Читать книгу Contenders - Erika Krouse - Страница 10

On a walk with his student, a Zen master watched a fox chase a gray rabbit across their path. The rabbit hopped in frantic zigzags, and the fox streaked closely behind. The animals disappeared into the underbrush.

The Zen master said, “That rabbit will escape the fox.”

The student said, “But the fox is bigger. It’s stronger.”

“The fox is running for his dinner,” his teacher said. “The rabbit is running for his life.”

~

Nina was a thief, technically, although she never defined herself that way. Apart from being negative-sounding, it was relative. The way Nina saw it, if you stole a wallet, people called you a thief. If you stole an election, they called you President.

Nina instead thought of herself as a kind of pool shark, except she didn’t play pool. It wasn’t her fault that they underestimated her. Men shouldn’t be hitting women anyway, I mean, really, what kind of world was this? She was an enforcement officer, collecting small fines from men who violated the social contract. Every animal steals to live. Nina liked to pay her rent on time. She liked to be fiscally responsible.

Nina shoplifted, too, but only stuff on sale. Meat, bound in butcher paper, sunk into a handbag. Filet mignon, fresh tuna, an artichoke. Socks, stockings, underwear, olive oil. If she thought she was being watched, she stood in line to pay for a single box of spaghetti, and walked out cradling a full purse of supermarket makeup and shellfish. She wondered which other shoppers among her were also harboring hidden Oil of Olay and vials of saffron. She suspected a higher incidence of shoplifting for embarrassing things like athlete’s foot powder, vaginal itch cream, Beano, or extra-small condoms, so she made sure to purchase those kinds of things outright if needed, in case security cameras were trained in those directions.

No, stealing was sponsorship. Fighting was the passion. She never stopped, never tried. During dry spells, she missed it like it was lost legs or a drifting lover. She knew what she loved.

Of course, like most careers, it’s harder for a woman, and easily complicated by standards. Nina had a code: she never hit first. Her teacher Jackson often used to quote an Okinawan proverb, Karate ni sente nashi—there is no first attack in karate—and Nina took it seriously. Anything after the first strike, she figured, was fair game.

Besides the first strike rule, she didn’t fight kids, women, the homeless or elderly, gangbangers, and crazy people. For practical reasons, she also avoided drug addicts and her neighbors. Basically, she tried not to fight anyone she wouldn’t have sex with.

It took work. Nina exercised every day to exhaustion. She dressed trampy, hung out in questionable areas of town. Certain streets, all she needed to do was stand with her back pressed to the wall, knee up, and someone came along demanding a date or worse. On the same streets the next night, nada. The odds sucked. Because she couldn’t get around it, no matter how hard she tried: people were essentially good. And she wasn’t as good as she used to be.

It was probably temporary, just a series of dumb mistakes resulting in minor injuries—a dislocated jaw, bruised ribs, shiners. They added up. Last month outside a 7-Eleven in the rain, a biker grabbed her and she punched him in the mouth. His front teeth broke and embedded themselves in her hand. He smiled, and blood streamed from his mouth in a silky rope. He hit her, and hit her again, and didn’t stop until she ducked and he broke his fist on the wet wall behind her. She heard the bones crack like small thunder, and still he cocked his fist again, a blinking robot. She ran straight home and lay damp and sweating under the covers until the sun came back up.

Men on meth were the worst because they felt no pain, had no morals. She tried to avoid them, but you couldn’t always identify them if they bathed. She wore precautionary leather, but she still bore scars on her ribs and arms. She had been cut five times. Her nose was crooked and blunt from breaking. She had fractured four ribs and a pinky. Her jaw was permanently askew and clicked when she chewed. When she groped her skull, her fingers found dents and scars she didn’t remember getting.

Sometimes she wondered if she had ever seriously hurt any of them.

Perhaps she should go on medication, and take one of those drugs that sound like superheroes (Effexor! Lexapro! Zoloft vs. Celexa!). She couldn’t go on like this forever, winning. Or, at least, not losing. It was mathematically impossible. She wondered if she’d soon start losing when she should win, and if these shitty times were, in fact, her glory years.

Sometimes she opened her desk drawer and counted all the wallets she had taken over the years—folded leather piled one on top of another, mounting evidence that her number was almost up. Nina had survived over ninety street fights. She knew exactly what she was made of.

