The Fist Fight

No one heard the commotion behind McLintock’s tonight. There wasn’t much to see- two drunk guys getting into it over nickel bets at the pool table. One was a heavyset townie. Probably construction, maybe firefighting. Smalltown pride with nothing to lose. The other was me, Bruce Villard.

If they had known it’d turn into murder, then maybe there would have been a crowd. But who could have expected that? It was a one-in-a-million punch, a knockout clip that brought his head against the asphalt like those carny sledgehammers. I hear the wind whistle from his barrel chest, and the sound of something dripping.

“Get up, bitch!” I check him in the leg. He barely moves- his fists are gnarled up and sticking straight out. Same with his legs.

“Get up!” I yell again. I’m panting heavy, the cold December night like cat hair on my tongue. At the end of the alley are Christmas lights, coiled around a streetlamp. They ride on the backs of shadows, glazing the man’s body in candy cane wrapping. 

“Yo?” The anger has seeped away from my voice. I bend down and hold my breath in anticipation for his. There is nothing to be heard. I can see my reflection in a puddle of his blood and curse the man that stares back at me.

“Fuck,” I moan. “Oh my fucking god. Fuck.”

Suddenly the night is hot. Oven-hot. I feel the eggnog curdling in my stomach, and that poorly planned whiskey shot racing back up my esophagus. I run over to the green metal dumpster and throw my head inside. There’s a gray shag carpet to the left and six rotting bags underneath me. I coat them all, the force of it bringing tears to my eyes. Things feel clearer after- nothing sobers a man up like the smell of his own contents. I raise my head out of the dumpster.

At my second viewing, I pray I have imagined things. Maybe there’s a pulse I missed, or a twitch in his fingers. I’m pretty drunk- I could have overlooked something. Kneeling over his body, I place the back of my fingers against his neck. It has a wet, cold feeling, like lunchmeat, and I count to thirty in my head, dragging out each number, hoping for a reason to stop. It never comes- at thirty, I know what I have done is real.

I throw my hands over my head and pace around the corpse, careful to keep my shoes clear of the blood. This is a new one for Bruce Villard. Sure, I’ve been in some skiffs during high school, over your usual suspects- a pair of tits here, a motherly insult there- but things have never gone south like this. There were only a few options left from here.

I could run. Get a job in California for a year or two, on those Napa orchards with the big round grapes. It’d be nice to feel the sun again, pulling the stems off those bloated berries, letting the purple (red) juices stain my hands. It could be a vacation from this tough-boy Borough lifestyle, a real wakeup call. Maybe I’d come back a different person- a better person.

I shake my head, the pace of my heart picking up. There is no running from this. My hands have been all over this guy, and Marty saw us walk outside, for Christ’s sake. If that didn’t tie me to him, then something else would- a toll road with those camera clippings, or a nosy neighbor, or just about any unpredictability. California would have to wait.

My other option is to fess up. Take it on the chin, like the big fella did. I’d get a few years- more than a few, probably. But with a good lawyer and good behavior, I’d still have a quarter of my life at the tail end.

I stand there, leaning against the exposed brick, feeling like a chimney in the world’s biggest factory. My stomach hurts, and my ears are ringing faster than the dull hum of Springsteen in the bar. I grab my flip phone out of my pocket and let the green display stare back at me.

I should just do it. Get it over with before I can look back. My freezing stubs begin walking over the keypad- first a nine, then a one. I hover over the last key as I bite my lip. The blood in my mouth is the only warm thing for miles.

“Quite a display,” I hear from down the alley. I look up and see a man in a brown trilby, leaning under the streetlight. His leather trench is muddled in ruby light. “Looks like the animals got out to play tonight.”

In that moment, my heart is gone- it has leapt out of my chest and ran the other way, into the dirty street with the rest of the rodents. I break down immediately. “It was an accident! It was an accident!”

He begins to walk towards me, under the aid of shadow. Only the click of his dress shoes and the soft orange glow of his cigarette can identify him. I hear an exhale, and then “Save the accidents for your mothah and fathah. This isn’t spilt milk- this is blood.”

“We were just slugging over a game of pool, and he knocked his head!” I put my hands back over the nape of my neck. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this!”

“Stop it,” the man says. He’s five feet away, the details of his face still obscured under the brim of his hat. “I know what happened. You conked him fastah than a Friday night love affair.”

I begin to object, but he puts up a leather glove. “The thing is, you’re not the biggest Capone on this block. There’s another fella, the Trim Reaper- he’s the one that keeps my headlights on. And he does his killing-” he points at the asphalt, “in this same alley. So I need you to beat it like two soldiers at a strip joint.”

I pause, my mind feeling dull and spastic. “You want me to go?”

