Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

We spent weeks at the edge of our backyard, down in the bowled-out depression, where we used the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery as one rope and landscaping timbers as the others. It was our training camp. What we were training for wasn’t clear, but we would be ready, prepared for any kind of attack from bears or Arabs or imposing fathers. When we went to school, we wore the bruises and cuts like badges, and when the other kids asked us what had happened we shrugged them off and smirked like they were stupid shits, nudges, all of them. Our muscles went taut as we sweated out the pudding cups and grape sodas, and Charley began to resemble one of our skinned cats—all rib cage and pale flesh and sinewy muscle clinging to an undersized skeleton. Our arms lengthened from the constant torque, our joints loosening up. I twisted my hips like my father told me, bobbed my head, weaved around Charley’s haymakers, and dropped a stiff jab or full overhand right often enough that it was clear I was in charge, that Charley was the nudge.

“New game,” Charley said when he had tired of straight boxing that he clearly wasn’t winning. He dropped a two-by-eight onto the ground and walked it like a plank. “Get on.”

We threw leather on the two-by-eight. If you accidentally stepped off, the other guy got a free shot to the body. If you got knocked off, it meant a free shot to the face. If you stepped off on your own, which almost never happened, you got punched in the dick.

Charley rarely backed up. He liked to swim in deep, taking shots to the nose, hoping to land a bare knuckle on my ribs. But I pawed at him with my longer arms, keeping him at a distance, waited for him to commit so that I could belt him with an overhand right.

We threw leather in the dark, that being most of the time in Cut Bank. Either we had short winter days, or the mountains blocked the sun. The light on the back porch was far away from our ring, and by the time it filtered down, it was pale. But through it, we could see each other’s eyes, Charley’s always flickering like a predator.

When winter landed early, we pulled on our Carhartt chore coats, steam funneling from our heads, and we threw more leather. The padding in the gloves went hard with the cold, and felt like cinder block slamming on our temples. Our free hands struck harder too, like frozen T-bones, though to punch with the bare hand in the cold hurt more than the damage it delivered. We slipped from frost on the board often, and the free shots piled up. Still, neither of us stepped off the board on purpose, knowing that a free shot to our frozen, shriveled dicks in that kind of cold might just jam the whole package up into our small intestines and truly turn us into nudges.

In March of the year we turned sixteen, when we’d been throwing the leather for more than a year, Charley got himself kicked out of school.

I arrived halfway through, never saw how it started. All the versions had him standing in the locker bay between classes, his arm hanging from Carla Depusio, a thoroughly unattractive girl who wore tight shirts and lived down the street. This was around the time I’d nailed Charley with a bare-hand left cross that sliced through his eye. The eyeball bulged out, and the cracked cut refused to close in the cold, just seeped a tea-colored liquid, and so he resembled some menacing mugger, always eyeball-fucking you.

From there, things went cloudy. Everyone claimed to have seen it firsthand, that it was the craziest shit they’d ever seen. The guys tended to claim Charley was a bad dude, a fucking hero. That dude could skin a bear with a spoon, they said. The girls shook their heads and said it didn’t matter—he was an animal who belonged in the wild.

Max Woods, a nice enough kid who lived in a two-story with vinyl siding and wore braces and started as a forward on the basketball team, told Charley to leave Carla alone. Some versions had him asking like a nice boy, being chivalrous, saving the young girl from the wolf. Other versions, though, had him demanding, looming over Charley to his full six-foot-plus. However it started, Max ended up raising his fists, and Charley went berserk. He hit Max six times before anyone knew what was happening. I got there just in time to see him timber Max and then pounce on him, dropping fists and elbows, mauling him until he was punching a bloody stump for a face, and through the shouts and moans what rose was the sound of Charley thumping on Max, like the dull thud of a rubber mallet pounding on a decomposing log. He kept punching. Teeth clinked onto the floor and his braces broke loose and jammed through his lips, hung there like dental floss. Carla tried to pull him off, and he backfisted her in the temple. When Charley finally stood up, his knees a dark purple red, Max Woods had swallowed two teeth the doctors had to wait for him to shit out.

Charley never bothered to tell me his full version. He merely claimed that the bitch had it coming, though I never knew who exactly he meant. “Besides,” he said, “school is for nudges.” It was fine; he needed to train. He was going for the gold gloves now. He’d tasted combat blood, and he needed more. Maybe he’d go box in the marines too. But his ego outgrew his muscles. Charley was a tough kid, but he was no pugilist.

My father thumped Charley when he found out. He wasn’t an educated kind of man, but his kids didn’t need to be getting booted out of school. Just because we were near-on the border didn’t mean we had to act like some bear-poaching Canadians who belonged up in Sweet Grass.

Charley told him to piss off, go bully his own son. I wanted to step in between them, act logical for once, but there was no way for my father to get his justice and Charley to avoid being a nudge. We all knew the rules to these games.

My father thumped him more then, got really rough. He tossed Charley up against the cemetery fence, kicked in his ribs. He picked up one of our jousting brooms and caned his back while Charley writhed on the frozen ground. “Should I still piss off?” my father said.

Charley coughed. “Shit, yes, you should.”

The thumping continued with steel-toes to the gut and hard, loud slaps to the face, slaps that left red hand-shaped splotches. Charley pulled himself up by the fence, wobbled there, waiting for my father to keep hitting him. Eventually, my father quit. He threw his hands in the air, grunted, and stomped off to the house, as if defeated because Charley outlasted him.

So Charley stayed home and ate bologna sandwiches with extra mustard while I went to school and tried to earn Bs from teachers who shot me dirty looks like I was some sort of accomplice. But then Charley told me that if he was going to train proper, he needed someone to spar with. I resisted at first, having a bit more fear of authority than he did, but I agreed to stay home a couple days a week and train with him.

We stole Starla’s couch cushions and taped them around an aspen for a heavy-bag. When our bare hands broke open from scraping too much, we doused them in snow and switched places. When we’d punched all the stuffing from the cushions, I stole new ones from the school library and tied them up as replacements.

Starla peeked her head out the back door one morning and watched us on the two-by-eight for a minute. She looked over to her cushions wrapped around the tree. “You boys should probably get to school,” she said.

Charley looked up at her without moving. “Piss off,” he said. “We are at school.” Then he turned back to me, and we threw the leather.

She stayed inside after that, watching her soap operas and smoking her menthols.

With no school to punctuate our leather throwing or our new games, Charley started to run wild. He disappeared for longer stretches and returned with scratches on his face and painful looking limps. He talked back to Starla more when my father wasn’t around. And at night, when we used to sit in our room and debate our scenarios, he shadowboxed in the foggy backyard light, the tombstones of the cemetery rising up behind him like giant obelisks with long shadows that pointed toward the forest.