by Jessie Cooke
There was no cage where Coyote fought…just a circle made of bricks. He stood on cement in the center of that circle with his opponent, while the bloodthirsty onlookers made bets on who would still be standing when it was all over. At least the surface encouraged him to stay on his feet. His head had hit the floor so many times that he wasn’t sure his brain could take another concussion. He learned how to fall and he learned how to deal with the pain. It was his life…for what it was worth.
Slinko did pay them when they won…a little. The apartment he so “kindly” allowed Coyote to use had been completely unfurnished. He used his winnings to buy some furniture, dishes, and his most valuable possession…a console television set. It wasn’t one of those newfangled color TVs and there was no antenna on the building…so the picture was fuzzy most of the time and it only got two channels. But the voices of people that weren’t yelling at him…to hit someone, hurt someone, draw blood, or kick ass…soothed his aching soul. He watched things like The Brady Bunch and Leave It to Beaver and tried to imagine how different his life may have been if he’d been raised by Mike and Carol Brady, or Ward and June Cleaver…instead of his parents, God rest their souls.
It didn’t matter what he imagined, however. He knew what his reality was. Tonight, Slinko had met him in a small room in the back of the warehouse, and he’d told him that the opponent he was about to go up against would be his toughest yet. Slinko was being extra nice. He told Coyote that he had put him instead of one of the other guys up against Viper because he was the “best” and Slinko knew he could do this. He told him that he’d get a big bonus if he won this one…enough to buy a color television and a new antenna. At the end of Slinko’s long spiel, he had told Coyote to be sure and let him know if he didn’t think he was up to winning tonight. He had a lot of money riding on the fight, and if need be, Coyote could be “replaced.” Coyote knew what that meant. In his mind, anyway, it meant that he would be on his way to that seat in hell he was sure the devil had reserved for him, and Slinko’s life would go on…sans a few hundred thousand dollars, and down another fighter.
“I got this,” was all Coyote had said. Now as he walked toward the circle and got a glimpse of “Viper,” death almost sounded more inviting. He took his place on the other side of the circle and quickly, without pulling his head all the way up, he took stock of who was in the room. Coyote was not an educated man, by any means. But he wasn’t stupid, either. He did have one ace in the hole, just in case an opportunity to use it ever presented itself. Coyote had an almost photographic memory. He remembered every face he ever saw, and if there was a name to be put to it, he would remember that as well. These illegal fights that took place in the midst of an empty warehouse in the center of nowhere and under the cover of night were not a poor man’s paradise. Only rich men came here to play. These men were important men in the community. They were doctors and lawyers, cops and politicians. Most of them were married with children…but it was rare that the woman draped over their arm wore a wedding ring or went by the name of “Mommy.”
For those who came alone, Slinko offered a second service…just as lucrative for him as the first one. Slinko didn’t just pimp out fighters. He had a collection of women “robots” as well. Some of them looked way too young to Coyote…but he was barely in a position to speak up for himself, much less anyone else. But he watched and listened, and somewhere deep down inside he hoped that someday he’d have cause to use all that knowledge he’d gained. Slinko offered him a “girl” once as a bonus for winning a fight. Coyote turned down the offer, cursing himself the whole time. He’d only been with one woman in his life, and that was some older woman who gave him a ride on his way out East. He didn’t know what to do with a girl his own age, and he was scared to death that she’d tell Slinko if he did it wrong.
