Griffin #2
Nothing. The jukebox stares back at me. A hunk of iron laughing in my face.
Okay, fine. You want to do this the hard way.
“It’s not going to work,” the bartender says.
“Yes, it will.”
I kick it. The glass cracks and the jukebox groans. Still not dead.
The few people in the bar shrink back.
“Hey, psycho, what the fuck!” the bartender yells.
I kick it again. And again. The girl stands up, her hand over her mouth. The big Johnny Cash fan doesn’t look so brave anymore.
On the fifth kick, the glass shatters. The machine lets out an electric whine and, out of nowhere, a song starts to play. It’s not Johnny Cash. It’s some pop shit about summer love. Close enough.
I grab my glass from the bar just to down the rest of the whiskey. The bartender stares at me, pale. I toss some crumpled bills near him.
“For the drink. And for the music,” I say.
“Hey, you asshole, I’m gonna sue you!”
“I solve your problem and you sue me?”
I walk out of the bar without looking back. The stupid pop music bleeds out the door, following me. I hear the bartender yelling something about calling the cops. By the time they get here, I’ll be long gone, rotting in another hole.
“You can’t just go around breaking things like that!” I hear the girl yell.
“I just did.”
I walk without rushing. A shard of glass is stuck in the sole of my shoe; it drags on the ground, scratching the sidewalk. It catches on my sole before breaking. Now there are two shards of glass drawing on the asphalt that Griffin was here. Griffin fucked everything up.
“You’re bleeding,” she yells, now from across the street.
I look down at my hand. It’s true. My knuckles are scraped raw—a piece of glass from that damn jukebox is sticking out from between my fingers.
Without thinking, I grab the tip with my teeth and pull. The friction tears a sliver of skin with it. I spit the shard of glass onto the sidewalk. Now there are three.
This time, she doesn’t follow me. The romantic fantasy of saving the monster ends when the monster shows its teeth.
I keep walking. Three shards of glass on the sidewalk. My mark on Sacramento.
At the motel, the TV is still on, but the game show is over.
Now, a white-toothed pastor is promising salvation in exchange for a generous tithe.
I listen. Yes, sir, provide me with salvation.
On the other end of the line, the devil himself agrees with him.
I was saved once before. Condemned right after.
For heresy. Why do you think angels tell you not to be afraid when they appear?
My phone vibrates on the nightstand. The pastor says, Trust in the Lord. It’s Marcus.
“Yeah,” I say against the phone screen. It’s too cold.
“They accepted,” he says. He’s out of breath. I can picture him on the other end, sweating.
“To kill me for free?”
“No, you lucky son of a bitch! The money! They doubled the offer!” He sounds like he can’t believe his own words.
“I swear to God, Griffin, I thought Karpov was going to use me to line the trunk of his car. The guy screamed. Said he was going to bury you in the desert where not even the coyotes would find your bones.”
“So unoriginal. At least get creative with it.”
“Shut the fuck up. He said that nobody, nobody, makes demands of him.”
I stay silent, waiting for the rest of it. The catch.
“And then?”
“And then he hung up on me. Five minutes later, he calls me back. Calm. Cold as fuck. Said he changed his mind. They’ll pay. Double. You just have to fight.”
A dry laugh escapes my throat. It’s an ugly sound. They doubled it.
“How fun,” I say quietly.
The ghost investor finds my death sentence amusing.
“Griffin, you crazy son of a bitch. You genius psycho. I gotta listen to you more often,” Marcus says.
I nod. Yes, sir. Trust in the Lord.
“One expensive whore,” I say, and my face twists into a smile without my permission. Marcus celebrates—easy money for him, since all he has to do is give up a life that isn’t his.
If they wanted me dead and didn’t want to connect it to the fight, there’d be a professional hitman at my door blowing my head off with a shotgun. But this.
Fifty fights. Fifty broken bones in a single night.
What would they think if I finished off the grappler too? How much would they pay me to try and kill me after that?
The pastor says, Where there is faith, there is a miracle.
Maybe I should have killed Rat.
The ring ropes are too clean. The canvas doesn’t stink. No loose nails. No puddles of beer on the floor. This new investor must be a meticulous bastard. Probably sorts his victims by blood type.
Even the crowd, tonight, seems better dressed than usual. The air conditioning disperses the stench of crowded sweat.
Marcus isn’t filling my ear with aggressive motivational speeches.
