The Fighter (34 page)

Suppertime
at Mount St. Mary's hospital. Orderlies hastened down the halls with trays of
Salisbury steak and lime Jell-O, or IV pouches of nutrient-rich Meal in a Bag.

Reuben
Tully sat beside his brother's bed reading a sheet of paper. Withered balloons
and wilted flowers. The room smelled too sweet.

He
glanced up. "Where the hell were you this morning?"

Rob
said, "I wasn't feeling up to it."

"I
don't give a shit if you felt up to it or not. You be there. We need to
maintain the basic routines, okay?"

"What
that you're reading?"

"Fucking
insurance companies," said Reuben. "Jackals. Blood
suckers.
They're claiming since Tommy never made a living will ..." A brief glance
over at his brother."...stupid, stupid ..." And back to Rob."...they
say his care is technically governed by the state. It means that once Tommy's
been declared—oh, Jesus, what was it?" He skimmed the letter. "Right—
a persistent vegetative state.
If that happens Tommy becomes a
ward of the state, which means he goes on the organ donor list, first come
first served. Whatever's left is donated to science."

Reuben
tore the paper up. "No way is some government ghoul harvesting my kid
brother's guts. No way is some medical school prick hacking up his head. I'll
die first."

Tommy
lay still. The EKG machine beeped fitfully; every so often the green line
trembled, indication that a semblance of Tom Tully yet existed. His arms were
pocked with needles—needles to feed and medicate and drain him.

Rob
said, "Why did you let him?"

"Why'd
I let who do what?"

"Why
didn't you stop him? Tell him how stupid it was, or refuse to go along with
it?"

Reuben
looked as if he'd been stabbed in the heart. "You think I didn't say
that—Christ, Robbie, you've been there, you've
heard
me say that. A thousand times I told him how stupid it was. I told him right up
to the day it happened."

"But
you were never forceful about it. You talked; that was all."

"Listen:
this wasn't my choice. If I'd had my way, Tommy would've been finished years
ago. All I could do was be there to see he didn't get hurt."

"But
he got hurt."

"And
you blame me." Reuben nodded, taking it in. "Maybe that's fair—I
blame myself. But then each man acts according to his own wishes. My brother,
not my slave."

Reuben
dipped his fingers in a cup of water and wet Tommy's cracked lips. "Your
uncle never learned how to throw a punch right. Purely an arm puncher; no hips.
Couldn't dance for the same reason. But he took his body and his talent as far
as they could go. A lot of it was for me. I was his trainer and he knew that if
he ever hit it big I'd be right there beside him."

"And
isn't it a trainer's job," Rob said, "to protect his fighter?"

Reuben
ignored him. "We used to talk about what we'd do if Tommy were the
heavyweight champ. I think we both knew it was a pipe dream, but where's the
harm? We'd go out for a big Italian supper and put every other nickel in the
bank. "And we didn't have the sort of relationship where ... we knew each
other too well—you take things for granted. He was always there so he's always
gonna be there. What were the last words I said to him? Something practical,
I'm sure: keep your chin down, plant your feet. Christ. Should've been, Fuck
all this, we're out of here. I should've been the older brother. The
protector."

Reuben's
fingers dipped and wiped. Rob became aware of a very strange sensation looking
at his father's hand: the paleness of it, bleached from enriched flour. A
baker's hand. A breadmaker's hand. A hand nothing like his own.

"He's
coming through this, Robbie. You still believe that, don't you?"

Watching
his father and uncle together under that harsh hospital light, Rob felt himself
pulling away. A dark hole opened and a massive force pulled him down a vast
corridor at such velocity he thought his skin might get sucked off, huge
pressure tugging at his arms and legs as his father and uncle dwindled, all
sense of intimacy gone and Rob not fighting it at all.

His
hands were clamped tight on the chair's armrests—not in fear, but rage. Rage at
these two men, mere specks now, who'd been charged with his upbringing; rage
that all they'd ever told him was that fighting was the only way to find a
little space for yourself in the world. His whole life funneled, focused,
preordained. How else to settle matters except through violence? It was all
he'd been taught. His anger swelled, magnified beyond any point of reference or
comprehension: a billowing mushroom cloud, a towering inferno, a brilliant
supernova.

Two
men drove the southbound QEW in a rattletrap Ford.

Paul
Harris wondered at the chain of events that had brought him here. To him, it
seemed life unraveled as a series of minor decisions. And it could begin almost
without your knowing it: one moment your life followed a predictable path down
well-lit streets, the next it was careening down dark alleyways. Momentum
becomes unstoppable. A snowball rolling down an endless hill until it was the size
of the world itself.

