Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  Rosalita’s was a clapboard tonk cut out of a canebrake. Acres of cane swayed in the wind’s grip, dry stalks clashing with a hollow sound, bamboo wind chimes.

  Inside was dark and fusty. Hank Snow growled about some woman’s cheatin’ heart from a heat-warped Wurlitzer. Off in the corner: a canted plankboard ring, red and blue ropes sagging from the ring posts. I bent between the ropes and shuffled to the four corners, shadowboxing. A rogue’s gallery of bloodsport enthusiasts swiveled on their bar stools. Someone called, “Looking sharp, kiddo!”

  My opponent was a whippet-thin Mexican in his mid-thirties. White sneakers, no socks, a clean white towel around his neck. His hair plastered to his skull in black ropes. He looked exhausted. Mexican fighters often hopped the border on the night they were to fight, winding up at Rosalita’s soaked from the swim and gashed from razor wire, sometimes pursued by feral dogs roaming the lowlands.

  I took a hellish beating. The fight was a four-round smoker, each round three minutes long. Those twelve minutes stretched into an eternity, especially the final three, eyes swelled to pinhole slits and gut aching from the Mexie’s relentless assault. The guy knew things about momentum and leverage I’d never learned in sparring sessions, how to angle a hook so it grazed my abdomen and robbed my breath, leaving slashes of glove-burned flesh. It was as though he possessed secret information about the exact placement of my organs, finding the kidneys and liver, drilling hard crosses into my short rib. I pissed red for days. Between rounds the bartender—who doubled as cutman— tended to my rapidly expanding face. He wore a visor, the kind worn by blackjack dealers, Vaseline smeared on the green plastic brim. He’d reach up and scoop a blob to grease my cheeks.

  “You’re breaking him down,” Jack lied. “Stick and move, Eddie.”

  By the final round the Mexican looked slightly ashamed. He ducked punches nimbly, sticking a soft jab in my face or tying me up in close. A chorus of boos arose: the shadowy bar patrons were anticipating a KO. The only damaging shot I landed all night was a right hook to the Mexican’s crotch. It wasn’t on purpose: my eyes were so swelled I couldn’t see what I was punching. He took the foul in good spirit, pulling me close until our heads touched, whispering, “Cuidado, lo blo, cuidado.”

  Afterwards I sat on the trunk of Jack’s Chevelle pressing an icepack to my neck. There was a tinny ringing in my ears and the moon held a wavering penumbra. I concentrated on not throwing up. Contrales handed over my fight purse: five dollars, management fee and transportation surcharge deducted.

  “You were tight. Gotta let go with a few bombs or you get no respect. He laid your ass on the canvas five or six times, but you stood up. Counts for something, right? Little bastard was sharp,” Jack admitted. “A dead game fighter.”

  I nodded vaguely, not paying much attention, more concerned with how I’d explain my state to my folks.

  “You fight, you lose. You fight, you win. You fight,” Jack suggested, heading back inside for a fifth of off-sale Johnny Red.

  The Mexican exited Rosalita’s. He moved out into the cane, clearing the razor-edged stalks from his path with still-taped hands. Spokes of heat lightning flashed behind a bank of night clouds, whetting the foothills in crimson light. The fighter walked gingerly, no wasted movement. He stopped at a grove of palmettos and glanced up at a low bronze moon, orienting himself to the land before melting into the trees. I thought about the coming hours as he hiked to the border and scaled the fence, where perhaps a boat was moored amidst the cattails. He’d battle the Rio Grande’s currents as they bore him to the far shore, then another hike would bring him to an adobe house in one of the fringing settlements. I pictured his wife and children: his wife’s oval face and fine-boned hands, shafts of dawn sunlight slanting lowangled and orange through an open window to touch his daughter’s sleeping eyes. The fantasy may’ve stood in sharp contrast to the abject reality—perhaps the man had nothing worth fighting for—perhaps all that waited was a lightless room, a bottle of mescal.

