The Fighter (37 page)

Rob
did not understand what he was asking.

Was
it:

Please, stop
.

Or:

Please, more
.

Paul's
eyes rolled back in his head as he slipped through Rob's arms, falling
senselessly the way a toppled mannequin falls. Rob made an instinctive grab for
him, but Paid was too bloody and Rob too exhausted and so he simply fell.

The
bell did not ring; there was no need. Men climbed over the bales and bent over
the stricken fighter with something approaching reverence. When they rolled
Paul over, the shocking bloody imprint of his face remained on the boards. He
was unconscious but his eyes were wide open. Someone might have placed two
fingers upon his lids and drawn them shut but nobody did.

Lou
lifted Paul's head and hooked his hands under his armpits.

"Careful,"
he instructed Fritzie, who'd taken hold of Paul's heels. "Get him out to
my car."

The
night was still. A low white fog rolled across the fields, thickening toward
the tree line. Rob moved over sedge grass stamped flat by cattle hooves. His
fury had evaporated as rapidly as it had risen, and in its place remained
sickness and self-loathing. He was horrified by his actions—the savagery of
them. He'd seen the bloody imprint of Paul's face stamped on the raw pine
boards. The sight had provided no solace or peace, only emptiness and
desolation more incurable than he'd ever known.

A
fine cool night and Rob walked between heads of cattle, their heaving flanks,
the pungent animal smell of them. He had glimpsed in himself a malice of
purpose he'd never known and it terrified him.
I'll kill him. It's what he wants.

The
fence post was the circumference of a dinner plate. Rotting at the top, slim
wooden stalactites he could snap off with a finger, but going solid toward the
middle. Moonlight winked off the rusted points of barbed wire twined around it.

Rob
asked himself: Can I break them all?

The
first punch was tentative: it wasn't the pain that frightened him, but the
finality of his actions. The next punch was harder; the post vibrated like a
tuning fork. Wire tore skin. He threw his fists with as much venom as he could
summon, dug his feet into the cold earth. The crisp
tok tok tok
of fist on wood gave way to mushier, meatier sounds until at some point his
right hand—the dynamite right, his father called it—crumpled, delicate jigsaw
bones shattering, and though the pain left him gagging he did not stop. His
hands became a blur of ever-expanding and ever-darkening red, blood in the air,
blood and skin stuck to the post and the bones of his left hand splintering
with a tensile shriek and bone visible now, thin glistening shards jutting
through sheared flesh, but he kept hurling them.

He
dropped to his knees as the sound of his blows echoed across the field. His
head rested against the post. The cool wood felt so good on his skin. His hands
looked like bags of suet tied to the ends of his wrists. A few fingers hung on
strips of skin at lewd angles. Rob curled them under his chin and cried. Softly
at first, then with building intensity.

Fritzie
found him hunched there. "We loaded that guy into the car. He's beat up
pretty bad, but he'll be okay."

Rob's
chest hitched; his body shook. Fritzie knelt beside him.

"What's
the matter, Robbie?"

Rob
uttered a wail of such resonant grief that it shocked Fritzie. Rob kept his
broken hands curled under his chin: Fritzie could not see what he had done and
so could find no sense in his despair.

"The
hell's the matter with you?" Fritzie was truly perplexed. "You won,
Robbie. For Christ's sake, you won."

Lou
swung onto Highway 406 and exited off Geneva Street. He wound the car down
Queenston, through staggered sets of stoplights and into the Emerg drop-off at
St. Catharines General.

"Hey,"
he said. "Hey, man."

Paul
cracked his good eye, saw the well-lit bay and the glowing red cross above the
sliding glass doors. "No."

"Be
sensible. You need stitches—your face is....it's fucked up."

"No...
hospital."

"Fine,
if you want to be an idiot. But we are doing something about those cuts."

Lou
parked in a shadowed alcove near some medical waste bins. He opened his medic's
kit and pulled out a roll of Steri-Strip, a 24 mm surgical needle, two packs of
Ethicon braided sutures, and a vial of high-viscosity Dermabond.

"Never
met a fighter more obstinate." He cut lengths of Steri-Strip and stuck
them to the dashboard. "I got no anesthetic, either—they only give that
stuff to, y'know,
licensed practitioners,
the type you'd find twenty feet
back that way."

Lou
gripped Paul's chin and angled his face into the dome light. Pinching split
lips of meat together, he moved the needle through Paul's cheek. Fresh blood
rolled down Paul's chest and onto the upholstery.

When
the gashes were closed he ran beads of Dermabond over them; the torn flesh met
in thin red crescents, like the stitching on a pocket. They would scar up, but
Paul would never look quite right again. His face was pulled out of shape, skin
tight in some places and slack in others.

Lou
said, "Should I take you home?"

"Where's
that?"

Lou
sighed, said, "So where am I taking you?"

"I
don't care."

