Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“Picking season’s over in two weeks,” he said. “I’m not sure what you plan to do then — run off into the forest and live off the land? Some hobo kick? Steal clothes off laundry lines and sleep in drainage ditches?”

“Maybe I’ll pack a bindle and ride the rails. King of the open road, uh?”

Jack was appalled. “You’re an infuriating little turd — do you know that? You’re like a kid who runs away but only makes it to the end of the block and sits in the bushes for a few hours, coming home when it’s dark and cold and he’s got the hungries in his tum-tum.”

His father’s temper was like a busted speedometer: it was impossible to tell how fast and hot his engine was running. He could go from zero to bastard in fifteen seconds flat.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” Jack’s temper downshifted. “If you’re fixed on staying out here, you’re getting paid like everyone else — by the bucket. Expect your next paycheck to be significantly smaller, old boy old chum.”

“Just pay me what I’m worth.”

“You’re worth a lot more than what you’ve settled for here.” Jack looked wretched, like a tank had run over him and left him lying there in the dirt. “And for god’s sake get your fucking teeth looked after.”

When the picking season ended the field workers went home to their wives and children to await the spring thaws. Paul did not return to the winery. He passed his days driving the city.

He would set out at dawn with the pale moon hanging over the lake and streets dark with night rain. He drove without motive or clear destination. He parked at the GM factory gates as the workers waited in line to buy coffee and Danish from a silver-paneled snack truck. He idled outside the bus terminal as drivers walked to their buses beneath strung halogens with newspapers folded under their arms.

He spied on janitors sitting on picnic tables behind the Hotel Dieu hospital, chatting and laughing, dousing cigarettes in soup tins filled with rainwater. Paul felt a huge sense of disassociation watching these men, floating, unattached to anything he understood. Men whose lives he’d never considered because they were unlike any he’d ever aspired to.

What had he ever really aspired to?

He drove to Jammer’s gym in his replacement wheels: a Nissan Micra, on loan from the dealership. Paul had expressly requested the crappiest loaner in the lot and the Micra fit the bill: raggedy and rust-eaten with a sewing machine engine, power nothing, K-Tel’s Hits of the 80s lodged in the tape deck. Even once his BMW was fixed, Paul stuck with the Micra.

He steered through the lights at Church and St. Paul. “Big Country,” by the Scottish group of the same name, blasted from the tinny speakers. He butted the Micra into a streetside parking spot, fed the meter, and headed into the gym.

It was sparsely populated: bored housewives going nowhere on the elliptical machines, university kids in the weight room. He donned his gym garb and hit the weights.

He’d started coming after picking let off. The only time he’d even considered working out before now was the time when, maudlinly drunk at three a.m., he’d ordered a Bowflex after watching an infomercial. But his existential despair had evaporated the next morning and the unassembled Bowflex, still in its box, was consigned to the role of mouse-turd receptacle in the backyard greenhouse.

Paul slapped a pair of weight plates on the bench press. He watched an anorexic-looking chick with fake tits run treadmill laps. Boobs bouncing, lathered in sweat, her face contorted into a look of desperate intensity unique to Olympic hopefuls and women of a Certain Age. An old dude with a toxic tanning-bed tan — his skin the diseased orange hue of a boiled tangerine — was rowing to Jehovah on an erg machine. Paul glanced away, mildly revolted, and caught the proprietor making a beeline for him.

Stacey Jamison struck the casual observer as a man who’d been given a girl’s name at birth and had spent his life trying to outrun the association. At five-foot-four and nearly three hundred pounds, there was nothing on the guy that wasn’t monstrous. His legs and arms and neck were like a telephone pole chainsawed into five sections. His body was networked in thick veins pushed to the surface of his skin by the sheer density of muscle tissue.

He was once a professional bodybuilder, but three consecutive heart attacks had forced him off the pro circuit. The cause of the attacks wasn’t openly stated, but gym scutdebutt had it that Stacey would pop anything that could be crammed into a syringe, including powdered bull testicle. Once he’d loaded himself up on Lasix before a show, leaching all the moisture from his body for that ultra-cut look; unfortunately the racehorse diuretic left his organs so desiccated that his kidneys tore like a tissue paper Valentine when he nailed a Double Crabbed Biceps pose during a heated pose-off segment.

“Harris, you pansy.” Stacey wore a shirt with a snarling cartoon rottweiler over the legend don’t growl ifyou can’t bite. “You got a hollow chest like a puffed-up paper bag. I seen ten-year-old girls with more definition.”

Stacey’s shtick was to stalk the gym belitding his customers’ physiques: You got driftwood arms; A butcher wouldn’t take those stringy legs as stewing beef; I could fry an egg on that flat ass of yours. While this initially struck Paul as an ideal way to alienate one’s clientele, he’d grossly underestimated the average gym member’s tolerance for abasement. More than a few appeared to crave Stacey’s brutal assessment of their physiques, as if he were a mirror that reflected the physical deficiencies they’d long ago glimpsed in themselves. And though most of Stacey’s assessments were of the critical variety, he was infrequently known to deliver faint praise: You’re not looking quite as sickly as I recall or You’re less skeletal; I guess I’ll have to tell those body farmers to look elsewhere. Such backhanded compliments were enough to lift Stacey’s regulars to a state of mild euphoria.

When Stacey wasn’t berating his cowering clientele, he acted as spotter for some of the more grotesque gym denizens. These juiced-up muscleheads could bench cart-oxen weight, the bar bowed under a mass of steel plates as finger-thick veins stood out on their corded necks. Einsteins of the Body, Paul dubbed them. Some were so huge their heads looked comically small in relation. It amused him to consider the possibility that they were, in fact, fantastically tiny men who zippered into a hulking coat of meat and muscles each morning; at night they unzipped and hung their muscles on a peg. Every few weeks they got their meat coats dry-cleaned.

“Get your ass under that bar,” Stacey told Paul, adding a few extra ten-pound plates. “It’s go time.” He slapped Paul’s face, slapped his own. “Do this, motherfucker.”

Paul braced his arms on the bar and jerked it off the pegs. His arms trembled; he entertained a giddy vision of his forearms snapping and the bar crushing his windpipe. He lowered the bar, felt it touch his chest, and pushed.

“You’re in it to WIN it, baby!”

Stacey jabbered. “Go hard or go HOME!”

Muscles tore across Paul’s chest, fibers snapping like over-tuned piano wires. Stacey’s crotch hovered above Paul’s face: stuffed into lime-green spandex shorts, his package looked like a plantain and two walnuts jiggling in a grocery sack.

“Lift, bitch! Be a MAN for once in your life!”

Paul’s strength ebbed as the bar locked inches above his chest. His muscles fluttered and bands of white fire stretched across his eyes. The strain coursed down his arms into his gut, knotting into an agonizing ball he expelled in the form of an oddly toneless fart. Stacey guided the bar onto its pegs.