Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

I finish wrapping my hands and stand, bobbing on the tips of my toes. Tug the sweatshirt hood up, cinch the drawstring. Half-circle to the left, feint low and fire a right cross, arm cocked at a ninety-degree L to generate maximum force. Torque the hips, still bobbing slightly, three stiff jabs, turning the elbow out at the end. A lot of people don’t like a jabby fighter, a pitty-patter, but a smart boxer knows everything flows off the jab: keeps your opponent at a distance and muffles his offense, plus you’re always in a position to counterpunch. And hey, if the guy’s glass-jawed or thin-skulled, a jab might just knock him onto queer street.

My father once took me on his evening rounds. August, so hot even the adders and geckos sought shade. We drove across the dry wash in his patrol Bronco, past clumps of sun-browned chickweed and pokeberry bushes so withered their fruit rattled like hollow plastic beads. He stopped to show me the vents cut through the border fence, chain-link pried back in silvery flaps.

“Tin snips stashed in a plastic bag tied to an ankle. Swim across the Rio Grande, creep up the bank and cut through.” A defeated shrug. “Easy as pie.”

The sky was darkening by the time we reached the dock. Walking down the berm to the shoreline, we passed a patch of agaves so sickly even the moonshiners couldn’t be bothered. Our boots stirred up clouds of rust-hued dust. Stars hovered at the eastern horizon, casting slivers of metallic light on the water.

My father cycled the motor, pulling into the bay. Suspended between day and night, the sky was a tight-sheened purple, shiny as eggplant skin. The oily stink of exhaust mingled with the scent of creosote and Cherokee rose. To one side, the fawn-colored foothills of west Texas rolled in knuckled swells beneath a bank of violet-edged clouds. To the other, the Sierra Madres were a finned ridge, wedges of terra cotta light burning though the gaps. A brush fire burned distantly to the north, wavering funnels of flame holding the darkness at bay. Stars stood on their reflections at the Rio Grande’s delta, a seam of perfectly smooth water where river met ocean.

My father fired a flare into the sky. As the comet of red light arced, he squinted at the water’s surface lit by the spreading contrail.

“They don’t understand how dangerous it is,” he said. “The pulls and undertows. Fighting a stiff current all the way.” He pulled a Black Cat cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. “Shouldn’t feel any responsibility, truly. Not like I make them take the plunge. Everyone thinks it’s sunnier on the other side of the street.”

I snap off a few more jabs as my heart falls into pre-fight rhythm. Sweat’s coming now, clear odorless beads collecting on my brow and clinging to the short hairs of my wrists. Twist the sink’s spigot and splash cold, sulfurous water on my face. A milky crack bisects the mirror, running up the left side of my neck to the jaw before turning sharply, cleaving my lips and continuing north through cheek and temple. Stare at my face split into unequal portions: forehead marbled with knots of sub-dermal scar tissue and nose broken in the center, the angle of cartilage obtuse. Weak fingers of light crawl around the base of my skull, shadowing the deep pits of my sockets.

Thirty-seven years old. Not so old. Too old for this.

On my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to Top Rank, a boxing gym owned by ex-welterweight contender Exum Speight. I’d been tussling at school and I guess he figured the sport might channel that aggression. We walked through a black door set in a flat tin-roofed building, inhaling air cooler but somehow denser than the air from the street. The gym was as spacious as a dance hall and dim, vapor lamps set in the ceiling. The ring erected in the center with a row of folding chairs in front. A punching bag platform stood between two dusty tinted windows on the left. An old movie poster hung on the water-stained wall: The Joe Louis Story. America’s Greatness was in his FISTS, the tagline read, The Screen’s Big Story in his HEART! A squat black man worked the speed bag in a ponderous rhythm while a Philco radio played “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” by A Taste of Honey.

A short thin man in his early forties exited the office. He wore a checkered blazer with leatherette elbow patches and a brown fedora with faded salt stains peaking the hatband. “How you doing, fellas?”

“You Speight?”

“Exum’s up in Chicago with a fighter,” the man told my father. “Jack Cantrales. I mind the shop while he’s gone.”

Jack made me skip rope for a few minutes, then quoted a monthly training fee. My father shook his hand again and said, “Be back in a few hours, Eddie.”

For the next two years I spent every free minute at Top Rank. As Exum Speight busied himself with the heavyweights, my training fell to Cantrales. Jack was an amiable bullshitter, always joking and free with advice, but later I came to realize he was one of the milling coves known to haunt boxing clubs, the “gym bums.” Gym bums were pugilistic has-beens or never-wases—Cantrales’s pro record stood at 3-18-2, his sole attribute an ability to consume mass quantities of red leather—who hovered, wraithlike, around promising fighters. Gym bums were also known to squeeze a penny ’til it screamed, and Contrales was typical of the breed: he once slid his foot over a coin a kid had dropped, shrugged, and told the kid it must’ve rolled into the sewer.

It was a dime .

Near the end of high school Cantrales booked my first fight at Rosalita’s, a honkeytonk border bar. My parents would’ve never allowed it had they known, so I squeezed through my bedroom window after lights out and met Cantrales at the end of the block. He drove a Chevelle 454 SS—car had get-up like a scalded cat.

“You loose?” he asked as we fled down the I-38 to Norias. June bugs hammered the windshield, exoskeletons shattering with a high tensile sound, bodies bursting in pale yellow riots.

“Yeah,” I said, though I couldn’t stop shaking. “Loose.”

“That’s good.” Cantrales had recently switched his fedora in favor of a captain’s hat of a style worn by Captain Merrill Stubing on Love Boat . Dashboard light reflected off the black plastic visor, according his features a malign aspect. “You’ll eat this frito bandito up.”

Rosalita’s was a clapboard tonk cut out of a canebrake. Acres of cane swayed in the wind’s grip, dry stalks clashing with a hollow sound, bamboo wind chimes.

Inside was dark and fusty. Hank Snow growled about some woman’s cheatin’ heart from a heat-warped Wurlitzer. Off in the corner: a canted plankboard ring, red and blue ropes sagging from the ring posts. I bent between the ropes and shuffled to the four corners, shadowboxing. A rogue’s gallery of bloodsport enthusiasts swiveled on their bar stools. Someone called, “Looking sharp, kiddo!”

My opponent was a whippet-thin Mexican in his mid-thirties. White sneakers, no socks, a clean white towel around his neck. His hair plastered to his skull in black ropes. He looked exhausted. Mexican fighters often hopped the border on the night they were to fight, winding up at Rosalita’s soaked from the swim and gashed from razor wire, sometimes pursued by feral dogs roaming the lowlands.

I took a hellish beating. The fight was a four-round smoker, each round three minutes long. Those twelve minutes stretched into an eternity, especially the final three, eyes swelled to pinhole slits and gut aching from the Mexie’s relentless assault. The guy knew things about momentum and leverage I’d never learned in sparring sessions, how to angle a hook so it grazed my abdomen and robbed my breath, leaving slashes of glove-burned flesh. It was as though he possessed secret information about the exact placement of my organs, finding the kidneys and liver, drilling hard crosses into my short rib. I pissed red for days. Between rounds the bartender—who doubled as cutman— tended to my rapidly expanding face. He wore a visor, the kind worn by blackjack dealers, Vaseline smeared on the green plastic brim. He’d reach up and scoop a blob to grease my cheeks.