In the Loyal Mountains (11 page)

On these afternoons, following an especially good run and an exhausting swim, I would be unable to lift my arms. Nothing mattered in those suspended, floating times. This is how I can give up, I'd think. This is how I can never fight again. I can drop out, raise a family, and float in the bright sun all day, on the Lake of Peace. This is how I can do it, I'd think. Perhaps my son could be a boxer.

 

Fights eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one: I tore a guy's jaw off in the Body Shop. I felt it give way and then detach, heard the ripping sound as if it came from somewhere else, and it was sickening—we left without any of the betting money, gave it all to his family for the hospital bill, but it certainly did not stop me from fighting, or even from hitting hard. I was very angry about something, but did not know what. I'd sit in the back of the truck on the rides home, and I'd know I wanted something, but did not know what.

Sometimes Don had to lean forward and massage his temples, his head hurt so bad. He ate handfuls of aspirin, ate them like M&M's, chasing them down with beer. I panicked when he did that, and thought he was dying. I wondered if that was where my anger came from, if I fought so wildly and viciously in an attempt, somehow and with no logic, to keep things from changing.

On the nights we didn't have a fight, we would spar a little in the barn. Killer watched us wild-eyed from his stall, waiting to get to me. Don made me throw a bucket of lake water on him each time I went into the barn, to make sure that his hate for me did not wane. Killer screamed whenever I did this, and Jason howled and blew into a noisemaker and banged two garbage can lids together, a deafening sound inside the barn. Killer screamed and reared on his hind legs and tried to break free. After sparring we went into the house, and Betty fixed us supper.

We had grilled corn from Bettys garden and a huge porterhouse steak from a steer Don had slaughtered himself, and Lima beans and Irish potatoes, also from the garden. It felt like I was family. We ate at the picnic table as fog moved in from the woods, making the lake steamy. It was as if everyone could see what I was thinking then; my thoughts were bare and exposed, but it didn't matter, because Don and Betty and Jason cared for me, and also because I was not going to fail.

After dinner we watched old fight films. For a screen we used a bedsheet strung between two pine trees. Don set up the projector on the picnic table and used a crooked branch for a pointer. Some of the films were of past champions, but some were old movies of Don fighting. He could make the film go in slow motion, to show the combinations that led to knockdowns, and Betty always got up and left whenever we watched one of the old splintery films of Don's fights. It wasn't any fun for her, even though she knew he was going to win, or was going to get up again after going down.

I had seen all of Don's fights a hundred times and had watched all the films of the greatest fighters a thousand times, it seemed, and I was bored with it. Fighting is not films, it's experience. I knew what to do and when to do it. I'd look past the bedsheet, past the flickering washes of light, while Jason and Don leaned forward, breathless, watching young Don stalk his victim, everything silent except for the clicking of the projector, the crickets, the frogs, and sometimes the owls. In the dark I wondered what New York was going to be like, if it was going to be anything like this.

Some nights, after the movies had ended, we would talk about Pig-Eye Reeves. It had been several years ago, but even Jason remembered him. We were so familiar with the stories that it seemed to all of us—even to me, who had never met him—that we remembered him clearly.

Pig-Eye knocked out one of the fighters Don had trained, in a bar up in the Delta one night, the Green Frog. That was how Don found Pig-Eye—he had beaten Dons challenger, had just stepped up out of the crowd. Dons fighter, whose name Don always pretended he couldn't remember, threw the first punch, a wicked, winging right, not even bothering to set it up with a jab—Don says he covered his face with his hands and groaned, knowing what was going to happen. Pig-Eye, full of beer, was still able to duck it, evidently, because Don heard nothing but the rip of air and then, a little delayed, the sound of another glove hitting a nose, then a grunt, and the sound of a body falling in the sawdust.

Don and Jason and Betty left the semiconscious fighter there in the Green Frog, with a broken nose and blood all over his chest and trunks. They drove home with no money and Pig-Eye.

They changed the number on the truck mirror from whatever it had been before—forty-five or fifty—back to one. Pig-Eye had won one fight.

