Matt Bell - Scrapper

But what was a locked door but an admittance there was something worth hiding.

You counted your breaths. You lost count, counted again. The impossibility of knowing how much time passed inside a clockless room.

Then the door bucking in its frame. The dampened sound of a body thrown against wood. The return of motion to the air.

Then the door bucking again.

The door would not hold. Nothing in the wasted house would hold against such men. The door opened.

The heatless sunlight from the hallway windows flooding the room.

The silhouettes of the men, pausing only momentarily in the doorway.

You turned on the flashlight, caught white eyes and white teeth rushing into its beam of light and even though there were two men, didn’t you think they were him ? The one you had been waiting for, ever since he took the last boy. Your intruder. Didn’t you think he’d somehow split into two men, each with slightly different reasons to want your blood?

Your intruder remained in the other city, the city you left, the city where all the gone boys were buried, but where it was no longer safe for you. What happened to you next had nothing to do with him or the last boy or anything else you’d done.

This was only the terrible randomness of the world.

You lifted the chair as the men with white eyes and white teeth charged, swung it once before it was taken away. They started in with their fists, a hammer. The men held you to the ground, opened your pockets, found your wallet, pulled your coat over your head. There was blood on the floor and when was the last time you’d seen your blood. Maybe never but there it was. How you’d assumed what was inside you was so different than what was inside everyone else. But you’d seen this mess before, inside the gone boys. How your last conscious thought was to renew your belief that you were at the center of a story — but then here was your premature ending — and outside your soundproof tomb the story continued without anyone even once having spoken your name.

BY THE NEW YEAR, ONLY one fighter stood out from the undistinguished rest and Kelly thought of him as the contender.

The others named the contender Bringer, a name that was an action, fit for cultivation into legend, this man a myth in the making, forged before the deed, taller than Kelly by six inches, every pound of his flesh corded and bulged even under a sweat suit, his skin covered in tattoos scribed in a script Kelly could never read, his footwork quick and sure and his reach like something out of prehistory, made for bringing down the megafauna. It was only the contender that Kelly avoided, by never approaching him in the locker room, by ceding weights and machines at his advance, giving up the speed bag, the heavy bag, the sparring ring itself. Kelly thought the contender was the only boxer in the gym who would escape the zone, who might one day earn his way out of the city by the strength of his blows, the steel of his skin, his endless will.

The contender’s trainer was younger and taut too, different than the other trainers, the aging men dressed in tracksuits, bellies barely covered, questionable primes long past. The contender paid no attention to Kelly but Kelly saw the trainer watching whenever he sparred on the mats at the center of the gym. Kelly’s punches would send another man reeling and in the gap the trainer would appear, standing beside the mats, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes bright and scanning with the kind of gaze that lit you up to yourself.

Kelly, almost half past thirty and without an honest future, in this world or any other, but still strong, angry, willing. The human body as perfectible tool. The other men thought Kelly was without fear but in the trainer’s eyes Kelly saw a more honest reflection, how he was almost nothing but afraid, afraid in every straining muscle fiber, every sliver of bone, every gush of blood, bile, marrow. The fear sweat from his body, stained his clothes, broke his skin with every blister and bruise. What the trainer saw would make him want something from Kelly and one day the trainer would ask. And when the day came Kelly would not deny him. It was the man who was most afraid who needed to put his fear into someone else. There had been so few people who had seen Kelly for who he was and now when he met one he wished only to say yes.

His activities began to jam against one another, a tectonics of overlap and damage. At the gym, he lifted heavier weights, lifted to forget, heaved the loaded bars over his shoulders again and again, probed the limits of his endurance. He was getting stronger faster than ever before and he took his new strength into the ring with him. When he sparred the men he fought were like ancient golems brought to new life by his want for opposition, their muscles carved of rock, their fists hard as the oldest earth. They knocked yesterday’s booze out of his flesh and the breath from his chest and if he found he couldn’t win he thought he’d at least bloody a lip, bruise an eye.

The world could destroy him but first he would become a destroyer too.

Now he watched the contender sparring, the contender’s trainer watching too. If any of the others were boxers going anywhere he couldn’t tell. He didn’t know how to measure a man’s quality except to throw himself against the man. A more personal metrics. The others had names but Kelly wouldn’t use them, kept to guy or sport or champ . They called each other words he wouldn’t repeat. He wasn’t ignorant and as they exchanged punches he hoped they knew. He respected their difference, wanted to see it preserved. There was no equal ground anywhere but the ring was close. The body the most personal tool, its absolute lack of any privilege you didn’t make yourself. Fists like meat mallets thudded against his skin and he felt the muscles beneath wearing thinner, he no longer had any fat on him so it was like their fists were striking his bones. He went down on one knee and the other man didn’t stop swinging because another time Kelly hadn’t either. There was a frustration in the others at his insistence on standing again, asking for more. They weren’t supposed to be going this hard but Kelly always forced the blow.

At work he carried gunmetal gray file cabinets to stairwells on his broadening shoulders and dropped them down two or three or five stories, let them crash off banisters all the way to the ground, where they’d wait in the pluming dust to be dragged out across the ice. He worked with other men but they had their own tasks and he barely saw them, acknowledged them less. Every possible friendship had ended before it began. The other men just pale shades of the better men he’d known at other jobsites, separated from him by a veil of disinterest, their comradery living in a world he could see but not touch.

In the absence of time and charity his meals with the girl with the limp reverted to meat and potatoes, everything starch and protein. Winter vegetables, carrots and beets, frozen foods. Cans of beans and cans of soup. They let the hockey games play through dinner so often they only spoke during the commercials, their voices loud over the volume of Budweiser, Labatt Blue, Molson Ice. One night she looked surprised as she reached out to touch his beard, his temples — he was going gray but you couldn’t tell until he got a haircut. He had stopped buying fresh food, stopped replacing his clothes. He was getting ready to leave again but he wasn’t leaving her, he didn’t think. He had started to notice how much more space he was taking up on the couch, the way his neck stretched the collars of his t-shirts, his thighs pulling his jeans tight into his crotch whenever he sat down. He knew how to throw a powerful punch without breaking his own wrist but he couldn’t stop his skin from splitting across the knuckles. She picked up his hands and frowned at the damage she found.