“Why don’t you want it?”
“Why’s that matter? Not my cup of tea or whatever. It’s mine now, but in a minute it can be his. He wants it. So let’s make it his.”
“What do I write on the invoice: Boxed Demon?”
“Not my problem, sport.”
I step forward to examine it myself. Whether the box was built expressly for this purpose is beyond me. Inside: an oblong ball, faintly pulsating. Its scabrous outer layer looks like dead fingernails. I snap a few photos with my cellphone. When the cheque is cashed the amount transfers to Starlings’ Centurion account. On the memo line I write: Antique Box. Blood spatters the paper. My nose has started to bleed.
I wait in the taxi while Starling speaks to a man across the road. He leaves the man standing beside the river and rejoins me. Our cab veers upriver to Chippewa. A harvest moon slit edgewise by an isolated cloud. The road bends past Marineland.
“Stop,” Starling tells the driver.
The dreadlocked guy from the strip club is propped against a tree in the parking lot. His eyes are a pair of blown fuses. When Starling offers him a ride I resolve to find my own way home. We load the guy into the cab and I say goodbye. The cab’s taillights flare as it accelerates on under an Oneida billboard.
Somebody’s egged the Marineland ticket booths. Sunbursts of exploded yolk. I worked here in high school. One time an animal rights activist with jaundiced eyes like halved hardboiled eggs shackled himself to the entry gates with a bicycle U-lock round his throat. The owner, a fierce Czech with pan-shovel hands, he’d gripped the protester by his ankles and shook him as you would a carpet. Roaring like one of the beasts he was accused of abusing. That was the autumn of my wife’s pregnancy. Dad floated the idea of an abortion. My wife showed me a terminated baby in a Right To Life pamphlet. Nothing so much as a skinned guinea pig.
From the amphitheatre arises a yell— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—followed by a splash.
I walk down McLeod to Stanley. Mist gathers in funnels of light under the streetlamps. I trot along the breakdown lane. My father would wake me in the witching hours to run the gravel trail skirting Twelve Mile Creek. A gumshield socked in my mouth conditioning me to breathe past the obstruction. Taste of epoxy on my tongue: the same taste that fills your mouth driving past that glue factory in Beamsville. A sensation innately linked to boxing, same as the smell of the adrenaline chloride Dad swabbed in my cuts, through layers of split meat: it had the smell of silver polish.
A pickup blasts down the yellow line. The bed’s full of young guys. Something of their circumstances— so different than my own at that age — washes over me with the diesel exhaust.
My twenty-seventh fight, the one where the wheels began to fall off, was against Clive Suggs. Our weights the same but Suggs was a man.
We fought at the Lake street armory in a ring erected between decommissioned tanks. I knew Suggs was going to cream me. So black that when sunlight struck him there was a soft undertone of heavy blue about his skin. Clavicle bones spread like bat’s wings from his pectorals. His wife had been there. His boy. I’d be fighting a father. I was a sixteen.
We boxers shared one change room. Suggs caught my eye and winked. Not an unfriendly gesture. He had his own problems with a wife giving him hell.
“Boxing at your age,” she said. “You must have a death wish.”
“Me, baby? Naw. I got a life wish.”
My father made a gumshield for me by joining two mouthpieces together. Glued slightly off-kilter so my lower teeth jutted ahead of the uppers. A forced underbite kept my teeth from clicking, which prevented shockwaves coursing down my jawbone into the cerebrospinal fluid occupying the subarachnoid space around my brain, which would have cold-cocked me. He cut holes in the silicon so I could vacate air without opening my mouth. It worked. I took shots that rolled my eyes so far back that the ligatures connecting to my eyeballs stretched to snapping. I was overtaken by this blackness where all I could hear was the scuffling of boots and thack of my heart. All I felt were bands of fire where the ring ropes touched my back. I’d sink back into my skin conscious yet likely concussed. Hoovering air into my nose. Expelling it in a mad hiss through holes in my gumshield. My father strapped oversize surgical Q-Tips to his wrist with a blue elastic band like they use to bind lobster claws. He’d soak them in adrenaline chloride 1/100 and between rounds stuff them so far up my bloody nose the pain of those Q-Tips poking what felt like the low hub of my brain made the nerves at the tips of my fingers spit white fire. And I never gave up. I should have. You can toughen every part of your anatomy save that glob of goo in your skull.
Strangest thing about a savage beating — one of those within-an-inch-of-your-lifers—is how everything’s the best the following day. You wake up, sun streaming into your room: The most beautiful sunlight ever. Eat a bowl of oatmeaclass="underline" Goddamn if this isn’t the best thing I ever ate. Look out the window see a butterfly: Mr. Butterfly, you’re the prettiest creature. If you’re lucky to have a girlfriend and if she’s kind enough to kiss those spots that hurt—“Every spot’s hurting, honey”—the feel of her lips will drive you into a whole other dimension of pleasure. That terminal day-after sweetness is so addictive.
Suggs starched me with a honey of a left hook that no mouthpiece or the direct agency of God could have averted. After the ref raised his hand, Suggs reached over the ropes for his son. Perched him on his shoulder. Never had I seen any two people so concurrently, radiantly happy. For the son: the elemental joy of being in that ring, one arm slung round his pop’s neck. For Suggs: that rare opportunity to share a personal triumph. You and me, boy! You and me. I suppose I became part of what may stand as Clive Suggs’s finest hour — sad, considering: he pulped a kid with no future in the sport in a ring erected between WWII tanks at a bout watched by fifty. But his boy didn’t know that. And it may not have mattered. To his son, Clive was mythic in those moments.
Suggs knocked over a Gales Gas and earned a jolt in the Kingston penitentiary. “So he did have a life wish,” my father remarked. “A ten-years-to-life wish.” He works at a retirement home now, I hear. That’s just how the wheels roll in these southern Ontario towns, and I roll on it same as anyone.
But… that look Clive Suggs’s boy gave his Dad. That myth-making look. I’ve never given my father that look. And my son has never given it to me.
The Falls tumble grey to match an overcast sky. A subdued crowd gathers along tarnished railings surveying the basin to watch Colin Hill go over the cataract.
“You’d’ve figured a bigger turnout,” says Abby.
She’s training again following a shoulder injury. She returned from vacation overweight and this, she says, had really set her father off. Dylan holds her hand as we come down Clifton Hill. On the patio of a dismal karaoke bar a rotund shill dressed as Elvis croons “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” His Tonawanda accent makes it sound he’s singing, “Are you loathsome tonight?” We find a spot amongst the railbirds. Down in the basin Wesley Hill stands at the stern of his boat.
“I got to pee.”
“You peed before we left, Dill.”
“That hot chocolate,” he reminds me.
I take Dylan’s hand to lead him across the road. He says he can go himself.
“That arcade across the street should have one. Come right back. I’m watching.”
Abby asks after my father. She knows all about the operation he’d botched some time ago. A wayward incision in somebody’s prefrontal lobe. The patient’s identity was protected by privacy statutes.