Those That Wake

by Jesse Karp

"My mother ... doesn't really get along with anyone."

  Laura looked at him, the scars masking with fierceness something quiet and sad and even innocent on his face. He had his hands under his head now, his tightly muscled arms spread at the sides. The cover exposed part of his chest, which also had nicks and welts, some of them recent enough to be raised and red.

  She put her hand onto his chest, touching one of the marks gently. She felt him tense, but she kept her hand on his warm skin and moved it until she could feel the slow, steady beat of his heart. After a time, his hand came down and covered hers.

  Laura's thoughts quieted. Ten minutes later, she could still feel Mal breathing shallowly and knew that sleep hadn't found him yet, either.

  "Would you tell me about your father, Mal?"

  He turned his head and looked down into her eyes, and she felt her heart stutter for an unexpected moment. Then he looked up again and let the memories out.

  Mal sat in school, paying less attention even than usual. There was a bandage taped across the bridge of his nose, wet with blood from recent damage. An unusual sight on most eleven-year-olds. Unfortunately, it was not particularly surprising to see evidence of rough treatment on Mal; a bruise, a cut, a welt—his classmates barely noticed it anymore. What was surprising that day, to Mal as much as anyone, was to see his father in school, his bleary, roughed-up face rotating back and forth with confusion as he wandered down the hall peering through the windows in the doors. It was more surprising still to have him come into the classroom, interrupting the teacher, who was at first irate and then, sizing up the intruder, cautiously silent as the fighter put a big hand on his boy's shoulder and led him out of the room, down the hall, and out of the school.

  He marched his boy into the subway and eventually to a beat-up old tenement, which Mal didn't recognize. The father took the son up three flights of stairs, unlocked a door with a key from his pocket, and brought him in. He sat down on a thick, dusty chair and stood his boy in front of him, hands on his shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes.

  "This is home now, Mal," he said. Max's face was full of dents and dings. Even on days when no fight had come along for weeks, the face was puffy in places, trying to find its original form, unknown for many, many years.

  "What do you mean?"

  "We're not going back to your ma. That's gonna get you killed." He touched his boy's nose gently. Max had bandaged it himself, from the kit he kept in the bathroom. "You and me both."

  The gash had been left across the bridge of Mal's nose last night. His mother had come stumbling back into the house, using one hand to steady herself on the wall and the other to bring a tall bottle half full of sloshing golden liquid to her slurring lips.

  Mal had watched her from the seat where he read his book. Schoolwork was by and large ignored, but at the beginning of every week, his father brought home a book from the library, one for Mal and one for his older brother. Max didn't care if schoolwork got done, but those books had better be read by the end of the week or for a month there was no going out to the gym to watch the fights.

  Now, Mal looked somberly over the cover of his book at his mother's return. And naturally, she saw the eyes, as she was meant to.

  She began screaming at him about respect and how he goddamn well better not be looking at her, lying in wait every night for her return so he could judge her. Then her voice got quiet, and that was when Mal knew trouble, real trouble, was coming. He rose from the chair, intending to retreat to his room, where Tommy waited. Tommy would scream at Max, rail at him, while Max looked down with tired, drowning eyes. But Tommy would never let loose on Sharon. He was good at looking for a fight, except when one was really coming. Tommy knew it was one of his father's fight nights, and he knew what time it was, and he knew he should be in their room then, no matter what. Mal knew to be in his room at these times, too, but he never was.

  Mal rose to leave now. His mother had struck him before, once or twice even tried to kick him. He was getting too big, though, and he could take the blows without flinching, and that would only enrage her more. So tonight he would retreat. And, for no reason in particular, tonight Sharon wasn't going to allow it. She admonished him in her harsh near-whisper not to dare walk out on her, and the bottle of liquor shot from her hand and blasted apart on the wall, inches from Mal's face. Had she meant to hit him with it or merely scare him? He never knew. But a shard of glass caught him across the bridge of the nose, deep enough so that the mark would never leave.

