Rust and Bone Read Online Free

to life.
    My opponent is a dreadlocked kid two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me. Goes by Nicodemus. Bare-chested, his arms are swelled, monstrous. Tribal tattoos crisscross the ribbed musculature of his stomach; ornate curlicues encircle his extruded bellybutton, giving it the look of a sightless eye. He turns to his cutman and says, “Who this, the shoeshine boy? Mus’ be my birthday.”
    We meet in the center of the ring, where the cigarillo-smoking promoter runs down the stakes: a thousand cash to the winner, five hundred to the loser.
    Nicodemus dry-gulches me while the guy’s still laying out the stakes, a hard sucker punch glancing off the high ridge of cheek, splitting bone. The blow drops me to my knees. Chill static wind pours through my skull, electric snakes skating the bones of my arms and legs. Nicodemus shrugs and smiles, as though to say, Hey, you knew the score when you stepped up, then wades in swinging. Guess the fight’s started without me. It’s not uncommon.
    I graduated in ’87 and moved north to Pennsylvania. Having trained and fought steadily through college, I’d amassed a Golden Gloves record of 13-1. Teddy Hutch, an Olympic boxing coach, caught one of my fights and invited me to his training facility in Butler. The welterweight division was thin, he said; I could earn a berth on the qualifying squad. The program covered food and accommodation. His prospects worked at a local box factory.
    I arrived in Butler late September. The trees and water, even the sky: everything was different. The Texas sky was not completely blue; its colour, I’ve come to realize, was more of a diffuse lavender. The skies of Pennsylvania were a piercing, monotone blue; they pressed down with a palpable weight. The tattery, see-through clouds I’d known since childhood were replaced with thick cumulus formations. And the cold —me and a Hawaiian boxer named David Tua bundled ourselves in sweaters and jackets on the mildest of fall days, much to the amusement of the Minnesotans and Dakotans in training.
    The prospects were billeted in a ranch house. The land behind fell away to a lake ringed by hemlocks and firs, rising to a wooded escarpment. We roused at five o’clock each morning and ate breakfast at long tables before donning road gear to run a three-mile circuit around the lake. Afterwards we herded into a school bus bound for Olympia Paper, where we spent the next nine hours ranged along canvas belt lines, driven half-mad by the pneumatic hiss of the fold-and-stamp machines. When the shift whistle blew we were driven to the Cyclone, a downtown boxing gym. We trained until eight o’clock before dragging ourselves to the bus, bolting dinner, and flopping into bed for lights out.
    It was a rough life, and a lot of fighters couldn’t stomach it: prospects came and went with such frequency Teddy considered installing a turnstile. But the regimen yielded results: I packed on ten pounds of muscle in eight months, and my cardiovascular endurance shot through the roof. My sparring partner was a Dixieland welterweight named Jimmy Carmichael. Jimmy had a peacemaker of a left cross; we beat each other black and blue in the ring but spent our days off together, catching the Sunday matinee and wolfing thick wedges of pecan pie at Marcy’s on Lagan Street.
    Jake visited that March. Steve was hauling a load up to Rochester and brought Jake along to visit. Steve dropped him off mid-morning, and we arranged to meet later for dinner. I was surprised how much Jake had grown. His cheeks, framed by the furred hood of a new winter jacket, were flush and rosy.
    â€œHow ya been, jellybean?” I said.
    â€œI been fine, pal o’ mine,” he said, repeating the greeting I’d taught him.
    Jake was antsy following the long drive. We walked down to the lake. A low fog rolled across the frozen water, faint ripples thickening into groundmist at the tree line. We