Read Online Dogfight by Michael Knight - Free Book Online Page B

on their stems that day, the petals browning at the edges. They’re so fragile, she had said, they can’t bear even the slightest mistreatment. He had seen Joan Bishop in the rain, another time, tying trash bags over the little wire cages to keep the flowers from being drowned.
    Maggie came in slowly, wary at having found her door unlocked, and dropped her keys when she saw Reed lying in the evening shadows on her couch. He smiled crookedly at her surprise, his lips cracked and tight with dried blood.
    â€œOh my God,” she said. “What happened to you? Were you in an accident?”
    She crossed the room to him and pushed back his hair to examine his bruise. Reed moved her hands away. She was left poised, her hands inches from him, fingers curved to the shape of his head.
    â€œBill Hoffman and I got into a fight,” he said.
    â€œWhat?” she said. “That’s insane. You’re grown men.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make it any less the truth,” he said.
    â€œLet me guess,” she said, holding his chin, despite his efforts to prevent her, and turning his face slowly back and forth, examining him. “Bill won. It serves you right. You look like you were thrown from a moving car.”
    Maggie put two fingers inside a rip in his shirt that he hadn’t noticed before and touched his chest. Her fingers were cold and she left them there until they warmed a little on his skin. She plucked a bit of leaf from his hair. He turned on a lamp beside them and they squinted at each other in the new light. She was kneeling next to the couch, rocked back on her heels. He liked the way she was looking at him. Maggie stood and kicked off her shoes and padded into the kitchen.
    â€œIf he won,” Reed said to the swinging door, “it was a Pyrrhic victory.”
    He could hear the sink running, drawers opening and closing.
    â€œHi John gets out tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here thinking we might go together to pick him up. He would like that.”
    â€œThat sounds nice,” she said over the rush of running water.
    Maggie returned with two washcloths, one wrapping ice and another soaked in warm water. She made him slide over and sat on the edge of the couch next to him. She pressed the ice to his temple and lifted his hand to it, so he would hold it there. With the other cloth, she brushed his face, wiping his forehead first and working gently down along the bridge of his nose. The washcloth stung where it touched his wounds but in a strangely pleasant way, the way muscles ache after a long, satisfying exercise.
    â€œI want you to tell me everything,” Maggie said.
    He didn’t say anything for a long time, just lay still and let her press the washcloth to his cheeks, run it over his lips. She was turned to him in such a way that one side of her face was lit completely by the lamplight, the other side drawn in shadow. She pushed his eyelids gently closed with her fingertips. Water streamed down his cheeks and he thought it must have looked like he was crying.

Gerald’s Monkey
    Gerald wanted a monkey and Wishbone said he could get it for him. Wishbone had a man on the inside. The three of us were burning out badly rusted floor sections of a tuna rig called
Kaga
and welding new pieces in their place, patchwork repairs, like making a quilt of metal. A lot of Japanese fisheries were having ships built in the states; labor was cheaper or something. This hold was essentially a mass grave for marine life and it stunk like the dead. The smell never comes out, Gerald told me, even if you sandblasted the paint off the walls. The door to the next room had been sealed, so there was only one way in, an eight-by-ten-foot square in the ceiling, and it was almost too hot to draw breath. They seemed connected somehow, the heat and that awful smell, two parts of the same swampy thing.
    â€œWill it be a spider monkey?” Gerald said.
    Wishbone shut down