree-falling-in-the-forest outlook
with regard to wealth:
If you're rich
and nobody can tell, well, are you really rich?

The
cab picked him up outside the estate grounds. Paul gazed out the window as they
headed downtown to retrieve his car. They drove along the banks of Twelve Mile
Creek, the squat skyline of downtown

St.
Catharines obscured by fog. Roadside slush was grayed with industrial effluvia
pumped from the brick smokestacks of the GM factory across the river.

Paul's
car, a 2005 BMW E90, was parked around the corner from the club. The car was
his father's gift to him from last Christmas. There was a parking ticket on the
windshield. He tore it in half between his teeth and spat the shreds into the
puddle along the curb.

He
stopped for a red light on the way to the winery, idling beside a Dodge pickup.
A junkyard mutt was chained to the truckbed. Paul locked eyes with the dog. The
mutt's muddy eyes did not blink. Its lips skinned back to reveal a row of
discolored teeth. Paul looked away and fiddled with the radio.

He
accelerated past big box stores and auto-body shops and gas stations out into
the country. The land opened into vast orchards and groves. Peach and apple and
cherry trees planted in neat straight rows, trunks wrapped in cyclone fence.

Ten
minutes passed before it hit him.

He'd
looked away. He'd broken eye contact first.

He'd
lost a stare-down...

...to a
dog.

The
Ripple Creek winery was spread across fifty acres of land overlooked by the
Niagara Escarpment. Paul's folks had planted the vines themselves some
twenty-five years ago.

Paul's
father, Jack Harris, had fallen in love with Paul's mother, Barbara Forbes, the
daughter of a sorghum farmer whom Jack first saw slinging sacks of fertilizer
into the bed of a rusted pickup at the Atikokan Feed'n' Seed, and whom he saw
again at the annual Summer Dust-Off, where she danced with raucous zeal to
washboard-and- zither music. He fell in love with her because at the time he
felt this coincidental sighting was fateful—later both came to realize that
they'd lived little more than thirty miles apart, but in northern Ontario it
was possible to go your whole life and never meet your neighbor two towns
distant. They had made love behind the barn while the Dust-Off raged on, in a
field studded with summer flowers on a muffet of hay left by the baling
machine. Afterward they lay together with hay poking their bodies like busted drinking
straws, feeling a little silly at the unwitting cliché they'd made of
themselves: gormless bumpkins deflowered in a haypile. Even the dray horse
sharing the field with them looked vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.

After
graduating high school Jack spent the next year tending his father's
cornfields. He married Barbara and she moved into the foreman's lodgings on
Jack's father's farm. Barely a month had passed before Barbara began to chafe
under the deadening monotony.

One
night Jack returned from the fields, filthy and itching from corn silk, to find
his wife in the kitchen. The table was piled high with books on wine making.

"What's
all this?"

"What
else would you have me do all day," Barbara wanted to know,
"crochet?"

Jack
knew not a thing about wine. He favored Labatt 50 from pint bottles.

"You
want wine, I'll head to the LCBO and pick up a bottle."

"I
want wine,
I'll
head to the LCBO and buy
myself
a bottle." Barbara closed a
book on the tip of her finger, keeping the page marked. "We might try
making our own."

She
told him that the soil of southern Ontario, much like that of southern France,
was well suited to grape growing. But wine ... it conjured images of
beret-wearing Frenchmen zipping down country lanes in fruity red sports cars.
An altogether foreign image, Jack thought, leagues removed from his tiny
foreman's cabin on the edge of the Ontario cornfields. Then again, why not? He
knew how to grow corn; why not grapes? And a gut instinct told him that a curve
might be developing; if they hopped on now they might land a few steps ahead of
it.

One
afternoon they headed down to the Farmers' Credit Union and applied for a
small-business loan. With it they purchased a homestead on fifteen acres in
Stoney Creek, a farming community in southern Ontario. Fruit country: local
farmers grew peaches, cherries, blueberries. Jack was the only one growing
grapes; this incited a degree of neighborly concern.
Concords?
other farmers asked.
Juice grapes?
When Jack told them no, a
Portuguese variety called Semillon, the farmers shook their heads, sad to see a
young fool leading his family down the path to financial ruin.