Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“All I want to feel right now is the bills in my hand.”

Drinkwater’s laugh wasn’t really a laugh, just bared teeth with air hissing through them: hsh-hsh-hsh! “You’ll get paid after.”

“That’s not how it worked before.”

“S’the way it works now. Roll with them punches, Diggs.”

I scratched behind my ear. “You got me over a bit of a barrel, Lemmy.”

“That’s not my aim,” he said — and maybe it wasn’t, but I also knew he didn’t give two sweet fucks whether anything he did happened to put me over a barrel.

“And if I walk out right now?”

He shrugged. “Plenty of warm bodies willing to step in, I’d say.”

“I’d say. Same purse?”

“Same as same as.”

I waded through the railbirds into a small cement-walled room to warm up. A single bulb burned on the end of a cord. I did some jumping jacks and ran in place, high-legging my knees to touch my chest. Sweat beaded my upper lip and my breath fell into an easy rhythm. I rolled my shoulders and snapped out a lazy left jab — my teaser punch, my bait: look at it out there, pesky, a bothersome gnat … you won’t see the right steaming behind it to steal your lights away.

Fighting didn’t tickle my nuts, just happened to be something I’ve always been half-decent at. I swung my right hand and things went down. There were a million better ways to turn a buck with your hands but I wasn’t good at any of those.

I chased the money. And I preferred to fight men drawn to the money — money’s clean, money doesn’t have agendas or psychoses. Sometimes I fought men who’d fallen way down the ladder. It’s rough work, tussling with a guy who’s trying to claw back up to that bottom rung. Other men wanted to figure something out about themselves, so okay, I’d oblige.

And some men were just batshit crazy. Those guys were the worst. Those guys you just about had to kill .

I’d taken a few bad beats myself. The worst was to a fellow from right there, the Tuscarora Nation. Wasn’t a big guy, but he was fast and wiry and once he’d gone slick with sweat I couldn’t lay hands on him. He didn’t rough me up so much as whittle me down, peppering me with stinging jabs and hooks like a man with a small, sharp knife taking thin peels off a big log. After a while my chest was greasy with blood and I’d swallowed so much of the red stuff that I needed to puke. It was all I could do to grab and hold him close, waltzing with an unwilling partner. At one point I sent up a little prayer: Let him knock me cold, God. Take me out behind the shed and put one in the back of my skull .

But he just kept at it, quick and relentless. By the end the punches came in the dark — my eyes were two pissholes in the snow — and I felt like I was being beaten with a black sack over my head. That guy, he shaved me down until I was thin as a toothpick and then I just … snapped .

Everything comes back to that question of hardness. I came from a hard place, yeah — a place where shopkeeps sell loose cigarettes because by the time that third Thursday of the month rolls around, most of their customers can’t afford a whole deck. But that guy, he probably grew up in a tarpaper shack, sleeping on the floor with eight or ten brothers and sisters, and had a dog in the yard chained to a radial tire. That’s another level of hardness, and I couldn’t find the place in my heart to match it.

The door to the dressing room opened. My opponent tonight was about my size, maybe a bit taller. He didn’t look much older than nineteen, twenty. A kid, really. His eyes pinned me. I gave him a look that said: You don’t have to show me your dick’s bigger, okay? All that’ll sort itself out soon enough .

He wiped his nose and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if to say he’d been expecting worse than he’d drawn. “You fight before?”

“Few times, yuh,” I told him. “You?”

“First time.”

“I’ll go easy.”

I leaned against the wall and watched him warm up. He was quick but gangly and it didn’t look like he could throw a straight right to save his skin — I started feeling sorry for him, then wiped those thoughts away.

“Know something?” he said. “You smell like Fig Newtons.”

His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones. I reminded myself to aim for those spots.

Drinkwater opened the door. The bare bulb winked off the teeth on his hat.

“Let’s go, you pigs.”

The first punch tabbed me flush on the jawbone and that’s when I knew he didn’t have the ol’ boom-boom to put me away. Him and me were only dancing a little dance that would end with me landing a starcher that left him snuffling concrete.

The punch landed solid, and it lit my head up like a slot machine: Cherry — Pineapple — Star . Yeah, I’d have a fat lip, and yeah, I tasted blood in the chinks of my teeth, but he didn’t quite have the juice.

I spat warm blood and stared into the crowd: a couple of dudes with the stringy-haired, strung-out look of fairground carnies sat beside a young girl, frighteningly skinny, in a Megadeth shirt: Peace Sells … But Nobody’s Buying . Her eyes were riveted on my opponent.

Were they together? God, I sort of hoped not.

I circled left and let my right hand hang at my hip, like maybe he’d really stung me and I was trying to haul the scrambled shards of my brain back to where the neurons would start jumping the gaps again. He circled with me— come on, friend, just a little closer now, let me get one good clean look —and the muscles flexed up his side, tightening over the ladder of his ribs as he stepped into a clumsy uppercut.

I shifted so his fist could pass harmlessly between the outer edge of my shoulder and my neck and for a heartbeat it was there: the knockout button of his outthrust chin. I planted my leg and dropped my head. My right came up in a swift arc; my shoulder joint swivelled in its socket, well-oiled with adrenaline, and my fist passed my ear on its downward flight, falling fast, a bomb splitting the clouds. Hell, it may have whistled like a bomb.

It met his chin flush. Something broke deep down in my hand. The impact jangled up my arm and hummed like restless honeybees in the hollow of my shoulder socket. He sagged into me, our chests touching. I felt the shuddering beats of his heart through my skin.

Bah-dum … bah-DUM … bah—

The kid’s face had gone pale. Beads of milky sweat leaked from the skin under his eyes, which were rolled so far back in his skull that I saw the twitching, vein-threaded whites.

— DUM … bah-bah-DUM … bah-dum—

His heart beat out of true. An arrhythmia, could be. A year ago Jeff King, batch mixer on the Oreo line, just lay down in the lunchroom, shut his eyes and died. A heart murmur, I heard. King was 225 pounds with a pulse like a jackrabbit. It was nothing he could guard against; a defect in his nature, was all.

I felt it in this guy, too: a structural weakness knitted tight to his body. He wasn’t built for this kind of rough work. I was terrified that if we kept at it, he’d die in my arms.

I held him until the fog left his eyes and he was able to collect his feet under him. When he stood, staggering back, I raised my arms.

“I’m done,” I said. “You win.”

The guy, still stumblebum, swung at me and missed. He tucked his fists tight under his chin, swaying unsteadily as I backed off.

I found Drinkwater in the crowd and said, “There’s something the matter with him. His heart or something.”

“You’re hilarious,” he said. “Get your ass back in there.”

The railbirds hissed and catcalled. A plastic cup struck my shoulder, spilling Orange Crush down my shirt.