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  Praise for In The Cage

  “The architecture of this first novel is faultlessly conceived; the construction of the storytelling is meticulously crafted. Hardcastle has an abiding sympathy for the neglected rural poor. The characters we love will break our hearts; the low-lifes we fear are no less indelibly rendered. There is an aura of foreboding—of tragic inevitability—to the collision course of their lives. And, speaking strictly as a former wrestler, the details are true.”—John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules

  “With a cinematic quality comparable to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Hardcastle’s In The Cage is a wild, unrelenting ride, filled with thugs and desperation and innocents and heartbreak. It’s a damn fine book.”—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

  “In the Cage is a potent and gripping novel that rigorously steers through rural poverty and mixed martial arts. Fighting is more than just a metaphor for what Hardcastle’s endearing characters must resolve as they face increasingly difficult challenges, and their depth and richness flourish throughout his captivating narrative. The story is a precise depiction of a vital and sometimes chaotic intersection between the cultural and social forces in its rural Ontario setting, which I greatly appreciate, having grown up on a reserve in the region. And as a martial artist, I was riveted by the fighting and training passages that intimately brought me on to the mat and into the intense confines of combat.”—Waubgeshig Rice, author of Legacy

  “Hardcastle’s signature style [is] a kind of rural poetry ... closer in spirit to McCarthy than Hemingway.”—Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire

  “Hardcastle’s descriptions possess an elegant choreography that is vivid, energetic, and well-paced … In The Cage—like its protagonist, Daniel—is well structured, engaging, and hard to dislike.”—Shawn Syms, Foreword Reviews

  Praise For Kevin Hardcastle

  “[Debris] has flesh and bone, soul and brain. It’s a rare, rock-solid first book by … a dexterous writer with unflinching vision. This book’s gift is in constructing a museum of hard lives, letting us circle them like excavated marble statues, taking us close enough to see all their mutilation, power, and rough beauty.”—Alix Hawley, National Post

  “[Debris] has its own strong voice… smoothly connected by uncompromising settings and Hardcastle’s authentic, plainspoken country-noir voice, the 11 stories collected here will appeal to fans of gritty, back-country crime fiction, even those who typically shun short stories.”—Booklist

  “Unflinching … Debris is impressive for any writer, especially for a first collection … Hardcastle comes close to a masterpiece.”—The Winnipeg Free Press

  “Each story is a fully realized world—as rich as it is bleak, the characters powerfully and carefully drawn … Debris is a collection to savour.”—Quill & Quire, starred review

  “The stories are told with careful precision, free of authorial judgment, in prose that reminded me of the understated lyricism of later Thomas McGuane or of David Adams Richards … [A] very fine collection, well-crafted and compelling.”

  —Malahat Review

  “Hardcastle manages heart-pumping scenes without ever coming off as trite, and his characters are always firmly grounded in the familiar—a fact which makes the carnage lurking off-stage all the more unnerving. Debris offers a fresh perspective on a familiar genre, and can be recommended for this very reason.”—Broken Pencil

  IN THE CAGE

  IN THE CAGE

  Kevin

  Hardcastle

  A JOHN METCALF BOOK

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ON

  Copyright © Kevin Hardcastle, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hardcastle, Kevin, 1980-, author

  In the cage / Kevin Hardcastle.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-147-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-148-6 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8615.A68I5 2017 C813’.6 C2017-901941-4

  C2017-901942-2

  Edited by John Metcalf

  Copy-edited by Allana Amlin

  Cover designed by Michel Vrana

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  PART ONE

  The first time Daniel fought in the cage was on his twenty-­seventh birthday. He had boxed as an amateur and went twenty-two and two with twenty knockouts. The losses were decisions, and he had only ever been hurt once in those fights but he never told anybody about it. He didn’t like the boxing game and before he could be pushed to turn pro his trainer was sent to Fernbrook penitentiary for work he did with the local motorcycle club. He didn’t come back. Daniel didn’t go to the gym anymore and then he saw a Muay Thai fight on TV and he decided he was done with boxing. Within a year he had fought twelve kickboxing matches under North-American rules and won them all by knockout. He fought in Quebec and Alberta and on First Nations land and some of those fights weren’t on his record and some were under Thai rules and the pathetic canvas matting of those rings were stained and stained again with men’s blood.

  In southern Alberta he found a gym that wasn’t much more than a storage locker with floor mats, and there he learned Jiu-Jitsu from two white men who had learned a poor man’s version from a half-Brazilian day labourer. When he went back to Ontario, Daniel found a true Brazilian gym with men of suspect lineage to players in Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba and they beat him bloody about the ears and twisted him to pulp and he dreamt about it every night, lying battered and aching in his one-room shithole apartment in the east end of the city. He didn’t talk to his father anymore and he didn’t go up north to the place he was born and grew up. His old man wanted him to come home and weld but the boy wanted no part of that life. He’d had offers to work in places remote and frozen without fight gyms but they were long withdrawn and Daniel cleaned the halls and toilets of his would-be alma mater and sometimes he shovelled snow out of entryways and laid salt on the pockmarked stone of the steps out front.

