The Dead Are More Visible Read online

  I choose to think he is just somewhat shy.

  It started because I was training for my fifth fight and my sparring partner had hurt that ligament in the knee that’s called, I think, cruciate but we just say crucial because that’s what it is. The other girls at the club are either on the little or the huge size and Trav is about the same weight as me, though he is shorter, and toward the end of a workout Webb yelled at him to get in there and give me a couple rounds. Trav’s face then—like someone told him to throw himself on a grenade. People started gathering ringside. Like I said, it was the end of the night, and I would have been interested too. I don’t think the coach had ever put a girl and guy in to spar that way.

  So the bell sounds, he comes out as if being shoved from behind and he is ogling my chin as usual, as if meaning to clock me there, but his eyes don’t have that focused, violent shine. He sets his hands high with the forearms upright in an old-fashioned stance and he peeks from between them like he’s behind bars, a guy who just woke up in jail and has no idea how he got there. I fling a few jabs at his face to see what he will do, which turns out to be nothing, so I hook low to his gut and then I follow with a loaded right and there’s this sound like an air mattress just sprang a leak and he takes a seat on the canvas and looks down at his lap with a puzzled frown. In a way it feels good that I’ve knocked down such a solid and experienced little guy, but mainly I feel bad. He was not trying. “Get up, send something back at her now, she’s training!” yells Webb from my corner. Trav’s cheeks inflate with air, which he now puffs out through his mouth in a serious way, and he gets to his feet slowly and we begin.

  Next day I see him downtown after my shift at the Ramada, where I work in the office. He is walking out of a camera store looking down at some photos and he has this warm, wide-open smile, just the opposite of his awkward frown last night in the ring. I stand in his path so he will have to collide with me or else stop. He stops, looks up from his photos. The smile dies. He’d looked beautiful before, thinking no one could see.

  “That’s a shiner, all right,” I say idiotically, even pointing. “Nice photos?”

  He mumbles something and he’s not staring at my chin but into my eyes! Well, my left eye.

  “Damn,” he says now. “Sorry.”

  “You know what Webb says about fighters apologizing.”

  “That’s just in the ring. I never gave a girl a black eye before.”

  “Yours is blacker,” I argue. “And I dropped my left.”

  He nods and develops a thoughtful frown. “It’s a bad habit.”

  “Not anymore. I won’t drop it in my fight and that’s thanks to you.”

  The shiner is a sexy touch on him, like a pirate eye patch on a pretty-boy face. I think he wants to leave but I would like a few more seconds here.

  “Your photos turn out?”

  His face unfists, almost smiles. My knees waver like from a scoring blow.

  “Sure,” he says, “they’re fine.”

  “They of you in the ring?”

  “Family,” he says, shaking his head. He looks down at his shoes, which I notice he always does after he answers a question, like he’s hoping that when he looks up again you won’t be there.

  “Parents?” I can’t believe how nosy I am being.

  “Uh, kids. Son and daughter. Four and three.”

  I stare from his face to the stack of photos and back again. I cock my head. In a slow, wary way he passes the top photo toward me like he’s surrendering his credit card to a mugger. It’s Trav, no shiner, pushing his grinning face (!) between the faces of the little girl and boy who are laughing in a wide, stretchy way on either side of him. There’s a cake too. The girl’s face has been made up as a black and orange butterfly. The faces are a bit blurred, and the pupils are diabolically red, but there’s no missing the joy here.

  “Birthday?”

  “Nicole’s third. At the five-pin lanes up on the base.”

  “Beautiful,” I say. “You look young to have a family. I mean, kids.”

  “Boy came when I was eighteen.”

  He shuffles. I think he knows what I want to ask.

  “It’s a shared arrangement,” he says, and the look on his face is like somebody tricked him into speaking.

  It can be as tempting to hit a face that attracts you as to hit one you hate, if the liked face is not replying to your attraction. At the Friday night workout we spar three rounds and he again pulls his punches but not too much now. A couple times after I score on him he retaliates instantly and for a second there is an exciting gleam in his eyes and he almost meets my gaze. He avoids hitting me in the chest guard, though. Breast shots really kill, so I guess I could see this as a sign of budding affection, though I realize it might just be courtesy.

