The Bleeding Stone

1.

—

“You have a fight. Two Saturdays from now. Local guy from Jim’s place up the street.” Coach checked his gloves while mumbling the details, wisps of white hair wavering across an otherwise bald head. The ceiling fans of the gym did little to alleviate the suffocating heat of the drenching early-June humidity. “I don’t think you’ve met him, but you’ll do fine. The guy likes to feint but he makes it too obvious. Complete amateur.” Across the room, Brett felt the attention of the gym’s receptionist on his neck. She averted her gaze when he turned to see. “He’s looking to go pro, but…” Coach trailed off uncertainly. “I don’t think he’s got a future in the sport.”

A fighter worked a Thai bag by himself. A great white window above him painted the room in warehouse shadows perforated by the grim interior lighting. The man’s left foot was behind his cross by just a few microseconds. If he tightened that up, he’d get a lot more power out of the strikes. Someone was using a weight machine. Two men sparred lightly with one another in the corner, training a set of drills. A man in a white jacket and athletic shorts oversaw them.

“Great,” Brett said. “I’ll win again.”

“Hope springs eternal, eh?” Coach laughed and slapped the front of his gloves. “Alright, combos one, two and three for the next ten minutes. Jack is coming out in a second.” Brett stepped through the ropes into the ring got himself warmed back up. A few shoulder rotations, a few jumps, a few bends and squats. He flexed his neck in each direction as Coach wandered toward the back of the gym calling out Jack’s name. Jack emerged from the office with pads, nodding absently and putting his hand up to unsuccessfully soothe Coach’s yammering.

Two Saturdays from now, Brett thought to himself. Another fight. Another win. The receptionist was looking at him again. He reviewed combos one, two and three. They had been drilled into him for the better part of a year, and they flowed out like unrestrained city water from a hydrant. This was going to be easy.

He was excited.

—

A week later, he returned home from waging and slaving at the worksite, hungry and tired. The light on his answering machine blinked.

“Hey, it’s me.” Stephanie’s voice called out from across a strip of reusable magnetic tape. Brett listened to her talk as he prepared a sandwich. “I’ll be free this weekend. I know it’s been a little while but I just got your message yesterday…” she trailed off and mumbled something that the machine didn’t pick up. Brett put another strip of ham on the sandwich. “—Anyway, I have nothing to do. Nothing at all. All weekend. I’m expecting you to entertain me. Call me back.”

It beeped. He took his first bite. There was another message. “Hey, kid, I’ve got a good partner lined up for you tomorrow for training. New guy, but pretty talented. Did some other training before he moved here. I want you to go a few rounds with him to prepare for the fight next Saturday.” Coach was short and to the point. Brett nodded as he made short work of the sandwich. It wouldn’t be enough for dinner, but it was a start.

Changing and showering, he gave Stephanie a call and about an hour later was downtown, the last rays of the sun cutting through June haze in long yellow-orange strips. The smell of the river was overwhelming.

“You look good,” she said, sitting down. She looked great, as she always did: a pale white blouse accompanied a light brown skirt that reached her calves. It complimented her figure well, but the colors struck him as remarkably unseasonable, reminding him of autumn instead of summer.

“It’s been a little bit, hasn’t it?”

“Sorry. Travel.” She flicked a strand of blonde hair out of her face as she self-consciously looked across the drink menu. “You have a fight coming up?”

He leaned in on the table, mainly so he could hear her over the disorienting volume of background noise in the bar. “Next Saturday,” he said. “Against someone from another gym. Kickboxer. I shouldn’t have a problem.”

The way she smiled made her subtle lipstick shine beneath the yellow lighting. “Don’t get too cocky, now.”

“Never.” His smirk was habit, natural.

The waiter came and took their drink orders, and they chatted about the last two weeks apart. He’d been training and working at a new job site over off of I-70. A new office development was being put in. The commute was longer than to the last site but it mostly guaranteed that he had time to train every week. She’d just returned from San Antonio coordinating a business merger which took a lot longer than she’d expected. He’d gotten a new coach that apparently had great connections to all sorts of venues, and was likely to even get paid for a few fights in the coming months. She’d gotten a new boss that had no qualms, apparently, shipping her out to Texas to, effectively, spin her wheels.

“I really just need a new job,” she sighed. The lights in the bar had dimmed a little. He was on his third beer and was only then beginning to feel the relaxing affect slowly unlock his muscles. “But, that’s life, I guess. Not getting any younger.”

He stayed quiet and smiled. The way her green eyes caught the lamplight put him at peace.

“When are we meeting up tomorrow?” she suddenly asked.

“I’ll be training all morning.”

“I can come sit in on that,” she smiled. He clenched his teeth and found the unfinished red brick facade behind the bar to be of sudden interest.

“I’d get a little self-conscious about that.”

Her rosy demeanor somehow affected the melody of her voice. “C’mon, it’s not like I’ll be in town to see your fight next weekend.” She ordered another drink. “After your training we can go back to your place, you can shower, I’ll make us lunch, we can take a nap, then maybe catch a movie before dinner.”

“You sound remarkably mature for your age,” he replied.

The waitress returned with her drink and set it on the table, wordlessly retrieving the empty glasses and disappearing with just as much ease.

Stephanie took a sip and grinned over the edge of the glass. “We can’t act like college students forever.”

He sighed. When he looked at her, she set it down and smiled. “I’ll send you the address,” he said. “Don’t come before ten.”

—

“You’re not bad,” the new guy said. “Brett, was it?”

Brett smiled at the compliment after spitting out his mouthpiece. Coach was across the gym yelling at someone on a heavy bag. The matches had been brief but rough. He was younger than Brett had expected, still young enough to be in school. That made him pretty fast.

“The last place I trained at had a couple guys like you, but they were already seasoned,” the guy continued.

“What do you mean?”

The guy paused to drink from his water bottle. He threw his gloves into his gear bag without a glance. Then he took a long breath. “You haven’t fought before, have you?”

Brett frowned. “Sure I have.”

“No, I mean…” the guy trailed off. He frowned and dropped his water bottle, some metal thing stained a deep red, into his bag. “I guess I don’t know what I mean,” he said, obviously trying to be indistinct. Then he smiled and looked at Brett. “I’ll probably be back here if you’re a regular here,” he said. “I’d really like to train with the people at this gym.”

“You’re welcome anytime,” Brett said. He puzzled still over the earlier comment and its abandonment. He suddenly asked, “have you fought before?”

The man raised an eyebrow as he retrieved his shoes to depart. “Yeah,” he said, after a while.

After the guy left, Brett got a short shower. He stopped at the receptionist’s desk on his way out, spying Stephanie across the gym. Her interest was directed at the pair of fighters doing rounds on the mock ring. Whomever was in the red headgear was winning by a wide margin. He was probably gearing up for a fight, like Brett was.

“Jess,” he asked, gaze still directed at the ring. “Who was that new guy?”

She looked up from the desk behind the window. “New guy? The one you went a few rounds with?”

“Was this his first time here?” Red slipped under another cross and nailed the other guy in the liver with one—two—solid hooks. Brett winced in sympathy.

Jess followed his gaze, but returned her attention to the desk. “Yeah. I can find the waiver he signed if you’re that interested. It’s probably buried under—”

Red caught a sudden kick across his jaw and stumbled. Overconfidence. Brett shook his head and flashed another smile at Jess. “No, that’s fine. I just didn’t catch his name.”

He hefted his bag and met Stephanie at the door. “What a match, huh?” he said.

“Yours were better,” she replied quickly.

—

The fight went well. At least, for Brett, it felt like it did.

“If this had been judged, you’d have lost by a landslide.” Coach told him this as he pulled off his headgear and held out his hand to retrieve his mouth guard. “What was that? How many jabs did you eat to the face? Are you retarded now from all that head trauma, or what?”

“I feel great,” Brett smiled. “I won again.”

Coach rolled his eyes and went about undoing his gloves. “You won something. Most indestructible face. Most resilient mug. They’ll call you the Unbreakable Nose.”

Brett smirked. “The Unbreakable Nose. I win.”

“You’re covered in bruises,” Coach said. “Next time use your roundhouse earlier in the fight. You’ve got a good one, it’s worth using it.”

Brett smirked. “I’ll win again.”

In the opposite corner, the opponent was having a conversation with his own coach. He seemed to have an entourage at his disposal. As his headgear came off, short dreadlocks obscured his face. He looked across at Brett, and Brett, unflinching, returned his glare.

“His jab was all he had,” Brett said.

“Yeah, well,” Coach mumbled. “You’re right about that at least.”

Brett smiled. The other fighter bared his teeth.

—

A few days passed and the bruises eventually went away. The foreman at the job site ridiculed his black eye with a good-natured dig at his hobby, offering to teach him how to dodge a punch like his old man did. Brett smiled politely and waved it off, unable to come up with a witty comeback on the spot.

Stephanie would not be back in town until Thursday. She had told him where she was sent this time, but as with the last trip, he had already forgotten. It sounded far away.

“Have you thought about getting a cell phone?” She had asked once, relatively recently.

“Too expensive.”

He could admit the tool’s utility. It would be convenient to simply call Stephanie when he was out and about, rather than being restricted to his apartment. On the other hand, he didn’t make many calls and he didn’t understand text messaging. Like Coach had told him back when he started training: it is better, whenever possible, to keep things simple. In fighting, there is no secret technique. There are advanced techniques, certainly, but the simple things, the basics, were always of the most importance. The more complex techniques were just variations or combinations of basic ones. At the end of the day, it was always more worth his time, at least as an amateur, to just keep training the simple things.

The simpler something is, the easier it is to keep doing it. Simple things known well make managing a tough situation possible.

Or at least, so seemed to be the case.

Stephanie was not simple, however. Like all women, or perhaps everyone else, she spoke with double meanings and acted with an enthusiasm that Brett frequently did not understand. But unlike the rest of the women who had long since exited his life, she was not hung up with complexities. She might say things that carried obvious double-meanings, and Brett might recognize the weight of her words or the fact that some other entendre existed, but exactly what that second meaning was often eluded him. And she probably knew that. He hoped she did. There wasn’t any conceivable way she’d still stick around, by his estimation, if she didn’t.

She often got a certain look in her eye when she’d tease him on subjects such as these. This indicated to Brett that she in fact enjoyed it. And yet, there remained a unique pang in his gut as if she was holding something back. At times he wondered if he was simply uneasy still about the relationship, doubting her presence or earnestness, or perhaps her seriousness, against all other indications. There was no reason to doubt any of this, he considered with some objectivity. And yet some unknown motion beneath her obvious expressions, some hidden movement, made him consider that he was missing something important.

Despite it all, he believed himself too simple for these sorts of things. He understood construction, foundations, building solid objects that wouldn’t move. And he understood fists, footwork, force. He understood the difference between getting hit in the face and hitting his opponent in the face. There was a simplicity to his life that, although he appreciated—no, more than that, very greatly enjoyed the presence of—Stephanie, he found it hard to connect. Most of their occasions together felt like practice for something else. What that could be, however, remained beyond his grasp.

Marriage, perhaps, but, as he looked at her, with her carefree smile and relaxed posture, natural highlights in her blonde hair sparkling under lamplight, he suppressed the thought. They were still young.

—

“Dodge training.” Coach finished tying the rope across two pillars that sat in the middle of the gym.

“We already did that.”

“And we’re doing it again.” Brett looked on as the Coach impatiently fumbled with the knot. He looked like he was getting confused. “You ate punches to the face last match like a complete amateur. The guy was fast but he wasn’t that fast. Shameful.” Coach’s fingers slipped and he dropped the line. He cursed quietly under his breath.

Brett retrieved the line and tied a large bow knot tight enough to secure it. “Dodge training it is,” he agreed.

“We’ll start with this today. Then I’ll have Jefferson there train your weave and counter.” Coach motioned to the tall player across the gym working a jump rope. “He’s faster than that guy you fought Saturday.”

As he was speaking, Jess approached Coach flanked by two men. They were somewhat large, with wide shoulders and cheap suits. They wore their sunglasses inside. Coach gave them a brief once-over and mumbled something under his breath that Brett didn’t catch. Jess’ gaze remained downcast, unsettled.

“Coach,” she said, “these guys were asking about you out front.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Brett, do your weave training solo until half-after. Then if I’m not back yet, go talk to Jefferson. He already knows about the drills today.”

