She helps him off with his shorts and brings him all the way hard with her hand, then touches his cock to her breasts, lets it butt and slide against her cheek, takes it in her mouth for just seconds, like into warm syrup, her tongue swirling, getting his hips to bridge up from the mattress, wise and playful in her moves, and finally she comes astride him and says, ‘I believe I’m ready for some of this, baby,’ her voice burred, and she reaches for him, puts him where she needs it, and then her whole dark, sweet weight swings down slick and hot around him, and his neck arches, his mouth strains open and his head pushes back into the pillow, feeling as if he’s dipped the back of his brain into a dark green pool, this ancient place with mossy-stone temples beneath the water and strange carvings and spirits gliding in and out the columns. When that moment passes, he finds she’s riding him slow and deep and easy, not talking hooker trash, but fucking him like a young girl, her breath shaky and musical, hands braced on the pillow by his head, and he slides his hands around to cup her ass, to her back, pressing down so that her breasts graze and nudge his chest, and it’s all going so right he forgets to think how good it is and gives himself over to the arc of his feelings and the steady, sinuous beat of her heart-filled body.
Afterward there is something shy and delicate between them, something he knows won’t survive for long, maybe not even until morning, and maybe it’s all false, maybe they have only played a deeper game, but if so, it’s deep enough that the truth doesn’t matter, and they are for now in that small room somewhere dark and green, the edge of that pool he dipped into for a second, a wood, sacred, with the calls of those strange metal beasts sounding in the distance from the desolate town. A shadow is circling beneath the surface of the pool, it’s old, wrinkled, hard with evil, like a pale crocodile that’s never been up into the light, but it’s not an animal, not even a thought, it’s just a name: Vederotta. He holds her tight, keeps two fingers pushed between her legs touching the heated damp of her, feeling her pulse there, still rapid and trilling, and he wants to know a little more about her, anything, just one thing, and when he whispers the only question he can think to ask, she wriggles around, holding his two fingers in place, turns her face to his chest and says her name is Arlene.
Training is like religion to Mears, the litanies of sparring, the penances of one-arm push-ups, the long retreats of his morning runs, the monastic breakfasts at four a.m., the vigils in the steam room during which he visualizes with the intensity of prayer what will happen in the ring, and as with a religion, he feels it simplifying him, paring him down, reducing his focus to a single consuming pursuit. On this occasion, however, he allows himself to be distracted and twice sleeps with Arlene. At first she tries to act flighty and brittle as she did in the bar, but when they go upstairs, that mask falls away and it is good for them again. The next night she displays no pretence whatsoever. They fuck wildly like lovers who have been long separated, and just before dawn they wind up lying on their sides, still joined, hips still moving sporadically. Mears’ head is jangled and full of anxious incoherencies. He’s worried about how he will suffer for this later in the gym and concerned by what is happening with Arlene. It seems he is being given a last sweetness, a young girl not yet hardened beyond repair, a girl who has some honest affection for him, who perhaps sees him as a means of salvation. This makes him think he is being prepared for something bad by God or whomever. Although he’s been prepared for the worst for quite a while, now he wonders if the Vederotta fight will somehow prove to be worse than the worst, and frightened by this, he tells Arlene he can’t see her again until after the fight. Being with her, he says, saps his strength and he needs all his strength for Vederotta. If she is the kind of woman who has hurt him in the past, he knows she will react badly, she will accuse him of trying to dump her, she will rave and screech and demand his attentions. And she does become angry, but when he explains that he is risking serious injury by losing his focus, her defensiveness—that’s what has provoked her anger—subsides, and she pulls him atop her, draws up her knees and takes him deep, gluing him to her sticky thighs, and as the sky turns the colour of tin and delivery traffic grumbles in the streets, and a great clanking and screech of metal comes from the docks, and garbage trucks groan and whine as they tip Dumpsters into their maws like iron gods draining their goblets, she and Mears rock and thrust and grind, tightening their hold on each other as the city seems to tighten around them, winching up its loose ends, notch by notch, in order to withstand the fierce pressures of the waking world.
