Craig Davidson - The Fighter

But he’d noticed the shops this time. Why? It wasn’t like he was in dire need of a carving knife or a tattoo. What caught his eye was the small sign with its clipped red lettering.

The boxing club entrance was around back. A worn linoleum staircase and bare concrete walls taped with posters advertising a local fight card: brawl in the basement, December5. At the base of the staircase was another door: thick steel with an inset combination lock, the sort of thing you’d see fronting a bank vault. It was wedged open.

A short hallway hung with boxing photos in gold-edged frames: Panama A1 Brown and Nigel Benn, Baltazar Sangchili, Fighting Harada, Sixto Escobar. A Spanish beer poster:

Oscar De La Hoya hoisting a Budweiser over the words salud-respecto-contro.

The famous George Bellow oil painting: Louis Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocking “The Manassa Mauler” Jack Dempsey through the ring ropes.

The hallway led to a tiny unlit office. A shape was sprawled out on a couch. Paul knocked. The shape snuffled. Paul said, “Hello?” The shape stirred.

“I low much do I owe?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t play silly buggers. Joke’s on you, asshole. I can’t pay.” A mirthless chuckle. “Can’t squeeze water from a stone, jackass.”

“I saw your sign.”

“Oh.”

The voice brightened. “So you want to join?”

The voice assumed the aspect of a man: short and barrel-chested and wearing rumpled slacks, a short-sleeved pearl-button shirt, crack-soled Tony Lamas. Bald with deeply furrowed cheeks and a bloated nose. There was a blob of dried food on his chin.

“Caught me in the middle of naptime.” His face had the haunted look of a man who’d crawled to daylight from a caved-in mineshaft. “Lou Cobb. I own the place.”

Paul introduced himself.

“Ever box before, Paul?” Lou asked. “Looks it — got the build all right. You work with Ernie Riggs over at Knock Out?”

Paul said he hadn’t.

“Good, that’s good. Riggs is a bum. Riggs has abused more boxers than Inspector Number Twelve. He stinks. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“I won’t lie — bit old for a rookie. We like to get kids in the ring at twelve, thirteen tops, parents allow it. But a young twenty-six — now that we can work with. Sure you’re not a fighter? Got that fighter’s smile.”

“I fell down a flight of stairs.”

“We must be talking some mean-ass stairs.”

Lou scraped the blob of dried food off his chin and studied it, as though straining to recall what meal it had been a part of. “Paul, you can join yearly, bi-yearly, or monthly. But you can’t expect to learn anything in a month.”

“Can I take a look around?”

“Not much to see.” Lou seemed disappointed his spiel had not earned a quick sale.

“Go take a peep round the change rooms. After I’ll give you the grand tour.”

The dingy change room was lit by a single bulb. Headgear and leather foul cups hung from wooden pegs. A showerhead dripped. Paul considered himself in the mirror. He’d lost fifteen pounds in the grapefields. He shed his shirt and stared dejectedly at his chest: despite the gains at Jammer’s, he still looked like a human boneyard covered in a quivering layer of flab.

When he emerged, Lou beckoned him over to the ring apron. “So, ready for that grand tour?” He swept his hand in an ironic, all-encompassing fan.

“Ta-daa.”

It was impossible for the place to look like anything other than what it was: the basement below a paint store, with a boxing ring and a few punching bags hung from exposed girders. Paul judged its Spartan nature suitable to the sport.

A new boxer made his entrance. The guy wasn’t big; his limbs jutted in raw bony oudines through his track pants and sweatshirt. His hood was pulled low to obscure his face.

Only his hands were visible and they looked awful: curled into talons and terribly swollen, knuckles gone black.

“What are you doing here?” A tiny vein throbbed at Lou’s temple; a note of nervous tension picked at his face. “Supposed to be home, in bed.”

The guy shuffled over to a heavybag. He moved with obvious difficulty — Paul couldn’t help noticing that his left leg dragged behind him like an invalid’s — and set himself in a pugilist’s stance, a posture he found painful judging by the grunt he let out.

Paul had the uncomfortable feeling he was watching a zombie or automaton, some brainless creature driven by mere impulse.

Lou spread his hands in an embarrassed, despairing gesture. “Some guys just can’t get enough of training. Like say an addiction.”

He excused himself and walked over. When he set his hands on the boxer’s shoulders, the guy drew away.

“Cool down,” Lou said. “No need to get punchy.”

The guy threw a few venomous shots at the heavybag. The bag jerked on its chain. His knuckles split open and made meaty sounds when they struck. Blood flew off the bag and splattered the scuffed floor tiles.

“No training today,” Lou told the guy. He turned to offer Paul a smile that suggested such things occurred frequently in boxing clubs. For all Paul knew, they did. The guy mumbled something.

“I don’t give a crap you want to,” Lou told him. “Murdering your body, all this is. You’re heading home and hitting the sack.”

But the guy’s hands flew. Blood flew. Lou’s own hand snaked out and snagged the guy’s wrist.

After a few seconds trying to twist free, the guy relented.

“Think I’m letting you put yourself through this? Then you don’t know me too well at all.

You’re gonna go lay your head down.”

The boxer lifted his head. Light hit his face slantwise. Paul got his first real look.

The guy’s eyes were swollen over, two plum-colored anthills separated by a split bridge of nose. The top portion of his head had gone dark and shiny as eggplant, impossible to tell where skin gave way to the dark roots of his hair. Strips of adhesive tape glued his broken lips together. He held one twisted hand out, tentative like a blind man or an infant reaching to touch Lou’s face. Lou lowered it for him. “Ease down, Garth,” he said. “You did good last night. Real good.”

Laying an arm over the guy’s shoulder, Lou made a clicking sound with his tongue, the sort you might make to guide a horse onward. Glancing back over his shoulder, he appeared chagrined to discover that Paul was, in fact, still present.

“I’ll have to ask you to come back tomorrow. Bring your togs; I’ll show you how we do things.”

It was near dark when Paul left the gym. When he arrived home his parents were sitting at the kitchen table. Early-arriving Christmas cards ringed an empty bottle of Merlot.

His parents’ teeth had that dead-giveaway mulberry stain.

“Look who,” his father said, “the goddamn wraith. Ooooo-ooo-ooo” he went, like a cartoon ghost.

Paul was ravenous but found the fridge stocked with the usual unappealing foodstuffs: a bag full of periwinkles, an eel wrapped in cling film, a crustacean with a price tag skewered on one spiny appendage. The damn fridge housed a bizarrely misplaced Sea World exhibit.

“Doesn’t this family eat normal food anymore?”

“We figured with the way he’s been acting lately, our son must be an extraterrestrial. We suspect he rocketed to Earth as an infant, moments before his world exploded.” Jack tossed a swallow of wine down his neck. “We wish to cater to his alien diet. Or don’t they eat that sort of stuff on your planet?”