Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  At intermission, he saw the group of boys before he saw Daniel emerge from their number, walking with the others in their blazers and khakis, shirts and ties. Coming up the stairs and then past, into the concourse, laughing and talking with his friends. Daniel inches taller, his face leaner, a teenager at last.

  Kelly knew he should let Daniel pass without acknowledging him but he didn’t think he could help calling out. He couldn’t leave her behind so he backed her away from the railing, pushed her out into the concourse where the boy would see them.

  When the boy passed Kelly said Daniel but the boy didn’t hear or if he heard he didn’t turn. And for a moment Kelly saw not the boy passing but the brother, saw how Daniel was growing to look like the brother even though they were not blood.

  The boys moved as a unit through the crowd, followed one another into breaches in the confusion, then clumped back up in open spaces. They were moving faster than Kelly could, loudly weighing options for food, souvenirs, talking about the game, the chances for the next period. They cheered for the home team, applied all their boyish arcana, the percentages and statistics and strongly held opinions gleaned from televisions and fathers.

  He thought he wanted something else from the boy but what. He couldn’t want thanks and hope to get it. He couldn’t want a relationship with the boy because those days were done. He had been brought into the boy’s life to do something for the boy that the boy couldn’t have done himself and now the deed was done. Now he only needed the boy to see him. He needed the boy to look up at him and see this new body, the spent man within, maybe changing again. But what he wanted to believe had changed him most was not what he had done in the low room but what he had done in the first basement, where he rescued the boy. That despite what happened next it was from the first the salvor he’d wanted to follow.

  What he wanted to ask was if the boy was at least safer than before. If safer was enough to be worth the cost.

  The boys moved forward faster, slipped away through the cracks in the movements of the crowd. When Kelly pushed at the crowd most of the crowd moved for him, gave the wheelchair room. Others balked, hesitated, looked too long at her, at him, their new bodies, her loose limbs, his logoed t-shirt tight, how the team’s wings and wheel stretched taut over his immense muscles. When he couldn’t maneuver the chair forward through the crush he picked her up into his arms, left the chair where it was. Her body was so soft, limp against his chest, she was lighter and he was stronger. She started to make some noise and this time there was no ambiguity whether she approved or didn’t approve.

  The boy, he said into her ear, her cheek beside his cheek. I have to see him.

  Daniel, he said. I want to see Daniel.

  He could pretend her sounds were no or yes, stop or go. He could pretend whatever he wanted. He stepped forward and the crowd parted. Someone asked if she was okay and he kept walking. He was attracting too much attention but what were his options. There would be a man or a woman who would retrieve the wheelchair and push it after them and he needed to find the boy before this person arrived to force him to play his part. The girl was mumbling into his ear, something repeated, a pattern of sounds, a prayer, a speaking in tongues. Other times he’d shushed her but here he wanted it, wanted it all, wanted her to fill his head with her sound so they might share its nonsense together.

  No matter how fast Kelly moved, he couldn’t find the boy again, couldn’t spy a single blue-blazered friend. He wanted to be winded, exhausted, but there wasn’t the slightest need to set her down. This was what this body was good for. He kept walking. People were yelling but he could barely hear them. The ringing in his ears was back again, loud as ever, and Daniel had not turned when Kelly said his name. And no matter how long Kelly looked he knew that had been the moment he’d lost the boy forever.

  Back home, Kelly lifted the girl’s cradled form, raising and lowering her as if baptizing her in a river of air, until she began to talk in her fastest speech, so she would give him all the noise she had left, all the sounds at once. That night he took her out into the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, carried her as far as he could. A block this first time. Then on another day two blocks. Then one day ten. The neighborhood they lived in had a name he couldn’t remember. He carried her around its streets, walked past her neighbors, said hello if they said it first but did not stop.

  Her neighbors were the people who had known her but with him she was going away, becoming someone else. Someone new, someone new as him.

