“FUCK YEAH!” Razor shouted. “DEEEE-STRUCTION!!”
Razor smashed himself in the face with two open handed slaps and roared like a lion. Lots of fighters take caffeine pills before big matches. Razor looked like he’d swallowed an entire espresso bar.
My eyes scanned the crowd. The fans buzzed, big and raucous. Sure, I might have been the hometown favorite, but I could tell a lot of people had made the trip out from California to cheer for their boy. His fans were vocal and hyped.
“Rip his flesh off, Razor.”
“Gouge his fucking eyes out!”
Under the lights, Razor’s skin shined eerily, and his swollen muscles rippled. Though twenty feet still separated us, I could already tell this was going to be a warrior’s war.
Again, I looked out into the crowd. Still no Dad.
Me against the world, I thought as I took a slow, deep, breath to help me remain calm and focus on the task at hand. Though he and I had never met, I could tell Razor had been coached to hate me. And to hurt me badly if he got even the smallest window of opportunity.
I took another deep breath. Me against the world.
“How we feelin’, M.D.? Ready to do this? Gotta find us some leverage tonight, Son, and apply it.”
“Where the hell you been?”
“That how you talk to me?” my father said. I didn’t answer. “I done had to arrange something,” he continued. “Like securitizing our future, and shit.”
“Well, jeez, Dad.”
“Chill da fuck out and get your head straight,” he told me. “Look, you know this bitch is gonna fight dirty tonight. See all that sweat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It ain’t. It’s body oil. Makes him slippery, impossible to grab. Total bullshit, but what you gonna do?” Dad reached into a black training bag. “Except this.”
He flashed a bottle of baby oil.
“Two can play at that game.”
I stared across the cage at Razor. Grappling with a slicked up fighter was like trying to twist a doorknob with a hand greased in Vaseline. Any plans I had for straight wrestling just got shelved.
“No.”
“What?”
“No,” I said. “I ain’t gonna cheat.”
“But that mothafucker’s cheating. We just evenin’ the odds.” My father squirted some oil in his hands and prepared to rub me down, but I pulled away.
“No,” I said. “I ain’t gonna do it.”
“Center of the ring, gentlemen. It’s go time.”
Glaring at me, disgusted by my decision to fight with honor, my father threw the bottle of baby oil back inside the black bag and then kicked the thing for good measure. “Well, just make sure you watch his fingernails.”
“Fingernails?”
“Why the fuck you think they call him Razor?”
The bell rang to begin the fight. Razor and I met in the center of the cage and started feeling one another out with strikes from the outside, neither of us really connecting with any shots of significance. Razor held a height advantage over me of about four inches, but I was thicker, with bigger traps and lats. Funny how he kind of looked like a giraffe, with a long neck, a pronounced Adam’s apple, and bugged-out, googly eyes.
He attempted a sweeping roundhouse. I stepped inside, avoided the kick, and went for a takedown, but he slid right out of my grip.
Then he slashed me across the chest. It drew blood. Those weren’t fingernails on his hands; they were claws that had been filed into bladelike tips hardened with some kind of manicure gel. People in the crowd with bets placed on me booed when they saw the bloody scratches on my torso, but in a no-holds-barred cage fight, nobody is gonna DQ a fighter for cheating like this.
Because how can you break the rules when there aren’t any? Last fighter standing wins. How he gets there just don’t matter.
I struggled the entire first round, taking cut after cut. I wasn’t fighting an MMA brawler; I was warring a greased-up wolverine. None of the wounds, however, would take me out—all they did was sting like hell—but walking back to my corner after the first part of our dance, I bled from a thousand small scrapes. After the first seven minutes of the match I definitely looked like the fight’s big loser.
“M.D.”
“What?”
“M.D.,” my dad called out to me; but strangely, he was standing outside the cage instead of inside of it in my corner. “Over there,” he said, pointing.
My eyes followed to where his finger directed me and suddenly, in the middle of a few hundred people, she and I made eye contact.
He brought her here?
Seeing me bloodied and sweaty, shirt off, in a cage, fighting a savage war in a savage place, she turned and headed for the exit.
“Kaitlyn!” I cried out.
But she kept going, and a minute later was gone. I spun around to face my father.
“Guess she didn’t like the skateboarding,” he said with a laugh as he torched a fresh cigarette and took a deep drag.
I lunged at him but the steel fence kept us separated.
“Aw, you’re better off without her,” he said. “Remember, bitches’ll just slow a champ down.”
I hardly even remember the rest of the fight aside from a few small things. Number one, the payout for the victory was eight thousand dollars. Also, Razor needed an emergency tracheotomy in order to breathe after my throat strike with a closed fist in Round Two collapsed his Adam’s apple and caved in his larynx.
And those fans who’d made the trip out from Cali, well…they didn’t have much to say after that.
The most vivid image of the night, however, was the sight of the High Priest giving me a small nod of his head. He didn’t take off his sunglasses. He didn’t rise from his chair or cheer. The man didn’t pump his fist or even clap his hands. But clearly, the evening’s results were events of which he approved.