  Looking back now, I do not believe that was the case. Reach a certain experience level, you don’t fight without reason. You’ve seen too many boxers hurt, killed even, to treat matches as dick-swinging contests. Fighting becomes a job, stepping into the ring punching a clock. It’s a pragmatic pursuit, opponents’ equations to be solved using the chimerical physics of reach, height, spacing, leverage, heart. You’d no more fight outside the ropes than a factory lineman would work a shift for no pay. I entered my first fight for no other reason than to see if I could, testing what I thought I’d known against the unknown reality. I lost because I was green, yes, but also because nothing was really at stake: my life wouldn’t’ve been substantially better or worse, win or lose. The Mexican stepped between the ropes with the subdued air of a man entering an office cubicle. When he realized it was going to be an easy day he leaned back in his chair, kicked off his shoes. He didn’t give the crowd what they wanted, didn’t hurt me without cause. His job was to defeat his opponent, and he did. But he wouldn’t be there without reason. He fought for the money, and for those he loved.

  A family waited on the other side of that river. I know that now. I know what it means to fight for a reason.

  The hallway’s lit by forty-watt bulbs set behind meshed screens. The cement perspires, as do the oxidized copper pipes overhead. Rivulets of brown water spill from the joists. The place is a foreclosed steelworks factory. Corkscrews of drilled iron crunch beneath my boots. The air smells of mildewed rock and ozone. Up through the layers of concrete and wires and piping the crowd issues a gathering buzz that beats against my eardrums.

  We fight bare-knuckle, or nearly so. A nostalgic few see it as a throwback to the days when barrel-chested dockhands brawled aboard barges moored off the New York harbor. It’s not throwback so much as regression. A dogfight. No referees. No ten count. The winner is the man left standing. Rabbit punches and low blows, eye gouges, head-butts—I once saw a fishhook tear a man’s face open, lip to high ear. Fighters score their hand wraps with sandpaper, soak them in turpentine, wind concertina wire around their knuckles.

  I fight fair. Try to, anyhow.

  I graduated high school in the spring of 1984. Excelling at English and Languages, I was accepted to Wiley College on a scholarship. That August I moved north to Marshall and spent three years living in my sister Gail’s basement, studying and continuing to box. Gail’s husband Steve was a journeyman carpenter and drywaller; he converted the unfinished basement into an apartment: bedroom and kitchenette, a small training area to skip rope and practice footwork. I’d squirrel myself away during midterms and finals, but otherwise spent my time reading in the family room, shooting hoops on the driveway net, or raiding the fridge. Gail occasionally tripped over my gym kit or spied a pair of hand wraps laid over the armrest of her favorite chair and pitched a fit, but for the most part we got along. Steve was a long-haul trucker circuiting between San Antonio and Sioux Falls. On my twenty-first birthday he bought a case of Lone Star and we sat on the back porch until the flagstones were littered with empties and we were howling at the moon.

  With Steve hauling and Gail landing a teller job at Marshall First Trust, babysitting duties fell to me. My nephew Jacob was ten months old when I moved in. An inquisitive boy with a sweet temperament. The kid was forever crawling out of sight, disappearing around corners or behind curtains, knees pumping so quickly I was sure friction would singe the carpet. We’d play this game where Jake stuck his fingers in my mouth and I’d curl my lips over my teeth and bite down gently, growling; Jake would shriek—a garbled string of syllables, “eepooo-ap!” or “yee-ack!” or “boo-ta-tet!”—and pull his hand away. This went on for hours, until I became slightly nauseated by the taste of Jake’s hand, a blend of sweat and mucus and the residue of whatever bacterial micro-sites he’d investigated that day. I remember the way Jake’s gaze locked with mine, fingers inches from my mouth, his eyes glowing, positively aflame, as though to say—

  “Look at the runt. Gonn
a get creamed! ”

  “Run along find your daddy, peckerwood!”

  The spectators hurl other insults, but these two I pick up clearly. There looks to be a hundred or more, ranged around a barricade of sawhorses stolen from a construction site: bright orange, flashing halogen discs screwed to the horizontal beams. The intermittently blinking lights brighten the spectators’ faces in ghostly yellows: a pack of bloodhungry crazies waving dollar bills. Moonlight pours through holes rusted in the roof, silver shafts gilding the crossbeams and glossing feathery shapes roosting in the latticework. A hypnotic sound underlies the hollering crowd: a distant, nearly sub-audible clash and cycle, the sound of long-derelict machinery shuddering uneasily to life.

  My opponent is a dreadlocked kid two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me. Goes by Nicodemus. Bare-chested, his arms are swelled, monstrous. Tribal tattoos crisscross the ribbed musculature of his stomach; ornate curlicues encircle his extruded bellybutton, giving it the look of a sightless eye. He turns to his cutman and says, “Who this, the shoeshine boy? Mus’ be my birthday.”

