Once You Break a Knuckle Read online

  All in all, a decent first-ever fight.

  My old man dabbed his forehead with a yellowed training towel. He squirted water into his mouth from a Judo B.C. water bottle that read: No Pain, No Gain. Five straight minutes against a guy half his age was enough to make him see that he was not as young as he remembered. He placed his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward. His back rose and fell with every breath.

  Joseki called the two “now fighting” names over the loudspeaker. Then: —On deck, John Crease and Will Crease.

  Maybe I’m dramatizing, but the crowd quieted – a third of them, after all, were from our club – and the lights flickered, and my old man lifted his head from his position of crumple and fatigue. He looked at me and I could hear him telling me how I would pay for this when he was a little rested and not as sweaty and after he’d rubbed on the A535. Herman ran toward us to watch the fight. He had that same green belt in his hand.

  Then my old man smiled. He dropped his head between his knees and then threw it back and chuckled.

  The kids on the mat finished fighting. They bowed off. Joseki called: —Now fighting: John Crease and Will Crease.

  I stepped up. I donned the red sash. My old man stood and placed his hands on his hips and bent backward. I did my customary hop and slapped the outsides of my thighs. He didn’t have a customary opening because this was his first tournament. The ref motioned for us to enter the mat. We bowed and moved to the first line, bowed again and stepped forward. I could see the rise and fall of his chest, the sweat beading on his forehead near the border of his hair. I could almost hear the whistle of his breath through his nostrils. On the sidelines I didn’t hear anyone yelling. I didn’t look. Never look.

  The referee yelled hajime.

  We are both right-handed. We are both standard grip fighters. I tried to catch his right in my left but he was fast and his massive hand, those massive fingers, curled around my lapel. You only become fully aware of a person’s measure when you fight him, as though this most base of human activity is the standard by which all people are judged. I clasped his lapel, the sleeve of his gi, could sense his patient grip, the complete absence of slack in his arms.

  Watching judo is watching two people move in circles until one falls down.

  I kicked at his feet a couple times, tried to hook his ankle for a lame win. This pissed him off and he kicked me right back. He was solid and he outweighed me. I tugged, hard, on his lapel and his head bobbed down. I tried to keep him bent over but he didn’t like it. He straightened and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to prevent it.

  He tugged me and I moved in whichever direction he wanted. He tried to trip me and I stepped over it. Speed and balance. The Gentle Way. I reacted, my feet fwa-thumping on the mat, hooked at his legs, the excess length of our belts whipping around our hips and the red sash some rogue colour among the black and brown. He tugged me again and I moved with it so he put himself off balance backward. This was judo – this was using his momentum and his force against him. Then I was doing my harai ogoshi, my Sweeping Hip Throw, and I had all two hundred and twenty pounds of him pinnacled on the fulcrum of my hip.

  This was it. He was tired and old and in the air. I was fresh and young and the balls of my feet were balanced on the mat, my knees bent and my calves tensed and quivering. If I threw him hard enough, if I hurt him, just a little – a sprained wrist, bruised rib, minor concussion – he would miss his flight. He would not go to Kosovo. He would stay in Invermere away from the snipers and the land mines, and he would fight me again.

  But then I stopped. I was stopped. He brought his policeman’s arms down in a bear hug and my balance disappeared. My momentum slouched away. He rag-dolled me into the air and then I was on the ground, pinned beneath his weight, and the referee raised his arm halfway to full, yelled waza ari, half-point.

  I tried to twist before he could lock it in. His hands found each other and I could hear someone on the sidelines yelling, SQUEEZE. He tucked his head down against mine and his sweat streaked against my cheek. Sourness, the split of his lapels. The referee yelled osaekomi – hold down started. I couldn’t budge him. I hooked his head with my foot and tried to leverage him back, but he just clenched his teeth against the heel in his face. Pain is only weakness leaving the body.

