Those That Wake

THE FIGHTER

AN OLD MAN WAS WALKING along a dirt path running parallel to the side of a paved road. He made little effort to hide his suspicion when two teenagers appeared from out of the field and asked him what town they were coming into.

“East Woodman,” he told them in a cracked voice.

“In New York,” Mal said, trying to sound as though he already knew it and was just mentioning it casually.

The man nodded.

“Somewhere we could catch a bus, sir?” Laura asked.

The man lifted a dry, bony finger and pointed back down the road the way he had come, at the row of eight or nine buildings that was the center of town.

“General store,” he said.

Laura smiled and thanked him, and she led Mal off in that direction.

East Woodman didn’t have a main street; East Woodman was a main street. A garage, a bar, and the general store were interspersed with two houses and two trailers. Past the properties, back in the field, the figures of Remak and Mike were no longer apparent. They were making another approach, or Remak had browbeaten Mike into hiking on to the next town, wherever that was. The mountain they had come down from was only partially visible, swallowed up by thickening forest. Of the tesseract, or whatever that prison was, there was no sign at all.

In the general store, they were informed that a bus stopped out front, destined—eventually—for Port Authority, New York City, every Monday and Thursday, which was tomorrow, at around 1:30.

Laura paid forty-eight dollars for their tickets from the one hundred seventy-five dollars that remained of her emergency money. Mal made an embarrassed attempt to contribute the twelve dollars he had in his pocket only to have Laura wave it away.

“Is there someplace to stay in town?” Laura asked the proprietor sweetly, knowing how this must look.

“Ways down Route Ten,” the woman behind the counter said with neither reprimand nor approval. “That way.” She pointed for them.

They spent another seven dollars for sandwiches and drinks, which they wolfed and guzzled, seated on the stoop in front of the store, just beside its rusting air pump.

Laura took her wallet out, pulled cash and the hard photo of her parents hugging her in the snow. She looked at the scene and was struck hollow by the idea that, if she died, no one would remember that these people ever loved one another and the love would be forgotten, as though it had never even existed in the first place.

“You look happy,” Mal said, looking over her shoulder at the picture. “All of you.”

“I lost my past, Mal. That’s where I come from. Without that, without them, I don’t know where I’m going.”

Mal looked down at his boots for some time. When he looked up, he stared straight into her eyes.

“I think you make your own future, Laura. And once you have, no one can take it away from you, either.”

She looked at Mal, her bright blue eyes shining with sorrow and fear, and something else, too.

“What do you think is happening to us, Mal?”

“I think there’s a secret machinery that makes the world work that we’re not supposed to see, and we saw it. And now we’re paying the price.”

As she looked back at him, her face got hard, determined not to back down from the idea.

“But we’re going to go back and get your brother out of it,” she said. “And my parents, too.”

She put her hand on his shoulder softly. Then she pushed herself up and walked over to the garbage can sitting by the door and took her wallet, filled with plastic cards that connected her to the world and maybe the secret machinery behind it, and tossed it in with the trash.

They hiked along Route Ten, not keen for more walking, but energized enough by the food in their bellies.

Three miles farther on was a dusty motel, squatting alone amidst an expanse of highway and grassy field.

Laura laid out another seventy-eight dollars for a single room.

“Single rooms only got one bed,” the gawky counter man, little more than a teenager himself, said with a lascivious tone.

Mal was about to suggest separate rooms, but Laura cut him off.

“That’s fine,” she said with finality, holding her hand impatiently out for the key.

The room was tiny, but it had a shower, of which Laura gratefully availed herself. When Mal had finished, too, she was sitting on the side of the bed in her loose sweater. Both of them were nicked and scratched from top to bottom.

Mal would have been pleased to sleep on the sofa or in the tub, had the room contained either of those. But other than the bed, there was only a small table and a seat. Laura saw him eyeing the floor and spoke up.

“Mal, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, but this is all the money we have, and I don’t think I could handle sleeping alone in a strange place tonight. I think we can sleep in the same bed after everything we’ve been through.”

He nodded slowly then he lowered himself into the bed, at first with clear discomfort and then with a gushing breath of great relief.

Laura, amused at how such a large person could compress himself into the merest quarter of an already small bed, set herself down along the other side.

