Excerpted: Bruise by Adrian Markle

The Greyhound bus shuddered in place behind him, then died. The engine clinked as it cooled in the sea air. It would wait a while then go back, not to return for another two weeks. This was the end of the line and would probably soon be beyond it.

An empty chip bag tumbled across the parking lot.

Stone-grey clouds hung low overhead as if caught in the depression of the small town, much of which was built, wedge-shaped, in a gutter between two ridges. On one of the ridges, a hospital perched. And on the other side of that ridge, in shadow for the last half of the day, was the rest of the town. Stretching out in either direction were countless other little ridges and lonely beaches almost certainly littered with rotting, abandoned fishing gear.

Jamie already wanted to get back on the bus and go crawling back to whatever was left of his life in the city, if there was anything at all, but he didn’t think he could even afford the ticket. It had cost him almost everything he had left just to get here.

So instead he let the streets carry him like trash in a river down toward the harbour. The road sloped sharply, the impact of his steps sending jolts of pain through his knee, and that was despite the surgery a few years ago. The houses were thin and tightly packed, white sides weathered grey and brown. There were FOR SALE signs in front of a lot of them, but the signs had been up so long they were weather worn, some rotting. A number of the houses were fully boarded up, and many of the rest also seemed empty—no lights or sounds from within or smoke from the chimneys. In its heyday about two thousand people had lived here. Now it was obviously less. Far less, by the looks of it, and shrinking.

At the harbour, the sea surprised him with its vastness, its dark emptiness. It had been a long time since he’d really seen it. He’d forgotten the relentless sound of it. The slips where the fishermen kept their boats were mostly full, though it was almost noon. They’d all used to go out at sunrise and come back at sunset, so as a kid he’d only really seen them as specks shrinking against dawn or growing from the dusk. But now they just rocked in place while a bent old man walked without urgency between them, pulling sodden ropes to check the tightness of their knots.

It seemed the only thing they’d hauled out of the water here lately had been his father’s body some months before, his flesh grey and yellow and wrapped in thin-blooded bruises, with lungs full of seawater and enough booze in his veins to kill a better man. Jamie hadn’t actually been here to see him, but he wouldn’t have bothered to look even if he had been. He’d heard some of the details in a voicemail and imagined the rest himself, and that was about all he needed to know.

There was almost no beach here, which was what had once made it so good for fishing. The ground fell away sharply from the shore, leaving a deep, natural harbour that the ships were safe to enter no matter how low in the water they rode with their haul, but it wasn’t good for much else.

The wind was strong, common for April. Common for most months, actually. He pulled his coat tighter and looked up to the hospital—the building a relic from another time—then forced himself to lower his eyes. He wasn’t ready for that yet, but he kept looking back to it. When he forced his gaze down for the half-dozenth time, he ducked into the only business he saw open, the bar called the Anchor, to remove it from his sight altogether.

What light came through the small, dirty windows was dead and grey. The bar was against one wall with stools in front of it, mostly full, and there were tables against the wall opposite, mostly empty. He stood in the doorway looking, until a woman shouted, “Close the door. Wind’s up.”

There were half a dozen men at the bar, each in a plaid shirt—varying colours and patterns, though most red and blue or red and black, and all sun-faded and fraying at the sleeves or collar—and high rubber boots, like they were going out to the boats, but the heaviness with which they sat on the stools belied the likelihood of that. They’d looked up at him as one when he’d opened the door, but not in the way he knew and missed. He sat in the empty stool closest to the door—the padding worn down to nothing—and set his bag down beside him. A mirror behind the bar had a collection of dusty Polaroids tacked around the frame and bottles on the shelves in front of it.

The bartender was the only woman there. She had a deep tan and brown hair, wavy and curly and wild. She was about his age, and strong. Lines of definition in her traps and pecs showed from the wide neckline of her shirt. He recognized her, probably from school, but that was the best he could do with that—it had been too long. And he probably hadn’t done his memory any favours by taking all those hits to the head over the years, either. She was pretty, though. He opened his mouth to maybe say something about that to her, then stopped. It had been years since he’d had to speak to anyone he didn’t already know, or at least who didn’t already know him. He didn’t know what to say to someone new, how to bridge that gap with strangers.

“What can I do for you?” She had a hard smile and a harder voice.

“Okay if I just sit a minute?” he asked.

“Sure. But this isn’t the library; you can’t just sit for free, or we’d be closed down just like they are.”

“The library’s closed?” He was strangely disappointed. He’d never gone, never had any desire too, but now that he knew he wasn’t able to, he felt sad about it.

“Yeah, years now. What can I get you?”