Her old teacher, Jackson, once said, “The smart thing is never the brave thing.” He was five-foot-six. He grew up on Oahu near the military base. On his way home from winning a cockfight, four drunken marines jumped him. He fought them all off, never once letting go of his chicken.

Jackson told Nina that her mother was once assaulted in Okinawa by two Americans. One of the men kissed her, his hands at her throat. She bit off his tongue and spat it at him. It’s impossible to know what a person is capable of until that moment comes and passes—who or what they’ll sacrifice. That person doesn’t know, either.

What will you fight for?

~

There’s a lot to learn. When Nina was a teenager, Jackson used to take her to Denver on long day trips. He introduced her to Asian men in dirty parts of town who showed them their minor miracles.

One was an Indonesian guy who practiced a monkey style. The story was, when he was young, his teacher threw him in a cage with a wild monkey. The monkey went crazy and tore the boy up. The teacher pulled him out just in time, saying, “Now you know how the monkey fights.” Okay, whatever, but this guy did fight like a monkey—crouching low, thumping people on the head, crawling all over Jackson’s hunched back. In the monkey man’s village in Indonesia, everyone carried knives, and if someone challenged you to the death, you couldn’t refuse. They’d kill you anyway.

The monkey man had killed people. The three of them had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The monkey man’s stained pants smelled like motor oil and chicken fat. He and Jackson mostly talked about food they liked, but Nina was too shy to say a word to the old fighter, who had bristly white hair and a long scar down his neck.

After lunch, the monkey man escorted them back into the kitchen. Midsentence, he punched a fist-sized dent into the metal door of a walk-in freezer. The kitchen staff kept working, chopping pork and rinsing bean sprouts. The other freezer doors had similar dents. The monkey man was a regular.

On another trip to Denver, they watched an underground, unadvertised demonstration. A boxer had challenged a skinny Thai guy. The Thai guy held out just one hand, the other still grasping a cheap Asian cigarette. The boxer sent a jab, and the Thai guy hit his arm so hard that an aubergine-colored bruise instantly appeared on the boxer’s wrist. Within seconds, the blood vessels broke and spiderwebbed all the way up his arm and neck to his face.

Once, they visited a craggy Chinese man who smelled like ozone. If you stood next to him, your skin vibrated, and static electricity raised the hairs on your arms and legs. In a dusty alley behind a burrito stand, Nina watched him drink an entire bottle of clear Chinese firewater with a snake coiled in the bottom. Then he ate the snake. Then he ate the bottle, tearing into the glass with his teeth, chewing and swallowing. She thought that was it—what else could there be? Then he started demonstrating throws, chucking people around the pavement until everyone just shook their heads, panting, hands on their knees.

He beckoned to Nina, the only girl there. She stepped forward, ready to be thrown against a wall or something. Instead, he wiped his hands on his bald head and gave her a fresh lychee, shell on. She ate it while it was still warm from his pocket.

Jackson used to split open watermelons with his fingertips. He cracked entire stacks of bricks with his palms. He could extinguish a candle from three feet away by swatting in the air. He could split a plank of tossed wood in midair with a punch, and push down trees. He kicked a double layer of baseball bats in half on his fiftieth birthday.

He criticized Nina for being in love with the tricks, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe that these people existed—real-life unsung heroes and demons in basements with water stains on the ceiling tiles, in alleys behind projects, in putrid restaurants that served jellied meat parts. In warehouses. She saw an eighty-year-old man throw a college linebacker fifteen feet. She saw a fat Chinese guy make a med school student puke from across the room, by pointing a finger at him.

How is this possible?

Nina refused to believe in a god who refused to believe in her. And Jackson said not to trust anything she perceived, said it was just shadows on the walls of a cave. The physics book she had stolen from the library said that sound was nothing more than vibrations in the air. From that you get language, the barking of dogs, Yo-Yo Ma. Sight—you actually see everything upside-down, and the mind subconsciously makes the flip for you. A mind can do that. An apple only looks like red because it absorbs light in every color except for red. So, the sky is everything but blue. What you get is not what you see.

