Vandal Love (4 page)

He lifted her. She hadn’t eaten in days. No one had tried. He knelt and closed his eyes. Blood pulsed in his ears like bird wings. When the silence returned, he eased her onto the blankets. He didn’t look at her face. He wrapped her, trying to be gentle. Everything he’d intended to take remained on the floor. He carried her downstairs. He left the house and followed off along the road.

The St. Lawrence stayed with him. The days were short, his step even, strong as if his training had been for this. He accepted rides but never put down his bundle or spoke or listened. The form in the blankets was so slight that no one could know what it held. When the sun was full, he lifted his face. There was Matane and Rimouski, a few churches, a cathedral, plenty of villages. A man in a box truck took him half the way. He rambled about the supplies he had to deliver before the snows. He offered Jude a cigarette and didn’t mind being ignored.

At Rivière-du-Loup Jude hid among crates in the stockyard and climbed on a train. Bales of stiff, pungent leather crowded the boxcar, and he huddled among them, sheltered against the wind. This way he saw Québec, Montréal, the shores of the St. Lawrence now
close enough for it to be called a river. Through the slats he glimpsed skyscrapers.

When he woke, a windy landscape shuttled past, pines black beneath ice and the deeper darkness of mountains. He’d crossed out of flat, winter-bleak fields. The Québec countryside had been tame, cultivated or recently fallow, sparsely wooded, here or there a few houses lining a throughway, a store and gas station. But only miles past the border, forest crowded the cargo doors. The train appeared not to move but instead the land swelled, erasing field and village.

That night he arrived in a stockyard, a maze of hitched wagons, sidetracks and crossovers and switch towers, coupled boxcars booming with the sound of bombs. Men tramped by, talking. A dog barked. He changed trains, the bundled leather now bales of cheap, single-stitched shoes. He created a space among them not only to hide but as shelter from the wind. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed. He hadn’t so much as folded back the blankets. He thought to look at her face. He didn’t. Late in the morning, after jolting, the train began to move. The day wore on and away and was only just returning when he woke.

The sun had reached the horizon. The air was humid. The heat of his body seemed contained by the bales. He pushed them back and stood at the door. With one hand he undid his jacket. He inhaled, great gasps. Seeing the possibility of hesitation, he clutched Isa-Marie to his chest, and leapt.

When he opened his eyes, the tracks were empty, bordered by fields, trees in the distance and farther the blue
smoke of low mountains. Gradually he looked down and unfolded the blankets. He stared and stayed there on his knees. Late morning, a raccoon came out and lifted its masked face. A groundhog and three deer all paused. Sometime before evening a storm blew through and puddled mud around him. Night came, the moon high, near full, the fields white and long and the mountains clearer, long and softly humped. When the moon was still setting, the sky began to grey. Ants probed weeds. Worms, pink and jellied in the rain, took shape and tongued the earth. His clothes might have rotted. He might have shredded them. Perhaps he’d been running days through fields and mountains. He recalled only standing to release the bundled sunlight, to let the blankets fall as he handed Isa-Marie back to the sky.

Weeks he wandered, starving, naked. He slept without consideration, woke to creeping insects or the patter of rain. He would never decipher those days, nor recall what had become of Isa-Marie or his clothes or even how he could have wandered so long in a country of roads and subdivisions. Years later he would see movies in which an event, a death or marriage or declaration of war, is followed by a shot of newspaper headlines or the sheets of a calendar fluttering from staples or even, as he recalled those days, a time-lapse with clouds whizzing past, suns flipping into the sky, shadows cast and snapped back. There had been the world of his childhood, clear and absolute, then the train and the same
day over and over, the sun, night, hunger, time a wheel spinning freely and without consequence until he stepped through a windbreak into the backyard of a rundown brick rambler, one of a dozen similar houses on a narrow road, across from which were more fields. He saw a gold-painted can of Lysol in the weeds, clothes flapping on a line. He stared at the can and nudged it with his toe. A black beetle shot from beneath. Right then nothing seemed so normal as the houses, the clothes, the can and —as if a guardian spirit had taken the burden of his emotions and now judged him capable of receiving them—his anger. He went to the clothesline and came to a pair of red, white and blue Everlast boxing shorts and a flannel shirt, which he chose because the wind was blowing.

