Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Every other time he’s fought he’s either seen the guy in action, had a look at somebody’s shaky iPhone video, or at least had an idea of who he’d beaten and lost to. This could be King-fucking-Kong.

  “You sure you don’t want the robe?”

  L. T. has tricked this thing up, some kind of wall hanging of a grizzly bear glued onto the back of a bathrobe stolen from a fancy hotel.

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that shit.”

  “You’ll stiffen up.”

  “Once I get down in the pit,” says Scorch, “it’ll cut the wind off.”

  The thing is it’s cold, the wind never letting up, the spectators in down vests and jackets, restless now, stomping their feet on the bleachers and shouting “Fight, fight, fight, fight!”

  Brent shows up then, smiling. Easy for him.

  “Showtime, Scorch. Take him apart.”

  Scorch is wearing work boots he bought at the Cenex today, unlaced, to get over the gravel to the pit. They’ve hooked four big work lights to a generator thrumming out in the field a couple hundred yards away, trained down into the hole and poled up high enough that they won’t blind the fighters.

  Shouting and cheers as he steps to the edge. There’s an aluminum ladder leading down into the pit. The crowd is stoked, Brent selling beer out of a panel truck for at least an hour now, some guys with hard liquor bottles in hand, passing them around. They overpour at Bazookas, cheap stuff but potent, and figure the more wasted the guys are the more likely to go for extras, to go for a lap dance or stuff a twenty into a girl’s g-string. Scorch can handle it, Vic always says. Vic, who gave him the night off and said if you break your fucking arm you’re fired.

  “Gentlemen!” calls Brent, already down in the cage with a cordless mic in hand. “I assume there’s no ladies here.”

  A roar of what– approval, complaint?

  “Welcome to the first annual Yellow Earth Invitational Mixed Martials Arts Massacre!”

  Another roar. There are at least a thousand of the bloodthirsty pricks crowded around, amazing when you figure there was no advertising, just word of mouth, and the location only revealed this afternoon. Some guy who owns private land on the Indian rez gave Brent permission. Way off the main roads, they stopped at two other lit-up drill pads tonight before they finally found it. And the vibe, right from the minute they pulled up– probably how it felt like when they used to lynch people.

  “The management respectfully requests,” says Brent, deepening his voice like the character who does the Caesar’s Palace fights, “that you refrain from throwing objects into the cage.”

  Laughter and some hoots. Brent said they’d do five-minute rounds, but he didn’t say how many, which means it’s till there’s a clear winner.

  “For our first contest,” calls Brent, strutting around to face all four sides above him, “we have a pair of heavyweight warriors new to the oil patch. In this corner”– he turns toward Scorch– “wearing the– what is that–?”

  “Teal!” Shakes calls out, enjoying this too much.

  “In the teal trunks, from Tampa, Florida, at two hundred and twenty pounds-Stanley– the Scorcher– Adamov!”

  There is no way to spring into the cage. Scorch kicks the work boots off, turns around and backs down the ladder. A guy immediately yanks it up and trots around to the other side of the pit while Scorch throws his arms in the air and walks a circle around Brent, to cheers and jeers.

  “In the opposite corner– from McAlester, Oklahoma– at two hundred and thirty-five pounds– Mike– The Mountain– Mullaaaaaaney!”

  The guy is two-fifty if he’s an ounce, and the only thing in fucking McAlester is the state penitentiary. It takes a minute for him to climb down the ladder and turn, most of the gawkers above on their feet and hollering. Big bald-headed hunk of muscle, like if Kimbo Slice was a white guy, and yeah, he’s got the shamrock with the 666 on one arm and A. B. over the SS lightning bolts on the other. No ink on his chest though, which is matted with hair.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Brent motions for them to step close, keeping his own body in between, and the eyeballing begins. The thing is to look right down through the pupils into the guy’s brain tissue, and concentrate on how you’re going to drive the fucker’s nose bone into it.

  “Fellas, let’s have a good, clean fight,” says Brent, then looks up to the crowd. “We are rockin in the Bakken! Let’s get it on!” he shouts, and then flips up the hand mic end over end for the ladder guy to catch. Under the roar of anticipation he has a private word with the fighters.

