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

by Unknown Author

  I recalled Colum in our kitchen a year ago. The lowered voices of adults. What had they been talking of so earnestly, why had my mother been laughing, what did it mean? I would never know.

  The myriad small mysteries of childhood. Never solved. Never even named.

  For all of the adult world is mystery, you will never comprehend it. Yet you must surrender to its authority. One day, you must enter it yourself.

  The bell rang! That loud, sharp sound.

  The first round began.

  Colum Donaghy, fair-skinned, in white trunks, moved swiftly to his darker-skinned opponent, and amid shouts and screams the long-awaited fight at last began. From the first, it was a surprise: for Colum rushed at LaStarza, throwing a flurry of punches, as LaStarza moved away and to the side, raising his arms to ward off the fast pummeling blows, trying to use his jab. The boxers circled each other, Colum was pressing forward, always forward. He rode the wave of the crowd’s excitement, he threw a right cross that swung wide of its target, he grappled with LaStarza and the men fell into a clinch. This was the pattern of the first rounds: Colum would push forward, La Starza would elude him while catching him with quick, sharp jabs, blows Colum seemed capable of absorbing, though a swelling began above his right eye. In the third round Colum came out fast and anxious and by apparent luck struck LaStarza a short, hard blow to the midriff, his powerful left hook he’d honed to perfection in the gym, and LaStarza reacted in surprise, in a flurry of blows pushing Colum back into the ropes. There was a scuffle and before the referee could break it up the crowd screamed, for LaStarza had slipped, one knee to the canvas, pushing himself up at once, and the referee didn’t call a knockdown, which precipitated boos, and more aggressive tactics on Colum’s part. The rounds were furious yet how slow time had become: the harder I stared at the boxers above me in their brightly lighted pen, the more exhausted and unreal I felt. Everything was so much more vivid than on TV. The live fight was nothing like the TV fight, which was so small and flattened, in black-and-white images. And with broadcasters continually talking. In the Armory, there were no broadcasters to explain what was happening. Much of the time I could not seem to see. My senses were overloaded. The thud of blows, the squeaking-scuffing sounds of the boxers’ shoes on the canvas, the blood splattered on both men’s chests and like raindrops onto the referee’s white shirt, the deafening crowd noises and the referee’s shouted commands—Break! Break! Box!—all were numbing, exhausting. Between rounds my eyelids drooped. My father and others shouted to one another, and shouted encouragement to Colum in his corner. I watched Colum Donaghy sitting in his corner as his seconds worked swiftly to prepare him for the next round. I saw his flushed, battered-looking face glisten with beads of water, a sponge squeezed out onto his heated head. Like an animal he seemed, a racehorse, purely physical, and strangely passive, so long as he was seated and these others labored over him. It had not seemed to me, maybe I had not wished to see, how Colum’s eye was swelling shut, how his face was cut, but there was his cutman deftly treating his wounds, sticking something like a pencil up into his nostrils in a way to make me feel faint. I asked my father if Colum was winning, for it seemed to me as to the crowd that he was, yet I dreaded some more expert knowledge, and indeed my father said only, frowning, “Maybe. He’s ahead.” This was a mysterious answer, for if Colum was ahead, wasn’t he winning?

  In the next rounds the boxers were more guarded, cautious. They were conserving their strength, covered in sweat and often breathing through their mouths. Colum’s face was pinkened, as if flushed with health and excitement, LaStarza’s was darker, heavy with blood yet still impassive with that carved-wood look. The older boxer was beginning to know that his opponent was going to give him serious trouble, the knowledge had sunk gradually in. A boxer wants to think that while his well-aimed blows are intentional, his opponent’s are accidental and won’t be repeated. But LaStarza saw that Donaghy was strong, clumsy and determined, a dangerous combination. The action erupted into flurries and then slowed into clinches. At the start of the seventh round Colum seemed to have regained his strength, and fought furiously, striking LaStarza on the right temple, following with his left, and there was LaStarza rocked back onto his heels. Screams on all sides, my father and his friends leaping to their feet, a wave of delirium, was LaStarza about to go down? But no. The moment passed. Yet the pace of the fight had accelerated. My eyes stung from the bright lights, the hectic action, a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke. Midway in the round Colum slowed, breathing through his mouth, and in that instant LaStarza swarmed upon him, a right to the head that made Colum’s eyes roll, a body blow like a sledgehammer. Yet Colum returned these with fierce blows of his own, and again delirium swept the crowd, for there was Colum in a frenzy pressing his opponent backward, relentless backward; yet unknowingly he lowered his left glove as he threw a right cross, and LaStarza like a man trying to wake from a dream swung blindly at him over the dropped left, and struck him above the heart, a blow that might have killed Colum if LaStarza had had his full strength and weight behind it. The round ended in a flurry of blows and a repeated ringing of the bell as the fighters fought on unhearing.

