The Fighter

by Michael Farris Smith

  He stopped and sat down on the steps. Opened the notebook and read. He needed thirty thousand dollars to keep the house from going to sale to the public, a sheriff standing on the front steps of the courthouse and auctioning the property to buyers who would get it for a fraction of its value. The years and history and generations of Maryann’s family who had lived there and wedded there and died there disappearing with a raise of the hand to the highest bidder. He made another checkmark on the foreclosure notice. From eight days down to seven days. But it might as well have been seven minutes. He searched the pages of the notebook for a note or a name, some clue to who may let him borrow enough to keep Big Momma at a distance and delay the foreclosure, but he knew there was no such answer.

  Two days after he turned forty he was sidekicked in the head by a much younger and quicker man and he was out before he hit the smooth clay of the fighting pit. He flopped unconscious and he took two more hard fists to the temple before it was called. He woke in a hospital room and he didn’t know his own name or where he was or how he got there and they gave him enough painkillers to dull a horse but the pain burned through in his head and neck in aggressive and arrogant flames. For days he lay in the hospital room in the great blank spaces of his mind with the whole world a stranger and he stared out of the window with a blissful unawareness of regret or loss. He left the hospital with a ringing in his head that was more piercing than before and a prescription for painkillers that carried a strength his body craved. Those tiny pills that released him for a little while. Allowed him to sleep. To sit up straight. Beginning to take an extra one in the mornings when it was difficult to get out of bed or when the sun was too bright against his eyes and the prescriptions disappeared more quickly. Going from one doctor to the next and trying to get refills and when that no longer worked he turned to the other fighters. Men with their own addictions and their own dealers. Paying cash in locker rooms or in parking lots at the venues, getting connected with dealers he trusted to eventually taking whatever he could get from whoever he could get it from. The headaches had been steady for years but now he carried something sharper, more violent inside his brain, a pain unlike he had known and a headache that would seize him at any instant. Take him to his knees. A pain that searched for a weakness in the medication he kept pumping into his body and when there was a pause, when he tried to lay off and let himself be, this new headache gripped and said who do you think you are. You can’t hold back. You better take it all the time whether you need it or not or I will cripple you.

  Along the highway in front of the house a log truck bellowed as it shifted gears. The crow flew from the clothesline post and landed in the tall grass of the front yard, pecked around and then flew away with a bug in its beak. Jack then stood and walked to the back door.

  He stepped inside the kitchen. The air stagnant and he left the door open and raised the window above the sink. On the small table where he had learned to drink coffee and eat things grown in the garden he set down the notebook and emptied his pockets. Four red and three blue pills and a fold of cash. Some change and a cigarette lighter and the brass knuckles.

  He walked through the house. Blades of sunlight slicing between spaces in curtains and blinds and making golden stripes across the hardwood. A heavy air and tiny dust diamonds moving across the light and Jack stepping slowly from room to room as if anticipating an ambush. His eyes careful around each corner and through each doorway and some strange fear rising in him as he moved throughout the sleeping house. No furniture. He had years ago loaded the armoires and handcrafted tables and mahogany headboards and everything else that had any value onto a U-Haul truck and then he drove out on the thin dirt road between the acreage, to a shack Maryann’s father had long ago strengthened with new framing and converted into a storage shed. He unloaded and put a combination lock on the door but he didn’t write down the numbers of the combination, trying to keep the furniture from ending up on a pawnshop floor.

  Only shadows across empty rooms, chandeliers dulled by a thick film of dust and cobwebs spun in the corners of the ceilings and window frames. The shift of light and shadow and he felt the sensation of moving out of one world and into another. The house a museum of life passed by.

  He climbed the stairs and ran his finger across the picture frames to wipe the dust away and when he got to the top he looked down over the banister. Waited as if maybe the ghosts he always imagined to be in here would slide out from behind their supernatural cover and welcome him. But there was only the sound of his own labored breathing from climbing the stairs and he moved into the upstairs hallway and went into what had been his bedroom.

  He crossed the room and stood at the foot of his bed. The only piece of furniture he did not have carted away. He set his gnarly knuckles on the top of the metal footboard and like he had done many times before, after listening to Maryann talk about mothers and great-grandfathers and grandmothers and great-aunts, he imagined the lives that had been lived in this house. The bare feet of old people and children that had crossed this floor in the first warm days of spring and the eyes that had closed in this bed and the dreams that came to those of past generations but still dreams of the same things. Of love and belonging and of a hand to hold and of flying and being embraced in just the right way. And dreams overrun by the eternal wolves of fear and loss until the body jerked and the eyes opened. In times when he could not sleep as a boy he would imagine the spirits of all those other lives coming and lying with him and escorting him into a peaceful sleep.

  He looked up from the bed. I was good, he thought.