Coach returned his gaze to the suspicious looking men and waved the assistant back to the front. “We can talk in the office,” he told them, and began walking. They followed wordlessly, one of them sparing a short glance at Brett as they passed. Brett paid it no mind.

—

Coach poured the eggs into the frying pan and tossed it about with the practiced hand of a sixty-year-old lifelong chef. The hair on his head seemed thinner than usual in the mid-June heat. White wisps of thin strands flittered in the fan like smoke rising from the caldera of some simmering volcano. Brett imagined his head as a great hot stone upon which water was poured in a sauna, or a sweat lodge.

“There will be a tournament you’ll be competing in next weekend,” he said. The pan hissed as he added a few spices to the eggs. “It’s in the city, but we’ll get a hotel so we don’t have to deal with traveling there the day of. A lot of big names will be showing up and I want you to meet them. Would be good for your future as a fighter.”

Coach’s gruff voice matched his short frame. The patterns of sweat across his back made his white tank top into a subtle Rorschach test in which Brett saw only stains and humidity. He appreciated how Coach lived without air conditioning, presuming it to be a form of physical conditioning that he had carried over from his youth as a fighter, himself. Coach insisted, frequently, however, that it was simply because he did not feel like paying to have the unit replaced. There was great humility in his words that Brett may have simply projected or imagined.

“How many fighters in my weight class should I expect to see there?”

“Not sure. You’ll definitely have at least one opponent. Probably not more than that.” Coach turned and dumped the scrambled eggs onto a plate, and with his spatula, shoveled half of them onto a second one. He handed it to Brett. “But it’s enough.” He turned around to serve himself.

“Do you know who I’m fighting?”

Coach was quiet for a bit. He was chewing. “No,” he finally said. “No idea. It’s a tournament.” He inhaled deeply as he turned and sat and the modest kitchen table. “You know how tournaments are. You have your regulars and your wildcards. You’re one of the latter, and, probably, your opponent will be too.” He gaze remained deliberately fixed on the eggs he moved about on his plate and scooped into his mouth.

Brett sensed something was a little off, but he guessed that it was probably the old man’s indigestion. When Coach looked at him, a shadow passed across his face. It was gone as soon as it arrived.

—

“One more trip,” she said. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear while staring down the menu. Brett leaned back in the hard wooden booth and contemplated the stickiness of the linoleum floor beneath the soles of his shoes. “I’m really sorry. I do want to see you fight, it’s just—you know how it is.”

Brett believed her. “It’s just how it is.” The waitress set their drinks down and returned to the kitchen. “I think you’re misunderstanding something, though,” he continued. “I think I’m more comfortable with you not being there for them, anyway.”

Stephanie quirked an odd smile. “Why?”

He didn’t really know.

“I mean,” he started, suddenly puzzled, “I always win, so it’s not like that’s a problem.”

“Worried your cute girlfriend will see you get all bloody and battered?” She leaned on the table to bring her face closer to his.

Mildly embarrassed, he looked away and tried to maintain an expressionless composure. He began to mumble something but didn’t have the words available.

She leaned back. “You’re a funny guy,” she said, sipping delicately on the mineral water before her. “I’m happy you brought me here.”

He grinned and let his gaze wander. It was the sort of storefront eatery sandwiched between two other buildings: narrow, with a service area that handled coffee and deserts squeezed to one side that led to the kitchen in the back. Hard booths lined the opposite wall, and there was room for additional seating up front by the window. Checkerboard linoleum tile and the green-red pattern on the curtains completed the aesthetic. Stephanie’s figure sat posed against the window light as if captured by some impressionist still life. With her neck curved in profile, her collarbones were visible through the top of her yellow blouse where she’d neglected to do up the last buttons. June heat afforded a subtle aestheticism that did not go unappreciated.

“I eat here after training, sometimes,” he said, looking away again. She had caught his gaze. “Their cheese steaks are pretty good. Real steak.”

“Good for building strong muscles,” she chided. “Eat your red meats to get big and strong.”

“That’s right.” Someone passed their table on the way to the back. “So how long are you home for this time?”

She sighed. “I’ll be going to Denver at the end of the week. It’ll be a long one, probably.”

“A week?”

“At least. Big negotiation to sort out.” She sipped on her mineral water again, gaze darting around the walls as she processed her annoyance. “When I get back I’ll be requesting some serious time off.”

“We should do something when that happens.”

She nodded thoughtfully, happily, as she returned her gaze to his. “What did you have in mind?”

He smiled. Their food came.

—

Coach parted the ropes and Brett stepped into the ring. His mouth guard felt slightly off inside his mouth. Maybe it had gotten crushed in the bag. He paid it no mind. Across from him, the fighter—whose name he purposefully did not remember—stared back at him through a black-darkened sneer, dirt-brown short hair pulled up by dreadlocks in some modern appeal to a prehistoric warrior caste. They poked out the top of his headgear. He looked familiar. It was hot inside the building, stuffy; already Brett felt the perspiration bead on his skin not of anticipation but of simple humid discomfort. It was going to be a long June.

The referee said his piece and nodded to the judges table. The fighters touched their gloves together. In another time, his opponent would have been running half-naked across the plains of a dark continent, pursuing game or some evil tribe with obsidian-tipped weapons of goring and mutilation. For himself, Brett mused, he’d probably have been enveloped in thick wolf pelts beneath a northern winter sky. But this fight was not some continental struggle between peoples. It was the last match of their weight class—the only match, in fact—at this national kickboxing tournament. They were fighting for first and second place in a competition too small to attract anyone else within ten pounds of each other to fight.

He heard the bell and watched the ring judge step back from the center of the mat. His opponent sauntered forth, gloves up and lips curled into a menacing expression that reflected back some disgusted demeanor. Brett clenched his right hand, tossed out a jab, and drove his left foot around into a thigh kick.

—

Brett stared at the drop ceiling tiles of the convention center’s hallway. His head hurt, and it rested not on anything particularly soft, but whenever he moved, whatever it was made a lot of noise. It was remarkably uncomfortable, and after a few minutes, he realized it was his gear bag.

“Feeling any better?” His coach suddenly stooped over him with an ice pack and a bottle of water. “Here,” he helped him into a sitting position and handed Brett the bottle. “You took a very hard fall and hit your head. What’s the last thing you remember?” With a concerned look, he bade the man focus on his finger as he moved it from side to side, tracking his eye movement.

“The opponent was slow,” Brett said. “He feigned right but went left. I ducked under a hook, made two solid shots body shots and went for the side of his face. I think he got me then.” As Coach finished judging his eye tracking, he frowned. “Came in at a blind spot, I guess.”

“Well, it was a double K.O.,” came the reply. “Your strike connected at about the same time his did. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anything like this happen outside of comic books.”

Brett smirked. “I win again.”

“Win my decrepit behind,” Coach seethed. “Absolutely ridiculous. You look like a complete fool.” He looked out of the convention center’s windows toward the sidewalks below, partially obscured by great city trees rich green in leaf and white in blossom. “Match was thrown out. No medals today.”

Brett smirked again. “I won.”

“Whatever. Get your stuff together, we’ll get a drink on the way back to the hotel.”

The walk back was largely uneventful. Coach chastised him repeatedly for eating the cross that way, even if he did deliver a knockout blow, himself. After about ten minutes of this cantankerous grumbling, he begrudgingly admitted that it was probably the funniest thing he’d ever seen play out at an amateur tournament, however small it was. A cloud hung over his amble, however, noticed quickly by Brett but unsullenly left silenced.

“I’ll remember that for a long time.”

Storm clouds had gathered overhead, and the hot mid-June heat felt charged and heavy with impending rain. They stopped by a liquor store near the hotel. Brett got a bottle of bourbon for himself, and Coach a pack of beer. At the hotel, Coach motioned for them to go around to the back entrance, and they sat down in a small garden that was obscured from the general parking lot. He cracked open a beer with a satisfied sigh as Brett opened the bourbon.

“Leave it in the bag,” Coach said. “We’ve got an aesthetic to maintain.” He shotgunned the beer and crumpled the can as he reached for another one. “Ah, this brings back memories.”

Brett held the bag around the bourbon and took a swig. It was good for thirty-five dollars, tasting of a sweet red-finished mahogany. It reminded him of what a well-polished piece of wood furniture probably looked like in a subway station. The burn made him clear his parched throat.

“Could use some water,” he mumbled.

Coach crumpled up a beer can and threw it against the wall where it joined two others. He let out a loud yell. “Hah,” he said, relaxing on the uncomfortable public curb. “What a week.” He slapped Brett on the shoulder and smiled, and then he leaned over to get another can. Brett sipped his whiskey.

“That guy you fought was the same opponent from last time,” Coach suddenly said. There was a falter in his voice that Brett caught but didn’t understand. Then he made a dismissive noise, as if brushing off whatever memory or regret that might have surfaced between beers. “You have another fight tomorrow,” he continued instead. Another can cracked open and he took a long drink, but he didn’t finish this one. “Mid-afternoon. Different venue.”

“That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” He could really use some water. “So quickly? How come you didn’t say anything before about it?”

“Didn’t know until this morning.” Coach seemed to be distracted as he took another gulp. He finished off his beer as Brett took another swig himself, and then motioned for Brett to hand over the paper bag. “I’ll try some of that.”

He drank. “It’s good,” he said, after a while. Then he drank again. Brett took a beer.

“You know,” Coach said, suddenly solemn. He took another swig of bourbon and handed it back to Brett. “Some learn to fight, but they never get very good. And some guys get really good, but end up being lousy fighters. Something to be said for the sport.” He grabbed another beer, cheeks rosy. “You can learn all the techniques and everything but if you don’t like getting hurt, or you can’t get used to it, you never get far.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Brett said slowly.

“You’re not either of those things, by the way.” Coach’s characteristic gruffness returned, but with a jarring sentimentality to it that disoriented Brett. He took another drink. “I hope you go far, and you’re really good at this,” he said, “but you’re not really a fighter.” He paused. “Or, maybe you are, but not real one. And maybe that’s the problem.” He trailed off, apparently losing his own train of thought.

“Well, I’m just an amateur, but I’ve won every match so far.”

Coach barked out a loud and mirthless laugh. It sounded like a cough. He drained the rest of his beer, crumpled it up, and threw the can at the wall with the others. “Let’s go, it’s still early but we shouldn’t get trashed before your fight tomorrow.” He wobbled as he stood.

“I think we could both use some water.”

“And food.”

—

It was the smell from the dumpsters that made Brett second guess his directions. They were the most striking part of the unpleasant scenery, aside from the overgrown corner of the back lot to their rear and what looked to be abandoned loading bays to their left. But the smell was that of rot. Food, perhaps, or animals. Or something worse.

“You’re sure this is the venue?”

Coach distractedly looked around. He was visibly nervous. “Yeah. Yep. This is the place. Let’s get you suited up.”

“No one would hold a fight behind a strip mall except some stree—”

“It’s like these backyard brawler matches, okay?” Coach dismissively opened the gear bag and grabbed Brett’s hand to start taping it up. “It’s kind of new, still pretty underground. Exposure to this sort of thing is good. It’s all uphill from here.”

“It’s all uphill from here, huh?” Brett stared at the pair of dumpsters sequestered in a corner opposite the loading dock. “I guess that means that we’ve hit rock bottom?”

“Don’t take everything so literally.”

The other crew arrived in three expensive-looking black SUVs. They parked such that visibility behind them, into the parking lot, was obscured. An entourage emerged. The man who seemed to be his opponent, a lightweight ethnic with short dreadlocks and bronze-blackened skin, started yelling the moment he set eyes on Brett.

“I didn’t think you’d show, white boy.” His tone seemed a little aggressive, but Brett shrugged it off and smiled.

“Ah, you,” he recognized him from the last match. “You’re doing this new backyard brawl circuit, too? That’s good, you’ll have to show me how it works. This is my first time.”

Without pausing or stopping his gait, the opponent sneered and spat on the ground, cursing. “What are you talking about? You trying to joke around with me, man?”

He was within closing distance now. Brett felt Coach immediately cease his preparations. He had grabbed the gear bag and hightailed it backwards.

Brett’s smile faltered, but he still felt pretty good. “…I don’t get it.”

The man stopped. He stared Brett dead in the eye with something of an incredulous look. He looked back at his entourage with a steady showman-like deliberateness, before regarding the fighter before him again. “You’re quite the simple person, aren’t you?”

