The Best of Lucius Shepard (57 page)

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Half
an hour before the fight is scheduled to start, Mears is lying on a training
table in the dressing room, alone, his wrapped hands folded on his belly. From
the arena come intermittent announcements over the PA, the crowd booing one of
the preliminary bouts, and some men are talking loudly outside his door. Mears
scarcely registers any of this. He’s trying to purge himself of fear but is not
having much success. He believes his peculiar visual trick has revealed one of
God’s great killers, and that tonight the red seed of pain in his head will
bloom and he will die, and nothing—no determined avowal, no life-affirming
hope—will diminish that belief. He could back out of the fight, he could fake
an injury of some sort, and he considers this possibility, but something—and
it’s not just pride—is pulling him onward. No matter whether or not that face
he saw is real, there’s something inhuman about Vederotta. Something evil and
implacable. And stupid. Some slowness natural to sharks and demons. Maybe he’s
not a fate, a supernatural creature; maybe he’s only malformed, twisted in
spirit. Whatever, Mears senses his wrongness the way he would a change in the
weather, not merely because of the mask but from a wealth of subtle yet
undeniable clues. All these months of imagining beasts in the ring and now he’s
finally come up against a real one. Maybe the only real one there is. The one
he always knew was waiting. Could be, he thinks, it’s just his time. It’s his time
and he has to confront it. Then it strikes him that there may be another
reason. It’s as if he’s been in training, sparring with the lesser beasts,
Alligator Man, the Fang, Snakeman, and the rest, in order to prepare for this
bout. And what if there’s some purpose to his sacrifice? What if he’s supposed
to do something out there tonight aside from dying?

Lying
there, he realizes he’s already positioned for the coffin, posed for eternity,
and that recognition makes him roll up to his feet and begin his shadowboxing,
working up a sweat. His sweat stinks of anxiety, but the effort tempers the
morbidity of his thoughts.

A
tremendous billow of applause issues from the arena, and not long thereafter,
Leon pops in the door and says, “Quick knockout, man. We on in five.” Then it
goes very fast. The shuffling, bobbing walk along the aisle through the Wichita
crowd, hearing shouted curses, focusing on that vast, dim tent of white light
that hangs down over the ring. Climbing through the ropes, stepping into the resin
box, getting his gloves checked a final time. It’s all happening too quickly.
He’s being torn away from important details. Strands of tactics, sustaining
memories, are being burned off him. He does not feel prepared. His belly knots
and he wants to puke. He needs to see where he is, exactly where, not just this
stretch of blue canvas that ripples like shallow water and the warped circles
of lights suspended in blackness like an oddly geometric grouping of suns seen
from outer space. The heat of those lights, along with the violent, murmurous
heat of the crowd, it’s sapping—it should be as bright as day in the ring, like
noon on a tropic beach, and not this murky twilight reeking of Vaseline and
concession food and fear. He keeps working, shaking his shoulders, testing the
canvas with gliding footwork, jabbing and hooking. Yet all the while he’s
hoping the ring will collapse or Vederotta will sprain something, a power
failure, anything to spare him. But when the announcer brays his weight, his
record, and name over the mike, he grows calm as if by reflex and submits to
fate and listens to the boos and desultory clapping that follows.

“His
opponent,” the announcer continues, “in the black trunks with a red stripe,
weighs in tonight at a lean and mean one hundred fifty-nine and one-half
pounds. He’s undefeated and is currently ranked number one by both the WBC and
WBA, with twenty-four wins, twenty-three by knockout! Let’s have a great big
prairie welcome for Wichita’s favorite son, Toneee! The Heat! Ve-de-rot-taaaaa!
Vederotta!”

Vederotta
dances forward into the roar that celebrates him, arms lifted above his head,
his back to Mears; then he turns, and as Leon and the cut man escort Mears to
the center of the ring for the instructions, Mears sees that menacing face
again. Those glowing eyes.

“When
I say ‘break,’ “ the ref is saying, “I want you to break clean. Case of a
knockdown, go to a neutral corner and stay there till I tell ya to come out.
Any questions?”

One
of Vederotta’s handlers puts in his mouthpiece, a piece of opaque plastic that
mutes the fiery glow, makes it look liquid and obscene; gassy red light steams
from beneath the black metal hulls that shade his eyes.

