The Fighter Read online

  But instead he was driving through the night. The dangerous debt in the glove box. The miracle still on hold. This midnight concoction of caffeine and nicotine and bourbon and the sweet little pills for the busted parts of his body. It all kept him running so that he could get back into the black land where he could walk into the ramshackle cabin where they played for blood and sometimes more and say to Big Momma Sweet here you go and toss the envelope into her broad, cushy lap. Here you go and if one of your boys follows me out of here and comes my way in some parking lot or sits down across from me anywhere I’ll break him in half and bury the top part and send you the bottom part so you can kiss his dead ass.

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Short brown hair, gray filtering in above his ears. Long sideburns that hid a jagged scar that ran from his earlobe and along the jawline of the left side of his face. A crooked nose. Scar slices across his forehead. Jack Boucher, he whispered and he shook his head. You ain’t nothing but a broken down dirty dog. Then he said his name louder, dragging out each syllable. Boo-shay. Boo-shay. Remembering Maryann teaching him how to say it. Almost thirteen years old and hearing his name pronounced correctly for the first time. She listened to him repeat it and then she interrupted and said do you know what it means in French?

  Le Boucher, he said to himself in the rearview mirror. The Butcher.

  He rubbed at his temple and shifted in the seat and with each move he felt it. He felt the twentysomething years of granite fists and gnarled knuckles beating against his temples and the bridge of his nose and across his forehead and into the back of his head. The sharp points of elbows into his kidneys and into the hard muscles of his thighs and into his throat and the thrust of knees against his own and into his lower back and against his ears and jaw. He felt the twist of arms and legs and wrists and ankles, being turned and wrenched in ways that God didn’t intend for them to be turned and wrenched. He felt the breaking of his own teeth and the blood in his mouth and the swollen fingers and swollen eyes and the ringing in his ears and the chainlink fence mashed against his face. He felt the scars and the slit in his tongue and the small knots across his body that had risen but never fully disappeared and he felt the rust in his joints when he wiggled his fingers or turned his head or raised his arms to pull on a shirt. The crash of his body against the hard floor and against any of the four steel poles of the cage corners. He felt the pain in his head from concussion after concussion after concussion after concussion and he lived in the blurred world of a rocked mind. He felt the streaks of pain through his eyes and down his spine and he felt the burst of bright lights and the sharp, unexpected noises of the modern world that screamed through his brain. Broken fingers and dislocated kneecaps and sprained neck and gashed skull and again and again and again the fists and knuckles and knees and elbows and he felt it all as if every blow he had absorbed and every blow he had delivered still existed somewhere in an invisible cloud of pain that draped and held him like some migrant soul in search of home. The years passing and his body rusting and his mind like some great wide open space with howling and twisting winds and swirls of memory that could not differentiate between now and then and he felt it all.

  He drove north and the earth flattened and the night opened up her wide, welcoming mouth and took him in. Stay awake, he thought. Stay hot. Rumble through the dark with abandon.

  2

  T​O THE WEST HEAT LIGHTNING STRUCK AGAINST THE eternal horizon and provided his drunk and doped eyes with something to chase as he drove on between the low black fields. It had been a hard summer and headhigh metal sprinklers stood tall in the cotton and soybean crops and worked through the relief of night, shooting widereaching sprays out across the thirsty land. Bugs raced past in the headlights and he crushed an armadillo or possum and he yelled for the truck to get on up as he goaded the engine like he was pushing a hardworn horse across a hardworn land.

  He was only a dozen miles from Clarksdale when he had to stop for gas at an allnight store in Alligator where they smoked ribs day and night in black steel drums. It was a cinderblock building with a crooked aluminum awning covering the single gas pump. From behind the building the smoke wafted up and into the night and after Jack put gas in the truck he let his hunger guide him around behind the store where a huddle of old black men sat in folding chairs and drank tallboys. On a table beside them were three packs of cigarettes and a gallon milk jug filled with homemade barbecue sauce. A pile of wood and halfbags of charcoal stacked beside the smokers. The back door of the store was open. Inside half a dozen people sat on milk crates and a ratty loveseat in front of the beer coolers and in front of them a duo played. The thump of a kickdrum and the shrill of a harmonica kept the knees of the nocturnals bouncing.

  Jack approached the men sitting outside and asked who he needed to pay for the gas.

  “I’ll take your money honey,” said a graybeard. He put his hand on the shoulder of the man next to him and pushed himself up. “How much you get?”

  Jack held out a twenty dollar bill. “All that.”

  “Good cause I ain’t got no change.”

  “In my whole life of stopping at this store y’all never have.”

  “Whole life? I ain’t never seen you,” the graybeard said.

  “I come and go.”

  The graybeard turned to the other old men. “Y’all know this boy?”

  All shook their heads but one. He wore a straw hat cocked on his head and he got up and moved close to Jack. “Yep,” he said. “He’s that boy that cost me all that damn money over in Itta Bena one night.”

  The huddle laughed and one of them said, “What the hell you doing in Itta Bena anyhow?”

  “Losing my damn money on this old boy. Way out in the damn sticks in this dirt pit where shouldn’t damn nobody be. Like to got my ass carried off by mosquitoes. And got my pockets holed out.”

