Roughhouse Friday Page 2

  “What a couple of dorks,” one of my stepbrothers said the morning of the race, as my father and I stood in the kitchen dressed in our matching uniforms.

  “You don’t have to wear that,” Martha said. Occasionally, she mediated my father’s grand gestures of love with maternal reasonability—an effort that made me feel that, together, we shared the unspoken secret of his weaknesses.

  I looked at my father, saw in him an image of the man I might become. “I don’t mind.”

  Later, I stood with my father in a crowd of runners. A pistol fired and we were off: trotting through a jiggling sea of legs and butts until the crowd thinned and we ran alone. The road we ran down was the same road that led to my old house, the same road that, two years earlier, I had watched my mother run down as she completed her first marathon. Back then, Martha had been her training partner, and later in my life I would see pictures of those days: my mother in denim cutoffs, a bandanna around her neck, a long black braid swinging at her waist. Behind her: Martha, holding on to my mother’s braid for support.

  Along the road, familiar faces—friends from my playgroup, mothers who had known my mother—cheered us on. “Go, Jeddy!” they yelled. “Go, Jeddy!”—Jeddy a baby name that I had shed since moving to Maine. But as we approached the finish line, I saw their overly cheerful faces as masks of pity. These were the faces who had invited my mother into their community upon her arrival in America; these were the faces who had whispered about my father’s infidelity behind my mother’s back; these were the faces who had stopped talking to her after she left the Champlain Islands; these were the faces of people who, now, accepted me as the youngest member of my father’s new family. Perhaps the joy on these faces was in celebration of what they’d secretly wanted to believe all along: that my parents’ union, like the horrible war that had brought them together, was doomed to fail.

  In the last hundred yards, as my father and I sprinted through a gauntlet of noise, my breath became short, and the vision I held of myself—a young champion running alongside his impressive father—began to fade. My legs wobbled, and my chest began to hurt, and my head filled with white fog. What I did next felt even more natural than running: just steps from the finish line, I let myself tumble to the ground, in a gesture so dramatic and obscenely false that I cannot imagine anyone believing its sincerity.

  I was not in pain. I was not out of breath. I was not even tired. But as I lay facedown on the street, my face hidden beneath my arms, I listened for what I needed to hear: gasps of concern, worried footsteps rushing to my side, any evidence at all that the people who had cheered me on understood what invisible thing I carried with me. Though I was not exactly sure why I had fallen, whatever condition I was pretending to suffer from—hyperventilation, a twisted ankle—felt as real to me as any pain. I remained on the pavement for several seconds, performing various forms of injury that I’d likely seen acted out in Platoon, until I heard my father’s voice above me:

  “He’ll be all right.”

  Then I felt his hands on my shoulders, lifting me to my feet. I shook my head, pretended to fight off the pain. Flinching, I limped a few steps forward. Then, to an explosion of applause—“Go, Jeddy! Go, Jeddy!”—my father and I, Lancelot and Galahad, sprinted across the finish line.

  * * *

  Back at the Birches, my father did not ask me to explain why I had fallen. But inside, I held a quiet shame, coupled with the unsteady conviction that what I had done was necessary. As for my CHEERIOS T-shirt, I felt a strange discomfort wearing it, as if its bright yellow color drew attention to a part of me that I wished to remain secret.

  One afternoon, I slid through the doors of the old barn and climbed up into the loft. There, beneath a beam of dusted, slanted window light, I found the sword. When I was sure that I was alone, I unsheathed the blade and set my feet just as my father had taught me to when swinging a baseball bat. Then I lifted it high above my head and drove it into the thick body of a wooden post.

  Whack!

