“I’m talking about you, Lem.”
Drinkwater batted his eyes. “Why, Officer, you of all people know I’ve never been convicted. As I recall, a great deal of your time and efforts have funnelled down that empty hole.”
“You’re clean,” said Owe. “That doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking you’re scum. Now that’s a fact, Lem. It’s the way you’re seen.”
Drinkwater’s jaw went hard. He swallowed in one sinuous movement.
“You want to fight, uh?” he said to me.
When I told him I wanted to fight three men, Drinkwater’s eyelids lifted from half-mast.
“One night,” I explained. “Any three men you want.”
“Think you’re the first swinging dick with a death wish who’s walked through these doors?” he said. “Anybody in particular?”
“Anyone’ll do. Whites, blacks, Natives.”
“No women and kids?” Drinkwater laughed softly. “I only ask because, well, I am talking to a man who cut another man’s balls off with a carpet knife, am I not?”
I said, “That’s not how it happened.”
“No? That’s the way everybody believes it went down around here. You snuck up behind poor Igor, slid a blade between his legs and slit him nuts to asshole. Were it not for the hard work of the police”—he turned to Owe, palms pressed together as if in prayer—“and bless you for that, Officer.
Bless you
. If not for the police you’d have gotten away clean.”
“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?”
Drinkwater said, “You’re asking me to assemble a war party? You got it, Pontiac. Three stout Indians, of heart proud and true.”
“I want to put a bet on myself, too.”
“Yeah?” said Drinkwater. “Well, nobody put me on this earth to talk grown men out of being stupid.”
The day before the fight I withdrew all but five bucks from my account at the Greater Niagara Credit Union. Edwina had sold our house while I was locked up and transferred my half into the account I’d opened as a ten-year-old to rathole the money I made mowing neighbourhood lawns.
The days leading up to the fight had passed quickly. I’d done plenty of running—I’d slacked off in prison, seeing as it made me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Now I ran at night. I’d wake up in the witching hours and drag myself to the bathroom. I’d open the cupboard and hunt out the bottle at the back with an old rag tented over it.
Tuf-Foot
. The tagline read:
A dog is only as good as his feet
.
I’d squeeze some goo into my hands and massage it into my joints. Afterwards my hands were stained brown and achy to the bones, but I needed them to stay together in the fights.
I’d yank on the heavy workboots I used to wear at the Bisk, a hooded sweatshirt, and enter the empty corridors of night.
The streets were pretty much deserted. The few guys I passed weren’t dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Every so often a face would jump out of a dark alley asking for something, or offering it, and I’d think:
Jesus, I used to know you. We played baseball at Reservoir Park
.
I’d run down Stanley Ave. as the bars emptied out, juking around drunk kids laughing their batshit laughter, finding myself a little terrified by that sound—it was the laughter of people who felt invincible because of their youth and promise and the wide-open future. Guys in prison didn’t laugh like that.
I’d run further down the block where other bars were letting out,
the ones with dark windows and no signs where the hospital orderlies and tollbooth operators drank. Men would shoulder through black presswood doors with fixed expressions on their faces and cigs fixed between their chalky lips. I’d watch the fresh air smack them in the face, their pupils constricting as the realization dawned:
Sweet Jesus, I’m not anywhere near drunk enough!
Some of them gave me a slit-eyed look before nodding, but not chummily. These guys weren’t a lot older than me, their faces wrecked from drink or just the years piling up with brutal math.
A lot of nights I’d end up at the Falls, leaning on the observatory railing. There was always light by the Falls. It made no difference if there was a full moon or a sliver no thicker than a bone fish hook: moonlight hit the spray at the base of the Falls and the mist projected it back, an upside-down bowl of light. Baby birds peeped from their cliffside nests, a sound I found mysteriously comforting.
The night of the fight I packed my duffel, tucked the money order into my pocket and headed to a convenience store near my folks’ place. Owe pulled up. I tossed my duffel in the footwell. We drove along the river past the hydro station. Owe cracked the window and hung a cigarette off his bottom lip. “You mind?”
“We all got to die someday.”
He pulled up in front of a bar. Bovine slid into the back seat smelling like he’d spent the afternoon marinating in a vat of Famous Grouse.
“Just a few hand-steadiers,” he said as we drove away.
Trucks were parked ten deep at the warehouse behind Smokin’ Joes. A knot of seamed faces clustered round the door.