This night wasn’t much different than any other as far as Coyote could tell. The warehouse was packed, and noisy. Coyote was fighting in the second match of the night. The first one had been quick. Coyote wasn’t allowed to watch the other fights; he only knew when they were over and how they went, if the winner came back to the fighter’s room…or the loser hadn’t shown up before they came to call him out. He focused his attention back across the circle on his opponent, Viper. Viper looked like the kind of guy that grown men would cross the street to keep from passing. His neck, chest, and arms were covered in black and white and faded green tattoos that looked like they might have been carefully crafted in prison. Coyote was six-foot-two and this guy had to be at least two inches taller than that. Coyote was told by the “trainer”…the guy who escorted the fighters in and…if they could walk…out of the circle, that he weighed in at three-fifty pounds. He was wearing shorts and nothing else, and as far as Coyote could tell by looking at him, none of the three-fifty was fat. He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his bare feet and nothing was moving. He had scars on his face, a lot of them, and his nose looked like it had been broken more than once. The swastika tattooed on his bare scalp drew the picture together. Coyote knew how to fight, and he was good at it. He did it to survive, but it didn’t normally give him joy. He focused on the swastika now, however, and thought about looking at it on the ground when he took this racist son of a bitch to the floor, and it did feel good.
When the buzzer rang he tried to block out the cheers and jeers echoing off the walls and ceiling around him, and he focused on the giant in front of him. There were no referees, no real rules…the people just wanted to see a fight, preferably a long one, with lots of blood. With both eyes on Viper, waiting for him to make the first move, Coyote cracked his knuckles and his neck and cautiously moved forward until he was close enough to Viper that the other man took a swing. Viper swung hard, but Coyote dodged it, coming up with an uppercut to the other man’s chin. Viper barely flinched, but as soon as Coyote was upright, the man threw another punch…this time his right fist connected with the side of Coyote’s head. His fist felt like steel, and it hurt like a motherfucker, but Coyote didn’t go down. He shook off the ringing in his ears quickly enough to dodge the next blow and this time threw a punch at Viper’s ribs. He hit hard and fast and he heard something snap and Viper wince. He almost hoped that he’d cracked one and punctured a lung, so the fight could be over. No such luck, though. Viper managed to keep moving while he fought through the pain and caught his breath, and then he lunged toward Coyote and started throwing punches one right after the other. Coyote bobbed and weaved and managed to dodge a few of them…but it was a relentless barrage of left, right, left, right, head, shoulders, ribs, head…Viper was trying to wear him down…and doing a pretty good job of it so far.
Coyote’s body was screaming in pain. Viper was in close, using Coyote’s face like a speed bag. He couldn’t hear anything and it was getting hard to see thanks to the blood and sweat in his eyes. He had never wanted to go down so early in a fight before, but this guy was a killer, and if he was going to die anyway, he wondered if he shouldn’t just get it over with. About that time he either saw Slinko or imagined he did, out of the corner of his eye, and the idea of Viper winning wasn’t half as repugnant as the idea of Slinko getting to finish him off if Viper didn’t. Viper wasn’t good with his feet, but Coyote hadn’t been able to get his arms up past the other man’s bulk and he was pushed to the edge of the circle already. So, with all the strength he could muster, he spun his aching body around, lifted his leg, and let his foot connect with Viper’s neck. The big guy stumbled a few feet back. He didn’t fall, but it gave Coyote the room he needed to attack. He didn’t know where the burst of energy came from, but it propelled him forward and he began to pound every part of Viper’s rigid body that he could reach until he heard the sound of the buzzer, calling an end to the first round.
During the small break, the men were allowed to use a wet towel and a dry one to wipe the blood off their faces and bodies and get a drink of water. If anything was bleeding too profusely, one of the “trainers” would try and patch it up, to get them thr
ough the next round. Apparently, none of Coyote’s injuries qualified. He mopped the sweat and blood off his face and chest, drank the thermos of cold water, and while he waited for the next buzzer, once again, he soaked up the faces in the crowd.
Without any other fanfare, the buzzer sounded again and Coyote and Viper met in the middle. Viper didn’t waste any time, landing a right jab smack on Coyote’s nose. The pain radiated up through his sinuses and into his ears. It pissed him off…not at Viper, but at himself. Getting hit dead in the face like that was a rookie mistake. But the beating he had already taken made his reflexes slow and his judgment cloudy. That’s why, when he saw Viper rearing back to kick him…he made a fatal mistake. Coyote let his reflexes take over from his good sense, and he turned about ten degrees to the left and ducked his head. Viper’s right foot didn’t hit the target it was looking for. Instead, it sunk into the small of Coyote’s back, right over the top of one of his kidneys. Coyote heard himself scream, right before they turned out all the lights.
