Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Rob finished his circuit and sat on the risers with the managers and gym bums. Tommy worked the ring with Scarpella. He fought out of a crouch, the way Scarpella’s trainer wanted. Scarpella let go with a clumsy roundhouse; Tommy let the punch slip through and took a knee.

The gym emptied out. The next wave of boxers would arrive after lunch. The gym bums swapped barefaced lies.

“Sailor Perkins could eat fifty pig’s knuckles at a sitting, may god strike me blind for a lie.”

“You’ll never see a Mexie heavyweight champ. They just don’t grow that big south of the Rio Bravo. Something to do with the intense heat shrinking the bones and that’s not just me talking — that’s science.”

“Johnny Pushe’s skin was so tough it could blunt a nail.”

“Every welterweight champ in history had O-positive blood. A-negative or AB-positive welters, forget it — pack on thirteen pounds and move up to middleweight.”

The walls of Robert’s bedroom were hung with portraits of Muhammad Ali and Roy Jones Junior. They had been hung by his father and functioned, Reuben hoped, as a subliminal training method. Rob was working on his homework assignment — a haiku poem — while his father and uncle prepared for their trip over the river. “Where’s the adrenaline chloride, Tommy?”

“In the fridge behind the milk.”

“Looks a mite yellow. Out of date?”

“How should I know?”

“Your face, not mine.”

Rob had so far composed a single line: My toenail is broken. This had come to him staring down at his bare foot. Was that too many syllables? “What about ice?”

“We’ll grab a bag over there.”

“We got any Canadian cash? Any whaddatheycallem — l oonies?’ Robert amended: My toenail is split. Tommy poked his head through the door.

“What’re you working on?”

“Haiku.”

“Gesundheit.”

“It’s a Japanese poem.”

Tommy strode into the room with his chest puffed out. “Why not write an ode to your handsome uncle?” He got down on one knee. “Tommy dearest, tell me true, why do all the gals love you…”

“Quit horsing around!” Reuben called. “I’m helping Robbie with his poetry!”

“You wouldn’t know Shakespeare if he crawled out the grave and bit you on your ass!”

“I’m a poet and you don’t even know it!” Tommy hollered back. “There once was a man from Nantucket—”

“Enough,” Reuben said, appearing in the doorway. “Robbie, we’re gone until eleven. If your uncle’s face isn’t bashed so bad it’ll put a man off his food, we’ll meet up at Macy’s.”

Rob wished his uncle good luck. Be careful, he wanted to add, but among boxers those words were considered the father of bad luck. He could already feel the lump of fear in his belly, a lump that would persist until he received his father’s call from Macy’s diner.

Reuben’s Dodge Shadow backed down the driveway, its rusted muffler rattling down 24th Street. Rob picked up the phone.

“Tully,” Kate Paulson said from her end. “What’s up?”

“Working on that poetry thing. What’re you up to?”

“ Meh .”

“Why don’t you come over and help out?”

“You mean do your homework?”

“Did I say do ? Did that word cross my lips? I said help” Rob tried to sound indifferent. “Or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” she mimicked, teasingly. “You know you need me, Tully. If poetic passion were punching power, you couldn’t plow your posterior out of a paper peanut pack. Bet you don’t even know what that’s an example of.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All those P words strung in a row — it’s called…?”

Kate hummed the theme from Jeopardy. Rob snapped his fingers, struggling to recall his last English lesson. “Alliteration?”

“Baaah! Sorry, you didn’t answer in the form of a question and must forfeit your fabulous Caribbean vacation for two.” Kate kept silent for a bit, then said, “Anything to eat over there?”

“Leftover spaghetti.”

“Oooh, now there’s a deal sweetener. No offense, but your dad…” She sifted various word combinations through her head. “… is a crummy caustic cook.”

“But he’s a blazingly brilliant baker.”

“Not to mention a terrifically tyrannous trainer.”

Rob let it slide; Kate’s thoughts about his boxing aspirations were well documented, as were those regarding his father’s role in them.

Kate’s fingers drummed the wall beside her phone. “I’ll be over in half.”

Tommy and Reuben drove streets slick with twilight rain past pawn shops and discount liquor outlets and All-For-A-Buck stores. Spitting rain froze into a milky glaze at the windshield’s edge. Tommy caught his reflection in the window, his forehead piled with scar tissue in the glow of passing streetlights.

Reuben paid the toll and drove out over the Rainbow Bridge. High-intensity spotlights trained on the Horseshoe Falls caused the ever-falling water to sparkle. The pines of Luna Island and Prospect Point were coated in crystallized spray.

They passed through the border toll and turned up Clifton Hill. Clusters of discount tourists peered through the darkened windows of shops closed for the season. Blinking neon reflected off frozen puddles; the road was pocked with fitful pools of blue, red, and green.

Reuben said, “A few fellas in the butcher department retired the other week. They’re looking for meat cutters.”

Tommy cracked his knuckles. “Maybe you think I’m blind,” he said mirthlessly. “Maybe you think I missed the copy of the want ads you left on my pillow.”

Reuben expressed mock surprise. “Is that where I left those? It’d be better than what you’re earning now, plus it’s forty hours a week, guaranteed.”

Tommy opened and shut his mouth, jutting his lower jaw out until he looked like some predatory deep-sea fish: jaw limbering exercises. “I’m too clumsy. Liable to cut my pinkie off.”

“Right,” Reuben said, “and how would you cope without it?”

“Wouldn’t be invited to any more tea parties.” Tommy mimed tipping a china tea cup, his pinkie extended. “The Duchess of Windsor would be heartbroken.”

The buildings and houses fell into the distance. The sawblade silhouette of a fir-lined ridge zagged above the fields.

“I thought you were done with this stuff, Tom.”

“I thought so, too. This is the last time.”

“The last?”

Tommy paused. “One of the last.”

Reuben wasn’t satisfied to let it rest. “This is how you imagined capping your career? You boxed at Madison Square Garden, in case the fact slipped your mind.”

“Long time ago I did.”

“So this is how you want it?”

“No, it’s not.” Tommy stared down at his hands lit by the dashboard, shrugging as if unable to conceive of another employment for them. “Just drop it.”

“I worry about my kid brother, is all.”

“Not a kid anymore.”

“You know, this is about the only time I ever see you serious. And you’ll always be my kid brother,” Reuben said, not unkindly.

Flat frost-clad fields, fence posts, barns, the dark contours of sleeping cattle. A corduroy road cut off the rural route leading to a farmstead hemmed by a windbreak of pines. A tiny farmhouse with squares of light burning in odd windows. The dark outline of a peaked-roof barn stood east of some silos.

Vehicles were parked along a muddy fenceline: pickups and rusted beaters, ATVs and dirtbikes. Moonlight danced over the polished paint of a German sedan. Bumper stickers: soccer dad and proud of it! and my other car is a broom.