Vandal Love by D. Y. Bechard Page A

couldn’t grasp the loss of Carney, the only constant in his life for the last seven years. Carney had just appeared, ready to take him in. He’d hardly asked questions, yet had chosen Jude’s age and name, and neither of them had considered it—Jude desperate and half mad, Carney too used to the unexpected. Boxing, he’d once told him, is a world of what you can’t see coming. Here today, gone tomorrow and sometimes good things, too. You can’t make nothing happen. It’s all got to be in you from the start.
    But Jude had never fought for himself, except perhaps on that windy day when he’d met Boss at the clothesline. He’d fought for his grandfather or Isa-Marie or Carney, and now he wanted to understand what his reason was. He closed his eyes and tried to calm the pain in his hand, but he could grasp only loss, that he’d wanted to fill empty spaces. All that he’d loved had been there from the beginning and was gone. He saw no other choice but to fight and, fighting, to get himself somewhere where things were supposed to be better than before.
    Three days later at the club he answered the phone. A man with a Jersey accent asked him to confirm a booking. You got it in you, kid?
    Okay, Jude told him. Later, Watson, still sweating, offered to be his manager.
    Those Garden fights do pay, don’t they, he said. Both seemed to have forgotten the ballooning hand, the penicillin shots. Louise said it didn’t want to heal. There’s a spirit to everything, she told him, even cuts and scrapes.
    The night after his injury she’d had a neighbour’s boy climb into the barn rafters and bring down hatchlings. There were three of them, covered in down. She fed them grubs. Jude sat on the couch and feigned sleep. He’d tried to make love once after his injury, something he’d wanted in the night, but his hand had throbbed and he’d stopped.
    Those weeks before the fight he didn’t train.
    You can’t box with this for at least two or three months, Louise told him. He looked at her fawn irises, her lips. Écoute —listen, Jude, don’t be crazy. You’ll ruin your hand.
    He studied his thick, corded fist. He couldn’t understand how anything had cut through. He took to not answering her. He went days without speaking.
    I was lonely, she told him.
J’étais seule
. I couldn’t let the girl in me grow up, and you looked scared and alone. I didn’t care you were white.
Ce n’était pas important
.
    She waited to see if he would reply. When he didn’t, she put his hand in a bowl of infusion and stood to leave.
    I have others in my life, she said.
C’est assez
.
    He’d never noticed anyone, but now that he was around more and the baby was due, the others became apparent, young black women, wiry men who passed without looking, as if they, like himself, couldn’t figureout why he was there.
    That Thursday, on the way to the airport with Watson, Jude gazed at the passing subdivisions near the city. There were a few clouds like strawberry blossoms in a deep blue sky and, on a cement driveway, a girl waving in the sunlight to someone he hadn’t seen.
    In New York he fought an Italian. The man attacked sloppily, had sticky feet. Jude didn’t use his right hand. His heartbeat alone made it ache. He dodged and jabbed. The commentators said that though Jude had a powerful left, did he think he could take a seasoned opponent with one hand? They said he looked like a man practising his jab in the gym. The Italian landed a few mean shots but Jude took these lightly. It had never occurred to him that someone might knock him out or really hurt him. When the scores were tallied, Jude had landed far more punches. The Italian was in sore shape, and the judges agreed that Jude’s was the stronger fight. The sportswriters claimed this insistence on the left was an act of defiance, of what, they couldn’t agree.
    During the match, Jude’s stitches had torn. Back in the locker room he was sick. The wounds that refused to heal had