  The impact ignited all the little muscles of my forearms with a clean rush of power, similar to the way it felt when I hit one of my father’s pitches clear over the barn. I wanted to feel that power again. But when I tried to pull the blade free, the weapon did not budge. I worked the handle up and down, pulling with all my strength, until I felt the smooth glide of release, followed by a metallic pang. When I opened my eyes, only the red-tasseled handle remained in my hands. The blade—curved and rusty, like an old farm tool—lay at my feet. I knelt, tried to force the two pieces back together as best I could. Then I buried the broken weapon beneath the boxes of my father’s past and, for the rest of that summer, and for the rest of my life, never went back to find it. Instead, in some foggy chamber of my imagination, I convinced myself that the beautiful weapon, forged in my mother’s country, brought home from my father’s war, still remained—in some other kingdom, in some other time—unbroken.

  PART I

  1. WHACK!

  I was lifting weights in the Sheldon Jackson College Gymnasium on a Friday night in early October when I heard the sound coming down the hall.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  The weight room was on the second floor of the SJ gym, in an upstairs loft overlooking a basketball court. Long ago, the college had served as a boarding school and was named after an American missionary who’d come north to reform Native children after the Alaska Purchase. Now SJ had about a hundred students—some hippies, some Christians, some Native kids from the Interior—but few of them did much working out, so I usually had the place to myself.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  After a few more bench presses, I let the bar fall into the yoke. I did not particularly like lifting weights, but ever since I’d showed up in Sitka at the end of the summer—alone, by sea kayak, at the end of a cross-country road trip and a one-thousand-mile paddle north up the Inside Passage—working out was the only thing that filled my days with any kind of ritual. I was one year out of college, wandering through that shapeless in-between period of my early twenties when I wanted to become a man but didn’t know how to start. For the past month, I had been living in a basement apartment, working as an academic tutor for a tribal organization, having a first crack at life on my own. Lifting weights brought definition to my physical self when every other fact about who I was pulsed inside of me with furious uncertainty.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  I got up from the bench and followed the sound to a small room where several men were working out like boxers. In one corner, two Native boys followed each other under a bob-and-weave rope. In the opposite corner, two white men took turns hitting a heavy bag. In the middle of the room, a short man in a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt held a pair of mitts for a shirtless redheaded boy whom I recognized from the high school. His name was Richie, and I often saw him wandering the halls as if lost in a foreign city.

  “Six!” the man called out, and Richie attacked the mitts—Whack! Whack! Whack!—with three rights and three lefts. “Ten!” the man said, and Richie dove forward with more punches. They continued for thirty seconds or so, the man calling out combinations—“Right hand–hook–right hand!”—as Richie, shoulders and chest glistening with sweat, kept punching. Then the man said, “To the bell!” and Richie hit the mitts until a beeper sounded in the corner. “Push-ups! Twenty!” the man said, and everyone fell to the floor.

  I remained in the doorway until the session was over, when all the fighters unwrapped their hands, dressed for the weather, and filed past me out the door.

  The man who’d been holding the mitts stood in the middle of the room, stuffing helmets and gloves into a duffel bag. “You need something?”

  I paused. “You ever take new guys on?”

  The man shook his head. “Got two guys fighting Roughhouse in November and the high school boys training for amateurs this spring.” He looked over his shoulder. “We just don’t have a whole lot of room in here.”

  I thanked the
man, turned to leave.

  “You ever do any fighting?” he called out behind me.

  “Yes,” I lied. My senior year at Middlebury College, me and some guys from my dorm had read a few chapters of Nietzsche and watched Fight Club too many times and come to the bold conclusion that our luxurious liberal arts existence was turning us into overeducated, technology-obsessed boy-bots. In a small room above the tennis courts, we started working out like boxers, trying to imitate the men in the movie. We did lots of push-ups and sit-ups, hit an old heavy bag with our bare hands until our knuckles bled, always with our shirts off so that the girls who used the room for yoga class could witness our rapid Becoming. After a few weeks, we bought some boxing gloves, named ourselves the John Keats Club, and started fighting for real. This was in the late fall of 2001, and it is hard to say what larger forces compelled us to perform such theater of violence. By late winter, the John Keats Club had mostly run its course: my training partners, perhaps aware that their imminent delivery into the upper-middle classes of America would likely protect them from most kinds of physical danger, all quit. I continued training on my own. Some nights, I looked at the young man scowling back at me in the long mirrors on the wall, wondering what he wanted to know.