At last, Brett thought, finally, someone who understood. “Yeah,” Brett said. He smiled. The man’s right cross hit him square in the jaw.

—

To Brett’s credit, the first strike didn’t ground him. It was a solid hit, but his opponent wasn’t wearing gloves, so a small cut on his jaw burst open. Coach had only had time to get one glove on him, and he was somewhat unaccustomed to throwing hands without some form of knuckle protection. But he steeled himself during the fight. Keep it simple. Weave. Counter. Block. Combo. Block. Kick. Weave. Ignore. Counter. Gain ground. Fight. Hit. Hit. Counter. Hit. Counter. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.

There was no timer. There was no referee. No judges. No corners. No rounds. There were apparently no rules, either, and no honor between fighters. The second time his opponent swept sand into his eyes and went for a press kick against his forward knee, Brett began to suspect that there was something other, far more sinister and darker, than mere sportsmanship driving this battle.

He caught a break in the middle of the fight when he ducked under a particularly wild punch and drove a round kick into his opponent’s side. He followed it up with three—four—strikes to the head and maneuvered for a textbook throw. His opponent landed on the ground heavily. He might have hit his head.

“Why are you doing this?” Brett asked.

The opponent wasn’t doing so well. He had a cut above his eye that Brett only now noticed was starting to bleed, and part of his nose was crushed. Blood ran down his lips, bright red against white teeth cut against his skin. The man cursed at him again, profaning the air as he profaned himself. “I wasn’t, this wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

Brett eased off, but had he been anyone else, he should have immediately regretted doing so. Instead, with a calm sense of detachment, although still with his guard half-up, he watched as his opponent rolled over, got up on all fours, hefted himself up to a kneel, and then picked himself up with some weighty effort that Brett himself sympathized with. Taking a liver kick was never a pleasant experience. The man removed his shirt and used it to wipe away the blood on his face as he turned around, facing Brett once more, red-smeared and barbarous, and spitting a baleful mouthful of crimson onto the ground, he tossed the shirt away and with his other hand lifted two fingers to gesture toward Brett.

The entourage began to mobilize. Three men moved around the peripheries of the makeshift arena. They were big men, larger than the fighters’ weight class by a significant margin. Brett understood that this probably wasn’t good.

They came at once. It was difficult to judge the situation. They grabbed at his arms, threw fists at his face and torso. He wrestled but where they lacked in skill they more than made up for in sheer mass. Brett found himself held by both arms and kneeling, face blooded by another kick from the opponent fighter to the face. He could not tell anymore what was going on.

When he opened his eyes, the familiar feel of macadam registered against his forehead. He saw Coach across the way. The entourage no longer bound his limbs and he was no longer being beaten.

“Coach, this doesn’t seem like a fight card,” he muttered, perhaps louder than he realized. But when his eyes focused, he saw Coach in some humiliating position before the entourage, pleading like some pathetic failure while a handgun was pressed against the back of his head.

Brett picked himself up and staggered before even finding an even footing. The stars were too far away to see behind the plaza of some rejected big box retail store. Blood caked the ground like sludge. It was on his face, his arms. His shirt, or what remained of it. His fists were covered in it.

“Do you get it now?” His opponent, face disfigured by blows Brett didn’t remember delivering so well, appeared as if in a dream. The fighter cursed him again. “Pathetic.”

But Brett didn’t get it. There was pain, somewhere, but it felt far off, something to worry about later, something for another time. He didn’t have to consider it now.

Things had to be kept simple. Try as he might, the simplest explanations for this turn of events made him think extremely unfavorably about his coach. And to put it simply, he didn’t want to think such thoughts.

He coughed and tried to speak. It was difficult. The copper taste choked his sinuses and confused his system as he tried to breathe. The sounds of his retching attracted the opponent’s attention. Coach still seemed to be begging for something.

“What’s wrong, white boy? You tasting defeat? Sick.” He could not see the opponent. “Just shut up and wait for your joke of a coach to drag you away.”

Brett didn’t understand what he was talking about. He did not even know the man’s name. His coughing was getting worse. There was blood, likely congealed with phlegm, stuck in the back of his throat. It had to get out.

“But… I won.” Brett said. He hacked out the mucous. “I won again.”

Stephanie. He wondered how she was doing.

He did not see the expression on the man’s face. He did not see anything. His eyes were closed as he blinked during another cough, and it was exactly then that the man grabbed the back of his head and slammed it, as hard as he could, into the pavement.

————

2.

—

The gentle rocking of the vehicle did little to ease the pounding pressure of blood in his skull. It was a soothing motion, however, and not altogether unpleasant to wake up to despite the headache. After a little while, his eyes began to focus. He still saw double vision and blurring in time with his heartbeat. He was in the back of a luxury SUV. The windows were black, but from how he lay, it was difficult to tell whether it was from tinting or if it was actually dark outside.

Given the darkness of the car’s interior, he presumed the latter, but his gut told him that it was a combination of both.

“Take a left here.”

“We’ve been driving for more than an hour.”

The muted conversation came from the front of the cabin. Their tones carried the bored disinterest of a pair of lackeys put up to a tedious job by their employer. Brett did not know, nor particularly care, who that was.

“Yeah, well. We got a ways to go yet. Another twenty minutes or so and then we get off on a dirt path.”

“Ridiculous.” They were quiet again. The cabin was insulated against road noise and the engine. Were it not for the blood pounding in Brett’s head, it would have been comfortable enough to relax back into sleep. His head hurt too much to rest, however, so he shifted his position and stared at the ceiling. His arms were pinned behind his back by plastic zip ties that cut into his wrists. A certain rhythmic motion sickness began to take hold. It would be a long twenty minutes.

“We can just park at the site, right?”

“We’d better be able to,” the navigator replied quickly. “I’m not carrying this guy farther than I have to. When I took this job, burying bodies was not part of the description.”

“Maybe bill it to assets protection.”

“You don’t make a lick of sense sometimes.”

Brett was in trouble. He strained his ears to catch more of their muted talk, but there was some background noise that made it difficult. Something too soothing to get through. It was the sound, he realized, of gentle rain on the windshield, and the wipers removing it in some same-styled repetition against the rain and against the dark.

“I hope the hole was dug for us.”

“Should have been, but with this rain we might have to—”

“Don’t even joke about that, man. I’m not digging nothing in this rain.”

There was a sigh from the navigator’s seat. “With that, honestly man, I agree with you.”

They were quiet for a while longer. The hum of the wheels and the engine, and the rhythm of the wipers in the rain offered to Brett a vision of comfort, a nostalgia for the long nighttime trips to see extended family in his childhood. The image did nothing to soothe the pain in his head and the impending sense of doom, the anxiety of what was going to happen when they stopped the vehicle and cut the engine.

Well, he reasoned, he’d handle that bridge when he got to it. No use in stressing out about it now. As quietly as he could, he began to wrestle with his arms and legs, attempting, eventually successfully, to pull his legs through the hold that pinned his wrists together. Whomever had tied him up was clearly an amateur. This, too, soothed his fear.

After a while, the car slowed and then stopped. “Here. That’s the road.”

“This will be fun,” the driver mumbled, pulling a left and jolting the SUV onto some off-road path. “I can’t see anything through this brush.”

“Let’s hope a deer doesn’t do something stupid.”

Brett felt the car tilt into an awkward descent, turn suddenly and, finally, stop. The engine cut, and the patter of rain against the roof and windows seemed to increase.

“Well, that was harrowing,” the navigator uttered.

“Let’s get this over with.”

Their doors opened. Brett wasn’t sure what to do. Attacking them immediately seemed the best option. His legs weren’t tied, so he shouldn’t have a problem moving around. It was only his arms that were secured.

Not that Brett had, either.

What if they were armed?

He thought about Stephanie.

The rear door opened upwards with a slow hiss and the cabin light came on. Brett knew immediately the position of one body. As the door’s upward swing cleared the man’s head, Brett saw him looking away toward his right as he slowly moved toward the captive. Brett shot the heel of his foot out as swiftly as he could muster given his position, catching him just as the man turned his head. His nose exploded behind the sole of the shoe and, startled, the man let out a cry. Brett moved out of the car and, despite slipping in the mud, aimed press kicks at the man’s knees. It was frightfully loud outside. One at least was successful. They both fell down. Rain was mixing with blood and getting into the man’s eyes. The rain was a torrent of silver-black in the dark night.

He opened his mouth to call out but Brett, to the best he was able, hammered at his head with wrists bound as the plastic dug into his own flesh. The sound of the rain was at a roar. He quickly grabbed a stone and smashed it into the side of the prone man’s head once, twice. Three times. The man under him was limp.

Brett got up and looked around. The stone in his hand was heavy, slick and black in the dark. He couldn’t see the second man. There was disorienting cacophony from the rain in every direction. All around him were walls of darkness and roars of water. His head hurt. He turned toward the SUV in time to see a dark figure wield a shovel directly at his head. The sound of rain on metal passed close. He ducked and, slipping, rolled through the mud.

The figure, unaccustomed to fighting or to the elements, slipped as well, and he landed heavily in the waterlogged earth with a surprised groan. Brett scrambled to his feet, hefted the stone above himself and intended to throw it into the back of the man’s head. Instead, the stone clung to his left hand, and he ended up launching himself, stone first, into the prone figure. The man didn’t respond.

“Feh,” Brett spat out some dirt that had ended up in his mouth. “I win again,” he mumbled, barely hearing himself against the roar of the rain. He picked himself up off of the body and tried to get his bearings, but the adrenaline rush had already started to fade and with it, his blood pressure. He pushed himself into a kneeling position and sought to center himself. Brett found it hard to focus on anything in particular. It was probably from the dehydration and the probable concussion.

He wondered, idly, whether his grave had been dug beforehand, but just as the thought crossed his mind, he fell sideways and tumbled into a hole.

Some part of him distantly wanted to black out and wake up back home, having won another fight, secure and warm and listening to another voice message left by his girlfriend on his answering machine. He didn’t want to believe that the last half-hour or so had happened, that he was currently laying in a muddy grave during a downpour and that two very amateurish men in suits had attempted to murder him. Brett very much liked his life, and he wanted to go back to it.

He didn’t black out, and he didn’t wake up. He closed his eyes a few times and listened to the roar of the rain and the felt the soft, cold earth beneath his back flex to accommodate him. The roar began to lessen, now at a harsh volume, now a little softer. The size of the drops against his skin decreased. The storm was easing from the torrential downpour to a steady soak.

Brett got up and scrambled out of the grave. The bodies of his kidnappers lay where he left them, heads tilted to the side so as not to asphyxiate in the mud, apparently broken like dolls and unmoving. They did not groan. Brett did not know if they were alive or dead. He opened his hands to see the stone that he had forgotten he had picked up. It had cracked during the fight, and was then smaller now than it had been when he’d used it as a makeshift weapon. Its surface was red, spotted and pitted in some places on one side with black, but marbled. The residue of blood bathed his palm where he had squeezed it.

He held it in his left hand again and squeezed it once more. A liquid seeped out. Blood began dripping out of his enclosed fist.

“Weird.”

He pushed it into his pocket and let go, but the blood had hardened such that it was uncomfortable to release it.

He wandered back to the vehicle. The lights were still on. Inside, he searched the center console and found a utility knife which he used to cut his bindings. As he folded it up and returned it, something buzzed from the navigator’s seat. One of the men had left his phone there, and the incoming number was listed as a contact.

Without thinking too deeply about it, Brett answered the phone. The voice on the other end was heavy, ominous, weighted with the interference of the remote forested countryside, but deeply anxious.

“You haven’t checked in. Is everything alright?”

“I seem fine,” Brett said. “Head hurts, but other than that, I seem fine.” The stone in his hand leaked blood.

“Your voice sounds strange. What happened?”

“It’s just raining pretty heavily.”

“You and your friend take the next couple days off,” the voice said suddenly. “Lay low for a bit. Come back to town next week. Funds will be in the account, so just stay out of the way.”

It occurred to Brett that the voice on the other end had confused him for one of the men laying face-down in the wet earth behind him. It also occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t have answered the phone, but the great throbbing at the back of his skull had made simple tasks difficult to think through. He wiped the phone off with part of his soaked shirt and dropped it back on the seat. Then, using the rainwater and his thumb to scrub some of the blood that had encrusted onto his left hand around the stone, he washed his arm off. Looking up the embankment, he decided to leave.

