Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Reuben stepped onto wooden batboards laid down over the mud. He grabbed a black valise from the back seat. They made their way through a canopy of leafless trees to the barn.

“I ought to put on one of those rubberized aprons,” he said. “The kind slaughterhouse workers wear.”

They were met at the barn by Manning.

On the second Thursday of each month the thick-lipped, beetle-legged cattle farmer doffed his cattleman’s hat and donned his fight promoter’s cap. Manning’s arms were netted with old razor scars and the tip of his nose was gone: depending on which account you believed it’d been variously hacked, gouged, or bitten off his face. Tonight he wore an ankle-length duster coat, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

“Evening, lads.” Starlight bent upon the barrel of a Remington over-under shotgun in his right hand. “Here to tussle or just catch an eyeful?”

“My brother’s feeling frisky,” Reuben said.

Manning kicked the barn door ajar with the heel of his boot. “Some fellas in there’d be happy to take that frisk right outta him.”

The space under the peaked wood ceiling was as spacious as a dance hall, filled with light and smoke and milling bodies. The crowd was clotted in groups distinguished by their dress: suits and ties or flannels and work vests. Manning’s buck-toothed son sold six-packs of PBR from an ice-filled trough. Bales of hay studded with pink blossoms demarcated the ring. Cows snuffled at gaps in the barn planks.

Spectators were rowed along a wooden skirt circling the barn’s upper level, legs dangling over the edge. Tommy saw Fritzie Zivic standing beside a wheelchair-bound geezer with a breathing mask strapped over his face. Zivic’s scrofulous old dog was chewing a wheelchair tire.

The fighters huddled in corners beyond the light. Some were washed-up trial horses and clubbers, others tavern toughs with cobalt fists. All bore the mistakes of their trade: worn-out, mangled foreheads and split brows and pitcher lips and eyes like milky balls socked into the pitted ruin of their faces.

Reuben scanned the prospects. All regulars, at least. Every so often a vagabond fighter would show up; he’d fight, collect his purse, and move on down the road. Reuben would never forget driving home after a night at the barn and seeing one of those vagabond fighters at the Niagara bus terminal: only hours ago that same guy had pinned another man’s skull between bales of hay and pounded until the floorboards ran red, and now here he was stepping onto a Greyhound with blood on his hands, moving on to another town and another fight while his opponent lay on a hospital gurney with a pair of detached retinas. No remorse — everyone who stepped into the ring knew the stakes.

Men born in the wrong century, Reuben had heard it said. Put ’em in a coliseum, fighting with spears and nets. It’s all that suits ’em. Men whose sole value lay in their willingness to absorb punishment; men in whose faces could be glimpsed an inevitability of purpose impossible to outrun. Some had no more intellect than a child. Reuben had seen one eating soda crackers spread with axle grease: his trainer insisted it thickened the blood. Later that fighter stood in the ring, his face black with blood, calling his trainer’s name in a high, childish voice. Only his trainer wasn’t there: he’d already hopped into his truck and driven away.

Reuben motioned his brother to a hay bale. “Gimme those mitts.” He taped Tommy’s hands with great care, first winding clean white bandages around and around, then placing sponge across the knuckles, then wrapping on the adhesive.

When the barn was full Manning bolted the door and crossed the wide sawdust floor. He ran down the rules, such as they were. “Fight goes until one man can’t answer the bell. A man goes down, both fighters take a rest. I won’t accept no outright foul play but whatever happens between two men in the course of a tussle, happens. Those men ain’t got nobody to stand by them, gypsy cab’s waiting to run ya to the medic need be — fare come out your purse, but.”

Something tightened in Reuben’s chest to hear Manning’s spiel. He knew his brother never went out to make a show — he went out to get a job done. He was a boxer: a rough occupation, yes, but one governed by laws of fairness and respect. There was a refinement and cleanliness to it. You don’t hit a man when he’s down. You don’t punch after the bell.

Here, men fought like weasels down a hole. It was dangerous and dirty and men were hurt in ways they would never recover from. Here you might see a guy staggering to his corner with his scalp split pink down the dark weave of his hair, his eyes half-lidded and tongue hanging like a dog’s. Here you might see an overmatched fighter struck a blow so vicious it cracked the orbital bone and pushed his eye from its socket, the blood-washed eyeball swinging on its optic nerve like a lacquered radish. Reuben knew such things were a possibility because he had, in fact, seen those exact things on past nights.

Top Rank operated under laws. The barn was international waters.

Top Rank was for boxers. The barn was for fighters.

Rob was watching TV when Kate Paulson rapped on the door.

“Andale, Tully, andale” she called. “Freakin’ cold out here.”

He opened the door and smirked. As typical, she was overdressed: blue winter shell, scarf, and mittens. “You must be looking for the polar expedition team. They’re two doors down.”

“I walk all the way over and you give me grief? May just go home.”

“What, head back out in that weather?” He clutched his shoulders and shivered. “Brrrrr.”

Kate lived three blocks east on 22nd. Kate’s mother, Ellen, had known the Tully brothers since the first grade; they’d grown up in the same ten-mile radius, attended the same schools, caroused the same bars. She worked in the florist department at Topp’s, where she and Reuben often chatted amid the daffodils and zinnias.

The Tullys and Paulsons might have existed like any two families in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls — that is to say, distantly — if not for a pair of coincidences, one happy, the other not so. The happy coincidence was the near-simultaneous births of their first, and only, children; Robert Thomas was born Monday afternoon, Katherine Harriet during the witching hours Tuesday morning. The infants spent their first night together in the Mount St. Mary nursery, side by side in transparent plastic tubs. Tommy, the most whimsical member in either family, believed they had imprinted on each other like baby chicks; this he held accountable for their enduring closeness.

The other coincidence was that, shortly after the births, both Ellen’s husband and Reuben’s wife had realized parenting wasn’t in their blood. Phil Paulson stepped out for a pack of Kools days after his daughter’s birth and never did manage to find his way home. And speculation had it that Phil’s itchy feet must have been highly contagious, spreading all the way down to Carol Tully’s house; one afternoon Reuben came home to find baby Robbie at the next-door neighbor’s and a note from his wife informing him she’d moved to Nashville to pursue a music career.

Following from the initial, heart-defibrillating shock of abandonment, Ellen Paulson recovered rather quickly. Her husband was a contract handyman whose keenest aspiration was to lose a digit in a work-related mishap and live off the settlement; as Ellen saw it, now she had only one child to care for instead of two. Every so often she’d receive a postcard from deadbeat Phil; these she read aloud to Reuben and Tommy in a deft imitation of her husband’s voice: I still love you, don’t think for a second I don’t, but the aloor of the open road, that freedum… its got me in its spell. She’d point out all the misspellings and clichés and finally, cathartically, burned each postcard in the fireplace. After a year she didn’t bother to read them anymore, just pitched them in the trash.