  “You want to give it a shot?” the man said. He was on his toes now, flicking half punches. He’d pulled off his sweatshirt and removed his hat, so that he wore only a tank top and shorts. The man stood around five foot eight, with hair and skin about the same shade as mine. He looked like he might be Native or part white or Filipino—in a town like Sitka, where many people had mixed blood, it was hard to tell. Standing across from him, I was sure I held an advantage. At five eleven and a lean 190, I had inherited my father’s build. The rest of me—flat nose, full lips, small hands—came from my mother.

  “Sure,” I said.

  The man offered me a pair of gloves and a helmet. Then he traced a square of duct tape on the carpet. “That’s the ring,” he said, through his mouth guard. “But you don’t have to stay inside it.” Then he tapped a small plastic box in the corner. “Beeper’s set for three minutes.”

  For several seconds, the man swayed in place, chin tucked into his chest, feet set, hands low, squinting at me beneath the padding of his helmet. I had no plan for how I was going to attack him, but I believed that somewhere inside me I possessed the power to beat him.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  A series of jabs—bouncing off my forehead in such quick succession that I could not tell the first punch from the third. Then a volley of harder punches—straight left hands that smashed into my nose, clubbed the side of my head, and drove me into the wall. I had never been hit like that before, but I did not experience the impact as pain. Instead, I felt as though the man’s punches were trying to tell me something, tapping out their message in code. As he slid away, I stalked after him, and swung for his head with a swooping left hand. But the punch found only air. Then I felt a dull ball of pain settle into a soft pocket of flesh beneath my ribs. The ball grew, traveled into my stomach, trickled down my legs, and pulled me to the floor. I tried to stay on my feet, but my knees buckled and I fell to all fours. Drops of blood from my nose dripped onto the carpet.

  Above me, the man stood with one glove extended, the white knuckles stamped with small rose shapes. “You got any more?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I took the man’s hand and came to my feet.

  For the next two rounds, the beating continued: jabs off my nose and forehead, followed by thudding left hands. By then, my chin and chest were covered with blood and I was out of air and I had all but given up. Even when I could see his punches coming, I was too winded to move my head out of their way. But nothing in my brain told me to avoid the impact. Toward the end of the third round, I put up my gloves and charged the man, thinking I might be able to tackle him. But as I came forward, his fist split my elbows, clicking my jaw shut and snapping my head back. I stumbled to the wall, dropped my hands, waited for more. But the punches never came.

  Across the room, the man stood in the opposite corner, hunched into a ball, his head buried in his shoulders, his hands up. “Your turn.” He waved me forward.

  I didn’t move.

  “Come on. Hit me.”

  I shuffled across the room and tapped my fist off his forehead.

  “Fuckin’ hit me!”

  I hit him again, in the same place.

  “Hard!”

  I set my feet like I was about to swing a baseball bat, reached back with my left hand, and drove my fist into the side of his helmet.

  “Unnhh.” The man rocked to his left, then righted himself. “Again.”

  I hit him a second time. Then I kept punching: powerless slaps that glanced off his shoulders.

  When I couldn’t lift my arms, the man lifted them for me. “To the bell!”

  I punched until the beeper sounded. Then I sat on the floor.

  He took off his gloves and unbuckled his helmet, reached into the duffel bag, and handed me a towel. “Sorry about that. I don’t usually do that on the first night. I just get so many guys coming in here that I got to have some way to figure out who’s serious. Most guys think they’re pretty tough till they get beat up. Then I never see ’em again.”

  I stood, took off my gloves and helmet, and put them in the duffel bag.

  “You new in town?” the man said.

  “Yeah. Summer.”

  “Fishing?”

  I shook my head. “I work at the high school. Native Education Program.”