  “You boys are getting paid plenty,” he says. “No tapping out. Now take three steps back.”

  So that’s the deal. Snap but no tap. I’m going to have to kill this motherfucker or he’ll kill me.

  “Bong!” shouts the ladder guy over the mic, and there’s only Scorch Adamov and Mike Mullaney facing each other in an overlit hole in the North Dakota prairie.

  Scorch gets on his toes and begins to bounce and sidestep. Fucker this big, that kind of power, you don’t want anything to do with grappling. He throws a few jabs and it’s clear he’s faster, the Aryan Brother barely moving his head to absorb the blows, then lunging to try to grab his arm. Boos as Scorch dances backwards out of the way. He’s had the fundamentals shown to him in the gym a couple times by serious practitioners, but the sport pretty much boils down to kick the shit out of your opponent without getting disqualified. Scorch fakes a jab and hits him with a left overhand, right between the eyes, then throws in a muay thai kick to the side of the knee before backpedalling. Think Bruce Lee, think Jackie Chan. Whap! Whap! Stick and move, stick and move, but the last move backs him up against the wall, no give to it, and Mullaney crowds in, sending an uppercut into his jaw before trying to grab him around the neck, Scorch getting his forearm up just in time to protect his windpipe but crushed in the grip, digging his bare feet into the mat to keep from being thrown, the two of them staggering together this way and that, till the Mountain jerks him off his feet and falls backwards with a heavy smack, Scorch able to get a knee up and pry himself loose, immediately rolling away and scrambling to his feet. The Mountain takes his time, huge arms up for protection, pushing back against the wall to leg himself upright.

  Neither of them is a marathon runner, both huffing for air as the crowd calls for mayhem. His best move in the clubs he works at is to step inside the other guy’s defense while he’s still cursing you out and then snap an elbow into his face. No talking down here in the pit.

  Scorch exhausts his supply of striker moves, jabbing and running to boos and catcalls as Mullaney closes, closes, closes, taking most of the blows on his forearms, patient, flinging an occasional body shot to the ribs or hips, trying to rush him when the wall is at his back, not bothering with kicks or fancy footwork.

  “Bong!” calls the ladder guy, and they separate into opposite corners, no stools there for them to sit on, just catching their breath and staring at each other. Brent comes over as if to check for damage.

  “Better get busy, pal. Folks came to see a rumble.”

  Scorch hasn’t ever been pinned in the cage like that, hasn’t been held down that helpless since those shitbirds at the Okeechobee CI when he was waiting for trial, after all their bullshit about white cons got to stick together, dragged him behind the generator in the machine shop and took turns on some teenage ass. The smell of the shop floor, the weight of them.

  It will not happen again.

  Scorch bites down on his mouthguard, tasting blood, and runs the possibilities through his head. He beat a Cuban guy in Dade County with a double leg takedown and then some ground and pound, but the dude was a light-heavy at best. The couple straight rights he’s landed haven’t had much effect, so a knockout is unlikely. Got to get him off balance, which means taking some chances–

  It is a very short minute.

  The crowd yells “Bong!” this time and the Mountain lumbers toward him. Scorch takes a step,
pivots and hard-kicks, hoping to hit groin but only smacking a hairy thigh and skipping away. A roar of approval– action is action. Mullaney rushes him and Scorch gets caught against the wall, the Mountain locking hands behind his head for a double collar tie, but Scorch thrusts up hard, butting him under the bloodied eye and trying to slip out, but he is hurled down and has only time to get one knee up before the man falls onto him, throwing short hooks to the head that Scorch mostly catches on his arms until Mullaney pins one of his wrists to the mat and continues to hammer with his left. He hurts but without full leverage or a clean shot at the face it won’t kill him. The big man pounds away till his arm tires, then tries to press the point of his elbow into Scorch’s Adam’s apple, and now it’s just wrestling, Scorch trying to hug close and the Mountain without the technique to even start a submission hold. Scorch has a sweaty, hairy shoulder grinding down on his mouth and nose, hard to catch a breath, and there is booing as it goes on too long, Brent slapping the Mountain on his back till he’s got his attention and pulling them apart to start on their feet again.

