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

by Unknown Author

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Fucking condescending!” “You can beat LaStarza, sure.”

  “You don’t exactly sound overjoyed.”

  My father would recount how he’d been tongue-tied. Almost shy. Sweat breaking out on his forehead, in his armpits. Damned glad Colum couldn’t see him, he’d have been madder than hell. “Colum, sure I am. It’s just a surprise. It’s—terrific news, what we’ve been waiting for, but a surprise. Isn’t it?”

  Colum muttered, “Maybe to you, man. Not to me.”

  “Colum, it’s just that I wonder—”

  “Save yourself the effort, okay? I’m not.”

  Colum slammed down the receiver, that was that.

  Patrick would wonder, What was happening, and what was going to happen?

  Because there was something fishy about the deal. Something in the evasive way Gus Smith talked about it, which wasn’t characteristic of the garrulous old man. And there was something in the vehement way Colum kept insisting, as the weeks passed, that he was going to win the fight, not on points but by a knockout; he’d give LaStarza the fight of his life, Colum boasted, and make the New York boxing crowd, those bastards, take notice of him. “It’s my turn. I always deserved better.” Colum confided in my father he wasn’t going to follow his trainer’s instructions, boxing LaStarza in the opening rounds, he was going to go straight at him, like Dempsey rushing out against Willard, or tearing into Firpo. Like LaMotta, Graziano.

  “LaStarza’s manager looks at my record, thinks Donaghy is a pushover. Sure. It’s a miscalculation in my favor. They see a fucking lousy draw in St. Catharines, Ontario! To a Canuck! So why should LaStarza train hard? This Donaghy is a small-town punk. I saw in the paper, LaStarza isn’t in the best condition, after a year off. You hear things. Marciano almost broke his arms, shredded the muscles, he could hardly lift them afterward. And money he owes. It’s just a payday for him up here. But me, I’m fighting for my life.” Colum grinned, showing his crooked teeth. “See? I can’t lose.”

  You never knew how Colum meant these words. He couldn’t lose because he was too good a fighter, or he couldn’t lose because losing this fight was unthinkable.

  The fight that ended in a draw in St. Catharines, Ontario?

  Until the LaStarza fight, this had been the worst luck of Colum Donaghy’s career. When he’d been twenty-seven, working in the Yewville stone quarry to support his young family, forty backbreaking hours a week, therefore Goddamned grateful for any fight Gus Smith could arrange, anywhere. Colum would fight guys who outweighed him by twenty, even thirty pounds, for five hundred dollars. For four hundred. Three-fifty! Sure he’d take a chance, fighting in some place he didn’t know, across the border in Ontario with a boxer he’d never heard of except he liked the name: O’Hagan. Between the Canuck O’Hagan and the Yank Donaghy they’d sell out the house, right?

  A dozen or more of Colum’s Yewville friends, including my father, drove to see the fight, and ever afterward it would be one of their tales of outrage and sorrow, Goddamn how Colum had been cheated of a win. It was an eight-round fight and Colum had won at least six of those rounds, beating up on his fattish thirty-six-year-old opponent who’d lost his mouthpiece in the last round, but managed to stay on his feet so the fucking local judges wouldn’t allow the local favorite “Irish” O’Hagan to lose, declaring a draw. A draw! The judges had slipped out of the arena when the referee announced the decision, there were cheers, and a scattering of indignant boos, but the cheers drowned out the boos, and O’Hagan looking shame-faced (both eyes swollen shut, nose broken) waved to his fans even as a sullen-faced Colum Donaghy climbed out of the ring indignant, like a rejected prince and stalked away. Sports reporters for every U.S. paper agreed it had been a shameful episode. The New York State Athletic Commission was going to investigate, though it had no Canadian jurisdiction. Local headlines made Colum a hero, briefly: heavyweight donaghy cheated in controversial Ontario decision. In interviews Colum made it a point to be good-natured, philosophical. “At least they didn’t stiff me, loading O’Hagan’s gloves with buckshot.” He laughed on WBW-TV, showing his crooked, slightly discolored teeth, the shiny scar tissue winking above his eye. “What can you expect from Canucks. They don’t have a democracy like we do.”

  All I thought of was him. Him standing between me and what I wanted to make my life perfect.