I walked home, about four miles, alone. Blood seeped through my T-shirt to my sweatshirt from all the scratches that had not yet closed. Something simple and true became clear to me as I stepped over a piece of rotted wood that lay in the middle of the dark, wet street.
I hated myself. And I completely hated what I’d become.
SEVENTEEN
Mrs. McCullough, my seventy-two-year-old neighbor who had white hair and couldn’t hear a rhinoceros if it walked through our living room, always watched Gem for me on the Saturday nights when I fought. I didn’t think she could do much if there was a fire, a burglar, or an accident of any sort, but I figured having someone there to stay with my sister while I was out would be better than having no one at all.
I turned the key and opened the door. Smoke rose from the tip of a menthol cigarette.
“Weasel’s supps’d to pay me, not you.”
I kicked the door shut behind me.
“I’m done,” I said.
I couldn’t tell by how much time my father had beaten me home, but Mrs. McCullough had already left and only about one-third of the bottle of cognac on the table next to him remained in the bottle.
“The hell you are,” he responded coolly. “Next fight gonna be worth big-ass bucks.”
“I’m done and I’m going to that school.”
“That school…ha!” With a smirk he polished off the rest of the honey-colored liquor in his glass. “You can’t run from your DNA, son. You don’t belong at that school. You belong in a cage.”
He took a long, deep, last drag off his cigarette before smashing out the butt in an ashtray. Then he stood.
“And as your father, you will do what I fucking say.”
He approached, his hand out, like he was expecting something to be placed in it.
“My money. Give.”
Yes, I had the envelope. But no, he wasn’t touching it.
“You hear me?” he asked.
/>
I didn’t respond. He stepped closer.
“I said, do you hear me?”
He put his nose next to mine and narrowed his eyes.
“Son, you say, ‘Yes, sir!’ when I talk to you.”
Again, I didn’t respond, and he raised his hand to strike but I blocked the blow and then pointed my index finger at the center of his face.
“I said I’m done.”
Anger flashed in his red, bloodshot eyes and he threw a crisp left hook, but I slipped the shot and charged for the inside. Since boxers like to box, I took him to the ground with a harai goshi, a hip sweep from judo that uses the momentum of your opponent against him.
His legs knocked over a lamp as he sailed ass-over-elbow through the air, and I slammed him to the floor. The cognac bottle flew across the room and shattered against the wall while my father crashed through a side table, the weight of his body blasting apart the cheap brown wood.
“Urrggh,” he groaned.
Like a jungle cat I was on him. Elbow to the top of his head, knee to the kidney, a forearm shiver to the base of his jaw that landed clean and with the force of a thick metal pipe.
Triangle choke hold.
I locked him in a vicious figure-four that gave no options: no defense, no way to counterattack, no air to breathe.
The student had become the teacher.
Rage consumed me. Hate boiled. I began to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
I’d feared him for so long but now, going toe-to-toe, I realized I had nothing left to fear. He couldn’t hurt me. He was done hurting me.
I would never let him hurt me ever again.
I tightened my vise grip around his neck. There was nothing he could do, no way to break the hold, no way to cry for help, no way to tap out. As he gagged and gasped and squirmed like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat pulled straight from the sea, I thought how the world would be better off without him.
His face turned purple. His eyes began to bulge. Strangulation in real life isn’t the same as in the movies, where people gently fall asleep like a baby being rocked in the strangler’s arms. Strangulation is a brutal, violent, ugly thing to witness.
And Gemma was watching it all.
She stood by her bedroom door in a fluffy pink and yellow pair of jammies, the sound of our fight having woken her. I hadn’t seen her come in, but there she was. We connected through a gaze. In my eyes, she saw venom; in hers, I saw fear.
Suddenly I realized that if she saw me strangle our father to death in the middle of the living room it would be a trauma from which she’d never recover. Some memories, after all, just can’t be erased.
I released my grip. My father wheezed and desperately sucked for air, struggling to catch his breath.
“I’m done,” I said.
He rubbed his neck, rose to his feet, and made his way for the door.
“The hell you are,” he said in a raspy voice.
The door opened, then closed and a moment later he was gone. An eerie quiet filled the apartment.
“Doc,” my sister asked, too scared to even move. “Are you okay?”
I opened my arms. Gemma raced over to me, and I wrapped her in a big, safe hug.
“Don’t cry,” I said, squeezing her tight. “It’s over. It’s all over.”
Of course, as soon as the door had shut behind him, I knew I’d just violated one of my father’s golden rules.
Always finish your opponent.
“Ssshh, don’t cry,” I repeated. “It’s gonna be okay. Ssshh.”
EIGHTEEN
The bell to dismiss fourth period rang, and kids began to file out of class into the loud, chaotic, overcrowded halls.
“Hey, McCutcheon, gotta sec?”
Mr. Freedman spun around in his chair and then reached into the filing cabinet behind his desk. “Here’s a few more activities that I think’ll help cement your knowledge of...” He tried to pass me a folder, but I didn’t take it.
Mr. Freedman’s arm hung in the air. Finally, after an awkward moment had passed, he set down the folder.
“What’s on your mind, son?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, clearly, it isn’t science.”
“I said, nothing.”
