Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  But what was a locked door but an admittance there was something worth hiding.

  You counted your breaths. You lost count, counted again. The impossibility of knowing how much time passed inside a clockless room.

  Then the door bucking in its frame. The dampened sound of a body thrown against wood. The return of motion to the air.

  Then the door bucking again.

  The door would not hold. Nothing in the wasted house would hold against such men. The door opened.

  The heatless sunlight from the hallway windows flooding the room.

  The silhouettes of the men, pausing only momentarily in the doorway.

  You turned on the flashlight, caught white eyes and white teeth rushing into its beam of light and even though there were two men, didn’t you think they were him? The one you had been waiting for, ever since he took the last boy. Your intruder. Didn’t you think he’d somehow split into two men, each with slightly different reasons to want your blood?

  Your intruder remained in the other city, the city you left, the city where all the gone boys were buried, but where it was no longer safe for you. What happened to you next had nothing to do with him or the last boy or anything else you’d done.

  This was only the terrible randomness of the world.

  You lifted the chair as the men with white eyes and white teeth charged, swung it once before it was taken away. They started in with their fists, a hammer. The men held you to the ground, opened your pockets, found your wallet, pulled your coat over your head. There was blood on the floor and when was the last time you’d seen your blood. Maybe never but there it was. How you’d assumed what was inside you was so different than what was inside everyone else. But you’d seen this mess before, inside the gone boys. How your last conscious thought was to renew your belief that you were at the center of a story—but then here was your premature ending—and outside your soundproof tomb the story continued without anyone even once having spoken your name.

  9

  BY THE NEW YEAR, ONLY one fighter stood out from the undistinguished rest and Kelly thought of him as the contender.

  The others named the contender Bringer, a name that was an action, fit for cultivation into legend, this man a myth in the making, forged before the deed, taller than Kelly by six inches, every pound of his flesh corded and bulged even under a sweat suit, his skin covered in tattoos scribed in a script Kelly could never read, his footwork quick and sure and his reach like something out of prehistory, made for bringing down the megafauna. It was only the contender that Kelly avoided, by never approaching him in the locker room, by ceding weights and machines at his advance, giving up the speed bag, the heavy bag, the sparring ring itself. Kelly thought the contender was the only boxer in the gym who would escape the zone, who might one day earn his way out of the city by the strength of his blows, the steel of his skin, his endless will.

  The contender’s trainer was younger and taut too, different than the other trainers, the aging men dressed in tracksuits, bellies barely covered, questionable primes long past. The contender paid no attention to Kelly but Kelly saw the trainer watching whenever he sparred on the mats at the center of the gym. Kelly’s punches would send another man reeling and in the gap the trainer would appear, standing beside the mats, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes bright and scanning with the kind of gaze that lit you up to yourself.

  Kelly, almost half past thirty and without an honest future, in this world or any other, but still strong, angry, willing. The human body as perfectible tool. The other men thought Kelly was without fear but in the trainer’s eyes Kelly saw a more honest reflection, how he was almost nothing but afraid, afraid in every straining muscle fiber, every sliver of bone, every gush of blood, bile, marrow. The fear sweat from his body, stained his clothes, broke his skin with every blister and bruise. What the trainer saw would make him want something from Kelly and one day the trainer would ask. And when the day came Kelly would not deny him. It was the man who was most afraid who needed to put his fear into someone else. There had been so few people who had seen Kelly for who he was and now when he met one he wished only to say yes.

  His activities began to jam against one another, a tectonics of overlap and damage. At the gym, he lifted heavier weights, lifted to forget, heaved the loaded bars over his shoulders again and again, probed the limits of his endurance. He was getting stronger faster than ever before and he took his new strength into the ring with him. When he sparred the men he fought were like ancient golems brought to new life by his want for opposition, their muscles carved of rock, their fists hard as the oldest earth. They knocked yesterday’s booze out of his flesh and the breath from his chest and if he found he couldn’t win he thought he’d at least bloody a lip, bruise an eye.

  The world could destroy him but first he would become a destroyer too.

  Now he watched the contender sparring, the contender’s trainer watching too. If any of the others were boxers going anywhere he couldn’t tell. He didn’t know how to measure a man’s quality except to throw himself against the man. A more personal metrics. The others had names but Kelly wouldn’t use them, kept to guy or sport or champ. They called each other words he wouldn’t repeat. He wasn’t ignorant and as they exchanged punches he hoped they knew. He respected their difference, wanted to see it preserved. There was no equal ground anywhere but the ring was close. The body the most personal tool, its absolute lack of any privilege you didn’t make yourself. Fists like meat mallets thudded against his skin and he felt the muscles beneath wearing thinner, he no longer had any fat on him so it was like their fists were striking his bones. He went down on one knee and the other man didn’t stop swinging because another time Kelly hadn’t either. There was a frustration in the others at his insistence on standing again, asking for more. They weren’t supposed to be going this hard but Kelly always forced the blow.

