The Fighter

by Michael Farris Smith

  “I got it from here,” he said. “Unless you can wait a little while and give me another ride.”

  You still haven’t answered my questions, she wanted to say. But he had the roughworn look of a man who was either squeezed right in the middle of hard and unforgiving things or at the end of some hellish journey. His pain and the deliberate nature when he walked or talked. The things he carried. And the necessity of coming to this place where there could only be someone he loved who did not have much longer to remain in this world. So she didn’t interrupt whatever he had to do with her own curiosity. He won’t run away, she thought. I’ve waited this long. I can wait until he’s done.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I can’t believe somebody who looks like you has got nothing better to do,” he said and then he started toward the freshly mopped hallway. She shuffled along with him, glancing at the photographs and crayon drawings that decorated the doors of the residents. He dropped the notebook and she picked it up. Worn and tattered. Stained with coffee. He took it from her and they passed two more rooms and then he stopped. The door was open a few inches and Jack nudged it and they moved inside. Only the light through the blinds and the steady beep from a monitor next to the bed. He set the boxes and the notebook on the floor and then he slid a chair over close to her. Her eyes were halfshut and she was mumbling in a dream. A stream of words that did not connect and she rolled her head on the pillow. He patted her hand and said it will be okay, Maryann. It’s okay.

  24

  J​ACK STROKED THE TOP OF MARYANN’S HAND AND WHISPERED to her and she quieted. Her head became still. Her eyes opened and she seemed to try and smile at him. Annette stood back from the bed in the corner of the room. Not expecting someone so frail and as he touched her wilted hand and whispered assurances, she realized she was an intruder.

  She stepped back into the hallway. Walked and found the cafeteria and she poured coffee into a white foam cup. Residents had begun to come into the cafeteria for dinner, moving with canes and walkers. Some in wheelchairs. Women wearing light blue scrubs helped them to tables and into chairs. Brought trays with plates of food and cartons of milk to those who couldn’t get it themselves. A wave of selfconsciousness came over her. She sipped the coffee and with her other hand rubbed at her bare arms and thighs. Wanted to be wearing long sleeves and jeans. Wanted the eyes, for once, to stay off her.

  She left the cafeteria and returned to Maryann’s door. Put her back against the hallway wall and slid down. Her knees up and her eyes on the photograph on the door across from her. A wrinkled little man sitting in a chair in the middle and his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren surrounding him. So many of them that they leaned and crammed together to fit the entire family into the photo.

  A cough from inside the room made her get to her feet. Jack let out big hacks and gasped for breath and she peeked through the door crack. Saw him stand from the bed and drink some water and get it together and then he wiped the side of his face. He then picked up the lockbox from the floor and he sat back down in the chair next to the bed. Opened the lockbox and lifted out a stack of letters.

  He pushed her hair away from her eyes. The blond gone from it and the gray gone from it. But still so long and thick, lying across her neck and shoulders like winding white trails of the past. He straightened the gown around her neck. And then he took an envelope. Opened it and removed the letter inside. And he began to read to her. He read slowly and patiently as if to make certain that each word found its way inside. When he was done with the first letter he laid it aside and then he opened the next one and he would read them all to her as if each letter were some sort of handwritten currency that could buy back the memories of her life. The emotions. The victories and the defeats. He read as if he could use the sentiments of the voice from long ago to purchase the parts to make her whole again. If only for a moment. She sometimes watched him and he believed that deep beyond her gray eyes she knew who he was and what he had found and what he was trying to share with her. Subtle glints of recognition, eyes that shifted in the shaded sunlight and said I can feel it all again and I am not dead yet. I can feel it all right there where it hurt before. And then she would look away as if there were images painted across the cream-colored wall, colors and shapes and faces that only she could see. Some subconscious collage of a life that existed now only in the endless realm of the imagination. He read without hurry and lifted his eyes to watch her and he wanted to stop and ask her about it all. Tell me. Tell me about her. Tell me why you didn’t go and were the hands that held you back visible or invisible or both. Or did they finally belong to me. But he didn’t pause to ask and he stayed in her story and when she finally closed her eyes he kept on reading. And as he read he saw her life but in another part of his mind he saw himself digging two postholes out among the wild magnolias next to the abandoned chapel, the place where he had watched her walk and whisper to herself. He saw himself sinking two posts in concrete and nailing a strip of lattice between the posts and planting wisteria vines that in the years to come would grow and weave through the lattice and deliver soft purple blossoms that would sway in the Delta wind and he saw himself digging her grave and burying her there beneath the blossoms, in the rich soil that in life had held her so tightly.

  She sat back down on the floor and didn’t know what she was listening to. Only that it was important. Only that it was full of guts and heart and she was hypnotized by the tenderness and defeat and hope all wound together and the more he read the more heartache she felt. Heartache for the person who had written the words and heartache for who they were written to and heartache for the man who sat reading them. Something fallen in his voice.

  And then there was a pause. Several minutes of silence. She rose to her feet and leaned her head closer to the opening in the doorway. No more words and no more movement. She pushed open the door and his head was lying on the bed next to her and his eyes closed. The letters and envelopes scattered across the bed and the lockbox open and empty. She moved quietly into the room. The jewelry box and the notebook were on the floor at the foot of the bed and she knelt and picked up the notebook and then crept back into the hallway.