  We meet in the center of the ring, where the cigarillo-smoking promoter runs down the stakes: a thousand cash to the winner, five hundred to the loser.

  Nicodemus dry-gulches me while the guy’s still laying out the stakes, a hard sucker punch glancing off the high ridge of cheek, splitting bone. The blow drops me to my knees. Chill static wind pours through my skull, electric snakes skating the bones of my arms and legs. Nicodemus shrugs and smiles, as though to say, Hey, you knew the score when you stepped up, then wades in swinging. Guess the fight’s started without me. It’s not uncommon.

  I graduated in ’87 and moved north to Pennsylvania. Having trained and fought steadily through college, I’d amassed a Golden Gloves record of 13-1. Teddy Hutch, an Olympic boxing coach, caught one of my fights and invited me to his training facility in Butler. The welterweight division was thin, he said; I could earn a berth on the qualifying squad. The program covered food and accommodation. His prospects worked at a local box factory.

  I arrived in Butler late September. The trees and water, even the sky: everything was different. The Texas sky was not completely blue; its colour, I’ve come to realize, was more of a diffuse lavender. The skies of Pennsylvania were a piercing, monotone blue; they pressed down with a palpable weight. The tattery, see-through clouds I’d known since childhood were replaced with thick cumulus formations. And the cold—me and a Hawaiian boxer named David Tua bundled ourselves in sweaters and jackets on the mildest of fall days, much to the amusement of the Minnesotans and Dakotans in training.

  The prospects were billeted in a ranch house. The land behind fell away to a lake ringed by hemlocks and firs, rising to a wooded escarpment. We roused at five o’clock each morning and ate breakfast at long tables before donning road gear to run a three-mile circuit around the lake. Afterwards we herded into a school bus bound for Olympia Paper, where we spent the next nine hours ranged along canvas belt lines, driven half-mad by the pneumatic hiss of the fold-and-stamp machines. When the shift whistle blew we were driven to the Cyclone, a downtown boxing gym. We trained until eight o’clock before dragging ourselves to the bus, bolting dinner, and flopping into bed for lights out.

  It was a rough life, and a lot of fighters couldn’t stomach it: prospects came and went with such frequency Teddy considered installing a turnstile. But the regimen yielded results: I packed on ten pounds of muscle in eight months, and my cardiovascular endurance shot through the roof. My sparring partner was a Dixieland welterweight named Jimmy Carmichael. Jimmy had a peacemaker of a left cross; we beat each other black and blue in the ring but spent our days off together, catching the Sunday matinee and wolfing thick wedges of pecan pie at Marcy’s on Lagan Street.

  Jake visited that March. Steve was hauling a load up to Rochester and brought Jake along to visit. Steve dropped him off mid-morning, and we arranged to meet later for dinner. I was surprised how much Jake had grown. His cheeks, framed by the furred hood of a new winter jacket, were flush and rosy.

  “How ya been, jellybean?” I said.

  “I been fine, pal o’ mine,” he said, repeating the greeting I’d taught him.

  Jake was antsy following the long drive. We walked down to the lake. A low fog rolled across the frozen water, faint ripples thickening into groundmist at the tree line. We held hands. Every fir looked dusted in powdered sugar. Jake’s hand slipped from mine as he ran ahead. He said, “I’ve never seen so much white.”

  The lake was a flat opaque sheet. A murder of crows congregated on a tree shattered under a weight of snow. The northern boys skated here on weekends; I saw the ruts their blades had left in the ice. Jake ran out, falling, sliding, getting up, running faster.

  “Hey,” I called. “Hey, slow ’er down, big guy.”

  I was raised in a part of Texas where the only ice was of the cubed variety. I’d only seen snow in Christmas movies. I mean, what did I know of ice? I knew it felt good pressed to the back of my neck between rounds. My five-year-old nephew ran heedlessly, hood tugged down around his shoulders, fine sandy hair and clean tanned skin brightened by the sun. What did he know of ice? Perhaps that it melted quickly on a summer sidewalk. Did he even know that much? We were both ignorant. But I should’ve known.