  The eight weeks Colum was in training, he avoided his old friends. He saw my father only a few times, when my father dropped by the gym, and he barely saw his wife and children. Long hours each day he spent at the gym, which was in downtown Yewville near the railroad yard. Often he slept and ate at his trainer’s house, which was close by, his trainer was a soft-spoken monkish Irishman in his seventies, though looking much younger, never married. Each morning Colum got up at 4:30 a.m. like clockwork, to run deserted country roads outside Yewville, six miles before breakfast, and each night by 9 p.m. he went to bed exhausted. On Fridays he made an exception, stayed up to watch the TV fights. He ate six meals a day, his life had become almost purely his body. It was a peaceful life in its obsessive, narrow way. A monk’s life, a fanatic’s life. As a fighter he was focused exclusively upon the coming fight and upon the figure of his opponent, who was no longer merely another man, human and limited, vulnerable and aging, but a figure of demonic power, authority. Like a monk brooding upon God, so Colum brooded upon Roland LaStarza. Pummeling the heavy bag, throwing punches whack! whack! whack! in a dreamy trance. Him! Standing between me and what I want.

  In the past Colum had not liked training. Hell no! Sure, he’d cheated. The random drink, even a smoke. Slipped away for a night with his friends. A night with a woman. This time there was none of that. He’d vowed. What I want to make my life perfect,I can taste in my mouth like blood.

  Each day the drama was sparring. Yewville men and boys dropped by to watch. Women and girls drifted in. They were crazy for Donaghy, there was an atmosphere of arousal, anticipation. The smell of male sweat, the glisten of bodies. In the background as in a film slightly blurred, the walls of the old gym were covered in posters of bygone fights in the Buffalo Armory, some of them faded to a sepia hue, dating back to the forties when the gym had been built. Most of the boxers’ names were unknown, forgotten. Colum took no notice. He was fierce and alive in the present, in his vision he was climbing into the ring to confront LaStarza, he took little notice of his immediate surroundings for they were fleeting, insubstantial. In the ring, his body came alive. Where he’d been practicing his robot-drill, now he came alive in a quite different way. Each of his sparring partners was a vision of LaStarza. Each of them must be confronted, dealt with. Colum performed, and the onlookers called out encouragement and applauded. The bolder girls asked to have their pictures taken with Colum, and sometimes he obliged, and sometimes no. He was quirky, unpredictable. A good-natured guy except sometimes he was not. You dared not expect anything of him. A promise made one day, sure he’d be happy to oblige, next day no. That was the way with boxers of his temperament. Sometimes his trainer shut the doors against visitors, no one was welcome, not even Colum’s friends. No one!

  In the ring, in Colum’s familiar, safe place. In the ring protected by ropes. In the ring in which there are rules, manners. No absolute surprises. He was shrewdly letting his sparring partners hit on him, his chin, his head, his body, to prepare him for LaStarza’s hammer blows that had knocked out twenty-four opponents so far and had visibly shaken Marciano. A wicked left hook to the body and a right cross to the chin that were almost of Marciano’s caliber.

  But I can take it. Anything he’s got.

  It was as if Colum knew, his trainer would afterward say, that this would be the last time he’d train so hard, he meant to give it all he had. Colum Donaghy never held back, his trainer would claim of him, even in the gym. By the week of May 20 the odds were nine to one in favor of LaStarza.

  “What the hell, it’s my advantage. I’m betting on me.”

  He confided in Pat
rick Hassler, but no one else was to know: not Colum’s manager, not his trainer, not his wife. My father dreaded to ask Colum how much he was betting, and Colum told him: “Three thousand.” My father laughed out of sheer nerves. “Why three thousand, man?” Colum said frankly, “That’s the most I could borrow.” He laughed at the sick look in my father’s face.

  “Colum, my God. Are you sure?”

  “Sure what? I’m going to win? Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea, to bet? So much?”

  “Why the fuck not? It’s like seeing into the future, you can figure backward what’s the smart thing to do. Say I didn’t, I’d be kicking myself in the ass afterward.”

  That was true, my father had to concede. If Colum was certain he was going to win. Why then, why not bet?

  Colum said, “Nine to one odds, fantastic. You should bet, if you’re smart. Three times nine is twenty-seven thousand, not bad for a night’s work, is it? Plus the purse.”

