My last ride of the night stumbled out of the pub, and I slid my passenger seat forward to accommodate his massive frame. Thick black hair spilled out of a paint-stained Boston Red Sox cap. Crammed in the backseat, he rested his elbows on jean-torn knees and planted his face in oven-mitt hands. His knuckles were scarred and the veins bulged. Those weren’t scars from framing houses or laying brick, I thought. I knew a fighter’s hands when I saw them.

My Lyft emblem glowed purple in the dark night, and after riding in silence on the desolate Brockton, Massachusetts streets I asked him what he does for a living. A plastic tarp blew in the wind on a boarded-up house.

“I’m a carpenter,” he said without turning away from the window. “And I also lay tile.” He fingered his coat pocket for a fifth of whiskey.

“Getting any work?” I asked him, as I glanced in the rearview. Normally I minded when my passengers drank—particularly the young, late-night crowd. But I’d never seen eyes so sad on a man that big.

He shook his head and lowered the window and let the wind whip his face. Glass shattered in the distance, and a car alarm blared.

We rode like this for the next few miles. He was going all the way to Worcester to stay with his uncle, he said. He knew a contractor who was looking for a crew to hang sheet rock.

Right before I merged on the pike, he picked his face out of his hands and fondled the hairs on his chin. He eyed the tiny silver gloves swinging from my rear-view mirror. They belonged to a deceased friend—back from my army days.

“I’m a fighter, too” he said, and those sad eyes glowed in the flicker of the passing lights.

I grunted like it was nothing, but I lowered my Johnny Cash and noticed the moon rise above the trees and cast light onto the empty road. I lit a cigarette and held the pack out for him. He took one and produced a book of matches from his shirt pocket.

I thought back on my fight with Edwards during my last tour in Vietnam. Floored him with a sneaky left hook. I held him in my arms in our bunk that night and iced his chin. He blew up on a landmine the next day. I shook the memory from my mind.

“Tell me about your first fight,” I said.

He regaled about some Irish Pub in Brockton, Massachusetts. Paddy’s, he said. After a long framing job faded into night, he stopped at the Pub on the walk home to relieve his aching knees. His dark Italian skin beckoned glares walking through the door. One small redhead took particular exception, and he found himself squared up in the parking lot, peering over the ridge of his knuckles. The redhead was short, as they normally are, but his neck was freckled and thick. Edwards told me you can tell the strength of a fighter by the size of his neck.

He fought the redhead for an hour, he said. Neither of them landing anything clean—all muffled body blows. They fought until there was no fight left in them, and the spectators staggered back into the bar. They found themselves laying on top of one another in the empty lot, gasping for air.

“Then he kissed me,” he said, as he flicked the ash off his cigarette, revealing a red cherry that glowed in the night.

“And what’d you do?” I asked the man. For years I kept a photo of Edwards in my wallet.

“I kissed him back.” His eyes shown in the light from a passing car. “I became a fighter.”

After the fight, they walked back in the bar, he said, like they hated each other. They drank on opposite ends of the pub with arms crossed, shooting a well-timed glare to sell the hate.

Every day after that was the same, he said. He’d leave the jobsite, walk to Paddy’s, find the redhead, and fight a bloodless fight—too well-matched to do any damage. They’d fight until everyone grumbled back to the bar—bored of their antics—and the two men collapsed in an exhausted heap—one battered body strewn over the other. And then they’d kiss, while the hot pavement seared their scraped-up skin.

But one day, he said, he nailed on the last piece of plywood sheathing on the house, and the job was done. That’s a wrap, the foreman said. The fighter blew a stream of smoke and gazed out towards the empty night. He swung by the pub one last time, he said, but the redhead was gone. He took a lick from his bottle. No goodbye or nothing.

We were quiet for a bit, and I pulled off the highway and into the Worcester motel on my Lyft app’s purple path. The lot was dark, and a blind man in a wheel-chair strummed a guitar and sang into the night.

“I’m sure there are other fights,” I said to the boxer. I rubbed my finger to my thumb and touched the silver gloves.

“It’s not the fight,” the boxer said. “It’s the moment after.” He held out his bottle to me, and I took a lick. “You see who someone is.” The old man in the wheelchair strummed and held a high note. When I awoke in Edward’s arm—the day he would die—the ice pack on his chin was just water in a plastic bag. I looked up and considered the moon.

The fighter tipped me cash, and I caught a glimpse of brilliance in his eyes before they went sad again. He shut the door and tapped the hood with those thick, gnarled hands. Then he slung his duffel bag over his monstrous shoulder, dropped a coin in the old man’s jar and limped off, swallowed by the night.

– Pete Prokesch