Craig Davidson - Cataract City

I gave him the money order: as good as cash but easier to get past the border guards. Drinkwater struck the match on the tight denim draping his thigh, then lit the cigarette.

“That’s a significant wager” was all he said.

“If you can’t handle it …”

“Save your energy,” Drinkwater told me, oh so softly. “I don’t want anyone going home without their fill of blood.”

“Add this to it,” said Owe, pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “How much?”

“Why don’t you count it, Lem?”

“I never learned how. I went to a residential school run by the white man.”

“Ten.”

Drinkwater tucked it into his pocket. “Three-to-one odds.”

“Bullshit,” said Bovine. “Seven-to-one.”

Drinkwater stared at him. “Who knew shit could talk?” he said mildly. “Four-to-one.”

“Six,” said Owe.

“Five. And you can only throw the towel once per fight.”

Nobody bothered to shake on it. It wasn’t a gentleman’s agreement.

“Get your ass ready,” Drinkwater said to me. “We Natives are getting restless.”

I snapped my head sharply to one side to drain the sinus cavities, rolled my shoulders loose and said: “Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er.”

First up was the big sidekick I’d seen weeks back at Smokin’ Joes. Igor Bearfoot II. He was a skyscraper with legs, three hundred pounds, easy. Drinkwater wanted to tenderize me, so he’d brought in his biggest mallet. Once I made it past this one, I thought, Lem probably had a fillet knife lined up, ready to slice me to ribbons. A dandy plan, I had to admit.

Still, I was okay with facing this monster out of the gate. Stick and move, chop the guy down Giant Kichi-style. Hopefully I wouldn’t be breathing through a mask of blood by the end.

“Jesus,” said Bovine, watching the guy warm up.

We came out of our corners, me stepping lightly on the balls of my feet, keeping my shoulders rolling — a move I’d picked up in jail — staring at the big man out of the tops of my eyes.

My opponent fought stripped to the waist. His nipples sat in sunken wells of flesh. The skin above and below his bellybutton funnelled into a cleft in the centre of his belly, lapping over in delicate folds like the skin of a half-deflated balloon. At some point he must’ve lost a ton of weight, which left him with those Shar-Pei folds. A weird surge of compassion rolled through me.

The guy’s right shoulder dipped as his fist came around. I ducked it easily but I heard his arm rip the air above my head in a wide sweep, like a sailboat’s boom swung free. Pivoting on my heel, switching the power to my hips, I hammered my own right into the man’s ribs. His flesh rippled in a wave and he stepped off, his body buckling before righting itself.

I backed away, throwing yippy rights and lefts. A flash jab tore the skin over his left eye, and the blood flowed round his socket and down the angle of his jaw. He pawed at the blood, smearing it down his neck, and swung. It caught me on the shoulder — more of a slap than a punch, but it still rocked me sideways. I righted myself and tagged his nose with a smart shot. The crunch of cartilage sounded like the top snapping off an unripe banana.

A cigarette hit my chest and hissed in the sheen of sweat. I stomped on it while stepping forward, blitzing the big guy with jabs he caught with his elbows and forearms as he peered hesitantly at me through his upraised arms. His face was a horror show and the fight wasn’t even a minute old. Did this guy know how to fight? Would Drinkwater tilt me against a big cream puff with sixty thousand dollars on the table—

Bullrushing with surprising speed, the guy ducked his head and rose up with his hands hooked under my armpits. I had a crazy weightless moment, my legs kicking at nothing. Then I brought one fist down on the big man’s skull; it sounded like a coconut hitting a softwood floor. He hurled me at a sawhorse. Hungry faces hunched in at the edge of my vision and something sharp — a razor blade? an untrimmed fingernail? — sizzled along my hip bone. The guy bridged a forearm across my chest, cheating the air out of my lungs and bearing down with his claustrophobic bulk. His breath was equal parts Wintergreen Skoal and camphor. I noted the fine grey edge of lead around his dead canine tooth.

The man brought one world-eating fist down into my face and everything exploded in starlight riots, hollowness threading down my jaw as if nothing anchored it anymore: my face was only a mask, the contents of my skull obliterated.

I staggered forward as he swung again, reeling into the middle of the ring and punching instinctively, not at a face or even a shape but just at that onrushing warmth. My fist collided with something hard again— snap! — and that hardness split, becoming two separate things under a tight stretch of skin.

I got knocked down again, my knees mashed to jelly and the air whoofing out of my guts in a helpless gust. The big guy was on top now. Fear chewed into the wires of my brain, the insane lung-chaining fear you feel when trapped under a bigger man’s bulk while your life is slowly choked out of you. Four bloody knuckles dropped from a great height, a cloud-splitting Hand of God. There was a loud crunch inside my head as the back of my skull rang off the concrete, a shockwave juddering me spine-deep.

Then, miraculously, the weight lifted. A racking gasp tore out of me. My head lolled to one side and I spotted the towel on the floor. Bovine must have thrown it.

At Drinkwater’s, the white towel didn’t mean the end. A cornerman threw it as a time-out and the injured fighter could get his wounds licked before wading back in.

I dragged myself up and hauled my ass to the corner amidst catcalls and hoots.

“He took you out behind the woodshed, whitey!”

Owe and Bovine sat me in a bright orange cafeteria chair. Bovine held my face, scrutinizing the damage. I let my skull rest against his hands. He slapped a bag of ice on the back of my neck and had Owe hold it there while he worked.

“He lumped your forehead but bad, Dunk. Burst a blood vessel?”

The skin of my forehead was tight, an odd shadow looming at the upper edge of my sight. I was cut over my left eye. Bovine swabbed the cut with a Q-tip saturated with Adrenalin. The raw burn rode the nerve endings down the side of my face, cabling the tendons in my neck.

Glancing to the opposite corner, I saw the big guy’s nose was badly bust: cartilage crushed on one side, leaving the other side jutting straight and strange like a shark’s fin. Bright blood streamed from both nostrils but the man sat with an easygoing expression, taking dainty sips from a Hamm’s tallboy. His cutman hovered over him with a packet of Monsel’s solution — the filthiest trick in a cutman’s bag. Of course it was illegal — just not at Drinkwater’s fights.

The cutman applied solution to the big man’s cracked-open beak, shaking it on like he was salting popcorn. I smelled it — a cooked smell like a skirt steak drenched in battery acid.

“His ponytail,” Owe said. “The ponytail , Dunk.”

“That’s time!” Drinkwater called.

The crowd stirred as we surged out of our corners. The guy’s nose was predictably hideous: lips of bubbly flesh opened down to the gleam of buckled cartilage. He’d have to find a doctor to dig out that pavement of scar tissue with a scalpel — otherwise he’d be left with a second pair of deformed lips running vertically down his schnozz.

He came out like a grizzly awoken from hibernation. I came out nimbly this round, my attitude set in the register of give-a-fuck, moving side to side with my hands hipped like cocked pistols. The fight was in my blood now, and it was an ecstatic feeling; my senses had jacked in at last, operating on some dog-whistle frequency only I could hear.