Or what you touch. If you remove the space between particles, a human body can fit on the head of a pin. Same with rocks, same with aircraft carriers. The only thing that gives the impression of solidity is that these tiny pieces of matter are moving fast all the time, carving out space for themselves, saying, “I’m here. Get the fuck out of my way.” And everything—every fingerprint, every snowflake—is made of the same particles, doing different dances. These tiny particles are connected by a force that moves at the speed of light, and is, therefore, light. If you could find a way to look closely enough, you’d see that everything is exactly the same, made of light, space, and potential. That included Nina.

So, on this most basic of levels, it was possible to do all these crazy things. Hell, more, even. You could shake a house on its foundation. You could walk through walls of stone, or split diamonds in half. Jackson called it Areté, after the Greek—doing that which you cannot do. Nina wanted to figure it out for herself—but with her body, not her mind. She wanted to be more than a story of something that happened to someone once. She would go to the source itself. By learning the exact relation of motion to matter, even the most ordinary person—Nina—could become extraordinary.

~

Her relationships tended to suffer. Not that she didn’t want one. She wanted one. Especially at night, watching her pizza cool on the plate, or sitting alone in a movie theater, baseball hat pulled low. When Nina saw couples going to dinner or bickering in a drugstore, she wondered how they managed to pull it all off. Her most recent love affair had stalled out when her boyfriend answered a call from the girlfriend Nina didn’t know he had, from a cell phone she didn’t know he had taken to bed with them. He called his girlfriend “Pumpkin” and smacked kisses into the phone, hung up, and tried to roll back on top of Nina.

That was over a year ago. Romance swirled around her and rolled off, like mercury in the palm. One day, she kicked a rug and found herself staring at her half-buried diaphragm, trying to remember what it was. It was a dilemma. She knew she’d never use it again, but it seemed like too personal an item to just toss in the trash with the potato peelings. Was it like a flag—once it touched the ground, you had to burn it? She eventually threw it into the South Platte River and watched it bob away like a legless octopus.

Before the married man, there had been others—men she had met in clubs, at coffee shops. She wasn’t a nun or anything. Her sheets had seen plenty of tug-of-war over the years. She had built pillow barricades to muffle nose whistles, endured scratchy feet crawling over her legs. She had eaten morning waffles and drank morning coffee with a bartender, a short order cook, a day trader, a marine, a tollbooth operator. A bisexual clown.

For one windy spring month, she dated the takeout guy from her favorite Chinese restaurant. She sloshed around his sleeping bag until dawn, dreaming out the window at neon signs with letters missing, waiting for him to bring home soggy fried wontons and leftover Kung Pao.

But he dumped her for the dishwasher, who was a man. Then she went out with a guy who believed the Federal Government spent too much money on education. Then she went out with a guy who brought along his ex-wife. Then she went out with a man who tried to sell her Amway.

Nina had never once planned ahead, never taken the person in her bed for granted. She had never walked down the street, humming, “Looks Like We Made It.”

She did have occasional good sex, which is easy to confuse with love. She spent hours lounging in bed with men, letting the major muscles atrophy while she thought, This is it. She memorized near-strangers. She laughed hysterically at things that were only vaguely funny, awash with desire, certain for the twelfth or nineteenth time that she had never, ever felt this way before.

Then, without warning, the drawbridge went up in the man’s face as he realized how precious life is, or how precious he is, or how nothing amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world, or how he’d always wanted to move out of the state but had never known it until that second, or how he’s not ready for love, or how he’s incapable of love, or how he’s got this, um, wife? Or this, um, disease? Or how he’s still getting over this girl, really psycho, who traumatized him, or how he was wondering if Nina ever noticed that she snores a little bit, or how this isn’t a relationship, they’re just dating, or how he’s used to his own space so could she please go home now, or how this is a momentous connection and he’s fucking it all up. He knows it, but he can’t stop himself, and it’s just killing him.

“Fight for love,” Jackson used to say, but Nina didn’t have any love to fight for. Instead of an actual heart, she had one of those have-a-heart traps: the rats get in, and they stay in. She suspected that she herself wasn’t a human being, but some kind of mutated animal. It made sense that she would attract men who could only love her with an animal love—that is, ferociously, and then not at all.