  She began to turn the pages and it was as if she were trying to make sense of a foreign language. Smatterings of directions. Fragments of sentences. Rudimentary addition and subtraction. Names of people and places scattered across the pages in a reckless handwriting. The corners of some of the pages singed from cigarette burns. What she could only believe to be dried blood smeared across the inside flap. She turned through the pages and imagined his chaos and wondered if her own life of flight may someday come to this.

  There was movement inside the room and she closed the notebook. Peeked around the door and Jack had raised his head. He gathered the letters and envelopes and set them inside the lockbox. He closed the lid and set it next to the woman in the bed. Lifted her hand and laid it on top of the box. And then Annette listened as he began his confession.

  Your family’s land is gone. All of it. To where I don’t fucking know, Maryann. I wish I did. But it’s gone and the house is next in only a few more days. All I can do is tell you I’m sorry but even saying it sounds like bullshit. The messed up part of me swore I’d get it all back but the story never ends that way. I’m a junkie and a drunk and there’s no other way around it. I’m never going to be off the pills because it’s just not possible. That’s not who you raised me to be but that’s who I am. Worse than all that I haven’t been here to see you as much as I should have. You treated me like your son. But I’m not a good one and I hope like hell you didn’t stay here because of me. I want to tell you I’m going to be back here. I want to come back and sit with you and read the letters but I can’t say for sure that will happen either. I gotta go fight, Maryann. I’m gonna take your jewelry and beg like a dog but I don’t think it’ll matter. And it’s gonna be a goddamn bad one. They’re all goddamn bad but nothing like
this is gonna be. I wish I had something better to tell you about but I don’t.

  Outside the door Annette held the notebook next to her chest. When this day began she was sitting at a café, deciding to drive away. Deciding to be alone again. Trusting her church to lead her in the right direction. And now this. She could not decide if she was putting together pieces to some fateful puzzle or if she had simply fallen into this man’s mess because of her own need.

  She pushed open the door and stepped inside. She set the notebook on top of the dresser and then she knelt at the foot of the bed. Folded her arms on top of the rail.

  “Who is she?” she said.

  “Maryann,” he answered. “My mother.”

  “How much longer do you think she has?”

  Jack shrugged. “A minute. A week. I don’t know,” he said.

  They spoke in low, almost reverent voices. Maryann shifted and a quick and highpitched sound came from her parted lips. She lifted her hand and pointed at the plastic pitcher of water on the tray table. Jack filled the cup and stuck a straw in it and held it to her lips. She sipped and then laid her head back.

  “She looks like she was a good woman.”

  “She was. She didn’t have to do nothing for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s my foster mother. Took me in when I was hard to handle and never looked back,” he said.

  Annette raised her folded arms from the bedrail. She stared at him as he stared at Maryann. The robotic rhythm of the beeps from the machines. The falling light of a late afternoon through the blinds. He looks like a wounded animal, she thought. A wounded animal ready to wander off into the woods and find a comfortable place to die. And then she turned her eyes again to Maryann. The small lumps of her knees and feet underneath the blanket. The pronounced cheekbones from her fading expression, an expression that seemed to be drifting between worlds. She admired her long white hair and her hands that rested still and peaceful and then Annette saw herself lying there. Time having robbed her of the natural gifts she now possessed and her own wandering having led her to a similar room in a similar place except that there would be no one there to sit with her. No one to say goodbye to. And she thought of Baron walking alone down that country road in Arkansas in the midst of a starstruck night and she thought of her own mother wherever she was and she imagined the highways before her that she would drive as she kept running away from one thing and to another and something moved inside her that was strange and strong as she wanted this moment to be the beginning of something that would not end.

  “Did you ever know a woman named Sally Magee?” she asked.

  Jack touched the straw to Maryann’s lips once more and then said, “What am I supposed to know her from?”

  “From twenty-five years ago,” she said.

  “Is this what you’ve been waiting around to ask me?”

  “Yeah. I hate to do it sitting here but I need to know.”

  Jack set the straw on the tray table. Stood from the chair and grabbed the notebook from the top of the dresser. “Come on,” he said and he waved her toward the door.

  In the hallway he opened the notebook.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Just something I carry with me. Nobody is in here from that long ago but I’ll look. Why should I know her?”

  “My name is Annette. And she’s my mother,” she said and she folded her arms. Looked down at her feet and then up again.

  He then closed the notebook and held it up. “What were you doing with it?” he asked.

  “Just looking. There’s nothing in there to understand.”

  “Did you see her name?”

  “I told you. I can’t understand any of it.”

  “I can’t do this right now.”

  “This is a shitty time to be asking you this but I can’t help it. You showed up at the gas station. That woman said you were a fighter and that your name meant butcher. Those are the only two things Sally ever told me about my father. He’s a fighter and his name means something. And she said you were from the Delta and we’re in the Delta. I don’t have a choice but to ask.”

  A nurse came out of a room at the end of the hallway and walked toward them. They hushed and waited for her to pass.