The next thing Coyote remembered was waking up with a pounding headache. Or maybe he wasn’t awake. He felt like he was floating, and then he realized he was suffocating. His head was pounding because his body had no oxygen…he couldn’t breathe. He opened his mouth and only when he sucked in air and got water instead, did he realize that he was drowning.
His body went into survival mode and his arms began to flail, looking for something to grab onto. The water was freezing but the cold at least made him too numb to concentrate on the pain. He needed to take a breath…if he didn’t, his lungs were going to explode. He opened his eyes as much as he could. It was dark, and dirty. He was probably in the Hudson River and if that was the case, fighting was a moot point, but he didn’t know how to not fight…he’d been doing it his entire life. Something kept drawing him toward the bottom of his dark, watery grave, but he fought toward the surface until one of his hands felt the cool air of the night. He sank again, but fought his way up, and then again, and the third time out just as he started his decent…probably for the final time…he felt a big, strong, cold hand clamp down around one of his wrists and then his body being hauled up out of the water, just as if he were no heavier than air.
Coughing, sputtering, choking, and trying to remember how to breathe, he looked up into a pair of eyes so blue that they shone in the night like a cat. Coyote said the first thing that came to his mind…
“God?”
“Close,” the man sporting the blue eyes said with a laugh. “Damned close.”
3
Boston, Three Weeks Later
“You awake, kid?” Coyote had been awake off and on for several days, maybe even a week. But it took him at least two of those days to remember what happened. He’d lost the fight, and he must have passed out…maybe they thought he was dead, or maybe they just wanted him to be. He remembered waking up when he hit the freezing water. They’d thrown him in the Hudson River and he was drowning. Then suddenly, he wasn’t. A strong arm, or maybe two strong arms, pulled him up and a man with blue eyes that looked like the light on top of a fucking police car had professed to be God…he thought. Maybe that part was a dream? He had no idea. But once those memories found a place in his chaotic head, there were new things to absorb…so many new things. He would wake up to the face and body of an angel standing over him. There were more than one, he thought. Sometimes she’d be a blonde and other times a redhead…maybe he was hallucinating, but if so, he didn’t want to stop. The angels would bathe him and feed him and tend to his wounds. They talked to him, and smiled at him…he liked that part, a lot. But for some reason, even though he tried, he couldn’t seem to form the words to speak back when he was spoken to. Although his social skills might have had something to do with it, he was sure it was more than that. He was in a lot of pain and his tongue felt swollen. He had a hard time swallowing even the soft food they fed him…so maybe there was damage to his vocal cords? He didn’t know. He was in and out of it, and he never really knew what was real and what was a dream.
Sometimes the man with the blue eyes would be there. Once, he thought he saw him putting a needle in his arm and attaching it to a big bag of liquid…an IV, he thought it was called. Other times, the man would hold a stethoscope to his chest and press it against the veins in his neck. The “angels” called him “Doc” but he didn’t look like any doctor that Coyote had ever seen. He wore a leather vest and jeans and he was usually unshaven. His blond hair was long and sometimes it was loose around his shoulders. Coyote hadn’t seen many doctors in real life, but he was sure that wasn’t their standard look. The room he was in looked like a bedroom…bare, with simple furniture and no pictures on the walls. There was a window, but all he could see outside were the tops of trees and the blinding sun in the morning and afternoon. He had no idea where he was…or who these people were. But for the first time he was feeling well enough that he thought it was time to find out.
“Yeah,” he croaked in a dry, raspy voice that he didn’t recognize himself. “Where am I?”
The blue-eyed man took a seat at the edge of the bed and looked at him intently. Finally, he said, “Boston, near Dorchester. What’s your name?”
“Coyote.”
