Craig Davidson - Cataract City

The big guy clipped me with a looping cross, opening the cut Bovine had just closed. I shook my head, droplets spraying, and cuffed him with a clumsy left as the crowd rose to a quick roar. We circled out of a sloppy clinch where I caught a heat-seeking whiff of raw adrenaline coming out of his pores.

We clashed in the rough centre of the ring. The guy hauled in bulldog breaths, blood burping out his nose. His sweat-heavy trousers had slipped around his waist to expose his BVDs, which were a cheery shade of robin’s egg blue. He dipped his head and came on but this time I timed it and stepped aside, letting him rumble past like a subway on fixed rails. Next, I was able to make two small adjustments that pretty much put the fight to bed, and I was lucky enough to do them in one fluid motion — watching it happen, I guess you might think we’d choreographed the damn thing.

What I did was snatch the guy’s ponytail with my left hand, doubling it over in my fist and yanking back hard like I was bringing a big dog to heel, which forced his chin to tilt up. Then I torqued my hips and came round with the dynamite right, whipping my torso to propel my fist with all the juice my body could generate.

The punch struck the big man dead in the middle of his face. The sound was like two flat rocks spanked together. Everyone in that warehouse leaned back — it was like an explosion had gone bang in the ring.

For a second the whole world sat still: me with that grimy handful of hair, my fist flattened against the big man’s face. If you could have frozen that image, you would have seen my curled fingers resting flush with the poor guy’s eye sockets, his nose having turned into mash.

The big man let out a muffled moan, spraying red spittle. His hands came up in search of blood or pity, I couldn’t tell. And I reached down inside, crushed that tiny voice in my chest pleading for mercy, cocked my fist and drove it into the guy’s face again.

That was it. The man’s body hung slack, back bowed, held up by my hand in his hair — he looked like a dead shark on a dock with a gaffing hook sunk into his snout. I lowered him to the floor gently as I could, then found my chair and sat. The ice bag hit the back of my neck. Blissful cold washed down my spine like water trickling in a downspout.

“You got lucky,” a voice hissed somewhere to my left.

I blew at the fringe of blood-grimed hair plastered to my rapidly ballooning hematoma and thought, You got that right, buddy. I’m the luckiest man in all Creation .

Two men dragged the big fellow away by his heels like hunters lugging a dead bear out of the woods. My next opponent warmed up across the ring. As predicted, he was young and thin, with whiplike arms and legs that, if they were attached to a woman, you’d say went on for days, took a break at the knee and went a few days more. He had the empty, edgeless gaze of a psychopath.

Bovine took my right hand in his own. “Is it …?”

“Broke? Yeah.”

“I’ve got some cortisone.”

“Just leave it be.”

Before we got to it the kid stuck his hand out, wanting to shake. Bad sign: it meant he saw this as pure business, which meant he wasn’t any kind of dick-swinger. Drinkwater had found a pro. For him this was punching a clock. This particular shift, his job was to put me to bed. Thankfully I got the sense he’d do no more than was needed to reach that goal — but he would finish me.

The first shot impacted the mouse on my forehead with the mathematical precision of a laser-guided missile. The kid followed it up with a smart jab to my nose and another to my mouth. I reeled. My nose was so packed with blood I couldn’t breathe; my lungs emptied through my mouth in a ragged hiss, air singing over my newly chipped tooth.

The kid slipped in blood falling from my face. Lowering my chin, I threw a punch that came up over my shoulder and tabbed the kid where his collarbone met his neck. The concussive smack travelled up to the rafters, making the pigeons take flight.

The kid’s knees buckled and he backed off shaking his head, the glazed look in his pale brown eyes turning into something far more feral and crafty.

I shook my head too, droplets flying off the tips of my blood-quilled hair. How many pints did a man have in him? It felt like I’d bled out a few pints and swallowed another: my gut was heavy with the iron-tasting stuff that flowed down the back of my throat.

Our heads clashed with accidental violence. The shockwave of bone on bone telescoped around my skull, a high ringing note like an air-raid siren. Rocking on my heels, I threw a hopeful uppercut but nobody was home to receive it. A left cross stung in reply. Next a body blow landed like a mule kick and once again siphoned the air from my lungs.

I pressed forward on instinct. A brutal shot sheered off my jaw. The kid’s fist slammed the hematoma, again, again — he kept tagging it like some asshole pressing an elevator button. The mouse had swollen ridiculously: its Cro-Magnon curve dominated the crest of my sight.

I closed in and hit him twice to the body, intending to crush his liver and rupture his kidneys, bear-maul this kid and put him down . I cornered him against the sawhorses but my punch swung through clean air, missing horribly, and next I was face to face with a jeering man in the crowd. A fist slammed into my ribs and sent bile burning up my throat. Turning, I was met with a right that tabbed me flush. Black lights flash-popped before my eyes and I was falling backwards into a wonderful coolness that felt like ever-tumbling water, so cold, so sweet and—

I was in a cave. The ground was black and granular. A tree. No top, no bottom, roots braiding in both directions. A slit in the tree’s bark. A man’s face appeared in it. He unfolded himself from the tree with great care, like a contortionist from a glass box. Small, so goddamn small, his skin a pale translucence. He was incredibly old; just looking at him, I felt my eyes dry in their sockets. The man dug a hole. Sometimes his shovel blade made a sound like hissing snakes as it bit into the ground; other times, it sounded like raindrops. When the hole was finished the man cocked his head calmly as if to say: Well, son, it’s your choice. I climbed into the hole headfirst. Wonderful, warm and comforting. A ball of light bloomed, becoming larger, larger …

I was slumped on the chair with Owe snapping a towel at my face. My skull felt like it had been cracked open and blowtorched. My ears were plugged as if I’d been swimming and water had packed into my ear canals. The kid stared at me from across the ring with a look of mingled respect and pity. You dragged yourself up after being knocked down , that look said. But what’s the use when I’m just going to plant you again?

Bovine edged in on my right, a razor blade pinched between his fingers. “We’ve got to cut that thing,” he said.

He drew the blade along my forehead, slitting the bulging mouse. Blood sheeted down my face, blinding me. Owe mopped it, and Bovine swabbed the cut with Adrenalin — I could feel the Q-tip moving inside the pocket of swollen flesh — and painted it with Hemostop.

Owe leaned in. “Keep going, Dunk? You sure? You’ve fought like an animal, but this guy … this guy . It’s only money, man.”

Acid curdled in my gut. Only money . It’s always only money if you’ve always had it. I heaved myself up to meet the kid.

What happened next happened quickly, as things often do in fights. It was an accident, pure and simple: I stepped on the kid’s foot.

I was rabbiting in, trying to close the distance. The kid side-stepped deftly, his left hand coming around with awful intent. My right fist was fixed on a similar orbit, moving slower but with a lot more oomph . Coming forward, I stepped on the kid’s right foot. It was nothing purposeful or planned. The kid’s fist collided with my ear, pinching a vessel threaded through the cartilage. My own punch landed solidly enough to knock him off balance. As he went back his left foot slipped on a patch of sweat, pulling him into an awkward splits.