The Fighter Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Farris Smith

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover photograph © Bruce J. West

  Author photograph by Luisa Porter

  Cover © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: March 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-43233-7

  E3-20170822-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Round One 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Round Two 12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Round Three 22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Farris Smith

  Discover More Michael Farris Smith

  For my family

  To be alive at all is to have scars.

  —John Steinbeck

  When he was two years old the boy was dropped off at the donation door at the Salvation Army secondhand store in Tunica wearing nothing but a sagging diaper. A Planet of the Apes backpack stuffed with more diapers and some shirts and mismatched socks and little green army men was dropped on the ground next to him. Then a hungover woman banged a scabbed fist on the metal door and a hungover man blew the car horn and she ran around and got in as the child watched with a docile expression. Out of the car window the man called out some sort of farewell to the child that was lost in the offbeat chug of the engine and then the foulrunning Cadillac rattled out of the gravel parking lot, leaving the child in the dustcloud of abandonment.

  The door opened and two women in matching red Salvation Army t-shirts stared down at the boy. Then they looked into the parking lot at the still lingering cloud. Out into a gray morning sky. They glanced at each other. And then one said I guess we’re gonna have to hang a sign next to the one that says no mattresses that says no younguns. The other woman lifted the boy and held him up beneath his arms as if to make certain he was made of actual flesh and bone. When she was satisfied she hugged the child close and rubbed her hand across the back of his head and she said I pity those who have to live behind me in this weary and heartless world.

  The police were called and while they waited the women washed the boy in the bathroom sink with paper towels and hand soap. Filthy feet and filthy hands and the diaper was two changes past due. After they had wiped him clean and filled the trash can with dirty paper towels the boy stood naked and fresh on the smooth concrete floor of the bathroom and they admired his innocence and beauty. He was then dressed in a new diaper and a Spider-Man shirt taken from a rack in the kids’ section. The boy did not cry and did not talk but instead sat satisfied between the women on a tweed sofa marked fifteen dollars as if he had already decided that this was his new home and he was better off.

  He was better off but this was the beginning of a childhood spent in the company of strangers. The next ten years saw him move from one Delta town to the next. Four foster homes and two group homes. Five different schools. A handful of caseworkers. Teachers whose names he could not remember and then stopped trying to remember because he knew he would not be in their classrooms for long. The steady and certain build of restlessness and anxiety in this child who was certain neither where he had come from nor where he was going.

  When he was twelve years old the assistant director of the group home told him to gather his things. Again. He sat on the bench seat of a white van with the home logo on the side and he watched the fields of soybeans and cornstalks with sullen eyes as he was driven from the sleepy, bricked street town of Greenwood to his fifth foster home. Moving northwest and closer to the great river, to the fringes of Clarksdale, the once bustling Delta hub of trade and commerce that now wore the familiar faded expression of days gone by. His eyes changed when the van pulled into the dirt driveway that led to a two-story home. A white antebellum with a porch stretching across the front on the bottom and top floors. Flaking paint on the sun side and vines hanging in baskets along the porch with their twisted and green trails swaying in the wind. A woman sat in a rocker and she rose to meet them. She wore work gloves and she pulled them off and tossed them on the ground as she approached the van as if readying herself for whatever may be climbing out.

  She took him to his upstairs room and opened the dresser drawers to show him where he could put his things and he told her there was no use.

  I won’t be here long enough to mess up the covers on the bed.

  Sure you will, she answered.

  No I won’t, he said. A twelve-year-old certain of the workings of the world.

  Are you gonna run away?

  I don’t know. Are you?

  Because unless you run away this is where you live now.

  So you think.

  So I know, she said.

  You don’t know nothing, he said and he walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs and out into the backyard.

  She stood at the window and watched him between the slit in the curtains. He did not stop in the backyard but crossed it and walked out onto the dirt road that ran on and on between the rows of cotton. The sun high and a short shadow followed him. She did not chase. She stood in the window and watched until he was nearly out of sight and she was one step toward the door to run after him when he stopped. A tiny figure in the distance.

