Until Your Carcass Hits the Canvas

In this corner: It’s the Fat Asshole! But he’s moving fast, stomach spilling over the jerking, kicking body as he lunges forward, tries to pry open the foamy jaws.

And in this corner: It’s the Hunted Man! The scrawny disappearing act with a white pill in his back pocket and his face all covered in glare. But underneath the nerves: his body one tight nerve strung too tight, strung to snap. He’s hard to corner. Hard to pin down.

In-fighter versus out-fighter. Speed and strategy versus power, versus chin. It’s a goddamned fight we’ve got here, folks. Until someone goes down for good. Until someone smiles real bloody for the cameras.

Program Notes

The Hunted Man: Doesn’t matter that it’s been ages. That he’s grown old, benign. His back went years ago and he hasn’t been able to lift a thing since. He’s bald. Grows breathless when he walks more than a couple of blocks. Sometimes it hurts just to piss, that’s what he is now. A guy who winces when he takes a piss. But they hang men like him no matter how much time has passed. Whether his remains are twitching at the end of a rope or spattered across the side of the road, doesn’t much matter.

The Fat Asshole and Co.: The new muscle isn’t the same as the old, back when they’d take just about anybody if they were the right kind of cruel. The new muscle is trained, professional, even if they don’t look it. These guys could break your neck with two fingers. And whether they liked it or not, you’d never know.

Round One

He realizes as soon as the tall young man in the navy suit taps him on the shoulder. Even before, really: he’s felt it, something breached, something broken, a current switched off. He doesn’t ask. He just offers his wrists.

Let’s go, says the man in the navy suit. He’s not chatty. But not brutish and hard like some. This one is polite, quiet, businesslike. Doing his job.

The man in the navy suit firmly parades him down the street, and together they pretend not to notice the blinds sliding shut as they pass each rotting row house. His neighbors, registering their collective disapproval. Tomorrow, they’ll have forgotten his name, too; they’ll let it fly right off the tips of their tongues in their sleep, unable to summon it back if anyone bothers to make an inquiry. Not that anyone will. It wasn’t his real name, anyway.

He and the man in the navy suit finally stop in front of a plain white van idling at the curb. The suit’s twin is at the wheel, wearing a fatter man. Obviously the brutal type, though right now his aggression is aimed at a handful of corn chips. More talkative, too. Christ, what took so long, he asks, mouth full of chip fragments. Some fall out onto his chin, sticking to the sweat, and he wipes the mess off impatiently with a meaty fist. God, he says, it’s so fucking hot out here. We gotta get them to fix this air one of these days. You know? It’s like a hundred degrees in this fucking thing.

The original suit makes a sour face. Just open up the back, he says. Let’s get him in.

Round Two

No window in the back. But the hunted man knows this scene. He’s been through it. Once the van starts up, he tries to figure out turn by turn where they’re headed. He thinks they might be driving to the old southwest station, the one that was abandoned until they rebuilt that part of town. They put up a new baseball stadium, and the stores sprang up around it like a beige rash. Ugly false-fronts, intended to provoke nostalgia for some flag or other. Some government or other. The development is called Main Street. He despises it, spits on the fake cobblestone every time he walks that way.

He wonders if he might be able to escape. Guesses not. Maybe when he was a younger man — of course, if he doesn’t escape they’ll kill him anyway.

Still, he thinks, shifting around on the hard plastic seat. Still, he’d like to be the one to end it, to maintain control to the last. It would be a small triumph. And there’s absolutely no chance of that if he goes down trying to escape.

If he can just get hold of it — he thinks maybe, yes. Yes. One of his hands is slightly more mobile than the other, the fingers a little less crammed together. Good. He bends his elbows as much as he can before the metal starts cutting into his wrists. Damn. Not quite there. His middle finger can just touch the tip of his jeans pocket, but the handcuffs won’t let him move his arms down any more. Sharp pain arcs his wrist, a knife of pain slicing up his resolve. Goddamn goddamn goddamn.

Round Three

The tires ka-thunk ka-thunk over the road. The hunted man takes a deep breath. Okay. He can be creative, even if he can’t be strong or young or agile. His mind is still fit enough. Think, think. Think! After all, if they’re really heading for the southwest station, they’ve almost arrived. He’s got maybe five minutes, tops.

After some painful maneuvering, he manages to get down belly first on the floor. Facedown so close he could lick the dust and dirt and filth right off from between those white grooves. He thinks of the shoes that must have worn down those grooves, the feet filling them cramped up with misery and awful hope. Wonders about the red-brown-yellow stains spilling across the middle of the floor. Are these small remainders biology or tragedy? Just a person’s sloughings, tiny pieces of hair and teeth and fingernails; what was once living is broken down to component parts. A skin flake is just a skin flake. An eyelash is just an eyelash. The body’s leftovers are myriad and mean.

He works himself into a U-shape, bends his back while curling his legs upward, falls over onto his face and flails about like a retarded seal. But finally, finally, he manages to jam two fingers into his right back pocket. He feels the edges of the pill, shoves it out with his fingers. It clatters and rolls on the floor behind him as the van turns, slows, stops. A door slams, then another. Footsteps around the side. Shit. Desperately he spins around on his stomach, crawls on his knees to the corner of the van, bends his head down and spoons up the little white tablet with his curled tongue. The van doors open and the fat asshole is reaching but he’s out of reach, ha ha out of reach you fuckers out of reach.

Knockout

He tastes blood, sweat, fear — all the human ruin built up in a coating on this impersonal, industrial rubber floor. He swallows down the present, then eats up the past. He puts out his own lights.

The medics swing the end of the stretcher around, aim it at the open mouth of the ambulance. As they shove the stretcher in, an arm slips out from under the sheet, fist up, purple circles inked around the dead white wrist. Just lines on skin, just lines on skin on bones. Soon to separate and fall away for good.