  “Is all that you said to her true?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why do you have to fight tonight?”

  He lowered his head for an instant and raised it again. “Come with me,” he said.

  They passed along the hallway and through the great room and exited the front door. In the parking lot he turned to her and handed her the notebook and said I know what you’re looking for and I even can understand why you’re looking and if there is an answer it’s in here. Search it again. It’s chicken scratch but if you really want to know you’ll go through it again. She took it from him and sat down on the curb next to a large terra cotta pot overflowing with a healthy fern. Jack lit a cigarette and paced around the lot while she turned the pages. She was more careful this time, with careful and studying eyes. He walked back over to her and flicked away the cigarette.

  “You really want to know why I have to fight tonight?” he asked.

  She looked up from the notebook and said yes. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last pill. Stuck it in his mouth and swallowed. And then he told her about the headaches and about his bad habit of creating more bad habits and he explained that this was why he carried around the notebook. Because it’s getting worse and there’s no turning back. He had not talked to anyone in a long time and he began to empty himself and he told her about Big Momma Sweet and who she was and what he owed her and because he didn’t have the money his only choice was to fight. Fight or have a blade pulled across his throat. Right after they branded him with a dollar sign. I had it, he said. I was on my way. And then I was gonna try to figure out about the house, and then he trailed off after mentioning the house. He held his hands up and turned them around as if seeing them for the first time and then he closed his fingers and made fists. Moved them slowly to his face and pressed the knuckles against his cheeks. When he moved his fists away there were red imprints on his skin and then he let go of the fists and held his hands open. Looked into his own palms as the twilight settled around them and the anxiety relented on his scarred face. His eyes softening as if he had come to some resolution. An acceptance of fate.

  “You should probably go,” he said. “Even if you only believe half of what you’ve seen here, you can figure out it’s best to get far away from me.”

  She closed the notebook and stood.

  “What house are you talking about? The one where I found you? That big white one?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And what happened to the money?” she said.

  “That doesn’t matter either.”

  She handed him back the notebook and said I know about the wreck. I don’t know where you were when we came upon it and the further me and you go along I don’t really care. But there is a great big world spinning around and sometimes it spins against you. Sometimes it spins with you. And sometimes it spins us right into what we need. That jackass who stuck his knife in my tire today slammed us right into each other, Jack. Without him I would have been gone a long way from here by now. But he did stick the knife in my tire. And I heard what the woman said about you and I followed you to your house because you are the only man I’ve ever come across who I thought had a prayer of being my father. It’s a longshot. I know. Most things are. God knows I’ve imagined what you might look like or be like and God knows you’re way beyond any of that.

  “You haven’t imagined me because you don’t know who I am. And neither do I,” he said. “I was a fighter but I’m not anymore. You’ve heard what all I said to Maryann. You see me. I’ve dug a grave for myself and I’ve been trying to figure a way out but it ain’t gonna happen and before this night is over there’s a fair chance I’ll be laying in it. Your story about the
world spinning around can’t change any of that.”

  She turned and walked across the parking lot and to the truck. She opened the door and reached underneath the seat and pulled out the casino envelope that held his money. Her tattooed body marching to the rhythm of her own gospel hymn as she strode over to him and held it out and said whether you understand it or not I was sent here to help you. I’ve been led right down into the grave with you by some force stronger than all of us. But what I’m doing now is standing below you in the bottom so I can shove you out. I don’t know if I’m your daughter but I am your angel and I bet you never thought of an angel doing such dirty work. But I’m no angel from heaven. It doesn’t matter where I came from, only that I’m here.

  25

  T​HE LAND OF BIG MOMMA SWEET WAS A PLACE OF MYTHICAL violence. Since late Wednesday night when Jack had taken Skelly’s body out into the rain to bury, Big Momma Sweet had spread her word through the jukejoints and barrooms and gambling houses of the Mississippi Delta like a fatal disease. Big Momma Sweet is having a fight. A big fight with no betting limit. And it’s Jack Boucher, the most unpredictable son of a bitch you ever saw put his fists up. Two days from now on Friday night. Cash your damn paychecks and come on.

  He’s too old, some of them said.

  I thought he was dead, some of them said.

  He looks like he crawled out of a landfill, some of them said.

  I wouldn’t bet on his ass, some of them said.

  I wouldn’t bet against him, some of them said.

  The crowd came early. Arriving at noon and sitting on tailgates and drinking beer from their coolers. Comparing rifles and pistols. The card games and the prostitutes started up in the middle of the afternoon and the music bumped and echoed out through the trees. They knelt around card tables because all the seats were full and when Big Momma Sweet told her men to cut them off at the door the gambling spilled out into the sunlight. Cards dealt across hoods and dice skipping across the dirt. Big Momma Sweet made sure she had plenty of women and they all danced and howled and satisfied every lust that money could buy in prelude to the vicious night. Some brought grills in their truck beds and coolers packed with venison and pork and the smell of charcoal and meat wafted in the humid air in breaking gray clouds. Some wandered over to the open-air barn and admired vehicles they had once owned but had been forced to turn the titles over to Big Momma Sweet to settle their debts.