He couldn’t really fit his right hand in his jeans’ pocket anymore, especially not sitting, so he patted the lump of change and notes and guessed at their value based on how much space it took up.

“Don’t really drink. Can I get a glass of milk?”

There was an eruption of laughter from the old men in the bar. His right hand burned.

“You want milk?” she said.

He nodded. “Protein, calcium, vitamins B-Twelve and D.”

“Don’t get much call for milk, I’m afraid. I’ve got juice.”

“All sugar. I guess a whisky then.”

“Thought you couldn’t drink?”

“Shouldn’t. And probably won’t. But . . .” But he had to get something to stay, and he’d be less tempted by that than the juice.

“What kind?” She gestured to the shelves behind her.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Can I see that one? The Japanese one?”

“You either order the drink or you don’t,” she said, so flatly and firmly she’d obviously said it a thousand times before.

“Please.”

She hesitated but passed the bottle to him. The label was thick, textured, rough under his thumb, with slick black strokes making Japanese characters. It was unopened. And a bit sticky.

“Why do you have this?”

“Old customer, Hiro, was exploring surfing spots around here for a few months.”

“People surf here now?” Jamie asked.

“No, not here. Harbour’s good for nothing but fishing boats, and not even them now. No, but places around here, maybe. Or at least he hoped to find some. He kept saying he wanted to discover the next new spot.”

“All he discovered was that there ain’t shit here now to discover,” one of the men said.

“So he left.”

“Could barely understand a fucking word from him,” the same guy said. He was in his sixties. He’d have had to cut to make heavyweight—tall and strong and broad in the shoulders, but fat. Real fat. The kind of concentrated fat that comes with being old and undisciplined and those things compounding each other for years. His hair was grey and straggled out from under the base of his toque. He held his pint with his left hand; his right, which rested on the bar, was curled up, probably by arthritis—a knobby and uneven claw. Jamie winced when he saw it.

The bartender laughed. “Understood every third word sober,” she said, “and every tenth drunk. Went on and on about this whisky, so I ordered it. But by the time it came in, he’d gone, and none of these cheap bastards will shell out for it.”

“Now that was a funny Jap,” the fat man said, eliciting a few laughs from the bar. The bartender shot the fat man a look and he pinched his lips shut, and Jamie opened his mouth to respond—it had been a long time since he’d tolerated language like that—but his voice stuck in his throat. He was used to feeling like he was in control in any environment he was in. Things happened because he allowed them. They didn’t when he didn’t. That didn’t feel like the case anymore. He didn’t know if it was because this place was different, or because he was. But he was not himself anymore, especially not here.

“I don’t believe that’s the appropriate term, Paul,” said a little guy from down the end of the bar—much leaner and shorter, with a bit of a stammer. Maybe a hundred and fifty-five pounds. He was similarly weathered, but his eyes weren’t dull.

Paul coughed. “CBC radio tell you that, Colin?”

Jamie ran his fingertips gently across the whisky label. “I worked in Japan, once. They gave me bottles of this.”

“That what you want, then? Am I finally going to open it?”

The other men stared.

Jamie moved his hand again to the smallness of the lump of money in his pocket. He put the bottle back down in the bar. “What’s cheapest?” he asked.

Paul exploded with laughter, the air in front of him filling with a mist of beer and spit. “They used to give me bottles of it!” he cried in a shitty impression of Jamie. His nose was swollen and red. He slapped the bar a few times, sending ripples through the beers.

Jamie felt the guffaws as a pulse in his temples. He wasn’t used to being laughed at anymore. It reminded him of his father.

The bartender leaned toward him. “Worthy’s is cheap.” She poured him a measure. “On me.”

The guys at the bar groaned indignantly.

“That was my father’s drink,” Jamie said. Coming in had been a mistake. He should have just been a man and gone straight up to the hospital.

As he stared at the whisky in the glass, he caught Paul smirking and shooting glances over to him, drawing in breaths then letting them go, clearly gearing up to say something hilarious.

Colin cut him off. “Easy there, Paul,” he said. “The man that you’re preparing to antagonize is, I believe, a cage fighting middleweight champion of the world.”

Paul got quiet and stared at Jamie, who knew what the old idiot was finally noticing. Tall, broad shoulders, big arms, a nose both flat and crooked, cauliflower ear, heavy caveman brow from scar tissue.

He felt the looks again, the more familiar kind.

The bartender seemed unsurprised. “What’s a bigshot like you doing here, then?”

He held his hand out above the bar, extended his fingers approaching straight, brought them together in a fist as much as he was able. “Broke it in my last fight. I’d broke it before, but this time . . .” He trailed off. He’d talked about it a lot in the last several months with whoever’s couch he’d been sleeping on, but they’d all been fighters; they’d had similar experiences and hadn’t needed him to actually tell the story, so he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure he knew how, even. But the men’s chatter did not return even though he stopped talking. He could hear the hum of the bar fridges.