  Max came home from fighting that night and saw his son sitting in the darkened room, the smear of red across the boy's face lit by flickering city lights through the sooty windows. Max took his boy into the bathroom and dressed the wound silently. Max finished the bandages and let out a long hard breath and shook his head.

  The next day he collected his boy in school.

  "But what about Tommy?" Mal asked, facing his father in his new home.

  "I'm sorry, Mal. Tommy is ... I don't know how I can explain this to you. Tommy is your mother's. I can't do a thing about that. It's always been that way. You were mine, and she gave you hell just like she gave me. And Tommy was hers. I can't make you understand any better than that."

  Mal didn't understand at all. He had never seen his father give up on anything, anything. Why should the first thing he ever gave up on be his own son?

  So Mal cried. Wailed like an infant. For the first time in either of their lives, and for the last, Max grabbed his son and pulled him close and hung on to him so tight that it hurt. Mal went on and on with it, and Max never let go. Somewhere in that time, Mal felt his father's chest shaking, too. But it was a hard, tight shake, and Mal looked up and saw through his own tears that his father was not crying. His face was dry. It showed nothing; a blunt, stupid refusal to back down.

  Mal saw Tommy in school, sometimes over the next year, more bruises on his face, his shoulders slumping a little bit worse each time. At first, Mal approached him, but Tommy turned away and hurried off to class. Eventually, Mal cornered him in the playground, grabbed him by the shirt, and pushed him up against a wall, demanding an explanation. Tommy kicked and spit and screamed, and Mal couldn't hold him any longer. The year after that, Tommy was gone. Sharon had moved to another place, another school district. Mal listened, waited for word of Tommy. It came: Tommy was getting beaten up, was stealing things, had been suspended, had moved again. Somewhere, in the space between the parents, the brothers had lost each other.

  ***

  Max worked at the gym all hours, filled it in with spare jobs at the dock, scrounging a pittance from six in the morning until nine or ten at night. On fight nights, it was later still. Mal would generally not see him until the next morning, purple and yellow in spots and maybe limping or favoring an arm, but with a particular set of his jaw and an upward line in his lips that was only there after a fight night. Sometimes he would sit with Mal and tell old stories, myths of men battling monsters until one was dead. That was all Max knew about: fighting and stories of men who fought and killed or died.

  Mal would wake up, put the bacon on, and roust his father, and on some mornings his father would have new bruises and welts, even though there hadn't been a scheduled fight the night before. Max just shambled out to the table or off to work, slow and limping, once or twice even blind in one eye.

  By the time he was thirteen, Mal was big, like his father. After school, two schoolmates would bring Mal to an old, dilapidated park. There, down a path, under a stone bridge that was rotting with moss and solitude, they entered him into bare-knuckle fights against amateur fighters. Not boys, these fighters, not other school kids looking for a rough time, but men who made a sick and dirty living at this. When Mal won, he got the cash prize, which sat on the ground in a pile held down by a rock until the fight was over. Mal started to come home bruised and battered himself on occasion, but that never bothered Max. Maybe, Mal wondered, it was even a badge of pride. Though he didn't have to wonder for long.
<
br />   One afternoon, as Mal hunched on a rock with blood trailing a river down his face and onto his bare chest, a shadow fell across him.

  "You hit like a pile driver, but you're too hot to throw a punch. It makes your guard too low on the right." His father was looking down at him.

  Mal looked back, through a partial red blur. As always, his father's face was unreadable.

  "How long have you known?" Mal asked.

  "How long? Who do you think told those kids in your class to bring you here?"

  "What?" The word stretched out in Mal's own ears as the world around him was drowned out by the suddenly shattering volume of his heartbeats.

  "I would have taken you myself, Mal, but I didn't want them to see us together right away. I thought they might make it extra hard on you or something."

  Was Mal supposed to thank him? Be grateful or proud, revolted or terrified? He felt none of those things. That was the moment Mal realized he was all alone in the world.