That afternoon at the gym, Leon takes Mears into the locker room and sits him on a bench. He paces back and forth, emitting an exhaust of cigar smoke, and tells Mears that the boxing commission will be no problem, the physical exam—like most commission physicals—is going to be a joke, no eye charts, nothing, just blood pressure and heart and basic shit like that. He paces some more, then says he’s finished watching films of Vederotta’s last four fights.
‘Ain’t but one way to fight him,’ he says. ‘Smother his punches, grab him, hold him, frustrate the son of a bitch. Then when he get wild and come bullin’ in, we start to throw uppercuts. Uppercuts all night long. That’s our only shot. Understand?’
‘I hear you.’
‘Man’s strong.’ Leon sighs as he takes a seat on the bench opposite Mears. ‘Heavyweight strong. He gon’ come at us from the bell and try to hurt us. He use his head, his elbows, whatever he gots. We can’t let him back us up. We back up on this motherfucker, we goin’ to sleep.’
There is more, Mears can feel it, and he waits patiently, picking at the wrappings on his hands while he listens to the slap and babble from the gym.
‘Member that kid Tony Ayala?’ Leon asks. ‘Junior middleweight ’bout ten years ago. Mean fuckin’ kid, wound up rapin’ some schoolteacher in Jersey. Big puncher. This Vederotta ’mind me of him. He knock Jeff Toney down and then he kick him. He hold up Reggie Williams ’gainst the ropes when the man out on his feet so he kin hit him five, six times more.’ Leon pauses. ‘Maybe he’s too strong. Maybe we should pull out of this deal. What you think?’
Mears realizes that Leon is mainly afraid Vederotta will knock him into retirement, that his cut of the twenty thousand dollars will not compensate for a permanent loss of income. But the fact that Leon has asked what he thinks, that’s new, that’s a real surprise. He suspects that deep within that gross bulk, the pilot light of Leon’s moral self, long extinguished, has been relit and he is experiencing a flicker of concern for Mears’ well-being. Recognizing this, Mears is, for reasons he cannot fathom, less afraid.
‘Ain’t you listenin’, man? I axed what you think.’
‘Got to have that money,’ Mears says.
Leon sucks on his cigar, spits. ‘I don’t know ’bout this,’ he says, real doubt in his voice, real worry. ‘I just don’t know.’
Mears thinks about Leon, all the years, the lies, the petty betrayals and pragmatic loyalty, the confusion that Leon must be experiencing to be troubled by emotion at this stage of the relationship. He tries to picture who Leon is and conjures the image of something bloated and mottled washed up on a beach—something that would have been content to float and dream in the deep blue-green light, chewing on kelp, but would now have to heave itself erect and lumber unsightly through the bright, terrible days without solace or satisfaction. He puts a hand on the man’s soft, sweaty back, feels the sick throb of his heart. ‘I know you don’t,’ he says. ‘But it’s all right.’
The first time he meets Vederotta, it’s the morning of the fight, at the weigh-in. Just as he’s stepping off the scale, he is startled to spot him standing a few feet away, a pale, vaguely human shape cut in the middle by a wide band of black, the trunks. And a face. That’s the startling thing, the thing that causes Mears to shift quickly away. It’s the sort of face that appears when a fight is going badly, when he needs more fear in order to keep going, but it’s never happened so early, before the fight even begins. And this one is differen
t from the rest. Not a comic-book image slapped onto a human mould, it seems fitted just below the surface of the skin, below the false human face, rippling like something seen through a thin film of water. It’s coal black, with sculpted cheeks and a flattened bump of a nose and a slit mouth and hooded eyes, an inner mask of black lustreless metal. From its eyes and mouth leaks a crumbling red glow so radiant it blurs the definition of the features. Mears recognizes it for the face of his secret pain, and he can only stare at it. Then Vederotta smiles, the slit opening wider to show the furnace glow within, and says in a dull, stuporous voice, a voice like ashes, ‘You don’t look so hot, man. Try and stay alive till tonight, will ya?’ His handlers laugh and Leon curses them, but Mears, suddenly spiked with terror, can find no words, no solidity within himself on which to base a casual response. He lashes out at that evil, glowing face with a right hand, which Vederotta slips, and then everyone—handlers, officials, the press—is surging back and forth, pulling the two fighters apart, and as Leon hustles Mears away, saying, ‘Fuck’s wrong with you, man? You crazy?’ he hears Vederotta shouting at him, more bellowing than shouting, no words, nothing intelligible, just the raving of the black beast.