  The crowd erupted in applause for the fury of the fight.

  Our way of thanking the fighters for—what? This mysterious gift of themselves they were giving us.

  Daddy! Take me home, take me out of here. These words I could no more have uttered than I could have uttered obscenities.

  It was seen that LaStarza, sitting slumped in his corner, was bleeding thinly from a cut above his left eye. It was seen that Colum leaned forward to spit into a bucket and in the dazzling light that seemed magnified what he spat with an expression of disdain was tinged with red.

  Another time I leaned over to ask in my father’s ear if Colum was winning, I was desperate to know, but this time my father shrugged me away like a bothersome fly, frowning and indifferent. He was smoking a cigar, gripping the ugly dark glowering stub between his teeth.

  At the start of the eighth round Colum came rushing to LaStarza as if bringing him something precious—a clumsy downward-chopping blow to the head, which LaStarza only partly blocked. Next Colum pushed forward with head lowered, bull-like, taking punches even as he threw punches, of varying degrees of strength and accuracy. Already at the start of the round, blood glistened in his nose. The deft, assiduous labor of Colum’s cutman had been outdone. There was LaStarza backed into a corner, now into the ropes, warding off Colum’s wildly flung blows, which fell onto his arms and shoulders. LaStarza’s ribs were reddened in welts. Colum swung and missed, another time swung and missed, but LaStarza’s reflexes were slowed, he wasn’t able to take advantage. My father said, as if thinking aloud, yet so that I might overhear, “This is the turn,” and his face was somber, unsmiling. I wondered: What did the turn mean? One of the boxers wasn’t able to fight back, to defend himself? Was the fight nearly over? God, please, end it now, please let Colum win. I shut my eyes, hearing the ugly whack! whack! of body blows. I had no idea who was being hit. I was dazed, sickened, the roaring of the crowd was so loud, I’d been pressing my hands against my ears without knowing. The referee struggled to pull the men apart. Their skins seemed sticky, adhesive. Again, again, again. Each man grappled, seeking advantage, hitting the other short, chopping rabbit punches on the back of the neck. The referee’s white shirt was now gray, soaked through with sweat as well as blood splattered. His ridiculous bow tie was crooked. Break! Box! I would hear those shouted angry-sounding commands in my sleep. LaStarza seemed to be dropping by degrees out of the active fight, like a man observing himself at a distance; protecting himself, yet offering little offense now. It would seem that Colum had won most of the rounds—hadn’t he? Colum “The Kid” Donaghy? His fans were cheering, inflamed with excitement. Both fighters had bloodied, bruised faces. LaStarza was clearly winded, yet like any experienced boxer he was dangerous, always dangerous, crouching in a corner, eyes glaring like a rat’s. He would not go down,
his will was unyielding. It was his opponent’s will to send him down to the canvas but he would not, yet his knees buckled suddenly, the crowd again erupted. There was a palpable pressure, you could feel like billowing waves of heat, that the fight come to an end immediately, a climax, no one could bear enduring it any longer. Was this the knockdown? Colum struck LaStarza and LaStarza lurched forward into a clinch and amid deafening screams the bell rang signaling the end of the round. Colum continued pummeling blindly and the referee shouted Bell! Bell! He would deduct a point from Colum for hitting after the bell.

  My throat was raw, I had not known I was screaming.