—

His wrists hurt almost as much as his head.

Brett made his way down the empty road in the rain. The torrent had lessened even more, turning first from the roar to a mild static, and then to the light static of heavy drizzle. It pierced the otherwise humid black gloom of the middle night, making the air thick and movement difficult. He had left the empty vehicle at the site. If the two strangers who had brought him here survived, it’d be better, he figured, that he just disappear than to have to deal with a mobster’s missing car in addition to an empty grave.

He walked with his left hand dug thoroughly into his pocket. He wanted to get used to this, in case he had to stop in anywhere on the way back home. But he did not know where he was, nor even what direction home might be, except by taking a guess on which way to start down the empty evening road based on the direction the car had turned onto the gravel path.

The road was a narrow one, with a narrow crumbling shoulder on either side that seemed wide enough only for the strip of paint that marked the yellow line. Past it was gravel and a short embankment, beyond which was the thick wood made dense by difficult if not untraversable underbrush. A few shallow streams could be heard running through it all, downhill, as Brett walked, eyes keen but dim down an utterly blackened route.

As was perhaps normal, Brett did not have a plan. He did not know where he was going and he did not know how he was going to get home. A part of him that he had trained hard to stifle questioned if he was even going to get home at all, and if he was instead going to find his eternal reward somewhere in this dark wilderness despite his best efforts from a few moments before. Mauled by a mountain lion, perhaps, or hit by a car. Worse, there was the distinct possibility that the stone that bled in his hand was some bizarre hallucination and that he’d actually lost a lot of blood, somehow, and that he might in fact already be dying.

His reason, however, was not altogether blinded by his doubts. His reason informed him that he could only be so far away from home. It was late afternoon when he met the fighter and his entourage behind the plaza. The thunderheads were probably visible then, but Brett had paid them no attention due to the more pressing matters at hand. When he had answered the phone in the car, it was about nine thirty in the evening, which meant some four hours or so had passed between losing consciousness and managing to avoid his early grave.

Exactly how much of that had been spent zip-tied in the rear of a luxury sport utility vehicle, however, was hard to determine. Especially in the dark. He could be in Maryland, or western Virginia, past Leesburg, or even in West Virginia. Part of him wished he’d spent more time paying attention when his family went camping as a child. Some of those survival-like skills might have ended up proving useful.

The rain had slowed now to a light drizzle. The peeping of frogs, which during the downpour he hadn’t noticed or was simply drowned out by the noise, was all around him and on both sides of the road: disjointed and high, forming a pulse of sound that weaved in and out of the patter of the rain on the leaves and road, like the cycling of some un-oiled chain through a tired machine. It carried with him for a while, at once both a comforting reminder of the summertime hike and the unpleasant whine that agitated the pain behind his ears.

But another, milder noise prompted him to cast a quick look over his shoulder. A pair of headlights had gained on him faster than he was used to. The sound of the tires was no doubt hidden by the sound of the countryside, and the thick blanket of humidity almost certainly did not help. Brett moved to he side of the road and shielded his face from the rain.

It was a truck. The headlights approached, slowing, despite Brett having moved off to the side of the road. The truck did not run him over. In fact, it stopped. Brett smirked. He won again.

The window came down.

“Stranger,” the driver called out to him. “Where’s your car at? If you’re out of gas, let’s siphon some from mine and get you to a station.”

Taken somewhat aback, Brett responded without thinking. “I’m trying to get back to town.”

“Which town?” The man looked him over. “Martinsburg? Winchester?”

That wasn’t a good sign.

“D.C.,” Brett replied. “I uh, sorta got lost. Can you tell me where we are?”

The guy shook his head. “I’m not going all the way out to D.C.,” he said. “I can take you into Winchester, though, if you don’t mind. What about your car?”

“Don’t have a car. Got, well, ditched out here, I guess.”

The driver leaned across the seats and popped open the passenger side door. “That’s rough, man. Hop in, we’ll get you taken care of.” Brett hefted himself up into the cab of the truck and mumbled a short apology about his soaking wet clothes. “Don’t worry, you can sort yourself out in town. Winchester’s about forty minutes away.”

“Nothing’s going to be open at this hour, right?”

The old man frowned and nodded sullenly. “I guess you’re right.” He breathed a short sigh through his old nose. “So what left you out here? Trouble with the girlfriend leave you stranded?”

“What?”

“You know. Get into an argument. She calls you one thing, you say another. Someone has corn mash for brains. Kicks you out of the car and takes off.” He spoke from what sounded like experience. “Gets more upset later, regrets her decision, turns around after you find a cab.” The stranger grinned beneath a scraggled mustache. “We’ve all been there once or twice.”

Brett considered if he’d ever call Stephanie’s brains corn mash, but he quickly suspected it would be the other way around. And she’d probably be doing it while she was laughing.

“No, nothing like that,” Brett said. “It’s hard to explain, but I had a fight card that went poorly, so I ended up stranded out here.”

The man eyed him suspiciously as the trees passed the windows. “A fight card?”

“I’m a fighter. Amateur, though. I work in construction.”

His gaze returned to the road. “Like MMA or boxing or whatever?” The wipers were at their lowest setting, picking up the heavy mist and spatter of rain from the slow drizzle.

Brett watched them make their circular path across the gloom. “Yeah. Mostly kickboxing, though.”

“Coach ditch you after a loss, huh?” The man shook his head. “That’s rough. Worse than your girl kicking you out. Bonds between men are sacred things.”

Brett considered this in silence as he contemplated Coach. Maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention for the last few months, but it seemed like Coach had made a number of poor decisions and that Brett was now paying for them. Interiorly, Brett resolved to call Coach at the earliest possible opportunity. There was only one main problem: the only thing in Brett’s pocket was the stone that bled. He had no wallet.

This one is going to be hard to win, he thought.

“What’s this?” The old man squinted into the dark where his high beams illuminated only so far. In the gloom were figures moving across the road. The light made them pale, almost phosphorescent, glowing or translucent like shaded ghosts, a great parade of them moving from one wooded side of the road to the other in a great if disorganized procession. A few, one or two, looked at the truck as it approached and their eyes flashed against the headlights into bright yellow coins that rested in white skulls. The truck rolled to a stop.

Brett peered at the crossing with cautious quietude. Some of them wore athletic mesh shorts, others sweatpants with the elastic scrunched up to the knees. Some wore boxing shoes, others went without foot coverings, many wore shin guards of various lengths or thicknesses. They sauntered across the road with hands wrapped in worn cloth or taped, as if just before a match. They came shirtless, in athletic tanks, tracksuits, hooded sweatshirts. Some had black eyes, great ribbons of bruises across their ribs, bloodied noses or mouths. Some limped, some nursed right hands, held cloth to their faces or necks. Periodically one or two here would spit red clumps off to the side.

“They’re fighters,” Brett said.

“Fighters?”

“Like me. Fighters.”

The old man watched with concern as the procession continued on. The woods to either side of the truck made it impossible to see how far it went or how far it had come. It seemed to appear out of one side of underbrush and disappear into the next.

“Is this what you fighters do in the middle of the night?”

Brett shook his head. “I’ve never done such a thing.”

He opened the truck door and got out, first only partially, then with deliberate motions, lowered his foot to the macadam. The drizzle had faded to an oppressive black humid night. Brett sensed that some great hidden evil lurked behind the fighters’ parade, behind its presence or its projection, or behind them, that they were pursued by it as if by an unseen threat that resided in the space behind their bones. The old man watched from the cab of the truck as Brett moved a few steps closer, compelled for some reason to join them.

One fighter observed him, a boxer with what was clearly a broken hand. He stepped out from the procession, one half-pace only towards Brett. Behind him, a kickboxer with a vessel that had burst in his eye and a blackened shin, followed nearby.

The boxer motioned with his head toward Brett’s left hand. “The bleeding stone,” he said. “What do you plan to do with it?”

Brett looked down at his hand. He had removed it from his pocket, but did not recollect exactly when. The stone bled greatly now, thick torrents bubbling up around his fingers as they pressed white hot into the pebble’s surface. It ran down the back of his hand and had left a red-black trail across the blacker macadam behind him.

The kickboxer said nothing behind the first man. Both simply observed Brett, and then the boxer turned and wordlessly rejoined the procession. He was gone in moments, but the kickboxer tarried, watching the blood gush from around Brett’s enclosed hand.

“Do yourself a favor,” he called to Brett. The procession was nearing its end. “Do not join us. Do not come looking for this, and do not join it when you find it.”

He held up a hand and stepped backwards, back into the parade, catching the tail end of loosely-staggered fighters as they left. His hand wraps were stained deep brown-black and crimson from underneath. Whether he held it up as a greeting or a farewell, or for some other reason, as a warning perhaps, Brett could not decipher.

He stood in the road for a little longer after the last man had crossed over and disappeared. The stone in his hand was back in his pocket, now caked heavier with dried blood.

“Well,” the old man called from his window, “we ought best get going, son.”

Brett nodded slowly, dumb, and returned to the truck. With more numbly deliberate motions he slumped into the passenger’s seat. The rain and the darkness had prevented the red stain of blood from leaking through his pants pocket too obviously.

—

Brett thanked the old man again after he got out of the truck. “Take this,” the man said, handing him a few twenties.

“Sir, really, I—”

“No, no. I hate seeing guys like you down on their luck.” He stuffed them in Brett’s hand by leaning out of the window. Something in his eyes indicated, again, that there was some part of the man’s past being revisited or refurbished in the exercise. “And after whatever that was on the road back there, well… you probably need it right now more than I do.”

“What was that?”

The driver shrugged and returned to his seat. “You see things out here, sometimes,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Just get yourself taken care of. So long.”

When the truck started off again, Brett waved weakly, less sure of himself than before, and watched its tail lights flicker across the dark and around a corner. He was alone again, for the most part, and the stone in his pocket seemed to hearken to him with some impulse of blood. It could feel his heartbeat, perhaps, or read his blood pressure when he held it. He did not know.

Downtown Winchester was muted but active. Here and there, on sidewalks and corners, people mingled and went about their evening, the light drizzle of the lingering rain and the oppressive humidity but considered part and parcel for western Virginia nightlife. Brett considered his options. He could get food and painkillers for his headache, and from there determine how to get back home. He could try to solve the second problem first, and then get something to quell the throb of his blood pressure through his skull. Or he could find someplace to sleep and dry his clothes for the night, which would probably take most if not all of the money he had just been blessed with.

Not unaccustomed to head injuries, he opted for the first. It would be easier to think things through if he had food in his stomach and something to alleviate the headache that had worn him down.

—

He walked a while east in order to get out of the busier section of town. The street blocks shifted to residential, and then eventually to low-density suburban housing that indicated the outskirts of town. He walked on further, encountering forests again, but also the square-fenced long tracts of farms, some for animals, horses perhaps, but others obviously suited to a different purpose. He walked for another hour, lost in the moment of walking, but pleased that the rain had mostly subsided and that the evening was warm. Some mild part of him feared illness after staying so long in clothing soaked to his skin, and his head still throbbed with a great ache that only seemed to have gotten worse.

The farms faded and the densely forested underbrush returned all around him, now alive with the sounds of various wildlife. All around him chirped the peeping of frogs and the rush of water through gullies cut by rainstorms such as that which he had tumbled out of. The black darkness of the road beneath his feet and the wet-drenched humidity made the evening gloom opaquer still than the previous storm.

After a while, a crossroads came into sight. It was illuminated by the pale blue glow of a solitary streetlamp, and across from it, the garish light from the storefront windows of a small convenience store. A single old gas pump sat outside, shielded overhead by its customary awning, and apparently not derelict. Brett approached with caution, finally seeking to relieve himself of the pain in his head and, now, in his gut.

A chime rang as the automatic doors opened. “Hello,” the attendant smiled some third shift grin. “What brings you here?”

“I’ll just help myself, thanks,” Brett replied. An undeliberate awkwardness invaded his movements thanks to the obscene forwardness of the man behind the counter. Perhaps he was merely a casualty of twenty-four hour convenience stores, or perhaps it was the lack of food and the pain in his head finally wearing him down. The store’s fluorescent lights cast blinding glows against the dark, but they flickered with unnatural frequencies and aggravated his eyes.

“Food and painkillers,” Brett mumbled, as he set some items on the counter. “And if possible, I’d like to use your phone.”

