Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw

by Unknown Author

  Our fathers were young in those years, in their early thirties. They were of a generation that grew up in the Depression, they’d been made to grow up fast. Most of them had dropped out of school by the age of sixteen, were married a few years later, began having kids. Yet they would remain boys in their souls, restless, hungry for more life. “Boxing is a kid’s game, essentially,” my father said. “That’s why it’s deadly, kids are out for blood.”

  They were our fathers, we had no way of knowing them. We adored them and were fearful of them. Their lives were mysterious to us, as our mothers’ lives and our own lives could never be. I’m just a woman, what the hell does it matter what I think, I’d overheard my mother once saying, laughing wanly over the phone to a woman friend, and this did not seem a misstatement to me, or even a complaint exactly. No man would ever make such a remark. I knew that my father was co-owner of a small auto and truck repair and gas station, and I knew that Colum Donaghy supplemented his irregular boxing income by driving a truck, working in a local quarry, a lumberyard. I knew such facts without understanding what they might mean. None of us children had any idea what our fathers earned yearly. How much a boxer made, for instance.

  A locally popular, much-loved boxer? Whose picture was often in the Yewville Post and the Buffalo Evening News sports pages?

  Our fathers were to us their bodies. Their male bodies. So tall, so massive-seeming, like horses magnificent and dangerous, unpredictable. They were men who drank, weekends. At such times we knew to recognize the slurred voice, the flare of white in the eye sudden as a lighted match, nostrils quivering like those of a horse about to bite or kick—these were signs that alerted us, prepared us to flee, as the casual lifting of a hand at a window will send birds flying to safety in the trees. Young, we learned that the male body is beautiful and dangerous and not to be trifled with.

  The safest time with these adult men was when they were drinking and laughing, maybe celebrating one of Colum’s fight victories, and he’d be treating his friends to cases of beer in someone’s backyard. It was a time of good luck and celebration and they’d smile to see a child appear; to be hoisted with a grunt onto a knee or onto a shoulder for a piggyback ride. Grinning Colum Donaghy would extend his muscled right arm out straight from the shoulder, make a fist and invite a child to swing from his wrist, he was so strong. No other man so strong. If you were a little older, and if you were a girl, and even just a little pretty, he’d make you blush with flattery, your own dad would smile and it was a time of perfect joy rushing into your face like heated blood to be recalled forty years later. And your dad, Patrick, having to agree yes, you weren’t half bad-looking, and Colum Donaghy fixing his sly blue eyes on you, saying with a wink, This little girl takes after her ma, not her pa, eh? And all the men laughed, your dad the loudest.

  When Colum Donaghy died the obituaries in the papers would end with Colum Donaghy is survived by. How strange those words seemed to me! Survived by. Only just close family members were named, of course.

  The friends who loved him were not named. My father Patrick Hassler was not named.

  After Colum’s body was found twelve miles from Yewville, off a country road near farmland owned by Donaghy relatives, Yewville police questioned Colum’s male friends, and it was my father who’d had to admit to police that the handgun Colum used to shoot himself was one he’d owned since Korea. No one in the Donaghy family admitted knowing that Colum had this gun hidden away somewhere, certainly his wife hadn’t known. My father was sickened by having to give such testimony. He believed it was like kicking Colum when Colum was down, defenseless. It outraged him to speak of Colum Donaghy to strangers.

  My father believed that a man has a right to privacy, dignity. After death, as before.