  “Holed out because I won or lost?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t recall.”

  “Because if you lost when I won then you should’ve known better.”

  “You don’t look like you never won much of nothing,” the man in the straw hat said and he craned his neck to get a better look at Jack’s scarred and crooked face.

  “You got anything to eat?” Jack said.

  “Not for you,” said the man in the hat.

  “Naw. Come on now,” the graybeard said. “If you gonna bet, you got to be a man if you lose it. Cause your snakebit ass damn sure knows you gonna lose it.”

  The others nodded and said you know that’s right. That’s right.

  The graybeard grabbed a halfrack of ribs wrapped in tin foil from the table. He held it out to Jack and Jack reached for it but staggered.

  “Shit,” said the graybeard. “You need to sit your ass down.”

  Jack got his hand on the ribs and the man held tight. And then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled ten and handed it to the old man.

  “You better sit down,” he said again.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sit down and eat them ribs. Sly over there’ll give you one of his beers.”

  “Say what?” Sly said.

  “Y’all quit being so damn greedy.”

  Inside, the kickdrum and harmonica stopped. Jack walked over and leaned against the table and began to unfold the tin foil. The graybeard told Sly to give the boy a beer and he reached into a cooler and set a tallboy on the table next to Jack. He ate and drank while the men went back to jawing about the mean women they had loved and the hot ass sun that made them that way.

  In the doorway of the store the harmonica player lit a cigarette. He was skinny and taut and wore a t-shirt with the sleeves and neckline cut off. He watched Jack and smoked his cigarette and then slid the harmonica into his pocket. His teeth were gray and scraggly hairs dripped from his chin. He watched Jack slurp the beer and gnaw at the ribs and he slid back inside. He picked up the telephone and dialed. It was the midd
le of the night but he knew she would want to know what he was looking at. And if he could deliver what he was looking at then he could save his own skin that Big Momma Sweet had threatened to peel off his back.

  A deep voice answered.

  “She up?” Skelly said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Does that make a difference whether or not she’s up?”

  “Yep. It do.”

  “Then it’s Skelly.”

  “She ain’t up.”

  “Hell just hold on. She might be up for what I see about twenty yards from me.”

  “She don’t care.”

  “Jack Boucher,” Skelly said with a tone of finality and triumph.

  A long pause came from the other end of the line.

  “You hear me?” he asked after waiting. Then through the doorway he saw Jack kill the beer and wipe his mouth on his shirtsleeve. He bummed a cigarette and then nodded to the men and headed for the truck.

  “I ain’t got time for this. You want him or not?”

  “Bring him here.”

  “Not without a damn promise.”

  “Promise what?”

  “That I don’t owe shit.”

  “She says no.”

  “You didn’t ask her.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “You better think good and hard again cause he’s walking toward his truck right now. I get him there and I don’t owe nothing to nobody.”

  Another pause. Outside the truck cranked.

  “You get him here and you don’t owe nothing to nobody,” the deep voice answered and then a click.

  Skelly dropped the phone and snatched a pack of cigarettes from behind the store counter. The drummer was coming out of the bathroom and asked where Skelly was going but he didn’t answer. He hustled out of the building and was standing in front of the truck when Jack turned on the headlights.

  3

  F​OR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT ONE ANOTHER. JACK’S face dark inside the cab and Skelly squinting in the headlights but they stared and waited on the other to say the first word. Skelly held his open palms out to his side as if to submit. Trying to kill another minute to figure out how to get Jack to let him in the truck. Trying to figure out how to get him out to Big Momma Sweet’s place. Trying to remember if he’d ever crossed Jack and hoping he wouldn’t simply put the truck in drive and run him over.

  Jack waved him out of the way.

  Skelly put his hands on the hood and yelled wait a second.

  Jack revved the engine and Skelly moved to Jack’s open window, his hands held back as if to avoid something that may scald.

  “Hold on now. Haul me into town if ain’t a bother. I just need a ride on up to Clarksdale if you’re going that way.”

  Jack looked him up and down. Sweaty from blowing and sucking on the harmonica and a sunkback jaw that Jack had seen many times before in the faces of the walking dead who tried to trade him meth for pills.

  Skelly figured Jack would have known him by now without the dirty windshield between them. They had sat together in poker games and Skelly had fought on the same card as Jack a few times down in Greenville. Way back when Jack was a main event. And they had smoked and turned up whiskey bottles afterward. Skelly raised his hands above his head and was about to say his name when Jack interrupted.

  “What you want again?”

  “Just a ride.”

  “Why you got your hands up?”

  Skelly lowered them. Thought to say do you remember me but he could tell by the vacant stare that Jack had no idea of who he was.

  “Just on up a little ways. My old lady stays in that trailer park right before town.”

  “Nah,” Jack said.

  “Come on, man. I’m already in deep shit. I got to get home.”

  “That ain’t my problem.”

  Skelly pulled some wadded bills from his pocket and said I can pay you.

  Jack leaned his head out the window. “What you got?”

  Skelly flattened and counted the money. “Seventeen,” he said. “And you can have it all.” He extended the money to Jack.

