The Fighter (9 page)

After
a half-hour Reuben parked the truck. He stepped out of the cab and booted the
door shut—the Dodge's door and rocker panel were cratered with dents, the
result of many years' worth of kicks. Rob didn't like it when his father hoofed
the Green Machine; to him it seemed the equivalent of kicking an old trail nag
who'd only done its job, albeit fitfully.

Reuben
said, "You really screwed the pooch today, I don't mind telling you."

"I
was concentrating on my footwork."

"And
playing pattycakes with the bag. Trust me on this: no boxer's ever signed a
million-dollar fight deal on account of his footwork."

Paul
Harris sat on bleachers overlooking an empty baseball diamond. Browned grass,
sky the color of stone.

His
face still bore evidence of the beating. Lingering yellow traceries ringed his
eye sockets. No dentist, so still the open gaps in his smile. Paul hadn't set
foot in the winery for a while now; instead he'd spent his days in the field
with the pickers.

He'd
rise at four o'clock, dress warmly, and slip past his parents' room out into
the pre-dawn darkness. The pickers were up by the time he arrived: sitting
around the tractor-hub fire, they kneaded tired muscles and wrapped their
fingers in tape. The men cinched buckets to their waists and stepped out into
the rows. Paul would thread a bucket's nylon strap through his belt loop and
grab a box cutter, testing its sharpness by running the blade over his thumb.
After finding a quiet row, he'd get to work.

He'd
walk in darkness for a minor eternity before the sun rose over the vineyard.
The rows stretched on forever: a span of twisted vines and frozen grapes. His
right thigh became one massive bruise from the constant bumping of bucket
against leg. The pickers were baffled:
Wey you looka da
bubu,
they'd
whisper.
Nice wa'am office, fine caa and suits—ees out 'ere workin
wid us!
Paul
was looked out for as though he were an accident-prone child: the pickers
shared their lunches and taught him to wrap hot embers in tinfoil, dropping
them in his coat pocket to warm his hands.

Late
in the first week his father had found him in the fields. "What the
hell?" Jack Harris asked his son. "I mean,
what... the ...
hell
?
'

Paul
tugged a pair of ski goggles down around his neck; a figure eight of pale skin
ringed his eyes. Jack Harris was puffing. Gobs of mud clung to his pant legs.

"This
is goddamn ridiculous—mucking around in the slop."

"Thought
I'd try something different."

"What's
so different about it? People have picked grapes for centuries—that is until a
few of us wised up and hired someone else to do it for us."

"It's
honest work. The great outdoors. Fresh air."

"Fresh
air? Have you been reading
Iron John
or something?" Jack looked
ready to grab his son's arm and drag him back to the office. Harsh and
forcible: jerk the ball-joint from his shoulder socket, if need be. But some
fresh element in his son's bearing steered him off this course of action.
"I know what you're trying to prove, but it's all a bit silly."

"Compared
to what," said Paul, "that art show Mom dragged us to?"

"Oh,
what are you bringing up that nightmare for?"

"It's
the sort of thing I think about out here. Ridiculous stuff."

A
few months previous they'd attended a conceptual art exhibit at his mother's
request—the artist, Naveed, was the son of his mother's Pilates instructor. The
opening gala was a black-tie affair at a downtown gallery; the exhibit was
tided "The Commercialization of Waste." A huge vaulted chamber
displayed various bodily wastes. Milk jugs filled with excrement. Jars of piss
on marble colonnades. Egg cartons full of toenail clippings. A salt shaker full
of cayenne pepper flakes—in actuality, scabs. Naveed was dressed in flannel
jammies, the sort kids wear with the sewn-on booties. He made sure to clarify
that every ounce of waste had been produced by his own body. The smell was
ungodly. Everyone must have been thinking the same thing:
Sperm in Ziploc bags and turds in milk jugs—this is art?
Paul and his folks had left
without a word.

"What
I'm trying to say is," said Jack, "this environment doesn't suit
you." He lowered his voice, as though fearful the vines were bugged.
"What if someone sees you—a potential investor?"

Paul
razored a grape cluster free and dropped it into his bucket. "No, I'll
stay. This is real life, right? This is good for me."

"Vitamins
are good for you. High colonics are good for you. This is idiotic."

But
Paul felt better than he had in years. Up before dawn, ten hours of
backbreaking field labor, collapse into an oblivious, dreamless sleep. The air
was so cold and the labor so demanding that its effect was to flatten out his
mind. Hours would pass without a single concrete thought: just empty, static
wind gusting and swirling through his head, snatches of songs repeating
themselves in an endless loop. The seething anger that so often manifested
itself in other forms—as cold nausea, as nameless dread—was, if not erased, at
least temporarily buried under the weight of physical exhaustion.

Jack
grabbed the bucket at his son's waist and shook it violently. "I was out
here when you were a baby," he said. "It was not
good.
It was miserable and torturous but it needed to be done so's I could get
that." He pointed at the winery. "A means to an end."

"But
you turned out all right, didn't you? Who's to say those days weren't the
reason?"

Jack
picked up a clod of earth and crushed it between his fingers. "Y'know, I
said to myself, Let him go. I said, He'll come around. But you're out here all
day and I may as well be living with a phantom for all I see you around the
house. Your mother's worried sick—"

"Is
she really?" Paul hadn't spoken more than two words to his mother in days;
he wasn't altogether sure how she'd taken to his new endeavor.