  Patrick Hassler was two inches taller than Colum Donaghy, bigger-boned, with heavy sloping shoulders and a fatty-muscled torso and long sinewy arms, big hands, weighing well over two hundred pounds, you’d think of the two that he was the heavyweight boxer, not Colum Donaghy the smaller man, but you’d be mistaken. Size has nothing to do with boxing skills. You’re born with the instinct or you are not. You’re born with a knockout punch or you are not. When they were in their twenties Colum and my father sparred together a few times at the Yewville gym where Colum trained, both men in boxing trunks, T-shirts, protective headgear and wearing twelve-ounce gloves, and someone (my mother?) took snapshots of these occasions. My father marveled at how fast Colum was, it was impossible to hit him! Colum invited my father to hit him hard as he could, and my father tried, he tried, throwing wide awkward punches that, even if they landed, were merely glancing blows to be deflected by Colum’s raised gloves or elbows, of no more force than a child’s slaps, and within five minutes my father, who believed himself in decent physical condition was flush-faced and panting, and his eyes brimmed with hurt and indignation and frustration. Colum was no Willie “The Wisp” Pep, not a graceful boxer, yet still he scarcely needed to move his feet to avoid my father’s blows, without seeming effort he slipped blows thrown at his head, moving back then and laterally, and everyone in the gym crowded around the ring cheering him in mock encouragement—“Get him, Hassler! Nail that Mick bastard!” And Colum laughed and ducked and swerved back inside with a flurry of left jabs to Patrick’s body gentle as love taps (he would afterward claim) that nonetheless left the larger man’s fleshy sides flaming and his ribs aching for days. Patrick was panting, “God damn you, Donaghy, stand still and fight!” and Colum laughed, saying, “That’s what you want, Hassler? I don’t think so.”

  Snapshots of these sparring matches were kept under the glass top of a cocktail table in our living room. For years. They’d been taken in the early fifties. So anyone visiting us who had not known of Colum Donaghy would ask who that was with Patrick, and the short reply was An old friend of Patrick's, who’d once fought Roland LaStarza in Buffalo. If my dad was present, there was no longer reply.

  After Colum died my mother wondered if she should remove the snapshots, how heartbreaking they were, my dad and his friend posed in the ring with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning like kids. But she was afraid to ask my dad point-blank. Just to bring up the subject of Colum was risky. And who knows, it might set off my dad to discover one day that the snapshots were gone from the cocktail table, he had a quick temper and after he’d stopped drinking he was anxious and edgy as a spooked horse, so the snapshots remained there in our living room for years.

  There were many more snapshots with Colum Donaghy in them, in our family photo album.

  Say there’s this special place somewhere on Earth. Where the inhabitants know ahead of time when they will die. The exact hour, minute. Not only this, they know when Earth itself will end. The Universe will end. How’s their way of living going to differ from ours?

  I’ll tell you: they would measure time differently.

  Like they wouldn’t be counting forward from the past. No first century, second century, twentieth century, et cetera. Instead, they would be counting backward from the end. People saying, What’s the date, the date is X. (X years before the end.) Somebody saying, How old am I, I’m X. (X years before he dies.)

  And how’d these people get along, what kind of civilization would they have? I believe they would be good to one another. They would be kind, decent. Not like us! But they would like to laugh, too. Have good times, celebrate. Because, see, they wouldn’t need to wonder about the future. They would know the future from the day of their births, they would be at total peace with it.

  Colum Donaghy was one to say strange things. He’d get this glimmering look in his face. After an out-of-town fight where he’d managed to win, but just barely; and took some hard punches to the head and body. A cruel welt on the underside of his jaw, fresh scar tissue in his eyebrow. Such a Goddamned bleeder, Colum joked he started to bleed at the weigh-in. Maybe it was funny? But a white man’s face can get used up, hit too many times. What’s being done to the capillaries in the brain
, you don’t want to think. Colum liked to say with a shrug, There’s fights where even if you win, you lose.

  This was a fact nobody much wanted to know. Not in Yewville or Buffalo among Colum “The Kid” Donaghy’s admirers. His trainer and his manager surely didn’t want to know. It was nothing to be discussed. Like enlisting in the Navy, being sent overseas to Korea, for sure you might get killed, you accept that possibility.

  A kid just going into boxing, fighting in the Golden Gloves at age fifteen, fourteen, as Colum had done, he won’t know it. A young guy just turning pro, he won’t want to know it. And by the time he knows it, could be he’s a legendary champion like Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, it’s too late for him to know it.

  Even if you win, you lose.

  You win, you lose.

