The Fighter (12 page)

But Paul
couldn't see himself back at the winery in his Organizational Adviser role,
writing memos to his father (Subject: Cost Breakdown of Kill vs. No-Kill Rat
Traps for Supply Room) and telling the bambino joke.

"You ought
to hire an assistant."

"Who, some
stranger?"

"Who the
hell cares? There's a million guys like me, and Mom doesn't give two shits what
I do—"

"I
do," Barb cut in. "I do give two ... shits. And much more. I just
wasn't aware it was your aspiration to be a fruit picker."

"Guess I
should have sent you to the fuckin' fruit-picking academy!" Jack roared,
zero to stone-cold sonofabitch in ten point six seconds—a new record.

"Didn't
know there was one, but that would've been swell," Paul
said as he made
for the back door.

The backyard
described a shallow decline to the shores of Lake Ontario. A snowy owl perched
on a tree bough, its flat phosphorescent eyes big as bicycle reflectors. The
water was a frozen gunmetal sheet; the lights of Hamilton and Toronto shone
upon it.

"Paul, slow
up."

His mother
traced a path down to the shoreline. She wore a mink coat Paul had thought
flattered her, but now all he could think about was how many minks had been
anally electrocuted to make the ridiculous thing.

"Can we
walk a bit?" she asked.

"We
can."

Wind whipped
over the ice pan, tossing up fans of crystallized snow. Barbara used to walk
the lakeshore for hours, calling out for her truant show dog—"Here, Sweet
Roses! Here, Sweet, Sweet Roses!"— in hopes of coaxing it away from the
renegade schnauzer.

"I'm not
too sure what's been happening lately." Barb's face bore a wounded
expression. "You were in a fight, you've picked grapes. So I guess I know
what you've been up to—but I can't see why."

"You
wouldn't get it."

"Care to
try me?"

Paul shrugged.
"Okay, say you got in a fight—"

"Man or a
woman?"

"Say this she-bear
of a woman kicked the snot out of you. What do you do?"

"First I'd
call the police—"

"See, Mom,
that's where we must part ways."

"Will you
let me finish? You never let
me finish.
I think I might..." She sighed. "No, I'd call the police. God, Paul, what
do you expect me to say? I'd embark on a province-wide killing spree?"

"You don't
go to the police."

Barb's wounded
expression persisted. "What you said about me not giving a shit—"

"Two
shits."

"Two, even
... that wasn't fair."

"I'm
sorry," he said, meaning it. "But it's nothing to do with you."

She shook her
head and shivered. "Cold as a witch's tit."

Though many
things about his mother had changed, her diction had not. She still said
I could've dropped cork-legged!
when something surprised her; when Paul was young she'd tell him
Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire
when it was time for bed. As a kid he'd purposefully
misbehave to
hear her holler
For two pins I
swear I'd thump you!,
safe in the
knowledge she'd never actually thump him.

"So what's
this big problem of yours?" she asked after they'd walked for a while.

"It's
bigger than one thing, more complex. I can only tell you some of the
symptoms."

"Symptoms,
okay."

"Okay. Last
summer I was driving home dead drunk." Barb was shaking her head.
"Mother, dear—did you, or did you
not,
ask? So I'm
driving. If I hit a check-stop I knew I'd blow over the limit and I already had
that DUI—"

"The one
your father cleared up."

"Can I tell
the story? I came across an accident scene. That hairpin curve—"

"At the bridge
over the regatta course?"

Paul nodded.
"Two cars. One crashed through the guardrail into the pond; its headlights
were submerged and they looked like lights at the bottom of a swimming pool.
The other one slammed into the bridge. A compact Suzuki—"

"Oh,
god." Barbara drove a Lincoln Navigator, comforted by its stellar
front-impact safety rating.

"—and all
accordioned up. The driver had rocketed through the windshield and was laid
out over the hood. His head—her head, his head; who knows?—
the
head was flattened
against the bridge abutment."

His mother
looked ill. "You know, I sat on a traffic safety committee years ago and
that same curve came up. I voted to widen it, but the road crews were
threatening a strike and ... well, go on."

"There were
cops, ambulances, fire trucks, those megawatt accident- scene spots. Everything
was focused on the accident. I could have popped my trunk and rolled a headless
corpse into the weeds and nobody would've said boo."

"But you
didn't cause the accident. And you weren't thankful for it happening—were
you?"

"Not
thankful." He stomped a crescent of ice off the shoreline. "But I
thought the only reason it happened was to distract the police. So I wouldn't
get arrested."

