The Fighter

by Michael Farris Smith

  He moved away from the desk and scanned the great room. Separate sitting areas in the corners, sofas and loveseats in flower prints. Ferns on end tables and bouquets of fake flowers adorning coffee tables. In the middle of the room was a circle of chairs and two women sat together and shared the Clarksdale Press Register and across from them an old man stared at a small green New Testament. Residents in wheelchairs were scattered across the room and Jack wondered how many times Maryann had sat there alone and wondered where she was. Wondered where he was. He sat down on the arm of a loveseat and stared at the floor and remembered an abandoned chapel on a dirt road out on her land where she had taken him many times and told him this is where I want to be buried. Out here in the silence. A boy listening to whatever she said and then climbing in the wild magnolias and watching her walk around the woodframed chapel, its windows cracked from stormswept limbs and its sagging roof and bird nest in the corner of the small steeple. He had looked around for other headstones but found none. From the magnolia tree he watched and he knew the look of loneliness because he had felt it so many nights in beds that were not in a home but in a house with others like him. Other lonely children who lay and wondered. He would watch her circle the chapel and he knew better than to bother her or to ask if something was wrong because it was nothing that could be explained. Only that feeling of being a singular soul amid the endless living and the countless dead with this black ground nestled against the skin of our bare feet.

  He stood from the arm of the loveseat and his eyes filled. He squeezed a fist and he felt the sting in the joints of his wrist and elbow as he flexed the muscles in his hand and forearm. With the back of his hand he then wiped his eyes as a woman in a blue blazer approached him.

  “I’m Linda Jones,” she said. “The director here. You’re Jack Boucher?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wanted to meet with you before you go in to tell you she’s not in the same room. We had to move her about two weeks ago.”

  “Why’d you move her?”

  Her glasses sat on the end of her nose and she took them off. “She’s getting close to the end,” she said. “She’s gotten to the point where she hardly speaks. Doesn’t really know who we are. She doesn’t have long and I’m sorry to have to tell you all this right before you go in. But we had no way of getting in touch with you and believe me when I say we tried.”

  “Can she talk at all?”

  “She talks but it’s nothing coherent. She talks to people from a long time ago. Probably family members or childhood friends, which isn’t unusual. It’s just the way the mind works. She won’t know who you are.”

  “She hasn’t for a long time. And I know what’s coming. That’s why I’m here. Can I just see her now?”

  They moved into a wide corridor. The doors of resident rooms on each side and some decorated with crayon drawings by children. Suns and clouds and dogs with big ears and hearts and names and I-love-yous written in uneven capital letters. Some with out-of-season wreaths or birthday cards and some doors bare. At the end of the hallway they came to Maryann’s room. The door was halfway open and a nurse was coming out. She nodded to them and then Mrs. Jones walked in first. Jack stopped in the doorway when he saw the end of the bed. Her feet only small bumps underneath the blanket and beeps from machines and the smell of a room where little moved and life waned. He tried to force her younger and happier face into his mind but before he could do it Mrs. Jones had taken him by the wrist and led him inside.

  “She’s sleeping,” she whispered. She let go of his wrist and asked if he wanted her to stay. Jack told her no and then she patted his shoulder and left the room.

  Tubes in her nose. An IV in her arm. He looked around and nothing belonged to her. None of the furniture and none of her clothes in the closet. He moved over to the window and twisted open the blinds and the midday sun penetrated the room. Specks of dust floated like fairies and he took a chair from the corner and set it next to her bed.

  He sat down and looked at her pallid eyes. Sallow cheeks. She looked hungry and weak and he wondered if she could even know what those things meant now or if her mind had chewed away at even the most basic ideas of necessity. He said her name. Thought that her eyelids twitched when he said it so he repeated it. Maryann. Maryann. No movement in her eyes but he said her name several more times because he had always liked the way it sounded. Seven days, he thought. Seven days until the house is gone and she probably has less than that. Look at her. Look at you. You couldn’t have fucked up any worse.

  A pitcher of water and a plastic cup were on the table next to the bed and he filled the cup. Dipped his fingertips into the water and then touched them to her dry lips. Scratchy and a pale pink as he moved his fingertip across them. He returned the cup to the table and slumped in the chair.

  “I’m glad you don’t know what all I’ve done,” he said.

  He stared at Maryann and he knew what was coming for him. His own mind invaded by vast expanses of nothingness that had crept in like lava and inched its way across the green earth and burned without regard for splendor or necessity. So many fists and knees and blows to the head that could not be taken back. Could not be erased and all the damage done and feeding himself for years with whatever could medicate for the moment. For the night. And he felt the erosion but he kept feeding the whirlwind that ripped the fertile chunks of memory away. It’s just the way the mind works, the woman had said. He sat up straight and leaned closer to her.

  “You are beautiful,” he said and he reached for her hand. So fragile and light. The loose skin and the blue veins. He held her hand inside both of his as if it were something valuable he did not want to lose or a secret he did not want to share with the world. He tried to think of a favorite song to sing or a favorite story to tell but he was grabbed and held by now. By what he had become and by what she had become and he listened to her labored breathing and watched her body rise and fall. And then he laid his head on the bed next to her. Slipped her hand from his and pressed her palm to his ragged face.