The room was dark and silent but for the hum of the air outside and the occasional thrum of a passing car.

“So,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “You’re a Mets fan?”

Laura glanced at her father’s Mets cap sitting forlornly on the table. “My dad is. Was. I guess he still is. I just don’t know if he’s my dad anymore. He gave it to me for my tenth birthday because that’s how old he was when he got it.” She could see her father’s face in that moment, bearing the funny, lopsided grin that Laura sometimes saw smiling back at her in the mirror.

“It’s nice to have a family that loves you,” Mal said. “It makes you strong.”

She wasn’t sure if Mal was telling her or asking her. She rolled over so she was on her side and she curled her legs up to her chest and put her hands between her cheek and the pillow.

“What’s Tommy like?” she asked. He could feel her bright blue eyes on the side of his face like a strobe light, studying his scars.

“God, I barely know him,” he said with quiet disgust. “I left home early and I … I never went back for him.”

“You know him, Mal,” she said with absolute certainty. “He’s your brother. What’s he like?”

“He was always angry, itching for a fight,” he said after a short time. “But once he started them, he fell apart. When he was young, he’d let go at my father, because he knew my father would sit and take it. But he’d never even look the wrong way at Sharon, my mother. When he got older, he was a skinny kid, never got my dad’s build. He’d pick fights with bigger kids, and half the time, I ended up finishing them.”

“An older brother who had to hide behind his younger brother.” Laura said it as if she could feel the shame of it. And hearing it in Laura’s voice, Mal tasted that shame himself for the first time.

“God, it made him so angry,” he said.

“Not at you,” Laura consoled.

“Definitely at me. Much angrier at me than at the kids who wanted to beat him.”

“No, Mal,” she said with a gentle smile that brooked no argument. “Angry at himself. Furious.”

Mal’s chest went hollow at the idea. He had been carrying around Tommy’s anger for such a long, long time. It was moments before he could speak again.

“My father always said that, in a fight, you have to use your anger. If it uses you, you crash and burn.”

“It’s kinda the same with life, I think.”

“It was for Tommy. And for Sharon.”

“Your parents didn’t get along,” Laura said.

“My mother … doesn’t really get along with anyone.”

Laura looked at him, the scars masking with fierceness something quiet and sad and even innocent on his face. He had his hands under his head now, his tightly muscled arms spread at the sides. The cover exposed part of his chest, which also had nicks and welts, some of them recent enough to be raised and red.

She put her hand onto his chest, touching one of the marks gently. She felt him tense, but she kept her hand on his warm skin and moved it until she could feel the slow, steady beat of his heart. After a time, his hand came down and covered hers.

Laura’s thoughts quieted. Ten minutes later, she could still feel Mal breathing shallowly and knew that sleep hadn’t found him yet, either.

“Would you tell me about your father, Mal?”

He turned his head and looked down into her eyes, and she felt her heart stutter for an unexpected moment. Then he looked up again and let the memories out.


Mal sat in school, paying less attention even than usual. There was a bandage taped across the bridge of his nose, wet with blood from recent damage. An unusual sight on most eleven-year-olds. Unfortunately, it was not particularly surprising to see evidence of rough treatment on Mal; a bruise, a cut, a welt—his classmates barely noticed it anymore. What was surprising that day, to Mal as much as anyone, was to see his father in school, his bleary, roughed-up face rotating back and forth with confusion as he wandered down the hall peering through the windows in the doors. It was more surprising still to have him come into the classroom, interrupting the teacher, who was at first irate and then, sizing up the intruder, cautiously silent as the fighter put a big hand on his boy’s shoulder and led him out of the room, down the hall, and out of the school.

He marched his boy into the subway and eventually to a beat-up old tenement, which Mal didn’t recognize. The father took the son up three flights of stairs, unlocked a door with a key from his pocket, and brought him in. He sat down on a thick, dusty chair and stood his boy in front of him, hands on his shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes.

“This is home now, Mal,” he said. Max’s face was full of dents and dings. Even on days when no fight had come along for weeks, the face was puffy in places, trying to find its original form, unknown for many, many years.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not going back to your ma. That’s gonna get you killed.” He touched his boy’s nose gently. Max had bandaged it himself, from the kit he kept in the bathroom. “You and me both.”