  Scorch feels dizzy for a moment, all the blood that was trapped up in his head draining out as he stands, but manages to move sideways leaning against the wall till he can get his balance.

  Brent signals for them to engage again.

  The Mountain’s cheek on the bloody side is swollen, maybe broken by the butt, and when he sniffs it brings his lips up over his mouthguard, which has a shark-tooth pattern painted on it. Scorch lowers his hands a bit and steps forward.

  If a bar fight lasts more than twenty seconds you’re doing something wrong. The point is to put the asshole down quick and hard and then hope his friends don’t have easy access to anything that shoots bullets. No feeling a man out, no playing with him, no referee, and if you’re lucky, no security camera trained on the floor.

  Scorch throws a couple jabs, leaving his left low, and the Mountain throws a tremendous haymaker hook to the side of his head, knocking him stumbling sideways, Scorch milking it a bit by bouncing hard off the wall before he skitters away. He brings the left up too high, jab, jab, and thwap! takes a sidearm hook in the ribs that almost knocks the wind out of him. He can hear the oil workers cheering, can vaguely see through the lights that they are on their feet. He goes flat-footed, bending his knees a bit as if he’s in trouble, circles right, then moves forward again, dropping the left even more. He throws a pussy jab, leaning his head in too far, then ducks back quick as the Mountain throws a killer right hook at his head, the momentum as it misses twisting his whole body enough that Scorch can stomp his heel down on the side of the man’s right knee, sending him to the mat, and the moment Mullaney’s right arm goes stiff to catch his fall, dive on it knee first, rig drivers out on Route 12 able to hear the report as the big bone snaps, a collective Ooooooooh! from the crowd as their bodies wince at the thought of it. Scorch rolls away and hops to his feet, Brent just standing with his hands on his hips and a grin on his face, so he straddles the mound of Mullaney and pistons his elbow to the Mountain’s thick neck, 12 to 6, just the way they say is forbidden in the instructional videos, just the way his Aryan Brother would have done to him if positions were reversed. Mullaney somehow rolls sideways and gets his good arm up to grab Scorch’s face, fingers probing for the eyeballs, till Scorch clamps both hands on his wrist, rises up and drives his knee through that elbow socket as well. Brent has him in a choke hold from behind then, and he lets himself be pulled back as the derrick jockeys whoop and holler and stomp the metal bleachers and yes, throw bottles and cans into the pit.

  L. T. and Shakes have to pull him from under the arms to get him the last two rungs up the ladder, the lamest corner men in history, while Brent squawks something over the mic and walks a little circle around the writhing Mountain, wondering, no doubt, how he’s going to haul the big fuck out of the pit.

  “And still unde-fucking-feated champion,” yells Brent as well-wishers and backslapping drunks surround Scorch, a smile on Brent’s mouth but his eyes reading that the prick did bet on Mullaney, “Scorcher– Adamov!!!” Serves him right.

  L. T. and Shakes help Scorch stagger, still winded and feeling his cracked ribs like an ice pick in the side, through the bug-eyed, shouting throng. They can hear Brent announcing the next contest.

  “That fucker owes me,” growls Scorch, his legs starting to shake. “That fucker owes me something good.”

  RANDY WAKES AND DOESN’T know where he is.

  It’s a suite in a Best Western, he can tell that much right away. A plane outside, landing, so it’s right by the airport. It takes him a minute to get to the little living room, turn the lamp on, find the stationery next to the phone.

  Yellow Earth.

  It was the blood fracking dream again.

  He looks to the clock, does the math. It’s too late to call Coral and the kids, even if they’re in Seattle. She’s very formal about the whole deal, likes a pre-call to repeat the ground rules and wipe her feet on him a little bit, remind him who ended up with full custody. He can’t wait till they’re old enough to have their own phones.

  And Jewelle is out for the count by now, always saying how dead she is after a shift.