  He stopped and stayed in the same spot for several more minutes and she could not know that he was talking to himself. Telling himself I don’t wanna do this no more. I don’t know why I can’t have somebody. With the space between them she could not have noticed that he looked back at the big house and said that place right there don’t want me neither and that woman can’t catch me. I’m gonna take off running and she won’t never catch me. Won’t nobody. I don’t wanna do this shit no more. She could not have heard him or seen him with any detail but she waited. Only could see that he had stopped. She whispered a prayer without moving her lips as if even the slig
htest flutter would spook the boy and send him fleeing on furious and reckless feet. He stood still talking to himself and she stood still whispering a quiet and motionless prayer. And then from the distant sky a hawk flew toward the boy. It flew low and its wings were spread wide and when it reached the vicinity of the boy it swooped and seemed to hold there out in front of him. Begging the boy to admire its eloquence. Begging the boy to notice something other than himself and his troubles. Begging the boy to think of something other than running from that woman. The hawk rose and fell again and the boy saw it and his eyes followed the hawk as it turned long and graceful curves in the bluewhite sky. From the window Maryann spied the hawk and she shifted her eyes from sky to land, waiting to see what the boy would do. The breath she had been holding was let go when the hawk turned toward the house. And the boy followed.

  Round One

  1

  H​E PASSED THROUGH VICKSBURG AT MIDNIGHT, THE DULL lights of the nonstop convenience stores and fast food restaurants fading in the rearview mirror as he drove onto Highway 61 and made his way north and into the Delta. The great alluvial plain spanning for thousands of acres, centuries of flooding from the Mississippi River creating deposits of the most fertile soil in the world, soil that for generations had made many rich and many more poor. Hundreds of flat miles. Haunts of slaves and soldiers. A land of the forgotten covered by boundless skies.

  Between his legs a pint of Wild Turkey. Between his fingers a skinny, woodtip cigar. In the cupholder a gas station cup of coffee. On the passenger seat an open plastic bag with two dozen red pills that killed the pain. His eyes scattered and alive and his cigar hand tapping the steering wheel to the stiff metal beat from the radio and the thumpity thump of the uneven highway. Halfwired, halfdrunk, fully loaded. There were few other headlights and out on the empty highway he floated from his lane and into the other and back again as if the truck itself was bored with the night.

  On the seat next to the bag of pills was an open box of the woodtip cigars, a pile of shirts and jeans, the belt he had taken off as he hurried across the parking lot of the casino in Natchez a couple of hours before. Getting to the truck and opening the door, removing his belt and tossing it inside and shoving the envelope of cash into the glove box and driving away before anyone found the man he left lying facedown on the bathroom floor.

  The truck seat and floor were littered with shiny cartridges to a pistol he no longer owned and crumpled pawnshop receipts and a spiral notebook filled with dates and names and notes he had written to himself. By each name he had written friend or foe. By each address he had written safe or stay away. The pages were filled with fragments of directions and phone numbers and what he owed and who he owed it to and other notes he had written out of frustration or anger or despair, notes to remind him of which world he belonged to. Two pages were committed to Maryann and only Maryann, halfsentences about her deterioration and when he had last seen her. Tucked behind the pages for Maryann was the folded foreclosure notice and across the top of the notice were checkmarks to keep track of the days because the clock was ticking. He had looked at the notice before he drove out of the casino parking lot and he had been gone from Clarksdale for twenty-two days. Eight left before the notice of sale would be delivered. He was not yet so detached from his own memory to need every note and name and warning but he was preparing for that day to arrive as chunks of his past had disappeared and little by little the recent had begun to flake away as if skinned with a sharp and shiny blade.

  He smoked the cigar to the tip and then let down the window and the night air whipped and momentarily chased the squalid smell out of the truck cab. He tossed the cigar butt and an orange trail of sparks danced and disappeared into the night. He drank from the Wild Turkey and drove a little faster. Drank from the coffee cup and turned down the radio. A pinch in his shoulder as he reached for the dial. A grip in his lower back as he situated in the seat. The clock read 12:27 and he tried to remember how long it had been since the last pill and he reached over into the plastic bag and took a tiny red one. He popped it into his mouth and chased it with the bourbon and reared back his head and stretched his neck and his eyes watered as the pill and liquor went down hot. The wind was strong in the window and he leaned out and spit and then rolled it up. Opened the glove box and took out the envelope to make sure it was still there. That he hadn’t imagined it.

  It was a folded manila envelope with the Magnolia Bluffs Casino logo in the top left corner. A sprawling magnolia flower that spoke more to debutantes than roulette. He steadied the steering wheel with his knees and opened the envelope and took out two stacks of cash, five grand each. A rubber band held a smaller stack of bills and he looked at the three stacks, smelled them, stuck them back into the envelope. He took out the note he had written to himself—12K straight to Big Momma Sweet. He stuck the note in the front pocket of his jeans and the envelope into the glove box and then he took out the photograph of the woman and child.