Half an hour before the fight is scheduled to start, Mears is lying on a training table in the dressing room, alone, his wrapped hands folded on his belly. From the arena come intermittent announcements over the PA, the crowd booing one of the preliminary bouts, and some men are talking loudly outside his door. Mears scarcely registers any of this. He’s trying to purge himself of fear but is not having much success. He believes his peculiar visual trick has revealed one of God’s great killers, and that tonight the red seed of pain in his head will bloom and he will die, and nothing—no determined avowal, no life-affirming hope—will diminish that belief. He could back out of the fight, he could fake an injury of some sort, and he considers this possibility, but something—and it’s not just pride—is pulling him onward. No matter whether or not that face he saw is real, there’s something inhuman about Vederotta. Something evil and implacable. And stupid. Some slowness natural to sharks and demons. Maybe he’s not a fate, a supernatural creature; maybe he’s only malformed, twisted in spirit. Whatever, Mears senses his wrongness the way he would a change in the weather, not merely because of the mask but from a wealth of subtle yet undeniable clues. All these months of imagining beasts in the ring and now he’s finally come up against a real one. Maybe the only real one there is. The one he always knew was waiting. Could be, he thinks, it’s just his time. It’s his time and he has to confront it. Then it strikes him that there may be another reason. It’s as if he’s been in training, sparring with the lesser beasts, Alligator Man, the Fang, Snakeman and the rest, in order to prepare for this bout. And what if there’s some purpose to his sacrifice? What if he’s supposed to do something out there tonight aside from dying?
Lying there, he realizes he’s already positioned for the coffin, posed for eternity, and that recognition makes him roll up to his feet and begin his shadowboxing, working up a sweat. His sweat stinks of anxiety, but the effort tempers the morbidity of his thoughts.
A tremendous billow of applause issues from the arena, and not long thereafter, Leon pops in the door and says, ‘Quick knockout, man. We on in five.’ Then it goes very fast. The shuffling, bobbing walk along the aisle through the Wichita crowd, hearing shouted curses, focusing on that vast, dim tent of white light that hangs down over the ring. Climbing through the ropes, stepping into the resin box, getting his gloves checked a final time. It’s all happening too quickly. He’s being torn away from important details. Strands of tactics, sustaining memories, are being burned off him. He does not feel prepared. His belly knots and he wants to puke. He needs to see where he is, exactly where, not just this stretch of blue canvas that ripples like shallow water and the warped circles of lights suspended in blackness like an oddly geometric grouping of suns seen from outer space. The heat of those lights, along with the violent, murmurous heat of the crowd, it’s sapping—it should be as bright as day in the ring, like noon on a tropic beach, and not this murky twilight reeking of Vaseline and concession food and fear. He keeps working, shaking his shoulders, testing the canvas with gliding footwork, jabbing and hooking. Yet all the while he’s hoping the ring will collapse or Vederotta will sprain something, a power failure, anything to spare him. But when the announcer brays his weight, his record and name over the mike, he grows calm as if by reflex and submits to fate and listens to the boos and desultory clapping that follows.
‘His opponent,’ the announcer continues, ‘in the black trunks with a red stripe, weighs in tonight at a lean and mean one hundred fifty-nine and one half pounds. He’s undefeated and is currently ranked number one by both the WBC and WBA, with twenty-four wins, twenty-three by knockout! Let’s have a great big prairie welcome for Wichita’s favourite son, Toneee! The Heat! Ve-de-rot-taaaaa! Vederotta!’
Vederotta dances forward into the roar that celebrates him, arms lifted above his head, his back to Mears; then he turns, and as Leon and the cut man escort Mears to the centre of the ring for the instructions, Mears sees that menacing face again. Those glowing eyes.
‘When I say “break”,’ the ref is saying, ‘I want you to break clean. Case of a knockdown, go to a neutral corner and stay there till I tell ya to come out. Any questions?’