“OK,”
says the ref. “Let’s get it on.”

Vederotta
holds out his gloves and says something through his mouthpiece. Mears won’t
touch gloves with him, frightened of what this acquiescence might imply.
Instead, he shoves him hard, and once again the handlers have to intervene.
Screams from the crowd lacerate the air, and the ref admonishes him, saying,
“Gimme a clean fight, Bobby, or I’ll disqualify ya.” But Mears is listening to
Vederotta shouting fierce, garbled noises such as a lion might make with its
mouth full of meat.

Leon
hustles him back to the corner, puts in his mouthpiece, and slips out through
the ropes, saying, “Uppercuts, man! Keep throwin’ them uppercuts!” Then he’s
alone, that strangely attenuated moment between the instructions and the bell,
longer than usual tonight because the TV cameraman standing on the ring apron
is having problems. Mears rolls his head, working out the kinks, shaking his
arms to get them loose, and pictures himself as he must look from the cheap
seats, a tiny dark figure buried inside a white pyramid. The image of Amandla
comes into his head. She, too, is tiny. A doll in a blue robe, like a Madonna,
she has that kind of power, a sweet, gentle idea, nothing more. And there’s
Arlene, whom he has never seen, of whom he knows next to nothing, African and
voluptuous and mysterious like those big-breasted ebony statues they sell in
the import stores. And Leon hunkered down at the corner of the ring, sweaty
already, breath thick and quavery, peering with his pop eyes. Mears feels
steadier and less afraid, triangulated by them: the only three people who have
any force in his life. When he glances across the ring and finds that black
death’s head glaring at him, he is struck by something—he can see Vederotta.
Since his eyes went bad, he’s been unable to see his opponent until the man
closes on him, and for that reason he circles tentatively at the beginning of
each round, waiting for the figure to materialize from the murk, backing,
letting his opponent come to him. Vederotta must know this, must have seen that
tendency on film, and Mears thinks it may be possible to trick him, to start
out circling and then surprise him with a quick attack. He turns, wanting to
consult Leon, not sure this would be wise, but the bell sounds, clear and
shocking, sending him forward as inexorably as a toy set in motion by a spark.

Less
than ten seconds into the fight, goaded in equal measure by fear and hope,
Mears feints a sidestep, plants his back foot, and lunges forward behind a
right that catches Vederotta solidly above the left eye, driving him into the
ropes. Mears follows with a jab and two more rights before Vederotta backs him
up with a wild flurry, and he sees that Vederotta has been cut. The cut is on
the top of the eyelid, not big but in a bad place, difficult to treat. It shows
as a fuming red slit in that black mask, like molten lava cracking open the
side of a scorched hill. Vederotta rubs at the eye, holds up his glove to check
for blood, then hurls himself at Mears, taking another right on the way in but
managing to land two stunning shots under the ribs that nearly cave him in.
From then on it’s all downhill for Mears. Nobody, not Hagler or Hearns or
Duran, has ever hit him with such terrible punches. His face is numb from
Vederotta’s battering jab and he thinks one of his back teeth may have been
cracked. But the body shots are the worst. Their impact is the sort you receive
in a car crash when the steering wheel or the dash slams into you. They sound
like football tackles, they dredge up harsh groans as they sink deep into his
sides, and he thinks he can feel Vederotta’s fingers, his talons, groping
inside the gloves, probing for his organs. With less than a minute to go in the
round, a right hand to the heart drops him onto one knee. It takes him until
the count of five to regain his breath, and he’s up at seven, wobbly, dazed by
the ache spreading across his chest. As Vederotta comes in, Mears wraps his
arms about his waist and they go lurching about the ring, faces inches apart,
Vederotta’s arm barred under his throat, trying to push him off. Vederotta
spews words in a goblin language, wet, gnashing sounds. He sprays fiery
brimstone breath into Mears’ face, acid spittle, the crack on his eyelid
leaking a thin track of red phosphorus down a black cheek. When the ref finally
manages to separate them, he tells Mears he’s going to deduct a point if he
keeps holding. Mears nods, grateful for the extra few seconds’ rest, more
grateful when he hears the bell.

Leon
squirts water into Mears’ mouth, tells him to rinse and spit. “You cut him,” he
says excitedly. “You cut the motherfucker!”

