Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“You’re a dog. A dog isn’t frightened by pain. A dog is frightened by thunder and fireworks and the vacuum cleaner, all the things its tiny brain can’t quite comprehend. But a dog — and I’m talking a real dog, here — is not the least bit frightened of pain. So: fight like a dog.”

Paul considered this man closely. He looked as though, in some former life, he might have been a doctor or a professor. Paul felt like he’d seen him before, somewhere.

“Makes my dick hard.” The fighter gestured to his jeans, the rigid outline of his cock swelling the denim halfway down his thigh. “It’s the anticipation.”

Paul had no response to this — he was fairly certain the guy wasn’t looking for one.

And he was utterly certain he’d rather not fight the bastard.

Lou returned. “You’re on as an alternate. But we should get your hands wrapped in case it turns out you’re called in.”

Reuben looped bandages over and around, pressing gently the oft-broken bones of his brother’s huge hands. Tape next, over and around, a thick encasing layer. How many times had they done this together, in preparation for training, sparring, title fights? A few thousand, surely. The act held an underlying ease, a familiarity: their heads bent and almost touching, they resembled lovers sharing some sweet intimacy.

Reuben scanned the barn. The dark peripheries hosted seventy or eighty spectators.

Fritzie Zivic stood beside a withered ancient in a wheelchair; Murdoch was chewing the codger’s slippers off his senseless feet. Reuben nudged his brother.

“Look who’s here.”

Tommy followed his gaze and saw Garth Briscoe sitting beside a young guy. Garth was wearing a pair of boxy glasses and looked repulsive; he rocked back and forth like someone suffering a neural disorder — as could be the case.

“Huh,” said Reuben. “Least he’s alive.”

“Take a break, Ruby. You don’t have to be a prick every day of your life.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” he admitted. “I always liked Garth; everyone liked him, till he went off the rails. But what does it say that you and him are in the same place?”

“Ruby…”

“All right, forget it, I’m laying off. You ready?”

Tommy punched himself under the jaw. “Time to make the donuts.”

Manning singled out Tom and Paul for the evening’s fourth bout. He recalled the rough time Tommy had had with the Kilbride kid and thought he’d throw the old warhorse a bone.

“Well?”

Lou asked Paul. “What do you figure?”

“God, that’s one big slab of humanity.”

Lou acknowledged this was so, but said, “Often the worst you ever absorb is one good punch: the one that knocks you cold. Most guys find it hard to keep hitting a man who’s gone unconscious — the skin goes slack, no tension to it, like punching a gutted fish. I’ve found there is an innately human resistance to such violence.”

The glasses-wearing schizo overheard Lou and said, “That guy’s a pro, too — he won’t hit you any more than he needs to.”

“Listen to Garth here,” Lou said. “He’s been around.”

The schizo gave Lou a smile so grateful it was sickening. Only then did Paul realize where he’d seen him before: that first day at Lou’s gym, the beaten fighter who’d shambled in to take a few licks at the heavy-bag before Lou stopped him. Ease down, Garth, he remembered Lou saying. You did good last night. Real good.

“So,” Lou asked, “are we on?”

Not long ago, the prospect of fighting a man like Tommy would have made his bowels quiver. Tommy was huge and scarred and looked exactly what he was: a tough veteran fighter in the Thunderbird Layne mold. But when Paul searched the place in his heart where stark fear once held court, he found the court was empty.

“I want to fight him,” he told Lou. “I do.”

They met in a circle of stacked bales. No headgear, no mouthshields or gloves. Paul felt his heart as a discrete presence in his chest.

Tommy considered the guy: young, not a whole lot older than Robbie. But a lot of his youth had been sucked out. He looked like the lone survivor of a nuclear Armageddon: missing teeth and acne scars and worst of all the haunted look Tommy had seen in far too many fighters.

A true fighter’s handshake was always soft. Perhaps this was because their hands were tender after months of punching bags and mitts and opponents. Or perhaps, after doing so much damage in the ring, they possessed not the slightest desire to do any damage outside of it — even so much as may be delivered through a stern handshake.

Paul and Tommy shook hands very, very softly.

“I’m sorry for what comes next,” Paul said.

“What do you got to be sorry for?” Tommy chucked Paul on the shoulder. His smile was somehow ashamed. “I’ll take it easy on you.”

“Please don’t.”

The first punch struck Paul in the shoulder. There was no oomph to it: were it possible to throw a well-intentioned punch, Tommy had done so.

But it was enough to unbalance him and he stumbled back, then rocked forward into Tommy’s chest. Tommy leaned on Paul, a forearm on the back of Paul’s neck forcing his head down and making it tough to draw breath. Paul was staring at his own belly button while the huge fucker hammered at his ribs — not too hard, just enough so he’d feel it. He felt his ribs shrink around his lungs, the staccato thump of his heart, the sensation of being closer to his body than he’d ever known.

Tommy’s forearm slipped off Paul’s neck. Paul reared up and lanced a right hand at his head; Tommy angled away and the blow hit the side of his throat, his own right hand rising between Paul’s arms to catch him under the chin. Pain blossomed inside Paul’s skull, not a flower but gardens of the stuff, a pain like searing-hot rivets sprinkled on his scalp.

Tommy was stunned when the guy didn’t go down. That Kilbride kid would have broken to pieces but this guy just smiled, blood climbing the cracks between his teeth.

He’s infected, Tommy thought, same way poor Garth Briscoe is infected.

Paul swung and missed, then Tommy hit him with an anvil fist. Tears flooded Paul’s eyes as a sharp note of pain danced across his face and hit the center of his brain. He was hit again, harder than he’d ever been hit before: nose compacting, capillaries bursting. The world went red and Paul fell through that redness as though in a dream. The floor rushed up to meet him. He watched a dark spot of his own blood shape itself into a fan, then a butterfly, glistening and soaking into the ripples and knots of the floorboards.

The bell rang.

Paul staggered to his corner like a man on a three-day drinking binge. He was grinning.

Lou helped him onto the stool. Paul’s face was like something Goya might’ve signed his name to: Neanderthal-like swelling above his brows and one tooth jarred from his gums, suspended on a strip of skin.

“Hold on.” Lou reached into Paul’s mouth and, with a vicious twist, yanked the tooth out. “Swallow more than a pint and you’ll be sick,” he said as blood gushed into Paul’s mouth. “What the hell — not like you’re liable to grow another set, right?”

He used ferric sulfate to cauterize the bloody hole in Paul’s mouth. Paul swallowed convulsively, the acid scorching his esophagus.