  He spoke dismissively of the purse, for it wasn’t the big payday he’d long envisioned. LaStarza was getting twenty-five thousand for the fight, and Donaghy was getting eleven thousand. So the newspapers said. Exactly what Colum’s purse was, my dad didn’t know. Public announcements of purses were always inflated. And Colum wouldn’t see more than sixty percent of whatever it was, in any case. His manager took a big cut, his trainer, his cutman, his sparring partners and others. And then there was the IRS.

  Colum, are you sure, man? This bet? You don’t want to be making a mistake here.

  Look: best you mind your own business, man. You think you do, but you don’t know shit about me.

  And that turned out to be true.

  We drove to Buffalo for the fight, a crowded carload of us. Dad and some of the Hassler relatives. 1 was the only girl. My mom stayed home.

  These weeks, my mother had refused to read about Colum in the papers. Even his smiling photo on the front page of the Yewville Post she thrust from her with a pained look. To my disgust 1 overheard her tell my father, “I don’t think she should go with you. It isn’t a healthy environment for a twelve-year-old girl. All those men! Such ugliness. You know what boxing is. Even if Colum isn’t hurt, she will remember it all her life. And if—he gets hurt—” my mother’s voice trailed off. My father said only, “She wants to go, and she’s going.”

  She wants to go, and she’s going!

  Sharp as pain, the happiness I felt hearing this. For I had not expected my father to say such a thing. Like Colum, my father was an unpredictable man. You could not plead with him, you could not reason with him, he made decisions as he wished, and they were inviolable.

  At that time in my young life I’d begun to hate my mother as always I had loved her so.

  I hated her for wanting to keep me a girl, weak like her. 1 loved my father for taking me into his world that was a man’s world. There, weakness was not tolerated, only strength was valued. I could enter this world only as Patrick Hassler’s daughter but I wanted nothing more, this was everything to me.

  Driving to Buffalo, my dad and the others talked only of the fight. Everybody wanted Colum Donaghy to win and was anxious of what would happen. What my dad must have known of Colum he would not reveal to these men, he spoke as if he knew Colum only at a distance. “It would be Donaghy’s break of a lifetime, if he wins. But he’s got to win. His manager says he’s being ‘looked at’ for Madison Square Garden, to see how he’d perform on TV, but Colum is thirty years old, let’s face it. He’s fighting LaStarza, and LaStarza is still a big draw. He’s on the skids, but still tough. You have to figure nobody in the boxing business wants LaStarza to lose just yet. Which means nobody in the boxing business wants Donaghy to win. Which means they don’t think Donaghy can win, or will win.” One of my uncles said, incensed, “This wouldn’t be a fixed fight, would it? Jesus.”

  My father just laughed.

  “What’s that mean? It’s fixed, or—what?”

  My father said, annoyed, “I don’t know what it will be. I hope to Christ Colum survives it.”

  From the backseat I asked him if Colum Donaghy could win. I wanted almost to cry, hearing him say such things he’d been saying.

  He said, “Sure Colum could win. Maybe he will. Maybe what I’m saying is bullshit. We’ll hope so, yes?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, our main event of the evening: ten rounds of heavyweight boxing.”

  The vast Armory was sold out, thousands of spectators, mainly men. In tiers of seats rising to nearly the ceiling. The smoke haze made my eyes sting. The sharp sound of the bell. Sharp, and loud. Because it had to be heard over the screams of the crowd. It had to be heard by men pounding at each other’s heads with their leather-gloved fists.

  The ring announcer’s voice reverberated through the Armory. My teeth were chattering with excitement. My hands were strangely cold, the palms damp. I felt a tinge of panic, that I had made a mistake to come here after all. I was twelve years old, young for my age. My heart beat light and rapid as a bird’s fluttering wings.

  God, please don’t let Colum Donaghy lose. Don’t let him be hurt. Beside me my father was quiet. He sat with his sinewy arms folded, waiting for the fight to begin. I understood that no matter how calmly and dispassionately he’d been speaking in the car, he felt very differently. He was fearful for Colum’s sake, he could not bear it that a man he loved like a brother might be publicly humiliated.