  She had always been straightforward and certain, human traits that were foreign to him as a child. He admired those qualities in the light of day but at night she grew quiet and pensive as if transformed by the dark. She became more like him. They would eat dinner and then she would make her way to the upstairs porch with a book or the newspaper and Jack would go back outside and chase fireflies or find a tree to climb until dark and then join her on the porch. By then she had set aside whatever she was reading and her eyes seemed to travel beyond the land and the stars out to a place that only she could see. At first he took her silence as a sign he had done something wrong or she was unhappy with him there but in time he began to look out toward the horizon with her, that distant realm alive in his own eyes and he had seen it in the ceiling above his bed in the group homes and seen it out of the windows of foster home bedrooms and he saw it way out there beyond this land of dust and bones where the black was as deep as heaven or hell. In the days she carried an air of optimism but by the end of their first summer together the boy had seen enough of her in the serenity of night to believe she lived with ghosts and in the mornings he sometimes expected to see their ashen footprints across the smoothworn floor.

  He raised his head from the bed.

  A nurse returned and saw him. Apologized and said I’ll return later and he asked her to close the door. To turn off the light. Leave us alone.

  11

  T​HE FIRST TIME HE HEARD THE WORD LESBIAN WAS HIS second day of school in Clarksdale. Sixth grade. Hands shoved in his pockets and he kicked a rock in the dirt. Kids huddled in groups of three and four and some went up and down the slides and swung on swings that others believed they had outgrown. A muggy morning and the kids beginning to sweat and Jack sized up the rock and gave a hard kick. The rock skipped and bounced into the side of the merry-go-round with a clang. Four boys straddled the handlebars that crisscrossed the merry-go-round and they looked up from the sheet of noteb
ook paper that held a crude pencil drawing of an oddshaped and naked man and woman.

  “What the hell?” said the boy who held the notebook paper. He eyed Jack and Jack slid his hands from his pockets and nervously folded his arms. The four boys stared at him and then Jack shrugged his shoulders.

  “I said what the hell,” the boy repeated. Louder. He had a square head and rughair. A brow stuck in perpetual meanness.

  Jack walked over and picked up the rock and then turned his back to them as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Sissy,” the boy said. “Sissified lesbian boy.”

  Jack stopped and looked over his shoulder at the boy.

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” the rughaired boy said and he and the other three stepped off the merry-go-round and moved toward him and the others on the playground paused and watched. “I said lesbian boy. Don’t you live with that weird woman out in that big white house?”

  “So?”

  “So you ain’t nothing but a lesbian boy and don’t be kicking no more rocks in my direction unless you want your ass beat.”

  The other kids had wandered closer now. A broken circle of curious eyes. Jack looked around as if to find empathy or encouragement and he found neither.

  “You don’t even know what that means,” the boy said. “Do you?”

  “I ain’t talking to you.”

  “You won’t be able to anyhow if you got a mouthful of broken teeth.”

  Jack switched the rock from one sweaty palm to the other and could not think of one word to say that could weaken what was building.

  “It means your momma licks other mommas right between the legs,” another boy said and the crowd gave scattered laughter.

  “She ain’t my momma,” Jack said.

  “That don’t matter,” the rughaired boy said and he stepped face to face with Jack. Brave with the numbers behind him and shorter than Jack but his eyes hard like small stones wedged in the sockets. “Don’t matter who the hell your momma is. You’re a damn lesbian boy now.”

  The boy shoved Jack and he backpedaled and then tripped and fell. A small poof of dust where his rear hit the ground. Some kid yelled out kick his ass and then others hollered for a fight and still others turned away uninterested. The four boys moved toward Jack as he hustled to his feet and the rughaired boy shoved him again. Jack retreated a step. Steadied and didn’t go down. But he didn’t shove back.

  “Fag,” one of them said.

  A school bell rang from across the playground, the faint sound of salvation. A few groans in the crowd and then the sixth graders began to trudge toward the school building. The rughaired boy told him he better watch himself and he led his crew from the playground.

  Jack stood there alone. As the pressure of the moment let go he felt himself begin to cry and he bit at his bottom lip to stop it. Bit so hard that it bled and when he tasted the blood he sniffed and quickly wiped his eyes with the bottom of his shirt.

  “She ain’t my goddamn momma,” he whispered.

  That night after he and Maryann had finished drive-thru chicken and biscuits he asked her about the word lesbian. They sat at a table for two in the kitchen. She licked a fingertip and dabbed a flake of crust and stuck it in her mouth. Then she asked where he heard that word.

  “At school,” he said. “On the playground.”

  She picked up the greasy takeout boxes and napkins and put them in the garbage can. She then scooped coffee and poured water into the coffee maker and turned it on and she sat down again. Tapped her fingernails on the Formica tabletop.

  “Is that what you are?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told you what it is yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did whoever said that word tell you what it meant?”