“You’ll be heading home with your scalp hanging out of your fucking mouth,” one of them said.
“That wig’s getting split straight down the middle,” said another.
The air hung hot and close inside the warehouse. Pigeons cooed in the rafters. When we entered the fighting area, a heavy silence fell. The Antichrist himself may as well have entered the building.
The fight box was the same as I remembered: a ring of sawhorses from a roadside construction site. Spectators ranged down them, the toes of their boots edging onto the fighting surface. They were drinking but nobody seemed drunk; they wanted to be sober to better witness the destruction.
Drinkwater stepped out of the crowd, laughing over his shoulder with someone. He eyed me up and down, and untucked a cigarette and a wooden match from behind his ear.
“What ya done brung me, son?”
I gave him the money order: as good as cash but easier to get past the border guards. Drinkwater struck the match on the tight denim draping his thigh, then lit the cigarette.
“That’s a significant wager” was all he said.
“If you can’t handle it …”
“Save your energy,” Drinkwater told me, oh so softly. “I don’t want anyone going home without their fill of blood.”
“Add this to it,” said Owe, pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “How much?”
“Why don’t you count it, Lem?”
“I never learned how. I went to a residential school run by the white man.”
“Ten.”
Drinkwater tucked it into his pocket. “Three-to-one odds.”
“Bullshit,” said Bovine. “Seven-to-one.”
Drinkwater stared at him. “Who knew shit could talk?” he said mildly. “Four-to-one.”
“Six,” said Owe.
“Five. And you can only throw the towel once per fight.”
Nobody bothered to shake on it. It wasn’t a gentleman’s agreement.
“Get your ass ready,” Drinkwater said to me. “We Natives are getting restless.”
I snapped my head sharply to one side to drain the sinus cavities, rolled my shoulders loose and said: “Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er.”
First up was the big sidekick I’d seen weeks back at Smokin’ Joes. Igor Bearfoot II. He was a skyscraper with legs, three hundred pounds, easy. Drinkwater wanted to tenderize me, so he’d brought in his biggest mallet. Once I made it past this one, I thought, Lem probably had a fillet knife lined up, ready to slice me to ribbons. A dandy plan, I had to admit.
Still, I was okay with facing this monster out of the gate. Stick and move, chop the guy down Giant Kichi-style. Hopefully I wouldn’t be breathing through a mask of blood by the end.
“Jesus,” said Bovine, watching the guy warm up.
We came out of our corners, me stepping lightly on the balls of my feet, keeping my shoulders rolling—a move I’d picked up in jail—staring at the big man out of the tops of my eyes.
My opponent fought stripped to the waist. His nipples sat in sunken wells of flesh. The skin above and below his bellybutton funnelled into a cleft in the centre of his belly, lapping over in delicate folds like the skin of a half-deflated balloon. At some point he must’ve lost a ton of weight, which left him with those Shar-Pei folds. A weird surge of compassion rolled through me.
The guy’s right shoulder dipped as his fist came around. I ducked it easily but I heard his arm rip the air above my head in a wide sweep, like a sailboat’s boom swung free. Pivoting on my heel, switching the power to my hips, I hammered my own right into the
man’s ribs. His flesh rippled in a wave and he stepped off, his body buckling before righting itself.
I backed away, throwing yippy rights and lefts. A flash jab tore the skin over his left eye, and the blood flowed round his socket and down the angle of his jaw. He pawed at the blood, smearing it down his neck, and swung. It caught me on the shoulder—more of a slap than a punch, but it still rocked me sideways. I righted myself and tagged his nose with a smart shot. The crunch of cartilage sounded like the top snapping off an unripe banana.
A cigarette hit my chest and hissed in the sheen of sweat. I stomped on it while stepping forward, blitzing the big guy with jabs he caught with his elbows and forearms as he peered hesitantly at me through his upraised arms. His face was a horror show and the fight wasn’t even a minute old. Did this guy know
how
to fight? Would Drinkwater tilt me against a big cream puff with sixty thousand dollars on the table—
Bullrushing with surprising speed, the guy ducked his head and rose up with his hands hooked under my armpits. I had a crazy weightless moment, my legs kicking at nothing. Then I brought one fist down on the big man’s skull; it sounded like a coconut hitting a softwood floor. He hurled me at a sawhorse. Hungry faces hunched in at the edge of my vision and something sharp—a razor blade? an untrimmed fingernail?—sizzled along my hip bone. The guy bridged a forearm across my chest, cheating the air out of my lungs and bearing down with his claustrophobic bulk. His breath was equal parts Wintergreen Skoal and camphor. I noted the fine grey edge of lead around his dead canine tooth.
