It’s a Tuesday night, and I’m watching the world slip away from my hands. I’m falling, falling down like some great crashing meteor blazing into Earth’s atmosphere. I’m watching the stars above me and they’re fierce--fierce like the night itself, and for all it’s fierceness I’m pacified. Fear is running through my veins, coursing through me like blood, slithering through my arms and my legs like snakes until they strangle my circulation and turn limp. The blood, it pulsates, never letting me forget I’m human. Never letting me forget that I’m not perfect. The blood, I can feel it falling with me. Sinking, and my heart beats faster than it should. It skips, and my pulmonary arteries jump out of my skin , and asphyxia, death by strangulation. There’s a man wringing my throat because as I’m flailing I can’t scream. I reach out to free myself, my shaking hands pushing out into darkness, searching, finding nothing. They sweep the air, looking and find no strangler. Just myself. Someone is looking above me. A great face swells like a ceiling above me, and they’re throwing fingers in my face. Counting the brief numerology. One. Two. Three. My body is sinking through canvas. My legs are rubber, and when I try to move them, they flop like cooked noodles. My shorts stick to my thigh, stinging there, pressed against welting skin. My hair is tasseled, and my face is ripped wide open so that the depths of my skull touch the cool air. Small beads of sweat running down my forehead are the only thing that tells me it’s not. My arms are smothered against my body, but I’m not worried. All I can hear are the numbers. Four. Five. Six. My body is crumpled up and the excited face of the man that bounces and throws numbers above me looks like he’s begging me to get up. The numbers, they spell defeat. I try to rise. I strain, every muscle in my limbs tensing like two ton weights are attached, and my legs push my weight up. I build momentum. I work towards freedom. Towards liberation. Towards salvation. I can see my cheering opponent, his thick pulsing arms catapulting in the air. He gallops around the ring, dancing over my body. I wish I could see his face so I could curse it, but with his back towards to me, I can only look on in admiration. I remember feeling the wind of a Chicago prize-fighter grazing my face. Seven. Eight. Nine. I’m almost up. My legs are swaying, but I’m almost stable. Then, my legs, they dive out behind me, and my face meets canvas. I can taste blood flowing through my mouth, and a chipped tooth rattling against my cheeks. I’m seeing birds flying around my head. Black doves with red eyes moving swiftly, circling. I wish I could fly like they do. My bones ache to the point that my limbs shake vicariously. I am no longer the master of my body. I hear words from a distance resounding through my ears. It was imminent. Tiny tears filled under the lids of my eyes, and I’m glad my face is hidden from sight by the floor I’ve smashed against. Ten. I hear the crowd begin to cheer outside the ring, and big strong hands lift me up. Moving me to the corner of my ring. Where a cut-man awaits to fix me up. I feel soft, and my skin twists and tangles under this. I feel my feet dragging on the canvas, and I feel the bruises I’ll remember getting in the morrow. And then dark, it swallows me whole. Jonas and the Whale David and Goliath Cain and Abel Remember thy Brother And I’m left wondering how this all started. There’s an avenue that pushes itself out of a dark and empty street. Dusty hills litter the road and the lines that dissect the asphalt, they are gone and faded. There’s trees, and life, but it’s all dying--and it’s summertime. It’s always dark here; industrial shadows loom over all the benches, the fountains, and the parks, and in the infinite shade, the trees crawl up and wither. The businesses are boarded up with straggled boards pinned by rusty nails. They hang aloof, and on a windy day they shudder against the brick building, slapping into a caterwaul. Card-board signs hanging on the door tell everyone no one’s home. Even the cardboard is tearing to pieces. I live on the fifth house on Milwaukee Ave. Inside, it’s cold, and dreary. When I walk in, the foyer light flickers. There is no furniture. A small couch hides in a corner, and it’s sodden and old, and weary. That is all that lives in the house beside me, and it was there before I moved in. There’s no television, and there’s no cable. The cable companies wouldn’t have even supplied it. There is no agony without it. I don’t like distractions. Walking on Water Parting seas Holy Grail’s Yet the house on Milwaukee Ave., it’s the only true home I’ve ever known. It’s the only home I’ve Whiteley--4 ever woken up in, not afraid of the morning light, or the morning dew. Sometimes, late at night, on Milwaukee, you can hear gun-fire shatter through the streets, and it’s loud cacophonous noise stirs every mammal for blocks, but squatting at 1135 Milwaukee Ave.