by Matt Bell
No more, Kelly said. You’ve taken what I have for you to take.
Kelly turned. The man with the gun raised the weapon. Kelly wasn’t confused about whether or not the pistol was loaded but he didn’t think the man would fire it. The bank parking lot wasn’t the center of the zone. There were rules here, an expectation of law, punishment. They stood a couple blocks outside the most desperate geography, and maybe distance meant everything. It was dark and snowing but there were cars driving by on the avenue. Someone would witness whatever happened next unless the man timed it right. The police would come. Kelly had to believe this. The girl with the limp would send them, they would come by her voice.
Kelly laughed and the man with the gun started. Kelly remembered the school gymnasium, other incidents in other cities. How once the fight began there might be no stopping him. He took a step forward. The mugger’s face swapped expressions. At closer range Kelly could see the details were shaking.
Kelly said, You’re what I knew you would be.
The mugger spoke, his voice shifting. What are you talking about.
Kelly said, I would rather you were anyone else. Anyone different.
A surprise, said Kelly. That’s what I wish you were.
I’m not giving you my truck, he said. My truck is my life.
Kelly took another step forward and whatever sometimes happened to his heart happened again. All his blood gushing around and he could track every singing pint. Kelly’s face dropped its blankness for another expression, something sporting. He told himself it wasn’t the color of the man that made him feel this way. There were other factors. Dress and speech and something else, something learned. Greater than, less than. The beliefs of the town named like poison.
They were both sweating, breathing hard through the waiting.
Get the fuck out of here, Kelly said, with such force he thought the man with the gun would run. Instead the mugger slowly lowered the weapon, put it back into his pocket. He zipped his jacket, pulled the hood up, put it back down. It was a cold night but not that cold. Kelly waited next to the truck, fingers clenched around the keys, the metal carving his palms. He waited in the falling snow until the man with the gun had walked two blocks, three blocks, then around a corner. The pounding in Kelly’s chest continued, a fist trying to escape its slatted cage. He thought he wanted the feeling to last.
At the bar that night a man called another woman a cunt and the girl with the limp was there to tap the man on the shoulder, to register her complaint. She didn’t mind cursing but she wouldn’t put up with other kinds of comments, certain kinds of objectification. Her rude body had made her an object of curiosity and she had no tolerance for unwelcome comment. What was happening to her was vulgar but it was also hers.
To the man, she said, You can say what you want but don’t say it around me.
When the man called her a cunt too, then Kelly took her by the arm and dragged her from the room, leaving their drinks unfinished, their bar tab unpaid. Some people loved to talk and talk. Kelly didn’t default to the right words but if he talked slow enough he might say fewer of the wrong ones. On the way back to her place he tried to grope after the handle of the day’s story, the place to open it up, let it out. He was embarrassed by his victimhood. He knew he was angry but he was having trouble feeling more than some numb portion of the rage. He could see the man with the gun if he let his eyes close. She caught him blinking too much and asked if he was okay. He shifted his expression into a smile, made small talk about the new job he hated. The worst part about keeping a secret was anything going wrong seemed to be about the secret. But so little revolved around his gravity, held an orbit. The case was his secret, the mugger too. The latest in a long line of things he had done, would do, had had done to him. The confusion of past and present and future. He didn’t have to share. This was their agreement. They believed there was a certain kindness to keeping yourself to yourself.
He hadn’t wanted to reveal his nature in front of her but after she was asleep in her own bed he left the apartment, drove back. He liked the bar and the bartender and wouldn’t do anything within those windowless walls but that didn’t mean he couldn’t wait in the parking lot, huffing steam into the frozen air. When the breather of the insult stepped out toward his car, then Kelly was there—or else not Kelly but the scrapper. The action did not require a weapon. The object of the lesson was instruction and if instruction required infliction it was something he could add with his hands. The language of the bully, put to better uses: the sharp inhales and exhales, the straining lungs following a landed punch, a right hook he’d been missing throwing, the way skull and knuckles split the bruises. How long since he’d last felt this way. The wordless voice of the fistfight, the meaty thudding of flesh on flesh, how even if Kelly had to be hurt too he would never cry out, would keep punching and kicking and dragging the other down into the gravel and the broken concrete and the dust and the dirt.
THE FIRST BOY you watched only for short spans, walking twenty paces behind him on the street along the path from school to home, from three thirty to almost four in the afternoon. A pattern so obvious you waited every day for someone else to notice. You thought you craved the voice of a teacher, a school aide, a concerned parent, the bleep-bleep of a querying siren and the red-and-blue splash of lights. The tight stretch of action, the gathered potential, the desired flush of shame, suspicion: it walked with you, it walked you down the street after the boy.
The more you watched the more visible you became. Every hour spent walking behind the child was another chance someone might notice. A police officer, a neighbor. A passerby, a bystander. But the child himself would be the first to see you for who you were, although you didn’t imagine this possibility at first. This was another thing you learned only in the low rooms, each a new space carefully chosen, prepared, soundproofed, and locked, one room for one boy. On the surface, each face required you to separate one expression from another, from the endless variety of human emotion, but faces were different in private than in public. Faces were different in the dark.
