Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Rob made his way through the crowd to a shadowed corner. A lot of eyes on him: Is that Rob Tully, the top-ranked amateur? He found a hay bale and scanned the fighters. They stood on the fringes, some singly, others with their backers. All of them scarred or disfigured or broken in some way. And their eyes — the newer ones had this look of sheer psychic terror. The older and more mutilated showed no emotion at all: faces a fretwork of scars, eyes blank as a test pattern. Then there were those hovering in the middle ground, neither new nor old: they had the look of men who’d realized their lives were irretrievably lost and they could only await the inevitable passage into the final stage.

Rob unzipped the duffel and removed tape, sponge, and gauze. He’d never actually taped his own hands — his father was always there for that. He ripped off lengths of tape and hung them off his trunks. He centered a strip of sponge on his hand but it kept slipping off his knuckles.

Fritzie materialized from the crowd. “Let me help with that.”

Rob pressed the sponge flat across his knuckles while Fritzie taped. “You go second, Robbie.”

“You’re up second,” Lou told Paul.

Paul held his hands out, palms up. Lou centered Paul’s left hand on his knee, flexed each finger, then began taping.

“Remember me doing this for you the first time you came by the gym?” Lou said.

“Just another silver spooner, I figured. Gave you a week, tops.” He shook his head. “This kid you’re fighting — Robert Tully. Only about the biggest thing to come out of Niagara Falls since. well, forever. He’s also the nephew of the man you knocked silly the last time out.”

“You don’t say.”

“I won’t build castles in the sky for you: godly intervention aside, he’s gonna kick your ass. Tell you another thing — I won’t be throwing in the towel.”

“That’s a good thing, Lou. I’d probably end up killing you, you did that.”

Paul stared at a dark knothole in the floor. He stared at that knothole, that cavelike spiderwebbing knothole, until he fell into it. Inside the knothole all was dark and quiet and calm. Inside he could think. I am a machine, he thought simply. A machine of unforgiving angles and unshakable geometries, titanium and bulletproof glass and ballistic rubber and dead metals. A machine assembled in a work area completely free of human presence, riveted together by preprogrammed robotic arms, altogether unfeeling. Without name or face, lacking a past, lacking dreams or memories. A machine feels no mercy. A machine cannot be broken by fear. I am a machine, he thought over and over, and over and over. A machine a machine machine machine machinemachinemachinemachine—

At some point Lou was saying, “You’re up.”

Two men stood in the center of the ring.

Between them stood Manning. He ran down the rules.

“Fight ends when one man goes down and stays there. One guy’s gotta go down to end the round. Keep it clean — no eye poking or biting. That’s sissy fighting.”

Manning stepped aside. The fighters came together. Their upper bodies were candle-white after the sunless winter months. Paul leaned forward until their faces nearly touched. Rob did not pull away.

Paul said, “I’m really sorry about all this.”

Rob’s first punch — a venomous straight right — struck Paul’s forehead, splitting the flesh between his eyes like the blow from a fifteen-pound hatchet to bring forth blood in needle-thin pulses. Rob saw it in slow motion: his fist rocketing from his chest shoulder-high to pass over his opponent’s guard, the flex of ligament and snap of tendon, impact sending a mild shiver down his arm and the guy’s face opening up, blooming like some bastard weed, a bone-deep trench cut down the middle of his forehead.

Rob watched the guy — his name, he remembered, was Paul — reel back, brain obviously scrambled, eyes wide. His knee had barely touched the pine boards before he was up. He shook his head, red drops flying every which way.

As Paul came on again, if anything, Rob felt vague disappointment: this guy hurt Tommy? Like Fritzie Zivic said: takes one lucky punch. Rob was also puzzled by Paul himself: what drove a man to seek out a place like this, to fight so maniacally, so recklessly — and to what end? They circled. The united voice of the crowd boomed like subterranean thunder beneath their feet. Blood coursed down the sides of Paul’s nose and off his chin. Someone tossed an empty mickey into the ring: it shattered with a glassy tinkle, silver shards sparkling the boards like chipped ice.

They met violently. Rob lashed out with a left hook. Exhibiting more grace than Rob would have credited him with, Paul ducked back and, rooting his left foot like a stump, threw a wicked right cross. The punch slammed Rob’s abdomen above the hip. A flash of white-hot pain exploded in his gut. He backed off, gagging, bile burning his sinuses. His vision was studded with shimmering dots; he retreated jelly-legged as Paul followed up with a crushing right hand, smoking it straight through Rob’s frail defense and smashing his mouth.

A cataclysmic bang filled Rob’s skull, the sound of a.44 Magnum discharged in a broom closet. He felt himself falling, but, as in a dream, was helpless to check himself.

He came to slumped against a hay bale. Dry stalks itched the knobs of his spine.

The soft tissue inside his cheeks was badly cut, pink rags hanging in his mouth. He couldn’t hear anything and for a brief span was gripped with a sickening surety he’d gone deaf.

Then he caught his own shivering exhalations and came to realize that the crowd had gone silent in disbelief. He spat blood and touched his upper front teeth, unsurprised to find them loose in their moorings.

Fritzie helped him up. “Want me to stop it, Robbie?”

“You better not.”

Paul leaned forward on a bale, elbows balanced on knees. His overall demeanor was that of a dog, a fighting dog, pit bull or rottweiler, waiting for his trainer to release the fetters.

Paul waved Lou’s hands away from the forehead wound. “Let it bleed.”

“You’re gushing all over the place. That blood will blind you.”

“I don’t care. Leave it be.”

The crowd was absorbed in funereal silence. Manning’s son swept the busted bottle from the fighting surface.

Paul glanced at the other corner. The kid had regained his senses. He didn’t appear fazed or scared — surprised, was all. Paul came to confront what he’d known all along: he was going to lose this fight, lose it badly. That suited him just fine. It was beyond winning or losing now. It was about the desire and willingness to approach the world with fists raised, always moving forward. To give everything of yourself without hesitation or fear.

Rob came out cautious the following round. His guts ached and broken points of fire danced across his vision, but his legs were steady.

Paul came on like a dervish, throwing hook after hook, lunging after Rob with ungainly strides. Blood ran unchecked down his face, into his eyes and mouth.

Rob snapped left jabs at Paul’s upper arms, driving his knuckles into the solid flesh of the biceps. Paul’s arms dipped and Rob’s fists flashed, jabs peppering Paul’s brows, cheeks, nose. Paul couldn’t protect himself: he might as well try to shield himself against a sniper’s bullets fired from a faraway bell tower.