He’d put on only the shorts when he heard a door slam and saw a beefy man with a blond flat-top and arms the size of rump roasts. The man had narrow eyes, more piggish than bovine and chub from his ankles to the thick, sweaty folds at the back of his neck.

Them’s my boxing gear. You don’t know what you’re in for, buddy.

He hurried down off the porch and advanced with heavy, bounding lunges. He wore polka-dotted briefs and was barefoot like Jude, a rim of fat jiggling in his singlet.

They came together on the lawn. Jude was weak with hunger but angry, longing back to those years of training, and whatever this man landed was no worse than what Jude’s mother or the wharf brawlers had dealt. Dressed in
roomy briefs, Jude planted his feet and struck as he would for years, not at the man before him but at a piñata loaded with loss and anger and loneliness. The man no longer moved, but the earth, the house and trees swayed. Jude had a cut on his forehead, and his blood did all the weeping that he could do. The man went down. A bird twittered, tweeted. Jude caught his breath.

A second man, this one old, came from the front of the building, hobbling a little, his shirt imprinted at the heart with hanging gloves. Hey, Boss, he called. He blinked watery eyes and followed Jude’s gaze to the polka-dotted underwear limp in the uncut grass as if Boss had melted.

Jude tried to speak but succeeded only in making a sound like barking. He growled, swallowed, took a deep breath. No de English, he said.

No de shit, sonny, the man replied. He came a little closer, inspected Jude as if he’d been recently painted. He cast a glance at the supine man. What’s your name, boy?

No de English. De Franch, Jude said after a bit more strangled barking.

Okay, Defranch. You need a trainer? How about a manager?

He and Jude just stared.

Okay, come on. My car’s out front. Just let me get somebody down here to check ol’ Boss out.

Jude stood there panting, and it wasn’t until weeks later that he understood the man’s name was Herb Carney, that he was Jude’s connection to the boxing world and that within a few years they would be on the
road to fame. You got some work to do, sonny, Carney later told him, but you got the moves. You’re good.

Then began the training, the fights and Jude’s dawning realization that he might find a place in this country and that the God so absent in fields and inarticulate sky, truant in grief, had made an effort after all.

The U.S. was a wild place, Jude decided those years that Carney raised him like a son. The neighbourhood was no different than Boss’s, a bit more crowded, bordered by a littered highway, scrub brush and fields piled with trash, a pitted and scorched no man’s land where locals had tried to burn household appliances and failed. Jude lived in Carney’s basement, slept on a green army cot next to a wall of gurgling PVC pipes. Though Carney had no idea as to Jude’s age, he figured the boy could use a few years of good training
and some time to learn the language. This wasn’t simple kindness. He recognized a money-maker when he saw one. He appropriated a false birth certificate from a man in Atlanta, had known others who’d done the same for immigrant boxers and so worked his connections. Jude became Jude White, a safe name the man in Atlanta had insisted, no need to attract attention. Jude was now listed as being eighteen, Carney having wanted to make him legal.

During the day Jude did chores or chopped wood as he had for his grandfather, but now it was Carney nodding and dipping chew, spitting into the weeds and saying, Faster, sonny, faster. Jude sweated and heaved, shearing knots and burls, his shoulders burning. The rest of the time he trained in a gym Carney had set up with a few friends. He familiarized himself with technique subtler than his grandfather’s, dipped beneath a rope strung across the ring and tore into the bags until they had deep dents and Carney made him wind them with duct tape. At night Jude lay on his cot, feeling his expanding body, the growth of bone and muscle that stabbed along his back and shins. He stared at the naked floor joists, heard the creak of Carney’s frequent nighttime visits to the bathroom.

Jude knew things now: doctors were normal, poverty unnecessary. For each little cough Carney brought home pills, took an aspirin in the morning to stay fit, told Jude old age was hell and then some. After having lived so long in a leaning house of unpainted wood, drafts in the walls, leaks everywhere, Jude was impressed by Carney’s
rather shoddy home. He found it sunny, open and clean. But still, Jude realized that this wasn’t the place he’d come for. The world that Honoré had described, that his mother and all those who’d gone south must have been seeking, was the very same that Carney watched each evening on the television. It wasn’t that Jude desired this, but thinking of Isa-Marie or Hervé Hervé or the farm, he drowned in a sense of loss. Each morning, he woke, still worrying about Isa-Marie, struggling to realize anew that she was dead. He watched TV and tried to believe that he could find a place here. But at night, he dreamed the motion of the sea.

