Craig Davidson - The Fighter

The rough adhesive on Rob’s fists left slashing burns on Paxil’s face. Rob wondered why he kept smiling. Or not a smile, exactly: an oddly blissed-out expression, as though he were in the midst of a pleasantly confusing dream.

The smell of cowshit and sawdust sweated up from the floorboards as Paul’s face swelled under Rob’s relentless assault. Blood vessels burst under the pressure of skin slamming bone, blood pumping from ruptured veins to collect in pouches like hard-boiled eggs inserted under his skin, erupting like oversize blisters under Rob’s fists. Paul tottered, he wove and stumbled, he refused to go down.

He threw punches blindly, not seeing Rob anymore, throwing for the doubtful possibility of contact or perhaps the sheer joy of it.

Rob only wanted Paul to go down and stay there. His hands were covered in blood and he didn’t know whether it was his own knuckles splitting and bleeding or if the blood was all Paul’s.

Voices in the crowd:

… never seen the likes of it…

…scrawny faggot’s gonna need a casket before long…

… drop that chickenhead, man! He’s neck-deep in hurt …

They collided in the middle of the ring and stood toe to toe, just winging. Paul felt like a man facing a barrage of rocks soaked in kerosene and lit on fire.

Rob finished with a vicious right hook that sent Paul down onto a bale. Brittle straw puffed up from under him and the bell rang while he struggled to find his feet.

Lou had never seen a face like it. A Sunday matinee horror show.

Paul’s lips were split so deep down the middle they were like four lips instead of two, the pink meat drooping in rags. Eyebrows broke open over the high ridge of bone, wounds so wide it was as though a pair of tiny toothless mouths were leering through the bristly hairs. One eye puffed completely shut, a fleshy ball the size of a baby’s fist.

How long had the round lasted: three minutes, three and a half? So little time, really, for such a sickening transformation.

“Paul,” Lou said carefully. “You need to listen to me. You can’t go on fighting this way. Let me clean you up a bit, at least.”

Lou wet a towel and wiped. When Paul’s face was clean Lou saw it was hopeless: the cuts were too deep, too long, too numerous. Adrenaline chloride wouldn’t do it, ferric acid wouldn’t do it, a goddamn staple gun wouldn’t do it. He could debride the deepest ones and razor the puffed flesh around that eyeball to give him some relief, but why bother? The kid didn’t want to be helped.

“How do I look?”

Lou said he looked like an elephant had shit him out sideways. “And you’re gonna lose the fight to boot. No other way this ends.”

In a voice so low Lou had to strain to hear, Paul said, “And you think I didn’t know that from the start?”

Fritzie yanked Rob’s trunks open and splashed cold water over his groin. Rob saw all the sweaty, booze-flushed faces standing like flowers in morbid arrangements and behind those faces the fighters waiting in pockets of shadow, their bodies shivering with terror or anticipation, and beyond them the discolored barn walls rising to a rotting roof through which he glimpsed the vaulted emptiness of the night sky.

“Just go in there and put him away, quick,” said Fritzie.

“I hit him as hard as I’ve ever hit anybody. He’s not going away.”

“Then hit him harder.”

Rob gazed across the ring. Paul stared back. Rob was repulsed by the damage he’d inflicted. Paul smiled — a gruesome sight — and his eyelid closed over his working eye: a wink.

For a moment Rob thought Paul had been blinking blood out of his eye, but no: a wink.

The revelation was startling in its clarity: none of this had been about Tommy, or about him, and never had been — this was something else entirely. Tommy lay on a hospital bed, fighting for his life — and why? To afford this guy a means of restoring some semblance of purpose to his pitiful fucked-up life. Fury settled, a small black stone behind Rob’s eyes. Spoiled selfish brat, winking at him. Spoiled selfish brat with his purposeless, futile, fucked-up life.

“Cut the tape off my hands,” Rob told Fritzie.

“Why the hell you want that?”

“Because I want to feel it.”

I’ll kill him. The notion arose from nowhere. It’s what he wants. So give it to him.

“He wants to feel it, too. I owe him that.”

“You don’t owe this guy a thing.”

“No,” Rob said softly, “I owe him that.”

When the bell rang for the third round, Paul was thinking about his last vacation.

He and a few university friends had stayed at a five-star resort outside Havana.

They’d lain on the beach drinking mojitos served by nut-brown cabana boys, laughing at their silly white outfits that made them look like plantation butlers. At night they’d gone to discotheques and hit upon the local women, pinching asses or grabbing tits until one reared upon Paul and slapped his face, but he’d only laughed thinking the sting on his cheek would be gone the next morning but her life would unfold in the same sad unremitting pattern until one day she died. He thought of such episodes, the indulgence and cruelty and extravagance and wastefulness. It seemed his whole life was a patchwork of similar events, one callous escapade stitched onto the next. He did not know how to make amends for any of it, to balance the karmic scales — was it possible? But the throbbing ache of his hands, the swollen fiery confusion of his face: this was good. If a man were to give enough, suffer enough — maybe. And so he craved this pain, the knowledge and atonement only pain could bestow, particular, intimate, and entirely personal, that pain washing over him, washing away his every wrong.

The next punch struck him square in the face and skidded him back on his heels. He took a knee, balancing on his knuckles; then, with a great shuddering breath, he stumbled in Rob’s direction again.

He swung and missed as another blow spiked the knot of nerves where his jawbone met his skull and shocked the upper left half of his body into mute numbness.

Another blow, then another and another, so fast his body could register the pain only after the fact, the way you’ll hear the crash of thunder moments after lightning has split the sky. He took a murderous shot in the gut and his bowels let go with a mordant note like the groan of a ship’s hull. “You reeking prick!” someone yelled and Paul was surprised at how quickly he’d moved beyond frustration or shame…

…as Rob’s rage built, cyclical and combustive, firing like the pistons of a supercharged engine. The thing facing him was nothing but a bag of skin and bone and gristle and blood and Rob wanted to inflict as much damage upon it as was humanly possible — as was inhumanly possible — smash and bash and crush and wreck until nothing of value remained.

The sack of meat shambled forward. Rob rained blows upon it. The air shimmered with blood. A few spectators looked away…

Paul came on awkwardly. Equilibrium shot, he moved as though his knees and hips were packed with rusted ball bearings. He couldn’t tell if he was smiling.

He sort of hoped he was.

Rob’s fist found his jaw and a cherry bomb exploded in the tin cup of Paul’s skull.

Warmth ran down the inside of his leg and he had no idea what it was but still it was oddly comforting. He was hit again and orange lights burned like sunspots before his eyes, initiating wild riots in his head until one of these spots mushroomed, bright as an A-bomb, blinding and beautiful and so incredibly alive and as he fell a claustrophobic blackness replaced that light, the airless dark of a deep sea cavern, then he came to on a bale of hay with spring stars shining through holes in the barn roof.