Free The Fighter by Craig Davidson Page A

been set the moment
Stacey placed the vial on the countertop.
    "How do I
get it into me?"
    "Injection
to the tushie. I'll do it for you."
    "Is that
the only w—?"
    Stacey cut him
off. "Please don't be a pussy, Harris. I was just starting to dig
you."
    And so it
transpired that five minutes later Paul found himself in a cramped stall in the
men's room at Jammer's gym, bent over the toilet with his pants wadded around
his knees and Stacey Jamison's hairy caveman hands clapped to his buttocks.
    Stacey kneaded
roughly. "Spongier than a loaf a bread."
    Paul braced his
hands on the stall wall. By now sickened at his impulsiveness—why couldn't he
just inject himself?—he was convinced it was too late to back out. Stacey gave
his ass a rough slap.
    "Christ—jiggling
like Christmas pudding." He was genuinely revolted. "How can you cart
those lumpy sandbags around all day? It's just... gross. Look at it— look!"
    Paul craned his
neck, angling for a glimpse of his own ass. "It could do with some
work," he said helplessly.
    Stacey's sigh
suggested that whipping a specimen as pitiful as Paul into shape would be a
mammoth chore, requiring the labor of thousands. "Don't move. If I jab
too deep you'll get a knot like a monkey fist."
    A steel wire of
stark terror pierced Paul's heart. What if Stacey hit a vein and pumped this
junk directly into his bloodstream? What if he went into anaphylactic shock
and— died ? He was
horrified by how Stacey might deal with the situation; he pictured Stacey
seating his dead body on the can, wrapping his dead hand around the syringe,
then calling the cops and saying one of his clients had perished while geezing
in the shitter. Paul pictured his body laid out on a morgue slab,
raisin-testicled with a twig for a penis.
    Stacey pig-stuck
him and pushed the plunger. As testosterone shot through him, Paul felt...
nothing. It might as well be vegetable oil— hell, maybe it was vegetable oil.
He yanked his trousers up and out of sheer habit flushed the toilet—that, or he
wanted to convince anyone in the change room he'd merely been taking a piss.
    "Work those
glutes!" Stacey hollered as Paul escaped through the change room.
"Tone that saggy caboose of yours!"
     

     
    Paul drove down
Highway 406 following the frozen river, took the mall exit, and turned left at
the lights. On Hartzell Road he passed pool halls and bars with neon signs, a
foreclosed Bavarian restaurant, a train yard where boxcars rusted in the nettles.
    He yanked down
his pants at a red light and gave his ass a good clawing. An itchy red bump had
risen at the injection site. His heartbeat was all out of whack, weird yips and
baps. Reeking sweat poured from his body, soaking his shirt and running down
the crack of his ass. His fingers came away bloody but the bump still itched
like a bastard. He stuffed McDonald's napkins down his trousers to sop up the
blood.
    At the end of
Hartzell a white-brick shopfront occupied the space between a knife shop and a
tattoo parlor. A sign above the door read Jensen's paints .
Below that sign a smaller one, reading, in clipped red letters, impact boxing club.
    Paul wrenched
the wheel and cut across the road, narrowly avoiding a T-bone collision with
an oncoming Buick. He skipped over the curb—some vital portion of the
undercarriage tore off with a shriek—into the paint store lot. The engine
rattled and conked out.
    He sat with his
hands gripped to the wheel, wondering how he'd managed to pass these shops a
hundred times without ever noticing them. He heard that up north in the
provincial parks most of the trees had been clear-cut by logging companies;
what they left was called a "veneer": the pines went twenty or thirty
feet deep along the hiking paths and riversides, but beyond that only miles of
stumps. Paul thought that if someone clear-cut this city, gutted the office
buildings and homes and stores, he'd never know—so long as the veneer remained.
    But he'd noticed
the shops this time. Why? It