Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“Roberto Curry?”

“Welcome to Bangkok.”

He wipes at sweat beading his forehead. “Country this hot all over?”

“Hotter,” I say. “Airport’s air conditioned.”

Don Muang airport sits atop an arrow-headed promontory, the darkened city stretching out below. To the west: the meandering strip of Ko Sanh Road contoured in stark neon. To the southwest: Patpong a bright starfish, lit tendrils spreading from its central hub. Humidity’s intense: like breathing through boiled wool.

The taxi traces a route down Thanburi Road, skirting the Chao Phraya river. Oil-slicked waters dotted with coastal trawlers and derelict coalships, floating communes of tin-roofed sampans. Turn onto Ko Sanh Road. Almost every building converted into guest houses, every corner has long distance telephone booths with cooling AC, cafés screen Rush Hour II and Brokedown Palace on video. Sidewalks strung with stalls trafficking in pewter flasks and teak elephants, knock-off Reeboks, bootleg DVDs. A train of Thai women dressed in garishly colored sarongs walk down the side of the road toting various bundles on their heads: firewood, guavas in large porcelain bowls, sacks of kola nuts, stalks of plantains, volcano fish, deep-fried crickets in beaten tin pans. Their husbands walk in front of them carrying not a damn thing.

The kid pockets his sunglasses stepping from the cab. His eyelids are networked with scar tissue. So he’s a bleeder.

Blood ruins some fighters. Since the deaths of Johnny Owen and the Korean Duk Koo-Kim, both of whom were blood-blinded from cut eyelids, paranoid refs and ring docs are kiboshing fights at the first sight of red. Some fighters got tough bodies but weak skin—breathe on them hard, they cut. There’s nothing a guy can do about it, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can help being brittle. But if that claret keeps flowing—a bad cut above the eye, say, deep and wide and vein-severed, your fighter’s heart pounding merry old hell—forget it, the fight’s over even if your boy’s not really hurt. But Muay Thai matches are rarely stopped on blood, and trainers are permitted certain measures—double-strength adrenaline chloride, ferric acid—to handle the most vicious cuts. Of course, all the ferric acid in the world isn’t going to help with the detached retinas and crushed metacarpals, but that’s come what may.

We sit in a curry stall with a dining area open to the street. Green curry for me, red for the kid, plus pints of fresh guava juice. The kid axes the juice in favor of beer.

“So,” I say, “what’s your record?”

“Twenty-two and three. Two losses on stoppages.”

“Blood?”

“Blood.”

“Lose the other on a KO?”

“TKO my third fight. Soft count to some unranked tomato can.”

“Get cocky?”

“Little, maybe.”

“I can see that happening.”

The kid digs a chicken claw out of his mouth, grimaces, spits on the sidewalk.

“Ever watch Muay Thai?”

“Sure,” he says. “Bunch of skinny guys winging at each other.”

Consider telling him about the fight I watched last week, the one where the loser left with hemorrhage-thinned blood pissing from his ears. Consider telling him how Muay Thai fighters strengthen their shins by pounding sand-filled bottles against them, the sound a wooden huk-huk-huk, until their skin’s tough as boot leather. Instead I say, “How much weight you carrying?”

“Started middleweight, climbed to light heavy.”

“Any vision problems, those scars?”

“Peepers are twenty-twenty.”

“What kind of condition you in? Don’t bother bluffing, I’ll find out.”

The kid rolls up a shirt sleeve and flexes his biceps muscle, pumping the brachial vein. “And body fat less than ten percent. I’m gripped, stripped, ready to rip.”

“You’re sweating like a bastard.”

“It’s the food.”

“It’s the heat. You’ll get used to it. Training camp’s outside Chang Rai, two hours south. You’ll be doing road work on jungle paths. Sweat off ten pounds the first week—your cardio’ll skyrocket.”

The kid finishes his beer, signals for another. “Want one, coach?”

“I don’t drink.”

The kid nods as if he’d anticipated this weakness in me. A local woman stops beside our table. Three-quarters legs, decent tits but hatchet faced, wearing a miniskirt exposing the lower crescents of her can. Red silk skirt and scarf, gold hoop earrings, white frosted lipstick.

“Herro, boys.” To the kid: “Wha jo’ name?”

“I’m Tony, hon.”

She rests a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Oh, ju a stron’ boy, hah?” She sits on his lap. “Ju a strong, han’some big boy, hah?”

“Watch yourself with that one.”

The woman pouts at me. “Ju be quiet.” She wiggles her ass into the kid’s crotch. “Ju lie me, Tony?”

“Sure,” the kid says. “Me love you long time.” His hands knead her thighs. “Thass ni’,” the woman says.

I grab the fluttering brocade of the scarf and yank it off. “Adam’s apple is a dead giveaway. Now your top-quality ladymen get it surgically shaved down so’s you can barely tell. But this one here—well, she’s no top quality.”

The aggrieved he-she snatches the scarf back. “Ju a horr’ble ma’,” she says to me. The kid shoves him-her away, beating his palms on his shorts as if they’re coated in flaming oil. Got a look on his face like he ate a handful of rat turds he mistook for Raisinettes.

“Ah, Christ, no!”

“I’d be inclined to blame it on the beer goggles, kid, but you’ve only had two. Got to watch out for the scarfed ones.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before I let it bounce on my dick?”

“You didn’t seem keen on listening.”

“You’re a real peach, coach.”

AN OPEN-TOP ISUZU drops us off at the training camp shortly after 5 a.m. It is a fine, clean morning, the kind of morning that, as they say, makes you wish you got up early more often. A scarred dirt path leads through the trees alongside a fast-running stream. The path leads into a large dusty clearing fringed by tall palms and dotted with bamboo-and-tin Nissen huts. At the far end is a long-house. The sounds of men in training are audible through its open doors.

“Stow your gear,” pointing to one of the huts, “and throw on your road kit.”

The kid comes out wearing gray jogging shorts, cross-trainers, a hooded sweatshirt. I retrieve a rusted bicycle leaning against the long-house and say, “Let’s go.”

The kid starts out in a stiff-legged trot but, warming up, his strides lengthen, smooth out. The path is too narrow for us to navigate side by side so I fall in behind him on the bike. Soon a skunk-tail of perspiration darkens the back of his sweatshirt as we follow the path east into the rising sun.

“Give me that shirt.” The kid doffs the sweatshirt and drops it in the bike basket. At the 3K mark his chest is heaving, arms hanging from his shoulders. When the path finally rounds back to the camp he sprawls out in the dirt, sucking wind.

“Piss-poor conditioning, kid, but you got heart. Wind we can work on.”

“Fucking country. Can’t breathe the air.”

“You’ll get used to it. Get home, your lungs will feel double-size. Throw on your training kit and meet me in the gym.”

“Fucking country.”

He comes into the long-house wearing a pair of shorts and his ring shoes, a towel draped around his neck. The tattooed face of a dog, blue and grinning, covers one shoulder. On the other shoulder a crude imp or demon brandishes a pitchfork beneath the words Li’l Devil .

The long-house is equipped same as any North American boxing gym. In the ring, Khru Sucharit, the legendary Muay Thai trainer, instructs Bua, a rising fighter. Bua’s eighteen and has been fighting since infancy. His body is perfectly shredded, each muscle group distinct and visible beneath rough, dusky skin. He’s drilling textbook hook-kicks into punch-mitts snugged over Sucharit’s hands, transferring his weight to rock the old trainer back a step with every blow.