The Fighter (6 page)

"Take
a bite out of it, like a juicy apple—
rowf!"

"Oh,
my...
god."

Jack
chuckled, easing himself off the desk. "Ah, come off it—your old man's
married, not dead." He frowned. "Get your damn teeth fixed, will you?
Look like you ought to be offering hayrides through Appalachia."

The
offices connected to the distillery down a stone corridor.

Paul
walked down rows of gleaming steel tanks. Back in high school he'd snuck in
here with his buddies; they tapped the spigots and guzzled Merlot until their
teeth were stained the color of mulberries before stumbling out into the
vineyard to reel through the darkened rows. The evidence was damning—smashed
glasses on the distillery floor, vines trampled by clumsy drunken feet—and
surely his father had known, but his only comment was that the Angel's Share
had been uncommonly high those seasons.

A
door gave onto a small portico overlooking the vineyard. In the summertime it
was a spectacular view: vines unfurling over the gullies and rises in lines
planted straight as the hairs on a doll's scalp. On early spring nights you
could actually hear them growing: a faint creaking like worn leather stretched
over a pommel.

A
group of men moved along the trellis lines at the vineyard's far edge.

Every
spring Paul's father hired a crew of Caribbean fieldworkers. He wasn't the only
one: most Niagara wineries hired crews from Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Ecuador,
supplementing this core with university students who were generally shiftless
and unreliable, prone to begging off on sunny days better spent at the beach.
Paul once accompanied his father to Pearson airport to pick up a crew of
pickers. They'd shared the Arrivals lounge with the owners of several local
wineries, and as the pickers disembarked, calls of
Pillittieri crew, here!
and
Stonechurch, over here!
rang out while the workers stood around, dazed and
jet-lagged, trying to recall the name of the winery that had hired them.

Today
they were picking frozen grapes for ice wine. Winemakers waited until frosts
hardened the grapes into withered purple pellets before harvesting.

"I
thought you guys might like some help," he told them.

Nervous
glances passed between the pickers. The owner's kid standing there in his
eight-hundred-dollar suit. Was he joking? White folks had such an odd sense of
humor.

Paul
cinched a red kidney-shaped bucket to his hip. The black nylon strap, crusted
with dirt and crushed grape skins, left muddy streaks on his jacket. A picker
with a mess of dreadlocks pinned atop his head said, "Is okay, okay,"
a gentle dissuasion, "go on back, mahn."

The
cold drew Paul's face in, thinned it down, tightened the skin to the bone.
Anger twined around his brain, a thread fine as catgut slowly tightening. What
the hell were they looking so damn sullen for—he was offering help. His father
owned the goddamn place, he'd flown them up here and wrote their checks, and if
Paul wanted to pick a few grapes he could fucking well pick grapes.

"Where
should I start?"

The
guy glanced at the others, shrugged, pointed to a far row.

Paul
worked his way down the trellis line, stumbling over the frozen earth, knocking
his bucket with a knee, wincing. Grapes hung in shriveled clusters, touched
with a glaze of frost that looked like powdered sugar. They landed in the
bucket with a metallic clink. Some broke open: their insides resembled a geode,
all those sparkling sugars. The sweat on his back and chest cooled, sending a
chill through his body. Vine ends punched through his fingertips like blunt
needles.

A
picker crossed over the rows and gave Paul his toque: bright orange with
sunoco
woven across the front, topped
with an orange and white pompom. It stunk of dirt and sweat and of the picker
himself. Paul couldn't recall the last time he'd worn clothes that weren't
solely his own; he'd never worn a black person's clothes, not once. The picker
made Paul hold out his hands while he wrapped strips of duct tape around his
fingers to protect them from the sharp vines. He wrapped with his head down:
Paul glimpsed his shaven head pitted with gouges and dents and a scar that
curled halfway round his skull. He wondered how the man acquired those wounds:
accidents, surgeries, fights? That night, before falling asleep, he would pass
a hand over his own scalp, dismayed to find it smooth and featureless as an
egg.

Wind
kicked up from the west, blowing grit across the fields. The pickers bundled up
in scarves and tattered parkas; one drew a pair of ski goggles down over his
eyes.

He
dragged his body down the rows, arms and legs and joints aching, socks glued to
his feet with blood and burst blisters. He emptied his bucket into a hopper and
stumbled back into the field, momentarily relieved from the constant burden at
his hip. But soon the bucket filled and though he felt his will deserting he
pushed on, whiting out his mind, thinking not of pain or relief or other
options.

Didn't
every organism by nature seek the easiest pathway to survival? Then what of the
organism reared in an environment without predators or obstacles, its every
need provided? Paul pictured a flabby boneless creature, shapeless, as soft and
raw as the spot under a picked scab.

In
some religions it was a sin for a man to die without the knowledge of how much
suffering he could endure.

When
the sun dipped behind the pines of the escarpment, Paul carted his final bucket
to the hopper. His shoes were ruined, his pants caked in mud. He became aware
of the powerful funk of his body and relished that smell.