The man smiled again, rigidly. He moved with an uneasy gait to the back of the store, where Brett sensed, or imagined, some other darker, more sinister figure sat in wait. He was not long for tarrying, however. When the attendant returned, he hefted an old style rotary phone up onto the counter top. The grey snaking landline trailed behind him.

Brett observed the phone quietly, and then the attendant.

Bill, the store clerk, smiled. “You can tell what my name is because it’s written on my name tag,” he said. Brett nodded expressionlessly and gripped the pebble in his pocket. Immediately, his hand grew wet with blood.

With his free hand, Brett picked up the headset and held it against his shoulder as he began dialing Coach’s number. It rang a few times, but eventually it went to his answering machine. “Coach,” Brett said, turning away from the counter to gaze outside. The windows were so black they could have been walls, or mirrors. “I don’t exactly understand what happened, but I’m way out east of Winchester right now. I’m making my way back home. Will probably take me all day, at this rate. Anyway, I need to talk to you about what happened yesterday, so I’ll call you again when I’m back home.”

He hung up. The attendant hadn’t moved so much as a muscle. Brett peered at him cautiously, then moved to make one more call. Again, it rang a few times and then went to an automated message. “Steph, hey. Hope you’re doing okay. I’m having a really weird night. Uh, call me back when you get this message. Hopefully I’ll be home by then. I, uh…” he thought about what the words ‘I love you’ meant, but the stone in his pocket poured more blood over his hand, and, distracted, he shook off whatever feeling had come upon him then. “I’ll see you soon.”

He hung up, and this time, he pushed the phone toward the attendant. Bill’s grin returned, and with methodical slowness, he gathered the phone and the chord and disappeared into the back again. Again, Brett felt or imagined some second presence, or third one, as he heard a muffled conversation take place in the storeroom, but with whomever it was, some other, darker presence lurked just out of sight.

He returned and scanned the two items, and then asked loudly, “So did you see the fight parade?”

“The fight parade.” Brett repeated evenly.

“You seem like the type.”

“I don’t understand.”

Bill set the items back on the counter and moved his hands to hang at his side. “It has something to do with what’s in your pocket,” he said. “You have something there, don’t you? Something your arm keeps flexing to grip. It’s something important, isn’t it?” The man’s expression was unreadable, but Brett felt threatened with his glare. “Do you know what it is? Perhaps it is something unpleasant.” The stone bled more. “Do you feel like you’ve won?”

“Bill, you’re scaring the customer.” A younger man emerged from the back room. “Go restock the fridges. I’ll take care of this.”

Wearing an identical uniform, he approached the counter and waved Bill back away. His name tag read ‘Biff’. Brett’s unease grew.

Biff turned to the register and hit a few buttons. The items had already been scanned. He made a face and looked at Brett.

“You’re a fighter?” Brett looked at him. “I heard the conversation,” Biff shrugged. “Just seems cool.”

“Ah, yeah.” He looked at the cigarettes behind the counter and thought of Coach. “I’ll take a pack of Menthols, too.”

Biff gave him a weird look. “A fighter who smokes, huh?”

“All fighters smoke,” Brett said with an uneven immediacy. His palm was slick drenched in his pocket with blood. The stone was heavy. Still, he clutched it tighter.

Biff regarded him. “Huh,” he said. Then with ambivalence, he retrieved a pack of cigarettes and scanned them. “I’m actually a competitive yo-yoist,” he said, taking Brett’s outstretched twenty and making change. “Ranked within the top fifteen of the country last year.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, wanna see?” The register rolled shut with a controlled crash and Biff pulled out a yo-yo, taking a moment to slip the string tightly over his middle finger. “I’ll show you the trick I used to get ahead of my local rival two years ago.”

With a few flicks of his wrist, he shot the yo-yo in several different directions, sometimes letting it spin, other times yanking it out of a sleeper and using its momentum to rocket it in some other direction. He was clearly just getting warmed up. Then, seamlessly, his left hand started catching the string around his fingers as he performed different loops, some smaller, others with greater bravado, his mouth making sound effects out of some ancient rehearsed method that sprung forth unfiltered almost certainly from his childhood. And then it was over.

“See? Cat’s cradle.” The device swung between his hands, back and forth, suspended by a tripod of some threaded talent that escaped Brett’s understanding, spinning and spinning.

“I think that’s called the Swing.”

Biff scowled and flicked the toy up in the air as he dismantled the trick. It returned to him seemingly without effort. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, man.” He slipped the string off of his finger and nodded toward Brett. “So, you’re a fighter,” he continued. He leaned on the counter top. “Show me something cool. If you’ve got time.”

Brett considered showing him the bleeding stone, now trapped in his hand and covered in drying blood, but he thought better of it. It seemed like a bad idea.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

Biff motioned to the far side of the store.

—

Brett pulled his left hand out of his pocket, now covered in blood from the stone. A rank stench of iron filled the little room, blood so thick it was a black-reddened glop that clung to his palm by the abundance of dried platelets and coagulated fluids. He plunged it under the small faucet and scrubbed at his hand and the stone with his free hand. It took a few minutes, and his left arm still reeked of iron and was stained here and there with splotches of brown-red rust, but there at least was presentable a limb that did not cause even himself to recoil. The stone, meanwhile, continued to seep blood as he handled it beneath the faucet, and eventually he gave up trying to clean it. It returned to his pocket. He left.

—

He had his bearings now. To the east, about an hour away, was the mountain that separated this region of Virginia with the metropolitan side. If he could cross the mountain, he could make it someplace where he could catch a ride to the airport in a reasonable time, and then just ride the metro home. In principle, it didn’t seem that difficult.

In practice, he wasn’t sure how much energy he had, and how long traversing the mountain would take. It was still on the near side of midnight, but only by an hour and some change. His clothes were still soaked through. The painkillers had yet to take effect. He was in the middle of, for the most part, nowhere. Everything about him, he thought, screamed of suspicion.

He hadn’t realized it until he saw himself in the bathroom mirror, but there were cuts across his face and swelling from the fight. Dark blue and purple bruises across his arms and his chest were visible thanks to the rain having soaked his shirt into translucency. And, of course, there was a great brown-red stain on the side leg of his pants where the stone bled.

In the dark, he surmised, it was difficult to see these things. Under the gruesome illumination of midnight civilization, however, they were unavoidable. The closer he got to the city, he reasoned, the slightly less out of place a man like him might look. At the very least, he suspected he could pass for a homeless man, and thus get home without attracting too much attention.

He walked for another two hours and passed through a sleeping town. The main street was nearly empty, save for a few people here or there sleepwalking or the vagabond. Brett received only a few glares as he passed. The town was soon behind him, and he found himself walking along the side of a major road that ran eastward.

Another hour or so passed. The ridge in the distance had gotten significantly closer, and the incline steeper. A car pulled over to the shoulder with its flashers on. It was a small pickup. As he approached, the window was down and a woman called out.

“Get in.”

Rain was starting to pick up again. He looked down at himself and then into the cab of the pickup illuminated by the pale light. A tanned woman in a tank top had opened the passenger side door, leaning across the bench seat to do so. She looked to be in her mid thirties.

“Come on, you look terrible. I’m sure. Get in,” she said again.

He climbed inside. “Sorry, about the mess,” he said. The chill of his soaked clothes pressed between the seat of the truck and the skin on his back made him shiver slightly.

“It looks as though it’s been something of a long night.” She eased the truck back into gear and accelerated off the shoulder. There were only a handful of cars on the road at this hour. “I can take you as far as Leesburg. Where are you headed?”

Brett only barely knew where Leesburg was. “The city. I’m trying to get home.”

“Huh.” She made a gruff, noncommittal sound.

“People out here are awfully friendly,” Brett continued. “This is the second time tonight I’ve been given a ride.”

She made some gruff noise. “It’s no problem for me,” she said. “I don’t like seeing travelers by themselves on this road. Hitchhikers, vagabonds. Whenever I see one, I try to get them into town, or at least off of the road.”

“Why?”

“This is a very old road.” Something in her demeanor grew more distant, darker. In the midnight gloom, her face was illuminated only by the dimmed lights from the radio and the instruments beneath the steering wheel. “George Washington used it to get to regions west of the gap that we’re passing through right now. There were Indians here in those days,” she said. “And… other things. I imagine the area looked a lot different back then, though. And the people colder.”

“Are you a historian?”

“No, I just travel this road every day,” she said.

Brett thought for a moment. “So you drive around here a lot, then.”

She looked at him with mild suspicion behind her eyes.

“Have you ever encountered any like…” he trailed off as he tried to focus through his fatigue. “Ghost stuff? Weird paranormal stuff?”

She shrugged and nodded. “Yeah. All the time. You see that stuff a lot in this country.” She took a sidelong glance at him and scoffed. “For all I know, you’re one of them.” When he looked like he started to consider her words, she laughed and shook her head. “I’m kidding. You city types practically glow in the dark, but it isn’t from being a ghost. You’re just totally out of place.”

“Ha ha.” Brett did nothing to hide his uneasiness, too disoriented by the events to know how to mask it, and too tired to care.

She changed lanes to pass some car going considerably slow on the road. “We get all kinds out here, though. You people, commuters, and all sorts of ghosts. The trail isn’t far from here. The old war path. See a lot of weird stuff out there.” She sighed and shrugged a midnight shrug that served as a period to her thoughts.

Brett was quiet before he replied. “That’s crazy, man.”

“You city people have your crackheads and your gang shootings,” she replied. “It’s not all that different.”

That didn’t make much sense to Brett. “I don’t know, it seems I’d rather have ghosts than the sort of stuff we have to deal with on the streets. The ghosts can’t shoot you.”

She shook her head. “No, but they’re just as dangerous.”

He pushed his hand into his left pocket, and when he pulled it out again, it was covered in blood.

“So, you have a girl back home you’re trying to get to?” she suddenly asked.

“I do,” he said. “But she’s out of town. Yourself?”

“No, no. Nothing like that.” She made the same gruff noise as before. “I drive this way every night, trying not to run into… well.”

“The person who offered me a ride earlier,” Brett said, “he was an old guy who drove a truck kind of like this one.”

“Let’s not talk about that guy.”

—

She dropped him off on the other side of the hill, a few blocks into Leesburg. “You’re going into the city?” she asked.

Brett nodded.

“The metro is about eight or nine miles from here, south. Follow 267 and you’ll run into it.”

“Thank you.” He offered her money for the ride, or a meal. But she shook her head.

“No, no. I can’t stick around. There’s a guy I’m trying to avoid right now. You know how it is,” she said dismissively. “Well, you’re from the city. Maybe you don’t.”

Brett didn’t know quite how to take that. Her truck sped off and in the late-midnight humid darkness it squealed wheels around a corner and disappeared. Brett tried to get his bearings again and began walking south.

A public square bordered a small dog park with a fountain in the middle. It was almost deserted. One or two men of questionable look laid on benches or sat slouched against a statue on the far side. Brett did not encounter them. The smell of blood attracted him to the fountain. It was wide, circular, with three tiers of small pools that each ran into each other in concentric order. Water ran over small tiled mosaics. But it was not water. He put his hand under a torrent and it came away red.

The fountain was thick with blood. Inside his pocket, his stone began to bleed. It dribbled blood across his hand and, as he held it out, into the thick sink below. It was an image engraved into his vision: he squeezed the stone, and blood poured into the basin, thick, the black-dark crimson of some horrible wound. The stone did not yield and yet it offered blood into his grasping fist. He grasped for something, and he was rewarded with blood, and it flowed into the fountain that received it.

—

Hours later, Brett began to relax, standing like a solid post on the platform of the metro station. This was the home stretch. He could ride the orange line back to Eastern Market, and then it’d be a hike, but he’d be home. He could strip off his clothes, take a shower, and sleep for a thousand years.

He’d probably have to talk to the landlady about gaining access to his apartment, he suddenly realized, as his keys, wallet, and everything else in his gear bag were gone. It shouldn’t be a problem, he thought.

The sound of waterlogged shoes hitting each step with specific deliberateness did nothing to palliate his mood. It was uneven, unkind. The rhythm of the gait indicated some other purpose. Some new horrible sequence was to beset him again, but this time amid the throng of morning commuters.

The stone in his pocket began to bleed again.