--at least I feel safe. Even with all the gun-fire. I don’t even have locks on the doors. I train in the old house. I push my fists into the walls so gaping holes exist in the foundation. The plaster makes for a good body bag. The result--chewed fists, and scars that run over my hands like dog scratches where the knuckles exploded. The result--callouses. They make your fists have more weight, so that when my fist comes with a wide hook, it’s like getting hit with a brick. I have never lived happier than on Milwaukee. I used to have a dog, a pretty cocker-Spaniard, but he left one night when he heard the gunshots, and never came back. I like to think that he runs through grassy fields and prettier places than Milwaukee. Only the derelict should truly live among the derelict. Run-down people live in rundown neighborhood not because they’re poor, but because they are one and the same. I have touched cottons of money, but it doesn’t matter. My home is among the defeated. It’s all I’ve ever known. I train every-day until I hear the train whistle steaming by. That’s my alarm that delivers me to the Promised Land, sleep. I take refuge on the sodden couch with the cockroaches and the rats. We have a lot in common, rats, and I. It is not the cadence in which we scurry among the living. It’s the atrocities we face, and the things we must conquer to survive. All rats have stepped on a rat-trap. A tight-lipped, young reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel once asked me, at a press conference, how I became a fighter. His broad-rimmed hat, and thick spectacles shined as he scribbled down on a notepad that made him look like Superman’s alter-ego. Clark Kent. The reporter asked me real nervous-like “Davie, what makes a fighter?” So I told him. I told him fighters are not born. I told him fighters are made. Whiteley--5 Made from the pain, the tears, and the ashes. And the reporter, he asked me, “What made you, Davie?” And the answer I had didn’t need telling. Wake-up. Rewind. I’m suspended in ropes by my legs, and all the ropes are hanging from a tall ceiling. My head is a hairsbreadth from the tile floor, and the blood rushing to my head, it hurts. Face flushed, my eyes go bloodshot. I see Red. It’s morning, I know that. Flickers of light pass through windows and stream down in cobweb patterns. There’s a steady humming of an industrial sized freezer behind me. “Do you want to die?” a man says to me. He moves out of the shadows towards me. Beady eyes with big eight-ball pupils glaring back. I don’t know who this is. “Do you want to die?” Repeat. Caught in an endless loop. A scratched record. I don’t know how to answer back. My voice is tied up with my legs and suspended upside down, and I cant reach it, can’t grab hold of it. I hear a whip cracking the air behind me. Splitting molecules. Sputtering Hate. Spinning out of control. I shake my head no. I don’t want to die. He nods at me, then cracks the whip again into the open air. A whip cracks because it breaks the sound barrier. I’m scared. “You think you can break the system,” he says. “Make a mockery out of us all,” I bite down on the wet sock that’s pushed half between my lips and my tongue, and I gag and can taste my bile ducts bleeding. My stomach acid is threatening to come up on me, and when it fills in my mouth, I swallow it back down. Burning, and I’m imagining my stomach as the pits of hell’s gates. Cocytus. Whiteley--6 The sock tastes like bitter chemicals. I’m a fighter, not a chemist. I remember using Clorox in my house. The sock reminds me of clean toilets. The man with the whip, he sees my jaw is clenched and asks me again, “Do I want to die?”. He asks me if I know what hell’s like, and I want to tell him how my stomach feels, and ask him what chemical wastes are on the sock, but it muffles my screams. I shake my head no. The man steps from the shadows and stands in the full light. He’s young, and grizzled. Chest hair pokes out from a Hawaiian shirt, and his eyes, they remind me of a weasel’s. Yea thou I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil. “It don’t matter how quick your fists are son,” the whipping man says. “We can hurt you so bad you can’t remember how to use them,” He looked to the shadows, and nodded. I feel Great big hands turn me around and around, spinning. I’m screaming so loud my voice hurts, but it comes out like a whimper, like a car struggling, and puttering and dying. And then, I feel the whip on my back. Stinging flesh sears strong. I can smell it cauterizing, and I think the steam of the devil is rising off where I’m cut. One. Two. Three. The brief numerology. I can feel the stinging lashes on my back, the poisonous rod coming down again and again, thrashing my body with deep welts. Blood trickles down my backside. And then, as quick as it came, it’s gone. The voices, the lashes, the pain. I think maybe my ears went numb with my body. I scream for help, but no one listens, and I think my vocal cords are gone too, but then I remember I’m a fighter. This is what they expect of a fighter. Of a killer. Nobody cares what you have to say. Nobody listens. Your ideals. They don’t matter. They just want to see a fight. The fight becomes you, and you become the fight, and