In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass Page B

again. I could not see myself ever giving up fighting, and I wondered how Don had done it.
    We floated and lazed, dreaming, each of us spinning out in different directions whenever a small breeze blew, eventually drifting farther and farther apart, but on the shore the dogs followed only me, tracking me around the lake, staying with me, whining for me to come back to shore.
    On these afternoons, following an especially good run and an exhausting swim, I would be unable to lift my arms. Nothing mattered in those suspended, floating times. This is how I can give up, I’d think. This is how I can never fight again. I can drop out, raise a family, and float in the bright sun all day, on the Lake of Peace. This is how I can do it, I’d think. Perhaps my son could be a boxer.
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    Fights eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one: I tore a guy’s jaw off in the Body Shop. I felt it give way and then detach, heard the ripping sound as if it came from somewhere else, and it was sickening—we left without any of the betting money, gave it all to his family for the hospital bill, but it certainly did not stop me from fighting, or even from hitting hard. I was very angry about something, but did not know what. I’d sit in the back of the truck on the rides home, and I’d know I wanted something, but did not know what.
    Sometimes Don had to lean forward and massage his temples, his head hurt so bad. He ate handfuls of aspirin, ate them like M&M’s, chasing them down with beer. I panicked when he did that, and thought he was dying. I wondered if that was where my anger came from, if I fought so wildly and viciously in an attempt, somehow and with no logic, to keep things from changing.
    On the nights we didn’t have a fight, we would spar a little in the barn. Killer watched us wild-eyed from his stall, waiting to get to me. Don made me throw a bucket of lake water on him each time I went into the barn, to make sure that his hate for me did not wane. Killer screamed whenever I did this, and Jason howled and blew into a noisemaker and banged two garbage can lids together, a deafening sound inside the barn. Killer screamed and reared on his hind legs and tried to break free. After sparring we went into the house, and Betty fixed us supper.
    We had grilled corn from Bettys garden and a huge porterhouse steak from a steer Don had slaughtered himself, and Lima beans and Irish potatoes, also from the garden. It felt like I was family. We ate at the picnic table as fog moved in from the woods, making the lake steamy. It was as if everyone could see what I was thinking then; my thoughts were bare and exposed, but it didn’t matter, because Don and Betty and Jason cared for me, and also because I was not going to fail.
    After dinner we watched old fight films. For a screen we used a bedsheet strung between two pine trees. Don set up the projector on the picnic table and used a crooked branch for a pointer. Some of the films were of past champions, but some were old movies of Don fighting. He could make the film go in slow motion, to show the combinations that led to knockdowns, and Betty always got up and left whenever we watched one of the old splintery films of Don’s fights. It wasn’t any fun for her, even though she knew he was going to win, or was going to get up again after going down.
    I had seen all of Don’s fights a hundred times and had watched all the films of the greatest fighters a thousand times, it seemed, and I was bored with it. Fighting is not films, it’s experience. I knew what to do and when to do it. I’d look past the bedsheet, past the flickering washes of light, while Jason and Don leaned forward, breathless, watching young Don stalk his victim, everything silent except for the clicking of the projector, the crickets, the frogs, and sometimes the owls. In the dark I wondered what New York was going to be like, if it was going to be anything like this.
    Some nights, after the