“I
know,” Mears says. “I can see him.”

Leon,
busy with the Enswell, refrains from comment, restrained by the presence of the
cut man. “Left eye,” he says, ignoring what Mears has told him. “Throw that
right. Rights and uppercuts. All night long. That’s a bad cut, huh, Eddie?”

“Could
be a winner,” the cut man says, “we keep chippin’ on it.”

Leon
smears Vaseline on Mears’ face. “How you holdin’ up?”

“He’s
hurtin’ me. Everything he throws, he’s hurtin’ me.”

Leon
tells him to go ahead and grab, let the ref deduct the fucking points, just
hang in there and work the right. The crowd is buzzing, rumorous, and from
this, Mears suspects that he may really have Vederotta in some trouble, but
he’s still afraid, more afraid than ever now that he has felt Vederotta’s
power. And as the second round begins, he realizes he’s the one in trouble. The
cut has turned Vederotta cautious. Instead of brawling, he circles Mears,
keeping his distance, popping his jab, throwing an occasional combination,
wearing down his opponent inch by inch, a pale, indefinite monster, his face
sheathed in black metal, eyes burning like red suns at midnight. Each time
Mears gets inside to throw his shots or grab, the price is high—hooks to the
liver and heart, rights to the side of the neck, the hinge of the jaw. His face
is lumping up. Near the end of the round, a ferocious straight right to the
temple blinds him utterly in the left eye for several seconds. When the bell
rings, he sinks onto the stool, legs trembling, heartbeat ragged. Exotic eye
trash floats in front of him. His head’s full of hot poison, aching and
unclear. But oddly enough, that little special pain of his has dissipated,
chased away by the same straight right that caused his temporary blackout.

The
doctor pokes his head into the desperate bustle of the corner and asks him
where he is, how he’s doing. Mears says, “Wichita” and “OK.” When the ref asks
him if he wants to continue, he’s surprised to hear himself say, “Yeah,”
because he’s been doing little other than wondering if it would be all right to
quit. Must be some good reason, he thinks, or else you’re one dumb son of a
bitch. That makes him laugh.

“Fuck
you doin’ laughin’?” Leon says. “We ain’t havin’ that much fun out there. Work
on that cut! You ain’t done diddly to that cut!”

Mears
just shakes his head, too drained to respond.

The
first minute of the third round is one of the most agonizing times of Mears’
life. Vederotta continues his cautious approach, but he’s throwing heavier
shots now, headhunting, and Mears can do nothing other than walk forward and
absorb them. He is rocked a dozen times, sent reeling. An uppercut jams the
mouthpiece edge-on into his gums and his mouth fills with blood. A hook to the
ear leaves him rubber-legged. Two rights send spears of white light into his
left eye and the tissue around the eye swells, reducing his vision to a slit. A
low blow smashes the edge of his cup, drives it sideways against his testicles,
causing a pain that brings bile into his throat. But Vederotta does not follow
up. After each assault he steps back to admire his work. It’s clear he’s
prolonging things, trying to inflict maximum damage before the finish. Mears
peers between his gloves at the beast stalking him and wonders when that other
little red-eyed beast inside his head will start to twitch and burn. He’s
surprised it hasn’t already, he’s taken so many shots.

When
the ref steps in after a series of jabs, Mears thinks he’s stopping the fight,
but it’s only a matter of tape unraveling from his left glove. The ref leads
him into the corner to let Leon retape it. He’s so unsteady, he has to grip the
ropes for balance, and glancing over his shoulder, he sees Vederotta spit his
mouthpiece into his glove, which he holds up like a huge red paw. He expects
Vederotta to say something, but all Vederotta does is let out a maniacal shout.
Then he reinserts the mouthpiece into that glowing red maw and stares at Mears,
shaking his black and crimson head the way a bear does before it charges,
telling him—Mears realizes—that this is it, there’s not going to be a fourth
round. But Mears is too wasted to be further intimidated, his fear has bottomed
out, and as Leon fumbles with the tape, giving him a little more rest, his
pride is called forth, and he senses again just how stupid Vederotta is, bone
stupid, dog stupid, maybe just stupid and overconfident enough to fall into the
simplest of traps. No matter what happens to him, Mears thinks, maybe he can do
something to make Vederotta remember this night.