  In the dream the blood is being driven by an enormous pumping heart, and he follows it out of the chamber in a tumbling flurry of platelets and red blood cells, the pressure straining the walls of the main arteries, making them bulge, then ripping through the smaller arterioles with a clattering sound and blasting out into the capillaries, and he is in one place and everywhere at once as the tiny vessels overload, circumference inadequate for the volume, endothelial cells suddenly rupturing and the fluid exploding outward into the muscle tissue, the skin flushing a purplish red, flesh torn from the bone, the blood-brain barrier giving way before a flood of leukocytes, and the cerebrum itself swelling, swelling, pushing outward against the thinnest wall of the skull at the temple–

  The shale has been responding beautifully, the wells already tapped are in several cases out-producing his calculations. He’s refined the technique a bit, adjusted it to the particular conditions of the play, but can’t imagine why they still need him here. They’ve got plenty of people who can pound combustibles out of the ground with sludge.

  In the dream, sometimes he is the heart, forcing the fluid through the vessels, sometimes he is only a tiny molecule swept along in the rush, and sometimes, at the end of the ones that wake him up, he becomes the organism, the man who is being blown apart from within.

  Randy turns on the TV, finds a movie, mutes the sound. He sits, naked and sweating, on the couch. The movie looks familiar, something he’s seen before, or maybe just a familiar genre, men in thin black leather jackets killing each other. They say the room service is twenty-four hours now, a sleepy cook downstairs probably watching the same show to keep himself awake, half the lights off till there’s a call.

  His father was in a Holiday Inn when the stroke hit him, a divorced mud man with so many wells to service that each assumed he was at another, and it was a full day, Do Not Disturb sign hung on the doorknob, before his body was found. He was a great admirer of room service, or at least pretended to be.

  One of the men in leather jackets, who looks like an Eastern European of some sort, has another man’s head stuck in the jaws of a vise, grilling him for information, steadily turning the handle. The pressure is unbearable–

  MACARIO CATCHES THE TAXI at the corner of Paseo Colón and the Avenue of Beheaded Saints. When he says he wants to see the border fences the taxista does not hesitate, taking him east on Colón and then right on the ring road named after the assassinated presidential candidate.

  There is not much to see. On the Mexican side, a massive cement ramp leading up to fenced-in fábricas, then the golf course, then a low, tree-covered flood plain leading to the Río Bravo and the United States beyond, on the other.

  There are a lot of things to be climbed over.

  “If there isn’t much rain you can walk across,” say
s the taxista. “You only get wet a little above the belt. But the current can be strong, so most people pay to be taken across on a raft, and for that the Migra is always watching. Those yanquis have cameras everywhere, even ones that see the heat of your body at night.”

  Macario has been trying not to look like an indocumentado, even carrying a second-hand toolbox, with no tools in it, when he goes into the bars where people know things.

  “And worse than the yanqui Migra are the Zetas,” adds the driver, singing the song Macario has heard a dozen times since he arrived in Nuevo Laredo. “You try to cross alone, or even in a group without paying their cuota, they kill you. A few come floating down that river every day.”

  They turn back in on Avenida Transformación, passing another cluster of the low, whitewashed factory buildings, all behind metal fencing with concertina wire strung across the top of it. But for the lack of gun towers, they look as much like a prison complex as the Centro de Ejecución de Sentencias #2.

  The taxista’s warning is the same as he heard from Nacho, the skinny little pollero who made him an offer on the first day here, a teenage boy with nervous, shining eyes, wearing a Tecate cap.

  “All my passengers pay me the cuota,” he explained, “and then I pay the ones who own the river before we cross.”

  The ones who own the city of Nuevo Laredo, and most of the state of Tamaulipas. Macario had gone to an immigration lawyer on the second day, a man who sighed a lot and told him the United States government did not care if huachicoleros would kill him if he returned home, that the ‘well-founded fear’ they made exemption for was meant to save the victims, hopefully well-educated ones, of governments they were waging quiet wars against.

  “You cross with me, I bring you past the first line of the Migra,” said Nacho, disturbingly loud, grinning over the beer Macario had bought him. “Believe it, güey, I’m the best.”

  “I want to go further than that.”

  “Yo soy solamente pollero del río. You want to go all the way to Houston on one ride, you need to get on a truck. If there is something illegal moving on a truck, the narcos want it to be their product.”