Caged Warrior (9781423186595) Read online

  Kaitlyn was aggravated. And the madder she got, the sexier I found her.

  “Look, I don’t wanna fight,” I said in a calm and even voice. “Just answer me this.”

  “What?” she snipped.

  I paused before posing my question. “So is that, like, a no on the caviar for lunch?”

  I grinned, hoping she’d take the bait and lash out at me again, ’cause seeing her get all hot and bothered felt like it would be kinda entertaining. But her response surprised me, caught me totally off guard.

  “Oh, do you feel sad? Do you feel hurt? I mean what’s really going on with you, like deep down, to make you act like this?” she asked. “Wait, let me guess. Do you feel like a viccccc-tim?” She spoke in a high, whiny voice. “Oh, poor me, poor me, you don’t know how tough I have it, poor, poor me?”

  “Now you’re goin’ too far,” I warned.

  “What?” she said. “You can dish it out but you can’t take it? Psssh. Figures.”

  “You don’t know me,” I snapped. “You don’t know what the hell I’m going through.”

  “Funny, that sounds familiar.”

  We walked on in a tense silence. This girl had some nerve, I thought. I mean who did she think she was? This time it was me who finally said something straight out of the blue.

  “All right, lemme ask you another question,” I said to Kaitlyn, feeling aggro.

  “Can’t wait,” she replied.

  “If I do come to this school, do I have to wear a uniform?”

  She rolled her eyes. “We all wear uniforms,” she responded.

  “And like,” I asked, “do they come with the bitchy attitude or is that provided separate by the snob distribution center?”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Tour’s over, Mr. Cool Guy.” Kaitlyn pointed west toward the sun. “Make a left at that building and it’ll lead you back to Mrs. Notley’s office.”

  “What, I don’t get an escort?”

  She walked off without responding.

  “Love that skirt,” I called out.

  Without turning around she raised her middle finger.

  Classy, I thought.

  I walked back to Mrs. Notley’s ready to hightail it out of there. I wasn’t ever gonna attend the University of Fantasyland, and while, sure, Kaitlyn was hot, hot, hot, chicks were a dime a dozen, and in a half hour I’d be back in my world and she’d stay in hers, the two of them forever separate.

  Way I saw it, all these do-gooders who wanted to save a poor kid from the ’hood would have to find a different sucker to help them soothe their guilty consciences, or whatever they were doing. But hey, at least they could tell themselves that they’d tried to help the pitiful kid from the wrong side of the tracks who lived in the ghetto with no mom.

  I entered Mrs. Notley’s office and eyed the tall, brown grandfather clock sitting against the wall. I’d already missed a day of training for this nonsense, but ain’t no way I was gonna risk not getting back in time to pick my sister up from Harriet Tubman.

  “How was the tour?”

  “I gotta be somewhere.”

  “That good, huh?” Mrs. Notley said.

  I nudged my head toward the clock. Mrs. Notley’s eyes followed mine, she checked the time, set down her pen, one of those fancy “writing instruments” that looked like it probably cost a coupla hundred dollars, and then she grabbed her purse and removed the keys to her shiny BMW.

  “Where’s Kaitlyn?” she asked.

  “Dunno,” I answered, and though I didn’t say it, I really couldn’t have given two shits if I ever saw that girl again.

  NINE

  Dad had me in the cage every week for the next month, out-of-towners coming in courtesy of the Priests to get a taste of the underground kid named Bam Bam who people knew was gonna one day own a belt. The more my rep grew, the more Sat Nite Fights I put in the W column, the more dollar bills my dad was able to put in his pocket.

  And when you drink, gamble, snort speed, and bang hookers for a living, there ain’t no such thing as having too many greenbacks in your jeans.

  Seventy-two hours after a quick six-thousand-dollar payday, we were down to a half-empty ketchup bottle, some skim milk, and a jar of squeezable mayonnaise in the fridge. Clearly, the trickle-down theory wasn’t trickling down. After my next fight, I knew I’d need to make sure that when payday came I’d score some extra cheese. Gem needed a new coat for the winter.