He glanced toward the door and waited until the last of his students had left so he could speak with me in private. Once we were alone, he cleaned his eyeglasses with the bottom of his striped red tie, then leaned back in his chair like some sort of wise professor.
“You know that a real man recognizes when it’s time to ask for help.”
Nonresponsive, I stared out the window. Gray skies, light snow, bleakness everywhere, inside and out.
“You shouldn’t feel any shame about seeking some assistance with your troubles, son.”
“Help yourself, old man,” I snapped. “You’re the one who hates his fucking job, not me.”
I stormed out of the classroom, headed for the back fence, and then jumped over the top in one easy leap.
But I wasn’t heading to Loco’z; I was off to the bus stop.
After two transfers and a half-mile walk in biting, bitter wind, I arrived at the front steps of Radiance.
PUGNARE AD CONSEQUI, CONSEQUI AD DA
FIGHT TO ACHIEVE, ACHIEVE TO GIVE
Whatever, I thought.
Once there, it took me about fifteen minutes to find which class Kaitlyn was in and where that was. Then I had to wait another ten minutes for the period to end. When the teacher finally dismissed all of the students, I ambushed her in the hall.
“Hey, do you, um, have a moment?”
“Don’t you ever speak to me again.”
“But you need to know that—”
“I said, never,” she repeated. “I can’t even begin to…I’m just…I’m sickened by the whole thing.”
Kaitlyn pulled her arms to her sides as if touching me would somehow contaminate her, and she walked away, no words to even say how she felt or to describe what she’d seen the other night.
“G’head, then. Leave!” Some of her classmates in the hall turned their heads to see what was going on. “What do you know about having to put food in a little kid’s belly? What do you know about having to shop at donation centers for clothing? Go ahead, run back to your precious little Archer Award. What the hell do you know about having to survive, anyway?”
I could feel wetness coming to my eyes. I was pissed at Kaitlyn, pissed at her for rejecting me.
But could I really blame her?
Naw, it wasn’t Kaitlyn who I was pissed at. Deep down, I was pissed at me.
I knew I shouldn’t have opened up to her. I knew it was a mistake to become emotional, to become vulnerable, to care. Though I hated to admit it, damn if what my father had said wasn’t true.
Relationships’ll just fuck a man up.
“I thought you were different,” I called out to Kaitlyn.
She stopped, turned, and then lasered in on me with her blue-green eyes.
“I thought you were different, too,” she responded.
She walked away. I didn’t go after her. Instead, I flew out of Radiance and began my half-mile trek back to the bus stop. The conversation between Kaitlyn and me, though short, kept swimming around and around through my head the entire way back to east-side D-town.
“I thought you were different.”
“I thought you were different, too.”
Two bus transfers later I cruised up to the front gate of Harriet Tubman Elementary School to pick Gem up, my head and heart still scrambled like a coupla farm-fresh eggs.
“She’s gone.”
“Whaddya mean, she’s gone?” I said.
“Like I told you, gone,” the lady at the front gate explained to me. “Her daddy done picked her up ’bout twenty minutes ago.�
�
“What?!”
I raced home. There was no Gemma; only a note.
BEAT THE BROOKLYN BEAST
IF YOU WANNA SEE UR LIL’ GEM AGAIN.
FATHER KNOWS BEST.
P.S. LEVERAGE, LEVERAGE, LEVERAGE.
NINETEEN
The weather report said a nor’easter was blowing in. A bad one. A storm that would attack with fury.
I didn’t care. I had to find Gemma. Where? No idea. How? I had no clue.
But so what. Not finding her wasn’t an option.
I grabbed my jacket, bolted out the door, and began to hunt the streets. Starting at the Honey Pot near Hoover Street made the most sense to me ’cause I knew the bar would always give my dad a line of credit for drinks when he was tapped for cash. Not needing to have to have any cheese in his pocket in order to get hammered made the Honey Pot one of his fave joints around.
I entered through a heavy door, waved away a fog of cigarette smoke, and scanned the room. Drunks, unemployed do-nothings, a few sad-looking hoochies, and a couple of bank-robbing–looking sons of bitches were scattered across bar stools and small round-topped tables. The door closed behind me. I could practically feel the negative energy ooze from the room. It wasn’t a mystery why my dad liked this place so much. His kind of people.
I approached the bar. Next to a rectangular Bud Light mirror, a large white sign warned that according to state law no one under the age of twenty-one would be served any alcohol.
“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked me, preparing to pour something.
My eyes darted around before answering and then I spoke in a semi-loud voice because I’d wanted more than just the bartender to hear me.
“I’m looking for Demon Daniels.”
A crash of pool balls from the pool table behind me exploded through the room. It was a violent collision, and its timing seemed to me to be more than just a coincidence.
“He’s my dad,” I added.
People got stabbed for opening their mouths and asking the wrong questions in dumps like these. Mentioning that Demon was my father would at least save me from anyone thinking I was too outta line for making this kind of inquiry. Yet still, I shoulda known no one would be stupid enough to answer. Responding to questions from strangers was enough to make people think you were a snitch, and everyone knew the golden rule about squealers in these parts.
Caged Warrior (9781423186595) Page 12