  After, I ask if he will walk me to my car and he growls, “With a right like yours, a chaperone’s the last thing you need.” He walks me anyway. We cross the parking lot and he slows up as we approach each car, then glances at me as we continue.

  “Farther,” I say. “I parked over there.” I nod up the dark service road toward the beer store on the far side of the diamonds.

  “Why so far?”

  “The lot was packed when I got here,” I lie.

  “I’ve never seen this lot packed.”

  “And like Webb tells us … got to fill those legs up with mileage before a fight.”

  Several hours later, it feels like, he says, “I think you’re ready. Guess you’ll taper back on the sparring, next couple weeks?”

  “Oh I don’t know,” I say quickly. “That’ll be Webb’s call.”

  The service road lacks lighting. I glance over but can’t read his face. I have butterflies, like before a fight, and it makes me walk faster though I am trying to slow down.

  “Maybe when you’re training for your next fight,” I blurt out, “he’ll put us together again. Give you some extra rounds!”

  “I doubt it,” he says. “I mean, I’d be training.”

  I will knock him down again next week. He is short and pale and uncommunicative. He needs a shave. When we clinched tonight, he smelled of, I think, garlic bread.

  Now he mumbles, “That was rude of me. Sorry.”

  All of a sudden we’re at my ruin of a Lada, which I parked under a crackling amber streetlight in a corner of the beer store lot. It sounds like a zillion volts are running through this light. I know the feeling. There is a ticket under the car’s front wiper. Trav removes it carefully and hands it to me with a sympathetic frown. He looks almost apologetic.

  “Can I give you a lift?” I say strongly.

  “I don’t want you to go out of your way, Trina.”

  “It’s no trouble! Get in! Don’t mind the mess.”

  There is no mess. This morning I vacuumed and lint-picked the interior and before the workout I took the car through a carwash where the asshole attendants actually offered me rain gear and then (I watched them in the rear-view) bent over laughing as I drove slowly in.

  “Thanks,” he says, and my heart seems to trip—then he says, “but I’ll walk. Like you say. Got to get mileage into these legs.”

  “Yup,” I say with an idiot’s grin. “For sure. That’s very true.”

  I renew my oath to knock him down Monday.

  “Anyway, I live close. Near the No Frills.” He points in a vague way, like he is embarrassed to live in the neighbourhood, or he just prefers not to locate himself too clearly.

  Webb says I headhunt too much and he needs me to work on my body shots. He also thinks Trav needs to work on taking body shots if he is serious about turning pro. For a round at the end of each workout he makes Trav become a human punching bag and sics me on him. Trav never looks pleased about these dates of ours. He leans back on the ropes with his blue gloves by his scrunched-up face, elbows glued to his ribs, and my job is to find openings and work his body. He is permitted to move but not to punch, which basically means I can have my way with him. Since he is short, with
long, thick arms, it can be hard to find undefended parts of his flesh to pound and I am very careful about not hitting below the belt—though at times I get the urge. Sometimes I feel him flinching, too. He must be concerned that even one of my hard punches could land foul, by accident or otherwise.

  Tonight he smells of, not garlic bread, just bread. He works in a bakery, four in the morning till noon, five days a week. He likes it there. He was just promoted. It is easier to pry personal information out of him now and I am getting opportunities because after the last two workouts he has let me drive him home. To extend the drive, since his place is only a few blocks from the gym, I park some distance in the other direction on the service road, which also means we get to walk first to my spotless wreck of a car. Naturally he is silent on these outings and I have to talk for both of us. I think maybe he is annoyed about the extra walking but he still does it with me and I choose to see this as hopeful.

  We are filling our legs with mileage.

