The Fighter (19 page)

"We'll
see." Lou leaned back in his chair. "Can't promise anything." He
scribbled an address on the back of an unpaid hydro bill. "I noticed
you're a bleeder. One little biff and you're gushing. That's gonna hurt you in
the ring." He handed the address over. "The guy's name is Sandercott.
A lot of my guys see him."

The address led
to a housing project in the Western Hill district.

The house
occupied the final lot on a treeless lane. Its faded paint was the color of
boiled organ meat. A Datsun B-210 jacked up on blocks on the front lawn,
windows smashed, interior gutted.

Paul's knock was
answered by a man in his late fifties. Balding and rotund, he wore a ratty
housecoat cinched with a yellow extension cord.

Paul said,
"Lou sent me."

Sandercott said,
"Nose or brows?"

Before Paul
could answer Sandercott reached out and ran a nicotine- stained thumb over the
curve of his eyebrow. "Brows look okay. So, by process of elimination,
nose."

The place stunk
of deep-fryer fat. The carpet was so threadbare the nylon underweave showed
through in spots. Paul had seen houses like this only in movies, desperately
grim movies where unfit mothers nodded on heroin while their urchins splashed
in the scummy gray water of a Mister Turtle pool.

"Head on
into the shitter," Sandercott said.

The bathroom was
bright and not particularly clean. A framed needlepoint slogan over the toilet
read
if you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a
sweetie, wipe the seatie
. Sandercott
came in with a Piano tacklebox. When he opened it on the sink's edge, Paul saw
that each compartment was stocked with gauze and iodine and burn salve.

"What are
you planning on?"

"Lou didn't
tell you? Typical." Sandercott motioned to the toilet.
"Siddown."

He showed Paul a
slender brushed-aluminum tool. It looked like the soldering rod that'd come
with Paul's Unger Industrial wood- burning kit.

"Electric
cauterizing wand," Sandercott told him. "A spark gun, in layman's
terms. Fuses veins during emergency surgery."

He pushed a
silver button; a cold blue spark snapped between the conductors. The hairs on
the nape of Paul's neck stood on end.

"What I do
is cauterize the soft tissue in your nostrils. Once you scar up you'll never
bleed again, even if someone whacks your schnozz with a ball-peen hammer."

"Can't this
be done at a hospital?"

Sandercott shook
his head. "Falls under the umbrella of non-essential surgery. Plus there'd
be questions—with me it's don't ask, don't tell." He considered Paul, his
cheap white T-shirt and knocked-out teeth. "No offense, but you don't
strike me as the type who's got much choice."

He spread Paul's
nostrils with a pair of nasal retractors. After trimming the bristly nose
hairs, he took a leather thong from the tacklebox and rinsed it under the tap.

"Bite down
hard," he said. "Not going to lie, son: this'll sting like a
motherfuck."

Paul drove
through a light snow, big flakes dissolving on the windshield like spun sugar.
Plugs of blood-soaked gauze were shoved up his nostrils. His brain felt swollen
and monstrous and threatened to split his skull.

When Sandercott
had eased the spark gun up his right nostril, Paul felt the contact points butt
the ridge of cartilage, then—
tsszzzapl
!
His
mouth filled with an ozone taste; blue sparks spat between his fillings. His
spine straightened as a rope of blood geysered from his nose. The spark gun
tsszzzzappe
d again. His
nose lit up like a Chinese paper lantern. Paul puked and passed out. When he
came to, Sandercott was Q-Tipping his nostrils with petroleum burn salve.

"All
done," he said. "You did good. I'd give you a lollipop, I had one.
Got Vicodin."

"I'll take
two." With Paul's nose swollen, this came out:
I dake doo.

He arrived home
shortly after nine o'clock. The house was festooned with Christmas lights,
thousands of them. Cars lined the horseshoe drive: Lexuses and Mercedes,
Cadillacs and Porsches.

He crossed the
front lawn past a carved-ice nativity scene. Faint music from inside: Bing
Crosby's "Silver Bells." The Harrises' annual Christmas function was
in full swing.

He crept in
through the back door; his ambition was to slip down the hall into his room and
avoid the party altogether. But his mother corralled him as he breezed up the
back stairs.

"Paul,
dear." Barbara wore a strapless black dress with fake-fur trim; stuffed
reindeer antlers were tilted askew on her head. She was distracted, her gaze
lingering on the living room and her guests. "You
must
come in and
mingle, darling."

He realized he
was dealing with Socialite Barb, an altogether different creature from his
mom. Socialite Barb had her own lexicon—
Darling
and
Oh my
and
Nonsense
—and her every
mannerism was exaggerated: privy to a juicy bit of gossip, Socialite Barb would
flap a hand before her face and swoon like a silent movie actress. Socialite
Barb wouldn't be caught dead uttering "Cold as a witch's tit."