The man laughed. “Well I’ll be damned. You’ll fit in nicely around here.”
“That’s what they call me,” he said. “What everyone calls me. Name I was born with was Xander Lee…but ain’t nobody used that in a long time.”
“Coyote will do,” the blue-eyed man said. “They call me Doc and I’m the president around here. You’re on the Southside Skulls Ranch, in our clubhouse.”
“That explains it,” Coyote said. “Been trying to figure out if you were just a really laid-back doctor, or…”
Doc laughed. “If you stick around for any time at all, you’ll figure out that there ain’t much ‘laid back’ about me at all. I’m not a doctor, either. I was a medic in the army, so I learned how to patch people up. You were pretty busted up, probably needed a hospital. But you didn’t have any ID on you…and you were dressed in a little pair of fighting shorts. I took a guess that you weren’t looking to talk to the authorities. If that guess was wrong, we can get you into town.”
“Nah,” Coyote said, grunting as he tried to sit up. “That was a safe bet. I lost a fight. Guessing the man I worked for wasn’t happy about it. Maybe he thought I was dead already. Most likely he just didn’t care. Thanks, by the way, for pulling my ass out of that water.” He looked around the room again. There was an IV pole next to the bed. He wasn’t hooked to it any longer. The stethoscope lay draped over the top of it and the table next to the bed was filled with a bottle of what looked like antibiotics and pain pills. “And all of this,” he added.
Doc just nodded. He stood up and said, “When you’re ready, you’re free to go…or stay. If you stay, I have to warn you, you’ll be put to work. Nobody gets a free ride around here.”
“Thanks. I’ll think on that and be up in a while.”
Doc nodded again. “There’s some clothes in the closet there that the girls thought might fit you.”
“Those girls,” Coyote said, suddenly remembering the redhead who had changed his bandages the first day he was slightly alert. “They live here…on your ranch?”
Doc chuckled. “Yeah, some of them. I don’t know how familiar you are with the MC life, but in this club, the women are free to choose who they want to be with…and who they don’t. We don’t tolerate abuse. If you choose to stay, I’ll get you a copy of the bylaws to take a look at and sign.” Doc started for the door. He seemed like a hard case, but something about him also made Coyote feel safe enough to share something with him that he rarely shared with anyone.
“Hey, Doc.”
Doc turned to look at him and Coyote said, “I can’t read, or write.” Doc cocked an eyebrow, gave Coyote another nod, and left the room. Coyote sighed and looked toward the window. For a second he thought maybe he found a place where his lack of formal education w
ouldn’t matter…and he wouldn’t be used as a punching bag in return. Doc’s lack of response, however, hadn’t been encouraging.
Coyote pulled the covers back and looked down at his bruised, bandaged body. He wasn’t shocked to see that he was naked, but he was slightly embarrassed. He didn’t know how long he’d been there, but if his memory was serving him correctly, it had been for more than a few days, or hours even. With a loud grunt, he moved his legs to the edge of the bed and then used his sore arms to push himself up to a sitting position. He was out of breath and lightheaded already, and pain was shooting through his body from head to toe. He sat there, trying to get his breathing under control and wondering if his legs would even hold him if he tried to stand up. With another grunt, he pushed with his hands, and his legs trembled like an active earthquake fault underneath him as he stood. They began to tingle like thousands of needles were being stuck into them and he had to put his hand out and grab the little nightstand to keep from hitting the floor. He was still standing there, hunched over and waiting for the circulation and life to return to his legs, when he heard the door open behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see Doc. Coyote was instantly embarrassed, thinking about the sight that Doc had walked in on, but the other man looked unfazed.
“Hey, you know the alphabet?”
“Yeah…” That was an odd question.
Doc reached around in front of Coyote and sat a slender book down on the table in front of him. It had a big, red “A” on the front of it, and a picture of an equally red apple. “For starters,” he said. “If you’re interested.” With that, he turned and left. Coyote stared down at the book in front of him. Maybe he had found his niche after all.