You left clumsiness behind in the first few takings. There was a lesson in the early mistakes, prompting the cultivation of a care you had never before exhibited. You hid the taking from yourself but you couldn’t hide the preparation. The soundproofing and sequester. You liked the houses with names on them the best: names beside doorways, on mailboxes, anywhere. Scrawled into the back of closets.
You became more complex with every taking. In the past you had acted without premeditation but now all your life was premeditated. The difference between the now thought and the then thought: you hadn’t known the monochrome of your movements until the first watching busted the seams of the world, filling it with color, movement, a low hum becoming a buzz between the ears. This ringing was what it meant to be a person. You hadn’t known, hadn’t ever imagined, the dim world could be made so loudly beautiful merely by having someone to watch, to make watch you back.
HE HADN’T HIT THE HEAVY bag in ten years but after the fight in the parking lot he went looking for a gym, somewhere to train. The morning after his first workout he woke up unable to straighten his arms but before work he went back for more, tried to put the same soreness in his legs. It took a long time to lodge the feeling where he wanted it, so close to the bones. His body was strong from work but he wanted it to be stronger. He winced around the apartment, made breakfast hunched over with his arms curled up near his chest. He contorted his body in the shower, found an angle to brush his teeth where the burning in his biceps went away. Dressing became a supreme act of will. He’d done too much but he wanted to do more. The bench press, the lat pulldown, the curls and tricep extensions, these were the beginning, what he remembered without effort, what he could do alone without needing to ask for a spot.
He was the strongest he’d ever been but he wanted to find his limits. He lifted in the mornings and after he lifted he
worked, swung the sledge and worked the shovel, drove busted drywall downstairs in wheelbarrows. When he went to bed he suffered through the angry stress of repetition, the lactic stretch of a body growing out of strained muscles, and after the first week he switched gyms, found somewhere cheaper, deeper in the zone, where he wasn’t wanted. The manager said he was welcome to try but he wouldn’t last. He referred Kelly back to the gym he had left but Kelly shook his head. He wanted to be held apart. He told himself the will to fight wasn’t about the color of a man but the otherness and he didn’t know how this was different, only that to him it was. He wouldn’t have said these things aloud, would have denied them if accused. The case notes had started calling for a man like the mugger and this place allowed him to fight such men. To align his aggression with the image in his mind.
The other boxers’ tattoos were different than the tattoos he’d known. He didn’t know the subtleties of their speech, the nuanced syntax of their slang. He couldn’t always beat the other men—in the beginning, he never could—but he could fight against their difference, could throw himself against what he told himself he was not. In the past, sparring had focused his instincts, forced him to act differently than in bar parking lots. Beyond the greater strength and training of his opponents he was also at a forgotten disadvantage, deprived of many of his oldest tactics, the wrestler’s grips and tricks he could use in the gravel and the dirt but not here, between the yellow lights and the cracking mats covering the floor. Out in the world he had counted on the other person having more to lose than he did or at least believe he did. In the ring there were safeguards in the way of total loss and so his pretense of fearlessness had less strength.
These men stood naked to the waist in their padded helmets and padded gloves and they put those gloves together and they spoke their prayers aloud, gave the familiar words new inflections. He’d grown up among people who mumbled their professions of faith, who sang hymns as if a monotone made the sweetest music. These men craved bravery and victory, forgiveness and salvation. They said that to perfect what you were given was to become mighty in your gift. They said a great fighter was a man who loved the body God had made, who loved it with bench presses and curls and squat thrusts and leg presses and the impact of fist on flesh.
The men at the gym had their methods but in the zone he had built his body in another way. It was not a temple. Or if it was then it was one more beautiful for being ruined. His uneven heart, an ulcerous stomach. Manual labor had set predictable pops and creaks into his joints, the telling music of early onset arthritis. He had forgotten the origins of most of his scars but he knew they spoke to other men, suggested a certain hardness. Or else bad luck, some idiocy in the way of his quitting.
Trainers arranged bouts by weight class but after the soreness receded Kelly signed up to spar with whoever would agree. He didn’t have the right shoes but you could buy shoes. He wrapped his hands and put in a mouthguard. He’d had to buy equipment but he had the reward money, the promise of more paychecks. He didn’t want all this protection but this was the price of arranged fighting.
He put his hands on men his own size but he preferred heavier fighters, the density of their bodies bowing below his blows, each jab like punching a statue made of meat. When their fists connected with his skull he heard memories realigning into new spaces. The shattering of old logic, his heartbeat rising as the speed of thought slowed, consciousness fading not in a subtle turndown but in a series of pulses, a drop in ability ten or twenty or thirty percent at a time.
They weren’t supposed to go this far but their honor system said it was up to him to stop the sparring, to wave off the bigger and stronger man. He never gave up, never gave in. There could be blood in his eyes or in his mouth and then he believed he heard it sloshing between his ringing ears, in the low cavities of the body. When he couldn’t breathe he spit out his mouthguard to clear his airway, gestured with his gloves that he was coming back for more.
