by Matt Bell
Weigh-in days you could check your weight in the morning with a banana in your hand and if you were underweight you could eat the banana. In the mirror there were always the folds of your former self, the hanging skin around the waist, self as shame refusing to fall away. You ate or didn’t eat the banana. You ran the miles. You carried the carcass of before. You climbed the scale naked and nervous and old as you had ever been and you were so young and you wondered if today was the day you measured light enough for battle.
He remembered the bodies of the other boys, lean and carved, organized by weight class. Veins cording forearms and calves, throbbing out of a neck the size of a thigh. Fingers cracked and broken and taped, eyes screwed and bulged out of a drawn face, all bones and bravery. He could go days without food, without any more liquid than it took to rinse his mouth. All your own meat could be made of was food and if you didn’t eat any food there’d be less meat.
Every morning he lifted and ran and every afternoon he threw his body at the body of another boy, practiced takedowns and reversals and arm bars, the half nelson, the quarter nelson. There were illegal moves no one ever taught but the team learned them anyway, taught each other, passed them down. Armlocks, leglocks, spinal locks. Small-joint manipulation. Choke holds, other methods for smothering. Slamming or spiking. No punching, no kicking, no gouging of the eyes. No fishhooking the mouth or nose. No squeezing the genitals. These were the ways to hurt a man, to bend his will faster than the rules would allow. You couldn’t use them in a match but after you had the knowledge weren’t you waiting for your chance.
His coach yelled but Kelly’s failure wasn’t a matter of motivation. Kelly skipped a practice, failed a weigh-in, missed the bus for a meet. There were better weeks where he found his enthusiasm and the coach said he thought maybe Kelly was shaking off a freshman slump but before the season ended Kelly packed his dorm room and left campus. There wasn’t anyone to tell he was leaving. He appreciated the coach giving him a chance but he didn’t owe the man a call. They weren’t close, not like the coach was close to the other guys.
He hadn’t made the kind of friends he wanted to make. He knew he wasn’t stupid but the classes had bored him too. Their steady drip of fact, fact, fact. He didn’t call his parents but before he left his father called him, said the coach had called first.
You can always come home, his father said.
Back home Kelly’s grandfather had worked for the copper mines in the state’s Upper Peninsula, his father in the auto factories near the town named like poison. The mines were long exhausted, the mine towns exhausted too. The factories weren’t hiring or they were paying half wages and no benefits or they were closed. If there wouldn’t be work, what else was there to go home to? Nothing Kelly wanted again.
Gas was cheap and a dollar could buy Kelly twenty miles in his ancient red Firebird, the car all he had to show for a year spent in fast food, his wrestler’s body hungry over the fryers. How far he escaped depended on how he drove but he wasn’t so careful in those days, liked to depress the pedal past prudence. He picked a southern city, rented an apartment, slowly bought used furniture, dishes, appliances. Then a progression of years, compressed into a list of occupations: there was work in kitchens, work in lumberyards, work painting the sides of houses, and then building houses too, framework and roofing and drywall, wallpaper and paint. There were girls but for a long time nothing steady. All he had left were isolated incidents, recurring images preserved by their rarity: the opening clasp of a front-closure bra, the first time a hand slid down the front of his undone jeans without his asking, the way community-college legs crossed in the low cramp of the Firebird’s passenger seat.
He didn’t remember anyone’s name from those years. Not the names of the girls, not the names of the boys he had wrestled with, not the names of the men he had worked beside.
As a boy he’d thought to know the name of a thing was to love it. But his father had known his name. So had his mother who had done nothing, said nothing.
There was a painter with the construction outfit with hands too big for his body and after a shared brawl in a dive bar parking lot it was this man who first took Kelly to the gym, said he saw a nervous energy Kelly needed somewhere to put. Kelly lowered his bruised face and said yes, lifted his busted hands. He’d missed the combat part of wrestling, the working out of aggressions in the mat room. Together Kelly and the painter lifted weights, hit the speed bag and the heavy bag until the painter said Kelly was ready to spar.
The painter was right: there was something Kelly had been looking for and here in the gym he was finding it, better than wrestling. More his own. The absence of his father, his father’s coaching. The complete absence of team. When sparring Kelly didn’t have the right kind of quickness and he wasn’t strong enough but he was plenty angry if provoked right. He’d move his feet wrong, sluggish, hold his hands too wide, but after the first few punches got through he’d discover his anger, find his gait. He wore himself out quick and never won anything but he made a lot of faces uglier, colored some ribs black and blue. He told the painter he saw better with blood in his eyes, with one eye bruised shut. He didn’t smile when he was joking. He didn’t know how to look friendly enough with his teeth bared.
What he remembered most was how much he had wanted the hitting, the being hit. Direct damage replacing submission, fists in place of locks and holds. He craved the space right before a punch landed in either direction, how there was a second where you could put a thought in harm’s way, let it get pulverized within a crater of flesh. He started to cut all ties with home, as easy as refusing to call. By the time he came back north, many years later, he had all the agency he’d ever thought to wish for. Even if his parents had lived forever he would have found a way to orphan himself.