  He had been young and fierce and every now and then someone knew enough French to call him the Butcher. He stared at the wall and he remembered this younger man and then he remembered the small town seized by an ice storm that snapped tree limbs and took down electrical lines and closed roads. The voices on the radio telling everyone to stay at home and do not drive. Build a fire if you have a fireplace. Take all precaution and help one another. Jack trapped in a motel room without any heat or electricity and the fights canceled and nothing to do. No telephone and no television and he did push-ups and sit-ups to keep warm. His twenty-fifth birthday less than a month away and his reputation growing and his confidence growing and believing he was always worth a ticket. He was in the main event on some nights and on other nights those who had seen him fight told him he should have been. A steady circuit of events across the southeast, as far over as Greensboro and as high up as Lexington and sometimes he went over into Texas and Oklahoma and the venues were clean and sold concessions and had seats.

  To shake the chill he had worked up a small sweat doing push-ups and jumping jacks. Boxing himself in the mirror. And then he took off his shirt and admired his muscular body before the cold covered him again. He put on a dry shirt and then he went outside to see.

  There was beauty in the ice that covered everything. Like nothing he had ever seen. Crystallized trees and silver icicles and the way that time seemed to hold still under the grip of the ice and cold and he could not help but wander and admire. The blanket from the motel room bed wrapping him threefold and his mouth and lips gone dry in an instant. Small clouds of breath from his mouth and nose and he sneaked a hand out from the blanket and touched the tips of straight and silver pine needles. He broke icicles from the ledge of the low roof and bit off the ends. He walked around the front of the motel, the dead grass like breaking glass beneath his feet, and he moved onto the slick sidewalk. He followed it with skating steps until he came to a street lined with leafless dogwoods and he gazed at their seized skeletons and imagined them to be ageless, caged warriors waiting to be freed by the sun. With wide eyes he marveled at the frigid and brilliant brush of Mother Nature. He turned back toward the motel and as he turned his head to catch a squirrel sliding down the base of a tree his feet went out from under him. His hands wrapped inside the blanket and nothing to break his fall and his head whiplashed on the icy concrete. A moment of black and then a dizzying gra
y sky and he lay still for a minute.

  He rolled to his side and got his hands free and pressed them against the ice. Raised to his hands and knees. A strike of pain through the back of his head and he crawled along the sidewalk, his knees sliding wide and gathering them back again. He came to a mailbox post and used it to pull himself to his feet. He held on. Let his eyes catch up. And then he very carefully made it to the room and except for going to the vending machine or knocking on the manager’s door and asking for aspirin he did not leave again until two days later when the temperature rose and the ice melted away. He did not know he had a concussion, only knew he felt different, and when he fought a night later in another town he was slow to react. Feeling as if he was lost in a dream where his arms and hands would not do what he wanted them to do but instead were being controlled by some sleeping part of his mind that would not wake up. He was slow and he paid for it and after the fight the headache that would not go away in the frozen days in the motel room became the headache that brought double vision and neck pain and it became the headache that would forever need something stronger.

  Now in the sweltering house his hands turned cold at the memory and he removed them from the footboard. Blew on them though there was sweat across his lip and down the sides of his face. He wanted to lie down in the bed where he slept as a boy and spread his arms and welcome those other lives. Ask them to come and deliver that peace and if it was possible to ask the gods and monsters that lurked on the other side to take him all the way back and give him a chance to begin again.

  He went down the stairs and opened the notebook, flipping through the pages until he came to the drawing. A rectangle with four stubby legs and underneath the image were the words In her closet. And beneath that No.

  He closed the notebook and set it on the table and he walked to the end of the hallway. He went inside her bedroom and to the closet. He scanned the shelves and then he knelt and he found the jewelry box on the floor, shoved into the corner. He dragged it out of the shadow. A white marble top and brass claw feet and inscribed on the inside of the box lid were several words written in Italian. He sat down on the floor. The jewelry box in his lap. He opened it and touched his fingers to the inscription and tried to remember what it meant. Inside the box a stack of notes lay on top of the jewelry, all of the notes written in his own hand. And they all said the same thing.

  Leave this alone.

  He lifted them out and counted. There were five notes and they were dated and covered the span of three years, the first written about the time he stopped staying at the house when he was in Clarksdale because he no longer trusted himself. And he wondered how many more times he had opened the box and seen the notes and walked away. Followed his own orders. He shifted through the notes and the first one had been written in cursive. The second used an exclamation point. The last three he had written in all capital letters. He then set the notes on top of the jewelry and set the box on the floor.

  Gone were the two hundred acres that should have never belonged to him in the first place, a foster mother signing over the family home and land to the man she had taken in as a roughedged twelve-year-old. Dementia closing in and nothing to do but move into a home and signing it all over to Jack though the lawyer begged her not to. She held the pen close to the document and said I’m sixty years old and can decide for myself and the lawyer rubbed at his temples while the ink hit the page. A long curl falling from a bobby pin and draping the side of her wrinkled blue eye.