  That’s the thing about kids. They grow.

  Only problem was to win my next purse I’d have to fight in a back-to-back round-robin and take home a victory in a two-wars-in-one-evening showdown. The Priests, always trying to make it more exciting, had set up an N-S-W-E elimination, so that to get paid, a fighter had to win two fights against two different warriors, instead of just one, kind of playoff-style like the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament.

  Though Detroit is sorta in the East, I was selected to represent the West. Why? Who knew? None of the geniuses in the crowd probably even knew spit about geography anyway. All those folks cared about was coming out to get wasted, gamble, and witness destruction and the spilling of blood.

  What the crowd ended up getting on N-S-W-E tourney night musta felt spine-tingling good. To be honest, something about that school visit had stuck in my gut and just sorta turned me raw. I’d been on a tear lately, just rippin’ through dudes.

  The hell with Radiance Academy, I thought. No matter how hard I tried, those words just kept rolling ’round and ’round though my head. The hell with them.

  Straws were drawn. It’d be South vs. East and then North vs. West. To me, it didn’t matter. I was always one of those fighters who’d take on all comers anyway. Just put a fool in front of me and ring the bell. The rest, I’d take care of on my own.

  “Bam Bam, you feelin’ good?” A fan rubbed my shoulders as I got ready to enter the cage.

  “Yeah, you gonna bring it?” asked another.

  I stared straight ahead, my eyes locked-in yet vacant, the expression of a cold-blooded assassin on my face. As always, I didn’t say squat to the fans on my prefight march toward the cage.

  “We love you, M.D.,” a voice called out.

  “Make us proud and fuck ’em up!”

  I’d still not gotten comfortable with complete strangers touching me with their germy hands, paws that had been who the hell knew where before being placed on my body. And while I know these spectators didn’t mean any harm, nowadays every time I walked to the cage I either got scratched by someone’s fingernails or stabbed by the tip of a pen somebody was holding out as they tried to score an autograph.

  “Bam Bam rules!”

  “Fill me with your sperm, I wanna have your baby!!”

  I blew through my first opponent in Round One with a heel strike to the face that split the guy’s nose like a blacksmith’s hammer smashing a grapefruit. Red face juice squirted high into the air and sprayed across the clean clothes of four onlookers in the front row who had cageside seats. Each of them jumped back in horror, upset that their outfits had been ruined, grossed out by being covered in the blood of a violent stranger.

  Yet deep down, I knew they loved it, too. Beat the hell out of sitting in the cheap seats, didn’t it?

  After twenty-eight seconds, half my work in this crappy tournament was done.

  “You left at least five hundred damn dollars on the table by not taking this to Round Three.” My father’s eyes were red and glassy. “Maybe more.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For the next fight,” he poked his finger in my chest. “Round fuckin’ Three. Got me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My father squirted a bottle filled with high-electrolyte water into my mouth even though I didn’t really need it. I’d actually broken more of a sweat warming up for the fight than I had fighting. “Go take a
piss,” he said to me. “We probably have at least thirty minutes before our next go.”

  Though I didn’t have to whiz, I headed to the bathroom anyway. It was the only place in the whole venue where a fighter could have any privacy.

  “Now this Dominican from Baltimore we got next,” my father said as soon as I got back. He lit a menthol cigarette. “This mother fights dirty.”

  Everyone knows it’s a free-for-all in underground cage fighting. “No holds barred” really does mean no holds barred, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a coupla unspoken rules.

  No eyes, no biting, no nuts. In general, there’s a “no orifice” rule, too: no putting your fingers in other fighter’s holes. This means no fishhooking, eye-gouging, ear insertions, or jamming your fingers into open flesh wounds to try to tear a gash apart like a six-year-old ripping open a birthday present.

  Straight out of the gate in fight number two, the Dominican went for my balls. Twice. Then he tried to thumb me in the eye.