  At work he carried gunmetal gray file cabinets to stairwells on his broadening shoulders and dropped them down two or three or five stories, let them crash off banisters all the way to the ground, where they’d wait in the pluming dust to be dragged out across the ice. He worked with other men but they had their own tasks and he barely saw them, acknowledged them less. Every possible friendship had ended before it began. The other men just pale shades of the better men he’d known at other jobsites, separated from him by a veil of disinterest, their comradery living in a world he could see but not touch.

  In the absence of time and charity his meals with the girl with the limp reverted to meat and potatoes, everything starch and protein. Winter vegetables, carrots and beets, frozen foods. Cans of beans and cans of soup. They let the hockey games play through dinner so often they only spoke during the commercials, their voices loud over the volume of Budweiser, Labatt Blue, Molson Ice. One night she looked surprised as she reached out to touch his beard, his temples—he was going gray but you couldn’t tell until he got a haircut. He had stopped buying fresh food, stopped replacing his clothes. He was getting ready to leave again but he wasn’t leaving her, he didn’t think. He had started to notice how much more space he was taking up on the couch, the way his neck stretched the collars of his t-shirts, his thighs pulling his jeans tight into his crotch whenever he sat down. He knew how to throw a powerful punch without breaking his own wrist but he couldn’t stop his skin from splitting across the knuckles. She picked up his hands and frowned at the damage she found.

  Is this from the gym? she asked. Don’t you wear gloves?

  He said, Gloves and helmet. Mouthguard. Hand wraps and taped ankles.

  He said, The gloves protect the other person. Not the striker but the one struck. Every punch you throw opens you up. You have to be willing to hurt yourself.

  Be careful, she said. You’re not young anymore. We’re not young together.

  She said, What will happen to me could happen any day and I can’t do anyth
ing to stop it. But this is something you’re choosing.

  She wasn’t wrong. He had begun wearing the watch’s orange jersey underneath his other clothes, its mesh scratchy against his skin, under flannel or sweater or sweatshirt. He hadn’t expected there to be so much power in the bright fabric but its intention clung to its flesh, authorized his vigilance. Now the jersey stunk no matter how he washed it, its material discolored under the armpits and around the neckline. He rinsed it every night in the sink but too often he put it back on before it was fully dry, wrapping himself in the smell of laundry soap, unscrubbed sweat.

  He hid the jersey from the girl, felt more naked than ever when he removed it in the secretive dark of the bedroom. She was worried enough, already had her reasons. There was a space growing between them, the case shortening his days and nights, constraining the chances for him to be with her, the attention she received. He thought he would make it up to her soon, ask her to move in or to move to a new place together, somewhere they’d have no previous history. A new beginning. He would ask her soon but not until he closed the case. He wanted to be with her but he didn’t want the case to come along.

  How to protect yourself from the blow you can’t see coming. This was what the other boxers talked about, beside the mats, in the locker room, while lifting heavier quantities of dull-black weights over their heads, straining thighs and calves and backs and shoulders. Chalk everywhere, on their hands and arms, the floor and the benches, and always the same topic: how to protect yourself from the invisible blow. Because it was the blow you couldn’t see coming that knocked you out. If you stared into every punch you could never be put down. The illusion of control. Self-determination in battle. Kelly didn’t believe in anything else he’d once believed in but he thought he might believe in this. To stop escaping what was coming. The recognition of the inevitable, the way a boxer’s knees might be buckling before the blow landed, the eyes rolling back, the mouth slacking open to utter some last dumb sound.

  In the morning the trainer approached Kelly in the locker room to pitch the fight, Bringer’s first. The trainer said he would train them both, with his assistant serving as Kelly’s corner man. There was no conflict of interest because no one—not the contender, not the trainers, perhaps not even Kelly—actually expected or wanted Kelly to win.

  I think you’re wrong, Kelly said. I could beat him.

  No, the trainer said. But I want you to think so. I’m betting on you believing.

  Kelly shook the trainer’s hand, saw how the trainer knew the truest shape of his heart. His ability to keep fighting even after he’d been hurt. How even if he knew he would be hurt badly it didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight back, wouldn’t push against every fist in the world. Always he had left behind what he’d done by giving up the portion of himself it lived within. With enough versions of himself he might compartmentalize anything. Diminishment could be a path to action and if Bringer did nothing else he might diminish what little resistance remained.

  The boy wakes up in the middle of the night. A nightmare. He’s back in the blue house, back in the basement. But this time it’s not the man in the red slicker in the chair. This time it’s the brother.

  The boy’s ankles are handcuffed to the bed. He can move but he can’t leave.

  He is naked but there is a blanket covering him. His body exposed but hidden.

  He waits quietly. This is the brother. He is not in danger.

  But then the brother says, Watch me.

  The brother says, Watch this.

  He says, Boy, just watch, and then the boy watches. The brother walks away from the bed, into the dark corners of the room. He’s looking for something but the boy can’t see what.

  But I can. He’s donning the red slicker, slipping inside it one arm at a time.

  When the brother comes back into the light the boy starts to scream.

  And then whose dreams are these.