There was another man, not altogether unlike himself, who sat down on the far side of the bench. He did not gaze at him and he returned nothing. Neither spoke a word to the other. When the metro arrived, he stood up when Brett stood up, and he followed Brett into the car.

The metro was empty save for the pair of them. This was uncommon. Perhaps Brett simply did not perceive the other passengers, or perhaps they had been hidden by some dark veil cast about his senses. The car lurched with the solemn rhythm of the metro, but all that was before him now was the un-hidden threat of violence by the man immediately to his right hand.

“You are a fighter, are you not?” His dark skin and dreadlocks were as wet with water as the rest of his clothes. He was older than Brett by perhaps two decades, almost doubling his age. There were lines on his face and in his hands, striking rigid-grey strands of hair that wove throughout his long dreads that stuck out from his head like haggard spikes. He smelled.

Waterlogged and fatigued, Brett replied. “Yes.”

“Then we should fight.” The man stood up, holding his weight against the ground the way the seafarers of old held their own against the decks of ships. “It is the only thing we know how to do.”

Interiorly, Brett ran his own dialogue. Couldn’t it wait? Can’t we go to a gym? Can’t we think about this, even if just for a moment? We could schedule a smoker. We could meet in a parking lot. We could train. Brett tried to stifle his interior whining. It was beginning to leak through, and the stone in his pocket was already torrent of blood. Can’t we go at this when one of us isn’t completely exhausted?

But he knew the answer to all of these questions. The rhetorical exercise was fruitless, undefined, indulgent. He had to keep things simple. He had to win. Brett dismissed himself from the endeavor. What was before him now was just another avenue by which to win.

He stood up, and immediately got hit with a left cross that swiped through his cheekbone. It aggravated the previous fight’s wounds. He was beginning to feel himself again. Two jabs, a hook, the impact of a handrail into his ribs and the window of the door against the side of his face. Drenched sleeves covered his nose as rough hands pulled him back and threw him down upon the center of the car. This wasn’t going well.

“You are a fighter and yet you do not fight.”

A reprieve. His thigh was drenched in blood that wasn’t his own. The smell of iron was in the air and he crouched upon the metro, evaluating his options. Lights flashed by the windows as the car floated on across a cacophony of noises toward its next destination.

He stood up and put his hands ahead of himself. The man came again. Brett avoided the jab and blocked the hook. He threw the round kick into his side, pushed the cross across the jaw, deflected the jab that grazed his own. He was in. He held, grabbed and clenched, went for the throw. The man was bigger than Brett, but he was suddenly off balance. Brett had the trip and he was about to go for the ground but the metro lurched beneath his feet. Brett was on the wrong side of the lurch. He went to the floor. His opponent, disoriented, hit his head against a railing.

They both moved to get up, but his opponent was faster. He threw a front kick into Brett’s side as he rose. He followed up with a downward cross to keep Brett down. The water from his sleeves went all over. The man’s movements were heavy, weighed down with the same drench-soaked water that Brett had accumulated in his own cloth. But Brett is tired. He feels the impact of the floor against his forehead more than he feels the fist against the back of his head. It’s not a good day. He’s probably not going to win. The throb in his skull, kept at bay by so many milligrams of painkillers, returned briefly and suddenly with a lightning-like flash behind his eyes.

The metro stopped and the doors opened. They’d made it to Tyson’s Corner. The man staggered backward, disarmed, and he clutched a railing as Brett moved to look at him for the first time. There was a sneer, or a grin, Brett couldn’t determine which, but the man left out of the side door as others flooded in. The fight was over.

“I,” Brett started. The ring remained his. “Did I win?” He asked himself. The doors closed and the train began to move again. “I don’t feel like I won.”

He stood up, face hurting, pocket wet. His left hand reached inside to feel the stone and confirm it. There were only a few people around.

He sat down in an empty seat and gripped a nearby pole with his free hand. A man across from him, suited up, ready for the workday, looked at him oddly. He observed Brett, and he made some crucial mistake that he almost immediately regretted. But still, he opened his mouth. And he hesitated, the boundaries of politeness having already been crossed with eye contact. This was not an utterance he was accustomed to making.

“You alright, man?”

Brett gazed back, eyes wide.

“I’m just trying to get home.”

—

The landlady opened his door for him and informed him that there’d be a fee for getting the locks changed. He apologized and smiled, thanking her again for answering his request, and then closed the door. He peeled off his clothes and, after a shower, threw them over the shower rod to finish drying. The water on his skin had never felt so refreshing. He was fain to enjoy it too long. Sleep claimed him the moment he collapsed into bed.

There were no messages on his answering machine.

————

3.

—

He slept uninterrupted for about five hours before getting up, eating a meal, washing his face, drinking a beer, and then going back to sleep. When he awoke the second time, it was morning. His head no longer hurt. He ate, hydrated himself, and called his boss. It was only by his work record that he kept his job. The number of days that had passed disoriented him. Things were going to be alright.

“I appreciate the heads up, at least,” the man said over the phone. “But are you good? You sound different.”

“It’s a little hard to explain.”

After their conversation, Brett placed the bleeding stone in a bowl after he found that it had soaked the pocket of his pants again. He had left it there the previous evening, having discarded his clothes on the floor in his daze to get some rest. They seemed ruined now, and they reeked of blood, so he threw them out. He took care of some chores, washed some dishes and checked his answering machine. Stephanie has apparently called while he was asleep.

“Hi, Brett,” she sounded chipper, “I got your message. Hope you’re okay, hope the fight went well. Didn’t hear from you all the previous day so I was getting a little worried. Anyway, I’ll be back in town in a couple of days, so make sure you keep that handsome mug in one piece until I get back. See you soon!”

Brett smiled. With his spirits lightened, he changed into day clothes, took another dose of painkillers, and decided to stop by the gym. On his way out the door, he grabbed the stone from the bowl and put it in his pocket.

—

The door to the old gym clattered shut. Inside, several regulars were busy in various corners. Class wasn’t in session at the moment. A couple of them hit the bags, or held them. Two men were up in the training ring working combos. Someone was using the weight rack all the way in the back. Brett noted the cavernous sense of emptiness that came from its sparse population during the morning hours. Something was missing, and it was more than just people.

One of the men at the lockers nodded toward him. It was Jack. “You look terrible, man,” he said. “Here to train after all that?”

“No, I’m looking for Coach,” Brett said. “He still hasn’t returned a call from a couple days ago.”

Jack frowned and shook his head. “I haven’t seen him.”

Brett checked the office. Jess looked up in time to see him approach and smiled as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Wow, look at you,” Jess uttered. “Does your girlfriend still recognize you?”

“It’s not that bad,” Brett replied. He hadn’t looked in a mirror since he got back. “Is Coach around? Has he been by recently?”

She shook her head as she leaned on the windowsill. “What was all that from, anyway? Was the last fight unregulated?”

“It’s complicated,” Brett said. “I think. I don’t really know if it’s complicated or not, actually, but I can’t make sense of it.” He looked around the gym again. “Do you know where Coach might be? It’s partly why I’m looking for him.”

Jess motioned behind herself. “His usual stuff is all still here, so I’m sure he’ll be back at some point. I’ll make sure he gives you a call when he does.”

The gym seemed cold, dark somehow, the rust lines that ran down a few of the brushed concrete walls more vivid-iron red, the pitted metal rafters blacker.

—

The outside of Coach’s house, about twenty minutes away, was grim. His old car remained parked in the small driveway, but the lights were all off and no one answered the door when he banged on it.

Brett frowned. It was almost lunch time. The stone in his pocket felt heavy.

A man came out of the house next door and turned to lock the deadbolt. As he moved to his car at the curb, Brett hailed him. “Have you seen the guy who lives here? Is he okay?” The man looked at him as if he was looking at a space alien. “I’m a friend of his,” Brett continued, uncertainly trying to parse out exactly why the man seemed so struck. “I’ve been looking for him for a couple days.”

The man smiled with a self-evident weakness of his station in life. Then, haltingly, “no, man, I don’t really know who lives there, sorry.” Brett’s brow furrowed, disarmed. “I don’t think anyone really knows,” the guy continued. “But I don’t really spend much time at home, either.”

Brett found the man’s behavior and speech extremely peculiar, but he let the matter drop. They waved at each other and the man departed, leaving Brett alone again on Coach’s meager front lawn.

—

Brett arrived back home to find that his door had been forced open. The hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up. With a slight nudge, his door swung slowly across its deliberate arc and Brett prepared to take cover. From what, he did not know.

Instead, in the kitchen, two men in identical suits were waiting for him. They spoke.

“Come in. Hello.”

“Hello.”

Brett said nothing and looked around uneasily. The shorter one had darker hair and was clearly the younger of the two. The older one Brett recognized as part of the entourage from the fight he won behind the strip mall. He had several scars across his face and the sort of lines that indicated a long and extensive career in dangerous businesses.

“You should come in, Brett. It’s your home.” The younger did nothing to mask the sneer beneath his mobster demeanor.

“Yeah.” Brett readied himself for another fight. His encounter with the strange man on the subway had taught him how much he had to learn about real fighting compared to what he had been training before.

“Relax, we’re not here to do anything,” the older man said. “My younger companion here has a few things to learn about politeness in such delicate matters.”

“Do I know you?”

“We sent you off to be taken care of,” the younger one said. It had only been a couple of days. Brett felt different.

“Proposition,” the older man said. His tongue ran across his lips but his lips parted and creased against his teeth, which were barred, tense, unsettled; there was evil there, and the stone began to bleed again. “Your fight with… with the master,” he began. “You aren’t aware, are you?”

Brett didn’t know what he was talking about. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

He thought about the fight behind the strip mall. And then he thought about the fight at the tournament. And then he thought about the suits at the gym and Coach’s words, his behavior, the circumstances. He thought about drinking with Coach before the last fight.

“What did you do to Coach?”

The older man waved his hand. “Don’t you worry about that too much,” he said. “We’re here with a proposition.”

“You’re a remarkably simple person to get a hold of,” the younger man said. “Just, apparently, a hard one to keep.”

Brett moved further inside and closed the door behind him, at least to what extent it could. The latch was broken. Cautiously, he looked about the room. There was no one save the three of them. “I’m not a fan of being buried alive,” he admitted. “I guess you could call that a simple enough motivation.”

The younger man smiled and nodded. “Well, fear not. We aren’t here to repeat the mistake from a few days ago,” he said. “Instead, as we said, we’re here to offer a proposition.”

“Bodyguard.” The older man’s voice came out with the gruffness of a strong growl.

“Bodyguard,” Brett repeated slowly. “What did you do to Coach?”

The younger man peered slowly at his colleague but stayed quiet. It was the older one who spoke, and he smiled as he did. “Let me assure you, Mister Brett, that I take great pleasure in my work only when I’m able to fight.”

Brett didn’t like the sound of that.

The younger man continued. “You won’t be seeing any more of that man for a very long time. Unless, of course, our meeting goes a little unfavorably.” He sighed and adjusted something under his suit jacket. “Then you might see him very soon.”

“Do you know who you messed up at your last fight?” The older man suddenly asked. There was an evil mirth beneath his words that Brett immediately picked up on. He quelled the temptation to begin clenching the stone in his pocket.

“No.”

“Thought so,” he said. “Let’s just say that there were plans and designs, and your coach knew of these, and apparently, because you’re so simple, he never communicated them.”

Brett smiled slightly.

“Well,” the older man continued, “it’s all water under the bridge, now. But we’re interested in you. In hiring you. We could use talent like yours in our business.”

“Thank you for the compliment, but I’m not interested.” Brett declined without a waver. “I like my job, and fighting is just a hobby.”

The younger man froze. A look of contempt crossed his face. After a short pause, he reached into his jacket again, but the older man suddenly moved. The other did not even seem to know what was happening, because the man’s fist collided with the side of his head and with a short yell, he fell over, limp.

“To tell you the truth,” the older man said, standing up, loosening his tie, “I just wanted a reason to fight you.”

Brett, again, did not understand. “I don’t understand.” The aura in the room had obviously changed. Conflict was immanent. He pushed one foot back but did not retreat, and his arms came up to a wide guard.

“I watched you fight twice,” the man said. He placed his jacket on the back of the kitchen table’s chair, along with the tie that he pulled over his head. His partner, or colleague, lay slumped on the ground next to him. “When fighting the young master,” he continued. “You were good. It made me want to test myself against you. It sparked something. An old man’s delight, perhaps.”