He sat on the
stairs. Taking a seat beside him, Barbara flinched at the blood on his shirt,
the toilet paper jammed up his nose. "Oh, Paul..." The socialite
veneer slipped. "What have you done to yourself?"

"I
aw'ight."

She smiled sadly
and went to touch his face, but could not quite bring herself to. "You
can't come in looking like that."

"Why oo I
hab to cub in a' aw?"

"Paul,
please. Your father and I want this to come off well." Worry
strobe-lighted across her face. "We want everything to look nice."

"'Appy
fambly."

"Yes, a
happy family. Aren't we?" She touched his shoulder; Paul thought she was
going to hug him but instead she plucked a hair off his shirt. "You've been
losing a lot of it, lately."

Another side
effect of the steroids. His shower soap was furred with so much shed hair it
looked like some headless, amputee rodent. He went upstairs and changed, shoved
fresh toilet paper up his nose, and soon found himself in a room full of people
he didn't want to talk to.

Tall, full blue
spruces decked with twinkling lights and tinsel stood on either side of the
fireplace—which, instead of an actual fire, contained a thirty-four-inch TV
playing a DVD of a crackling fire. Rita MacNeil Christmas carols on the CD
player. Guests milled about in sleekly cut dresses and dinner jackets, sipping
martinis or Seabreezes or Danish beers. Broken conversations washed over him,
so unlike the patter of the boxing gym it was nearly a foreign language.

...
got my money in at 34¼ and got out at 56¾—zoom
!...

...
four hundred thread count. Anything less, you may as well
sleep on sandpaper
...

...
Oh
no. Can't do it
Thursday. Herbal wrap. But how's Friday
?
...

...
East Timor. Who will consider the downtrodden shepherds of
East
Timor
...

His father
tended bar, dispensing Chardonnay and Veuve Clicquot with typical Jack Harris
swagger. Seeing his son with those racoon eyes and corkscrews of toilet paper
jammed up each nostril, a flinching expression crossed his face.

"Ah,
god," he said. "Have you been boxing—seriously
boxing?"

By now Jack knew
that his son had taken up the sport. The glove- burns on his face and the
bruised state of his hands, the smelly boxing shoes in the front hall.

"Whaa 'id oo
'ink?"

"I thought
you were training," Jack told him, "not actually fighting. Looks like
you got popped one—how you feel?"

"Grade,"
Paul said truthfully. "Riddy, riddy grade."

"Great?"
Jack touched his son's face, traced with thick fingers the slope of Paul's
nose. "Keep it up, son, you're gonna wind up with a face like a catcher's
mitt."

"I'b
'ine."

"Fine, he
says!" Jack spread his hands in an appeal to some unseen jury.
"Twists of TP up his nose and a pair of matching shiners—not to mention
those teeth—
this
guy's telling me he's fine." A snort. "You're too old to be a
fighter. You'll never earn a dime. Might as well teach Esperanto lessons!"

Paul was
unsurprised that, to his father, it came down to dollars and cents. He took his
bottled water to a chair in a corner of the room. Guests roamed about in bovine
patterns. Businessmen's laughs boomed like awkward thunder:
Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak!
Everyone
was so fat and satisfied. Sausagey fingers grasped at canapés; fleshy goldfish
lips sucked at cocktail glasses. The older men, the fathers, still bore traces
of a hardened life: facial scars and roughened features, a certain tautness
around the eyes indicative of past toil. But their sons' faces were scrubbed
rosy and unmarked, their manicured hands smooth as glass.

"Young
master Harris. How do, how do?"

He'd been
accosted by Drake Langley, whom Paul had last seen the night of his beating.

"'Ello,
Drake."

Tonight Langley
wore a checkerboard-patterned jacket with a ludicrous bow tie flared beneath
his jaw. His insubstantial frame was balanced on a walking stick with a silver
dog's-head handle— a Dachshund—which Drake leaned on like a vaudeville
performer at the cusp of a song-and-dance number.

"You and I
should set up a meeting..." Drake was saying,"... relative merits
and demerits of corporate reconfiguration ..." he was saying, "...
that new Porsche 911 Boxster made my dick hard just looking at the brochure
..." he was saying.

Drake's thin
lips formed a stream of inane jabber. Paul was amazed that Drake hadn't
bothered to comment on his frightful appearance—he'd nearly forgotten how
self-absorbed his old chums could be, with their spectacular ignorance of all
things outside their tiny sphere of existence. He felt he was in the presence
of an alien life form unsuited to existence on this planet: a creature to whom
oxygen was poison and water acid.