  And what of fixed fights, another fact of boxing in the fifties nobody liked to acknowledge. That of bribed referees and judges. A boxer wants to win, it’s his life on the line, Colum used to flare his nostrils saying every time he stepped into the ring he was fighting for his life, but there are boxers who have given up wanting to win, their spirits have been broken, there’s a deadness in their eyes and they know they’re being hired to fight and lose, they’re being hired as “opponents” to showcase another guy’s skills, some hot young kid on the way up. Their paydays are about over, and they know it. So they will sign on, and go through the motions of fighting for four, five, six rounds, then suddenly they’re on the ropes and the crowd is wild for blood, they’re down, they’re struggling to get up, on their feet seeming dazed but with their gloves uplifted so the referee won’t stop the fight, and the young kid rushes them with a flurry of hard, showy punches, and another time they’re down, and this time counted out. And it isn’t the case that the older boxer has been bribed, or the fight’s been fixed, not exactly. But the outcome is known beforehand. Like a script somebody has written and the boxers act out.

  In the fifties, in any case. A long time ago.

  If you rebelled, past a certain age, if you were a midlevel boxer who’d never made the top ten ranking in your division and your name no longer generated ticket sales, you were in trouble. It would be said of you you’re washed up. You’re on the skids. If you persisted in being a maverick, your career was over, you were out on your ass. If you talked carelessly and word got back to the wrong people, you might be dead meat.

  So Colum said unexpected things. Interviewed in the Buffalo Evening News after he’d won a locally big, money-making match when he was in his mid-twenties, he’d said in reply to a reporter’s question about alleged criminal connections with boxing that he’d fire his manager if he heard even that the man was taking calls from “those s.o.b.’s.” (This was a time when boxers of the stature of Graziano, Zale, Robinson were being subpoenaed by the New York State Athletic Commission investigating bribe offers to fix fights.) A few years later, interviewed prominently in the Yewville Post before the LaStarza fight, which would be the biggest fight held in the Buffalo Armory since an aging Joe Louis came through in 1951, Colum promised the boxing crowd “exactly what they deserved.” Which meant—what?

  And with his friends Colum said even stranger, more enigmatic things that no one knew how to interpret. Saying he was a Mick, he knew not to trust anybody at his back. Saying when his big payday finally came, he’d be giving money to the IRA back in Belfast, Ireland—“So those poor bastards can get some justice there.” Saying he wasn’t scared of anybody in the ring, white, black, spic, but anybody out of the ring, he was. My dad and the others never knew if they were expected to laugh, or whether all this was dead serious.

  Like when after a few beers Colum got onto one of his subjects, which was time. This special place on earth where the inhabitants know ahead of time when they will die. Talking so intense, excited. And his friends tried their best to follow. My dad said it was like some puzzle in the newspaper, Einstein and atomic physics and sending men to the moon. You could sort of follow it, but you only thought you were following it. Actually, you were lost. You couldn’t repeat a word of it. And Colum was like that, talking faster and faster, and you’d be like trying to keep up with him in the ring. Quick as you might be, Colum was quicker. “See? A man would say, you asked him how old he is, ‘I’m X years.’ Like me, Colum Donaghy, might be five. By which it’s meant, ‘Five years till I die.’ Instead of saying my age measured from when I was born, I’d say my age measured from when I would die, see? ‘Five’ means five years left to live.”

  Colum’s buddies shook their heads over this logic. If it was logic.

  Mike Kowicki pulled a face. “So? What the hell’s that supposed to mean? I don’t get it.”

  Otto Lanza, who was generally conceded the most educated of the guys, he’d graduated from high school and owned a cigar store that also sold newspapers and paperback books, shook his head reprovingly. “Kind of morbid, ain’t it? Thinking that way.”

  “It’s the opposite of ‘morbid’!” Colum said. “It’s what you call ‘hy-po-the-sis.’” Colum pronounced this word, which surely had never before been uttered at the Checkerboard Tavern bar in its history, with care.