  The last two rounds were very different. As if a flame had been burning higher and higher, but now a dampening wind blew upon it, the flame lost its power, its luster. Colum tried to press his advantage as before but he’d lost momentum now. His legs were slower, sluggish. He threw combinations of punches intermittently, like a robot LaStarza lashed out, yet both seemed to be losing their concentration. Now Colum, wrenching out of a clinch like a death grip, was the one to slip on the blood-dampened canvas and fall to one knee, and immediately pushed himself up with a grimace of pain, had he injured his knee, the referee stopped the fight to examine Colum, staring into his eyes, the crowd erupted in boos, was the referee going to call the fight? Award a TKO to LaStarza? Was the fight fixed? The crowd yelled its displeasure, the referee squinted into Colum’s eyes in a pretense of concern but had no choice finally except to nod, to wave the men on, yes the fight would continue.

  Both men came out exhausted in the tenth and final round. Both men had difficulty raising their arms. It seemed now that LaStarza had been pacing himself more shrewdly than his opponent, yet still he had little strength left. He hit Colum with a combination of blows, none of them very hard, and Colum stood his ground, shaking his head to clear it. The men staggered like drunks trapped in some bizarre hellish ritual together. They had been together a very long time, neither would ever forget the other. It was possible to see both struggling men, near naked and gleaming with sweat, as noble; and at the same time as defeated. Midway in the round LaStarza managed to hit Colum with what remained of his fearful right cross, and Colum countered with what remained of his fearful left hook, a short, curving blow that looked more powerful than it could have been, since LaStarza staggered but didn’t collapse, grabbing on to his opponent like a drowning man. In the final ten or twelve seconds of the fight LaStarza seemed completely dazed and the crowd was chanting Col-um! Hit him! Col-um! Hit him! but Colum, who was the crowd’s favorite, was too exhausted, his muscled arms hung by his sides like lead. He’d punched himself out, my father would say afterward. He had nothing left.

  The bell rang.

  The moment I died, and I was happy.

  Following that fight of May 20, 1958, which would live long in ignominy in local memory, pervasive as the smoke- and chemical-tainted air of industrial Buffalo, Colum Donaghy would fight once more in September of 1958, in Syracuse. That fight, against an opponent of a very different stature than Roland LaStarza, he would win on points, narrowly. Five days later he was dead.

  In the night Colum drove into the countryside. On a lane near his relatives’ farm he parked, walked a short distance from his car and shot himself at the base of the skull. The county medical examiner stated he’d died instantaneously. He’d used a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, unregistered, for which he had no permit. No one in the Donaghy family admitted of knowing of the gun’s existence. But my father Patrick Hassler, interrogated by police, had to tell them Colum had brought the gun back with him from Korea. He’d won it playing poker.

  Had he been in the game with Donaghy, he was asked.

  Not me, my father said. I don’t play poker, I’m a man without that kind of luck.

  Patrick was deeply ashamed to be questioned by police, for he understood that he was betraying Colum Donaghy simply by speaking of him as he did. Yet he believed he had no choice. Despite the ruling of suicide, there were questions about Colum’s death; there was a distrust of individuals associated with professional boxing, and the LaStarza episode was occluded by rumor, scandal. My father didn’t volunteer to tell police, however, that Colum had told him he’d borrowed three thousand dollars to bet on himself.

  Had Colum Donaghy ever spoken of taking his own life, my father was asked.

  Not to me, he told them. We never talked about that kind of thing.

  My father was stricken with grief at Colum’s death. He was stunned, he was baffled, he was ashamed. You could see the vision in his eyes shrunken to pinpoints. You could see he’d aged within days, his ruddy skin now ashen, tight. This was not a man to speak of his feelings, this was not a man who wanted sympathy. Like a dangerous sleepwalker he moved among us, his family. My mother took care that we did not disturb him. Sometimes he was absent for days. He’d go on drinking binges. My mother wept in secret. Late at night we heard her on the telephone downstairs, pleading. Have you seen Patrick? If you see Patrick...

  When Colum shot himself he’d knelt in the country lane. In the darkness. He’d aimed his gun carefully. The bullet to enter at the base of the skull, tearing upward through the brain. Yet his hand must have shaken. It can’t be so easy to take your own life and throw it away like trash. He was missing for two days before he was found lying on his side in the lane, the fingers of his right hand curled stiffly around the revolver handle. He was found by two teenaged boys out hunting. They’d seen the car first, then found the body. They’d recognized Colum Donaghy, they said, at once.

