Rust and Bone (22 page)

“Blood?”

“Blood.”

“Lose the other on a KO?”

“TKO my third fight. Soft count to some unranked tomato can.”

“Get cocky?”

“Little, maybe.”

“I can see that happening.”

The kid digs a chicken claw out of his mouth, grimaces, spits on the sidewalk.

“Ever watch Muay Thai?”

“Sure,” he says. “Bunch of skinny guys winging at each other.”

Consider telling him about the fight I watched last week, the one where the loser left with hemorrhage-thinned blood pissing from his ears. Consider telling him how Muay Thai fighters strengthen their shins by pounding sand-filled bottles against them, the sound a wooden
huk-huk-huk,
until their skin's tough as boot leather. Instead I say, “How much weight you carrying?”

“Started middleweight, climbed to light heavy.”

“Any vision problems, those scars?”

“Peepers are twenty-twenty.”

“What kind of condition you in? Don't bother bluffing, I'll find out.”

The kid rolls up a shirt sleeve and flexes his biceps muscle, pumping the brachial vein. “And body fat less than ten percent. I'm gripped, stripped, ready to rip.”

“You're sweating like a bastard.”

“It's the food.”

“It's the heat. You'll get used to it. Training camp's outside Chang Rai, two hours south. You'll be doing road work on jungle paths. Sweat off ten pounds the first week—your cardio'll skyrocket.”

The kid finishes his beer, signals for another. “Want one, coach?”

“I don't drink.”

The kid nods as if he'd anticipated this weakness in me. A local woman stops beside our table. Three-quarters legs, decent tits but hatchet faced, wearing a miniskirt exposing the lower crescents of her can. Red silk skirt and scarf, gold hoop earrings, white frosted lipstick.

“Herro, boys.” To the kid: “Wha jo' name?”

“I'm Tony, hon.”

She rests a hand on the kid's shoulder. “Oh, ju a stron' boy, hah?” She sits on his lap. “Ju a strong, han'some big boy, hah?”

“Watch yourself with that one.”

The woman pouts at me. “Ju be quiet.” She wiggles her ass into the kid's crotch. “Ju lie me, Tony?”

“Sure,” the kid says. “Me love you long time.” His hands knead her thighs. “Thass ni',” the woman says.

I grab the fluttering brocade of the scarf and yank it off. “Adam's apple is a dead giveaway. Now your top-quality ladymen get it surgically shaved down so's you can barely tell. But this one here—well, she's no top quality.”

The aggrieved he-she snatches the scarf back. “Ju a horr'ble ma',” she says to me. The kid shoves him-her away, beating his palms on his shorts as if they're coated in flaming oil. Got a look on his face like he ate a handful of rat turds he mistook for Raisinettes.

“Ah, Christ, no!”

“I'd be inclined to blame it on the beer goggles, kid, but you've only had two. Got to watch out for the scarfed ones.”

“Why didn't you tell me before I let it bounce on my dick?”

“You didn't seem keen on listening.”

“You're a real peach, coach.”

AN OPEN-TOP ISUZU
drops us off at the training camp shortly after 5 a.m. It is a fine, clean morning, the kind of morning that, as they say, makes you wish you got up early more often. A scarred dirt path leads through the trees alongside a fast-running stream. The path leads into a large dusty clearing fringed by tall palms and dotted with bamboo-and-tin Nissen huts. At the far end is a long-house. The sounds of men in training are audible through its open doors.

“Stow your gear,” pointing to one of the huts, “and throw on your road kit.”

The kid comes out wearing gray jogging shorts, cross-trainers, a hooded sweatshirt. I retrieve a rusted bicycle leaning against the long-house and say, “Let's go.”

The kid starts out in a stiff-legged trot but, warming up, his strides lengthen, smooth out. The path is too narrow for us to navigate side by side so I fall in behind him on the bike. Soon a skunk-tail of perspiration darkens the back of his sweatshirt as we follow the path east into the rising sun.

“Give me that shirt.” The kid doffs the sweatshirt and drops it in the bike basket. At the 3K mark his chest is heaving, arms hanging from his shoulders. When the path finally rounds back to the camp he sprawls out in the dirt, sucking wind.

“Piss-poor conditioning, kid, but you got heart. Wind we can work on.”

