by Steve Vernon
I spent the night in bed. When I woke up that rap poster had fallen off of the wall and that empty fist hole was talking to me. Or maybe I had taken the poster down again and couldn’t remember. I was still pretty wasted from the night before. I lay there under the covers, listening to what the fist hole was saying only it seemed to me like it was speaking in Swahili because I couldn’t understand a word it was telling me.
I leaned my ear against it.
I could hear the sound of the waves from down on the shore and it felt as if that sound might have been coming from out of the mouth of my wall’s fist hole. It made a hollow sound that whispered about deepness that I couldn’t imagine, anchors pulling down and chains and chests and dead men’s coffins and a whole lot of cold wet darkness.
I closed my eyes.
Wake up man.
I opened my eyes.
It was Tommy. Standing there over me like he’d just tucked me into bed. I didn’t ask how he’d got into my bedroom.
We’ve got to go, he said.
* 8 *
They drove me to the fight in Lorne’s pickup truck. We all smoked some weed while we were driving and Tommy gave me some sort of a pill.
Take this, he told me.
By this point in time I’d given up on free choice and had decided to do whatever Tommy told me to do. I swallowed the pill down without a word of protest. Tommy seemed as good a compass as any to follow right now. The fact was I was still trying to wake myself up while everybody else in the truck seemed to be seriously determined to get themselves good and stupid.
And there were a lot of people on that truck. Tommy and Lorne and me jammed into the cab, with maybe twenty people wedged into the truck bed.
That’s our audience, Tommy shouted at me over the music that was blaring on the truck radio. Only his mouth was moving one way and the words were coming out another and underneath his words I could hear that sound of the wall’s fist hole rising up over the radio music.
Have they all paid to see me fight, I asked. That was pretty impressive, that many people turning out to just to see a few Nova Scotia boys throw down on each other. I felt about ten feet tall, which was a pretty good trick given as how I was currently jammed beneath the sweaty fat folds of Lorne’s right armpit and Tommy’s bony shoulder bones.
Tommy looked over at me like I was the number one depositor in the Bank of Stupid and I shrank down about two or three feet.
They’re just the audience, Tommy said. I’ve invited them along. Some of them will buy copies of the film we make.
So we’ve got a camera, I asked.
I’ve got it worked out, Tommy said. Here, have another pill.
I took it and for a while things began to blur.
* 9 *
I woke up sleeping under a jack pine. The wind was making a whispering sound through the dead brown needles that had been burnt by the summer heat and the acid rain. I could hear people yelling and it sounded as if they were years away.
Wake up, Tommy said. It’s time for you to fight.
I tried to stand up but my legs were made from rubber and Slinky toys. I felt itchy, like I was covered in mosquito bites and my mouth felt dry and numb at the same time and the world was turning slowly.
Come on, said Tommy. Don’t keep everybody waiting.
I shook it off and I did my best to cowboy up just the way that my gym teacher always told me to do. This is what I said I would do and I wasn’t about to wuss out now.
Snap to it, Tommy said. Get your ass into that cage.
I could see it now and it looked pretty freaking cool. That big old cage, all black under the moonlight with all of those people standing around it. I could see the print of the ABS labels on the pipe standing out in the darkness. A part of me wanted to stop the fight and paint over the lettering with some black paint but there was no time to stop.
Do we have a camera, I asked. Where’s the camera?
Shelley brought her cell phone, Tommy said. She can shoot movies on it.
I could see her now, standing close to the bars of the cage with her cell phone camera up and ready. I wondered just how good of a picture it would shoot here in the dark and I wondered if maybe we should have set this whole thing up in the daytime and then I decided it didn’t really matter.
I was here to fight and that’s all that counted right now.
I climbed down into the pit. It seemed darker and deeper by moonlight. Tommy still hadn’t told me just who I had to fight.
Hey, a voice said from out of the darkness.
Oh shit.
It was Hank.
He was standing there in the center of the pit, waiting for me. He had the big old pirate earring that he wore fish-hooked into his eyebrow and he had war painted his face up with his mother’s lipstick. I didn’t know that Mi’kmaq wore war paint and maybe Hank didn’t either. Maybe he just saw it on television. The war paint should have looked silly but in the darkness and the closeness of the pit it scared the hell out of me.
He stepped up almost lazily taking a swing that clipped me on the side of the ear and left it numb. I took two steps back but he hadn’t been trying to hurt me so much as make me take those two steps back. While I was stepping back Hank stepped up and brought his knee into my ribs and I thought I felt something break.
Holy shit.
