Craig Davidson - The Fighter

He kept an eye on the rearview and even pulled over, idling at the roadside for a minute. Nobody came after him.

Paul dropped the vehicle at Jammer’s, where he’d left his own car, and grabbed a tire iron from the Micra’s trunk.

The gym was empty save for an old guy on a treadmill plodding along like a prisoner on the Bataan death march. Paul took the tire iron to the locked drawer behind the front desk. He filled his pockets with Deca, HGH, two 500-count jars of Dianabol. He was amused to find that the drawer also held Polaroids of Stacey in naked bodybuilding poses. He sported a boner in one shot: the thing looked like a whippet’s backbone. Paul emptied out his locker and departed Jammer’s for the last time.

Back in the Micra he wiped his face with fast-food napkins; red paint was still grimed into the creases at his eyes. He gobbled a handful of Dianabol and a live-wire jolt thundered up his spine. His skin was yellow and tight and infested with a bone-deep itch, as if his skeletal system were constructed of pink fiberglass insulation.

He drove down Geneva to Queenston then on to Glendale past a stretch of shipyards.

He got the little car up to eighty, sparks hopping off the muffler like flaming crickets. Popping the cap off an HGH syrette and plunging it into the hard-packed muscles of his trapezium, he wondered if he’d shot himself with quality fetal brain tissue or run-of-the-mill cadaver.

Had he killed that guy? The silly fucker who shot him — was he dead? Paul pictured the Einstein on the frosty earth with that fucking shrub growing up out of his face. Had he been breathing? Probably. Human organisms are tough and it’s hard for them to die. He tried to concentrate — had the guy’s lungs been pumping, even a little? — but the image dissolved, his mind unraveling in messy loops.

People were jogging and dog-walking along the canal. He thought how easy it would be to skip the curb, accelerate across the greenbelt, slam into one of them. He pictured bodies crumpling over the hood or rupturing under the tires with red goo spewing from mouths and ears and assholes; he saw smashed headlight glass embedded in faces, saw windshield wipers flying at murderous velocity to sever arms and legs.

He was doing sixty-five when he wrenched the wheel and sent the Micra over the curb. His skull hit the roof and the seatbelt cut into his porcine, fluid-filled body.

His target was riding one of those idiotic recumbent bicycles. He wore a shiny metal-flake helmet, royal purple, like the paint job on a custom roadster. Paul figured he’d hit him broadside and crush him against a dock pillar, or else clip his wheel and launch him into the ice-cold sky, a flailing purple mortar crashing through the canal ice. The Micra shimmy-shook as he gunned it over the greenbelt; a tree branch tore the side-view mirror off. The cyclist caught sight of the car barreling down and pumped his pedals as if to outrun it. Paul had a hearty laugh — what bravado!

He slewed onto the pedestrian footpath, his heart palpitating madly. He popped an ampule of Deca-Durabolin into his mouth, crushed the light-bulb-thin glass between his molars, and swallowed it all down.

An old man was seated on a bench scattering bread crusts to pigeons; his eyes became cavernous white Os at the sight of the onrushing car. Paul considered grazing the bench, severing his legs at the knees, but the old man didn’t deserve it half so much as the cyclist so he swerved through the pigeons instead and had to admire their reluctance to pass up a free meal, even in the face of death; their gluttonous shapes bounded over the hood leaving blood and shards of pigeon skull on the windshield. One bird’s beak got jammed in the windshield-wiper arm — its body sailed over the roof but its knotted rag of a head, with its calcified beak and diseased eyes, that stayed put. This unsettled the hell out of Paul; he flicked the wipers but the damn thing just flapped side to side across the glass.

The cyclist glanced over his shoulder and saw Paul twenty yards back; his legs were pumping like a pair of sewing machine needles. Paul checked the speedometer, saw he was doing nearly forty klicks, and felt grudging respect. He pictured himself in a courtroom, defending his actions to a powder-wigged judge. Mitigating circumstances, your honor: not only was the deceased riding a recumbent bicycle, but let the record show he also wore a fruity purple helmet. He inched up on the bike tire, close enough to see the cyclist’s terrified reflection in the bike’s rearview mirror — Y our honor, he had a rearview mirror bolted to the handlebars! I throw myself upon the mercy of the court!

Paul was charged up, galvanic, rocket fuel coursing through his veins, but at the last possible instant he jerked the wheel and the Micra went skipping back across the greenbelt, the front bumper clipping a trash can and sending the car into an unchecked swoon. His head cracked the dashboard and stars, whole constellations, blossomed before his eyes as the car spun across the frictionless grass, one revolution, two, three, then he was back on the street as the windshield filled with the blaze of oncoming headlights, tires screeching, horns bleating, and Paul, still woozy, hit the gas and cut across lanes into the parking lot of an insurance broker, mercifully closed. He lay draped over the wheel until he heard angry voices nearby and veered onto the street again.

In a supermarket now, pushing a shopping cart down the aisles. The industrial halogens stung his eyes. In the produce section he picked a ripe peach, took a bite and grinned as sweet nectar dribbled down his chin.

He bagged up a dozen tomatoes then swung down the next aisle and picked up six cartons of extra large Omega 3 eggs. He spied a pack of firecrackers in the discount bin and chucked it in the cart.

He passed down the household gadgets aisle. He saw the Remington Fuzz Away; phone attachments with 200-number autodial memories; something called the Racquet Zapper, an electric flyswatter that promised to make “pest control a zap.” It was funny, Paul thought, how we do it to ourselves. He thought of all the inventions over the past fifty years and figured ninety-nine percent were of the “quality of life” variety. Inventions to make life easier, lighten the roughness of existence — as if an electric flyswatter could somehow ease the stress of daily life. So now everyone’s got a houseful of these dopey gadgets, mountains of cheap plastic and wiring, and can’t possibly live without their juicers and pepperballs and hands-free phone sets and — he scanned the shelves restlessly — yes, their cordless Black and Decker Scumbuster 300s, couldn’t visualize life before any of them — god, how did the pioneers manage it? — when all they really did was make everyone weaker, more reliant, less able to do for themselves until they were nothing but puddles of mush.

“Remember your own damn phone numbers,” he muttered. “Roll up a newspaper to swat at flies,” his voice rising. “Pick lint off your fucking sweater with your fingers?’ he screamed.

In line at the checkout he scanned newspaper headlines. The Weekly World News’ stop headline read: cloned hitler turns seven years old! The Toronto Star’s seemed equally absurd: shot in thedark: blind students treated to deer hunting trip. He felt much calmer now, having settled on a plan of attack.

The cashier eyed his purchases skeptically. “Looks like you’ve got an evening all planned out.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “I’m baking a pie.”