Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Barb was weeping now, sniffling and holding her head.

“I thought…” Her chest hitched. “Thought maybe…”

“Hey, calm down.” He laughed a little — getting over the initial shock, he saw it was the craziest, most impetuous thing his mother had done in years. He was oddly touched.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

He stifled another chuckle. “It’s nice, really. A very… nice gesture.”

But his mom was not to be consoled. Tears turned to sobs. She sat on the bed, rocking.

“Oh, come on. Really, I love them. Look.”

He selected a tooth — an incisor by the looks of it — and jammed the pointy root ends into a gap in his gum line. The prongs pierced the soft skin; Paul shoved hard with the pad of his thumb, socking it into the pocket of flesh. It looked like a fang.

“See?”

he said. “Peachy. Good as new.”

He grabbed another tooth — a canine? — grasped firmly, and drove it into his lower gums. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror: the tooth, large and brown as a Spanish peanut, jutted from his mouth at a coarse angle. This one looked like a tusk.

“I vant to suck your BLOOD!” he bellowed in his best Nosferatu accent. “Blah! Blah! Blaaaaaah !”

Paul collapsed into uncontrollable giggles with blood bubbling over his lips. He found the whole scene uproariously funny.

He wiped tears from his eyes. Barb regarded him with an expression of stunned, horrified awe. The room was silent save the pitty-pat of blood on the floorboards.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought maybe…”

But Barb was already up, running to the door and slamming it behind her. Paul heard her stockinged feet thumping down the staircase, ungainly in flight.

He spat another mouthful of blood and wiped his lips on the pillowcase. On the dresser sat a framed photo of himself on the afternoon of his high school graduation. He smiled under his mortarboard, as did his folks on either side of him. Paul struggled to recall himself at that age, that boy’s dreams and needs and fears. He wondered how his then-self might’ve reacted had his now-self shown up on that sunny afternoon years ago, crashed the graduation ceremony all cut and bruised and bloody. Would then-Paul have been sickened and ashamed — or fascinated? Perhaps he would’ve viewed his future self as a different species of creature altogether, one whose life bore no resemblance to his own.

Paul waited while the whore — her name, she said, was Adele — paid for the room. The A-l-Motel: owing to a string of dead neon, the marquee read simply a motel. Niagara Falls, the red-light corridor. Streetlights along the quay cast their brightness upon the frozen Niagara River, a blue-gray sheet stretching to the rocky escarpment of New York State.

He lacked any clear recollection of how he’d gotten here. He’d borrowed five hundred dollars from his father’s dresser before leaving the house, but since he had no means or intention of repaying it, stolen was the more accurate term.

Adele came out dangling a key from its plastic diamond-shaped fob. She was young and skinny as a guitar string. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s blade, Lou Cobb might’ve said. She led him up a rusted staircase to a small clean room on the second floor and sat him on the bed.

“I got to say you’re not looking so hot, cowboy.” She drew a circle around her lips. “Your teeth are all shot to hell. Couple of them look too big.”

The teeth his mother had “found” were still lodged in his gums. They didn’t hurt that badly, though to leave them in much longer was to risk infection. “They were a gift.”

“For the man who has everything, huh?” She flipped her hair — a strangely girlish gesture — then squeezed Paul’s crotch. “I’ll go wash up.”

The bathroom door shut. Running water, splashing water. Paul removed his shirt and stood bare-chested before the window, considering the reflection of his body.

The flesh over his ribcage was an ugly bluish-yellow mottle. It still hurt to breathe.

The name of the man who’d done this damage was Tom Tully; Lou had given him the name after much prodding. An ex-pro boxer. He and his brother shared a small house in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls. Tom Tully was at Mount St.

Mary’s hospital, comatose fifteen days now.

Paul often thought about Tom Tully. What sort of person was he? He’d visited the local library archives and hunted through old Ring magazines.

He’d dredged up an article: sammy “night train” layne & tommy “boom boom” tully setto tango on holmes/cooney under-card at msg. A photo: Tully looking impossibly hale beside a cigar-chomping manager. A trial horse, the scouting report said. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.

For the past few days Paul had taken a cab over the river. He idled across the road from the row house off 16th Street. Everyone looked so different. Nobody wore suits or carried briefcases. Everyone took the bus. Though a mere forty miles separated Paul from his childhood home, the distance seemed much greater. Paul Harris and Tom Tully — he wondered, were their lives in any way similar? The prospect gnawed. If they’d met outside the ring, somehow by chance, might they have been friends? Paul remembered the bigger man saying he’d take it easy on Paul. He remembered Tully’s awkward, shamed smile.

A trial horse. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.

The whore, Adele, was singing. A sweet voice. She stepped into the room with a towel wrapped around her head and another draping her body.

“So,” she said. “Ready to rock and roll?”

Paul realized, somewhat abruptly, that he had no desire to fuck this girl. He wondered if he could ask her to get dressed and leave so he could catch a few hours’ sleep.

Adele stared at Paul, fascinated with his body: the lumps and abrasions and bruises.

She leaned back on the mattress, a slatternly pose, running her bare feet over the puke-green shag. Paul retrieved his handwraps from a coat pocket and sat beside her.

“Give me your hand.”

Gently, the way he’d been taught, he wrapped this whore’s hand. Holding firm her wrist, he felt the birdlike bones pulse under her skin. The wraps were filthy, stinking of sweat and blood. Adele didn’t seem to mind. Paul worked slowly, applying gentle pressure, testing his handiwork. Again he was struck by just how young she was: the rosy, fresh-scrubbed complexion of a high school girl.

He considered asking her to leave — but perhaps her being with him tonight was the lesser of so many possible evils.

“What’s your name?”

“Rex,” Paul told her. “Rex Appleby.”

Adele offered him a soft smile. “And what do you do, Rex?”

“I’m the last good cop on the force. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire… Rex Appleby.”

When Adele’s hands were wrapped, Paul set them back in her lap. He knew he wanted something from her — not sex, not comfort or intimacy, any of that. Contact, was all. Not loving contact, or even professional tenderness. Something more forceful that would leave him scarred.

He heeled off his shoes, unbuttoned his jeans and shucked them. He removed his underwear and stood before her naked.

“You sure got a big dick.”

Paul knew she was lying: his cock was a runty wrinkled thing sunk so deep into his crotch it almost looked like a second belly button. She was no different from the stylist who runs her hands through a balding customer’s hair and remarks how lustrous it is.