The Fighter Read online

  The bluegray of dawn. A solitary cloud hanging next to the fading moon. Flocks of blackbirds like flapping dots in the morning sky and the sound of doors opening and closing around the trailer park as the early ones left for work. Baron stood from the lawn chair and tossed away a cigarette. Stretched his big arms and bent his back and then he saw Annette climb out of her boxlike camper and he was relieved by her appearance.

  He had first thought of her the way most men thought of her. He imagined doing things to her and what she might do to him but that feeling drifted away as she soon became a much needed relief from the macho men on the payroll. As close to a friend as he thought he could have. She had simply walked up to the carnival one day. Rides spinning and popcorn popping and across the lot came this artful thing and he not only noticed her but noticed the way that the heads turned when she walked by wearing a short skirt and tanktop. Her arms and legs covered in designs of blacks and reds and blues and she owned the body to exhibit. The children had looked in wonder. The mothers in jealousy or loathing. The men with openmouthed curiosity. She had stopped and asked for the bossman at the ticket booth and by the time she had crossed the carnival grounds and introduced herself he was already trying to think of a way to use her ability to lure.

  Now she sat in the empty lawn chair next to him. Pulled a rubber band from her wrist and put her hair in a ponytail.

  “You should be sleeping,” he said.

  “So should you.”

  “Well. I can’t.”

  “Me neither. Where is it?”

  “In there,” he said and he nodded at the vehicle. And then he lowered his voice and said I counted it. Twelve thousand. I can’t figure out what to do with it.

  “Divide it up.”

  He shook his head. “There is no such thing as a democracy when it comes to money. Besides, then everybody will know where it come from. And I don’t need that headache. These boys didn’t gain employment by singing in the choir.”

  “Then give me half and you take half. You know I won’t say nothing.”

  “There’s something in it for you. But not half.”

  “Why not half?”

  “Because I’m the one that will answer one day for what happened back there.”

  “You think you did something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I think it’ll take more than what’s in that envelope to cover whatever sins you believe you might have.”

  He stroked his goatee. Scratched at his cheek.

  Annette crossed her legs and yawned. “Why don’t you do what any good American would do and put it in the bank?” she asked.

  “I don’t have an account nowhere. Then the IRS would know where to find me. It’s taken a lifetime of ducking and dodging to stay hid from them.”

  “Burn it then.”

  “What?”

  “You got to do something,” she said. “Give it away. It’s not the lottery jackpot but it’s the kind of money that could change somebody’s life.”

  Across the lot the carnival workers appeared at random, coming out of their trailers and crawling out of their truck cabs like the weary survivors of a storm.

  “I think I’ll just let you have it,” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Really. You take it. Do something with it. Whatever you want except running off.”

  “I don’t want to mess with it,” she said and she shifted in the chair. Shook her head.

  “How come?”

  “Not sure. Feels like when I got my palm read one time. I knew it was all bullshit but I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about what I’d heard.” She leaned forward and slipped a cigarette out of the pack on the ground. “Besides. Whatever I do with it you won’t like.”

  “I told you I don’t care.”

  “That’s not like you, Baron. You’re making me nervous. What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Does it bother you that bad? What you did?”

  “No. Not so much. All I did was send him where he was already going.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He lifted a lighter and lit her cigarette.

  “I guess I’m like you. Uneasy about it. This money can’t lead nowhere but somewhere really bad or somewhere really good. Sounds like that crazy church idea you’re always talking about. And I ain’t really in the mood for extremities.”

  “You believe in my church now?”

  “I didn’t say I believe in it. I said it sounds like it. The church of cooperation. That it?”

  “Coincidence,” she said. “The church of coincidence. You know what it is. It brought me to you.”

  “I guess. And now something brought this money to us. That how it goes?”

  He lit another cigarette. He smoked and then said I know you’ll handle the money better than me. If you want it. But I don’t. I wish I would’ve left it laying there in the dirt. Just whatever you do don’t run off.

  “You said that already.”

  “And I meant it both times. I’ve heard enough about your story to know it doesn’t take much for your winds to change.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my winds.”

  “Maybe we’ll call it a donation to your church. That’s tax deductible.”

  “Except you don’t pay taxes.”

  “Yep. And never will.”

  He held the cigarette between his lips and pushed himself up from the chair with the armrests. Then he said let’s take a ride. That’s the best way for me to give the envelope to you. Away from here and all these hounddogs.

  Ricky Joe lay on a mattress in the back of the El Camino. The windows of the camper shell dirty and damp on the outside from the morning dew but when he heard their voices he lifted his head and saw them clearly enough.

  He shifted to his side, unlatched the window and it opened a few inches. In a pile of clothes he dug for cigarettes and kept one eye on Baron and Annette. They spoke in what he could only hear as mumbles and then they got in the Suburban together. Rolled down the windows. Her long and lanky arm hanging out as they drove away.