  ***

  At fifteen, Mal started working at the gym after school. One day, as inexplicably as Sharon deciding to hurl that bottle, Tommy showed up at the gym. He was taller now, but had always been thin and still was. His face, though, had become like his mother's: hard, resentful, unyielding.

  "Heard you were working here now," Tommy said, as though they were simply old pals who had a hard time staying in touch.

  Mal nodded, in terror of saying the wrong thing and maybe driving Tommy off forever.

  "I'm gonna get a job, too, soon as I can; get out of the house. Mom's got a new guy. It's not working so well for me."

  "Are you all right, Tommy?" Mal asked.

  "Yeah." Tommy looked up, insulted. "I'm fine. Her shit can't hurt me." He was angry now. It toppled out of him, as it always had, like an uncontrollable flood. "You can't hurt me, either, Mal. You ran away." His face was red and he skewered the air between them with an accusing finger. "You and Dad both."

  Mal backed down, tried to calm him. He asked if they could meet somewhere, for a sandwich, maybe. Just to talk. Tommy agreed and never showed up.

  ***

  On the first night of Big Black, the first of those fourteen nights of intermittent darkness and catastrophe, Mal raced through the chaotic, crying streets to the apartment he shared with his father. After all the blows to the head and face, the old man could barely see straight when the lights were on. Mal let himself in and immediately heard a sound.

  Even over the shouts and roars from the street, it was instantly recognizable as crying. But from his father's room? Was someone already here with him? Mal shot through the darkness and found his father, startling the older man badly as he grabbed him by the shoulders.

  "Dad?" he said into the murky shadow. "Are you all right? What's going on?"

  He got Max at exactly the right time, in the dead of night, in the dark, with the city falling apart outside. At his absolute weakest, the old man couldn't resist giving an answer.

  "I've got cancer, Mally," he said between tears and sucking in air. "It's in my gut. Or that's where it started, anyway. They couldn't do anything about it. Not that I could have afforded it, anyway."

  "Jesus, Dad," Mal said, something beneath him crumbling away. "How long do you have?"

  "Well"—his father actually looked like he was smiling in the dim moonlight through the window, tears catching and glittering in the curves around his lips—"they gave me six months."

  "Jesus," Mal whispered.

  "But that was twelve years ago." Max grinned. "So who the hell knows?"

  "What? Twelve years?"

  "Yeah."

  "You've had cancer for twelve years?" Mal said. Even as he did, he realized it had come out wrong. His father had been fighting cancer for twelve years. That was why he was still alive.

  "Days are painful. It helps to let go a little bit at night. Sorry I scared you, Mally."

  Mal looked down at him and laughed. What else could you do?

  And a matter of months later, Max Jericho finally went down. It wasn't the cancer. A week before he died, the old fighter had retired from the ring.

  THE INTRUDER

  THE NEXT MORNING, the bus came and took Laura and Mal for a five-hour ride. It stopped at towns here and there, each one getting progressively larger until they were on a thruway and through a tunnel and finally onto streets suffocated by long gray shadows cast off of towering gray buildings.

  At Port Authority, the silvery gazes of MCT officers greeted them. The subway headed downtown was dense with faceless, preoccupied figures, and Laura found herself hyper-aware of any person glancing at them for a second too long. It seemed to Laura as if everyone was gazing at her intently from behind her back or just out of her peripheral vision.

  The last time Laura had come to the city—the last time before her life fell apart—had been for an impromptu weekend shopping jaunt with her mother. She had been in one of these vast rat-and-cockroach warrens the city referred to as the subway when the car had ground to a halt and sat there in the dingy tunnel for nearly an hour. She remembered with disturbing clarity the dull looks on the other passengers' faces, more resigned than upset, really. The dead faces, many retreating into the comforting companionship of their cells, waited for the MCT to come through the dark tunnel and haul them all out. Laura had wondered then if no help had come or if the train hadn't started up again, would those other passengers have bothered to get off their asses and hike out? Or had the Con Edison attack robbed them of something so integral that they would have just sat there, tapping away at their cells until they starved to death?

  "When did this city give up?" Laura asked Mal, looking sideways at the numb faces around her now.

