Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“I’m trying to go easy. But he’s a glutton.”

Reuben soaked Tommy’s head with a wet sponge. “What did you expect? Last time you fought a feeb, now you’re up against a punch Pug”

“Masochist,” Tommy corrected.

“Keep leaning on him. You don’t owe any a these jerks a show.”

“What if he won’t go down?”

“Then you have to make him go down.”

“I might really hurt him.”

“Christ, Tom — how else do you picture this ending?”

It ended thirty-three seconds into the second round. And it ended like this:

Two men warred in a starkly lit ring, the whistle of their fists a death song. Paul experienced a wholly perverse joy in the feel of another man’s hands upon his body — even in violence. Tommy found the soft spot under Paul’s heart with a tricky uppercut; Paul gasped as if a crowbar had been spiked through his chest.

Tommy saw the opening: the kid let his guard fall each time he threw a right hand.

Make it quick, Tommy thought. Make his world go black.

Tommy planted his feet and sat down on a right uppercut that rose from his waist like a Stinger missile shot from a hayfield silo.

The punch missed by an eighth of an inch.

Consider that distance for a moment.

Your own index finger, say. At the base of your nail, where the nail plate meets the nail bed — where nail meets flesh — that whitish half-moon. It’s called the lunula, after the Latin luna meaning moon. The lunula should be no more than an eighth of an inch thick at its broadest point; a little thicker if your nail has been manicured, the cuticle pushed down.

Tommy’s punch missed by a lunula. By a ladybug’s wing. An eighth of an inch. But more crucially it missed by a lifetime, or several. It missed by Tommy’s forty-three years and Reuben’s forty-five, by Paul’s twenty-six and Rob’s sixteen. It missed by all the possibilities that existed in the split-second before it missed and by all that might conceivably have been afterward.

When Tommy’s fist sailed past his chin, Paul stepped away and struck back instinctively. Tommy’s jaw was clenched: the maxillary artery running from tip of skull to base of throat was crimped, blood collecting at his temples.

It was a lucky punch, the sort you’ll see if you watch enough fights. Paul was in the right spot, Tommy the wrong one. The angles worked in Paul’s favor and against Tommy. Everyone in that place knew who was the better fighter; not a single bet had been placed on Paul to win.

A lucky punch, is all. It happens.

Paul felt as though a very small, very ripe grape had burst under his knuckles.

Put it another way:

They say every substance that appears solid is, at its most basic level, not solid at all. Everything is composed of atoms, a nucleus orbited by protons and electrons. Massive distances separate protons and electrons from their nucleus: imagine the moon circling the Earth, or the Earth orbiting the sun, and you get the idea. They say if you remove all those empty spaces and squeeze everything together, the Empire State Building would fit into a teaspoon — a spoonful of pure matter weighing roughly 19,800 tons.

Paul’s punch hit Tommy like the Empire State Building dropped from a teaspoon.

The instant the punch landed, as Tommy’s eyes rolled involuntarily back in his head, Paul wanted to take it all back, as if the punch were an angry word he could revoke. Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean that. They were fighting, yes, trying to knock each other out or force surrender, but the sound of Tommy’s skull hitting the boards — a horrid fracturing noise like a squashed snail — broke whatever spell he’d been under and now Paul could only watch as Tommy tried to stand up but failed miserably, blood coming out his nose as he stared around with a queer disoriented smile. And when Tommy fell, reaching for Paul because he was the only thing to reach for, Paul was there to catch him. He cradled Tommy’s thick stalk of neck, his dense lifeless weight like a sweating sack of cement. Tommy’s head lolled, eyes wide open, tongue jutting past the flat black gumshield.

Seconds later Reuben shoved Paul out of the way and knelt beside his brother. He mopped blood with a towel but there was so goddamn much of it and it wouldn’t stop coming. The sweat on Tommy’s arms was ice-cold and his head looked all wrong; Reuben was sick to his stomach wondering if everything inside was busted and if it was only the unbroken skin holding the works together.

“Call an ambulance!”

“That’s not how it works,” Manning told Reuben. “You take care of your own.”

“Take care of him how?”

“Any way you can.” Manning crossed his arms. “Anywhere but here.”

Seven minutes later Reuben and Tommy were in the backseat of Fritzie Zivic’s Cadillac El Dorado. Zivic’s foot was tromped on the gas pedal and cold night air whistled through seams in the frame. Tommy’s head was wrapped in towels; Reuben had cut holes over the nose and mouth so he could breathe. As the miles clicked off, the towels became redder and redder until Reuben’s lap was soaked.

Six minutes later Tommy was strapped to a gurney wheeled through the Emerg doors at Mount St. Mary’s Catholic hospital. The admitting nurse was Helen Jack — bespectacled Frankie Jack’s youngest daughter. She told Reuben to calm down and tell her what happened.

“Tommy… he fell down a flight of stairs.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Reuben.”

Twenty minutes later, after an X-ray revealed the base of Tommy’s skull to be severely shattered — the medical term an eggshell fracture — the beeper of a Buffalo-area neurosurgeon went off. Tommy received a blood transfusion. The towels were cut from around his head with surgical shears. His eyes stayed open the whole time.

Heart rate: forty beats per minute. Tommy’s HMO coverage was inadequate but Helen Jack was able to hustle the paperwork through.

Thirty-seven minutes later a bonesaw cut a window into Tommy’s forehead. The portion of skull covering his frontal lobe was removed to allow his brain room to swell.

His gray matter turned a creamy shade of pink from oxygen exposure. Tommy’s face remained serene; a vague smile touched his lips. EEG readouts indicated brain function next to nil. Cerebral blood flow a trickle. Neurological activity proportional to a Stage 3 coma victim.

Rob was in his bedroom when the telephone rang. Racing downstairs to the kitchen, he caught it on the fourth ring.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not calling from Macy’s, Rob.”

His father had never called him Rob before. Not once in his life.

A gypsy cab dropped Rob off at St. Mary’s Emerg entrance. Reuben stood shivering under a cone of blue light near the doors.

“What happened?” Rob’s dread was such that he could hardly breathe.

“Tommy—?”

“He’s alive.” The past hours had shrunk Reuben, cored and hollowed him; Rob was afraid to touch his father for fear he’d crumble to dust.

In the Emergency room they sat on orange plastic chairs bolted to the wall. Reuben explained. Rob couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. In his mind’s eye he still saw his uncle as he’d been earlier that evening: shadowboxing the fridge, dancing on the tips of his toes with a loaf of Wonder Bread clasped to his chest. Rob could not conceive of Tommy as he was at this moment: in an operating theater five stories above, strapped to a steel table with a precision window carved in his skull.