The man brought one world-eating fist down into my face and everything exploded in starlight riots, hollowness threading down my jaw as if nothing anchored it anymore: my face was only a mask, the contents of my skull obliterated.
I staggered forward as he swung again, reeling into the middle of the ring and punching instinctively, not at a face or even a shape but just at that onrushing warmth. My fist collided with something hard again—
snap!
—and that hardness split, becoming two separate things under a tight stretch of skin.
I got knocked down again, my knees mashed to jelly and the air whoofing out of my guts in a helpless gust. The big guy was on top now. Fear chewed into the wires of my brain, the insane lung-chaining fear you feel when trapped under a bigger man’s bulk while your life is slowly choked out of you. Four bloody knuckles dropped from a great height, a cloud-splitting Hand of God. There was a loud crunch inside my head as the back of my skull rang off the concrete, a shockwave juddering me spine-deep.
Then, miraculously, the weight lifted. A racking gasp tore out of me. My head lolled to one side and I spotted the towel on the floor. Bovine must have thrown it.
At Drinkwater’s, the white towel didn’t mean the end. A cornerman threw it as a time-out and the injured fighter could get his wounds licked before wading back in.
I dragged myself up and hauled my ass to the corner amidst catcalls and hoots.
“He took you out behind the woodshed, whitey!”
Owe and Bovine sat me in a bright orange cafeteria chair. Bovine held my face, scrutinizing the damage. I let my skull rest against his hands. He slapped a bag of ice on the back of my neck and had Owe hold it there while he worked.
“He lumped your forehead but bad, Dunk. Burst a blood vessel?”
The skin of my forehead was tight, an odd shadow looming at the upper edge of my sight. I was cut over my left eye. Bovine swabbed the cut with a Q-tip saturated with Adrenalin. The raw
burn rode the nerve endings down the side of my face, cabling the tendons in my neck.
Glancing to the opposite corner, I saw the big guy’s nose was badly bust: cartilage crushed on one side, leaving the other side jutting straight and strange like a shark’s fin. Bright blood streamed from both nostrils but the man sat with an easygoing expression, taking dainty sips from a Hamm’s tallboy. His cutman hovered over him with a packet of Monsel’s solution—the filthiest trick in a cutman’s bag. Of course it was illegal—just not at Drinkwater’s fights.
The cutman applied solution to the big man’s cracked-open beak,
shaking
it on like he was salting popcorn. I smelled it—a cooked smell like a skirt steak drenched in battery acid.
“His ponytail,” Owe said. “The
ponytail
, Dunk.”
“That’s time!” Drinkwater called.
The crowd stirred as we surged out of our corners. The guy’s nose was predictably hideous: lips of bubbly flesh opened down to the gleam of buckled cartilage. He’d have to find a doctor to dig out that pavement of scar tissue with a scalpel—otherwise he’d be left with a second pair of deformed lips running vertically down his schnozz.
He came out like a grizzly awoken from hibernation. I came out nimbly this round, my attitude set in the register of give-a-fuck, moving side to side with my hands hipped like cocked pistols. The fight was in my blood now, and it was an ecstatic feeling; my senses had jacked in at last, operating on some dog-whistle frequency only I could hear.
The big guy clipped me with a looping cross, opening the cut Bovine had just closed. I shook my head, droplets spraying, and cuffed him with a clumsy left as the crowd rose to a quick roar. We circled out of a sloppy clinch where I caught a heat-seeking whiff of raw adrenaline coming out of his pores.
We clashed in the rough centre of the ring. The guy hauled in
bulldog breaths, blood burping out his nose. His sweat-heavy trousers had slipped around his waist to expose his BVDs, which were a cheery shade of robin’s egg blue. He dipped his head and came on but this time I timed it and stepped aside, letting him rumble past like a subway on fixed rails. Next, I was able to make two small adjustments that pretty much put the fight to bed, and I was lucky enough to do them in one fluid motion—watching it happen, I guess you might think we’d choreographed the damn thing.