  The horn sounded. Twenty seconds done. The referee called ippon and my old man’s arms slackened. I lay on the ground and stared at the rafters of the gymnasium. A pair of sneakers hung over a metal beam. People on the sidelines laughed and cheered. Herman stroked his Austrian beard, the green belt discarded. Of course it is not fitting that the son should defeat the father.

  MY DAD WOULD go to Kosovo. He would be shot by a Serbian man while apprehending him for spousal abuse, something he was doing only because the Kosovo police were short-handed. The bullet would enter his torso just above the second rib on his left side and puncture the lung, and he would feel it compress into a ball the size of a discarded tissue. His fellows would gun the Serbian down, rush my old man to the hospital. They would reinflate his lung and he’d recover.

  He would keep the bullet. It is not an easy thing to look at.

  Even the referee smiled. I stayed on the ground. My old man laboured to his feet and reached down and I caught his hand. He hoisted me up. He patted my back. The referee awarded him the match and we bowed off the mat.

  —Dammit, old man, I said.

  —Someday, boy, he said, and grinned, the two of us alone in that roaring gym.

  THE PERSISTENCE

  The morning he decided to put things back together, Ray walked five kilometres along the highway in the hours when everything was grey except the mountains lightening in the east. It was one of those mean days in November – sub-zero, wet – so he couldn’t wear a scarf or a ski mask because his breath would condense on the wool and freeze, and then he might as well have been breathing an arctic wind. It was still dark, five-thirty, but the sky over the Rockies had reddened, which meant today might be one of those days he’d carry with him to the grave – red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.

  Ray drew a cigarette from his chest pocket and fumbled it in gloved fingers. He had four, maybe five left, and too little money for another pack. It always bothered him how smoking didn’t warm him like he expected it to. He removed one glove to light the thing and burned the ends of his fingers with the match, stupidly, like a fourteen-year-old trying to be cool. Nerves, maybe. This valley, maybe. He’d been absent three years, had spent a little time in Cranbrook, a short stint in Calgary, but the places were deadly similar. Too frequently he bumped into things from the past: a person he recognized, some guy with a sledge seesawing over his shoulder. Relics, anchors. They made him think of her.

  But all threads lead home, and so does every missing cent and every angry creditor.

  The Kootenay Valley stunk of gossip; even the two Calgarians he’d chatted with on the Greyhound were up on local banter, about a cop getting shot in the chest overseas and a tinbasher haunted by the ghost of his dad. He knew people who existed solely for gossip, and given the chance he would bury them all.

  He walked under a panelboard sign that read Welcome to Windermere. The only way to fix himself, here in this place, was with his old friend Mudflap. Mud had worked with him for five years, started as a dumb apprentice and became the guy who ran Ray’s company in his absence. Ray taught him everything he knew, and in return Mud kept him living vicariously. He was the kind of guy who planned his mid-life crisis, whose central philosophy was persistence beats resistance. He was also one of the few people Ray had parted with on speaking terms.

  Ray found the place after a short walk. Log house, landscaped yard, a couple trucks and a minivan. He was too cold to wait for signs of people awake so he climbed two steps onto the porch and stepped in a pet’s dish and something like the haze he’d lived through took hold of him, and he wanted to bootfuck that bowl across the lawn. He’d have to watch himself, avoid people. Mud could help with that
.

  He knocked on the door and stood straight. People moved about inside. Someone swore and was hushed. A baby cooed.

  —I swear to God if it’s your dad again I’ll kick him in the fucking teeth.

  Mud opened the door wearing jeans and a clean T-shirt, a ballcap that said Olympus Electric. He had a dad’s face now, not age-creased but with skin drawn tight around the bones of his ocular and jaw. His blond wife, Alex, leaned on the wall in a bathrobe, arms crossed and foot tapping. She’d always been a good-looking woman.

  It only took Mud a second.

  —Ray?

  —Hey, Mud.

  —Jesus, come on in. You want a coffee?