News came and Carney jawed on worse than a TV commentator. There was a man in orbit, some sort of missile crisis and a president shot in a parade. There were facts about the universe, satellites and probes and all that hooey doom. Jude ignored the broil of politics, colour TV and congressional bills. What English he learned was from Carney’s endless diatribes, his talk of the old days and the boxers he’d lost to war. The man Jude had fought was named Hoss Jenkins, nicknamed Boss, an up-and-coming who’d defeated Lou-Roy Webster and Tony Salamba both in the first round with a hard left hook. After his fight with Jude, Boss had gotten up from the grass. Carney had replaced the Everlast shorts, but at the nationals Boss had lost anyway and was back on the farm, broken spirited, feeding orphaned calves with a rubber nipple. Carney used him as an example.

Don’t fight with anger, he said. Dammit, sonny, you fight angry and there’ll always be someone out there to
beat you. That’s the problem with old Boss. He didn’t realize there was boys angrier than him.

As for his own rage Jude doubted this. He was desperate to begin, to get into the ring, but Carney was cautious, telling him that he still hadn’t learned to box, that boxing wasn’t fighting.

When Jude was eighteen, he started the amateur circuit. He cleaned up, abbreviating matches by breaking jaws, smashing ribs, lifting men off the ground with uppercuts. He went national, winning with ease. He now measured six foot seven, weighed over two hundred and sixty pounds and didn’t have an inch of skin not bulging with muscle. Carney was always there, telling him he was great, measuring, weighing, prodding his flesh, collecting money from tournaments. After fights Carney took him to steakhouses for cheese-baked spuds and cuts of broiled and peppered meat. He fed him like a pet shark.

But Jude came out of each match unsatisfied. He was fighting poor whites, Hispanics and Italians and hulking blacks. In this world with so much sunshine, he couldn’t help but think of what he’d lost to be here, and he considered that he might be happy with a family of his own. But though he searched the crowd for bright happy people, he saw crooked jaws, puffed lips, some bald, bearded fat men in oil-stained suspenders giggling over a downed fighter. Only at the nationals were there a few pretty single girls in tight jeans and leather vests, drinking beer and cheering. He watched them awhile, considering for the first time how this was to be done. They smiled until he’d lumbered close enough for them to see his boiled-fish
head, his sparse, red eyebrows and the scaled, spreading muscles of his torso. Then they fled. Carney noticed his distraction.

Sonny, he said, we got the Christian religion today because Jesus didn’t give in to girls like that.

Jude had been raised Catholic and saw Christ as the curé’s business, a threat or oath or colourful laminate awarded at school for good grades.

Goddam, sonny, Carney said, you just keep the flesh strong. I’ve done invested in you.

And so Jude fought on. He swung his way through those months as if in a car wash, liquids spraying, great brushes whipping in like the faces and hair and gloves of opponents. He hoped that sooner or later anger and loneliness would be washed away and that he’d have no reason to return.

Though Jude won the nationals, the Tokyo Olympics had been the previous summer, and he wondered if Carney had kept him back to avoid an early defeat at the hands of Joe Frazier. Both agreed he shouldn’t wait three more years and that he should go professional.

Don’t lose heart, Carney told him, you’ll be whupping Ali in no time.

All that fall and through the winter Jude fought, building a reputation, destroying ranks of middling boxers. Carney wasn’t discerning. No purse was too small, no fighter or rundown showroom too disgraceful. The events were more often than not hardly newsworthy, and
when the prize cash was on the table, Carney grabbed it up, shoved it in his pocket, gave Jude a crumpled dollar. In the hot spring of the following year, he booked a tournament in New Orleans.

Of the boxers there Jude was the only white, and the audience held more blacks than he’d ever seen at a match, boys stepping up on bleachers, girls tilting heads and making wry expressions. He couldn’t shake his doubts about fighting these men also struggling to rise, but like that boy obeying his grandfather, he was resigned to victory. He climbed into the ring without show of any sort. He rolled his shoulders a bit and looked lethargic under the lights. The bell rang. His first match didn’t last a minute.