Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Paul cinched a red kidney-shaped bucket to his hip. The black nylon strap, crusted with dirt and crushed grape skins, left muddy streaks on his jacket. A picker with a mess of dreadlocks pinned atop his head said, “Is okay, okay,” a gentle dissuasion, “go on back, mahn.”

The cold drew Paul’s face in, thinned it down, tightened the skin to the bone.

Anger twined around his brain, a thread fine as catgut slowly tightening. What the hell were they looking so damn sullen for — he was offering help. His father owned the goddamn place, he’d flown them up here and wrote their checks, and if Paul wanted to pick a few grapes he could fucking well pick grapes.

“Where should I start?”

The guy glanced at the others, shrugged, pointed to a far row.

Paul worked his way down the trellis line, stumbling over the frozen earth, knocking his bucket with a knee, wincing. Grapes hung in shriveled clusters, touched with a glaze of frost that looked like powdered sugar. They landed in the bucket with a metallic clink. Some broke open: their insides resembled a geode, all those sparkling sugars. The sweat on his back and chest cooled, sending a chill through his body. Vine ends punched through his fingertips like blunt needles.

A picker crossed over the rows and gave Paul his toque: bright orange with sunocowoven across the front, topped with an orange and white pompom. It stunk of dirt and sweat and of the picker himself. Paul couldn’t recall the last time he’d worn clothes that weren’t solely his own; he’d never worn a black person’s clothes, not once. The picker made Paul hold out his hands while he wrapped strips of duct tape around his fingers to protect them from the sharp vines. He wrapped with his head down:

Paul glimpsed his shaven head pitted with gouges and dents and a scar that curled halfway round his skull. He wondered how the man acquired those wounds: accidents, surgeries, fights? That night, before falling asleep, he would pass a hand over his own scalp, dismayed to find it smooth and featureless as an egg.

Wind kicked up from the west, blowing grit across the fields. The pickers bundled up in scarves and tattered parkas; one drew a pair of ski goggles down over his eyes.

He dragged his body down the rows, arms and legs and joints aching, socks glued to his feet with blood and burst blisters. He emptied his bucket into a hopper and stumbled back into the field, momentarily relieved from the constant burden at his hip. But soon the bucket filled and though he felt his will deserting he pushed on, whiting out his mind, thinking not of pain or relief or other options.

Didn’t every organism by nature seek the easiest pathway to survival? Then what of the organism reared in an environment without predators or obstacles, its every need provided? Paul pictured a flabby boneless creature, shapeless, as soft and raw as the spot under a picked scab.

In some religions it was a sin for a man to die without the knowledge of how much suffering he could endure.

When the sun dipped behind the pines of the escarpment, Paul carted his final bucket to the hopper. His shoes were ruined, his pants caked in mud. He became aware of the powerful funk of his body and relished that smell.

The pickers sat around a fire stoked in the rusted rim of an old tractor tire. An urn of coffee perked on a charred grill above the flames and one of them poured Paul’s measure into a beaten tin cup. They sat in the lengthening twilight enclosed by flat autumn fields. The coffee was so strong it stung his gums where they no longer moored teeth. He gave the toque back to the young man who’d lent it, then took the Ray Bans from his shirt pocket and handed them over too. It no longer concerned him who saw his pulped eye or busted mouth.

He waved goodnight and set off across the cool evening rows. Reaching the winery he found the doors locked. Callie and his father had gone home for the night.

Paul keyed the BMW’s ignition and pulled onto the road. He drove past orchards and sod farms and cows sleeping along barbed-wire fences. For a two-mile stretch all light vanished as he drove under a moonless sky. The eyes of feral night creatures flashed in roadside gullies.

He drove on across a one-lane bridge spanning the QEW, over the isolated headlights of travelers driving south into the city, a trail of taillights twisting north to Toronto. The heater’s warmth restored feeling to his fingers.

Driving too fast, Paul slewed into the shale of the breakdown lane. He tromped the brake pedal but the front end slid over the culvert and slammed into an iced-over ditch. The airbag deployed: a moon-white zit exploding into his face.

Paul sat with his face buried in the silken skin of the airbag. Something was burning, wiring most likely, the smell like a blazing iron scorching linen. He considered going to sleep: the airbag made a comfortable enough pillow. But then he considered the possibility of a ruptured gas tank, pictured a greasy orange fireball billowing into the night.

He gave the door a boot and stepped out. His loafers slipped in the ditch. He went down on his ass, cracking his head on the doorframe. He sat in the frozen mud with his feet in ditch water. A rime of ice slashed his trousers and cut into the backs of his calves. The air reeked of engine coolant. The BMW’s grille butted a patch of crushed cattails.

Craning his neck, he saw amidst the cattails the squat outline of the tree stump that had decimated his car. He had no means of calling for a tow truck and felt mildly regretful for having garburated his cellphone.

On the other side of the ditch lay a cornfield. He recalled a movie where the characters walked into a cornfield and into new life. It was a pleasant thought. To become something else, a whole new person. No money or name or past or worries or hunger — a solitary wanderer upon the country’s heat-shimmered highways, its open-topped boxcars filled with chicken feed and baled pulp, its slashes of wilderness, its lightning storms and lost spaces. He’d befriend a dog with two-tone eyes and together they could fight small-town corruption….

Then it dawned on him what a stupid notion it was. Walk into a cornfield and vanish.

Ride the rails with a crime-fighting dog. What was he, an idiot?

He hauled himself from the ditch. It couldn’t be more than a few degrees above freezing. He considered the possibility of dying somewhere along this isolated country lane. He pictured some gormless dirt farmer coming across his body tomorrow morning: Paul Harris in his dirt-caked suit and two-hundred-dollar loafers, frozen stiff in mid-stride with a rigor-mortis boner tenting his trousers. Ole Popsicle Paul Harris with a snot icicle hanging from his schnozz.

Shoving his hands deep in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, he set off. He had only a vague notion of how far it might be. But, if not resigned to his fate, he was at least accepting of whatever it might hold.

Robert Tully woke in the cool exhaust-scented morning. He reached blindly for clothes he’d laid out the evening before, laced his sneakers with sleep-clumsy fingers.

Coming downstairs, he misjudged the second-to-last step and stubbed his toe, cursing softly. Water pipes clattered behind the thin walls. The small bedroom off the kitchen was empty: his uncle was either pulling an all-nighter at the Fritz or already at Top Rank. He pulled a sweatshirt off its hook in the front hall, tugging the hood over his head and cinching the drawstrings.

A clear fall morning, air thick with a silvery chemical smell borne down from the SGL Carbon plant along Hyde Park Boulevard. He ran north on 24th, past abandoned shopping carts and junked cars with garbage bags taped over shattered windows, old tires and cast-off water tanks rusting in the weeds. He juked around spots where the sidewalk buckled and lapped, on past bodegas with ads for Wonder Bread and menthol Kents taped to bulletproof windows and stores without names: just neon signs blinking L-l-Q-u-o-R.