soon enough it’s all you’re good for. When the fight in you leaves, you wash up on a beach somewhere drinking rum and wasting money. Maybe, I had too much fight in me. Suddenly, I’m wondering where the fight in me has gone now because I’m dangling from the Whiteley--7 ceiling like a pig’s carcass and feeling like a broken horse. I feel like I’m under the stars of Dante because when I look up, everything is: Black Black like daunting canvas And the night leaves me still. All I can feel is the blood in my brain beating and swelling. The lashes on my back. I try to raise my arms, to see my hands, because they’ve gone numb so many hours ago, but I can’t. I’m crying, and tears fall to the floor through my hair. My tears, they plummet. And only a pool of blood awaits. I see Red. I smell Copper. Cain and Abel. Damn thou who strikes against his brother Psalm 26:9 May the Lord have mercy on my soul. Time. There’s a period of time before a fight when it’s silent. When there’s no noise at all. There’s the sound of the crowd, and the fighters, and the vendors; for the minutes before though, there’s nothing. There’s only hunger in the air. A fire that burns through fabric and erodes sea-walls. Even the ocean cannot contend. Crowds wilt their voices; they hold their lust into their hearts, instead of expunging them out into the stadium. Sometimes, when the noise becomes so soft I can hear my shoes squeaking on linoleum in the locker room, inside I think happy thoughts. Imagine myself on a hot glade floating on a small skiff downstream a narrow river with towering Whiteley--8 palmetto’s on my sides, and an exotic browned woman fanning me with bright green leaves. In my fantasy I sip a margarita, and eat small berries plucked ripe off the trees of summer’s day. But then, and only then, does happiness come so ready. Usually, to feel that happiness, I need to be tasting blood. You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick. And, that time before a fight, it’s an illusion. The calm before the storm, it doesn’t exist. There is no calm. The fight rages on, even when you’re not touching canvas. Existence is a last century fad. Now, it’s all about proving how nothing exists. Not even I exist; Not anymore anyway. Limbo is the home for me, deep in the first rings of hell. God, did you put me here? That was a rhetorical question God. I forgot, you don’t exist. And neither do I. Neither will I, soon enough. 2+2=5. Sensibility doesn’t make much sense these days. Wakeup. Rewind. A grease head with a baby-face is in my locker room after I win the fight I was supposed to lose. Next to him, is a man that looks like Kramer, with pubic hair sprouting from the top of his skull. He’s balding. Imagine taking a Glock and gunning them down one by one so that my locker was splattered an oozing red like the color of my gloves. I’d murder them. They murder the fight. “Romano hasn’t gotten back up yet,” the grease baby says. “Lying on the canvas like a fish without the flopping,” “You done him in good,” the weasel with pubic hair says. Whiteley--9 “You aint done nothing,” Greasebaby now. “We had big money on that fight,” He wasn’t putting up any type of fight. Wouldn’t even land a punch, I say, but they don’t care. They’re all snarling teeth and tire-rims under their eyes. “Don’t matter. What you did to us was bad business,” grease baby says, and I’m thinking of all the different ways I can make fingerpaintings on the walls with his blood. Thinking of the Nativity scene, and making baby Jesus out of a thicker blood than the rest, because he’s more special and unique than everything else. Don’t you wish we could all be special and unique, just like Jesus? I tell him I’m not afraid of him or his scare tactics, and that he’s a whole lot of fluffy clouds and no thunder, and he gets angry and says I oughtta be terrified. That I need to be. Having only spoken once before, I don’t even know him, but I know he’s the dirt under my feet when I walk through the mud after it rains. “The whole city lost on you, boy,” grease baby says. The sweat drips off his face and down his Hawaiian shirt like a bad sinus drip. Suddenly, I want to take a shower. “Romano’s a king. You’re not anything but a small fish in a big pond,” I tell him that I’m not so little now that Romano hasn’t even stood on two legs yet, and grease baby says, “You’re as little as I want you to be,” and I’m thinking he’s going to bite my neck because how close he gets to my earlobe. The sound reverberates off my inner ears and shudders out, stuttering. I hate noise. He says he’s got a van out back and that he wants to go for a little drive, and he fingers a gun hiding in his waist, and I have no real choice but to go with him where he wants me to go. I tell him let me put my gloves up, and while I do, a janitor with rags instead of clothes taps me on the shoulder, and whisper in my ear. “Romano hasn’t got back up. They checked his pulse. He’s not breathing. He’s dead,” Whiteley--10 Somehow, I knew this before he told me. I could tell from the sound outside, the deadening silence. I could tell from the way my