“Every time I hit him,” he started, surprised at himself, “there was pain shooting all the way up. Almost passed out. Imagine that—hitting someone in the face and you’re the one that almost goes out. Fought most of the fight like that. Came up just short. But, next time.” Even finished, he didn’t know if he’d needed to say that, or if he’d just hated that silence.

“Guess that makes you the ex-champ then, huh?” Paul said.

“A middleweight champ,” Jamie said. “Not the champ. There are lots of organizations, so lots of championships,” he started. When he’d first been coming up, he’d had to explain who he was and what he did so many times it now happened almost automatically. “I fought for Kage Killers, the biggest organization in Canada, but my opponents come from all over the world, so it’s a world championship, and it’s mine. Still. And no one’s ever going to take it from me. But this fight I’m talking about—think of it like winning the Calder cup in the AHL. And then fighting in Japan was me getting called up to the NHL, right into the playoffs. Twenty-five thousand people live. Major league money. And I got injured my first time out.”

He hadn’t had a drink in a long time. It was bad for training, but he supposed that wasn’t an issue just now. He took a sip and it was hot on his tongue and stung the roof of his mouth. The glass felt loose and unsteady in his hand.

He’d actually been stripped of the belt since he’d been unable to defend it with his hand how it was. But he still felt like it belonged to him, since no one beat him for it, and he wasn’t going to talk about that here, not with these people.

He was working up the will to head back out when her hand came down onto his arm.

“So tell us the story then,” she said.

The other men turned toward him, even Paul.

“He’s an Olympian, Tamura,” Jamie said, as quickly, almost urgently, as before. “Judo. Handsome guy, too. Honor Fighting Championships wanted to make him a superstar, and they brought me in to be his debut opponent. I’m foreign, a champ in another organization, and I’ve been uglied up some, so I look legit. Be a hell of a coming-out party if he could beat me.”

“If?” Paul said, chuckling again.

“Well, they brought him along too fast. He wasn’t ready, and I had him dead to rights, until . . .” He held up his hand again. It was swollen and discoloured—a few thin lines of that dark angry blood rose to the surface near joints, but it was mostly a gentler colour, in places either piss-yellow or lilac—starting at the base of his thumb and stretching out across the back of his hand to the base of his pinkie.

“He’s been getting a lot of shine since. He’s a contender already, and making money. But, good; the more he gets now, the more I can take from him when we run it back.”

“None of that explains what you’re doing here, though,” the bartender said.

He was only half listening, his head still in Japan. After a moment he returned his hands to his lap and said, “I grew up here.”

“Really,” Paul said. “Who’s your old man?”

He’d been wondering if people here would’ve known him, if this would’ve turned out to be the only place in the world besides the gym where anyone knew who he was. But he’d been gone from here a long time, and he was different now. And the people who’d definitely have remembered him, his brother and father . . . well, he wasn’t surprised they hadn’t talked about him much, after what had happened.

He shook his head. “It was a while ago. Doubt you’d know him.”

“Place this size? Try me,” Paul said.

Colin drank his beer, eyes roaming the ceiling. The bartender looked to the floor. They knew. They didn’t want to say it.

“Chuck Stuart,” he said.

The men at the bar leaned slightly away.

“Jesus,” Paul said, absently running his fat fingers across the scar under his eye. He cast a quick glance back over his shoulder.

“Oh, you’re that boy that ran away,” one of the other men said.

The bartender put her hand on his arm again. “You come back for the funeral?”

“If you did, you missed it,” Paul said. “By quite a while. Don’t think you were alone in missing it, though.”

“Not here for him,” he said. “Just here. Thanks for the drink,” he added. He stood, his whisky untouched but the one sip.

He looked at the collection of faded and liquor-stained Polaroids pinned to the mirror frame. They were of people who’d been barred, usually blurry and from a bit of a distance. They were indignant fisherman mostly, some shitty kids, some furious women. But in one photo, blocked at first by the bottle that had been taken down for him, a man posed with a wide, defiant smile. A line of blood ran down from his nose, spread across his teeth, and poured over his bottom lip and down his chin—almost the shape of a cross.

It was his brother, head shaved and face narrow and axe-like. Pinned beneath the photo was a small piece of paper that said SID STUART – VIOLENCE, with a small drop of what looked like blood after the letters like a period.

Excerpted from Bruise: A Novel by Adrian Markle, copyright © 2024 by Adrian Markle. Reprinted with permission of TouchWood Editions.