  “You better watch that dirty stuff.”

  “I eat your mother’s tits.”

  The Dominican cracked a crooked smile that revealed broken front teeth and black, rotted gums.

  “Dude, you need a dentist.”

  He smiled even bigger.

  It wasn’t too long before he launched a third nut shot with a low kick to the groin, and once again tried to thumb me in the eye.

  “I’m warning you, man. Fight clean.”

  “Nipples,” he said. “I chew them like candy bar.”

  He launched an elbow strike that missed, and I took the Dominican fighter to the ground. Once on the mat, he immediately tried to fishhook me by jamming his index finger two inches deep up my nostril.

  One rip and my face would have been permanently disfigured.

  I spun away and jumped to my feet. Wow, did I hate dirty fighters. Hell, I still had those half-moon teeth marks on my left triceps from where some Mohawk-haired fool had bitten me on the upper arm three years ago.

  Screw it, I thought. It was time to teach someone a lesson.

  I set up in a square wrestler’s stance, exposing my face, guessing that he’d go for another cheap-shot eye gouge with his thumb. He did, but expecting the move, I snatched his arm and quickly ripped the Dominican into a savage wristlock. Making sure all the crowd could see, I held his hand up high in the air, then snapped his thumb backward in the opposite direction a thumb is supposed to go, using the full weight of my body to amplify the blow.

  His tendon shredded like a piece of cheddar cheese. The crowd let out a groan. His joint split from the knuckle down past the wrist with a chilling pop, and I took a step backward so every spectator in the arena could get a clear look at the Dominican’s mutilated hand. His thumb hung backward and limp like a tree branch torn from its roots by a hurricane. I’d ripped his tendon so far back the crowd could see his radial artery as the digit dangled in the wrong direction off his disfigured limb. It almost seemed like a fake Hollywood movie.

  But this was real.

  I heard gags. Then someone vomited. The Dominican collapsed to his knees. Hunched over, he dragged his wounded arm between his legs and, in his last coherent act, slapped the mat before I kicked him in the face like an NFL punter hammering a football sixty yards in the air downfield.

  The Dominican hadn’t just tapped out; with the move I’d just pulled on him, that guy would be lucky if he could ever hold a soupspoon again without using two hands.

  The tourney was mine.

  Cheers and boos flooded the arena as I walked to my corner. The cheers were for the violence; the boos because there wasn’t enough of it. Both my fights had ended too quickly for the crowd’s taste. Two short first-round wins meant that a lot of people would be heading home that night much earlier than they’d hoped.

  My dad charged up to me. “I thought we said Round fuckin’ Three?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, my eyes drifted over to the Dominican lying sprawled on his back in the center of the cage.

  He began to convulse.

  “Hurry up,” one of his team members cried out, rushing to his aid. “He’s going into shock!”

  At the sight of the frenzy to aid my fallen opponent, my dad cracked a smile. “That’s my boy,” he said, his anger fading. “The killa instinct, that’s my mothafuckin’ boy.”

  I spied Weasel about to approach, but before he caught up to me I took off. Just bolted. Hands slapped me and people shouted obscenities and fans of newly won money were waved in my face as I pushed my way through the crowd. Finally, I was able to disappear through a door in the back and enter the bathroom.

  Where I could go throw up.

  Inside the stall, I could still hear the cheers.

  Bam Bam! Bam Bam!

  Strands of yellow puke hung from my chin. My head spun like a whirling merry-go-round. My stomach, steel on the outside, soup on the inside, emptied into a toilet, where random pubic hairs dangled from the side of the bowl just inches from my face.

  What was I becoming? I wondered to myself.

  Suddenly, the door to the restroom slammed open.

  “You throwing up? Are you throwing up? You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me?”

  I didn’t respond. My dad kicked open the door to my stall.