He went to the church on the wrong days too, to watch other people pray. The kneeling and rocking, the low murmur of their speaking in tongues, mimicking the voices of angels. The habits of his parents, his parents’ friends, the parents of his friends. The prayers of thanks, the prayers of protection from suffering, the prayers of thanks for how suffering made them strong. He’d carried a rosary in his pocket long after he stopped believing but one day he’d left it behind, abruptly filled with ridiculous mistrust of its possession. He wasn’t about to start speaking in tongues again but he still liked the way those beads looked between other people’s hands.
When he didn’t understand what he saw he took a picture with his phone: a sign he hadn’t seen before, the absolute shadows of dusk on a street lacking streetlights, a high cast of graffiti, a flyer bearing the insignia of the city watch, the orange-clad volunteers he occasionally saw in the zone. Or else inside the houses, some configuration of wiring he wasn’t familiar with: knob and tube, the Carter system, the California three-way. He took pictures of his queries and sometimes he discovered their answers but other times he hit some wrong button and reversed the camera to accidentally take a picture of his own face, this man covered in dust and sweat and always sporting the same grime-stained expression. There was a record of his year in the city accumulating in the camera roll but who was he supposed to show the pictures. There was an icon on the screen meaning share but it wanted to know who with.
The city was famous for its music and when Kelly knew he wouldn’t sleep he went looking for the sound he remembered. On the best nights the music pounded heavy from the PA, its rolling torpor loud enough to make talent an irrelevant measure. He set himself apart, moved his feet and his arms in his own approximation of the rhythm. He wasn’t without feelings but he was aware of their constrained range, his distance from their centers.
The band quit the stage, the drinkers hung on to the rail. The door to the parking lot opened, admitted a woman on her own, arrived late enough to skip the cover. There was an open seat beside Kelly but there was a longer run of seating on the opposite end of the rail, around the curve, past the uninhabited waitress sta
tion.
Kelly watched the girl make the turn, sensed something surprising drag at his gaze.
When he thought about this moment afterward, he could see her limp more clearly, but this wasn’t memory, just familiarity’s revision.
He would call her girl from the start but even then he knew she was the same age as him, maybe older. From across the rail he watched her hands move, her bare fingers lighting cigarettes, tearing the labels away from consecutive bottles of beer, her painted nails scratching at the brown glass. He raised a hand to the bartender, sent another beer around the bar. The girl with the limp didn’t acknowledge the drink but he watched her smile to receive it.
There was a kind of bravery in his heart but it didn’t prevent him from knowing what he was. He wasn’t afraid of self-deception except in others.
When she left the bar she left on foot, which meant she lived in the neighborhood. There were others who lived here too but not in every house. She was a block ahead and now he saw her limp entire, the way one foot dragged and turned, the extra sway it added to her step. She slowed, turned the corner away from these houses and toward the rare apartments beyond. Even before she reached the stairs leading up to the barred gate of her building he knew she knew he was behind her. He tried to signal his innocence but what did innocence look like. He could smell the city and he could smell himself, a shared pungency. He wiped at his face and ran his fingers through his hair and on his hands he smelled his cigarettes mixing with stolen steel, copper’s tang, the other alloys and elements each inert until touched. Even every handful of coins smelled like its owner and on his hands he could smell all the old metal of the city, the dead sweat of its lost citizens mingled with his own living scent.
The girl with the limp turned upon the stairs and he saw her face clearly for the first time. He hadn’t realized he’d gotten so close. There were words he wanted to say. Who she looked like. Why he had bought her a drink. Why he had followed her home.
He said, I’m sorry I followed you.
He said, I thought you were someone else.
He had, back in the bar. And there was no mistaking the resemblance now.
He said, I think I knew you.
But what he’d meant to say was I thought.
She put her key in the door, turned the key. Even from his distance he could hear the clunk of the bolt. She pushed the door inward an invisible inch. When she turned back he could see the damage, had learned to recognize it in others. The way what happened to you either made you defensive or reckless and how now it was the reckless who were his people. When she entered the white light of the hallway beyond the door he knew she would invite him in without additional word or gesture, by leaving the door open wide to the street, by waiting for him to leave it yawning or else to close it, to close the door behind him as he entered.
THE CITY CLOSED ANOTHER DOZEN schools and after the students were gone the scrappers came. The schools left the security systems intact—cameras, passive infrared monitors—but eventually someone cut the power, hauled away the transformer box. The battery backup kept the security live for eight hours but turning the power back on would take days of work, twenty thousand dollars the city didn’t have. When the security died the most aggressive scrappers came first, headed straight for the copper: The concrete in every bathroom shattered with hammers, the wire mesh inside bent with pry bars or else yanked free by grabbing hold and leaning back, letting body weight pull the mesh free of its fastenings. Then turning a pipe cutter around whatever they could see. Then down to the basement for the boiler, its own set of copper piping. Dismantling the plumbing could set off the sprinkler system. Then water cascading on chalkboards, bookshelves, hardwood floors, destroying whatever the scrappers left.