  As he got stronger they went farther, past the bounds of her neighborhood, into the first circles of the zone. He knew there were men who carried their crippled children in triathlons and he thought he could outdo them all. He carried her past those abandoned houses, those shuttered buildings, all the shattered glass and bent steel, burnt wood and broken brick. The same few elements everywhere unresolved. They couldn’t walk at night, not because it was dangerous but because every week there were fewer working streetlights.

  The farther they walked the fewer people they saw but he didn’t think they walked to be alone. There were dogs in the street, birds overhead. The power lines were electrified but you couldn’t get the power down on the ground. The rare car went by filled with staring faces but there wasn’t any aggression left in him, wasn’t any fear. Fear required hope to live and he believed he’d put his last hope into the earth. One day the rest of the steel and concrete would collapse overtop it. Everywhere they went they went into the painful past. These places where people had lived. Inside some remainder unrecovered. Their old posters of extinct pop stars, assimilated brands. Old uniforms hanging in closets. He knew what men and women had written on the walls, all the countless forms of goodbye. He’d see a pickup truck pass with a bed full of twisted metal and know it was the future being sold, never merely the past carted away. Every address was a reminder how this pasture had been a home. There were good people living in the zone but he no longer hoped to see them. Seeing the possibility of goodness would make it harder to have done what he had done, to have become what he was. He had come to the zone to escape the past. Then he had discovered the past was all the zone was. The city watch had given him its colors but now he was quitting the team. He had done his grim service. He wanted only to be a spectator again.

  Now he thought he knew who he was. Not a name but a task. Not a name but an action. His capacity for distance grew. He carried her a half mile then a mile then five miles. He would carry her forever. She was the one he should have protected. He had promised. He would take her the length of the earth, he would never leave her behind, together they would keep moving until he was exhausted, until his muscles were stopped with salt, until his bones bent beneath their combined weight. Until neither of them could move. Until on their lips they tasted their last words. It would have to be far now. They would have to go so far that when they arrived at the center of the city they would be so exhausted they would not ever be able to make it back. When they arrived at their exhaustion he would kneel down upon the ground of the zone, cradle her in his arms, and press his lips against her ears. He would speak to make her believe he knew who she was. He would whisper her name.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are more sources that inspired and informed this novel than can possibly be named, but the following deserve special mention:

  Thank you to the anonymous photographer behind Detroiturbex.com, whose incredible images and historical research were crucial to the writing of this novel, and whose generous guidance during a final research trip to Detroit in September 2013 was both invaluable and unforgettable.

  Similarly, I might never have written Scrapper without Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s short documentary Dismantling Detroit, which appeared online at The New York Times on January 18, 2012. Somewhere in that five and a half minutes of footage was my first glimpse of Kelly, of the world he’d come to inhabit.

  I also owe direct debts to S
vetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, as translated by Keith Gessen; to Yasiin Bey, who subjected himself to the force-feeding techniques used at Guantánamo Bay for a striking video released by the human rights organization Reprieve; to the work of Lars Svendsen and Michael Ignatieff, particularly Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Fear; to the short film Old Glory by Will Eno and Shevaun Mizrahi; to the Detroit Metro Times article “Kick Out the Demons: Exorcism Detroit-Style” by Detroitblogger John; and to On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates, which—along with too few boxing lessons with Jodi Coolman and Quincy Russell at JAB Boxing Club in Marquette—helped shape the novel’s depiction of that sport.

  Thanks also to my wife, Jessica, whose constant support made this and every other book I’ve written possible; to Northern Michigan University, whose support for my research aided the completion of this novel; to my editors, Mark Doten and Rachel Kowal; and my agent, Kirby Kim; to my copyeditor, Susan Bradanini Betz; to my first readers Jamie Iredell, Amber Sparks, Roy Kesey, and J.A. Tyler; and to Kyle Minor, who—during a meal we shared in Detroit several years ago—asked me when I was going to write a book about my home state.

  This novel is my answer.