  The man in the red slicker—is he a person or an action? An action that until I found the boy I had never been able to name?

  Who do I see when I picture the kidnapper?

  Anyone I can put inside a red slicker.

  W

  Once upon a time the brother claimed a calendar’s worth of extracurriculars but I cannot find the evidence. If the brother was on the basketball team, then there would be practices, games, public places to surveil from within a crowd. But if these events existed they were without schedule or record.

  Despite these mysteries, the brother is not impossible to track and so I track him.

  I follow the brother’s brown car, memorize its license plate. The same model as the man’s in the red slicker, an accidental overlap with dire consequences. The boy’s false schedule buys him freedom behind the wheel, access to all the city from school’s end to curfew, eleven on the weekdays, midnight on Saturday. The brother’s friends are not indistinguishable but at this distance I know them only by their grossest types: there is the fat one and the tall one and the thin one, each more similar than distinct. Always the brother drives, the others fighting for shotgun and the losers crowding into the backseat.

  Together they visit certain houses in the zone. The brother stays in the car while the fat one goes inside. I hang back but afterward I roll by the houses again, scan the metal screens over the windows. The game the brother’s playing isn’t basketball but I think I know the rules.

  The brother and the brother’s friends drive the neighborhood closest to their school, stop to pick up girls from front porches. They smoke in the car, keep the windows rolled up for blocks before letting the world back in. I think I can hear their laughter but I know I’m not close enough. I never had these kinds of friends but I was once young and dumb too, know the story, know these girls with bad taste.

  I watch while the brother and these others get high in his car, get high in lots between abandoned houses, then high in the houses. At first I maintain my distance, stay down the block in the truck. The brother knows my face but the brother never sees me. The obliviousness of youth is all the cover I need. I leave the truck behind, walk into the small trees circling the house the boy and the friends and the girls have found, approach it from the back. I can’t get close enough to look through the windowless walls but I can hear the sounds of laughter from the first floor, then the brother’s voice upstairs, then the sounds of him with one of the girls. A girl, yes, but a girl is not adequate cover. Not proof of anything. There had been girls for me too. There is a girl now and I know better than to believe it means the past is ended.

  The brother going to school but not staying all day. The brother cutting out early, leaving at lunch and not coming back. Or else not going at all.

  The brother sitting in the fast-food restaurant where the fat friend works, hanging out in the backmost booth. Not buying anything. Sitting there drinking a soda. Thumbs on his cell. Bored but nowhere to go.

  The brother at the mother’s house, turning off the light in the boy’s bedroom.

  The brother at the father’s apartment, where they have to share the second bedroom.

  The brother in the dark with the boy. The brother hurting the boy. Because the boy is in the room. Because the easiest victim is the one at hand.

  Before he was taken from me I let the brother bring the boy to my apartment. The brother driving him there even though the brother skipped school. A certain amount of normalcy necessary to retain access to the mother and the father, their separate homes.

  There were ninety minutes between the end of school and when I arrived home from work and some days the boy was there, let in with his own key, and some days he was not.

  On the days the brother didn’t bring the boy, where did the boy go?

  The boy told me the brother took him home but now I know this wasn’t true.

  I have to be waiting outside the boy’s school if I want to follow so I leave work ear
ly. It’s easier if I don’t ask, and the jobsite is big enough I can just wander off. I’m there on the street when the brother pulls up in the brown car. It’s like watching a reenactment, every time.

  The brown car pulls up. The boy gets into the car. The car takes the boy away. And if the destination is harm for the boy, does it matter who’s driving?

  What I want to ask: Is he your brother or isn’t he?

  What I want to hear: He is and he isn’t.

  I would say, I would never want to hurt anyone you loved.

  He is and he isn’t.

  But I would hurt anyone who hurt you.

  He has but what if someone hurt him first. What if he could learn to stop, like you learned.

  But I didn’t learn. But look what it cost when I failed.

  The night of the brother’s birthday party, I am there too, watching from the evening gloom through the windows of the green house, its lonely outpost upon this neighborless block. Inside the house, the boy attends the brother’s birthday dinner, father and mother and sons reunited again. Chocolate cake, presents, a video game and a pair of sneakers. The celebration ends, the father leaves. I was inside just the one time but I know which window is the boy’s. I shiver and shake and watch for him to appear in the glass. Much later I am sure the boy is asleep but still there is a nightlight burning somewhere in the room. He never told me he was afraid of the dark—a ward, perhaps, against what else he had to fear.

  The brother, eighteen at last—but despite his age you had to want to call him a man.

  The next week the brother moves out of the mother’s house and I watch him go. He wasn’t their real son and they’d never become close and what other options were there. The mother helps him carry his boxes to the car, hugs him goodbye. At first I don’t know where the brother will go but it isn’t hard to tail him to his new place, an apartment with the fat friend in a worse part of town. I sit in the parking lot and watch his windows, try to imagine a scenario where this is how the case ends. Because if the brother is out of the boy’s life forever, then maybe there is nothing else to do.