  Mal watched them, too, staring at their cells or at the HDs, or at nothing at all.

  "After Big Black," he said, "the lights went back on, but..."

  "But they never came out of the dark," she said.

  "Dark. Yes. Enough to eat us all alive."

  She closed her eyes and rested her head on Mal and searched for his heartbeat.

  The sign was well faded, but it still said JERICHO'S. They went up the dirty steps and into the big room, where the smell of worn leather and honest effort brought him comfort. They stood at the door, Laura soaking in the atmosphere with a curious expression and a crinkled nose, watching someone pound the bag, another man jump rope, neither of whom had turned to see Mal yet. And there in the office, amidst a fog of cigar smoke, sat a gruff, stubby-looking man.

  "That's Stoagie," Mal whispered, his eyes fixed on the man. She could see the anticipation travel down his body like a physical sensation. He grabbed Laura's hand and hurried them toward the office.

  By the window was a wall displaying pictures and trophies. It was crowded, and many of the images held a young Mal in their frames. He was ten, shaking hands with Stoagie in front of the gym. He was fifteen, sweating and with a bruise on his face, and on either side of him Stoagie and a man who must have been Max were holding up his gloved hands. He was a little boy, giving his father a sock on the chin, his father pretending to reel backward from it. Laura looked at the younger face—fewer scars, brighter eyes—and tried to find the Mal she knew in it.

  Stoagie had come out of the office and was standing outside in slacks and shirtsleeves. Mal had described him on the bus ride, an old coach and corner man. He looked every inch of it, grizzled and mean and invincible.

  Stoagie eyed the incongruous young lady and nodded at Mal's approach. Mal had stopped dead, not receiving the smile and gruff hug he had expected as greeting.

  "Ben Carmichael," Stoagie said, offering his hand. "Welcome. You interested in our place?"

  Mal forced his hand out, cold and numb, and swallowed weakly as he shook the other man's.

  "You look like you've done some boxing in your life," Stoagie said. "Whereabouts?"

  "Around," Mal said in a tone that was rigid and hollow. Stoagie nodded, waiting for more. Mal looked at the wall near them. "Is it true Max J
ericho used to coach here?"

  "Sure. Used to own a piece of it. That's why his name's over the door."

  "What about Max Jericho's son?"

  "Sorry?" Stoagie squinted.

  "Didn't Max Jericho have a son?"

  "Not that I know of," Stoagie said, "and I knew him for a long time. So, no."

  Laura could see that it would have been less painful if he had struck Mal with a sledgehammer in the gut. Mal's hands actually went to his stomach, and she could feel his suddenly labored breathing through the hand she had put gently on his back.

  "Who's this boy in the picture?" Laura asked. Stoagie came around and squinted at the images in question.

  "That's Max," he said of the picture where Mal was punching his father. "Don't know which boy you mean."

  Mal stared at this old man he had known all his life, now a collaborator or a pawn or something even worse.

  "I'm a friend of Nikolai Brath's," Mal finally came up with in a voice so weak, Laura barely recognized it. "Seen him around lately?"

  "You know Brath?" Stoagie looked mildly interested. "I haven't seen him in a bunch a days, actually."

  "I haven't seen him, either," Mal said, and Laura saw his eyes shining with moisture. "That's why I came around."

  "Ah." Stoagie stuck his cigar into his mouth and munched it in thought. "Well, if you see him, tell him we're looking for him."

  "I will."

  And Mal stood, uncertain what exactly to do, until Laura's hand curled around his and she led him toward the stairs. The men there watched them go, but no one said a word.

  ***

  "I'm so sorry," she said to him when they were back on the subway. She was holding his hand as tight as she could, but his had gone slack. "We need to find someone else, someone at school, maybe."

  Mal shook his head. It was a life she could hardly imagine herself, going somewhere every day with no friends, no one to talk to, just whiling away the hours.

  "Your foster parents?"

  "If they got Stoagie, the Fosters won't know me, either. They barely knew me before all this."