“Fucking country. Can't breathe the air.”

“You'll get used to it. Get home, your lungs will feel double-size. Throw on your training kit and meet me in the gym.”

“Fucking country.”

He comes into the long-house wearing a pair of shorts and his ring shoes, a towel draped around his neck. The tattooed face of a dog, blue and grinning, covers one shoulder. On the other shoulder a crude imp or demon brandishes a pitchfork beneath the words
Li'l Devil
.

The long-house is equipped same as any North American boxing gym. In the ring, Khru Sucharit, the legendary Muay Thai trainer, instructs Bua, a rising fighter. Bua's eighteen and has been fighting since infancy. His body is perfectly shredded, each muscle group distinct and visible beneath rough, dusky skin. He's drilling textbook hook-kicks into punch-mitts snugged over Sucharit's hands, transferring his weight to rock the old trainer back a step with every blow.

“Know what I see?” The kid points at Bua. “Skin and bones and arms and legs.”

“Then you're only looking, not seeing.”

“Let me know when it's time to snatch the pebble out of your hand, sensei.”

Set him off on the speed bag. Hand speed's decent, and the kid's got power: the leather bag snaps hard against its ringed-iron mooring. He starts mugging, beating a rat-a-tat rhythm on the bag, bringing one knee up and then the other, two pistons in perfect cadence, lisping, “I'm the champeen, the greatest, the king.”

“Pop the bag.”

The kid stalks over to a tan-colored heavy bag suspended from a crossbeam and tees off. He rips a half-dozen body shots into the two-hundred-pound bag, causing it to buck on its chain. He sways at the hip in bob-and-weave style, shouldering the bag, throwing hooks and short right hands, falling in line with its rhythm before stabbing four left hooks and following with an overhand right.

The kid forces a yawn. “Okay, boss?”

“It'll do.”

After a half-hour of rope skipping and shadowboxing I tell him to stop. Brew a pot of oolong tea and pour cups with lemon. We sit on the ring apron and watch Bua run footwork combos in front of a full-length mirror.

“Moe only sends me hardasses,” I say. “What's your story?”

The kid wipes his face with the towel. “Moe thinks I'm a hardass?”

“You wouldn't be here otherwise.”

“Well,” the kid says, “could be he thinks I don't train hard enough.”

“Why would he think that?”

“No idea. I win fights.”

“People think you win a fight in the ring,” I tell him. “But you know where the big fights are won? Right here. In the gym and on the road.”

“I know, I know.” The kid's heard it all before.

“Moe says you brawl like a Viking. Says you fight with your dick instead of your head.”

“He told you all this already, what you asking me for?”

I nod over at Bua. “That kid's won over a hundred fights. Started when he was thirteen, fights twenty times a year. He's not a crowd favorite—he's too smart for that. He doesn't go out to make a show. He goes out to get a job done and absorb the least punishment possible.”

Bua's feet flicker across a vulcanized floormat, body circling to the left, feinting, ducking away, back to the right. The squeak of his shoes on the rubber and his breath coming into an even rhythm. The boy's so quick he could fight in a rainstorm and stay bone dry.

“I don't know where Sucharit found him,” I say. “Probably on the streets. He doesn't fight for glory. He fights for a paycheck. The boy trains hard and fights for the money because he knows, even at his age, it could all be taken away.”

The kids sips tea, wipes his neck. “I don't fight for the money, exactly.”

“Then why?”

“I got anger.”

“At who?”

“Don't know. Everyone. Not all the time, you know, but sometimes … it builds up. This need to hurt, even if it means getting hurt myself. And that's okay, the way I see it, because everybody stepping into the ring knows the stakes. You accept those stakes, you accept the risk—maybe you're going to get fed. No, it's not the money. Fighting, it's like,
therapy
.”

Fighters like him are the hardest to train. On one hand, he's managed to inhibit his natural instinct for survival: he understands he will get hurt, bleed, and doesn't run from it. Stifling the survival instinct—to continue fighting after being knocked down, to wipe blood out of your eyes and wade back into the fray—is a trick some fighters never master. On the other hand, his anger is dangerous: it's useless, not to mention foolish, carrying too much fury into the ring. Successful fighters learn to see their opponent as a faceless thing whose weight roughly equals their own, something vertical that must be laid horizontal. But successful fighters respect their opponents: respect their power, their stamina, their will to win. Lack of respect leads to a cocky fighter blinking up into the ring lights as the ref counts him out.