fist collapsed in his face, sinking into his skin until it was swallowed whole Jonah and the Whale. I could tell by the way he fell when he hit the ropes, not sliding along them like a fighter should, trying to grab hold of the canvas to his feet, but dropping instead, like a brick suspended from the sky that realized it could no longer hang about floating in space. I killed again. Davie killed again. I wasn’t a fighter. I was a killer. What’s the difference? The rag-tag janitor that’s so black he’s purple walks off to clean a bathroom or the showers, and grease baby prods me with the gun. Let’s go for a ride, he says. “F*** you,” I say to him, and follow him out through doors painted red. I see Red. And the blood of my brother. Cain and Abel. When God is a lie Cain lives longer than he should. Cain faces no exile. Instead, this is what he becomes. A monster. The trouble with sports is it’s all fixed. The football games, baseball games, none of its real. It’s all staged to get the biggest crowds and the largest profits. Athletes don’t even have to be athletic anymore--they just have to look the part, don a costume and walk on stage to a round of cheers and applause. We’re actors, and the Olympics are the grandest stage, the Holy Grail of acting. Performers. Have you ever heard of the Black Sock Scandal? 1919 World Series. They fixed the World Series. The team owner wanted to make money on the Whiteley--11 team losing the Series. Betting. It’s all about the money. The owner of the White Sox told his team to throw the series for money. Throw away the dreams of your youth, and boyish promises of fame and honor. For a handful of money, and a sack full of cash. Dollar bills with Jefferson’s face. Thomas Jefferson had over two hundred slaves. It’s no wonder you never see a Bernard Jefferson, or a Sylvia Jefferson. There’s not a white Jefferson on the face of Earth anymore. And the man who ruined sports, his name is Arnold Rothstein, the gangster who started it all. The New York gangster who destroyed sportsmanship for good, and the careers of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and the other seven players of the Black Socks. The 1919 World Series. His name is Arnold Rothstein. Because of him, there’s no freedom in sports. There’s cages of men waiting to get out of the machine, the machine of gambling and no one can do it. It’s all a show. It’s all an act, and Boxing is the worst of them all. When a boxer starts to become a contender, starts to become a somebody, a man whom the bosses can depend on, they come to you. In pinstriped suits and cigars flaunting from their mouths they come in drones to the hive of men who love sports and turn them into working machines. It’s such a busy hive. The Prizefighter’s are the bums. The bums are the prizefighters. That’s how you know you’re living in the land of Cocytus. When nothing makes sense anymore. Deep in the rings of hell where no happy man can wallow. They come and say, “Win this fight,”. “Lose that fight,”. And just like that, the whole idea of boxing is washed away under a sea of meaningless acting. But the fans love it. They don’t care. Sometimes, it seems like I’m the only person on Planet Earth who does. Who cares. They came to me when I was young bum with all my teeth and fists faster than a hummingbird, after I iced Punishing Joe Black. That’s when the newspapers started running stories, and my name was in ink all through the North East. The fans whispered my name in train stations like the steam of speeding locomotives and sooner rather than later my name got around to those that mattered. And suddenly, I was under their thumb. Whiteley--12 I was the grime underneath their fingernails. I was nothing. With the hot barrel of a gun in between your tongue and your cheek, there’s not much room to complain. It all starts with Arnold Rothstein. Wake-Up. Rewind. Romano is coming at me like a rhinoceros. Bulking arms lurking through the air towards my body. He’s so slow. He couldn’t hit a punching bag. I’m trying to keep my fists tied to my waist and just let him hit me, but he’s miles off my face every time he goes for the kill. I feel like a mouse teasing an elephant. He throws a hulking hook and I’m halfway down a highway before he realizes his punch didn’t connect with my face. I give him a one-two and he shudders back, and then I go back to teasing him. I want him to hit me. Why doesn’t he hit me? I can’t take being whipped again. He holds his big gorilla fists up and pushes his mighty legs forward. David and Goliath. I want to be covered in blood tonight. I want to see Red. And Romano is so slow he wont let me. I wonder how this bum ever became the world’s most prestigious prizefighter. Romano grimaces and swallows some spit, and throws his fists in my direction, and I think I could move away from his fists if I was a blind man, or a century old Cybil. He raises his hands in the air to say, “what gives”, and I can see every camera in the arena snapping photos of him looking strong. Like a prizefighter should look. I want to end him. I want to f*** his girlfriend at his