Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Reuben smeared Vaseline over the burns left by Kilbride’s gloves. “Slow or not, I couldn’t help but notice that kid’s only too happy to hit you.”

Two bungling men in their mid-twenties, Reuben and Tom Tully’s combined knowledge of child rearing could have fit on the head of a pin. To spare infant Robbie the indignity of newsprint diapers and herself the expense of a nanny, Kate’s mother had come up with a solution. Weekday mornings she dropped her daughter off with Tom, who cared for Kate and Robbie until Reuben arrived home from his bakery shift; Tommy then set off for the loading docks and Reuben looked after the kids until Ellen returned from the floral shop.

The five of them knit into an odd, but oddly workable, unit. The sight of Ellen Paulson flanked by lumbering Tom Tully and Reuben in his peaked fedora became a familiar one: at the park, in the supermarket aisle, pushing prams up Niagara Street. Tommy and Reuben often took Robbie to Loughran’s Park on their own; those newly arrived to the neighborhood had been overheard remarking upon the raffish homosexual couple and their adopted Serbian baby. Tommy made a joke of this perception at his prudish brother’s expense: he’d grab Reuben’s hand at inappropriate times, or rub his shoulder with the tender fondness of a lover. “So help me god” Reuben would seethe.

Kate and Rob had grown up almost as brother and sister; for the most part, they treated each other with the brusque affection of siblings. But lately Rob had been reminding himself that she was not, in point of fact, his birth sister.

“You’re hopeless,” she said when Rob told her his haiku began with the line My toenail is split. “Of all the poetic topics in our vast universe, you settle on the most revolting feature of the human body.”

“You’re forgetting something,” he said. “The duodenum.”

They were covering anatomy in biology class; everyone agreed the duodenum was one ugly organ. “Fine, second most revolting. Come on — what sort of things excite you?”

Like a lot of guys his age, Rob twigged on stories tinged with a note of morbid irony — like the newspaper article about a frozen ball of shit that was accidentally discharged from the hull of a Swiss Air flight from Geneva to New York; the pinky-brown boulder had rocketed into a house in Rochester, crushing its owner, who happened to be relieving himself at that very moment.

“Frozen balls of turd?” Kate said, after he’d been foolish enough to tell her. She put the base of her palm of the flat of her forehead and held it there for several seconds. “Roll over, Basho.”

“Then give me guidance, O Poetic Spirit.”

“Look around you. And a bit farther than your toenail.”

“Busted syringes on the basketball court at Loughren’s?” he said, after brief consideration. “The god-awful stench from the rubber plant as you cross the bridge over the polluted river, before you hit the burned-down strip mall and pass into factory outlet wasteland? Is that poetry?”

“Probably,” Kate said, “to some people. But why concentrate on that? How about something you know a lot about? How about boxing?”

“No,” muttered Rob. “Not boxing.”

Kate was pleased to hear this. They sat for a while in silence, then Rob stood up and tapped the windowpane. “How about that?”

“What, Mr. Cryptic — the curtains?”

“The view. The maple tree, the fence, the sky. I’ve grown up, so my perspective has changed. But tree, fence, sky. Those have always stayed the same.”

Kate clapped her hands. “Grab a pen, son — strike while the iron is hot!”

When he sat down with a pen she plucked it from his grip. She took Rob’s hand, flipped it so his palm showed, and pressed it flat to the table. She licked the pen tip and touched it to a big blue vein where his wrist met the meat of his palm. “So — how does that make you feel?”

A trapdoor opened in Rob’s head, dumping endorphins into his brainpan; it felt like getting hit in a sparring session, his pain centers bombed with peptides. No pain now, only the pressure of Kate’s fingers on his hand. A surge of power flooded him, the kind that made him a terror in the ring, but here, now, he had no idea where to go with it.

“How about…” He flushed; his eyeballs must be bulging like grapefruits. Why? She was only touching his hand. “… The view out of my kitchen window—”

Her fingertip tapped beats on his wrist like a second heartbeat. “The view out of my… okay, that’s your first line… kit-chen window. Three more syllables.”

“Remains the same… no, is the same…”

She wrote across his palm in smooth cursive. “… Is the same… one more line. Five beats.”

“… since I…”

“… since I…”

“… was a child — no, boy.”

She contemplated the words spread across his palm. “Simple, but I like it.”

Looking at her, he thought of a night months ago. He’d stopped by on his way home from the club and she’d been on the porch — waiting for him, or so he’d felt for a moment. She stepped into light thrown by the porch bulb and the scent of her — vanilla, remarkable only in that he’d never known her to smell this way — fell through the light, melding and bonding so that for Rob the light itself smelled of her.

Kate flipped Rob’s other palm over and, with quick strokes, wrote her own haiku.

When the bell rang to start the second round Caleb Kilbride tear-assed across the ring windmilling his fists. Tommy got on his bicycle and circled away, taking a few harmless shots to the arms and brisket. Kilbride was in no kind of shape: greasy sweat shone under his eyes and where his nose met the rest of his face. The kid was used to fighting scratch-ass hill people who folded at the sight of those flatiron fists.

Tommy led Kilbride around the ring, absorbing the young man’s lunging blows on hip and elbow. Taking him into the deep waters, any boxing aficionado would’ve known. Gonna drown him.

Kilbride threw a sloppy hook and when Tommy ducked he saw the ridge of Kilbride’s wide-open torso. After a moment’s hesitation Tommy lashed out with his left, banging Kilbride’s liver. The bigger man bent forward at the hip; ropes of snot jetted from his nose.

Tommy grabbed Kilbride by the scruff of the neck — the hairs back there were coarse as hog bristles — and, jerking his skull forward, smashed a fist into his face. Something gave under his knuckles with a dim splintering and Tommy saw a shard of bone poking through the skin below Kilbride’s right eye.

Kilbride struck out instinctively, a bone-cutting shot that sheared off Tommy’s jaw. Tommy belted Kilbride’s left ear, fattening it instantly. They fell into a clumsy embrace, foreheads touching, arms tangled.

“Go down, kid,” Tommy whispered. “No shame in it. You’re one tough hombre.”

Kilbride only grunted. Blood sprayed from his fractured cheekbone into one eye but the other one held Tommy in its gaze with the belligerence of a petting zoo goat.

Kilbride pushed off and hit Tommy with a left, following up with a right. Tommy held his hands at his waist, not bothering to cover up, and the shots glanced off the crown of his skull, reopening the cut above his eye. Kilbride threw another weak left and Tommy swatted his fist out of the air and came over the top with a right hook that slammed the side of Kilbride’s head and the ridge runner’s swollen ear exploded, the pressure of compressed blood splitting it off the side of his head. Hanging by its lobe on a rope of skin, it looked like a crushed baby mouse.