"Sure
she is," Jack said. "We're all worried. And I don't get it. Some
shitkicker beat you up. Big deal. I never told you this, but I took a shit-
kicking for a gas-n-dash years ago. This pump jockey whapped me over the head
with a squeegee and had me seeing stars. Then he dragged me out behind the
lifts and put the boots to me. I was in such bad shape he had to let me go: the
cops would've booked me on attempted robbery, but I would've made damn sure he
got booked for assault."

Paul
laughed. "Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"Why
the hell would I? It's not my habit to go around telling stories that cast me
in an unfavorable light."

Jack
looked at his son. In truth, the kid looked pretty good. He'd shed a few pounds
and packed muscle onto his legs and shoulders; in all, he looked more like the
son he'd imagined. Perhaps getting the stuffing knocked out of him had done him
some good. Still, it was as if he'd taken a step down the evolutionary
ladder—become stronger, harder even, but less cultured. Even now Jack could
smell him: ripe and musky like the first whiff of a logger's shack. Problem
was, his son's devolution was a threat to their shared futures. What self-
respecting woman would marry a man who picked grapes all day and came at her
with calloused, purple-stained fingers? How could he pass the business down to
a son happy to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder when he'd been earmarked
for the highest?

"Picking
season's over in two weeks," he said. "I'm not sure what you plan to
do then—run off into the forest and live off the land? Some hobo kick? Steal
clothes off laundry lines and sleep in drainage ditches?"

"Maybe
I'll pack a bindle and ride the rails. King of the open road, uh?"

Jack
was appalled. "You're an infuriating little turd—do you know that? You're
like a kid who runs away but only makes it to the end of the block and sits in
the bushes for a few hours, coming home when it's dark and cold and he's got
the hungries in his tum-tum."

His
father's temper was like a busted speedometer: it was impossible to tell how
fast and hot his engine was running. He could go from zero to bastard in
fifteen seconds flat.

"I
love you, Daddy."

"Shut
up, why don't you?" Jack's temper downshifted. "If you're fixed on
staying out here, you're getting paid like everyone else—by the bucket. Expect
your next paycheck to be significantly smaller, old boy old chum."

"Just
pay me what I'm worth."

"You're
worth a lot more than what you've settled for here." Jack looked wretched,
like a tank had run over him and left him lying there in the dirt. "And
for god's sake get your fucking teeth looked after."

When
the picking season ended the field workers went home to their wives and
children to await the spring thaws. Paul did not return to the winery. He
passed his days driving the city.

He
would set out at dawn with the pale moon hanging over the lake and streets dark
with night rain. He drove without motive or clear destination. He parked at the
GM factory gates as the workers waited in line to buy coffee and Danish from a
silver-paneled snack truck. He idled outside the bus terminal as drivers walked
to their buses beneath strung halogens with newspapers folded under their arms.
He spied
on janitors sitting on picnic tables behind the Hotel Dieu
hospital, chatting and laughing, dousing cigarettes in soup tins filled with
rainwater. Paul felt a huge sense of disassociation watching these men,
floating, unattached to anything he understood. Men whose lives he'd never
considered because they were unlike any he'd ever aspired to.

What had he ever
really aspired to?

He drove to
Jammer's gym in his replacement wheels: a Nissan Micra, on loan from the
dealership. Paul had expressly requested the crappiest loaner in the lot and
the Micra fit the bill: raggedy and rust-eaten with a sewing machine engine,
power nothing, K-Tel's
Hits of the 80s
lodged in the tape deck. Even once his BMW was fixed, Paul stuck with the
Micra.

He steered
through the lights at Church and St. Paul. "Big Country," by the
Scottish group of the same name, blasted from the tinny speakers. He butted
the Micra into a streetside parking spot, fed the meter, and headed into the
gym.

It was sparsely
populated: bored housewives going nowhere on the elliptical machines,
university kids in the weight room. He donned his gym garb and hit the weights.

He'd started
coming after picking let off. The only time he'd even considered working out
before now was the time when, maudlinly drunk at three a.m., he'd ordered a
Bowflex after watching an infomercial. But his existential despair had
evaporated the next morning and the unassembled Bowflex, still in its box, was
consigned to the role of mouse-turd receptacle in the backyard greenhouse.

Paul slapped a
pair of weight plates on the bench press. He watched an anorexic-looking chick
with fake tits run treadmill laps. Boobs bouncing, lathered in sweat, her face
contorted into a look of desperate intensity unique to Olympic hopefuls and
women of a Certain Age. An old dude with a toxic tanning-bed tan—his skin the
diseased orange hue of a boiled tangerine—was rowing to Jehovah on an erg
machine. Paul glanced away, mildly revolted, and caught the proprietor making
a beeline for him.

Stacey Jamison
struck the casual observer as a man who'd been given a girl's name at birth and
had spent his life trying to outrun the association. At five-foot-four and
nearly three hundred pounds, there was nothing on the guy that wasn't
monstrous. His legs and arms and neck were like a telephone pole chainsawed
into five sections. His body was networked in thick veins pushed to the surface
of his skin by the sheer density of muscle tissue.