  He turned twenty-seven in a cage near Fort McMurray. The man he fought had a huge, mutant head and cauliflowered ears and his nose buckled in at the bridge. At two hundred and four pounds Daniel gave up a lot of weight to the other man but he had no true manager and the fight had been re-classed as a catchweight bout and he would not see his money if he walked away. The only punch the big man threw was slipped and then that other man ate a one-two and fell and he was swarmed by Daniel and had his brow cleaved by elbow-strikes and his head bounced off the mat while he tried to get his forearms up.

  Daniel fought in a legion hall in Lethbridge and there he left an American ex-wrestler turtled up against the cage with his rib broken from a knee and his left eye swollen shut. He fought in Red Deer and in Grande Prairie and the men he fought were younger and both lasted no more than a minute and when he got to his next fight at a cut-rate casino in Lloydminster the other fighter was not there. The
promoter didn’t want to pay Daniel but he did pay him and then Daniel sat in a motel room on his own and drank all of the unearned money away. He fought on a reserve outside of Vancouver and there he had his nose broken by an illegal headbutt that the referee didn’t see and he gobbed blood and filth out of his mouth between rounds and his ear hurt where it had been torn under the lobe by the ridge of the other man’s glove. Not a minute into the second round that man was prone and senseless from a left head kick and Daniel’s shin stung as he walked the cage-perimeter with his hands in the air, his cornerman trying to plug his nostrils with gauze. He fought in Olympia and Portland and outdoors on a ranch in Montana, cowboys and rednecks sitting in wooden bleachers drinking beer as if they were watching high school football. He and another man went through the cage door in Lincoln, Nebraska and didn’t know what to do when they got up on the cold concrete with the sparse crowd pulling away. In the cage again he dropped the man with a wild overhand right and the man had a lot of trouble coming around and Daniel was terrified. He went to a small town outside of Kansas City, Missouri that he couldn’t remember and he had to sneak out of the back door of the community hall and he never fought that far south again. There were fights in Quebec now and he fought there often and won twice in televised fights. In Ontario there were no sanctioned fights but he fought on the Akwesasne and Rama reserves and then he went west.

  At a backwater clinic outside of Medicine Hat a nurse’s assistant with long red hair stitched his eyebrow and then put seventeen stitches through a cut on his shin. She asked him what he was doing with his life and he asked her the same. She was twenty-one years old and her family was American but she had been born on the Canadian side of the forty-ninth parallel under circumstances she didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. She had spent a few years in British Columbia with her older sister until that sister went home to tend to their sick father. She told Daniel that she had come to Alberta for the work, like everybody else, like him. He’d shied from the first stitch and she wouldn’t let him get away with it. A man who got punched in the face for a pittance but didn’t like needles. He had no fights in Medicine Hat again but he pulled his stitches and went back and then he started inventing new injuries and fantastical post-operative complaints. Before the first snowfall of that year he had fought twice more and they were married when the cold and bitter winter came and laid that country barren but for houselights burning in the black prairie night over wasted fields and empty roads.

  They had a red-haired daughter in that bleak season. Over eight pounds and she kicked and wailed. If he thought he knew what love was, he was wrong. To be loved just for being alive. To be loved to the point of desperation for the little space that you took up. That was how he loved the girl and sometimes he could barely look at her because he didn’t know what to do with it.

  ONE

  They drove through the cornfield with the sun rising and burning white in the sideview mirrors. The cruiser listed side to side like a dinghy at storm’s onset, the tires sinking and then spinning free in the sucking mud. They had driven for a long while without speaking. The stalks had been shredded and strewn about and the car followed that wrecked path with five-foot walls of sagging, late-season corn at either door. Out they came into a clearing where a tornado might have touched down. That was where they found Daniel’s truck.

  The truck lay on its side with the passenger door sunk into the ground. There were cornstalks mangled through the grillplate and front fender and stuck up under the bent windshield wipers. Stalks were wrapped around the front and rear axle, twisted and pulled taut into a crude sort of rope, filthy and fraying. The windshield had been punched outward and hung down in a flap like the tongue of an old shoe. The cruiser stopped and Daniel got out and walked over to the wreck, his steel-toed boots churning the sodden ground and rising heavy with muck after each step. As he came closer to the exposed undercarriage he studied the way the truck had upended. It leaned hard toward the driver side and Daniel stepped wide of it and went on, walking around the part-crushed cab until he could see the truckbed. There he stopped.

  Constable Smith was coming now and he was trying to keep his shoes on as he walked out into the clearing. He was hollering something but Daniel wasn’t listening. The welding rig was gone. Daniel got down to one knee and ran his hand along the inside of the box, over the boltholes punched through the metal there. Daniel stood up and saw deep gauges in the bed where the welding unit had been ripped from its moorings. He reached out and clamped both hands around the edge of the box. His knucklejoints went white and then he let one hand drop and stood there with it dangling as he stared across the field. The outlying forest stood black and still. Mist clung ghostly to the firs.