He spoke with a tune of violence that Brett did not altogether decipher. But it was not one that was unfamiliar. It was a language he knew, just a formality that indicated a familiarity with which he was not accustomed, nor even totally versed in. He also considered, reading the man’s movements, that a fight here would be a bad idea for himself.

“I might not win,” he suddenly muttered, but it made the older man’s eyes glow.

He said, “Oh, you think so, do you?”

The man closed the distance. They fought. A jab, a weave, a jab, a sidestep, hook, cross, jab. Fists met the flesh of arms or air, and Brett backed off; he jabbed, he stepped and tried to test the striking zone. But this was not a competitive match. The man’s fists were inside his guard, turning to grabs faster than Brett could react. He shook himself loose once, twice, but it was a failing effort.

He weaved and leaned his elbows into the man’s frame, but the man’s forearms had already slid past his own. A fist was in his face, and as he ducked his head, it turned to a grab that wrenched his left guard open and thrust his body down. Where was his other hand? The second fist collided with the side of his head and grabbed the side of his face, but Brett found his right hand burying itself over and over into the hollow beneath the man’s outstretched left arm. He relaxed his neck and pivoted. They went to the ground but the man had let go by then, and Brett rolled into his kitchen cabinets. As he got up, the man grunted and smirked.

“That coach of yours made for himself a decent fighter.” He rubbed his side. “Better training and you’d be lethal. You’d be something else.”

“I’m not interested,” Brett repeated.

The man grinned. “I wasn’t offering.” He came again. The man was fast but Brett knew he was faster. But every strike connected to nothing, and when he moved to grapple, he felt like he was fighting a mountain. No, a mountain during a mudslide, or a volcanic eruption. Don’t maintain contact, he thought. Strike, strike, and strike. Stay away from the man. The moment he moved to engage with any kind of torque, the man would sink and pivot, twist, and Brett would feel himself slammed into this or that piece of furniture, the floor, this or that arm escaping a bout-ending lock only by the very hairs above his terrified goosebumps.

But it ended quickly, and Brett could not utter that he had won, because he could not utter anything. The man had ended another clench and buried his knee into the back of Brett’s neck. His head was twisted at an uncomfortable angle, one arm pinned to his own back and the other ineffectually pushed upright someplace. He could barely breathe, much less speak.

“A good fighter,” the man repeated. “But that’s all you are. You are wasted in construction, in the ring.”

Brett suddenly wondered if his life was about to end.

But the man spotted a red spot in Brett’s pocket, and it caused him to pause. He eased himself toward Brett’s thigh and reached, as if indulging in some invasive procedure, into his pocket to grab the bleeding stone. He held it up to the light.

“Incredible,” he said. “You actually have one. I’ve only met one other—”

His weight had eased too much. He was a professional, but he made a mistake. Everyone does. Brett knew this. He felt the subtle shift on his neck. And he knew he could use it.

He rolled over and used his nearest available limb to strike. It was a leg, and the centrifugal motion of his roll buried the toe of his shoe into the man’s throat as he slipped off of Brett’s neck. Brett’s shoulder wrenched and the pain was something he simply grit his teeth through. The man gagged, completely off-guard, toe of a shoe lodged against his Adam’s apple, and he dropped the stone. As it fell, Brett continued the roll and sent his fist into the side of the man’s temple. He knew what he had intended to do, right then, pushing the fingernail of his thumb into knuckle of his middle finger, protruding out the bent form of his topmost finger.

By chance, perhaps, or by some other cause, his fist missed and found its mark slightly below its intended target, slamming into the nerve bundle at the nexus of the jaw. The pointed strike and the force meant the man lost consciousness before he even hit the floor.

Brett groaned as he sat up. He throat felt like splinters were dragging through it at every breath. “I win,” he said hoarsely. He nodded to himself. His shoulder felt awful. The stone sat in a pool of blood. “I won again.”

His kitchen was a mess. Two bodies lay amid the disarray of loosed pots and pans, the dishes now crashed upon the floor from the drying rack, the broken door frame from the guests’ forced entry, a splintered cabinet door. A bloodstain from no one lay on the floorboards where the stone continued to bleed.

The phone suddenly rang. Rubbing his throat, Brett let it go to the answering machine. He sat with his back against the kitchen doorway and contemplated his next move.

“Hey,” a happy voice pierced the air. “It’s me. Looks like I’ll be getting home sooner than expected. The deal went well. I might need a ride from the airport, though.” Stephanie’s charmingly singsong tone put a smile on his face. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening, bye bye!” The machine ceased and its little red light started blinking.

“What a beautiful voice,” the old man on the floor grated out. He groaned as he rolled over onto his back, and Brett jumped to his feet. “No, no. I’m done. I lost that fight, and I don’t feel like a rematch.”

“What’s going to happen now?” Uncertainty clouded his words only because he did not seem to know what direction events would take next.

“I’ll remove my colleague here and we’ll get going,” the older man said. “I do wish you’d reconsider the bodyguard offer. It would at least protect you from what’s probably going to happen next.”

Brett furrowed his brow once more. “Another threat?”

“No, no.” The older man rose to his feet and moved to retrieve his jacket and tie. “No, who I work for will probably find you, and you’ll probably have a very unpleasant time of it when he does.” Seeing Brett’s look of confusion, he chuckled darkly to himself. “He didn’t send us, by the way. I made the call to recruit you. The man you beat three days ago was under my protection, see. My charge. But his father is my boss.”

Then, gaze settling on the stone on the floor surrounded by reflective dark crimson blood, his face changed. “That stone,” he began, but he paused and seemed to think better of it. Closing his mouth, he shook his head. “No, never mind.” He groaned as he picked up his slumped partner and threw him over his shoulder. “We’ll send you a check for the door,” he said. And then they were gone.

—

Brett watched the traffic pass by from his window seat in the little eatery. He looked forward, one day, to taking Stephanie here again. Hopefully as soon as the weekend. He grimaced as his shoulder twinged.

He hadn’t ordered yet, and if he was being honest with himself, wasn’t hungry enough to eat, anyway. The stone in his pocket was not bleeding. He was careful not to touch it or apply pressure to it, as he had not yet found a way to stop the blood from drenching through his clothes. While ruminating on this and other matters, such as what to order, fate caught up to him once more.

A black limousine pulled up to the curb and stopped. The rear door opened and a large black man in a remarkably expensive suit stepped out. Brett watched him slowly survey the street, then the building, and then himself through the window. Brett only blinked back in response. Then he came inside.

The door jingled as he entered. The large man took in the sight of the eatery without expression or interest, but with the great deliberateness of a man who carried everything with him. He approached Brett’s booth and sat down. When he spoke, he spoke with an accent thick with some foreign lilt that had rose up out of regions south of the Sahara.

“You are a simple man to find,” he said. Interiorly, Brett agreed.

“This is the second time I’ve heard that today,” Brett replied. The man, unfazed, said nothing to that.

“I have been informed that a couple of my men have greatly inconvenienced you,” he began. “For this, you have my apologies. But there is a greater matter that we must discuss.” Brett remained silent. “You may call me Ngumbo. I request that you come with me on a short drive.”

“In there?” Brett asked. He nodded toward the limousine at the curb. The man gave no outward indication of responding to him. Brett met his gaze and found himself wanting. “It’s a nice car,” he finally said.

Ngumbo’s face never changed expression. “We will go to my office to conduct and conclude our business with one another. Matters are too delicate for this place.”

Brett decided that he wasn’t going to eat after all, and he accompanied Ngumbo to the limousine. He entered first, and Ngumbo came in behind him, closing the door. Brett sat with his back to the driver’s cabin. There was no one else in the back.

“I do not have a meal to serve you,” he said. “We do, however, have some food. And drink, if you are so inclined.” He opened one of the side compartments to reveal protein bars and alcohol. Brett thought it was a pretty good setup, but also believed it to be a bad idea to drink when he didn’t have the foggiest idea of where he was going.

“No, but thank you.”

Ngumbo closed the compartments and leaned back in his seat. There were no seat belts. Brett didn’t mind. The scenery outside the windows was darkened. The light inside came only from interior running lights at the base of the seats and LEDs in the ceiling. There was little to see outside that Brett hadn’t already spent most of his life looking at, anyway.

—

The ride was short. Before long, the limousine had pulled up to the front of one of the larger buildings downtown, not far from the mall. Ngumbo got out first, and Brett followed after him. He was met at the door by a couple of guards.

“We will be going to the top,” Ngumbo told Brett. As they passed through the main lobby, Ngumbo nodded to the staffers at the front desk. Large fountains flanked them on either side, beyond which were sitting areas, a cafe, and other amenities that Brett did not have the time to see or spot. By the elevators a dark-skinned young man sat on a bench, dazedly looking out across the marbled lobby. The sound of water from the fountains filled the air.

Ngumbo stopped walking upon seeing him. The younger man made no outward response. Brett suddenly recognized him as the fighter he encountered who had said something about demanding a rematch.

“This is my son,” he said to Brett. “He goes by the name Damon now. It is a bad name, but I allow him the luxury of a bad name in order to better get along in a bad world.”

“That’s not his real name?”

“An outsider like you, who belongs to this world, has no need to know his real name. He chose it, and although it is distasteful, as his father, I allow it.” Brett could not discern whether it was wistfulness or enmity behind his eyes as Ngumbo stared past him out of a window.

Brett followed his gaze. “I don’t really understand.”

“I suppose you would not.” Ngumbo smiled suddenly, without mirth or joy. “But let us conduct our business and be done with one another.”

Flanked by the bodyguards, one of whom Brett had already encountered, they made their way to the penthouse suite at the top of the tower. The elevator ride was long, and its length made Brett slightly uneasy. The men who entered the space with himself and Ngumbo were both large, imposing. Brett did not consider winning any fight that might break out in such confined quarters with such massive people. Worse, he had no idea where this was going or, given the way Ngumbo spoke, whether he’d be leaving the tower alive.

Simplify it, he thought to himself. One step at a time.

The stone in his pocket had gotten heavier. At the slightest pressure, Brett knew, it would let loose a torrent of blood.

—

They arrived in his office soon enough. The elevator emptied out onto small lobby of the penthouse. Ngumbo lead them straight ahead. Great windows lined the far wall of the spacious room. Near the center of the room, but toward the windows, sat a large granite desk, altar-like, littered with several spiral-bound volumes and papers. To the side of it was a second wooden desk with a computer terminal set up. The whole room was patterned in the hues and sparkle of lapis lazuli, and Brett spied immediately upon entering great orange eyes on either side of the doorway that he entered.

Ngumbo made it clear that this was where he was most at home. He traveled briskly to the desk and then to the windows. The view was spectacular, insofar as a view of the District’s swamp could be. The great white dome of the Capitol shown out with iridescent splendor.

“You have seen my son.” He said finally. “He was to be a fighter. Or so he considered. I let him occupy his time as he saw fit until he would reach the proper age. Older here, in this country, than in my own. I did not approve of this, but he is my son. I let him handle his own affairs. A test, perhaps. A father’s love.” Ngumbo seemed to be gazing at the white sheen of the Capitol. “He had people to handle. Things to learn. Models. Good ones.”

Brett stayed quiet.

Ngumbo shook his head. “But it was not to be. A man must know when he has come up against his superior.” He looked at Brett.

“I only did what I was supposed to do,” Brett said. “It was a fight. He and I are fighters.” He thought about Coach and the suited entourage and the stains of blood left on the concrete pads behind the strip mall. “I don’t know anything more than that.”

Ngumbo maintained a level, expressionless gaze that unnerved Brett the way the sun through a magnifying glass does an ant. Brett shifted uncomfortably and reached into his pocket, where the stone immediately made itself wet to his touch. It bled great red crimson torrents that soaked his leg. He interpreted this as a sign of immanent danger.

Ngumbo spotted the widening stain of red on his pant leg. He regarded Brett for a moment. What Brett did not know was that he considered commanding his people to remove from Brett’s pocket whatever it was that made the stain. But he did not command this. Instead, he simply regarded him.

“I see you have one as well,” Ngumbo said. “We are alike, then. These do not come to people naturally. In my home country, the stones which bleeding are said to be tokens of great power. There are legends about them. They can make you fast. Strong.” He turned away. “I do not know, of course. Whether these stones are powerful or simply oddities of a distant fable, it is not for me to say. It is an inconvenient thing, and yet you seem to take yours along with you wherever you go.” Brett could see, in Ngumbo’s half-turned expression, that his face turned to a frown. “This makes us different, despite what we share.”