  He shrugged.

  It was a small town and she had been there her entire life but for the four years she spent at Emory University in Atlanta. A small town where her family had lived and farmed for generations and despite the great spaces in land and sky there seemed to be no secrets that could not be carried and scattered on the slightest Delta wind. She had waited and waited for the social worker to ask her such a question when she was going through the process of becoming a foster parent but to her surprise it never came. But here it was now from the boy. Who had learned of it from children who had come to this part of her life God knows how.

  As she explained she could see that some things he understood and some he didn’t. He sat still and watched her mouth as she spoke and when she was done she asked if he had any questions. He nodded.

  “Do you know who that ugly little son of a bitch is in my class?”

  “Try not to talk like that, Jack.”

  “Do you?”

  “What does he look like besides ugly?”

  Jack tried to describe the boy. The hair tight against his head and the flat face. Maryann could only shake her head and when he was done describing the boy he told her what happened and what had been said. There were four of them and he pushed me down and then pushed me again and there wasn’t nothing I could do. I don’t want to go back to that school. I hate it.

  Maryann stood and poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down again.

  “He’s going to do it again,” she said.

  “I know it. That’s why I’m not going.”

  “You have to go. If you don’t go to school your caseworker will come looking for both you and me.”

  “It don’t matter to me what she does.”

  “And then she’ll take you away from here because she’ll think we don’t know what we’re doing together.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should. Because that little jackass isn’t going away. He’s going to be everywhere you go. He’ll look different but he’ll be there. He’s at school for now and then one day you’ll have a job and he’ll be there and he’s going to get in the way when you find a girl you like and he’s gonna be there in a week and in ten years and twenty years. The world never runs out of people like him and you got to figure out how to deal with it. And I can tell you one thing more. It doesn’t matter what he says about me. It doesn’t matter what he uses to pick a fight. Nobody has the right to call you names or push you around. Nobody.”

  Brave, she wanted to say. Be brave like I could have been when I had the chance. Like I should have been.

  Through the hazy blue of a fallen day she stared at the boy and wanted to touch the skin of his sunken face and form his expression into something hopeful. Transform his eyes and cheekbones and mouth into a face that would not carry such burdens. He then lifted worried eyes to her and said I know what I got to do. But I know it’s going to hurt.

  The next day he stood farther away from the playground and the other children. A stray from the herd that no shepherd bothered to tend. The same rock from the day before in his hands. He steadied his eyes on the four boys who again straddled the merry-go-round. The rughaired boy sighted Jack and he waved. Jack took it as some suggestion of peace and he waved back but then the rughaired boy gave the middle finger and they all laughed and then all of them waved middle fingers. A collective fuck you drifted across the playground and sank into Jack and he watched them no more. He turned around and stared at the cars passing along the highway at the edge of the school and thought of walking to it and sticking out his thumb. And if he had even five dollars in his pocket he would have but he had nothing but the rock.

  “Lesbian boy,” the rughaired boy called as they came toward him. “Hey lesbian boy. I saw you shoot me the bird.”

  “I didn’t shoot you the bird,” Jack said.

  “You better keep your hands in your pockets.”

  Jack didn’t move.

  “Right now,” said the rughaired boy. “Put your hands in your pockets right now.”

  “Just leave me alone,” Jack said.

  “I was leaving you alone and then you shot the bird at us. Don’t nobody do that to me. Now put your hands in your pockets.”
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br />   “Go on. I didn’t do nothing to you.”

  “I said shove them down or you’ll get it worse than you think.”

  They inched closer to him. Within reach. Jack crept back a step and he put his hands down into his pockets and as soon as they were in the rughaired boy shoved him hard in the chest with both hands. Jack shot right off his feet and he hit the ground with a flat back, the air out of his chest and he gasped as they laughed and circled him.

  “I told you, lesbian boy,” the boy said. One of the others kicked him in the thigh and then they all slapped hands and walked toward the playground.

  Jack caught his breath. Sat up. Then he stood and knocked the dust from his clothes and he pulled out the rock he had been clutching in his pocket. He held it gently in his fingers. And then with a long stride he hurled the rock and it surprised both him and the rughaired boy when it centered the back of his head. The boy cried out, knelt and grimaced and wondered what had happened. And then a trickle of blood ran out of a cut on his head and down his neck. He touched his head at the tender spot and then saw the crimson on his fingertips.

  Jack raised his hand defiantly and this time he gave them all the finger.

  And this time they all used their fists.

  The boy stood in the window with his hands pressed against the glass and stared at the wobbly moon, not quite full. His eyes were swollen. So was his bottom lip. His nose hurt and his arms were bruised where he was kicked when he went to the ground and covered himself until a teacher and a coach hustled onto the scene and pushed through the crowd of children and pulled the boys away from him.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. Two days before he had to go back to school. Two days to figure out what to do. He had emptied the dresser drawers and his duffel bag sat packed next to the door. He had lain down on the bed and waited until he believed Maryann was asleep and then he got up and stood in the window, trying to decide which direction to run.