FICTION | Randall Brown
I Still Don’t Know What They Were Fighting For It must’ve been the giddiness of that contract Mr. Ward sold so he could throw the block party—steaks, lobsters, bar, a steel band—or maybe the informal quality of what Mr. Green proposed—just a rope tied around a square formed by lawn chairs—that led Mr. Ward to say yes to Mr. Green, to the bout. § That night, my father sat in a chair with his martini, watching my mom dance with Mr. Ward near the weeds on the edge of the property. I’d found, a few weeks before, a contract both my parents had signed—An Open Marriage—stuffed in a pocket of my dad’s uniform along with other stuff: pot, pills, some Korean money. “I know something,” I had told my father “about Mr. Ward.” At the party, my father didn’t take his eyes off them. I had told him what Annie Ward had revealed to me, that her father killed a guy, his best friend. A blow to the nose sent a bone through the guy’s brain and ended Mr. Ward’s fighting career because that kid haunted him still. “What do you want me to do about it?” my father had asked, and I’d told him, but he didn’t say anything in reply. § Fight time and Mom stood in Mr. Ward’s corner. Mr. Green swayed, drunk on Wild Turkey. His wife yelled that it wouldn’t recover anything, beating Mr. Ward, and Mr. Green yelled back if she didn’t see why it would, maybe she should shut the fuck up. The rest of the neighborhood
Raleigh Review | 33