The
pickers sat around a fire stoked in the rusted rim of an old tractor tire. An
urn of coffee perked on a charred grill above the flames and one of them poured
Paul's measure into a beaten tin cup. They sat in the lengthening twilight
enclosed by flat autumn fields. The coffee was so strong it stung his gums
where they no longer moored teeth. He gave the toque back to the young man
who'd lent it, then took the

Ray
Bans from his shirt pocket and handed them over too. It no longer concerned him
who saw his pulped eye or busted mouth.

He
waved goodnight and set off across the cool evening rows. Reaching the winery
he found the doors locked. Callie and his father had gone home for the night.

Paul
keyed the BMW's ignition and pulled onto the road. He drove past orchards and
sod farms and cows sleeping along barbed-wire fences. For a two-mile stretch
all light vanished as he drove under a moonless sky. The eyes of feral night
creatures flashed in roadside gullies.

He
drove on across a one-lane bridge spanning the QEW, over the isolated
headlights of travelers driving south into the city, a trail of taillights
twisting north to Toronto. The heater's warmth restored feeling to his fingers.

Driving
too fast, Paul slewed into the shale of the breakdown lane. He tromped the
brake pedal but the front end slid over the culvert and slammed into an
iced-over ditch. The airbag deployed: a moon-white zit exploding into his face.

Paul
sat with his face buried in the silken skin of the airbag. Something was
burning, wiring most likely, the smell like a blazing iron scorching linen. He
considered going to sleep: the airbag made a comfortable enough pillow. But
then he considered the possibility of a ruptured gas tank, pictured a greasy
orange fireball billowing into the night.

He
gave the door a boot and stepped out. His loafers slipped in the ditch. He went
down on his ass, cracking his head on the doorframe. He sat in the frozen mud
with his feet in ditch water. A rime of ice slashed his trousers and cut into
the backs of his calves. The air reeked of engine coolant. The BMW's grille
butted a patch of crushed cattails.

Craning
his neck, he saw amidst the cattails the squat outline of the tree stump that had
decimated his car. He had no means of calling for a tow truck and felt mildly
regretful for having garburated his cellphone.

On
the other side of the ditch lay a cornfield. He recalled a movie where the
characters walked into a cornfield and into new life. It was a pleasant
thought. To become something else, a whole new person. No money or name or past
or worries or hunger—a solitary wanderer upon the country's heat-shimmered
highways, its open-topped boxcars filled with chicken feed and baled pulp, its
slashes of wilderness, its lightning storms and lost spaces. He'd befriend a
dog with two- tone eyes and together they could fight small-town corruption....

Then
it dawned on him what a stupid notion it was. Walk into a cornfield and vanish.
Ride the rails with a crime-fighting dog. What was he, an idiot?

He
hauled himself from the ditch. It couldn't be more than a few degrees above
freezing. He considered the possibility of dying somewhere along this isolated
country lane. He pictured some gormless dirt farmer coming across his body
tomorrow morning: Paul Harris in his dirt-caked suit and two-hundred-dollar
loafers, frozen stiff in mid-stride with a rigor-mortis boner tenting his
trousers. Ole Popsicle Paul Harris with a snot icicle hanging from his schnozz.

Shoving
his hands deep in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, he set off. He had
only a vague notion of how far it might be. But, if not resigned to his fate,
he was at least accepting of whatever it might hold.

Robert
Tully woke in the cool exhaust-scented morning. He reached blindly for clothes
he'd laid out the evening before, laced his sneakers with sleep-clumsy fingers.
Coming downstairs, he misjudged the second-to-last step and stubbed his toe,
cursing softly. Water pipes clattered behind the thin walls. The small bedroom
off the kitchen was empty: his uncle was either pulling an all-nighter at the
Fritz or already at Top Rank. He pulled a sweatshirt off its hook in the front
hall, tugging the hood over his head and cinching the drawstrings.

A
clear fall morning, air thick with a silvery chemical smell borne down from the
SGL Carbon plant along Hyde Park Boulevard. He ran north on 24th, past
abandoned shopping carts and junked cars with garbage bags taped over shattered
windows, old tires and cast-off water tanks rusting in the weeds. He juked
around spots where the sidewalk buckled and lapped, on past bodegas with ads
for Wonder Bread and menthol Kents taped to bulletproof windows and stores
without names: just neon signs blinking
L-l-Q-u-o-R.

He
turned west on Pine Avenue, warming up, perspiration beading on his forehead
and below his eyes. At the corner of Pine and Portage a wrecker's crane sat
immobile on the remnants of a pizza joint shut by the health authority. Always
plenty of demolition going on: buildings torn down and rubble carted away, but
nothing new ever put up. Empty lots dotted the streets and avenues, lifeless
but for the profusion of weeds. It was as though a consortium of concerned
citizens was buying up the neighborhood, bulldozing the homes and shops,
sterilizing one block at a time in hopes that someday they might start over
fresh.

Robert
had a good sweat going by the time he hit Main. Running on the wet grass
bordering the sidewalk, shadowboxing, flashing quick left jabs and the
occasional right cross. Cars and trucks fled by on the double-lane road, people
heading to work at factories or outlet malls. In the early light he made out
the Rainbow Bridge as a harp of steel and concrete spanning the surging river.