“You just left your other fighter sitting there?” I asked the first time I heard the story, though I knew better than to ask now.

Don had seemed confused by the question. “He wasn't my fighter anymore,” he said finally.

Sometimes Jason would ask the question for me, so I didn't have to, and I could pretend it didn't matter, as if I weren't even thinking about it.

“Is Mack a better fighter than Pig-Eye?” he'd ask after watching the movies.

Don answered like a trainer every time. He was wonderful, the best. “Mack is better than Pig-Eye ever dreamed of being,” he'd say, clapping a big hand on my neck and giving it the death squeeze, his hand the size of a license plate.

“Tell him about the balloon,” Jason would cry when Don had reached a fever pitch for Pig-Eye stories.

Don leaned back against a tree and smiled at his son. The lights were off in the house. Betty had gone to bed. Moths fluttered around the porch light, and down below us in the Lake of Peace, bullfrogs drummed. There was no other sound.

“Pig-Eye won his last five fights down here with one hand tied behind his back,” Don said, closing his eyes. I wondered if I could do that, wondered if in fact I'd
have
to do that, to ride down the legend of Pig-Eye, and pass over it.

“We sent him up to New York, to a promoter I knew”—Don looked at me quickly—“the same one we'll be sending Mack to if he wins the rest of his fights. This promoter, Big Al Wilson, set him up in a penthouse in Manhattan, had all Pig-Eye's meals catered to him. He had masseurs, everything. He was the
champ.
Everyone was excited about him.”

“Tell him about the scars,” Jason said. He moved next to his dad, so that his back was against the same tree, and it was as if they were both telling me the story now, though I knew it already, we all knew it.

“Pig-Eye had all these scars from his bar fights,” Don said. “He'd been in Vietnam too, and had got wounded there. He flew those crazy hot-air balloons for a hobby, once he started winning some fights and making some money, and he was always having rough landings, always crashing the balloons and getting cut up that way.”

“Helium balloons,” Jason said.

“It was a very disturbing thing to Pig-Eye's opponents when he first stepped in the ring against them. They'd all heard about him, but he really had to be seen to be believed.”

“Like a zipper,” Jason said sleepily, but delighted. “He looked like a zipper. I remember.”

“Pig-Eye won fourteen fights in New York. He was ranked fifth and was fighting well. I went to a few of his fights, but then he changed.”

“He got different,” Jason cautioned.

“He stopped calling, stopped writing, and he started getting a little fat, a little slow. No one else could tell it, but I could.”

“He needed Dad for a trainer,” said Jason. In the distance I heard Killer nicker in his stall.

“He lost,” Don said, shaking his head. “He was fighting a nobody, some kid from Japan, and that night he just didn't have it. He got knocked down three times. I saw tapes of it later. He was sitting up like one of those bears in a zoo, still trying to get on his feet for a third time, but he couldn't do it. It was like he didn't know where his legs were, didn't know what his feet were for. He couldn't remember how to do it.”

I thought about the ammonia and the chloroform handkerchiefs Don would sometimes place over my face when we were sparring. I wondered if every time he did that to me, he was remembering how Pig-Eye couldn't stand up—how he had forgotten how to get back up. I thought that I surely knew how Pig-Eye had felt.

“The balloon,” Jason said. There was a wind in the trees, many nights, and so often those winds reminded me of that strange feeling of being both old and young, someplace in the middle, and for the first time, with no turning back.

“The balloon,” Jason said again, punching his father on the shoulder. “This is the best part.”

“Pig-Eye was crushed,” Don said, sleepy, detached, as if it were no longer Pig-Eye he was talking about. I thought again of how they had walked off and left that other fighter up in the Delta, the nameless one, sitting in the sawdust holding his broken nose. “It was the only time Pig-Eye had ever been knocked out, the only time he'd ever lost, and it devastated him.”

“A hundred and fifteen fights,” Jason said, “and he'd only lost one.”

“But it was my fault,” Don said. “It was how I trained him. It was wrong.”

“The balloon,” Jason said.

“He rented one,” Don said, looking up at the stars, speaking to the night. “He went out over the countryside the next day, his face all bandaged up, with a bottle of wine and his girlfriend, and then he took it up as high as it could go, and then he cut the strings to the gondola.”