  The man who fought Roland LaStarza.

  That first terrible day at school it was being said that Colum Donaghy had died. Agnes was called out of class, her mother had come to bring her home. Later it would be said that Colum had shot himself with a gun. He’d taken his own life, and that was a sin. A terrible sin. When we saw Agnes Donaghy again, two weeks later, it seemed that another girl had taken her place. Not so pretty, with eyes ringed in sorrow. Even her freckles had faded.

  The cruelest among us whispered, Good! Now she knows.

  Knows what?

  How it is to be like everybody else. Not the daughter of Colum Donaghy.

  In my father’s face that was shut like a fist we saw the sick, choked rage. He would never speak of it. But sometimes he would say, “I hope they’re satisfied now. The bastards.” Meaning the boxing crowd. Gus Smith, too.

  The judges had ruled the LaStarza-Donaghy fight a draw. A draw! Sports reporters had given it to Donaghy, clearly he’d won six or seven rounds. He’d punched himself out by Round Ten, but by then LaStarza was finished, too. The referee, interviewed, said evasively it had been a close fight, and a fair decision. One of the judges was from Rochester, the others were from New York City. No one could discuss the fight with my father. Colum refused to be interviewed afterward. He refused to see a doctor. A few weeks later he moved out of his home to live downtown near the railroad yard and the gym and the bars. He had a very young girlfriend from Olean, he spoke of quitting boxing. He complained of headaches, blurred vision. Still he would not see a doctor. He worked part-time at the quarry. He reconciled with Carlotta, and moved back home. Evidently he wasn’t quitting boxing: Gus Smith signed him on for a fight in Syracuse, in September.

  After that night in the Buffalo Armory, I never saw Colum Donaghy again. Though I would see his picture in the papers and on TV often. Sometimes when my father came home I was wakened, and listened for what I could hear. There was always wind, wind from the north, from Canada and across Lake Ontario and the sound interfered with the sounds from my parents’ bedroom. My mother’s voice was anxious, lowered. “How could he, oh God. I can’t sleep thinking of it, I can’t believe it.” And my father’s voice was inaudible, his words were brief. My mother often cried. 1 wanted to think that my father comforted her then. As she’d comforted me when I’d been a little girl and had hurt myself in some childhood mishap. I wanted to think that my father held my mother in his strong, sinewy
arms like adults in movies, that they lay together in each other’s arms, and wept together.

  Mostly I heard silence. And beyond, the wind in the trees close about our house.

  “I never wanted you to know how close to the edge we were in those days, honey. See?”

  The edge. What was the edge?

  He made a cautious gesture with the back of his hand. Approaching the edge of the table. It was not the Formica-topped kitchen table at which Colum Donaghy had sat, decades ago. A newer table, sleek and still shiny, though my mother Lucy was not the one to sponge it down any longer.

  The edge of things, Daddy meant. The edge of civilization.

  At Christmas 1999, I went to visit my father in Yewville. He was living alone in the old house, stubborn and remote from his grown children. He lived in just two rooms, the upstairs was closed off, unheated.

  He was seventy-two. His life, he said, had rushed past him without his exactly knowing.

  He hadn’t voluntarily seen a doctor since my mother’s death nine years before, of cancer. He blamed the Yewville General Hospital for her death, or spoke as if he did. A malevolent they presided over such institutions. Goddamned bloodsuckers. A year before, he’d had a heart attack on the street and had been rushed to the emergency room of the very hospital that had killed his wife, he vowed he would never again return. He was subject to angina pains, he had bad knees, arthritic joints, yet he still smoked, and he drank ale by the case. He boasted to his children he kept “emergency medicine” in the house for his private use when things got bad. He would not be hooked up to machines as others had been. He would not be “experimented on” like a monkey. He laughed telling us these things, he gloated. Sometimes when we spoke of helping him sell the house and prepare for the future, he was furious with us, slammed down the phone receiver. But sometimes he listened attentively. It was “about time for an overhaul,” he conceded.