  Ray stomped the snow from his boots. His steeltoes were so damned cold he expected to hear them ring as he set them side by side. Inside Mud’s house, he noticed the designer lighting but couldn’t say it surprised him – Mud was an electrician, after all. Years ago, Ray worked in a house where the owner, a plumber, had plumbed beer to every sink. Once, he and his crew puzzled over how to wire a swivelling wall in a framer’s rec room.

  He sat at the table and Alex shuffled to the kitchen to make coffee. Mud intercepted her, caught her forearm, and whispered in her ear. She took the baby and left the room. Mud ground coffee beans and heaped three spoonfuls into the filter and Ray watched his hands. They were the hands of a guy who no longer worked like he used to – not nicked and burred from splinters and construction yards, but still callused. A man never loses his calluses. Well, a working man never loses his calluses. Ray used to tell his guys to find a girl who didn’t mind rough hands, and that advice had come to bite him in the ass.

  The coffee brewed behind Mud. Ray had taken to drinking espresso because the drip of normal coffee made him lonely.

  —This isn’t easy for me.

  —I know.

  —I’ve got nowhere else to go.

  Mud filled two cups.

  —Like I told you when you left, Ray. My door is never closed.

  Ray wrapped his hands around the mug and felt its warmth. He drank his coffee black, always had. He didn’t consume it for fun or flavour, only as a means to keep grinding on.

  —I need a job.

  —I’ve got work.

  Fucking Mudflap. Fucking reliable Mudflap.

  —I need a place.

  Mud raised the mug to his lips and held it there. It had a picture of two guys in overalls dancing and a caption that said, You and Me Soul-Brother.

  —My suite isn’t finished.

  —You’re getting lazy.

  —No one to boss me around. Well, someone.

  He looked down the hallway toward the door Alex had disappeared through. Christ, she was a good-looking woman.

  —A couple days, Mud?

  —You got money?

  —Do I look like I’ve got money?

  —I see you’re bitchy as ever.

  —Just old.

  Mud pulled his ballcap off and spun it on his finger.

  —My suite needs work. You wanna work on it?

  —I’d need a place to stay.

  —There’s light and power and I think I even put up a piece of drywall.

  —Are you serious?

  —Just lazy.

  He’d hoped for a day or two on the couch, enough to get his bearings and find a place with some snowboarder come to work at the ski hill for the winter, a place where he could get jealous of the twenty-something getting laid every night in the next bedroom. A place to make him feel his age.

  —When can you start work?

  Ray kicked his pack.

  —Got my tools with me.

  IT TURNED OUT he didn’t have all the tools needed, but Mud gave him the things he lacked and a threat that if he lost them, he’d buy new ones. Olympus Electric employed two other journeymen and three apprentices. Mud took one apprentice and gave the rest of the team instructions for the week; they wouldn’t be seen except for material runs or if it all went south.

  Mud leaned close and spoke in a low voice. —One of them’s a woman.

  —So?

  —I’m just saying.

  —Saying what?

  —If you want on that crew you just let me know.

  Mud winked.

  Ray’s apprentice, a kid named Paul, sat in his truck in the driveway, asleep against his own chest. He drove a ’92 Ranger with green paint peeling to black. There was something sickly frozen in clumps onto the driver’s door.

  —Is that egg?

  —From last Halloween. Fucker’s too lazy to clean it.

  Mud knocked on the window and Paul jolted awake.

  —You didn’t load the Bullet?

  —I didn’t know what we needed.

  —Goddamn it.

  Paul climbed out of the truck and pulled his tuque over his ears. He was a spindly kid with curly hair and bony cheeks, long arms that could probably haul more weight than a pair twice as thick. He moved with a long, awkward gait; his boots slapped the driveway every time he stepped, as though he hadn’t adjusted to the weight of his steeltoes. Mud pointed at the things they’d need for the day and Paul packed them in the work truck, a ’79 Dodge with a metal material box bolted to the frame, aptly named the Silver Bullet. Mud’s father-in-law built it for him during his apprenticeship, and as much as Ray made fun of the beast, it held as much gear as a van and burned twice as much gas. It looked like a shed on wheels, and the running gag was to screw crushed beer cans to it, because Mud never removed them.