  When my arms get too heavy to plant the punches Webb is yelling at me to throw, I have no option but to lean in on Trav and clinch, for a pleasant rest. Would anyone notice if I sampled the fresh sweat on his neck? I think Trav would notice. Tonight for the first time he initiates a clinch. On Webb’s command I have been throwing repeat right hooks at his solar plexus, trying to pry through his guarding elbows, and now I do get through and his stomach is solid, though with a slight layer over it, I guess from all those baked goods. It’s so satisfying to connect. He grunts and gasps softly and sags and envelops me and my punches stop dead. He is humid, panting. Webb hollers at him to break and get back on the ropes.

  My roadwork is a forty-minute run each day at the traditional hour for fighters in training. It’s a struggle to get out of bed but once you are up and out, you can sprint straight down the middle of Princess Street if you want to. I do that sometimes. I have been known to sing at the top of my lungs while doing that.

  I would like to sing at the top of my lungs this morning but this morning I will play it cool because this morning Trav is running with me. It’s the first day of his weekend, Tuesday. You’d think he would choose to sleep in but he says he is used to getting up for work and besides he wants time to get his place ready for his kids, who stay over on these days. Runs With Man is his morning alarm, he says. Runs With Man is a pound rescue dog, Jack Russell and malamute, a furry barrel with a wolf’s head and stub legs who trots at Trav’s side without a leash.

  I would feel more encouraged by Trav’s presence if he hadn’t said, when I asked him to run with me, that Tuesday is his “usual day for a run anyway.”

  Like I say, I love running through the city in the last dark with the streets wide and empty and all to myself, but this morning after we do some of that, Trav asks me to run across the causeway to the fields and hills around the old fort. “The sunrise,” he says and it sounds like a romantic proposition maybe, except as usual he mutters it from the side of his mouth. But we run across and there’s this mist on the river from the night’s chill and with the lake still warm from the summer. “Let’s go,” he says, and frowns at his watch. He has a good idea of exactly when the sun shows its face every day because he works at an east window, and to me there is something so appealing about a guy who sees every sunrise.

  We put on a surge as we run up the middle of the road that climbs to the hilltop fort. Trav’s face knots up with the strain. When we get there he is winded. This embarrasses him, I think—that he is somewhat unfit or maybe that I am fitter. He mumbles that he can’t get out for runs more than once or twice a week, because of his hours.

  Runs With Man flops on the grass and his tongue lolls like a pulled muscle.

  “So are you really going to turn pro?” I ask, hoping the question won’t offend.

  “Coach still wants me to, but there’s no way,” he tells the patch of dirt at his feet.

  To my surprise his words are a relief. To my greater surprise I realize I am not serious about turning pro either, though I have talked about it like I am.

  “I saw a couple friends turn pro,” he says. “Used to think it might be a way to support the kids. Not a chance.” He turns to watch the coloured clouds at the horizon as if trying to figure the odds on our sunrise. To me, the view up the river and west over the big lake is enough. This view of Trav in profile is enough. He says, “I’m not good enough to win big prize money and not bad enough to get work as a bleeder for rising stars.”

  “They love you at the bakery, though.”

  “For some reason I’m good at it.”

  I shift my feet downhill so my eyes are at his level, even a bit lower. Will this help? I am almost ready to suggest we start back down the hill when he taps the dog in the butt with his shoe and says, “Go, boy, get that squirrel.” The dog’s ears prick up and it pelts away downhill toward the water.

  “I didn’t see a squirrel,” I say.

  He looks me plumb in the eye and shows his still-good teeth and steps toward me. The sun is up. Clouds are in the way but sunlight sneaks through a momentary opening and it is enough to turn the grassy hill and the fort and the calm river and lake a rosy gold, like in a religious poster. Then it’s gone and I am glad because I see that the flush in his cheeks and spreading up to his hairline and down to his throat is not a reflection of the sun at all.

  Like Webb says, the one that gets you is the one you don’t see coming.

  “Just wanted us to be alone for a second,” he says, and as I open my arms the hill pulls him down to me.