Sometimes, though, she caught glimpses of something, rare moments full of potential when, despite herself, she unfurled in sleep and the men did, too. For a night, they were one person, one breath. Their thoughts blended with their smells and they turned into abstract Picasso selves, more like shapes than flesh, more like dreams than names. Then Nina would love, in the primitive way that sleeping babies love. She loved because she could, and because she needed, and because a hand lay in hers, and, in its careless sleep, promised to stay there forever.

~

Three blocks from the scene of her latest crime, Nina sat in the driver’s seat of her Pinto, ignition off. She still felt the aftershocks of contention, like minor quakes through her chest. She tried to shake the adrenaline from her limbs, but they trembled anyway. It felt bad in a good way, and good in a bad way. The loose window shuddered next to her, and a soda can rattled in its cup holder.

The street was quiet—no police cars, no sirens, just the night traffic playing its one note. She wiped her cheek, and a smear of blood snailed across her palm. She probed until she found the raised outline of a nick on her cheekbone, the size of a grain of rice. She checked the rearview mirror; a new bruise bloomed above her eye.

Nina picked up the wallet she had won. It was blue. They were never blue. She smelled it—real leather. She pulled out his driver’s license. He had lied about his height—no way he was six foot one. Men always lied about height. She replaced the license and flipped through the billfold. Fifties, four of them, two twenties, and some singles. That was all right. The credit cards she would sell tomorrow to Jared, a teenager who worked at the Denver Public Library. The folds hid a video rental card. An Eagle Scout card. A punch card for a deli downtown—one more visit and she’d get a free sandwich. She slipped the cards and the cash into her own pocket. Nina was an Eagle Scout, now.

She smoothed her hand over the dashboard of her Ford Pinto. She loved this car, admirably well-performing despite its danger of bursting into flames upon impact. It had somehow missed the recall, and for that reason she had been able to buy it for a few hundred bucks and twenty-five stolen credit cards. She had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with this car. If she heard a strange sound, she turned up the radio. If she smelled something burning, she opened the window. It was like the old, balding widows who shuffled around her neighborhood—they never seemed to work right, but they just wouldn’t die, either.

Nina scrabbled a Strike Anywhere match against the stack of papers in the passenger seat. It ignited, and the list of phone numbers flared under the flame. She lit her cigarette. She only smoked one pack a week, but she couldn’t bear to quit. Not because she missed cigarettes, but because she missed missing cigarettes—the swift ache, and its instant satisfaction. Besides, she wasn’t a quitter. She figured that if she died of anything, it would be in a fight, and the worst thing she could imagine was lying in the street, bleeding to death, and thinking, “Wish I had smoked that last cigarette.”

She drove toward Capitol Hill, steering with one middle finger locked over the wheel. She parked near Kitty’s Porn Shop and got out of the car. She shifted the stack of papers in her arms, the blue wallet wobbling on top, and walked down the alley to her apartment building.

She loved this alley, her alley. Nobody else ever walked down it, never ever. Maybe that was because it was next to a gun shop, and maybe because it was the only alley in Denver that dead ended, due to an proviso made to an ex-mayor who owned an interfering building at what should have been the alley’s mouth. The building had been turned into a gun shop that sold firearms, porn, and, strangely, secondhand shoes. To get into the alley, you had to squeeze past the building via a broken sidewalk too narrow for a bicycle.

Not only was the alley cut off from street view, but no windows faced the alley at this end. It was as if all the adjacent buildings had agreed on a boycott. If you died right there, nobody would find you until garbage day. Maybe even later; the garbage trucks sometimes skipped this alley, since they had to drive in and back out in reverse. The walls looked like the blank, windowless sides of a prison, except you were on the outside, where nothing interesting was happening.

Nina did most of her morning and afternoon training here. She ran wind sprints up and down the alley, her sneakers grinding against the oily concrete, the rarefied air brushing her cheeks. She pounded an abandoned thirty-inch tire with a sledgehammer until her bones ached. She had made a medicine ball out of an old basketball and sand, and she did power crunches with it, bouncing it against the wall and catching it. She whipped chains so heavy, nobody had ever tried to steal them. Likewise with a dirty duffel bag packed with rags and sand, which she had covered in duct tape, attached to a chain, and hung vertically under the fire escape stairs for a heavy bag. Right now, lying on its side in the dark, it looked like a dead body.

