Craig Davidson - The Fighter

He cracked the freezer door, relishing the blast of icy air that hit his face. In fact, he liked it so much he stuck his entire head in. Frozen air flowed over the dome of his skull.

He rummaged through the fridge. His mother was on the Caspian Sea Diet. Dieters must subsist upon edibles found in and around the Caspian basin: triggerfish, sea cucumbers, drab kelps, crustaceans. The diet’s creator — a swarthy MD with a face like a dried testicle — cited the uncanny virility of Mediterraneans, evidenced by the fact that many continued to labor as goatherds and pearl divers late into their seventies.

Paul’s search yielded nothing one might squarely define as edible: a quivering block of tofu, a glazy-eyed fish laid out across a chafing dish, what looked to be bean sprouts floating in a bowl of turd-colored water.

He shoved aside jars of Cape Cod capers and tubs of Seaweed Health Jelly.

“What the.. .fuck” He slammed the fridge door. On the kitchen island: Christmas cards.

His mother got cracking on them earlier each year. She sent off hundreds, licking envelopes until her mouth was syrupy with mucilage. The cards were pure white with gold filigree and the raised outline of a bell. A stack of pine-scented annual summations sat beside them: season’s greetings from Harris county!

His own summation read:

Paul is still living at home and we’re so happy to have him, but lately he’s been talking about finding his own place, leaving Jack and I empty nesters.

That was it? A year gone by and all his mother could say was that he was looking for his own place? A cowl of paranoia descended upon him; he considered scribbling something else, a flagrant lie if need be — Paul was voted one of Young Economist’s “Up and Comers Under 30” or Paul recently returned from a whirlwind seven-city business junket or Paul is in talks with Singapore Zoo officials to bring Ling Si , a giant panda, on an exhibition tour of Niagara’s wine region — anything, really, to prove to all the distant aunts and uncles, the unknown business acquaintances and second cousins twice removed, that he was going places.

He headed into the living room. The sofa was white, like the rest of the room and like most of the house. Soothing, artful white. His mother and father’s sofa in his mother and father’s living room in his mother and father’s house, where he still lived. The floors were new, the appliances so modern as to verge upon space age: no creaks or ticks or rattles. Paul sat on the sofa in the deadening silent white.

Closing his eyes, he pictured shitkicker Todd’s trailer — Paul wasn’t sure he lived in a trailer, but it seemed entirely plausible — aflame, the cheap tin walls glowing and bowling trophies melting like birthday candles until suddenly the bastard crashed through the screen door, a burning effigy. Next he saw the entire trailer park on fire — why the fuck not? — occupants smoked from their mobile shanties, their macaroni-casserole- TV-Guide lives, running around waving flame-eaten arms and the air reeking of fried hogback.

A flashback from last night tore the fragile fabric of his daydream: a huge fat fist the size of a cannonball, the skin black as a gorilla’s, rocketed at his face.

“God damnit!”

He struck the sofa cushion. The punch was weak but ill-placed: his wrist bent at an awkward angle and he yelped. He hopped up, shaking his hand; he booted the sofa but his kick was clumsy and he jammed his toe. Gritting his teeth, grunting, he lay upon the Persian carpet. His body quaked with rage.

Paul often found himself in this state: anger bubbling up from nowhere, a teeth-clenching, fist-pounding fury. But it was undirected and one-dimensional and lacking either the complexities or justifications of adult anger. More like a tantrum.

He nursed his hand and drummed his heels on the carpet. His cellphone chirped. One of his asshole friends calling to dredge the gory details of last night’s misadventure. Or his father, wondering why he wasn’t at work yet.

Paul headed to the kitchen, popped his cellphone into the garburator, and flipped the switch. The gears labored, regurgitating shards of shiny silver casing into the sink; a sharp edge of plastic shot up and struck Paul’s forehead. He twisted a spigot and washed everything down, then picked up the kitchen phone and dialed a cab.

Paul followed the cobblestone path alongside a boxwood hedge past a marble fountain: an ice-glazed Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle. Early autumn fog blew in off the lake, mantling the manor’s roofline. It was much too large for its three inhabitants, but Paul’s father held a tree-falling-in-the-forest outlook with regard to wealth: If you’re rich and nobody can tell, well, are you really rich?

The cab picked him up outside the estate grounds. Paul gazed out the window as they headed downtown to retrieve his car. They drove along the banks of Twelve Mile Creek, the squat skyline of downtown St. Catharines obscured by fog. Roadside slush was grayed with industrial effluvia pumped from the brick smokestacks of the GM factory across the river.

Paul’s car, a 2005 BMW E90, was parked around the corner from the club. The car was his father’s gift to him from last Christmas. There was a parking ticket on the windshield. He tore it in half between his teeth and spat the shreds into the puddle along the curb.

He stopped for a red light on the way to the winery, idling beside a Dodge pickup.

A junkyard mutt was chained to the truckbed. Paul locked eyes with the dog. The mutt’s muddy eyes did not blink. Its lips skinned back to reveal a row of discolored teeth. Paul looked away and fiddled with the radio.

He accelerated past big box stores and auto-body shops and gas stations out into the country. The land opened into vast orchards and groves. Peach and apple and cherry trees planted in neat straight rows, trunks wrapped in cyclone fence.

Ten minutes passed before it hit him.

He’d looked away. He’d broken eye contact first.

He’d lost a stare-down…

…to a dog.

The Ripple Creek winery was spread across fifty acres of land overlooked by the Niagara Escarpment. Paul’s folks had planted the vines themselves some twenty-five years ago.

Paul’s father, Jack Harris, had fallen in love with Paul’s mother, Barbara Forbes, the daughter of a sorghum farmer whom Jack first saw slinging sacks of fertilizer into the bed of a rusted pickup at the Atikokan Feed’n’ Seed, and whom he saw again at the annual Summer Dust-Off, where she danced with raucous zeal to washboard-and-zither music. He fell in love with her because at the time he felt this coincidental sighting was fateful — later both came to realize that they’d lived little more than thirty miles apart, but in northern Ontario it was possible to go your whole life and never meet your neighbor two towns distant. They had made love behind the barn while the Dust-Off raged on, in a field studded with summer flowers on a muffet of hay left by the baling machine. Afterward they lay together with hay poking their bodies like busted drinking straws, feeling a little silly at the unwitting cliché they’d made of themselves: gormless bumpkins deflowered in a haypile. Even the dray horse sharing the field with them looked vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.

After graduating high school Jack spent the next year tending his father’s cornfields. He married Barbara and she moved into the foreman’s lodgings on Jack’s father’s farm. Barely a month had passed before Barbara began to chafe under the deadening monotony.