In the case notes the story got more determined as time passed but maybe it remained a fiction. His own past often faded and cracked open, let in white space between fragments of sensible time. If he found he knew too much he stopped trusting what he thought he knew. Some of the pages of the notebook contained drawings, smeared sketches. Some drawings were of the house where he’d found the boy, its doorways and staircases, its blue siding and peaked roof. When Kelly next returned to the notebook he found several sketches of a suspect. He didn’t know what the kidnapper looked like and the boy remembered only the mask watching, the rough handling of gloved hands, the red rain slicker—Kelly didn’t necessarily remember drawing the sketches but there they were, rendered with his amateurish pen. The faces in the sketches wouldn’t have moved anyone else but they moved him: the sketches were of the mugger or else, sometimes, the brother, who Kelly had not met, who the boy would no longer speak of, who he would no longer blame for the bruises Kelly spotted pressed into his upper arms.
Kelly thought the tragedy of love wasn’t that we weren’t loved but that we weren’t loved by the people we’d been given. The problem with seeking revenge was that if he couldn’t find the one he was seeking, then who might get hurt instead.
One night, Kelly parked the truck down the street from the green house, the only lit rooms for blocks. In the darkness it would be harder to see out the windows than to see in, and from the far edge of the yard he watched the mother setting the table for a dinner for three. The mother’s car was in the driveway but the brother’s was gone and Kelly wondered who she was expecting, the older son or the husband. When no one else came he watched from the dark as she called the boy in to dinner, as the boy sat down in the bright room and ate his food silently, eyes cast to the task. The mother’s mouth moved but what was she saying. If she was asking questions the boy didn’t answer.
Kelly flexed his muscles, hopped from foot to foot to keep warm in the black and lightless air. He was starting to get his step back, remembering how to keep his torso and his head in a constant bob, an unpredictable weave. The painter with the big hands had taught him to fight by never taking the same step twice but Kelly thought a better tactic was to broadcast his every intention and still come out ahead. For now he was making a case. He was glad the boy came to visit. He thought no matter how long he spent with the boy he would never want to hurt him. He was aware of what lurked within and he had made moves to cordon that action from thought, present want. He would stretch his life beyond the mistakes of his past, and for this the boy was both the test and the answer.
W
The gym posted its rules on every wall. There was a maximum number of times you were allowed to spar in a week but no one kept close count. Most of the others sparred at sixty or eighty percent of full speed but if they held back against him he surged into the space of their hesitance. His head snapped back under jab after jab; in the locker-room mirror, his belly and ribs looked punched in, bruises sprawled over scrawny skin. He wasn’t eating again or when he ate he didn’t eat right. He was stronger than he looked but he wasn’t strong enough. His was a musculature fit for climbing the exposed structures of the zone, for swinging the sledge and dragging scrap. The others appeared molded for boxing alone, for punching into and through a man. Every opponent all veins and teeth, hungry eyes bursting from tight skin, angry under the brow of a padded helmet. They had taken the given and built the desired. He had made what body was necessary for his work and now he sought to bring it to a new task.
He didn’t want a trainer, couldn’t pay, wouldn’t ask. He trained by fighting. By getting hurt. Education by knockdown. Gloved fists pummeled his stomach but the next time a boxer came for Kelly he’d find the same tactics denied. Experience had made him who he was. If he could get hurt he could get better. A man raised his tattooed forearms over his face and Kelly battered his defenses until the man cried out. Kelly liked the way winning was temporary. You earned it but it didn’t last. He liked how after he showed his
opponent he would give no quarter, then the man spit and swore and came at him senseless, his entire body open to the blow.
When Kelly got his insurance he went to the doctor but he didn’t tell the girl with the limp he went. The doctor measured his blood pressure, listened to the thumping chambers of his heart, counseled him to avoid strenuous activity. He laughed and told the doctor what he did for a living. The doctor lifted his chin, probed around his neck and jaw, put a light to his eyes and ears and nose and throat. His fingers and hands were blacked from work and his body was bruised as rotten meat and the doctor suggested nothing he didn’t believe he could be paid for. Kelly had insurance but the doctor said mostly it would only promise that if he died he would die in a bed.
Now Kelly walked the zone like a squared spiral, moving outward from his starting point in a series of right turns, every rotation allowing another block’s length to stretch the circle. He bought graph paper, plotted each block of buildings, their various modes of inhabitation. He got to know every boarded house, every chain-link fence. He found members of the city watch in the zone and he signaled to them, offered to buy them coffee. Each questioning began with the necessary small talk, family, children, church, work. The endless sameness of the weather. Eventually they invoked the holiness of their task: if the police wouldn’t protect their communities they would protect the city themselves.
Whenever Kelly encountered the volunteer built like a linebacker again, the linebacker pulled Kelly into a headlock or else faked a jab to his stomach. Then to resist punching back. To resist locking his arms around the slab of the man’s belly and lifting, trying to put him on the ground. Later the linebacker answered Kelly’s questions over coffee, handling his crude maps, adding landmarks Kelly would never have known. The locations of legendary shootings, rapes, hate crimes. The names of families long extinct or fled.
What exactly are you doing here, the linebacker asked, and Kelly shrugged.