  My dad said, “What’s the point, Colum? We’re listening.” Colum said, like a child who’s just discovered something, “The point is, see, if we could know how things turn out, how they end, we would experience time differently. We would count backward from the end, see? Like a boxer knowing how a fight was going to end, which round, he’d know how to pace himself, what kind of mind-set to go into it with. See?”

  “Wait,” my dad said, “he knows how it’s going to end, what’s the point of trying? If he’s going to win, he wins; if not, he can’t. Why’d he do anything at all? Why even show up?”

  The others laughed. “Just collect his purse,” Otto Lanza said sagely.

  But Colum was shaking his head, annoyed. A slow flush came into his face. Maybe this was a factor he hadn’t considered, or maybe it was far from the point of what he was trying to say; the reason he was so involved. “See, if we knew these things, we’d behave better. Like my last fight, I KO’d the guy in eight rounds, but I was pretty sloppy in the first rounds, I kept getting thrown off stride, I could’ve tried harder, looked better. See? I could’ve won with style.”

  “You won by a KO, so what? You don’t get more money, winning with style."

  Colum considered this. My dad said afterward that for sure, Colum was thinking hell yes, you do get more money if you’ve got style, eventually you get a lot more money. Because you get matched with top contenders and your purses improve. But that was a subject of a certain fineness or subtlety Colum wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge. The difference between “The Kid” Donaghy and, for instance, LaStarza, Marciano, Walcott. He said: “See, if we knew, we wouldn’t be guessing. Making mistakes.

  If you were going to marry your wife, from the start when you first met her, you’d treat her a helluva lot better. Right? If you knew how you’d be crazy for your kids once they got born, you wouldn’t be, you know, secured as hell ahead of time. That’s what I mean.” Colum looked at his friends in his strange squinting way, as if daring them to disagree. And they were sort of conceding the point or anyway had gotten beyond a serious wish to contest it. What the hell? Let Donaghy talk. They loved “The Kid” when he was in his weird moods and insisting upon buying rounds of beers, dropping ten-dollar bills on the bar like he had pockets of them, an endless supply.

  “The crappy thing about dying is you only get to do it once,” Colum added. “The second time, see?—you’d go with style.”

  The man who fought Roland LaStarza, in Buffalo back in the fifties. Whatever happened to him?

  A boxer who’s going to be a champion is on the rise from the first fight onward. He’s going to win, win, win. He’s going to win his amateur fights, he’s going to win his first pro fights. He’s protected from harm or accident by a luminous light enveloping his body, like Athena protected her soldiers in the Trojan War. He will not be seriously hi
t, he will not feel his mortality. He will not be matched with fighters who might beat him, too soon. His career is a matter of rising, ascending. To him, it feels like destiny. It does not feel as if it’s being arranged by human beings. Money changes hands, but it isn’t a matter of money. Is it?

  These boxers rise through their ranks undefeated. They win by spectacular KO’s, or failing that, they win on points. They win, consistently. The future champion is one who wins. If two future champions are fighting in the same division at the same time, their canny managers will not make a deal for them to fight, too soon. Because the big payday is somewhere ahead.

  Then there are the others who cure not going to be champions.

  They win, and they lose. They have a streak of wins, and then suddenly they lose. They lose again, and then they win. Their careers are what you’d call erratic, up-and-down. They do predictable things in the ring because their boxing skills are limited, like a small deck of cards. But they do unpredictable things, too, because their boxing skills are limited, like a small deck of cards. And sometimes there’s a wild card in the deck.

  This was Colum “The Kid” Donaghy.

  He began boxing as a kid of fifteen, in 1943. He fought his last fight in September 1958.

  Never would Colum Donaghy be ranked among the top ten in his division. In the Navy, he’d been a light heavyweight winner and he’d looked good against that tough competition. In the places like the old Buffalo Armory, matched with men like himself, boxers with showy aggressive skills and little or no defensive strategies, he’d looked very good, crowds loved Colum “The Kid” Donaghy. And grinning happily out at them, covered in sweat like cheap glittering jewels and an eye swollen shut, blood dribbling from a nostril as the referee held his gloved hand high amid a deafening roar of cheers, yells, applause, “The Kid” loved them.