He drags his cigarette, then ashes it on the pavement, mashing it with the tip of his shoe. “Kid,” he says, “what I want is a bourbon and five dollah dame. What I need is for you to split before I lose my mark.” He exhales, the smoke billowing around his skull. “And take that body, too.”

“What do I do with it?” I ask.

“Right,” the man says. “First time with a snoozah.” He looks at his watch, then back at me. “I’ve got an hour until Trim gets to work. If I’m not back on patrol by then, it’ll be you wondering what heaven feels like. Understand?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

The man pulls the hat farther down on his head. “Start with the pockets. What’s he got in there?”

I stare at him, the world moving a bit too fast for me. He claps his hands in front of my face. “You think I’m chatting with the moon, pal? Get on it!”

“Oh!” I say, and stumble a bit towards the body. The fat man chose tight jeans for the bar, and they stretch against his belly like the gullet of a snake. I feel a bulge in one of his pockets and begin the process of bending my wrist at the right angle to gain access to the thing. After a minute of digging, I pull out a beaten leather wallet with the words ‘Bad Motherfucker’ imbedded on the surface.

I go to give him the takings, but the man’s got his hands full with the carpet from the dumpster, and he’s spreading it parallel to the corpse. “Need help?” I ask him.

“No need. I’m going to pull this two hundred pound monkey myself.” He pauses and points a finger up to my face. “You might be a shimmy away from soft skulled, my friend.”

“Sorry,” I say, and jump to his side of the carpet. “Never really done this before.”

“And you think I have?” We are heaving the man together on the gray carpet, his thick shoulders rolling like a sagging wheel. “Most killahs are smart enough to play their game without the help of a private eye.”

I wipe the sweat with the back of my forearm and pull the man’s shoulder one last time, the sticky meat already stiffening in my hands. “You’re a private eye? Doesn’t this, like, go against your code or something?”

He pulls the carpet over the body and tightens it around the legs. I do the same with the torso. “There’s no code to a clean street. If there was, I’d be in a cell serving chilled slop to every othah detective.” There wasn’t a corpse anymore- only a long gray cigar. “My cah’s out by the streetlamp,” the PI says. “We’ll throw him in the trunk.”

It takes a second to wrap our hands around the oversized tube, but the investigator and I are able to hoist the carpet under our armpits and move out of the alleyway. An icy breeze has scared all wanderers indoors, and it barks at our heels as we hustle to the blacked out Caprice with the open hatch door. The detective puts his free hand on his hat, desperate to keep it from blowing away.

I slow down as we approach, but the detective reprimands me. “Headfirst,” he says, “and don’t spare a walloping.” It’s at this moment that I realize how dependent I am on this man- how deep in his pocket I am sitting. My two options have fizzled upon his existence, and I can’t tell where this third one ends. I force the legs of the body into the car, and mash it like an oversized banana with the hood of the trunk. On the third push, it clicks. The detective has already moved to the driver’s seat and started the Caprice with a low exhale.

I climb in, and before I can close the door, we are motoring down the street with that slow, steady pace one associates with investigators. There is no music, and so I figure it’s time to do a little investigating myself.

“I haven’t gotten to thank you for helping me,” I say. “What’s your name, sir?”

“It’s Harold,” he replies, sparking another cigarette. “Harold Lungford.”

“Thanks, Harold.” I pause, looking out at each passing streetlight and their various red and green decorations. A smile almost crosses my face, until I remember the nature of this drive and the visitor we have stored in the trunk. I begin to feel that familiar stage of nausea come around, and I curb it with another question.

“So, uh, this Trim Reaper,” I say. “Must be a pretty nasty guy if you’re willing to get your hands this dirty.”

“Nasty’s the prerequisite with the men I deal with,” Harold said. The car is filling with gray smoke, as if the man in the back is dissolving. “Then he went and made it personal.”

“Personal?”

“Wife-and-kids kind ah’ personal. Make-me-a-widow kind ah’ personal.” He pulls deep on the thick tobacco, and it billows out his nose. “He’s a gypsy killer. Gets a few hits and beats town. We were stop number one, back in the Meadowlands. He nabbed a Quik-E-Maht, a couple in Libahty State Park, and my family in the subahbs.”

“Did you see him?”

“Course. Caught him breathing and blood stroked in my own home. He’d already gotten to the kitchen when I arrived. That’s where I found my wife, dancing cheek-to-cheek with red linoleum.” He pulled his trilby hat lower on his eyes.

“I could hear him upstairs with the kids, the stairway as black as the coffin nails I planned to bury him with. I ran up, my Luger hungry on my hip, and kicked the bedroom door in. But he got me under my left eye, hiding in the corner with a piece of copper pipe, and I collapsed.” His cigarette dropped a clump of ash onto his black slacks. “Last I remember is his smiling face and the scars on his skulls. Five long lines, recently cut and dripping like devil fingers. Word is, he does em’ himself, for every soul he takes.” Harold swings right, off the main road and towards the stick covered woodlands.