  Ray offered to help load. Mud shook his head.

  —It’s like obedience training. The kid’s got one hell of a lip so I’m trying to breed it out.

  —Does he know?

  —That, or it’s starting to work.

  So his days went. In the mornings he’d wake and brew a pot of coffee and make two peanut butter sandwiches, grab his tools, and head out to the Silver Bullet. He’d start the thing so it was warm by the time Paul arrived, always on time. He’d sit in the driver’s seat and drink his coffee and smoke while Paul loaded the things they needed for the day.

  Mud put him and the kid in charge of wiring a fourplex condo unit. The entire thing was built on two lots, with room on each side; they were tiny, and constructed with each cost cut as low as anyone could get away with. The studs twisted near the tops – culled lumber bought at a fraction of regular price. The place smelled like snow and sawdust and as though someone had pissed in the corner, and someone probably had. He marked the locations for plugs and lights and Paul scurried behind him with one end of a wire spool in his fist.

  In the evenings Ray worked on the suite. Mud gave him free rein over the design, access to his supplier for any materials needed, and a budget. Ray added recessed lights over the dining area, a track in what would be a small kitchen after he pulled in the stove. He worked two hours every day. It gave him something to do. He only went out to get groceries, and occasionally with Mud for beers at the City Saloon. He had friends in town, still, and they called him one by one. They wanted to know how he was doing, if he needed anything, if he’d heard any news about Tracey, about her painting company. He’d tell them they’d drink beers and they’d be satisfied, and he’d hang up and press his forehead to the raw drywall and think about how far he’d come, and how far he had yet to go.

  HE CAME OUT THE door on a day in mid-December and found most of Olympus Electric’s crew gathered outside the shed. They were two journeymen and an apprentice, named Philippe, Clay, and Greg. Philippe was in charge; he was a stubby Frenchman with a white cowboy hat who slurred his e’s.

  —How’s the dumb apprentice?

  —He works hard.

  Philippe fished into his pocket and snatched a pair of pliers. He started clipping his fingernails.

  —You used to be Mudflap’s boss?

  —Yes.

  —And now he is the boss.

  He’d been warned about Philippe, the way he’d look down his nose even though the top of his head barely measured to Ray’s ch
in. He had eyes like a pair of gun barrels and he sniffled each time he clipped a piece of fingernail.

  Ray lit a cigarette.

  —I’m just here to help out.

  Philippe stopped with the pliers held level with his chin, his hand half a foot from his face.

  —It is good for you then. We are glad to have you.

  —Where’s Mud?

  —In the shed with Kelly. She is angered with me because I try to make her work and she does not. I tell her to bring the things, she does not.

  —You make her haul everything?

  —She is the greeny. She must do these things.

  Mud came out of the shed with Kelly behind him. She had high cheekbones and tight lips bent into a scowl. Her brown hair hung to her shoulders beneath a grey ballcap. She was taller and she wore a denim jacket over a grey vest, and an Usher T-shirt beneath that. She must have been at least Mud’s age. Mid-late thirties, maybe.

  Mud took his ballcap off and ran a hand through his hair.

  —Ray, you have enough work for one more?

  —Sure, but no room in the Bullet.

  Mud nodded and secured his cap on his head. He strode to Paul’s window and Paul started unrolling it, frantically.

  —You’re driving your own truck today. Bill me for gas.

  Ray climbed in the Bullet and leaned over to unlock the door for Kelly. She got in and chucked her tools on the seat between them. He snuck glances at her as the Bullet trundled down the highway. She shifted and eyed him, patted the unoccupied middle seat. A curl of dust drifted from the fibres.

  —There’s room in here for Paul.

  —I don’t like rubbing up to that kid. He enjoys it too much.

  He saw her relax. She put her seatbelt on.