  No cigarettes but he found a can of root beer. He raised the hatch of the shell and he climbed out and sat on the hood of the El Camino shirtless and barefoot. He opened the warm root beer. The other carnival workers milled around with cigarettes or instant coffee. They opened trunks or trailer cabinets and took out small gas grills and skillets. Opened coolers and found butter and bread or eggs or packets of ham.

  He had snuck out of the El Camino during the night while the caravan was pulled to the side of the road. He had heard Baron tell them all to stay put but then he had seen Annette walking with him and he slid across the bench seat and slipped out, moving into the kneehigh cotton and pretending to piss as a voice from the vehicle behind the El Camino told him to get his ass in the car and do what Baron said. He was out of the caravan headlights so he knelt in the field as he watched them searching the scene. Watched when they paused and Baron knelt to pick something up. Watched them talk about it and then watched as they returned to their vehicles. And he had seen the body. Or what he thought was a body. The silhouette of some figure that could have only been the dead. He hurried out of the crops and into the El Camino as the caravan moved again.

  The carnival had been his traveling home for only a few weeks. Right out of doing ninety days in the Bolivar County lockup for simple assault. His hand flat against the ass of a woman in the supermarket checkout line and her husband smacking a can of creamed corn into his nose and then the two men taking out the candy bar and battery racks before the wheezing security guard could get there from his comfy chair in the break room. The county lockup familiar to him but this time when he got out he came upon the carnival on the side of an empty furniture warehouse. He carried a tallboy in a paperbag as he strode about and looked for something worth stealing and then there was a loud metal grind and a flush of smoke when the engine for the Tilt-A-Whirl seized up. He was entertained
by the screaming children stuck in midride and entertained watching them rescued one by one and more entertained watching the huddle of men who stood around the engine, unable to figure out what to do.

  “I can fix it,” he finally said.

  “Who are you?” asked a big man with a braided ponytail.

  “It really don’t matter. Does it?”

  Baron had studied him. Redeyed and squirrelly but seemingly certain of his ability. “Fix it then,” he said.

  Ricky Joe had grown up in a mob of brothers and sisters. Uncles and aunts and cousins. All living in three mobile homes on the edge of a junkyard owned by his grandfather. Some cars in the junkyard were crushed. Others they tried to repair and make their own and he grew up trying to help resuscitate vehicles that were graveyard bound. So the engine of the Tilt-A-Whirl appeared to him as no bigger a problem than two plus two. He knelt next to the engine and they gave him room and in thirty minutes the Tilt-A-Whirl was spinning again and Baron offered him a job. He took it.

  But he wasn’t interested in this job anymore. He was interested in what he had seen the night before. Two people at the scene of an accident interested in something more than the accident itself. He sipped the root beer and scratched at his belly. Baron is not the play, he thought. You won’t get nothing from him except turned out of the carnival. It’s her. She’s the one.

  9

  J​ACK CLIMBED OUT OF THE TRUCK BED. THE TOP OF THE SUN over the edge of the horizon as he stared at the truck and said no I don’t expect you to crank but I wish you would before I have to explain what’s in this blue tarp to somebody.

  He crawled under and realized the dripping was from a cracked radiator and if it wasn’t already all leaked out it would be soon. He slid out from under and got in. The keys still in the ignition. He turned the key and the engine chugged but then caught. It coughed and smoke came from the engine and from the tailpipe and he didn’t wait to see how long it would last. He shifted into drive and the truck gagged and almost died but then it jerked forward and then smoothed and in a few miles he came to Clarksdale.

  He drove through the tired downtown with the grand old buildings that had suffered decades of apathy. Rainstreaked facades and faded FOR SALE signs in windows and barrelsized flowerpots with white and purple petunias running over the sides as if serving as a small reminder of the color of possibility. And then the bricked streets of downtown turned into the patched roads that passed the government housing and trailer parks that finally gave way to the green and spacious. He turned left on Highway 1 and drove past a gas station. A policeman leaned on the hood of his patrol car looking at the newspaper and when the smoking truck with the busted windshield passed by he looked up. Jack slumped in the seat a little. Raised his hand and waved and the cop nodded.

  Along the highway he began to look for the house off the road in the same way that he had always looked for it on the school bus in the afternoon. His time with Maryann stretching on and his clothes in the same room and the rhythm of life unfamiliar to him so he remained distrustful and looked for the house out of the window as if it wasn’t going to be there. As if she wasn’t going to be there. That the bus would take him somewhere different and drop him off and the driver would tell him good luck as he climbed off and tried to figure out what to do next.

  But it was always there.

  He turned into the gravel driveway and rolled along, the house back from the road and flanked by oak trees. The grass and summer weeds high and several shingles missing from the roof. The white more like gray and pieces of frame hanging here and there. A crow sitting atop a post that served as one end of a clothesline. He parked and rubbed at his chin. Took his notebook and got out, walking around antbeds and fallen limbs and stepping over the petite petals of wildflowers. A window screen loose and folded back. He stepped onto the front porch and noticed the droppings of some kind of animal. On the front door a copy of the foreclosure notice had been posted.