  [ SHARED ROOM ON UNION ]

  They were parked on Union, in front of her place, their knees locked in conference around the stick shift, Janna and Justin talking, necking a little, the windows just beginning to steam. We’d better stop, she said. I should go now. It was one a.m., a Thursday night turned Friday morning. Squads of drunken students were on the town. So far nobody had passed the car. Hey, take it to a Travelodge, man! Nights like this, that sort of thing could happen—one time a rigid hand had rammed the hood, another time someone had smacked the passenger window a foot from her ear, Justin’s fingers in her hair stopping dead.

  I won’t miss this part, he told her.

  I really should go, Jus.

  Friday was her “nightmare day,” a double shift at the upstyle café/bistro where she was now manager. Thursday nights she insisted on sleeping at her own place, alone. Sleep wasn’t really the issue, he sensed. This seemed to be a ritual of independence, and he knew she would maintain it strictly, having declared she would, until they moved in together in the new year. Other nights of the week they slept at his place or hers. They would be moving into a storm-worn but solid Victorian redbrick bungalow, three bedrooms, hardwood floors, in a druggy neighbourhood now being colonized by bohemians and young professionals. Justin and Janna were somewhere on the chart between those categories. In March they planned to fly, tongues somewhat in cheeks, to Las Vegas to get married.

  These separate Thursday nights, this symbolic vestige (as he saw it), tore him up in a small way. He could never take in too much of her. He had never been in this position before—the one who loves harder and lives the risk of it. It hadn’t been this way at first. Then it was this way, then it wasn’t, and now it was again, but more so. This must be a good thing, he felt—this swaying of the balance of desire—and he would try to work out in his mind why it was a good thing, and the words “reciprocal” and “mutuality” would pop up from somewhere, and the idea of a “marital dance,” which he thought he had probably read somewhere, yes, definitely … and his mind would start to drift, unable to concentrate on the matter for so long, and he would simply want her body next to his again. For now, no excess seemed possible.

  Okay, he said. I know.

  I’ll see you tomorrow, Jus.

  Great.

  From somewhere the remote, tuneless roar of frat boy singing. Possibly the sound was approaching. One of the ironies of existence in this city of life-term welfare and psychiatric ca
ses was that the student “ghetto,” on a weekend night, could be as dangerous as any slum north of The Hub or in the wartime projects further up. She tightened her eyes and peered through the misty windshield. She had a vertical crease between her brows and it would deepen when she was tired. That one hard crease; otherwise her face was unlined.

  What’s that?

  The boys seemed to be receding, maybe turning south toward the lake. Then another sound—the flat tootling ring of a cellphone, as if right behind the car. Still in a loose embrace they looked back over their shoulders. Someone was there, a shadow, as if seen through frosted glass, standing by the right fender.

  What? Yeah, but I can’t talk right now. Right, I’m just about to. What’s that? Yeah, I believe so.

  I’d better go, she said.

  I’ll walk you in.

  It’s okay, she said. She didn’t move.

  Call you in five minutes, the voice said in a clumsy, loud whisper. Me you, not you me, okay? The shadow wasn’t there by the fender. There was a rapping on the driver’s side window, a shape bulking. Justin let in the clutch and pinched the ignition key but didn’t twist. With his free hand he buffed a sort of porthole in the steam of the window. That middle-class aversion to being discourteous, even to a lurking silhouette at one in the morning.

  Open it, the voice said roughly. No face visible in the porthole. Justin twisted the key.

  Don’t!

  Jus, he’s got something, stop!

  It’s not a fake—open the fucking door. The man clapped the muzzle to the glass. Behind the pistol a face appeared: pocked and moon-coloured under the sodium streetlights, eyes wide and vacated. A too-small baseball cap, hair long behind the ears, dark handlebar moustache.

  Justin got out slowly, numbly, and stood beside the car, his eyes at the level of that moustache. The man put the pistol to Justin’s chest. An elongated, concave man. Some detached quarter of Justin’s mind thought of an extra in a spaghetti western—one of the dirty, stubbly, expendable ones. A hoarfrost of dried spittle on the chin.

  Janna was getting out on her side, he could hear her.