Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Old Rob saw his younger version’s left index finger was as yet unscarred.

“Oops. Let the cat out of the bag, didn’t I? Stupid, stupid me.”

“Please, stop saying that.”

A pained expression came over Old Rob’s face. “I’m sorry — I mean, I’ll stop.” He reached out to touch Rob, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to. “You look so good. Strong, you know? And all that hair.”

“You look good, too.”

“You’re not just saying it?” Old Rob was pleased. “I like to keep myself in the mix.”

“You’re still fighting?”

“Not professionally.” He touched the side of his right eye. “Detached retina. First time my sight came back; second time, too. Third time…” He shrugged. “My license got revoked, but I found other places.”

“I don’t want to know about them,” Rob said.

Old Rob wiped away the ring of condensation left by the glass. He was so goddamn servile. “No saying you have to,” he said. “Maybe this life, my life, isn’t yours.”

“I hope not.”

His older self got that pained look again; he wrung the rag out and folded it into a neat square. “The fight’s a tough thing to leave behind.” His shrug indicated that this was not an excuse, this was the plain fact of it.

“They say every fighter dies twice: once when he takes his last breath, the other when he hangs up the leathers. And that first death — that’s the bitch.”

“But,” Rob said, “I don’t like fighting.”

“You get to like it.” Old Rob smiled in a confused way. “Smart too late and old too soon, huh? Everything passes so quickly.”

The telephone woke him up. Probably his father, calling from Top Rank wondering why he was late for training. But Rob hadn’t really trained for weeks. Not since Tommy.

He threw on sweats, grabbed his jacket, and set off down the street. A machine-gun wind hammered his body. He did not know where he was headed: an aimless trajectory through deadeningly familiar streets, no terminus or friendly port of call. All he saw were the hard, unflinching angles of a city he now wandered as a stranger. A sense of unremitting hopelessness descended upon him. The realization that other families suffered tragedies on such a scale as to reduce the sufferings of his own to a pitiful dot did nothing to allay his sense that a cosmic injustice had been perpetrated. His family asked for so little: a little house, a little money, a little respect, a little, ordinary life huddled together as an odd but workable unit.

Others had so much. Their wants were modest. Was it too much to ask?

He wound up at Kate’s house. Seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, the neighborhood still asleep. He packed a snowball and hurled it at the transformer box bolted to a power pole.

“Tully?”

Kate’s head occurred in a second-floor window. “Jeez, Rob…”

“Did I wake you?”

“I was awake,” she lied. “Everything all right?”

“Copacetic.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

She came out wearing her powder-blue shell and unlaced boots. Crumbs of sleep in the corners of her eyes; a tuft of hair sticking straight out like a unicorn horn. “Fine morning for a walk.”

They moved together down Niagara Street. A fire burned somewhere to the north: columns of blue-gray smoke rose over the flat shop roofs. Kate hummed a tune under her breath — high, peppy notes — and kicked pebbles from her path.

“How’s your pops doing?”

“Tommy’s coverage isn’t great, so Dad’s battling the insurance company. But it’s not like they can pull the plug, can they?”

“No,” said Kate. “That would be unethical, or something.”

They passed Loughran’s Park. Rob and Kate used to come here with Tommy when they were kids. Tommy would sit on the benches with the housewives while Rob and Kate played. He became a park fixture, an ox of a man with his smiling crumpled face. The housewives tried to teach him to knit, but his hands were huge and scarred and he never did get the hang of it.

“I met him,” Rob said.

“Who’s that?”

“At the hospital. I caught him visiting Tommy.”

“Why was he there?”

“Felt guilty, I would say.”

“Well, sure. Two guys in a ring, neither expects it to turn out that way.” Kate puffed air into her cupped palms. “Big guy?”

Rob was too embarrassed on Tommy’s behalf to give a truthful description: the raggedness, the toothlessness. “Big guy,” he said.

“Very rough-looking.”

“Tommy never should’ve been there,” Kate said. “Or your dad. It was a stupid thing to be mixed up in.”

“Boxing’s all Tommy’s ever known. It’s what my family’s always done.”

They crossed a baseball diamond. Rob stepped in old boot tracks pressed into the cold mud, idly wondering if he knew the person who made them.

“My father,” Kate said, “was a big asshole. That’s how Mom refers to him — The Big Asshole. Steps out for cigarettes one day when I’m three days old and never comes back. Talk about your abandonment clichés. He was a selfish man — but in a way it took guts to do what he did. Leave it all and never look back. Step out into the world with nothing. Of course, it was cowardly, too — walking away from his wife and kid, leaving us in the lurch. I don’t know… cowardly and gutsy at once, if that makes any sense.”

Rob gave a long sigh and looked away from her.

“You don’t even like boxing,” she went on. “Not like that’s any secret.

Your greatest problem stems from your not going after what you really want in life.”

“And so what?” Rob felt himself getting tight inside; iron bands clapped around his skull and rocks started growing in his chest. “Who loves their job — who has that luxury? You think my dad likes hauling his ass out of bed at two a.m. to bake bread, or your mom loves clipping the stems off marigolds, or Tommy loved driving a forklift? No, they do it because it’s their duty and you don’t shirk that. Everyone has obligations; why should I be above that?”

“Yeah, but whose obligations?” She stopped and looked at him. “For a tough guy, you sure let yourself get shoved around a lot.”

The whole point wasn’t worth arguing, especially with Kate, who had honed her skills on the school debate squad. Still, he couldn’t quite let go. “At some point you need to start being sensible about things. Take an adult frame of mind. Stop writing poetry and hunting up and down a beach with a metal detector.”

“At least Darren has dreams and they’re his own. His mom’s a toll-taker but he feels no need to be one himself.”

“Let’s drop it—”

“You want out of here as bad as he does.”

“Maybe so,” Rob said. “But how can you escape without a plan that makes any sense? Boxing makes sense. I can make it work.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s not your own plan.”

Rob lacked the energy to go on with this, and besides, he knew she was right.

“You’ll make a great boxer,” she told him, “whether you want to be or not. We all know that.” She paused, then added, “But it takes guts to step away from the safety of the world you grew up in. I’m not saying the life you leave has to be a bad one — maybe it’s just not right for you, personally. Any other way and it’s not really your life, is it? Just the one someone else thinks you ought to be living.”

They rounded back to Kate’s house. They talked about trivial subjects: a spring-break road trip to Daytona Beach, the prom’s lame “Under the Sea” theme.

“Mom and I are stopping by the hospital this afternoon,” said Kate. “Mom’s baking those sugar cookies Tommy loves. She thinks the smell…” She shook her head. “Maybe I’ll see you.”