  The first night he had spent at Maryann’s house he slept late and when he opened his eyes he had to think. Remember where he was. Remember who he was with. Thin curtains allowed the sunshine into the highceiling room and he put his feet on the floor and looked around. A painting of a horse and a woman in a field on one wall and black and white photographs of some cityscape were arranged in a rectangle on another. A rug much too small for the space of the hardwood floor lay between the bed and the door and three bulky and warped candles sat on a brass tray on the marble top of a corner table.

  He had come down the stairs and the wall was lined with more photographs. Some of the photos black and white and some so old they were shades of gray and sepia and others in color but the colors washed with time. Photos of children sitting on a porch and brides and grooms beneath the same arched trellis and an old man leaning against a tree and a man and woman posing with their arms propped on the hood of a tractor. An endless trail of faces as Jack moved down the stairs and he had stopped in the middle of the staircase and paid close attention to a man with a mustache. His arms folded and a cigarette in his hand. A gray tweed coat. Jack pretended to take the cigarette from his hand and he took an imaginary puff and tossed it over the banister and then he descended and looked for the woman who had showed him the bedroom the day before.

  He had gone into the kitchen and through the open door he saw her in the backyard. She was opening bags of mulch and spreading it across a freshly dug flower bed that circled the thin trunk of a young Japanese maple. She wore jeans too big rolled to her knees and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. Her hair in waves and stuck to her sweaty forehead. He tried to think of her name and when she saw him she called out. Said come on. I want to show you something.

  They walked across the yard. She had asked what he liked to eat for breakfast and he said whatever you got. She then took him into a spacious one-room building on the edge of the backyard that bumped right up against the crop rows. Shutter windows that stayed swung open in the heat of early summer and two ceiling fans circulating overhead. A wide plank floor and the back wall lined with shelves from floor to ceiling and resting on the shelves were ceramic plates and bowls of all sizes. Planting pots and serving platters and coffee mugs. All in different stages as some were unfinished pieces, dry and chalky and the color of mud. Others of the same color but shiny with a coat of varnish and still other shelves held the finished productions. Vases and pots and bowls that had been painted and coated and dotted with tiny price stickers.

  Around the room had been a couple of stools and square wooden tables. Dropcloths in a folded stack in the corner. Tubes of paint and paintbrushes sat in a wide plastic tray on one of the tables and a double sink splattered in color was beneath an open window. Aprons hung on hooks on the wall. A handcrafted potter’s wheel sat in the middle of the room, the dust and trails of a hundred years of work seeped into the rustcolored grain of its tabletop and bench legs.

  “What do you think?” she had asked as they stood in the doorway. “This is the potter’s barn. At least that’s what my mom and grandma called it.” The boy looked around curiously and then he stepped inside and walked over and ran his finger across the flat circular slab of the wheel.

  “That’s called a potter’s wheel,” she said. “But it’s old. They make electric ones now but my grandma taught me how to use this one when I was about your age and it’s the only one I’ll have.”

  “What does it do?” he asked.

  She had waved her hand toward the shelves and said it makes all of this.

  “How?” he said.

  She told him about how she had learned watching her grandmother and she explained the process and how long a piece needed to sit and dry and what kept your work from splitting and cracking and why it was important to put your initials on the bottom of each piece so that when you sold it that part of you would always be there. And sometimes the piece would be passed on from one family to the next. And a little of you would live wherever that bowl or vase lived. He had asked questions
about the wheel and about mixing paints and he had asked how she decided how much a piece cost and where she sold them and she answered all his questions and was happy that he had them.

  “Why?” he finally asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I’m not a farmer and don’t really know anything about all that land out there except who I lease it to,” she said. “I like to use my hands. Start with nothing and end up with something.”

  He had walked over to the wall and taken an apron from the hook and slid it over his head. The end of the apron touched the floor and she asked if he wanted to try.

  He looked at the wheel and then looked at the work on the shelves. “No,” he said. “I’ll just mess it up.”

  “There is no messing it up,” she said. “Just try.”

  “Not right now,” he had said again and he removed the apron and returned it to the hook. “Maybe I could watch you do it.”

  “All right.”

  “But can we eat something first?”

  They had walked out of the potter’s barn and as they moved up the steps of the porch and toward the kitchen door he said, “I need to ask you one more thing. What is your name?”

  Now he snatched the foreclosure notice from the front door and paced and the boards creaked beneath his feet as he chastised this other self. This other Jack who did things he could not remember and somehow thought he could get away with it. This other Jack who walked and talked and signed papers and lied and cheated and lost and then did not have to face the consequences as he left it all for him to clean up. The one who stood at the end of his mistakes where all the Jacks collided.