  He came back and forth to see Maryann. To sit with her and reintroduce himself. To show her photographs of them together and they would walk in the garden of the yard of the nursing home. Lantanas tall and yellow and butterflies touched their tiny petals and she told him stories he had already heard but he listened and sometimes held her hand if she let him. And then he would stay a few days in the house. Reminded of the simple things she had tried to teach him. Reminded of sunsets and starlit skies and the solace of space. Sit on the upstairs porch in a lawn chair with a pack of cigarettes and a pint of bourbon and feel the silence and feel the pangs of a body breaking down and he would swallow a dozen Tylenol to fight the headaches that were as much a part of him now as skin and bone. Trying to keep off the little red pills when he was there because he imagined her looking over his shoulder. Asking what he was doing. He would sit alone and imagine himself as a boy running across the backyard with his shirt off and swatting fat bumblebees with a tennis racket. Imagine her rocking slowly as she read in the aluminum glider in the afternoon shade of the house. Imagine the miracle it had taken for him to have been delivered to her.

  He was only going to do it once. Borrow money against the land and pay everything he owed for the gambling debts and fixes he had blown when he changed his mind in the middle of the fight. As he got older and as he ached more he had begun to work a fix now and then. When he knew the opponent couldn’t hurt him until he was ready to be hurt or if the payday for fixing was greater than the payday for winning. But there was one thing he would not take and that was being called old man. He could survive their young muscles and quick hands and cheap shots and drunks standing against the cage calling him names when he didn’t seem to be fighting back but only hanging out until it was time to let his hands drop. Take the right punch and then go down and stay down and then get up and collect. He could take all of that. But he could not take it when the opponent said stay down, old man. Or get up and take some more, old man. Or give it up, old man, the young fighters would whisper when they were clutched together. And that was when the transformation began. No matter the fix. No matter the money at stake. No matter how bad he was bleeding or hurt, if his opponent called him an old man it became a different fight. And the money did not flow in the right direction. And the debts he owed for not doing what he said he was going to do spread from state to state.

  Only one time, he had promised himself. And she will never have to know I borrowed the money and I’ll come home and get clean. And then figure out what to do. Maybe stay here and get a job doing God knows what but I’ll pay it back and she will never know. Just once. He had gone to the bank and got what he needed plus a little more and hit the road. He had driven to Mobile and paid up. Driven to Valdosta and paid up. Driven to Huntsville and tried to pay up but there was an open spot on the card. An easy fight for you, they said. You could walk out of here with your pockets full.

  He had eight thousand dollars remaining and he put it all down on himself and then tried to temper a headache with pills and moonshine in the parking lot before the fight. Then was faceplanted on the plywood floor of the ring not sixty seconds after the fight began. And he had been delivered right back into the longfingered grasp of debt.

  He looked again at the notes from the jewelry box and they all screamed back in a chorus of his own voice. Leave this alone.

  He slammed the jewelry box back into the closet and then walked into the kitchen. Took the pill bag from the table and emptied the pills into the sink and then he ran the water and washed them down the drain. Knowing what kind of headache was coming but sick of it all. Sick of the dope and how bad he needed it and sick of the booze and the nausea. Sick of the mounting debts and running from one place to another trying to get even and sick of the sight of himself in the mirror and the thoughts of disloyalty that stuck in his mind whenever he thought about Maryann. He washed his hands and washed his face. Felt the weight upon him from all sides and he had made every excuse for himself since Maryann had gone into the home but that shit was over.

  He stuck the money and the lighter and brass knuckles into his pockets and he walked outside. He cranked the truck and drove into the backyard and to the garden hose that fed from the well and he filled the leaking radiator with water. A piece of rope lay next to the potter’s barn and he used it to tie up the ends of the tarp and he lifted the body out of the truck bed and hid it behind the potter’s barn. He had to get rid of it. He had to face the music with Big Momma Sweet. But that would have to wait
until nightfall. The first thing he had to do was see Maryann.

  10

  HE DROVE TO THE GLIMMER MOTEL, A ROW OF REDBRICK rooms at the city limits. In the lot next to the motel an old man and woman sat under an umbrella and sold watermelons from the bed of a pickup and across the street a spraypainted plywood sign announced BINGO ON TUESDAYS in front of a forgotten church. The temperature gauge spiked and the engine coughed a trail of white behind him. He left the truck running outside the motel office and when he walked in a woman and her teenage daughter sat behind the desk. The daughter unrolling curlers from her mother’s hair and the sound of game show applause coming from a small television in the corner.

  The woman lifted her eyes to Jack. “You again?” she said and then her daughter opened a drawer and took out a room key attached to a small wooden block, the number 5 carved into the wood. She slid it across the counter and said don’t puke in there this time or else you can clean it up yourself.

  It was a short drive to Maryann. He stood at the front desk of Friendship Village Retirement Care and waited on the receptionist to finish a phone call. She then hung up and scratched her nose and asked if he needed some help.

  “I’m here to see Maryann,” he said.

  She looked at him cautiously. His red eyes. Dirty hands and sweat running down the sides of his face and neck.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then hand me the sign-in sheet.”

  She picked up a clipboard and held it out to him. He signed his name and looked at the clock on the wall and wrote 12:20 p.m. beneath TIME IN. He handed the clipboard to her and took a deep breath. Picked a handful of tissues from a Kleenex box and wiped his face. The receptionist then turned to her computer and tapped the keyboard a few times. She gave a pensive look at the screen and then she asked Jack to sit down. A note in Maryann’s file says our director needs to see you.