  The man paused. He was looking at me in that confused way that people sometimes looked at me when they were trying to figure out where I came from. I didn’t mind the scrutiny: such hesitations gave me time to prepare an explanation. A phone rang in the man’s pocket. “Home in five minutes!” he said into it, then stuffed the phone back into his pocket. “I got to go. Got a wife and son back home.”

  I followed him downstairs to the entrance of the SJ gym. We stood outside under an awning. It was raining again, for the fifth or seventh or tenth day straight. The gravel parking lot was full of deep puddles that reflected the orange light of the streetlamps like giant orange moons. I pulled my bicycle off the rack—a girl’s model, once teal, that a Tlingit man named George had given me when I’d first arrived in town. I’d stripped the frame down to bare metal and spray-painted it black.

  “You got a truck?” the man said.

  “No.”

  “How’d you say you ended up here?”

  I told the man about my trip.

  “A fucking kayak?” He laughed. “What the hell did you eat?”

  “Mostly rockfish. A couple sculpin.”

  “Sculpin? You know they eat shit off the bottom?”

  I laughed. “It had green meat. It wasn’t very good.”

  The man shook his head, looked at me more closely. “You Native or something?”

  The only thing I knew about what it meant to be Native was that sometimes people mistook me for one. “No. I’m from Maine.”

  “Maine. Well, I hate to break it to you, but winter isn’t the best time of year to be up here. If you don’t fish or hunt … or box”—the man shrugged—“I don’t know what the hell you do. Summer, that’s the time to visit. All sorts of things to do. This time of year, people go kind of crazy.” His phone rang again. This time he didn’t answer. He held out his hand. “Victor Littlefield.”

  I shook it. “Jade Coffin.”

  Back East, everyone had pronounced my name Jed for as long as I could remember. But for some reason, as soon as I landed in Sitka, people had started pronouncing my name as Jade, and I’d never bothered to correct them. The only person I knew who said my name right was my mother, so—Jade, Jed, what was the difference?

  “Well, Jade,” Victor said, “we’re in here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, six o’clock. I can’t promise you work, but if you come back around, I’ll see what I can do.” He crossed the parking lot to a black electrician’s van and drov
e away.

  2. SOLITARY MAN

  I rode home that night as I often did—along the dark streets of downtown in a light rain, through the quiet neighborhoods above Lincoln Street, where a heavy mist hung over the channel and buried the booms of the fishing trawlers in Crescent Harbor. I rode on—past the teardrop steeple of the old Russian cathedral, the vacant windows and storefronts of cruise-ship tourist shops, before turning right onto Katlian Street, past the steamy windows of the Pioneer Bar and Kenny’s Wok, beneath the sidewalk shadows of the clan houses and the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall in Indian Village, through the whirring neon glow of the seafood cannery and Old Thomsen’s Harbor. From there, it was a short ride uphill onto my street, Halibut Point Road.

  HPR was one of two main roads in Sitka. It ran about nine miles north to the end of town, out past the ferry terminal and Mosquito Cove. The other major road in town was Sawmill Creek Road, or SMC, which ran about ten miles south, under a wall of steep mountains, to the narrow inlet of Silver Bay. Though Sitka had about nine thousand full-time residents—a relatively big population for a community in Southeast Alaska—the town occupied less than 1 percent of Baranof Island, most of which was covered in thick rain forest and a sharply carved labyrinth of rugged mountain ranges. When I had first arrived in Sitka, I had spent my weekends hiking up streambeds along Indian River, following vague hunting trails into the woods, trying to familiarize myself with the topography of the wilderness. But something about its vastness—you could almost hear it breathing in the air—made me feel at odds with the forest in a way I never had before.

  My apartment was about two miles down HPR, across the street from a McDonald’s, beneath the house of a white fisherman and his Native wife who went south for the winter. They’d furnished my apartment with a couch, a bed, a small TV/VCR, a breakfast table and two chairs, some pots, pans, and silverware, and a freezer full of leftover fish. The fish was nothing good—mostly oily cuts of black bass and lingcod—but I’d been eating it for dinner for the past several weeks, with a pot of brown rice and chili sauce, and it was still only half gone.