Nina mounted the dim fire escape stairs to her second-floor apartment, the metal clanging against her shoes. The building was called The Chessman Arms, its facade originally constructed in careful brick patterns that were now painted with decades of soot. The Arms was one of many apartment buildings off Colfax Avenue—The Cavendish, The Holiday Respite, The Country Squire—designed to appeal to grannies and Section-Eighters, anyone willing to believe in the grandeur of the name despite all visual evidence to the contrary. The hallways were mottled with carpet stains, plaster scabs, and old mold. Inside the apartments were scarred hardwood floors, tall windows of rheumy glass, and ceiling leaks. It was just the right kind of old, and if you squinted and it was dark, the building looked classy with a capital K, at least from the outside.

Nina had moved into this apartment two years ago and stayed out of inertia. The neighborhood felt home-ish, flecked with prostitutes, gallant art deco buildings, and waving trees. Homeless people ambled down hot alleys, magpies squawking at them. She belonged here. The abandoned Guardian Angels Headquarters was two blocks away. She was within walking distance of three, count ’em, three tattoo parlors, and a head shop/bookstore called Leaves of Grass. She was as settled as a person could get.

But tonight, she dumped her stuff in the middle of the floor and scrutinized the squalor. What had she done here except time? She had wrapped rubber bands around doorknobs and subscribed to The Denver Post, but she was still a squatter. She saw her neighbors every day, smelled their cooking, and heard them have sex, but she never felt like she could knock on their doors and borrow an egg. She didn’t know their names. They didn’t know her, or like her. All her furniture had once sat on a nearby corner with a “Free” sign on it. She didn’t own anything she couldn’t move herself.

She kept a goldfish in a coffeepot. It swam upside down, too dumb to die. And every time she tried houseplants, she was reminded of the phrase, “Death comes to us all.” She never understood why they shriveled up, those quiet little guilt-trippers. They seemed so needy, always wanting water and giving nothing back to the world but (huh!) oxygen. Once, she found an abandoned cactus in a terra-cotta pot, sitting on the curb. She put that plant in her window and watered it for a year before she realized that it was plastic.

Home, this wasn’t.

Two weeks ago, a drunken ex-wrestler tried to slap her. As she blocked his hand, he followed with a punch to her jaw that she was too late to slip. Nina saw black, tasted aluminum. For a few seconds, she was unconscious on her feet, and her heart stopped in her ribcage.

Her twin brother’s face loomed in the ether, just like in cartoons and movies. He was huge, filling every inch of the screen of her mind.

“Hey, Chris,” she said. “What’s up?”

He looked at her the way a person looks at his own hangnail. Unfettered by consciousness, Nina missed him with the force of a tsunami, with a violent undertow of hope that she hadn’t realized was still there.

Then Chris was gone and she was back on the street, her heart beating again, that stubborn machinery. The sweating face of the ex-wrestler had replaced her brother’s, and she stumbled backward at the ugly transformation. The man reached into the back of his pants and pulled out a gun.

Nina turned and ran, but he shot at her anyway. The bullet whistled just past her head. The sound punctured a hole in her eardrum. That week, every time she had a cigarette, smoke leaked from her left ear.

What if she had caught that bullet? She’d never see her brother again. She’d never see anything again. She would end up unclaimed in the morgue, her body disposed of like medical waste, dumped from drawer to incinerator. No lover would mourn her. Nobody’s life would be ruined by her absence. Isn’t that why people had husbands, families, children? Isn’t that what everyone wanted, in the end? To be vital enough to ruin a life?

If you’ve lost your way, you retrace your steps, and hers dead ended with Chris, wherever and whatever he was. As the wind pushed against her windows, Nina studied the list of names and phone numbers she had bought from an elderly private investigator. Hundreds of Chris Blacks, all in California, if that was even where he was.

Nina laid a ceramic plate on the floor next to her phone, unwrapped a Twinkie, and poked a pink-and-white striped candle into it. She struck a match and touched it to the wick, humming “Happy Birthday” to herself and her absent twin. Shy and unaccustomed to wishing, she silently appealed to the water stain on the ceiling.

Then, in the wee hours of her twenty-eighth birthday, Nina Black blew out her candle, picked up the phone, and dialed the first number on the list of two hundred forty-three. A lady answered, voice mushy with sleep. “Hello,” Nina began, clearing her throat. “I’m looking for Chris Black? My brother?”