Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“So.” Kate clapped her hands. “Where’s that leftover spag?”

In the kitchen Rob set the pot of sauce on the stove. She sat at the table rubbing the cold from her hands. Her pageboy-style hair stuck up in wild spikes. She had green eyes, like her mother: cat’s eye green, Reuben called that color.

“You want noodles,” he asked, “or on toast?”

“You’re kidding.”

Rob shrugged. “Tommy likes it that way.”

Which was true. Tommy ladled spaghetti sauce on top of bread — and not any old bread: Wonder Bread. This caused friction in the household, since Tommy preferred it to the bakery loaves his brother brought home. Why, Reuben harped, would you fill your face with that crap? I doubt it’s even bread; I bet it’s labeled “food substitute.”

Rob set another pot on the stove and dumped in a handful of spaghetti. Kate, who’d been watching with a critical eye, asked what the heck he was doing.

“You didn’t sound keen on toast.”

She joined him at the stove, hip-checking him out of the way. “Got to boil the water first, dummy. Then the noodles.” It was hot over the stove top and she pulled off her school sweatshirt, rucking her undershirt up. Rob caught bare skin, the dip under her ribcage, a groove of muscle down her stomach.

He was unruffled that she’d taken over the kitchen; Kate had always been alpha to his beta. Their easy acceptance of these roles was one of the reasons they got on so well. And since Rob had never seen his own father and mother interact, he’d always wondered if, in their way, he and Kate behaved as a married couple might.

She sprinkled the cooked spaghetti with Kraft Parmesan — “Cheese in a canister,” she said disapprovingly, “that’s what you get in a house full of men” — and slid Rob’s plate across the table. He’d eaten only two hours ago, but most boxers existed in a more or less permanent state of appetite.

“Where’s your pops,” Kate said, “or Tommy?”

Rob kept his eyes on his plate. “Busy tonight.”

Kate arched her eyebrows. “Second Thursday of the month. I didn’t think your uncle was mixed up in that anymore.”

Most people in the neighborhood knew of the barn; a few, desperately strapped for cash, had even tried their luck there. For all but Tommy, once had been enough.

“Tommy’s shifts at the warehouse got cut back,” Rob said. “He’s in some to Fritzie Zivic and hasn’t been drumming up much sparring work—”

She cut him off. “The supermarket’s looking, and nobody’s gonna try and knock his head off there — or if so, some turkey-armed fogy because he cuts the salami too thick.”

Rob laughed, but he was shaking his head. “It’s not the money so much…”

“So much as?”

All Rob could think was that boxing got into people’s blood like a poison, except that the poison was the only thing that kept them alive, or at least made them feel that way.

“I mean it’s a tough life for a man to leave behind, is all.”

Kate looked up at the ceiling, scanning for bits of Rob’s brain that clearly must have drifted out his ears. “Women find it hard to leave things, too — shitty marriages, and boyfriends, and degrading jobs. We can be every bit as pigheaded as men.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Rob. “You’re defending a woman’s right to act as stupidly as a man?”

“I’m saying men don’t have a hammerlock on weakness. But it’s still no excuse.”

In their neighborhood, gender roles were pretty well defined. Men did this; women, that. There wasn’t a lot of friction over it — just the way things were.

“Hey,” he wanted to know, “are we having an argument?”

“No, Tully. We are having a discussion.”

“… Oh.”

One commonly held theory in streetfighting is that you must get the first punch no matter what the price.

Christ, Tommy thought, staggering back on his heels, I really should’ve known better.

The blow struck him dead between the eyes — a poleax, in the same spot that a slaughterhouse stunner aims his kill hammer. The air shimmered with darts of white light as his mouth filled with the taste of cold lightning.

He’d been matched against a young fighter, Caleb Kilbride. The Kilbrides were a clan of ridge runners who made ends meet smuggling reservation cigs and booze across the Niagara River. Shirtless, the kid was built like the butt end of a sledgehammer. His neck and arms were mottled with burn scars; the falling light picked out further scarring on his hips, a galaxy of pale white chips.

They’d met in the middle of the ring. Tommy noted Kilbride’s small, close-set eyes, the slight upslope at their outer edges that bespoke inbreeding. He looked over at the kid’s corner, where Papa Kilbride swigged at a flask of triple-X; a black eyepatch gave him the look of a landlocked, hillbilly pirate. He seemed the sort of father who might force his mentally defective son into a fight, and Tommy had been considering this very possibility when Caleb Kilbride came forward and popped him in the face.

The blinding sting in Tommy’s eyes told him that Kilbride’s work-gloves were soaked in caustic, weed killer most likely, but it was too late for complaining and besides, there was no ref to hear his grievance. Kilbride pressed in, bashing Tommy about the head and arms; the ridge runner’s breath was warm in Tommy’s ears, the excited exhale of his lungs like hickory wood cracking.

“Circle out of there!” his brother called as the crowd hooted and catcalled.

Kilbride let go with a flurry of haymakers, thudding them into the dense muscling of Tommy’s arms and shoulders. By then the canaries had flitted from Tommy’s head and he was able to step inside one of Kilbride’s looping punches, set his shoulders, and hook to the kidneys. Kilbride’s breath escaped in a gust: a sweet pablum-y smell.

He recovered enough to smash a fist into Tommy’s forehead. The shot lacked gas and Tommy weathered it easily, but Kilbride followed up with another in the same spot, planting his feet and dropping his fist like a guillotine blade. The blow landed with the sound of an ax chopping into wet wood and split the skin over Tommy’s left eye along the socket ridge; he felt the buzzing X-ray contour of bone beneath his skin.

He dropped to one knee and Kilbride hit him going down, an uppercut fired straight from the hip that flattened Tommy’s lips against his teeth. He went down with the taste of blood and Killex on his tongue. The bell rang but Kilbride kept slugging until Manning dragged him off.

Reuben helped his brother to the corner. The railbirds hubbubed and pumped their fists. Fritzie Zivic sucked a toothpick beside the wheelchair-bound fogy who looked either comatose or dead save his eyes, which were riveted on the ring above the green plastic edge of his oxygen mask.

Reuben jammed a hand down Tommy’s trunks and splashed ice water on his groin. “What’s the matter? He’s wide open.”

“Something’s wrong with him. He’s not all there upstairs.”

Reuben cracked the seal on a vial of adrenaline 1:1000 and dipped a Q-Tip. He jammed it into the wound above Tommy’s eye, down through the layers of meat, pinching the flaps of skin over the cotton tip.

“How many of these punch-drunk tomato cans do you figure are all there?”

“No, I mean… slow.” Tommy rinsed water around his mouth and spat. “His breath smells like a baby’s.”

Reuben glanced at the opposite corner. Kilbride was taking pulls from a flask while Papa massaged his shoulders.

“You socked him, all right,” Papa crowed. “The ole Missouri soup-bone!”