The other scrappers didn’t wait for night. The scrapyards closed at five and so you took the five o’clock price if you didn’t have somewhere to stash what you took. Or else the scrapping started at three or four or five in the morning, so it could be done by the time the scrapyards opened again at eight.
Kelly refused to be the first thief. He worked other sites during the day, dropped his scrap, hit the bars. By midnight he was back in the truck, driving a loop of closed schools, looking for broken glass, a pryable door. The city boarded windows, put up chain-link fences. But boards didn’t stop anyone. But scrappers would take the fences too, cut the posts off at the dirt.
Inside an elementary school Kelly dragged a makeshift sled of locker doors down the front stairs, busting the concrete with the bounce of the weight. Outside the night air was cool, the sound of the season’s last crickets louder than anything else, the school surrounded by pasture, grass overtaking the long absence of nearby houses. Kelly had parked his truck within the school’s courtyard, the most convenient cover, but if anyone else came while he was inside, they might take the scrap out of the truck instead of heading in. They might take the truck.
The men came for him in the darkest hour of night. A gloom of moonlight fell through the tall windows of the second-floor gymnasium, where Kelly piled coils of insulated wire pulled from the circuit breaker, the conduits within. He thought he’d been listening but by the time he heard their footsteps coming they were in the vast room with him, rushing out of the shadowed hallways. He turned his headlamp fast, caught white eyes and white teeth in its light as the first shape struck him, knocked him to the ground. Fists bruised his face and forearms and when he was almost stilled the man’s hungry hands pushed into Kelly’s pockets, looking for his wallet, keys, phone. Kelly brought up a knee, cracked some breathing room from the man’s ribs, rolled him over and off.
The lamp slipped from Kelly’s forehead, its beam falling uselessly diffuse across the gym floor. Before he had his feet the other was coming fast and Kelly reached out blindly for the man’s head, catching the hood of his sweatshirt. He spun, dropped to his knees, turned the fabric around the man’s throat, bunched and twisted, and the man cried out, kicked, and tried to pull out of his shirt. Kelly lifted the man to his feet, tightening his grip, reeling him in. Robbers in the night. He wouldn’t have to hurt them much more. These weren’t the actions of brave men. Kelly was a thief too but he told himself he only stole what no one wanted. What he could tell himself hurt no one. A hierarchy of opportunity and morality.
The first man stood too, a slimness of air between him and Kelly and the second man. The darkness massed in the high room, everything sure reduced to touch and smell and sound, to echo, to the fear expanding inside everything you couldn’t sense.
I’ll let him go, said Kelly. But if you come back at me I don’t know what I’ll do.
Neither man spoke but the man caught in Kelly’s arms stopped his struggling. Kelly released the man, watched him flee in the same direction as the other. He crouched into the silence of the room, found his tools. First the hammer, then the headlamp. He moved the beam of light across the gymnasium but the men with white eyes and white teeth stayed gone. He couldn’t catch his breath and bruises lifted from his skin but otherwise he could pretend the men had never existed. Once he had been stronger than he was but had he ever heard his heart thudding so loudly. He shut off the lamp, sat down on the floor among the wiring he’d pulled from the wall. He waited, listened. He moved to the windows, watched the courtyard, saw his truck untouched. Still no sound from below but there were exits without doors, windows without glass. You could walk through the broken world like a wraith. As Kelly waited the night spoke to him, crickets again, wind and far-off traffic and what he swore were voices, speaking somewhere at the limits of sense. At such great distances it was impossible to understand the words the voices said, what they intended, whether these were the voices of bad men, whether the invisible evil all men carried was something they were born into or something they chose.
THE GIRL WITH THE LIMP wanted to see a hockey game but Kelly didn’t think he had the cash. He asked her when her birthday was, calculated the di
stance. He wasn’t confident making the promise but maybe the question was enough to suggest his hopeful thinking. There was the arena by the river where the hockey team played and all around there were banners above the street proclaiming the team’s championships, redubbing the city Hockeytown, and on game day he offered to take her to a bar nearby.
It wasn’t what she wanted but close enough would work to start. When he picked her up outside her apartment she wore a red-and-white jersey over skintight jeans and in the car he admired the way the jersey’s shapelessness draped her form, worked by suggestion. You couldn’t tell she limped when she was sitting down, standing still. There wasn’t anything wrong with the shape of her muscles, only their function.
At the bar, she said what was wrong with her was going to get worse and in its progression she had lost her fear of everything else. Her limp didn’t keep her from getting places, didn’t affect the quality of her walk, just its character. She told him she couldn’t hurry anywhere and he didn’t argue. He liked where they were starting and what it required. There were other places they might end up but he thought it might take something dramatic to get him there.
She worked as an emergency dispatcher but he hadn’t known the first night, hadn’t asked, had only learned her name beyond the point of further questions. Jackie. When she revealed her profession she said she’d just wanted a job, hadn’t meant to get so close to the unfolding tragedy. She laughed before he knew he was supposed to. It was a cynical view, and sure, she said, she never saw the endings of things. All she had was the prologue, the in medias res, the confusion amid the disaster.