The gash had been left across the bridge of Mal’s nose last night. His mother had come stumbling back into the house, using one hand to steady herself on the wall and the other to bring a tall bottle half full of sloshing golden liquid to her slurring lips.

Mal had watched her from the seat where he read his book. Schoolwork was by and large ignored, but at the beginning of every week, his father brought home a book from the library, one for Mal and one for his older brother. Max didn’t care if schoolwork got done, but those books had better be read by the end of the week or for a month there was no going out to the gym to watch the fights.

Now, Mal looked somberly over the cover of his book at his mother’s return. And naturally, she saw the eyes, as she was meant to.

She began screaming at him about respect and how he goddamn well better not be looking at her, lying in wait every night for her return so he could judge her. Then her voice got quiet, and that was when Mal knew trouble, real trouble, was coming. He rose from the chair, intending to retreat to his room, where Tommy waited. Tommy would scream at Max, rail at him, while Max looked down with tired, drowning eyes. But Tommy would never let loose on Sharon. He was good at looking for a fight, except when one was really coming. Tommy knew it was one of his father’s fight nights, and he knew what time it was, and he knew he should be in their room then, no matter what. Mal knew to be in his room at these times, too, but he never was.

Mal rose to leave now. His mother had struck him before, once or twice even tried to kick him. He was getting too big, though, and he could take the blows without flinching, and that would only enrage her more. So tonight he would retreat. And, for no reason in particular, tonight Sharon wasn’t going to allow it. She admonished him in her harsh near-whisper not to dare walk out on her, and the bottle of liquor shot from her hand and blasted apart on the wall, inches from Mal’s face. Had she meant to hit him with it or merely scare him? He never knew. But a shard of glass caught him across the bridge of the nose, deep enough so that the mark would never leave.

Max came home from fighting that night and saw his son sitting in the darkened room, the smear of red across the boy’s face lit by flickering city lights through the sooty windows. Max took his boy into the bathroom and dressed the wound silently. Max finished the bandages and let out a long hard breath and shook his head.

The next day he collected his boy in school.

“But what about Tommy?” Mal asked, facing his father in his new home.

“I’m sorry, Mal. Tommy is … I don’t know how I can explain this to you. Tommy is your mother’s. I can’t do a thing about that. It’s always been that way. You were mine, and she gave you hell just like she gave me. And Tommy was hers. I can’t make you understand any better than that.”

Mal didn’t understand at all. He had never seen his father give up on anything, anything. Why should the first thing he ever gave up on be his own son?

So Mal cried. Wailed like an infant. For the first time in either of their lives, and for the last, Max grabbed his son and pulled him close and hung on to him so tight that it hurt. Mal went on and on with it, and Max never let go. Somewhere in that time, Mal felt his father’s chest shaking, too. But it was a hard, tight shake, and Mal looked up and saw through his own tears that his father was not crying. His face was dry. It showed nothing; a blunt, stupid refusal to back down.

Mal saw Tommy in school, sometimes over the next year, more bruises on his face, his shoulders slumping a little bit worse each time. At first, Mal approached him, but Tommy turned away and hurried off to class. Eventually, Mal cornered him in the playground, grabbed him by the shirt, and pushed him up against a wall, demanding an explanation. Tommy kicked and spit and screamed, and Mal couldn’t hold him any longer. The year after that, Tommy was gone. Sharon had moved to another place, another school district. Mal listened, waited for word of Tommy. It came: Tommy was getting beaten up, was stealing things, had been suspended, had moved again. Somewhere, in the space between the parents, the brothers had lost each other.

***

Max worked at the gym all hours, filled it in with spare jobs at the dock, scrounging a pittance from six in the morning until nine or ten at night. On fight nights, it was later still. Mal would generally not see him until the next morning, purple and yellow in spots and maybe limping or favoring an arm, but with a particular set of his jaw and an upward line in his lips that was only there after a fight night. Sometimes he would sit with Mal and tell old stories, myths of men battling monsters until one was dead. That was all Max knew about: fighting and stories of men who fought and killed or died.