  Injury, defeat, even death: these would be preferable to the abject humiliation of a boxer knocked down repeatedly, knocked down and knocked out.

  At ringside in the row ahead of us there was the brunette in a showy electric-blue velvet costume, the bodice spangled with rhinestones, her face heavily made up: Carlotta, Colum Donaghy’s wife. Tonight she was glamorous indeed. Her curled hair was stiff with spray, she wore rhinestone starburst earrings. She was seated with Colum’s Buffalo friends, whom my father did not like and did not know well. Always she was glancing over her shoulder, seeing who might be watching her, admiring and envying her, she was Colum Donaghy’s wife, his fans were eager to see her and there were photographers eager to take her picture. She smiled nervously, laughing and calling out greetings, her mascara-rimmed eyes bright and glazed. She saw my father, her eyes snagged on him, where we were seated in the third row a short distance away. Carlotta Donaghy staring at my father with an expression of— what? Worry, pleading? Seeming to signal to her husband’s friend, Well! Here it is, here we are, nothing will stop it now. Quickly my father raised a hand to her. Nothing to worry about, Colum will give him hell.

  I would see Colum’s wife and another woman suddenly rise from their seats and leave the Armory by the nearest exit, midway in the fight. The tension was too much for her, her nerves could not bear it.

  In his white satin robe Colum Donaghy was the first to enter the ring amid deafening applause. And how pale Colum’s skin, milky pale, set beside the other boxer’s olive-tinted skin. Roland LaStarza! Abruptly there he was. In black satin robe, black trunks. A pelt of dark hairs on his torso, arms, legs. He weighed only a few pounds more than Colum Donaghy but he looked heavier, older and his body more solid. His face was impassive as something carved from wood. His eyes were veiled, perhaps contemptuous. Wherever this was he was, this ring he’d climbed into, this drafty, crude hall filled with bellowing and screaming strangers, he was LaStarza, the TV LaStarza, a popular heavyweight from the Bronx, he was in western upstate New York on business. He had no sentiment for the occasion. He knew no one in Buffalo, he had not gone to school in Buffalo, there was no neighborhood here to claim him. The Italians adored him, but he was LaStarza from the Bronx, he could tolerate their noisy adoration, but nothing more. His trainer had no need to talk to him earnestly as Colum Donaghy’s trainer was talking to him, trying to calm him. LaStarza would do what he had to do to defeat his opponent. He would not do more, and he would not do less. In his career of more than ten years he had rapidly ascended the heavyweight division in the way of a
champion-to-be. He had basked in victory and in praise, he fought for years before losing his first fight and that had been no disgrace, for he’d lost to Marciano, and still a young boxer he’d fought Marciano the champion for the title and again he’d lost, he’d ascended the glass mountain as far as his powerful legs would carry him. He knew: his moment was behind him. Now he was in upstate New York; this was not a televised bout. His manager had younger, more promising boxers to promote, another rising champion-to-be. LaStarza would have to accept this deal, he’d turned down similar deals in anger and contempt but now he had no choice, he was thirty-one years old. He’d never fully recovered from the beating Marciano had given him. That public humiliation, the terrible hurt to his body and to his pride. He would win this fight, he would dispatch his opponent whom the morning before, at the weigh-in, he’d scarcely acknowledged. One of those thin-skinned Mick bleeders. Their noses crumple like cheap aluminum cans, their eyes bruise and swell. Their blood splashes like a tomato being burst. At the weigh-in the men had been photographed together for local papers and for TV sports news, shaking hands. Bullshit! The pose pained LaStarza, classy LaStarza, as a bad smell would pain him. He did not despise this Colum Donaghy, he had no thought for the man at all.

  While Colum Donaghy bounced about the ring in his white satin robe with golden trim, shadowboxing, displaying himself to cheering fans. Almost shyly he smiled. A boy’s smile, tentative and hopeful. He was one who knew himself adored yet could not entirely trust it, the adoration. He was one who required constant reassurance, nourishment from the crowd. For how milky pale he was: his torso and sides shone clammy white beneath fair reddish hairs. The scar tissue in his face was obscured by bright glaring lights, his skin appeared almost smooth as a boy’s. Is it wrong that a boxer smiles before a fight? I was very frightened for Colum Donaghy, and for my father seated grim and tense beside me.