I Still Don’t Know What They Were Fighting For

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

surrounded the ring, the whole lot of them sadly mismatched.

Annie rang the bell, the squat muscled Mr. Green moving like a wrestler and the skinny, mean Mr. Ward not moving at all.

My father wasn’t around. I hoped he had changed into his uniform as I had told him to and that he’d step into the ring as that kid. I thought Mr. Ward probably fucked Annie. I don't know why I thought it, and maybe that was just my own sickness having grown up around all of them. He looked at her creepily, like now, stalking Mr. Green like a ninja.

“One shot,” Mr. Ward kept saying. “That’s all it’s gonna take.”

I was looking past the weeds for my father, so I missed it. When I turned around, Mr. Green was squirming on the ground holding his face. Mr. Ward ignored him, went to my mom in the corner, gave her a big long kiss in front of everyone. §

Later that night, I found my dad in the car in the garage, uniform on, not dead or anything, the car inside full of smoke from that old pot. I told him what had happened and he said, “Figures.” I asked him what had happened to the plan. He didn’t answer, just laughed a lot, and repeated “what had happened to the plan” over and over, like something broken.