Mal would wake up, put the bacon on, and roust his father, and on some mornings his father would have new bruises and welts, even though there hadn’t been a scheduled fight the night before. Max just shambled out to the table or off to work, slow and limping, once or twice even blind in one eye.

By the time he was thirteen, Mal was big, like his father. After school, two schoolmates would bring Mal to an old, dilapidated park. There, down a path, under a stone bridge that was rotting with moss and solitude, they entered him into bare-knuckle fights against amateur fighters. Not boys, these fighters, not other school kids looking for a rough time, but men who made a sick and dirty living at this. When Mal won, he got the cash prize, which sat on the ground in a pile held down by a rock until the fight was over. Mal started to come home bruised and battered himself on occasion, but that never bothered Max. Maybe, Mal wondered, it was even a badge of pride. Though he didn’t have to wonder for long.

One afternoon, as Mal hunched on a rock with blood trailing a river down his face and onto his bare chest, a shadow fell across him.

“You hit like a pile driver, but you’re too hot to throw a punch. It makes your guard too low on the right.” His father was looking down at him.

Mal looked back, through a partial red blur. As always, his father’s face was unreadable.

“How long have you known?” Mal asked.

“How long? Who do you think told those kids in your class to bring you here?”

“What?” The word stretched out in Mal’s own ears as the world around him was drowned out by the suddenly shattering volume of his heartbeats.

“I would have taken you myself, Mal, but I didn’t want them to see us together right away. I thought they might make it extra hard on you or something.”

Was Mal supposed to thank him? Be grateful or proud, revolted or terrified? He felt none of those things. That was the moment Mal realized he was all alone in the world.

***

At fifteen, Mal started working at the gym after school. One day, as inexplicably as Sharon deciding to hurl that bottle, Tommy showed up at the gym. He was taller now, but had always been thin and still was. His face, though, had become like his mother’s: hard, resentful, unyielding.

“Heard you were working here now,” Tommy said, as though they were simply old pals who had a hard time staying in touch.

Mal nodded, in terror of saying the wrong thing and maybe driving Tommy off forever.

“I’m gonna get a job, too, soon as I can; get out of the house. Mom’s got a new guy. It’s not working so well for me.”

“Are you all right, Tommy?” Mal asked.

“Yeah.” Tommy looked up, insulted. “I’m fine. Her shit can’t hurt me.” He was angry now. It toppled out of him, as it always had, like an uncontrollable flood. “You can’t hurt me, either, Mal. You ran away.” His face was red and he skewered the air between them with an accusing finger. “You and Dad both.”

Mal backed down, tried to calm him. He asked if they could meet somewhere, for a sandwich, maybe. Just to talk. Tommy agreed and never showed up.

***

On the first night of Big Black, the first of those fourteen nights of intermittent darkness and catastrophe, Mal raced through the chaotic, crying streets to the apartment he shared with his father. After all the blows to the head and face, the old man could barely see straight when the lights were on. Mal let himself in and immediately heard a sound.

Even over the shouts and roars from the street, it was instantly recognizable as crying. But from his father’s room? Was someone already here with him? Mal shot through the darkness and found his father, startling the older man badly as he grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Dad?” he said into the murky shadow. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”

He got Max at exactly the right time, in the dead of night, in the dark, with the city falling apart outside. At his absolute weakest, the old man couldn’t resist giving an answer.

“I’ve got cancer, Mally,” he said between tears and sucking in air. “It’s in my gut. Or that’s where it started, anyway. They couldn’t do anything about it. Not that I could have afforded it, anyway.”

“Jesus, Dad,” Mal said, something beneath him crumbling away. “How long do you have?”

“Well”—his father actually looked like he was smiling in the dim moonlight through the window, tears catching and glittering in the curves around his lips—”they gave me six months.”

“Jesus,” Mal whispered.

“But that was twelve years ago.” Max grinned. “So who the hell knows?”

“What? Twelve years?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve had cancer for twelve years?” Mal said. Even as he did, he realized it had come out wrong. His father had been fighting cancer for twelve years. That was why he was still alive.

“Days are painful. It helps to let go a little bit at night. Sorry I scared you, Mally.”

Mal looked down at him and laughed. What else could you do?

And a matter of months later, Max Jericho finally went down. It wasn’t the cancer. A week before he died, the old fighter had retired from the ring.