Lou
put the Steri-Strip and Dermabond away. The air between them was thick and warm
like in a tent.

"I
was riding my bike home one time," said Lou. "This was as a kid. I
saw this accident: a pickup truck hauling one of those mobile stables or
whatever—those things you truck livestock around in. Both were smashed up. It
was late, but a few cars had pulled over. There was a horse; must've been
riding in the stable when it crashed. One of its legs was broken and almost
torn off. It moved down the embankment between the trees and it stood there.
People went to their cars and found whatever—chips and crackers, sugar packets,
apples—and crept after the horse, making the stupid sort of noises people
make." Lou made a clicking sound with his tongue:
cluk cluk cluk.
"But when they got close, the horse would bolt. This kept on for some
time: the pack creeping after the horse and the horse bolting, busted leg swinging.
I was young, but even then I knew what it wanted. Do you know what that
was?"

"Don't
tell me," Paul croaked. "That little horse grew up to become...Black
Beauty."

"That
horse didn't want to live anymore. Not all creatures want to die in the light,
surrounded by friends and loved ones. Some just want to crawl into a dark quiet
space away from everyone and die alone."

"Do
you think you're being subtle?"

Lou
turned the key and gunned the engine. "I don't want to see you around my
gym again, Paul. You're not welcome anymore."

Jack
Harris's study was a large oak-paneled chamber off the sunroom. It was
furnished according to a clichéd
Better Homes
and Gardens
ideal:
a huge mahogany desk, bookshelves lined with imposing hardcovers, a pipe rack
without a single pipe—bizarre, as his father didn't smoke. As a kid, Paul once
spent the better part of an afternoon tilting the spines of each and every
book, convinced one would spring a door leading to a hidden chamber; his
childish suspicion had been that his dad was a superhero. Now Paul moved as
quietly as possible, not wanting to wake his parents; he was shirtless and
bloody, having nearly impaled himself while scaling the estate's spiked
wrought-iron fence.

The
safe was hidden behind a Robert Bateman painting. The combination was Paul's
birthday: 07-22-79. He'd looted it many times, figuring his father would never
know—though of course he had, just as he had known about his drunken forays in
the winery and a dozen other indiscretions.

The
light snapped on. His father stood in the doorway in a brown housecoat.

"What
are you doing?"

"What's
it look like?"

"Like
you're stealing." "Better call the cops."

"Don't
think I won't."

Paul
turned to face his father. Jack Harris recoiled at the sight. That face—like a
rotted mummy risen from its sarcophagus.

Jack
walked past his son and sat in the overstuffed chair behind the desk. Whoever
had stitched his child possessed no more skill than a deli butcher. When he
could not look anymore he laid his arms on the desk and rested his head upon
them.

"We
can't do this anymore."

Paul's
knees buckled; his body slid down the wall until his butt hit the carpet. The
study was warm and smelled of his father. He could fall asleep right here.

"This
whole situation is destroying us, Paul. Your mom and me. And I know it's not
your intent—maybe you think what you're doing is justified or that you have no
other option. But we can't go down this road anymore."

"You
shouldn't feel that way, Dad. Not your fault."

When
Jack looked up, his eyes were swollen but he wasn't crying. "Oh, no—whose
fault is it, then? It's never been my practice to pass the buck, but at least
it's easier than admitting you fucked up your son's life."

Paul
dearly wished he could somehow console his father but the answer was too big
and required too much of him so he said nothing.

"At
first I was scared for you," Jack said. "Now I'm scared of you. Never
thought I'd be scared of my own kid."

"The
point was for me to stop being scared."

Jack
nodded, as though this answer at least made sense to him. "The world is
hall of hard men—a lot harder than you'll ever be. And you're bound to run
across a truly hard man—then what?" When Paul did not reply, Jack said,
"It's like anything else in life: a ladder, but those rungs, they keep
going up. You'll never find any peace until you come to grips with your place
on it, or else kill yourself trying to climb to the top."

"I
need money," Paul said flatly.

Jack
rose from his chair and spun the safe's dial. He grabbed two stacks of bills
and tossed them on the desk.

"Get
on up," he told Paul. "Take a seat."

Paul
dragged himself up and sat in the chair opposite his father. Jack poured
scotches from a decanter and set one in front of his son. Scotch dribbled down
Paul's split lips onto his chest.

The
money lay on the desk between them. Two crisp stacks. Jack sipped his drink,
tapped the crystal rim against his teeth.

"Ten
thousand enough?"

"It'll
do."

A
few years ago a worker's arm had been torn off by a tilling machine. By the
time Paul and his father arrived on the scene the young worker was lying on
earth gone dark with blood. Jack had made a tourniquet of his belt and held the
man until medics arrived. He'd saved the man's life—and yet Paul never forgot
that look on his face. Under the obvious care and worry, he'd glimpsed a mind
calculating how this accident might affect his enterprise. A look of
bottom-line pragmatism.