Impact Boxing is located in a strip mall on Hartzell next to a knife shop, King of Knives, whose banner reads: Knives, The Perfect Gift for Knife Lovers! Beyond lies Sterno Dell. Charred tree skeletons poke from its rain-sodden ash like spears.
Entering the club gives me the same sensation an Olympic swimmer must get slipping on a clammy Speedo for morning laps: uncomfortably familiar. My DNA is soaked into these speed bags, headgear, punch mitts. Atomized remainders cling to sewage pipes spanning the ceiling. Photos of prematurely aged fighters on the walls. My favourite a B&W portrait of Archie Moore, the Mongoose, with this quote: Nowadays fighters tussle for money. I was fighting when the prize was going to jail. When I was a kid, two men nursing a blood feud stepped through the ropes to go at it barefisted. One hit the other so hard he face-planted the canvas. While unconscious he sneezed involuntarily; a pressurized hiss as the air driven into his skull vented around his eye sockets. My father said the man had suffered an orbital blowout fracture and was lucky: had he sneezed much harder an eyeball might have ejected itself.
Dad’s beaten us here. Following his medical suspension he’s taken to drinking at the Queenston Motel, a bar lonely, dispossessed men gravitate to before gravity hauls them off the face of the civilized world altogether.
“Look,” he says with a sigh. “It’s the Count.” “Good eeevening,” Dylan greets his grandfather. In the changeroom Dad unfurls Dylan’s handwraps like lizard’s tongues. Spreads the fleshy starfish of his grandson’s hands to gird them. Dylan sucks air through his teeth. “Tight.”
Dad unwinds his work. He believes Dill’s wussiness hovers round the fact he required an operation to correct an undescended testicle. But my father is prone to tendering wild accusations based on picayune evidence — such as the time he spotted me with a grape juice moustache and got into a big kerfuffle with Mom, levying the charge I must be “guzzling the frigging stuff,” which according to him was a sign of burgeoning gluttony. I was seven.
The club is sparsely trafficked. A retired bricklayer hammers away at a heavy bag with a watchman’s cap tugged tight to his eyes. Young hockey players— goons in training — take wild swings at the bags adjacent. I untangle a skipping rope.
“Try for a minute, Dill.”
He can’t go ten seconds. As always, I am shocked by his lack of coordination. His feet snarl in the cape. He stomps on the hem and its cord chokes him.
“Swell cape,” Dad says. Queenston Motel suds percolate out his pores.
“Saaank you,” Dylan says in his vampire voice. “Jor blood vill stay in jor veins tonight, old one.” “Yeah? That’s swell.”
I tug Dylan into a pair of sixteen ouncers. Giant red melons attached to his arms. We stake out a bag beside a poster of a vintage Lennox Lewis with his high-and-tight MC Hammer hairdo. Dylan throws a whiffle-armed one-two. The feeble blut of his gloves slapping the bag stirs a deep sorrow in my chest.
“Pretend it’s vampire bait.”
“Vampire bat?”
“Bait.” I shouldn’t encourage it, but: “Vampire bait.”
“Eef it vas wampire bait, I vould do dees!”—and bites the bag.
“Dill. How many people you figure sweated all over that?”
Dylan smacks his lips. “Eet’s wary, wary hard to be a wampire deez daze.”
He heads to the fountain. Dad’s emptying spit troughs: funnels attached to lengths of flexible PVC hose feeding into Oleo buckets in opposing corners of the ring. The cell-phone girl, Cassie, comes in with who I assume must be her father: Danny Mulligan. His romance with Abby broke down in Moose Jaw along with his VW Minibus. He’s a cop now and looks it: Moore’s suitcoat shiny at the elbows, saddle shoes squashed at the toes like a clown’s, horse teeth, a Marine’s whitewall haircut shorn close to the scalp. I can already picture him as an old man: high blue veins, buttons of nose-hair. He looks — why do I harbour such unreasonable, mean-spirited, perverse thoughts? — like the sort of guy who, mid-fuck, grabs his own ass-cheek with a free hand. That selfconscious hand-push, like he needs help burying it home, coupled with an equally affected back arch. Yeah, he’s that guy.
“Nick, right?”
“Danny,” I greet him. “Yeah, hi.”
“It’s Dan. My little girl tells me there was some ruckus today at school.”
“That’s right. Something to do with videos.”
Mulligan spread his legs as if readying to perform a hack squat.
“Trupholme took away her phone. I bought that for Cassie’s birthday. All her numbers stored in it. Important dates, too.”
Important dates. She’s ten. What, when the next Tiger Beat hits the newsstands?
“I imagine she’ll get it back.”
“If not?”
“Are you telling me to buy her a new phone?”
“How about we’ll talk.”
With that, Dan dismisses me. He pulls gloves onto his daughter’s fists and leads her to a bag. Cassie summons enough force out of her tiny frame to rattle it on its chain.
“Why not your little gal get in with Dylan?” Dad calls to Mulligan.
“We’re game,” goes Mulligan, with a shrug.
Dad turns to Dylan. “What d’ya say, Drac?”
Dylan scuffs his shoes at a black streak on the floor.
“I don’t vant to heet a girl.”
“Not hitting,” I say. I hate seeing him cave. “Manoeuvring. You’ll be okay.”
Headgear squashes his eyes-nose-mouth into the centre of his face. I tuck his cape into the back of his shorts. The silicon gumshield stretches his lips into an involuntary smile.
When the bell rings, my son stares around, confused, perhaps thinking the fire alarm’s gone off. Cassie bears in, one gloved fist big as her head glancing off Dylan’s shoulder. Mulligan’s next to me on the apron. He carries himself in a physically invasive manner. Commandeering airspace. It speaks badly of a man.
Dylan rucks in gamely, gloves hipped and rubbing against Cassie. Latent frotteur behaviour? He stumbles on his heels trying to find me in the lights, smiling at nobody in particular before turning that silly bewildered smile on his opponent as if to say, “We’re having fun, right?” Cassie’s snorting round her mouthpiece as the headgear constricts her sinuses. She bulls Dylan into a corner and drives her hands into his face before pulling away to slap a glove into Dill’s breadbasket. Dylan quivers: a seismic wave up his neck and down his thighs. They joust in the centre of the ring. Dylan’s pushing at Cassie’s shoulders to keep her unbalanced. I see my son in the west-wall mirror, and the reflected action states more profoundly just how lost he looks, soft and salty and unprotected like a massive quivering eyeball and I’m stepping through the ropes to stop it when Cassie plants a foot and rears so far back at the hips her lead hand nearly touches the back of her knee, coming on with the nastiest overhand right I’ve ever seen thrown by anyone so young. The sound she makes throwing it the screech of a gull. With the blood knocked temporarily out of his face, Dylan looks like an actor in a Japanese Noh play. He gets plunked on his backside where the ropes meet, spread-legged, skull too heavy for his neck. It dips between his knees to touch the canvas.