He’s in the middle of the audience, wedged between two busty women, blowing kisses at any passing skirt.
He doesn’t give a damn about the outcome.
Win or lose, his bank account is getting fatter tonight, and that’s all that matters.
He gives me a thumbs-up. Go on and bleed pretty for us. Thanks, Marcus. Real inspiring.
I used to fight in moldy garages, on floors slick with old beer and sometimes fresh blood, for off-the-books bets. It was always the same: the winner left with a limp wad of cash while the loser left with a bottle of warm water and the right to try again next week.
It was a telemarketer’s salary: you earn just enough to keep coming back.
It’s called an “appearance fee”, which is a fancy word for a handout.
The real money never went to the fighter.
It went to the promoter who organizes it, to the security guard who pretends he didn’t see, to the bookmaker who controls the odds. To Marcus.
But with this investor, my defeat is already priced in, and priced well.
With 10.000 dollars, you could pay four months’ rent on Marcus’s shitty apartment.
Think about it, ten grand just to step in the ring.
A monthly salary for one of those starched-collar IT guys, pocketed in five minutes and a few broken ribs.
The organizer, the same one as last time, yells in the middle of the ring. New microphone, new speakers. A sound tech. It sounds too clean.
“IN THE RIGHT CORNER... RYAN ‘THE REAPER’!”
The so-called Reaper enters the ring without posing for the crowd.
His ears are deformed like those of MMA fighters, swollen into an ugly cauliflower.
They look like angry little tumors clinging to the sides of his head.
Cute. He doesn’t have the same massive physique as Rat.
Worse; he’s toned, and his muscles, unlike Rat’s, don’t come from steroids and chicken breast. You can see it in his posture.
Pajama bullshit, Marcus had said. It’s noticeable. He has a stance inherent to jiu-jitsu.
“AND IN THE LEFT CORNER... THE brUTE FORCE THAT KNOWS NO LIMITS... IRON ARM!”
For me, the same old mix. Applause from those who bet on the underdog, boos from those who think they know better. I touch the medallion under my shirt in a prayer to an angel I know is a demon.
Then, I give them a little wave. Gotta keep the fans happy.
The bell rings.
I don’t know how to fight on the ground.
Never had to. The formal part of breaking people was never my thing—the uniform, the rules, the mat, none of it ever fit me.
It was always simple: I hit, the other guy falls.
But not here, not now. Here, I’m going to die, or, at least, that’s what the ten-thousand-dollar check says.
Nobody pays that for a random fighter. Here, Karpov is paying for a front-row seat to his revenge.
Ryan doesn’t charge. I know what’s going through his head because I’ve been there: the guy who isn’t betting on his own strength, but on his opponent’s failure. He just has to not make a mistake.
I take a false step, feign a slow jab just to measure the distance, and the bastard reads my intention before I even finish the move. I try another, and he flows closer to me. The transition is so fast I barely register it. I feel my feet leave the floor.
The air gets knocked out of my lungs like I’ve taken a shotgun blast to the gut. He sticks to my chest and hips, the dead weight of a pitbull, and makes me remember all the times Marcus yelled, “For fuck’s sake, learn to defend a double-leg!” I never learned.
I try to use my strength, but it’s useless.
The iron arm wasn’t made for fighting on its back.
Every time I try to push or pull something, he redirects, isolates, turns my strength into nothing.
I can’t be angry with him. Ryan fights clean.
I respect that—I’d buy him a beer after I’m done rearranging his face.
When he starts going for my right arm, I already know what he wants—he’s going to try to tear the socket.
And that’s exactly what he does. He grabs it, twisting it at an angle a flesh-and-blood arm couldn’t withstand.
He’s looking for a joint to submit, a lock.
The metal doesn’t give, of course, but the socket wasn’t made for full-body leverage.
What holds the prosthesis to my stump is a carbon fiber strap that’s rotted from the inside from constant use, and it gives way more easily than I’d like.
I feel a wet snap at the tip of my shoulder, followed by an electric pain that shoots down what’s left of my arm. It’s a pain I haven’t felt in years. The prosthesis has come unseated.
The vacuum seal that holds the fiber structure breaks. The pain is so intense that the world goes white, like a baptism of fire. It reminds me of Seraphim. Everything does.
But, this time, it also reminds me of when I was a boy again, kneeling on the ground, with a rusty machete coming down against the bone of my arm, hacking and hacking until it was torn off. I stayed conscious back then. I stayed alive.