  “Where you going again?”

  “Just right up the road.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What?” Skelly said.

  “Your name. What is it?”

  Skelly looked past Jack and an empty pack of cigarettes sat atop the gas pump. “Kool,” he said.

  “Your name is Cool?”

  “Yeah. With a K.”

  “Like the damn cigarettes?”

  “My momma loved them so.”

  “Sounds to me like she loved way worse than that,” Jack said. He opened the notebook and looked for the name Kool in his list of enemies. When he didn’t see it he closed the notebook and dropped it behind the seat. Then he told him to get in.

  Skelly hadn’t even closed the door behind him when he pointed at the pint of Wild Turkey and asked for a drink. Jack nodded and Skelly gave him a cigarette in return. Jack eased out onto the highway and they rode for several silent miles. After a few sips from the bottle Skelly said it’d be fine with me if we kept on riding a little while. My old lady ain’t exactly interested in seeing me no way.

  “What’d you do?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing. Just can’t keep her happy. You know how they are.”

  “Not really.”

  “You ain’t got an old lady?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Cause we can keep riding. I know this place out close to the river that don’t never stop.”

  “So do I.”

  “We can go on out there. My old lady’s mad anyhow.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Well. She is.”

  “I told you I’d take you to your trailer park. Nowhere else.”

  Skelly drank from the bottle again and waited. Waited for Jack to place him. Waited for Jack to remember that his name was not Kool. Waited for those hard eyes. But he kept waiting and riding and nothing. He drank again and passed the bottle over. Jack drank and then screwed on the cap and set it on the seat. Then Skelly opened the glove box.

  Jack reached over and slammed it shut. He thrust his forearm against Skelly’s throat and pinned his head against the headrest.

  “Keep your damn hands to yourself,” Jack said.

  Skelly couldn’t answer and he slapped at Jack’s forearm to get some air. Jack held him until Skelly’s tongue came out and then he lowered his arm. Said if you wanna start walking across this black night with a broken nose or worse then do that shit again.

  Skelly coughed and tried to get his breath. “Damn it. You ain’t got to do all that.”

  “Not one thing in here belongs to you. You got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Sit fucking still and ride. First lights I see and your feet hit the ground.”

  And then the knife came out. Jack never saw it but he heard it snap open and then felt it against his throat.

  “You son of a bitch,” Skelly said. “Don’t look like you’re the boss no more. You’ll do what the hell I say and you’ll take me where I want to go.”

  Jack nodded a little. Let off the gas.

  “Don’t even slow down,” Skelly said and he took the dangling cigarette from his mouth. “You gonna go out to the river. Out where I say. Or I’ll open you like a tuna can.”

  Jack nodded again. Drove on through the unresolved night with a blade on his throat and the sour and smoky smell of this man in his nose. Skelly slid closer to Jack for better leverage with the knife and he caught himself in the rearview mirror. An expression of pride flashed back at him and he believed that this was his night and only his night and it’s about goddamn time. Son of a bitch ain’t so tough with his nuts shriveled up. Don’t nobody put his damn hands on me. Don’t nobody. This is my night and he don’t know half the shit he’s got coming. He smoked and winked at himself in the mirror. My night you son of a bitch. He doublechecked the blade against Jack’s throat and
then he reached over and opened the glove box again. Said you done gone and sparked my interest. I wonder just what you got in here now after all that ridiculousness.

  Skelly saw the bulk of the envelope and the name of the casino in the left corner. The certainty he had felt from what destiny had already laid at his feet on this humid night when all he had set out to do was to play a little harmonica and get a little drunk now multiplied itself into realms of satisfaction that were foreign to him. The very brief thought flashed in his shallow and eroded mind—I have it all.

  He lifted out the envelope and his dull gray teeth showed themselves in the dull black night and in his revelry he did not notice that Jack had gradually been speeding up the truck. Easing from sixty to seventy and now almost eighty with the lightning closer as Skelly turned the envelope in his hand and the bigger he grinned the harder he pressed the knife against Jack’s throat and the closer the skin came to splitting and the faster Jack drove. The rhythm of the road thumping quicker beneath the tires and the wind coming harder through the windows and the lightning in front of them in white hot flashes and Skelly began to fumble with the envelope with the one hand. Jack felt either sweat or blood trickle down his neck and he wasn’t going to wait to find out which it might be and going almost ninety now he yanked the truck to the left. The knife came off his throat just enough for him to snatch Skelly’s wrist and slam it into the dashboard. The knife fell from his hand and Jack let go of the wheel and with both hands he twisted the skinny wrist and it popped like a stick and Skelly howled. The truck swerved off the highway and Jack had to let go of Skelly and wrestle the steering wheel to keep from losing all control. Skelly yelled out in pain as he dropped the envelope and went for Jack’s eyes with his good hand. Ninety miles an hour and two men clawing and beating at each other and the truck bouncing and swerving and Jack stomped the brake just as somebody’s elbow brought the steering wheel down hard to the right and the truck jerked off the road. It flipped once and then stuck on its side and slid across the fertile ground like some strange metal plow preparing the earth for seed.