“Jesus,” I murmur. “And you’ve been chasing him since?”

“Every day. Never gotten this close. That’s why I won’t let a hammer-fisted punk like you ruin it.”

I point my eyes out the window, towards the darkening foliage. We’re heading uphill, in a direction the locals called Gulch Country. The Christmas lights are long behind us.

“Where are we going?”

“Trust me,” Harold says, puffing quietly. There is no more room for questioning.

It’s fifteen minutes of nothing before I hear the gushing of a river. We pull across a tight metal bridge towards the county dam, a big concrete giant fifty feet above the water. I’m familiar with it- every Halloween, the neighborhood kids drop their rotting, used pumpkins off the lip and watch the height of their splash. As Harold pulls over and dims his headlights, I assume he has a similar plan.

“Here?” I ask him. “Are you sure?” 

“Don’t worry,” Harold says. The cigarette is almost to the filter. “We’ll roll him out of the carpet. Every gumshoe will pin it on suicide.” He cracks the door open and steps out the Caprice. I can’t do anything but follow.

The wind is buckling at this height, and it almost blows me over the waist-high ledge. I prop both hands on the hood of the car and look towards Harold. He’s a big black smudge, and it feels like we’re in the alleyway again, my only companion that one orange firefly above his pearly chin. I make my way towards him.

The body has become rigid in its cramped space, and it takes some strength to stretch it out fully. “Grab him, kid. Let’s prop him on the ledge before we let him go.” I’m brought back for a moment- my father said those exact same words on a fishing trip to Lake Campanoa, ten years ago. It wasn’t crazy to believe this river led to the same location. My hands move without thinking.

With the body in our arms, we wrestle against the wind and get halfway to the ledge before the man slips from my clutch. He crunches against the metal surface, and the carpet slips from his face. When I look down, I stare directly into his wet, open eyes. They are blue and sleepy.

A moan escapes from my throat, and I fall to a knee. My eyes are turning sleepy, too, like the corpse’s. Everything is moving- the tires, the stars, the yellow New York license plate. I can hear Harold barking from above.

“Never look at the faces, bucko. You’re letting Death kiss you on the cheek.”

I close my eyes and crawl to the shoulders, pulling the carpet tight again. It’s a sleeping bag after Summer Jamboree, a regatta-winning sail, Grandma’s Strawberry Swiss cake. Anything but a human body. Getting a better grip, I heave the package back under my armpit, and step slowly before balancing him on the ledge. The carpet drops on both sides of the dam like the wings of a butterfly. I look toward Harold- he’s holding onto his cap again, the cigarette completely dead.

“Ready kid?”

I nod, the words feeling treasonous on my lips. Together, we push the mass off the wall, and watch as it tumbles head over heels into the water. The splash is massive. It almost coaxes another squeeze from my stomach, but I pull back.

The carpet lays lonely on the ledge, a blemish on the bright white lining of the dam, and I turn away from it, looking at Harold. “I’m glad that’s over,” I whisper into the wind.

He’s still working, now grabbing the end of the carpet and furling it with both hands. “Well done. Did good for a first timah. Didn’t ask questions. Stayed focused.”

There was a kick from inside, and I begin laughing. I couldn’t tell what was so funny, but the feeling was there, and all I could do was excise it. “I thought… this was… your first time,” I say through cramped breath.

“Veteran by trade, rookie in tha field,” Harold says, then pauses; the carpet is parked under his armpit. He is staring out over the dam, the long winding waterway becoming the back of some foreign animal. “But boy, do I love this sport.”

My sides are in dire straits. A strange thought erupts in my head, and it spills out of me. “Why… the New York… license? You… you’re from New Jersey.”

Harold turns to me and smiles. It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen on the man all night. I take a step back and can feel my rear against rock and open air. A gust of wind speeds across the bridge and bristles my hair. Harold’s hands are occupied, and his hat goes tumbling down the open lane.

He is bald. Well, not quite. At first, it looks like a bad combover, but as my eyes adjust, I can tell what I’m staring at. Fifty lines, maybe more, dancing in all patterns across his scalp. Some are deeper than others- it’s like the scribbling of a hasty child.

“Harold?”

His smile doesn’t waver. Instead, he drops the carpet and pulls a long hunting knife from his trench pocket. As he walks toward me, he draws the knife across his forehead and lets crimson run over his eyebrows and nose.

In a voice I can barely hear over the silver wind and pulsing river, Harold speaks.

“Now that you’ve seen an amateur… ready to watch a pro?”