  “You are one soft son of a bitch, you know that? I should just put a skirt on you and check for a vagina.” He smashed the stall’s wall. “When you enter that cage you identify your opponent’s weakness, you exploit it to maximum capacity, and then you force that motherfucker through unyielding anguish and pain to abandon all hope. Defense is offense, down is up, hurt is joy, and brutality is your best friend, so grow some big-boy nuts, son. A fighter who’s not a monster is a fighter who ain’t never gonna win a belt.”

  He grabbed me by my ear and pulled back my head.

  “And one day, you’re gonna be a world champ.”

  I pushed his arm away and spit into the toilet bowl. He glared from above, a look of disapproval and shame written all over his face.

  “Get up,” he finally said in a low, even voice. “Get up and go wash yourself off.”

  I rose from my knees, crossed to the sink, and turned on the water. Raising my eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the dirty, cracked mirror. A moment later I lowered my gaze, hating the sight I saw in front of me. The restroom door opened again.

  “Great fights, kid. Great fights.” Weasel entered with an unlit cigarette dangling from of his mouth and a second unlit cigarette stashed behind his ear. “Gotta nice, big delivery of green colored paper for ya after an evening like that. Woulda like to see it go a little longer, but hey, great fights, Bam Bam.”

  “What’s the total?” my father asked.

  “Seven large.”

  “Thought it was nine.”

  “You picked Round Three,” Weasel responded. “Round Three, that shaved ya.”

  My father shot me a dirty look, reached for the envelope, and began to count the cash.

  “It’s all there, Demon. It’s all there.”

  “Eat ass, Weasel,” my father said as he double-checked to make sure every dollar he felt was owed to him had been placed into that envelope.

  “Punk coulda detached your retina,” Weasel said to me trying to make small talk while we waited for my father to finish counting the cash. “Make a fella blind with that low-rent, thumb-you-in-the-eye shit.”

  I spat into the sink.

  “Serves him right what you did to that kid,” Weasel said. “Serves him fuckin’ right for messing with Bam Bam.”

  “He okay?” I asked.

  “Who gives a piss if he’s okay?” my father snapped. “We’re square, Weasel. Now get lost.”

  “Of course we’re square. Priests don’t cheat, Priests don’t cheat.”

  “I said go,” my father repea
ted as he peeled me off three hundred dollars.

  “I need at least eight.”

  Both my dad and Weasel froze.

  “At least eight,” I repeated.

  Slowly, Weasel’s head rotated over to turn and look at my father, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lips. Both of us wondered the same thing: what was my dad’s reaction going to be?

  For a moment he was quiet. Still. Thoughtful. Then patiently, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a rectangular green package, a lighter, and then torched the end of a fresh menthol cigarette. A small waft of smoke rose from its tip and drifted into my father’s eye, causing him to squint as he responded.

  “Take a grand,” he said to me as he peeled me off seven more crisp hundred-dollar bills. “’Cause see, that’s what families do for one another, son.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t want the money anymore. It felt dirty. He felt dirty. This whole damn thing felt smacked up and dirty.

  I think my father sensed my sudden change of heart about wanting the cash, so he pressed it firmly into my hand and forced me to take it.

  “Shit, there’s more comin’ from where this came from anyway, right, M.D.?” My father took a deep drag off of his cigarette and then courteously blew the smoke out the side of his mouth so as to not blow it in my face.

  “Kid’s a helluva fighter,” Weasel said. “A helluva fuckin’ fighter.”

  TEN

  “So when I grow up I am going to write a book about a princess. But a princess that’s a monster. And she likes cupcakes and unicorns and sparkles and when she waves her magic wand she can make as many kitty cats as she wants to appear but they all need to share the milk.”

  I walked Gemma to school on Monday morning, hand-in-hand as always, but as she chattered on, my mind felt a million miles away. It was inevitable that one day somebody was gonna catch me. Underground cage fighting with boys as badass as the ones I was starting to face was like riding a motorcycle in the rain at high speeds while weaving in and out of stop-’n’-go traffic. It wasn’t a question of if I was gonna crash; only a matter of when.