  He flipped on the light in the truck cab and looked at himself and Maryann as they stood in front of his first car. A boy of sixteen with his shirt off and brown from the sun. Her kneehigh skirt and her sandals and her hair dirty blond but beginning to show silver streaks and each with a hand propped on top of the hatchback. Rusted bumper and the hood a different color from the rest of the car but bought and paid for. Still a year before he stepped into the cage for the first time. Another twenty years before her mind betrayed her to the point of being a risk to herself. Still time for us both to be saved, he thought.

  His life was filled with drug dealers and illegal gamblers and men who killed dogs with other dogs and fighters like himself who lived in violent and unforgiving worlds. There had been women and even when he had found a small sympathy or something tender he knew that it was not true but part of the trade. The only one who loved him was sitting in a nursing home in Clarksdale and could no longer recognize his face or his name and he had betrayed her beyond even his own imagination but he had eight days to bring her home.

  He turned the photograph over. In recent ink he had written ME AND MARYANN. He brushed a thumb across the words and then set the photograph on top of the casino envelope. Turned off the light. For three weeks he had crossed the Mississippi River back and forth between Natchez and Vidalia. Hiding out in a motel room in Vidalia and driving over the bridge and to the casino when he had enough cash to play. Getting hot and going cold and then going to the abandoned sawmill on the outskirts of Vidalia when he was flat busted, where the moon stared down upon the empty land and they fought on Friday and Saturday nights. Getting on the card and doing what he could to survive another night of fists and knees, doping himself into slow motion to keep the crippling headache at bay while the knuckles went into his ribs or the side of his neck. Managing to stay upright long enough to get paid and then going to the motel room. Running the bathtub full of hot water and then settling his tired body into the water and his head back against the tub and his eyes closed and waiting. Waiting for the moment when he could rise again. Take the two hundred dollars they had given him for the fight over to the casino and this time would be the time. All you need is sixty great minutes, he told himself. And you can pay Big Momma Sweet and then you can pay the man at the bank and go and get Maryann and no more fighting and no more of this other shit and you can sit with her where she belongs, move her bed out to the porch and watch the sun cross the sky and the shadows shift and just be there with each other.

  But they were on him. Someone had seen him at the fights in Vidalia and knew he owed Big Momma Sweet and that someone made a call and then they came. A price on his head. He had headbutted one in the alley behind the motel and knocked another unconscious in the casino bathroom after he had a big run. He had to get back to Maryann and he had to clear himself with Big Momma Sweet or else they would find him and hurt him. So he had stepped across the man on the bathroom floor, the blood coming from his nose and puddling on the glossy tile and he hustled to the cashier and e
mptied his pockets that were full of one hundred and five hundred dollar chips and he had just enough to get clear with her and a few hundred left over to get him started at the next casino. He believed in the miracle of getting hot one more time, just one more time, without her goons looking over his shoulder. With nothing to do but get to thirty thousand and rip the foreclosure notice into shreds and take Maryann out of that place.

  He was hellbent toward the Delta now, going to see Big Momma Sweet way out there in that deadend spot of the world where the river was wide and black and where the old graveyards wrestled to keep the dead in their graves and where man vanished if he didn’t pay what he owed. Deliver, he told himself. Deliver and then fill the canyon you have dug for yourself with rocks and dirt and then cover it with sod and plant flowers and trees and if somebody walks by they’ll never know how deep and cavernous and jagged was the canyon.

  He punched the truck ceiling and let out a quick, vicious scream. He’d had the chance to score it all, the twelve thousand for Big Momma already in his pocket, and as he walked into the casino bathroom he knew all he needed was two more sets of kind cards at the blackjack table. He would go and sit back down and bet it all and get to twenty-four. Bet it all again and get to forty-eight and without looking at the dealer again or the waitress again and without listening to the gasps and cheers from those who would be standing around the table he would simply gather the chips and walk to the cashier. Drive back to Clarksdale and when the sun came up the house would belong to her and not the bank. His life would belong to him and not to Big Momma Sweet. He punched the truck ceiling in quick thrusts, knowing he should have never gotten up and gone to the bathroom. Knowing he should have sat still at the table with the fresh ice in the drinks, with the bullshit smiles from the dealer. With the smooth, green felt of the tables, with the fake red leather cushions of the table chairs. Knew he should have stayed there while his blood was running right and while the cards laid down like he needed them to and while the woman across the table was leaning forward in her lowcut dress and telling him with the flap of her long lashes, I’m yours if you want me. Stay hot, baby. Stay hot.