Craig Davidson - The Fighter

A thump; a strangled yelp. The back tire skipped ever so slightly, then settled.

He got out in time to see a little dog running frantic circles around its own head, which had been flattened under the Micra’s rear wheel. A teacup Chihuahua; it must’ve gotten under the car while Paul and the cop were talking.

He knelt on the street and looked around for its owner. The dog’s legs got tangled up and its body tumbled over its own head in a maneuver circus acrobats call a “flic flac” and stayed that way.

The streetlamp’s acid glow was stark, merciless. The dog was mangy-looking, with clumps of hair falling off; maybe it had been abandoned, maybe they weren’t hot fashion items anymore. Its head was intact only in the way a light bulb wrapped in layers of masking tape before being stepped on could be considered intact.

The dog’s eyes were closed; what looked like burst bath beads were pinched between each eyelid. A quivering red worm poked from the soft beige skin of its pelvis.

Paul’s guilt curdled into rage when no owner appeared: what sort of asshole lets his little dog run around unattended? Rage soured into fear: what was he going to do? He sat there in his sheath of muscles wondering what the hell any of it mattered because he still felt terrified, weak, and worthless — he didn’t even know what to do about a dead dog.

The dog’s body was as loose and warm as a boiled hen, its legs Tinker Toys wrapped in moleskin. He pulled gently but realized that if he pulled much harder he’d disconnect its head from the rest of it. Hunting through the trunk, he found an ice scraper and tried to lift it off the cement, but he was crying by then and the chest hitches made him so clumsy he ended up folding the dog’s muzzle over its eyes, folding the poor thing’s head like an omelet, and the desecration reduced him to racking sobs and his tears, pattering the cold street, were yellow like his skin, yellow from the poisons he’d shoveled into himself, the mashed-up fetal brains funneled into his veins, and then he realized he had nothing to put the dog into and found himself back in the car hunting under the seats until he located a crumpled Burger King bag.

He returned to the dog, which he’d managed to scrape up without further damage. He dropped it in the bag and felt a sadness that bordered on the existential to discover that a dog’s body could actually fit in a paper bag.

The Chihuahua’s collar lay on the street. Pink, no thicker than a shoestring. One of the tags, shaped like a bone, read killer.

Another one said if i am lost, please return me to… followed by an address. He stared at the address for a long time before hurling the leash into the bordering yard. He rolled the bag closed like a sack lunch and set it on the passenger seat.

Ten minutes later he was in the country. No streetlights, one headlight busted: he hurtled through the night in near-total blackness. Fruit fields rushed past as the car bounced along a corduroy road, wind howling through the windows and his mind out of sync, destination forgotten until like a desert heat-shimmer the winery appeared, dozens of security lamps fighting off the darkness. He sped through the parking lot and hit a speed bump and the muffler finally tore loose as the car crashed through a chain-link gate in a spray of blue sparks and shot into the grape fields, flying between the tight rows as a re-energized Paul Harris sang over the un-mufflered roar of the engine until an irrigation pipe rose up and he had just enough time to picture himself on a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of him before he hit the pipe dead-on, his body thrown against the windshield.

He came to dazed but remarkably unhurt. The windshield was smashed, webbed, but still of one piece. A wave of cold nausea rolled through his chest and he jerked forward and vomited between his legs. The crash jarred the tape from the cassette player; silence except for a slow hiss of steam from the rad.

The door was crimped shut. Paul wiped strings of bile swinging from his lips, grabbed the tire iron and paper bag, and clambered out the window.

A clean, still night, dark though he could still make out the contours of the fringing hills. The Micra’s hood was crushed halfway down the middle. The headlights nearly faced each other.

From summer through early fall the pickers bunked in shacks on the easternmost edge of the fields. Small and spare — they reminded Paul of Boy Scout cabins. He made his way to the nearest one and used the tire iron to pry the padlock off.

Meticulously winterized: mattresses wrapped in tarps, the stove’s flue tightly stoppered.

He stoked a fire in the potbellied stove. The pickers had left a box of canned food behind; Paul brushed away mouse turds and found a tin of sardines. His hands were grimed with blood and dog fur but he shoveled the fish into his mouth and licked the oil off his fingers. God, he’d never tasted anything so good. The warmth awakened pain he hadn’t felt all night. Shoulders and arms and neck: every part of him ached.

The shack creaked as fire-heat flexed the joists. He relished the isolation, miles and miles from another human being. He sensed he was on a collision course, though with whom or what he didn’t yet know. There was no doubt about it.

Something was approaching. The tracks he stood on vibrated with the force of it, yet he was powerless to move so much as a step.

He stirred the fire and set the paper bag on a bed of embers and shut the grate.

The shack filled with the stink of burning hair. Sizzlings and spatterings; a sharp pop.

Paul lay on the planks and shut his eyes.

He dreams he is in a cave with another man. There is a sense of being miles underground; above is a vast and empty darkness. He sits on a wooden chair, lashed at the wrists and ankles with copper wire. The other man is huge, three hundred fifty, four hundred pounds, not fat but thick-gutted; he’s wearing a rubberized butcher’s apron and a belt hung with delicate tools like dentist’s instruments.

He dances forward awkwardly, as though he isn’t in control of his own limbs; the effect is shocking and awful because he is so large. “Are you scared?” The pitch of his voice is breathy, babyish. Paul says no and so the man plucks a sharp tool from his belt and reaches two fat sluglike fingers into Paul’s mouth, taking hold of his tongue, and Paul bites the man’s fingers only to find they’re hard as wood, then the tool is in his mouth, the taste of metal at the back of his throat, and his tongue is severed deftly and the man stares at it with fleeting curiosity before casting it into the darkness.

“Are you scared?” he asks. “Oo,” says Paul. The man looks confused or even scared but he reaches to his belt and picks a long steel rod and, setting a hand on the side of Paul’s head to steady it, pushes the rod into Paul’s ear until a stereophonic crunch fills his skull, followed by silence. He does the other ear, too, until Paul can hear only a soft hiss inside his head, the sound you’d hear on a cassette tape between songs. The man’s lips move: Are you scared? Paul shakes his head. The big man’s look of confusion deepens as he unhooks a walnut-handled meat cleaver from his belt and hacks Paul’s legs off with a few brisk strokes, sawing through strings of gristle, and there’s no blood, not a single drop. The insides of Paul’s thighs are full of dark coils, like age rings on a tree. Are you scared? Paul says he is not — and he is not, none of this scares him — and when the man shakes his head Paul sees there are filament-thin strings attached to the man’s skull and arms and legs, to his fingers and every joint, strings threading up into the darkness, and the man is moving under their influence like a marionette in a dumb show. With a tool like a sharpened spoon he slits the skin around Paul’s eyes and draws Paul’s head down until his eyes fall from their sockets and Paul feels something for the first time — a bracing icy coldness all along his optic nerves — and just before the man snips the nerves with a pair of silver scissors Paul sees his own fingers, sees the thin black threads tied around each fingertip moving the huge man to his bidding. The world goes black and though he cannot see the man’s mouth he knows what words are being spoken because he is making the man say them, and his answer is unflinching: No, No, No, No, No…