One of Vederotta’s handlers puts in his mouthpiece, a piece of opaque plastic that mutes the fiery glow, makes it look liquid and obscene; gassy red light steams from beneath the black metal hulls that shade his eyes.
‘OK,’ says the ref. ‘Let’s get it on.’
Vederotta holds out his gloves and says something through his mouthpiece. Mears won’t touch gloves with him, frightened of what this acquiescence might imply. Instead, he shoves him hard, and once again the handlers have to intervene. Screams from the crowd lacerate the air, and the ref admonishes him, saying, ‘Gimme a clean fight, Bobby, or I’ll disqualify ya.’ But Mears is listening to Vederotta shouting fierce, garbled noises such as a lion might make with its mouth full of meat.
Leon hustles him back to the corner, puts in his mouthpiece and slips out through the ropes, saying, ‘Uppercuts, man! Keep throwin’ them uppercuts!’ Then he’s alone, that strangely attenuated moment between the instructions and the bell, longer than usual tonight because the TV cameraman standing on the ring apron is having problems. Mears rolls his head, working out the kinks, shaking his arms to get them loose, and pictures himself as he must look from the cheap seats, a tiny dark figure buried inside a white pyramid. The image of Amandla comes into his head. She, too, is tiny. A doll in a blue robe, like a Madonna, she has that kind of power, a sweet, gentle idea, nothing more. And there’s Arlene, whom he has never seen, of whom he knows next to nothing, African and voluptuous and mysterious like those big-breasted ebony statues they sell in the import stores. And Leon hunkered down at the corner of the ring, sweaty already, breath thick and quavery, peering with his pop eyes. Mears feels steadier and less afraid, triangulated by them: the only three people who have any force in his life. When he glances across the ring and finds that black death’s head glaring at him, he is struck by something—he can see Vederotta. Since his eyes went bad, he’s been unable to see his opponent until the man closes on him, and for that reason he circles tentatively at the beginning of each round, waiting for the figure to materialize from the murk, backing, letting his opponent come to him. Vederotta must know this, must have seen that tendency on film, and Mears thinks it may be possible to trick him, to start out circling and then surprise him with a quick attack. He turns, wanting to consult Leon, not sure this would be wise, but the bell sounds, clear and shocking, sending him forward as inexorably as a toy set in motion by a spark.
Less than ten seconds into the fight, goaded in equal measure by fear and hope, Mears feints a sidestep, plants his back foot and lunges forward behind a right that catches Vederotta solidly above the left eye, driving him into the ropes. Mears foll
ows with a jab and two more rights before Vederotta backs him up with a wild flurry, and he sees that Vederotta has been cut. The cut is on the top of the eyelid, not big but in a bad place, difficult to treat. It shows as a fuming red slit in that black mask, like molten lava cracking open the side of a scorched hill. Vederotta rubs at the eye, holds up his glove to check for blood, then hurls himself at Mears, taking another right on the way in but managing to land two stunning shots under the ribs that nearly cave him in. From then on it’s all downhill for Mears. Nobody, not Hagler or Hearns or Duran, has ever hit him with such terrible punches. His face is numb from Vederotta’s battering jab and he thinks one of his back teeth may have been cracked. But the body shots are the worst. Their impact is the sort you receive in a car crash when the steering wheel or the dash slams into you. They sound like football tackles, they dredge up harsh groans as they sink deep into his sides, and he thinks he can feel Vederotta’s fingers, his talons, groping inside the gloves, probing for his organs. With less than a minute to go in the round, a right hand to the heart drops him onto one knee. It takes him until the count of five to regain his breath, and he’s up at seven, wobbly, dazed by the ache spreading across his chest. As Vederotta comes in, Mears wraps his arms about his waist and they go lurching about the ring, faces inches apart, Vederotta’s arm barred under his throat, trying to push him off. Vederotta spews words in a goblin language, wet, gnashing sounds. He sprays fiery brimstone breath into Mears’ face, acid spittle, the crack on his eyelid leaking a thin track of red phosphorus down a black cheek. When the ref finally manages to separate them, he tells Mears he’s going to deduct a point if he keeps holding. Mears nods, grateful for the extra few seconds’ rest, more grateful when he hears the bell.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 33