The Fighter (28 page)

Tommy
considered the guy: young, not a whole lot older than Robbie. But a lot of his
youth had been sucked out. He looked like the lone survivor of a nuclear
Armageddon: missing teeth and acne scars and worst of all the haunted look
Tommy had seen in far too many fighters.

A
true fighter's handshake was always soft. Perhaps this was because their hands
were tender after months of punching bags and mitts and opponents. Or perhaps,
after doing so much damage in the ring, they possessed not the slightest desire
to do any damage outside of it— even so much as may be delivered through a
stern handshake.

Paul
and Tommy shook hands very, very softly.

"I'm
sorry for what comes next," Paul said.

"What
do you got to be sorry for?" Tommy chucked Paul on the shoulder. His smile
was somehow ashamed. "I'll take it easy on you."

"Please
don't."

The
first punch struck Paul in the shoulder. There was no
oomph
to it: were it possible to throw a well-intentioned punch, Tommy had done so.
But it was enough to unbalance him and he stumbled back, then rocked forward
into Tommy's chest. Tommy leaned on Paul, a forearm on the back of Paul's neck
forcing his head down and making it tough to draw breath. Paul was staring at
his own belly button while the huge fucker hammered at his ribs—not too hard,
just enough so he'd feel it. He felt his ribs shrink around his lungs, the
staccato thump of his heart, the sensation of being closer to his body than
he'd ever known.

Tommy's
forearm slipped off Paul's neck. Paul reared up and lanced a right hand at his
head; Tommy angled away and the blow hit the side of his throat, his own right
hand rising between Paul's arms to catch him under the chin. Pain blossomed
inside Paul's skull, not a flower but
gardens
of the stuff, a pain like
searing-hot rivets sprinkled on his scalp.

Tommy
was stunned when the guy didn't go down. That Kilbride kid would have broken to
pieces but this guy just smiled, blood climbing the cracks between his teeth.
He's infected, Tommy thought, same way poor Garth Briscoe is infected.

Paul
swung and missed, then Tommy hit him with an anvil fist. Tears flooded Paul's
eyes as a sharp note of pain danced across his face and hit the center of his
brain. He was hit again, harder than he'd ever been hit before: nose
compacting, capillaries bursting. The world went red and Paul fell through that
redness as though in a dream. The floor rushed up to meet him. He watched a
dark spot of his own blood shape itself into a fan, then a butterfly,
glistening and soaking into the ripples and knots of the floorboards.

The
bell rang.

Paul
staggered to his corner like a man on a three-day drinking binge. He was
grinning.

Lou
helped him onto the stool. Paul's face was like something Goya might've signed
his name to: Neanderthal-like swelling above his brows and one tooth jarred
from his gums, suspended on a strip of skin.

"Hold
on." Lou reached into Paul's mouth and, with a vicious twist, yanked the
tooth out. "Swallow more than a pint and you'll be sick," he said as
blood gushed into Paul's mouth. "What the hell—not like you're liable to
grow another set, right?"

He
used ferric sulfate to cauterize the bloody hole in Paul's mouth. Paul
swallowed convulsively, the acid scorching his esophagus.

"I'm
trying to go easy. But he's a glutton."

Reuben
soaked Tommy's head with a wet sponge. "What did you expect? Last time you
fought a feeb, now you're up against a punch Pug"

"Masochist,"
Tommy corrected.

"Keep
leaning on him. You don't owe any a these jerks a show."

"What
if he won't go down?"

"Then
you have to make him go down."

"I
might really hurt him."

"Christ,
Tom—how else do you picture this ending?"

It
ended thirty-three seconds into the second round. And it ended like this:

Two
men warred in a starkly lit ring, the whistle of their fists a death song. Paul
experienced a wholly perverse joy in the feel of another man's hands upon his
body—even in violence. Tommy found the soft spot under Paul's heart with a
tricky uppercut; Paul gasped as if a crowbar had been spiked through his chest.

Tommy
saw the opening: the kid let his guard fall each time he threw a right hand.
Make it quick, Tommy thought. Make his world go black.

Tommy
planted his feet and sat down on a right uppercut that rose from his waist like
a Stinger missile shot from a hayfield silo.

The
punch missed by an eighth of an inch.

Consider
that distance for a moment.

Your
own index finger, say. At the base of your nail, where the nail plate meets the
nail bed—where nail meets flesh—that whitish half- moon. It's called the
lunula, after the Latin
luna
meaning
moon.
The lunula should be no more than an eighth of an inch thick at its broadest
point; a little thicker if your nail has been manicured, the cuticle pushed
down.

Tommy's
punch missed by a lunula. By a ladybug's wing. An eighth of an inch. But more
crucially it missed by a lifetime, or several. It missed by Tommy's forty-three
years and Reuben's forty-five, by Paul's twenty-six and Rob's sixteen. It
missed by all the possibilities that existed in the split-second before it
missed and by all that might conceivably have been afterward.

When
Tommy's fist sailed past his chin, Paul stepped away and struck back
instinctively. Tommy's jaw was clenched: the maxillary artery running from tip
of skull to base of throat was crimped, blood collecting at his temples.

It
was a lucky punch, the sort you'll see if you watch enough fights. Paul was in
the right spot, Tommy the wrong one. The angles worked in Paul's favor and
against Tommy. Everyone in that place knew who was the better fighter; not a
single bet had been placed on Paul to win.

A
lucky punch, is all. It happens.

Paul
felt as though a very small, very ripe grape had burst under his knuckles.

Put
it another way:

They
say every substance that appears solid is, at its most basic level, not solid
at all. Everything is composed of atoms, a nucleus orbited by protons and
electrons. Massive distances separate protons and electrons from their nucleus:
imagine the moon circling the Earth, or the Earth orbiting the sun, and you get
the idea. They say if you remove all those empty spaces and squeeze everything
together, the Empire State Building would fit into a teaspoon—a spoonful of
pure matter weighing roughly 19,800 tons.

Paul's
punch hit Tommy like the Empire State Building dropped from a teaspoon.

The
instant the punch landed, as Tommy's eyes rolled involuntarily back in his
head, Paul wanted to take it all back, as if the punch were an angry word he
could revoke.
Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean that.
They were fighting, yes, trying
to knock each other out or force surrender, but the sound of Tommy's skull
hitting the boards—a horrid fracturing noise like a squashed snail—broke
whatever spell he'd been under and now Paul could only watch as Tommy tried to
stand up but failed miserably, blood coming out his nose as he stared around
with a queer disoriented smile. And when Tommy fell, reaching for Paul because
he was the only thing to reach for, Paul was there to catch him. He cradled
Tommy's thick stalk of neck, his dense lifeless weight like a sweating sack of
cement. Tommy's head lolled, eyes wide open, tongue jutting past the flat black
gumshield.

Seconds
later Reuben shoved Paul out of the way and knelt beside his brother. He mopped
blood with a towel but there was so goddamn
much
of it and it wouldn't stop coming. The sweat on Tommy's arms was ice-cold and
his head looked all wrong; Reuben was sick to his stomach wondering if
everything inside was busted and if it was only the unbroken skin holding the
works together.

"Call
an ambulance!"

"That's
not how it works," Manning told Reuben. "You take care of your
own."

"Take
care of him how?"