"You've
lost me."

"I'm saying
that when I saw that person flung through the windshield the first thing that
leapt into my head was that my, I guess you could say
existence,
was so vital
that some god or universal force had rigged the whole accident for my benefit—a
human being had been killed, just to get me off the hook. And I drove away
smiling." He gave her a look: hopeless, cored out. "Smiling, Mom.
Really."

"They're
only thoughts, Paul. You didn't make those cars collide; you didn't hurt
anyone."

"And that's
basically it, Mom. I haven't done anything, ever. Good or bad."

"Nonsense.
You've graduated university—"

"Whoopee.
Only took six years."

"What about
all those trophies in your office?"

"Dad bought
them at a thrift store! Didn't you know that?"

Barb looked
confused. "Really? I could have sworn ..."

"Nothing!"
The enormity of the understanding rocked Paul like a blow. "Even vicious
murderers go to their graves knowing they've changed the world somehow.
Murdering takes initiative; it takes
drive.
You
got to get up off your duff to murder someone."

"Paul!"

He calmed down.
"It's just, sometimes I feel like ... a nonessential human being. I could
be replaced with a robot that looked and dressed like me, that'd been
programmed to run through the basic routines of my life, and nobody would ever
know the difference." "And you think picking a few grapes will make
those thoughts go
away?"

He gave a sigh.
"Other suggestions?"

"Therapy,
for one—"

"Jesus
please us."

"—or
medication. My Pilates partner told me that Stelazine brought her son back from
the brink. He's grinning like a cherub all day long, never been happier.
Paul—?"

He peeled away
from her and walked out onto the ice. He caught his reflection in a boil of
dark water: eyes as wide and scared as a horse in a barn fire.

"Do they
make a drug called
Chrysalis,
Mom? You swallow one and hang from a tree branch until a cocoon forms, and two
weeks later you crawl out, a whole new person. Pharmaceutical
reincarnation—some egghead should get cracking on
that
!
"

"Paul, come
on in. You got me fluttering."

The ice pan boomed
as a long fault line split its surface. Ice shattered under Paul's feet; his
leg plunged in up to the crotch. His heart hammered so hard it threatened to
tear his chest apart.

"Do they
make pills for people who don't want to be themselves anymore, Mom?"

The water was
probably fifteen feet deep beneath him, currents running swift; they wouldn't
dredge his carcass up until next spring, which by then might have floated
halfway to Cornwall, but he didn't give a damn and he laughed like a bastard.

I work hard
so
you won't have
to.
Parents tell their children this, Paul thought.
I will sweat and toil and bleed so you never will.

All for love,
but still, they miss the point entirely.

Reuben Tully
worked in the bakery department at Topps Friendly Market. He rose at two a.m.
weekdays, showering and dressing in the dark so as not to wake his son and
brother. He caught the 2:30 Portage Express and nodded to the bus driver, who
always touched the brim of his cap in reply. A woman who collected border tolls
hopped on two stops later; she always sat four seats from Reuben with a coffee
thermos and a lurid tabloid magazine. At the next stop the doors admitted a man
in a threadbare suit who worked as night auditor for a strip of border motels;
he always sat ramrod-straight—
stiff as a
bishop's pecker,
the gym bums would say—with a
briefcase on his lap.

Reuben had
traveled with these people for twenty years. They'd all put on weight together
and lost hair together, their eyesight had waned and their faces had furrowed
together. They'd ridden through marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. Reuben
rarely spoke to them, yet felt an odd kinship. On those rare occasions when
he'd spot one on the street he'd raise a hand and they would respond with a nod
or smile.

At the
supermarket he'd buy coffee from an Italian with his steam cart; he'd mill with
the butchers and florists and forklift drivers in the pre-dawn darkness. When
the shift whistle blew he'd wheel a barrel of Red Star yeast down a row of
industrial mixers. Over the years a yeasty, breadlike smell had sunk into his
flesh. No amount of granulated pink industrial soap or frenzied scrubbing could
erase that smell, and in his most maudlin moods Reuben could hear mourners at
his funeral whispering that his corpse held the odor of fresh-baked bread.

Every few years
a new man was hired fresh out of high school. Reuben wondered what he'd do if
Robert chose to quit boxing and work here—a prospect that filled him with an
intractable, deep-seated fear. His son was better than this town, with its
crumbling tenements and bulletproof shop windows, its rusted cars and malt
liquor bottles lining front stoops.

Robert Tully was
destined for mythical things. Reuben Tully's only son would not die in upstate
New York with the stink of bread on his hands.