I came around trying to swing on him and he sort of leaned back with my swing and blocked me at the wrist. He blocked me hard and it felt as if the bones in my wrist were ringing like a recess bell only Hank wasn’t giving me any time out. He brought his arm up short and sharp, getting his hip behind it, and tagged me on the nose. I felt a water balloon swell up inside my nostrils and when it broke my face felt warm and wet all over.
I could hear the crowd above us roaring and yelling and I knew that some of them were watching the fight and some of them were just standing around and shooting the shit with each other. This really wasn’t much of a big deal to them, no matter what Tommy said. They could see this sort of thing on the television and the pay per view and at the DVD store any time they wanted to.
I jacked my arm forward, catching Hank in his gut, but his abs felt as if he cranked out about ten thousand crunches every morning before eating a breakfast of washboards and corrugate iron. He brought his head down into a nasty hard head butt that broke a sunrise under my vision and damn brought sunset down on after it.
We were in close now and I forked my hands up wildly; catching hold of his t-shirt collar and trying to choke him but strangulation is a hell of a lot harder than it looks on television.
Hank hammered his fist into my cheek again and again and I knew it was probably hurting him nearly as bad as it was hurting me but that didn’t matter one bit right now.
I grabbed at his face and I felt my finger poke into the pirate earring and I yanked it out just as hard as I could. I felt it tear, his eyebrow giving way, and I could see the blood washing down his face over his red lipstick war paint. The forehead bleeds really easily and Hank’s head looked like a giant angry raspberry.
I stood there for what seemed to be a hundred minutes or so, staring up at the eyebrow ring in my hand. I could see the moon peeking down through the hole in the earring like a head in a sniper scope and I wondered if this was what Frodo felt like on the edge of Mount Doom and then Hank fell on me and avalanched a half a dozen more hard slamming jackhammers to my face.
I jerked my knee up just as hard as I could and caught him under the chin and his teeth and jaw bone made a clacking sound and I thought I saw that twisted brace grin of that toque chucking asshole back in grade three whose smile never really grew back and I thought I saw Shelley staring down at me through her cell phone camera and I wondered if she was trying to make some kind of a crazy telephone call to me from outer space and then I brought my elbow down just as hard as I could about five or six times into the top of Hank’s skull and something broke.
The next thing I knew I was standing over Hank and he was lying there in the dirt and I
wasn’t sure if he was ever going to grow back straight and I could hear that hushed seashell roar of my wall’s fist-hole shouting over everything and Tommy was down there beside me holding my fist up in the air.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if Tommy was talking about Hank or me but it didn’t matter much right now. I grinned as hard I could through broken teeth, enjoying my shining moment while I could.
Five minutes later Shelley used her cell phone to dial 911 because Hank wasn’t breathing right and his eyes were all funny and blood was coming out of his nostrils and ears and I stood there listening to the sound of the wind whistling through the pine needles and the distant waves beating against the rocks and Hank’s funny breathing. I kept thinking about that film Shelley had shot on her camera and all of these spectators who had been watching the whole thing and me here in this pit staring out through these bars with this bloodstain earring clenched in my fist wondering what came next.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Vernon is a storyteller. The man was born with a campfire burning at his feet. The word "boring" does not exist in this man's vocabulary - unless he's maybe talking about termites or ice augers.
That’s all that Steve Vernon will say about himself – on account of Steve Vernon abso-freaking HATES talking about himself in the third person.
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ALSO AVAILABLE AT AMAZON
My Regional Books – from Nimbus Publishing
Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia
Wicked Woods: Ghost Stories from Old New Brunswick
Halifax Haunts: Exploring the City’s Spookiest Spaces
Maritime Monsters: A Field Guide
The Lunenburg Werewolf and Other Stories of the Supernatural
Sinking Deeper OR My Questionable (Possibly Heroic) Decision to Invent a Sea Monster
Maritime Murder: Deadly Crimes From the Buried Past
My E-Books
In the Dark and the Deep – Steve Vernon’s Sea Tales #1
Flash Virus
Fighting Words
Tatterdemon
Devil Tree
Gypsy Blood
The Weird Ones
Two Fisted Nasty
Nothing to Lose –Adventures of Captain Nothing, Volume 1
Nothing Down – Adventures of Captain Nothing, Volume 2
Roadside Ghosts
Long Horn, Big Shaggy
I have released over FORTY e-books, all available at Amazon. If I were to try and list them all I’d give my keyboard a digital hernia – so why don’t you just CHECK OUT MY AMAZON PAGE?
Tales From The Tangled Wood
Volume 1
Author: Steve Vernon
ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-39-5
First Printing – January 18, 2015
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