  Nicodemus rushes across the ring, jackhammering his fists. He throws a series of haymakers so slow he might as well have telegraphed them last week; I feint from a kneeling position and hammer a left hook into his ass, nailing the sciatic nerve. Shrieking, he limps back. I struggle to my feet and bicycle into the open ring. From time to time someone shouts Nicodemus’s name, and under that the distant hum of machinery.

  He throws a looping right that I duck, rising with a short-armed cross to the midriff. He bulls me into a corner. I juke, try to circle clear, but he steps on my foot and hits me with an overhand right. Lips flatten against teeth, mouth filling with the taste of rust and bone. The air shimmers, shards of filigreed light raining down like shiny foil in a tickertape parade. I go down heavily under a sawhorse, staring up at a dark forest of legs.

  I can no longer consciously recall the sound that ice made as it broke. Sometimes I’ll hear another noise—the low crumple of a beer can; the squeal of an old nail pried from a sodden plank—similar in some way, timbre or pitch or resonance, and realize it lives somewhere inside me now. I remember the fault line racing out to meet him, a silver crease transecting the ice like a cracked whip. It seemed to advance slowly, a thin sluggish snake zigging and zagging; it was as though I had only to holler “Step back!” and it would rip harmlessly past.

  Water shot up in thin pressurized needles from hairline cracks under Jake’s feet. He lurched sideways, outflung arms seeking balance. The ice pan broke in half, plates levering up, a V of frozen water with Jake plunging through the middle.

  I laughed. Maybe Jake looked silly going down, mouth and eyes wide, hands clutching at the broken border of ice that crumbled like spun sugar in his grasp. Maybe I could not conceive the danger: I pictured the two of us sitting before the fireplace in the big safe house, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, a mug of hot chocolate, tendrils of steam rising off Jake’s wet pants as they dried.

  “Hold on, big fella,” I said. “Do the eggbeater!”

  My boots skidded along the ice. I overbalanced, fell down. Jake churned foam, clothes plumping with water. Everything seemed all right until I saw the fear and confusion, deep thin creases out of place on a face so young; I saw, with the dreamlike clarity that colors all memories of the event, molecular beads of water clinging to his cheeks and nose. I crawled forward, outspread hands distributing my weight. Jake splashed and kicked and called out in a reedy whisper, nose and mouth barely above water. Ice crackling under my hands and chunks of ice floating on the water and the trees of the near shore wrapped in transparent icy layers. So much ice.

  He stopped struggling abruptly, just hanging there, eyes closed, water trickling into his mouth. Only hi
s chin and the tips of his fingers floated clear. I reached the edge and extended a hand. The supporting ridge broke away and my chest and head slipped below the surface. Cold black water pressed against my eyeballs. I caught movement through the brown water and grabbed something—smooth and slim, perhaps a jacket sleeve—but the cold made my fingers clumsy and it slipped through. The lake shoved me back and forth, currents stronger than I’d imagined. Sinewy shapes turned over in the murk, shapes like seal pups at play.

  I broke the surface snorting streams of water, wiping away cords of snot. I stared into the swirling blackness in search of movement, a leg kicking, fingers grasping. I plunged my arm in, stirring around, hopeful: a few strands of eelgrass draped over numb fingers. Not knowing what to do, I called his name. “Jake!” The word echoed uselessly across the flat expanse.

  When my voice died away I heard it: a sustained resonant thump. I couldn’t tell where it came from. The ice trembled. A dark form was pressed to the chalky sheet a few feet to the left, trapped beneath the surface. It twisted and thrashed, beating the ice.

  I crawled towards the shape—crawled on my hands and knees like a fucking infant. Ice pocked with craters and boils from thawing and re-freezing. I saw a dim outline down there, a creature of crude lines and angles. The ice shuddered; fresh-fallen snow jumped off the surface, resettling. My fingers spread across the milky whiteness and ears plugged with frozen lake water, a frantic buzzing between.

  I made a fist with my right hand and brought it down. The ice buckled, splintered, but held. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, a white-hot bolt. I raised the right again—my lead hand, the dynamite right—smashing the ice. It broke and my fist plunged into the darkness, grasping frantically, closing on nothing. A powerful current caught hold of Jake and he drifted sideways, beyond my grasp. Something passed through my fingers—a bootlace?

  I tracked the shape beneath the ice. The freezing water on my arms crackled like dull metal. My teeth chattered and I called his name. Maybe I was screaming.