“He was good,” Jason said solemnly.

“He was too good,” Don said.

 

All that summer I trained hard for New York. I knew that I would win my hundred fights. I knew that I could win them with one arm tied behind my back, either arm, if Don and Jason wanted that. But I wasn't worried about my one hundred bar fights. I was worried about going up to New York, to a strange place, someplace different. Sometimes I did not want to fight anymore, but I never let anyone see that.

Jason was getting older, filling out, and sometimes Don let him ride Killer. We'd all have breakfast as usual, then Jason would saddle Killer. I'd wake the dogs and we'd start down toward the lake, moving lazily through the trees but knowing that in a minute or two we'd be running.

Don would sit in a chair by the shore and follow us with his binoculars. He had a whistle he'd blow to warn me when I was about to be trampled.

When the dogs and I heard the horse, the hard, fast hooves coming straight down the hill, we'd start to run. It would be almost six o'clock then. The sun would just be coming up, and we'd see things as we raced through the woods: deer slipping back into the trees, cottontails diving into the brush. The dogs would break off and chase all of these things, and sometimes they'd rejoin me later on the other side of the lake with a rabbit hanging from their jaws. They'd fight over it, really wrestling and growling.

All of this would be going past at what seemed like ninety miles an hour: trees, vines, logs; greens, browns, blacks, and blues—flashes of the lake, flashes of sky, flashes of logs on the trail. I knew the course well, knew when to jump, when to dodge. It's said that a healthy man can outrun a horse, over enough distance, but that first mile was the hardest, all that dodging.

Jason shouted, imitating his father, cracking the whip; the sun rose orange over the tops of the trees, the start of another day of perfection. And then the cry, “The Lake of Peace!” And it would be over, and I'd rush out into the shallows, a dog on either side of me, tripping and falling, the lake at my ankles, at my knees, coming up around my waist, and we'd be swimming, with Killer plunging in after us, and Jason still cracking the whip.

 

Actually, there were two stories about Pig-Eye Reeves. I was the only person Don told about the second one. I did not know which one was true.

In the other story, Pig-Eye recovered, survived. Still distraught over losing, he went south, tried to go back to Don, to start all over again. But Don had already taken on another fighter and would not train Pig-Eye anymore.

Don rubs his temples when he tells me this. He is not sure if this is how it went or not.

So Pig-Eye despaired even more and began drinking bottles of wine, sitting out on the dock and drinking them down the way a thirsty man might drink water. He drank far into the night, singing at the top of his lungs. Don and Betty had to put pillows over their heads to get to sleep, after first locking the doors.

Then Don woke up around midnight—he never could sleep through the night—and he heard splashing. He went outside and saw that Pig-Eye had on his wrist and ankle weights and was swimming out to the middle of the lake.

Don said he could see Pig-Eye's wake, could see Pig-Eye at the end of it, stretching it out, splitting the lake in two—and then he disappeared. The lake became smooth again.

Don said that he sleepwalked, and thought perhaps what he'd seen wasn't real. They had the sheriff's department come out and drag the lake, but the body was never found. Perhaps he was still down there, and would be forever.

Sometimes, as Jason and the horse chased me across the lake, I would think about a game I used to play as a child, in the small town in Oklahoma where I grew up.

When I was in the municipal swimming pool, I would hold my breath, pinch my nose, duck under the water, and shove off from the pale blue side of the pool. Like a frog breast-stroking, eyes wide and reddening from the chlorine, I would try to make it all the way to the other side without having to come up for air.

That was the trick, to get all the way to the other side. Halfway across, as the water deepened, there'd be a pounding in the back of my head, and a sinister whine in my ears, my heart and throat clenching.

I thought about that game, as I swam with Jason and Killer close behind me. I seemed to remember my dogs being with me then, swimming in front of me, as if trying to show me the way, half pulling me across. But it was not that way at all, because this was many years before their time. I knew nothing then about dogs, or boxing, or living, or of trying to hold on to a thing you loved, and letting go of other things to do it.