Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“Electric cauterizing wand,” Sandercott told him. “A spark gun, in layman’s terms. Fuses veins during emergency surgery.”

He pushed a silver button; a cold blue spark snapped between the conductors. The hairs on the nape of Paul’s neck stood on end.

“What I do is cauterize the soft tissue in your nostrils. Once you scar up you’ll never bleed again, even if someone whacks your schnozz with a ball-peen hammer.”

“Can’t this be done at a hospital?”

Sandercott shook his head. “Falls under the umbrella of non-essential surgery. Plus there’d be questions — with me it’s don’t ask, don’t tell.” He considered Paul, his cheap white T-shirt and knocked-out teeth. “No offense, but you don’t strike me as the type who’s got much choice.”

He spread Paul’s nostrils with a pair of nasal retractors. After trimming the bristly nose hairs, he took a leather thong from the tacklebox and rinsed it under the tap.

“Bite down hard,” he said. “Not going to lie, son: this’ll sting like a motherfuck.”

Paul drove through a light snow, big flakes dissolving on the windshield like spun sugar.

Plugs of blood-soaked gauze were shoved up his nostrils. His brain felt swollen and monstrous and threatened to split his skull.

When Sandercott had eased the spark gun up his right nostril, Paul felt the contact points butt the ridge of cartilage, then — tsszzzapl ! His mouth filled with an ozone taste; blue sparks spat between his fillings. His spine straightened as a rope of blood geysered from his nose. The spark gun tsszzzzapped again. His nose lit up like a Chinese paper lantern. Paul puked and passed out. When he came to, Sandercott was Q-Tipping his nostrils with petroleum burn salve.

“All done,” he said. “You did good. I’d give you a lollipop, I had one. Got Vicodin.”

“I’ll take two.” With Paul’s nose swollen, this came out: I dake doo.

He arrived home shortly after nine o’clock. The house was festooned with Christmas lights, thousands of them. Cars lined the horseshoe drive: Lexuses and Mercedes, Cadillacs and Porsches.

He crossed the front lawn past a carved-ice nativity scene. Faint music from inside: Bing Crosby’s “Silver Bells.” The Harrises’ annual Christmas function was in full swing.

He crept in through the back door; his ambition was to slip down the hall into his room and avoid the party altogether. But his mother corralled him as he breezed up the back stairs.

“Paul, dear.” Barbara wore a strapless black dress with fake-fur trim; stuffed reindeer antlers were tilted askew on her head. She was distracted, her gaze lingering on the living room and her guests. “You must come in and mingle, darling.”

He realized he was dealing with Socialite Barb, an altogether different creature from his mom. Socialite Barb had her own lexicon — Darling and Oh my and Nonsense — and her every mannerism was exaggerated: privy to a juicy bit of gossip, Socialite Barb would flap a hand before her face and swoon like a silent movie actress. Socialite Barb wouldn’t be caught dead uttering “Cold as a witch’s tit.”

He sat on the stairs. Taking a seat beside him, Barbara flinched at the blood on his shirt, the toilet paper jammed up his nose. “Oh, Paul…” The socialite veneer slipped. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I aw’ight.”

She smiled sadly and went to touch his face, but could not quite bring herself to. “You can’t come in looking like that.”

“Why oo I hab to cub in a’ aw?”

“Paul, please. Your father and I want this to come off well.” Worry strobe-lighted across her face. “We want everything to look nice.”

“’Appy fambly.”

“Yes, a happy family. Aren’t we?” She touched his shoulder; Paul thought she was going to hug him but instead she plucked a hair off his shirt. “You’ve been losing a lot of it, lately.”

Another side effect of the steroids. His shower soap was furred with so much shed hair it looked like some headless, amputee rodent. He went upstairs and changed, shoved fresh toilet paper up his nose, and soon found himself in a room full of people he didn’t want to talk to.

Tall, full blue spruces decked with twinkling lights and tinsel stood on either side of the fireplace — which, instead of an actual fire, contained a thirty-four-inch TV playing a DVD of a crackling fire. Rita MacNeil Christmas carols on the CD player. Guests milled about in sleekly cut dresses and dinner jackets, sipping martinis or Seabreezes or Danish beers. Broken conversations washed over him, so unlike the patter of the boxing gym it was nearly a foreign language.

…got my money in at 34¼ and got out at 56¾ — zoom!..

…four hundred thread count. Anything less, you may as well sleep on sandpaper…

…Oh no. Can’t do it Thursday. Herbal wrap. But how’s Friday?…

…East Timor. Who will consider the downtrodden shepherds of East Timor…

His father tended bar, dispensing Chardonnay and Veuve Clicquot with typical Jack Harris swagger. Seeing his son with those racoon eyes and corkscrews of toilet paper jammed up each nostril, a flinching expression crossed his face.

“Ah, god,” he said. “Have you been boxing — seriously boxing? ”

By now Jack knew that his son had taken up the sport. The glove-burns on his face and the bruised state of his hands, the smelly boxing shoes in the front hall.

“Whaa ’id oo ’ink?”

“I thought you were training,” Jack told him, “not actually fighting. Looks like you got popped one — how you feel?”

“Grade,” Paul said truthfully. “Riddy, riddy grade.”

“Great?”

Jack touched his son’s face, traced with thick fingers the slope of Paul’s nose. “Keep it up, son, you’re gonna wind up with a face like a catcher’s mitt.”

“I’b ’ine.”

“Fine, he says!” Jack spread his hands in an appeal to some unseen jury.

“Twists of TP up his nose and a pair of matching shiners — not to mention those teeth — this guy’s telling me he’s fine.” A snort. “You’re too old to be a fighter. You’ll never earn a dime. Might as well teach Esperanto lessons!”

Paul was unsurprised that, to his father, it came down to dollars and cents. He took his bottled water to a chair in a corner of the room. Guests roamed about in bovine patterns. Businessmen’s laughs boomed like awkward thunder: Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak! Everyone was so fat and satisfied. Sausagey fingers grasped at canapés; fleshy goldfish lips sucked at cocktail glasses. The older men, the fathers, still bore traces of a hardened life: facial scars and roughened features, a certain tautness around the eyes indicative of past toil. But their sons’ faces were scrubbed rosy and unmarked, their manicured hands smooth as glass.

“Young master Harris. How do, how do?”

He’d been accosted by Drake Langley, whom Paul had last seen the night of his beating.

“’Ello, Drake.”

Tonight Langley wore a checkerboard-patterned jacket with a ludicrous bow tie flared beneath his jaw. His insubstantial frame was balanced on a walking stick with a silver dog’s-head handle — a Dachshund — which Drake leaned on like a vaudeville performer at the cusp of a song-and-dance number.

“You and I should set up a meeting…” Drake was saying,“… relative merits and demerits of corporate reconfiguration…” he was saying, “… that new Porsche 911 Boxster made my dick hard just looking at the brochure…” he was saying.

Drake’s thin lips formed a stream of inane jabber. Paul was amazed that Drake hadn’t bothered to comment on his frightful appearance — he’d nearly forgotten how self-absorbed his old chums could be, with their spectacular ignorance of all things outside their tiny sphere of existence. He felt he was in the presence of an alien life form unsuited to existence on this planet: a creature to whom oxygen was poison and water acid.