Bua completes his drills and he and Sucharit walk over to the ring. The boy's body is slick with clean, healthy sweat. He smiles. The bottom front teeth have been punched out.

“Your fighter's looking good,” I tell Sucharit.

Sucharit frowns: trainers never admit the worth of their fighters, especially in their presence. “He slow,” Sucharit says. “Like he eat lead.” He slaps the boy's toned stomach. “Hah? You eat lead, hah?”

“I thought he looked slow,” says the kid.

“When's his next fight?”

“Two wee',” Sucharit says to me. “Ban'kok.”

“Tell him I say he's a weak puncher,” the kid says. “Girl arms.”

“He understands fine,” I say. “Quit making an ass.”

“Tell him I got two friends I want him to meet,” the kid goes on, grinning. He holds up his right fist: “Bread.” He holds up the left: “And Butter.”

Sucharit puts his arm around Bua's shoulder and guides him away. “Goo' luck training.”

“Why'd you say that?” I say after they've gone. “Something in the air?”

“Air's fine.”

THE MOST WIDESPREAD MISUNDERSTANDING
surrounding the death of Johnny “The Kid” Starkley is that I killed him purposefully and maliciously because he questioned my sexuality, called me
faggot
at the weigh-in. But it had nothing to do with vengeance: I'd been trained to fight until my opponent dropped or the bell went or the ref stepped in. The bell didn't ring and Ruby Goldstein didn't step in and Starkley refused to go down so I did as I'd been trained. I didn't want to kill him. My only intent was to defeat Starkley completely, leave him lying there on the canvas. I wanted him dead
to me,
dead as a threat. Nietzsche wrote,
Every man unfolds himself in fighting.
Well, that night in Tupelo, in a ring smelling of sweat and spit and cold adrenaline, I unfolded.

My popularity skyrocketed after the fight. Everyone wanted to ink the “sanctioned murderer” to their card. But by then all the fight had drained out of me. I stared at myself in every passing mirror: nose busted so many times over it couldn't rightly be called a nose anymore, right eyelid hanging half-masted due to nerve damage, cheeks so scarred they looked like carnival taffy. I understood the same thing could've happened to Starkley in a bar or back alley for no payday at all. It's just, that way it wouldn't have been on my conscience. I started juicing hard, haunting the Cyclone with the washups and fight bums, stripping down everything I'd built.

My second week in Bangkok I drifted into the Royal Jubilee Palace arena, drawn by crowd buzz and frantic ocarina music, to see my first Muay Thai match. I was mesmerized by the pre-fight rituals, the lean tan bodies, the thrill of men in close combat. The
pureness
of it all. I knew then I'd never escape. Marvin Hagler spoke for all of us when he said,
If they cut my head open, they would find one big boxing glove. That's all I am. I live it
. You can't outrun this life. Sounds weak, I know, but it's the truth. Whether it was bred into me or whether I'd always harbored the bent has long ceased to matter.

This morning I'm watching the kid shadowbox in a wash of hot, dusty sunlight pouring through slats in the long-house roof. The kid's a bully: in sparring sessions he'll remind you of a vintage Foreman, shoving his partner around before tagging him with jabs, then a hook to the body, finishing with an uppercut flush on the knockout button. Shots so hard the other guy's eyes fog despite the headgear and oversize gloves.

Problem is he can't leave his fight in the ring. Type of alpha male who'll walk into a bar and knock the bouncer's teeth out to prove he's the toughest bastard in the place. He's got serious heart: takes sparring shots so wicked they'd cripple a bear, eats up mile after mile of road like he's starving, punches a dent in the heavy bag. But there's too much of the animal in him.

The kid's sharing the ring with Bua, shadowboxing. Sucharit's in with his boy, pointing up, down, to the side, Bua following Sucharit's pointing finger with a punch, kick, or sweep. The kid's working the opposite corner, wearing ring shoes, red trunks, and wrist wraps, flashing hard combos—double-up jab, feint, hook, hook, straight right, bob back, jab-jab, uppercut—exhaling short puffs with each punch.