funeral for the sport of it. It’s a cleaner sport than this is. No Whiteley--13 betting in f*ng. Only the lust of man. Romano comes at me and misses again. I duck and I’m under his big swinging arms, and then I’m spoon feeding him an uppercut. Then a quick jab. He puts his hands up and figures out he can cover his face, and I’m welting the skin where packed abs jut out to meet brutality. Bloody bruises bend and break under my fists and he stumbles and drops his hands to his body. I reel back and place one in the jaw. David and Goliath. One. Two. Three. The brief numerology. Four. Five Six. My hands are catapulting in the air. I’m somebody now. Seven. Eight. Nine. I’m a prizefighter. Ten. I won the fight. I’m a dead man. I can’t take another whipping again. I don’t have it in me. I had to lose this fight. They told me I had too. It all started with Arnold Rothstein. Fear is the root of all evil. Fear from the stars above you that guide the way--- fear of the beaten path that starves those who drift from its tenure. The fear of going forward like a blind man without staff, without rod, and walking into the Valley of Death and the City of the Damned—places where tufts of grass don’t grow, and seeds pushing into the Earth never fester. Blind-folded, we walk as startled lambs in many directions. Isolated, and alone, we walk through wilderness, and sleep on barren ground until we reach majestic skies or thrones of dirt; but these are far off still, and the Road, the broken Road with forking tongues at its penultimate moment, grows ever steeper. After I iced Punishing Joe Black, the press swarmed me like mosquitoes and sucked the fighting Whiteley--14 blood out of me. Answering questions all day about which fist I used most, and which way I leaned—left or right—when I fight, it all became a hyperextension of the machine. Press was just the long robotic claw that drifted out from the machine and wrapped steel pinchers around my vocal cords so that while they were asking questions, the words I spoke came out as tired whimpers—or so much worse; sometimes the words would leave my lips as lies. They would escape, and I would clamp my mouth shut tight after they left, and try to herald them back into my soul, where the lies could lay dormant. Lies never did come back to me. Instead, they ran rampant, tearing down the world one sector at a time. Soon, I was no better than the press. Telling lies became what I was and the truth became a convoluted and forgotten mess that was an unmanageable tangent of anything I could ever remember it being. Truth became the lie itself, and the lie became me. The press flashed bright bulbs, clicking and clacking, and taking pictures of me posing with Boxing Commissioners, and Coca-Cola bottles. They flashed big cameras, and I flashed big smiles, and the press and I, we became a team. We worked together for the modern image, and then the mob bosses—the Italian families and the Greek too—they came from the woodwork, and then instead of teaming with the machine, I became a slave. I have fifty-six lashing scars that run west, parallel with the setting sun. Sleeping curses the wound, and the sensation of having my backside touched, it forces my feet to leave my shoes as I hop out of them and fall back down again. There is no freedom anymore. There is no freedom for anyone. The press—the athletes—the bosses; all of us together are trapped in the machine. The machine is a home for those who don’t have one. Those who have never known a home, this is where they end up. Milwaukee Ave. never was my home. My home is boxing. It’s all I ever had. When a tight lipped young reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel asked me how I became a fighter, I felt those cold unnerving pinchers wrapping around my throat like a noose so I couldn’t breathe—couldn’t speak. Whiteley--15 The reporter asked me real nervous-like, “Davie what makes a fighter,” So I told him. I told him fighters are not born. I told him fighters are made. Made from the pain, the tears, and the ashes. And the reporter, he asked me, “What made you, Davie,” And the answer I had I couldn’t tell. Strong pincers carried my voice far away. The answer I had, it was too hard to tell, and the machine had let me forget it, and move on. But, how I was made, that is the answer. This is where it all started. I’ve been a fighter since the beginning. Welcome to the machine. Wake up. Rewind. Relive. Reverse. I’m just a boy again, and: Yellow wheat willows rise to over my waist, and scratch against my arms as I run past them. I look up and the sun is setting over farmland. It reigns sovereign over the farms with an iron fist, and when night approaches, this far from city lights, there is nothing. Dark settles, and the mosquitoes leap from the haystacks and pray on the cattle, and if you’re caught out by yourself, when you found a light to look at your skin, it would be chewed by hundreds of the bugs. Red welts would riddle your skin, and later they’d fester, pucker up and bleed. That is the night’s stake, lying just beyond daylight’s wake. I’m just a boy again, and: The smell of sweat slipping over my eyelids mimics the dirty scent of grime on skin and I remember being pushed down in the mud until worms filled my cheeks. I remember my brother holding my Whiteley--16 head with his gargantuan hands and holding me, splishing and splashing in the wet mud where it had rained just hours before. “This is what you get for being,” My brother, Thomas stopped there and lifted my head up over the mud and fed my nose to a thorny strawberry bush. It scratches the tip and a small trickle of blood runs down my nose, and I can taste the blood in my mouth. It’s bulbous and smells of copper. “Being what?” I had asked. “Just being,” He let me run then, and watched laughing as I disappeared into the pastures. Running. Running. Running. Sweat greases my forehead as I run, but I can’t run fast enough. I feel like I’m running into the sun because it’s setting in front of me. My legs sweep the Earth, then glide there, before twisting and taking to wings and flying. My feet fleet the ground and hover instead with the speed of running before leaving and disposing back to the ground. For once, with my brother behind me, I feel free. Freedom. Then my big brother with powerful legs, he’s running through the fields faster after me. His big legs throb with muscle as they slap with the soil and he huffs loudly as he tears the ground. He tears it so tectonic plates underneath the ground’s crust twist and mangle so that after he’s done running they form rivers and ravines. That’s how loud each pounding foot is when it lands. Like bombs going off, mangling the world to the core. I can hear his steps behind me, and I’m thinking about how much I hate him. I’m just a boy again, and: My big brother Thomas holding my head in the mud, and I’m the grime that lives underneath the Earth. The sludge that dissects itself among the living except this time it’s altogether for committee. And I want to kill Thomas. I want to cut his face into tiny pieces and hide it under the farm-hands dirty floorboards so that no one ever knew where he went to. I want to scratch long nails into pale white skin until I can see tendons in his flesh, and veins pulsing, and humming as blood runs through them. And then Whiteley--17 not; no blood running through anymore. I want to see the look in his eyes when he sees I’m a fighter. “I’m going to kill you,” I hear him screaming. “Mommy and Daddy love you, but that doesn’t mean I have too,” He catches me and grabs me and wraps me around his fingers. Let me go, I say. He doesn’t listen. He smiles a big wide treacherous smile and punches me in the gut. And I’m keeping my lunch down. All this internal anger in the presence of all this external beauty and, even as a little boy, I realize how mismatched the world, everything is. “Mommy and Daddy think you’re special because you’re smart. They think you’re so wonderful. Do you know what I think you are?” my big brother Thomas says. I try to tear away from him but he wont let me. “Do you know what I think you are?” Repeat. Recycle. A Scratched Record. I sob and shake my head no. I remember all the Sunday school lessons about Cain and Abel. “I think you’re nothing,” he says. “I think you’re s***, and a liar,” If from anybody but him I had heard that word, I would be surprised to hear it. Even appalled. From him, it was standard affair. “Everyone loves little baby Davie. I’m sick of it, you little mouse. You’re a runt, a nothing,” I’m remembering the gospels and all the things they say about loving thy brother and I’m throwing it out the window. I’m mustering all the strength I have and squirming in Thomas’s hands. He lets go of me, and I rear back on my heels and plant him with a hook in the face. It lands and Thomas falls backwards. David and Goliath. Cain and Abel. Love thy Brother. Whiteley--18 Thomas doesn’t move when he’s left to the dirt, and I try slapping him to get him to wake up. I try holding him in my arms, and then I play with his eyelids some to see if they open on their own. When I put my hands over his heart, its quiet. I fold his eyelids down over his eyes. I’m thinking about burying him in the willow wheats, in the pasture. He can be fertilizer to the plants, I think. I’m thinking about dragging his body into the rows of crops, and then just like that, I’m doing it. Moving my brother’s limp body across the field. And all I feel for him is my fear of being caught and found out. Fear in the hope that nobody notices where I hid his body. In a shallow grave. Not even six feet under. God, I didn’t mean too. It was an accident, but then, I was a fighter, and there are no accidents for fighters. There is good luck and bad luck, and good betting and bad betting. God, I didn’t mean too. I promise. And this is how it began. This is how I became a fighter. This is how I became a Prizefighter, became a somebody. And this is how I became a bum. And on. And on. And on. Maybe now, I’ll find some nice island to lay out on and drink rum. First I was Davie the Killer. Then, I was Davie the Prizefighter Now, I’m Davie the bum. The last one. ---- It has a nice ring to it.