Lou
asked Paul how he felt. Paul said he felt fine.

"Don't
look so fine."

Paul's
face was as expressionless as the face on a coin. "Don't worry about
me."

The
dotted median strip flickered, a luminous white line in the side-view mirror.
Lou cracked a window—the kid plain
stunk
—to let the cool air circulate.

"What
was it you said you did before this—something business-y, wasn't it?" When
Paul nodded, Lou said, "Ever think about heading back to that?"

"Are
you kidding?"

Lou
shrugged. "Let your body heal up, buy a nice set of false teeth. Figured
you'd enjoy looking at your face in the mirror and not seeing a plate of dog
food staring back."

"Since
when did you start giving a shit?" Paul asked him.

"Since
never," Lou said, honestly. "A temporary lapse on my part."

Fritzie
Zivic drove down narrow streets past boarded shopfronts and fire-gutted
buildings. American flags hung from poles in rigidly frozen sheets; faded
stickers covered rust-eaten bumpers:
god bless the usa
and
support our troops
and
blessed be.

Staring
from the passenger seat, Rob Tully was overcome with a consuming need to be
different—different in every conceivable way—from all this. To be rich where
all he saw was poverty. To find sophistication where all he knew was crassness.
Grace where all he saw was ignorance. Girls with platinum hair extensions and
three-inch fingernails gabbing outside Sparkles Nail Boutique. An old black man
wearing a snap-brim fedora behind the wheel of a shiny white Mustang 5.0
ragtop. Teenage boys passing brown bottles of Cobra malt on the curb outside
Wedge Discount Liquors.

"Just
so we're clear," said Fritzie, "if things get ugly, I'm stepping in.
I'll wave that white towel. That's the price of this ride."

Murdoch
cut a toneless fart in the backseat: a low wheezing groan like a bungling
musician hitting a flat note on his accordion. The car filled with a
reprehensible stench.

"You
sour, ungrateful mongrel," Fritzie said dourly.

The
lights of the city faded. The Cadillac wended down dark country roads. Rob's
heart beat in a regular rhythm. His course of action was settled. Fritzie
slotted an eight-track cassette into the player; Frank Sinatra sang "I've
Got You Under My Skin."

They
pulled off the main road and parked along a barbed-wire fence. Bars of cold
even light cut between the barn's slats: in the darkness the light appeared to
be slanting up out of the earth itself.

Manning
stood beside the barn door. Ankle-length duster coat parted slightly, the butt
of his Remington shotgun resting on the toe of one boot.

"Who
you brung me, Fritzie?"

"Amateur
fighter from out my way. Robbie Tully."

Manning
set his sharp eyes upon the young fighter. "I heard of you. You're hot
shit."

"I
just want a fight."

"Plenty
safer places to find one."

Fritzie
said, "He's got a specific fight in mind."

Manning
nodded. "Big fella went down last time—that was a Tully, no? We run a
blind draw here, so strictly speaking it'd be a beggary of the rules. But rules
can be bent to clear room for a grudge."

The
space under the barn's peaked ceiling was packed to capacity. The crowd was a
mix of Canadian and American, their country of origin distinguished by the
coffees in their hands: white Dunkin' Donuts cups for Yanks, brown Tim Hortons
for the Canucks. Some wore T-shirts bearing tough-guy phrases:
pain is only fear exiting the body
and
yea, though i walk through the valley of
the shadow of death i shall fear no evil, for i am the meanest motherfucker in
the valley.

Rob
made his way through the crowd to a shadowed corner. A lot of eyes on him:
Is that Rob Tully, the top-ranked amateur?
He found a hay bale and scanned
the fighters. They stood on the fringes, some singly, others with their
backers. All of them scarred or disfigured or broken in some way. And their
eyes—the newer ones had this look of sheer psychic terror. The older and more
mutilated showed no emotion at all: faces a fretwork of scars, eyes blank as a
test pattern. Then there were those hovering in the middle ground, neither new
nor old: they had the look of men who'd realized their lives were irretrievably
lost and they could only await the inevitable passage into the final stage.

Rob
unzipped the duffel and removed tape, sponge, and gauze. He'd never actually
taped his own hands—his father was always there for that. He ripped off lengths
of tape and hung them off his trunks. He centered a strip of sponge on his hand
but it kept slipping off his knuckles.

Fritzie
materialized from the crowd. "Let me help with that."

Rob
pressed the sponge flat across his knuckles while Fritzie taped. "You go
second, Robbie."