He turned to face Brett again.

Brett didn’t understand. Words were left unspoken. Those about the fight parade. The blood from the stone. The desire of the exact moment blood might be shed. Ngumbo offered nothing. He measured Brett, and Brett found himself utterly out of whatever element was necessary to understand this. The stone bled more into his hand.

Ngumbo took a long, measured breath with a deliberate unease. “In my home country, there are people who would have taken your hands for what you have done, and your tongue for the things you have said. But I have left that country. I no longer practice those ways, as you see. I made my home here, in America, in order to prosper.”

Brett stayed quiet. There was no way out of this situation. The hair on the back of his neck was practically supercharged. There was blood running down his leg that soaked his shoe. A puddle was beginning to form.

Ngumbo took another slow, deliberate breath and returned his penetrating gaze to match Brett’s. Brett understood then what had him on edge. It was more than the situation, the feeling of the trap closing in around him. It was that Ngumbo’s gaze was of the same harshness as Coach’s. It was not the gaze of a fighter. The man who tried to recruit him had the same penetrating glare. It was the gaze of a man well-accustomed to taking things. Objects, people, ambitions. It was a gaze of a man who owned himself and inflicted that ownership upon the world. A man well-accustomed to taking life.

“My son does not know the ways of that cursed place,” Ngumbo continued. “He does not know his home. I have made sure of that. I wanted a good life for him. A secure one. Perhaps you would not understand, but perhaps, some ancestral memory remains in your own blood, of your own comers to this land before it was tamed. I have read about your country, your peoples, your way of dealing with things. I have read of who were once here before. Your forests and plains, your rivers. And your great evils, too. There is no continent on this earth that lacks them, but each one’s evils are unique. And they never go away.”

Brett was struggling to maintain his train of thought, and the direction Ngumbo’s monologue had taken. He had broken out in a cold sweat. There was a pressure exuded from the man that would have made him suffocate were it not that he felt trained for this sort of thing. But he was a fighter. He was in the presence of something else. He was not facing another fighter. Ngumbo was altogether different. The men behind him shared the same category of person. He didn’t like it.

Ngumbo nodded to the men behind Brett. Brett did not have to see to know what happened next. He felt his arms immediately pinned and he was lurched roughly toward the desk.

“Perhaps in some cultures there exist ceremonies of retribution akin to this,” Ngumbo said. “Where I come from, there were no ceremonies for it, but certainly there were traditions. Where I am now, I do not know. Your land is different.” He leveled Brett with, for perhaps the first time since their meeting, a human gaze. “To tell you the truth, much of what I have done in America are the result of guesses.” But the gaze was gone as quickly as it flashed across his expression, a flash of who he was illuminated by whatever lightning occupied his mind. He had retrieved a metal baseball bat from behind his desk and held it for Brett to see. “As America is unkind to ritual or ceremony, we will simply carry out the next best thing to a tradition.” He handed the bat to one of the men.

The two men holding Brett wrenched his arms around onto the marble slab that was Ngumbo’s desk. His left hand was bright slick-red and it stained the desk when it made contact. Ngumbo retrieved a bottle of water from a drawer and poured it across Brett’s bloodied hand in some imitation of a ritual. He had a feeling he knew where this was going.

“You have taken my son from me,” Ngumbo said. “He was a bad son. But he was my son. And now he is a vegetable. So I will take from you. But I am not interested in your people, your family. You haven’t any. You would not know this pain. You are a simple person.” The corners of Brett’s lips involuntarily curved into a small smile. “It must be simpler.”

The man with the bat approached to his side. Brett’s hands were pinned at the forearms and spread across the granite surface like a pianist’s measuring his range. He raised the bat.

“In some places, it is the custom that a finger is offered up in compensation for a mistake,” Ngumbo said. “But what has been committed against me deserves more than just one finger.”

————

4.

—

“So,” she said. She didn’t want to continue, but it seemed like a conversation needed to be had. “How do you explain this?”

Brett smiled and nodded. The stone had ceased bleeding, finally, but both of his hands were encased in plaster casts. The stone was not in his pocket. It was somewhere on the mantle, placed deliberately in a dish, just in case.

“I’m probably going to need a little help for a few weeks,” he said. “Coach is gone. And I, well,” he looked at the bandages. “I can’t use my hands.”

“How long are you going to have those casts on?” From her place at the table, her gaze flickered across his kitchen cabinets and rested on the busted lock on his door. She frowned. “You were up to some excitement while I was gone this time, huh?”

The way her blonde hair flitted across her eyes made him smile, but she didn’t reciprocate. She was probably worried. “About a week,” he said. “They’re supposed to take them off on Monday.”

“That seems pretty quick.”

“I’m a fast healer.”

She gazed at him for a while as she sipped on her coffee. The gaze he returned was different now, steadier, grounded. Perhaps it was just the painkillers they had him on for the first day. He only took a quarter of the recommended dose. The stone did not bleed.

“I’ve been thinking about things a lot,” he started to say. She blinked. There was cinnamon in her coffee, tinging the black fluid a barely perceptible red.

—

The week passed slowly. His boss had given him the week off after the news, but met with him personally on his first day back to reluctantly tell him that he should probably start looking for another line of work.

“It looks like it’ll be another week or two before you can even hold a pencil right, kid,” he said with a gruffness that reminded Brett of Coach’s. But he was wrong. It would be longer than that. The sort of fractures he’d endured meant he had to relearn small movements, and it would probably hurt doing such tasks for the rest of his life.

It had only been a week and a half, but the truth was that his hands hurt dreadfully and they hurt all of the time. They hurt when he moved them and when he didn’t move them. They hurt at night, in the evenings, during the day, and they especially hurt the most in the mornings when he woke up. Movement only made the hurt of stillness be replaced with the hurt of motion. In the mornings, he began wrapping his hands with the wraps he once used for fighting, first just to apply pressure to the limbs, but then later as a sort of ritual that helped him prepare for the day: a deliberate exercise of control that prompted him to confront the pain at the start of waking. This was his life now, and he was going to win.

“Your bones are trying to heal,” the doctor had told him. “If you keep your hands stationary, they will fuse together and then you won’t have mobility at all.” He offered more painkillers and in greater dosages, but Brett’s psychological allergy to anything complicated included those things that required him to rely on pharmaceuticals.

Pain was something he understood. But it was no longer an enemy he could duck and weave to avoid. It was something instead that had him grappled, wrestling him at every moment into the threat of a debilitating pin, in a very uncomfortable and unfortunate match. And this match seemed like it was going to last until he died. There was no pill for that.

So he wore the wraps. The days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months. The pain subsided some, but Brett was unsure if this was the case because his hands had healed or because he had simply gotten better used to dealing with it. Every morning the little bones groaned out in the agony of disuse, and every evening they cried with the strain of motion. Using eating utensils, handling tissue to blow his nose, writing down a note or holding a glass of water—all of it hurt.

—

“You haven’t seen Coach either, huh?” Jess leaned on the office windowsill. He had stopped by the gym a week after his casts had been removed in order to see whether Coach had ever turned up. Her worried expression told Brett all he needed to know. “Cops called the place, asked a few questions. He’s been declared missing, but that’s all,” she continued. He had gotten a similar call a little earlier.

“You haven’t been around much, either,” she suddenly said. “Your girlfriend got you busy or something?” He looked at her. “You look different.”

“Well my hnds are shot,” he said. They were wrapped, but even his fingertips looked unwell. Red, but unswollen. “I had an incident involving my hands the same day I came here last,” he said. “Nothing to do with fighting.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Well,” Brett started. He looked at Jess. She returned his gaze with something he knew had been there all along.

“Was it work?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He looked away. Rather than seeing the feign of mystery across his lips and brow, she saw an unnatural darkness that his face was wholly unaccustomed to bearing.

“The pain is manageable when the hands are under some compression,” he replied. “I wrap them like this every day and remove them at night. It gives me an opportunity to sort myself out.”

Brett noticed her expression begin to sour, and then sour deeper as he continued to speak. “I guess what I’m saying is that I won’t be back for a while. It’s not feasible for me to even grab objects like this, much less hit them.”

“Are you going to be okay?” His hands curled into fists as he put them by his sides. He could not clench them. It was habit, albeit a painful one, now. She settled down and looked about the gym. “Of course you’ll be okay,” she mumbled.

“I’ll try to be back when I can.” He shoved his aching hands into his pockets and tried to mean what he said. He knew he would not be back, and he knew this would be their last encounter. “Just need to toughen up these hands.”

She looked at him, but she did not know what to say.

—

As promised, he was not contacted by Ngumbo nor anyone associated with him again. During the same week Stephanie stayed with him to help his recovery, some repairmen came unannounced to replace the door frame that had been broken. They were very polite and did not leave a bill, but rather a receipt that indicated all expenses had already been paid.

Stephanie had gone back home after that week ended. She was kinder to Brett than at any time in their relationship before, but Brett perceived that she was reacting to something that was different in him. He had been trying not to think about how his hands affected his future, his fighting, and his career path. He had time to sort the last one out, but his disappointment at leaving construction—even in a supporting or administrative role—was great. Never being able to put gloves on to hit a heavy bag, however: that was a greater defeat.

—

Brett began working again about a month after the incident. He’d gotten a job in a management position at a construction supply warehouse. It was an upgrade from his last post, with more regular hours, slightly better pay, and no regular or irregular changes in his usual commute. Brett took Stephanie out to eat at their favorite bar downtown after his first week on the clock.

“The planning is going well,” she smiled. The late-July humidity was suffocating so near the swamp. Her pale blouse was yellow, but cast orange beneath the lights, countering the light beige-brown skirt she had folded with demure practice as she bent to sit in the booth. “Red wraps, today,” she observed.

“It’s a special occasion,” he replied. “The Chinese consider red to be the color of good luck.”

“You need luck?”

“Of course not,” he smiled. His eyes were less distant now, and Stephanie more distinct.

“My transfer was approved, too,” she said. “Finally off of sales management.”

“No more traveling?”

There were lights. There were people ordering drinks, having a good time. There were people unencumbered by the excruciating pain of hands that didn’t heal. But there were also many more people in different kinds of pain. Theirs was pain that could not be expressed, could not be grappled with or fought and by which dragged into observation and dealt with. Theirs was some other pain. It was not simple; it was not made simple. Theirs was something else. Perhaps they were not as lucky, or perhaps not as prudent in their address. Pain was something to be made clear, Brett believed. But Brett did not know their various pains. He knew only his own.

“No more traveling.” She smiled and wiped a stray blonde wisp of hair behind her ear. On her finger, a modest band of silver, crowned with a bright ruby, flashed in the light of the pub.

—

One night, about a month after the incident, he awoke in a sweat cold and painful against his skin. His hands screamed with pain enough to make him delirious, unsure whether he was dreaming or truly among the living. He had dreamed, as he was accustomed to these nights, that some horrible thing was torturing his hands. One night it had been a train running over them, pinning them between the steel of the rails and that of wheels. Another had made him bear witness to ethnic torturers inserting pins between the joints of his fingers. In this particular dream, however, seedlings had been planted in the bones of his hands, and they grew, splintering his bones. Great red roots stretched outward through his fingers and into the palms of his hands, rupturing ligament and sinew, and as the branches pushed forth out of his knuckles, there gleamed on one red-stained branch a ring of gold.

He stumbled out of bed. The deduction that he was indeed awake, if only barely, was one arrived at with confused glances at his hands and the patterns against the ceiling made by light through gaps in his curtains. He poured water over his hands from the bathroom faucet. Cold water made them hurt more. Warm water didn’t help, either. As he looked at his hands, pale and agonized beneath the white bathroom light, a drop of red fell into the sink. But the red was still part of his dream, and it was just water, and not blood as he had imagined.

He retrieved the stone from the mantle and placed it in a large bowl. Unable to squeeze it, he pressed upon it with his weight, bearing with the pain. The pressure against this hands nearly made him cry out, but the stone gave up its blood quickly. It was hot. Soon, the bowl was full and his hands were completely submerged. The pain subsided, first to a dull ache, and then, for the first time in weeks, to a dim memory. He kept his hands there for a little while.

He saw his face reflected dimly in the surface of the red pool.

###