Craig Davidson - The Fighter

This is a rough place to fight, but not the roughest. In Brazil, this whippety little bastard locked a jujitsu move on me and pulled my elbow apart — turned the joint into oatmeal. I heard they were tough in Brazil but wanted to see for myself. I won’t be going back.

An ancient ragman steps into the room. He’s got a bale of hemp rope in his right hand and a bucket of white powder hanging from his left. Nobody fights barehanded here; you can watch a fistfight on any street corner in the city.

Spectators crave blood in torrents, disfigurement, death. We fighters oblige.

Concertina wire. Pine tar and busted glass. Turpentine. Razor blades. Tonight our fists will be dipped in yaa baa — T hai methamphetamine.

Numbers are drawn. I get #5.

A Spanish fighter sits at my side. His right eye is gone; a ball of knotted flesh sits in its place. He killed the guy who took it, pounding with fists of barbed wire until the other man’s head was little more than red mush loosely moored to a stump. £l estol6 mi ojo, was all he could say afterward. Él estoló mi ojo. He stole my eye. Sounds so much more poetic in Spanish, don’t you think?

On the floor, between my spread legs: a ladybug. They look different on this side of the globe: nearly the size of a dime and bright purple. It lies upon its back, legs knitted like tiny black fingers. When I pick it up its legs unknit and it hangs, weightless, from my thumb. The floor is scattered with dozens of dead ones. What could have drawn so many of them? Whatever they were searching for, it’s not here to be found.

I hold my thumb toward the Spaniard, who extends his cupped palm to catch the insect as it tumbles off my ragged thumbnail. We trade smiles — the very nick of time — and he sets it on the bench beside him, where it sits with a deathly stillness.

“Numba ei’!”

The Spaniard stands.

“Numba fi’!”

The arena is wide and low-ceilinged and packed to capacity. Stands rise in tiers from the circular arena floor in the style of a Greek amphitheater. Men in dark sunglasses and silk suits sit beside street gamblers in madras shorts and baseball caps. A blonde with cut-from-the-sky blue eyes sits in the front row; her face is specked with blood.

We fight on white sand trucked in from beaches to the south; it feels so soft beneath my feet. I snap my neck to drain the sinuses and for an instant the fear grips me — I could die here — b ut the emotion is as undefined as bodies at movement in a darkened room.

Scars tough as rawhide adorn the Spaniard’s face; the surrounding skin is so tight a few good shots will rip it all apart. He catches me looking and smiles.

There are three signs you’re up against a real fighter. They’re not what you might think; nothing to do with how big the guy is, or the size of his fists. The three Harbingers are:

1. A calmness, almost a deadness, in his eyes.

2. That he insists upon shaking your hand and makes no effort to crush it.

3. When he asks your forgiveness for what comes next.

If you find yourself outside a bar faced up with a guy who shakes your hand and begs forgiveness before putting up his dukes, my humble suggestion is that you run.

We meet in the center of the ring. The Spaniard bows like a toreador. The crowd’s chant is familiar though I’ve never understood the words. It feels as if I’m dreaming and the dream is also familiar: a dream shot through with the smell of blood.

Sometimes I’ll think — often right in the middle of a fight, when I’ve made a mistake and loosened my guard, in the instant before that fist opens up a part of me — I’ll find myself thinking, How? How did I get here? How does a man fall off the civilized slope of the earth, and how far down does that slope go? I’ll think of those men I’d see every so often, nameless strangers stepping off a Greyhound bus in the witching hours with nothing but a duffel bag, men with no family or friends who must have made their way down to the factory that is constantly running under the veneer of polite society. I’ll think about how every factory needs its workforce.

And I often think about how it all flowed, so ceaselessly and unerringly, from there to here and then to now. I marvel at how absolutely my life was guided upon its new course and wonder: how close are any of us to those moments? How near to our hearts do they lie — behind what doorways, around which corners?

The Spaniard holds his hand out. I raise my own. We touch fists gently.

“Perdónam”

“And you me.”

I breathe deep, hold it, and exhale.

And waiting. As ever, waiting.

For the bell.

Paul Harris turned to catch a fist that smashed the left side of his face along the angular ridge of jaw and rocked him through a padded burgundy door tacked with tiny brass rivets. Busted hinges, a shower of toothpicked wood, and he was reeling out into cold early autumn air.

Wiry weeds touched with frost jutted from sidewalk cracks. Streetlight reflected off office windows, windshields, and beer caps sunken in opaque puddles along the curb. Paul grasped the stalk of a parking meter and hauled himself up.

Shock-sweat fused his hand to the chilled metal: when he pulled free, pinpricks of blood welled on his palm.

A pair of rough hands gripped the back of his camel-hair coat and shoved him up against the canopy of a late-model Jeep. His face mashed to the translucent window, Paul’s nose filled with the antiseptic, plasticky smell of inflatable pool toys.

A clubbing blow sent him to the ground again. He backed away on his palms and heels, skittering like a sand crab. The world acquired a pinkish tinge, the buildings and streets and cars spun from cotton candy.

His attacker’s shoulders were broad and dense with muscle, tapering to a supple waist and lean hips. His boots boomed like hooves on the broken cement.

“Gonna split your wig, bud.”

Paul struggled to understand how all this had happened. He’d been to the club before; it was as classy as could be found in his hometown of St. Catharines, a depressed shipbuilding community sprawled along the banks of Lake Ontario. He and his date had come from a production of The Tempest in Niagara-on-the-Lake; neither had enjoyed or even quite understood it, but everyone they knew had seen it and they felt compelled. Faith, his date, was skinny, her eyes cored too deeply into her face; the pair of sunken pits between her collarbones were deep enough to collect rainwater. He found her about as interesting as an outdated periodontal health brochure, the sort he might have flipped through in his dentist’s waiting room, and he was certain she felt the same about him — not that it mattered, as she was the daughter of one of his father’s business cronies.

Like feudal times: a sack of gold coins and ten head of cattle to take my daughter off my hands. Except nowadays you got forty percent equity in a chain of gelato parlors and the summer place on Lake Muskoka. How did it all end?

Paul could guess: with the bloodlines all fucked, with runny-nosed mongoloids kicking big red balls around the offices of Fortune 500 companies. That’s how.

Point being: the club was upscale. A well-stocked wine cellar. A tastefully understated tapas menu: Oysters Rockefeller, Wild Mushroom Croustades with Fennel. And yet here he was being slammed up against an aluminum shopfront, water trickling off the eaves and soaking his hair. This bastard’s knuckles pressed into his throat, this asshole’s knee driven into his crotch so hard he puked a gutful of single-malt scotch.