  Daniel gave the truck a little shove and felt it list slightly and come back. He went around to the other side and studied the undercarriage in silence. He reached up and spun the rear wheel. Hub toward the heavens. Daniel tilted his head back to see what was up there and when he did a flock of late-running geese flew past in an ever-shifting V, squawking as they went. In seconds they were smaller in the southern sky and after they were gone nothing else moved for a very long time.

  The constable stood ten feet out from the truck and watched the man.

  “Hey, don’t stand by that thing,” Smith said. “Don’t get under it or anything in case it turns back over.”

  “I sort of wish it would,” Daniel said.

  “What?” the cop said.

  Daniel didn’t say anything else. He waited a few more seconds and then he made his way back to the other side of the wreck. He backed up a step and booted the top of the cab and the truck leaned hard and groaned and then started falling. When it fell it went all at once. The tires landed stiff in the ground and the vehicle did not buck but shuddered hard enough to loose a wheel well.

  TWO

  In the dark and pisswet alleyway, Daniel stood under one meagre light. A lonely bulb sticking sideways out of a socket in the moldy brick, glowing pale orange and humming high and quiet. Rain fell on it and hissed out of existence. He stood with both hands in his jacket pockets, staring blankly at the opposing alley wall not ten feet away. Four days past since they’d recovered his truck and he’d taken it to the mechanic to piece it back together hideous. He’d parked a block away and hoped the frame wouldn’t take water in. Cars ran by at the near entrance and drubbed the gravel out of the shallow potholes there, sprayed rainwater on the sidewalk and set it sloshing back and forth in the holes to fill up again. The prepaid cellphone in his right hand started to whir and rattle. He took it out and as he looked at it a black van turned from the roadway and came bucking down the alley toward him. He put the phone in his pocket and hooked his thumbs in his beltleather. When the vehicle pulled up the side door was open and he got in and shut it behind him and the van went on down the alley into the waiting blackness.

  They were in a crude cinderblock and sheetmetal warehouse about the size of a high-school gymnasium. Five men all told. A table with a duffel bag atop it, set up in the middle of the room. Little else in the place. Clayton sat at the table in a wooden chair with his arms crossed. Wiry man with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, clothes like an executive trying to dress casual. Short grey hair with no part and clean-shaven to the lined and aged skin of his cheeks and chin. A lone man sat opposite and smoked. A Francophone drug dealer named Asselin. Wallace King sat beside Clayton and he flicked through the bound billstacks and set the counted money aside. Clayton stared across the table at Asselin. The man exhaled too hard, snapped loose the ash from his cigarette even when there was none to drop. That man was not armed under his leather jacket but his minder at the door had a semi-automatic pistol slung in a holster with the clasp and thumbsnap loosed. Daniel stood on the other side of the metalframe doorway and he watched the table and the count and the man across from Clayton. And he watched the minder on the other side of the doorway, studied him sidelong.

  �
��I know you,” the minder said.

  Daniel looked at him for a second. The minder wore leathers of his own but Daniel figured they’d had to slay a number of beeves to make a jacket wide enough to fit him. His skin had the boiled, pink hue of a man full with bought testosterone. Daniel didn’t know the man’s given name, only that they called him Lumpy, so called because he was lumpy with muscle.

  “There’s not much pistol work done inside that cage, is there?” said Lumpy.

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ for?” Daniel said.

  Lumpy smiled and put his back to the block wall. Tried to draw himself up bigger.

  At the table, Wallace King laid down the last bundle of cash and looked at Clayton. Nothing was said. Clayton nodded and reached across to Asselin and shook his hand hard and held it a few moments before letting go. The man dropped his smoke and crushed it underfoot as he stood up. His minder started walking to the table. Lumpy had gone a few steps before he realized Daniel wasn’t beside him. He stopped and looked back. Daniel left his spot near the door and when he caught up with Lumpy they went the rest of the way across the room together. Clayton and Wallace were standing now. Wallace had swept the money into the bag and it hung heavy by the handlestraps in his right fist. The minder stood beside his boss and Lumpy and Daniel were opposite each other again with the table between them. Wallace started to hand the bag to Clayton and Clayton reached to take it but then his hand came back and there was a razor held there and it passed through Asselin’s cheek and drew a line in his skin. All at once the line fattened and the skin separated and showed pink gums and white teeth for a moment before the blood ran.

  Asselin staggered back from the table and his minder didn’t see the cut right away but his hand started to move to his side. Daniel reared back and booted the edge of the table and it caught Lumpy high on his legs and his hand missed the gun. Then there was no table between them and Daniel hit Lumpy in the chin with a short right hand and as the man crumpled he took a left hook and another straight right and his eyes were rolled back to where the white twitched in taut ocular muscle. Daniel followed the minder down and grabbed the pistol even before Lumpy had settled limbstretched on the cold concrete floor. Daniel came back with the gun in his hand and turned to see Clayton talking to the man he’d cut, a revolver pulled from inside his jacket and pressed against Asselin’s temple. Asselin was crouching and trying to hold his face together as blood slipped his fingers and ran his forearms and his shirtsleeves. Asselin bobbed up and down under the gun and blood danced the concrete and drew weird patterns as he hobbled by.