Rope Burns - [SSC]

by F. X. Toole

  “Welcome to boxing,” Frankie said.

  “Will she be all right?” Maggie said.

  “Probably. But what if she ain’t?”

  “Guess she’ll hafta git herself a ol’ hairy leg and have a batch of kids,” she answered. Having said it, she saw herself at thirteen standing barefoot in the dirt in a faded little dress, impetigo spreading across her face. “Naw, I don’t mean that.”

  Now her record was 18 and 3, with 8 knockouts, and Frankie was getting her eighteen hundred a fight. She was beginning to get attention in the media, and several articles about her had appeared in the fight magazines. But other managers became afraid to put their girls in with Maggie, not wanting to risk their fighter’s record for the short money the small-time promoters could afford to pay. So Frankie sweetened the pot on his own, pulling cash from his savings account to pay as much as three thousand dollars extra to the other girl through the promoter. Maggie’s record became 19 and 3, with 9 knockouts, which was less than a 50 percent kayo ratio. But her record with Frankie was 10 and 0, with eight opponents being counted out, a knockout ratio of 80 percent.

  “Let me pay at least half of what you gotta pay,” she said.

  “Nah, I’ll get mine back. Quit your job.”

  They took an eight-round fight in London for eight thousand dollars, and two thousand in training expenses. They were on the undercard of a featherweight title fight, and for the event Frankie had a new outfit made for Maggie, the green so pale it was almost white and would sparkle under the lights. On her shorts, in kelly-green Celtic lettering, was MAGGIE. On the back of her robe was a gold Irish harp. Above the harp, in kelly-green Celtic lettering trimmed in gold, was the Gaelic MO cuishle. Frankie had her wear the robe at the weigh-in, and when the Irish press saw it, news of her immediately went on Irish TV and into the newspapers. The English media followed, and the Irish living in England filled the stadium. Frankie had pipers in kilts escort her to the ring at fight time, and the crowd was chanting Ma-cush-la! Ma-cush-la!

  The fight was shown in the States on Wide World of Sports, and Maggie stopped her opponent—a tough Jamaican girl in dreadlocks with a record of fourteen straight knockouts—on cuts in the sixth. When Maggie got back to Los Angeles, all the TV stations wanted her for interviews. Her price went up, and Frankie got her fights in Vegas and Atlantic City for fifty thousand dollars, which was more than most top male contenders were getting. Now all the promoters had pipers march Maggie to the ring. The Irish, who had laid low for so long, began to strut. Based on her last two wins, one of them by knockout, Frankie signed a conditional contract with a New York promoter for two 10-round fights in Madison Square Garden. For the first fight Maggie would get an unprecedented seventy-five thousand. If she won that fight, the purse would be a hundred thousand for the second. Irish fight fans from Boston filled chartered trains down to New York.

  Maggie’s first New York opponent hit the canvas in the fourth. The other quit in her corner after eight. The headlines on the sports page of The New York Times read MACUSHLA FIRST MILLION $$$ BABY?

  Another offer for the title came from Atlantic City, but Frankie turned it down because of the money split.

  “No way we’re takin less than the champ,” said Frankie. “We’re the draw, not that Russian kraut, whatever she is.”

  Frankie and Maggie were putting money in the bank. And now all the managers of all girl fighters everywhere, because of the big money Maggie generated, wanted to fight her. Frankie knew she could beat them. But by then they’d been working together almost three years, and he also knew that time was running out for Maggie, that her body could only take so much punishment. Her brothers and sisters were writing and calling for money. She began sending five hundred dollars a month to her mother, Earline. Between fights, Frankie went with her back to Missouri, where she bought and furnished a comfortable, two-bedroom brick house for her mother as a surprise.

  “But how’ll I get welfare and my food stamps?” said Earline.

  “Can’t you and Roxanne git a job?”

  “Your sis and me watch late movies and sleep too late for that.”

  “Then sell the damn house.”

  “Can you spare a little cash, honey?”

  “Here’s two hundred,” said Maggie.

  “When you come home next time, leave your boyfriend behind.”

  “Mama, what have you become?”

  ~ * ~

  She fought in Johannesburg and Paris. Frankie had taught her to stick and move, to rip and tear, to keep her opponents out at the end of her punches, instead of letting them get in close. Both girls quit in the corner. From Paris, she went to Dublin, where she sparred with three girls-—two rounds each—in an exhibition to raise money for Ireland’s amateur boxing program. The lord mayor proclaimed it Maggie Macushla Day and gave her the key to the city. The streets were packed with cheering fans.

  “Money in the bank,” said Frankie.

  Though Frankie now devoted much of his time to Maggie, he never shorted his other fighters, working with them daily and traveling with them when they had fights out of town. Jet lag killed him, but he was always back at the gym the next day. His fighters, eager as baby birds, never knew how tired he was. Girls from as far as Brazil showed up wanting Frankie to train and manage them.

  “I’ll split the money fifty-fifty,” they’d offer. One of them offered a seventy-thirty split and showed him nude photos of herself, the implication clear.

  “I know you won’t understand,” Frankie would tell them, “but I don’t train girl fighters.”

  More than one called him a male chauvinist pig.

  When Maggie’s ten-round title fight with Astrakhov was finally made, it was to be held at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, and to be shown on HBO. Frankie negotiated a two-fight deal that gave $225,000 to Maggie. If Maggie won that fight, the contract for the second title fight, against an unnamed opponent, stipulated that she’d get $500,000.

  For the Mirage fight, the champ Astrakhov would get $125,000, or $75,000 more than she’d ever got before. The champ was outraged that she got the short end and vowed revenge for the insult.

  Frankie knew that Maggie only had two, maybe three more title fights in her. For sure he wanted her to be the first Million Dollar Baby, wanted her to be somebody before she hung up her gloves, so she’d always be somebody afterward.

  “You’ll be quittin, too, won’t you, boss?” Maggie asked.

  “Nah. I’d miss the stink.”

  Billy “the Blue Bear” Astrakhov was a big-busted, masculine-looking Russian girl living in Hamburg, who grew a faint mustache and dated fashion models. A former Moscow prostitute, she paraded herself in white tuxedos and lavender ties. She was a banger who waded in winging shots from all angles, and she’d been easily beating girls from Berlin to Australia. Considered the dirtiest fighter in the female ranks, she was known to head-butt and throw elbows. She was a big draw in Germany. Her favorite trick was to get inside and jam the palm of her glove into her opponent’s nose, breaking it. That she might kill them didn’t worry her. She promised to knock Maggie out.

  “After I vip her,” she said at the weigh-in, grinning and winking at Maggie, “I take her to my room. On a leash.”

  Maggie was asked to comment.

  “I’ll break her down like a Winchester and clean both her barrels.”

  ~ * ~

  Billy wore a Russian fur hat and was dressed in an electric-blue outfit with bright bolts of red-and-purple lightning down each sleeve. She took the hat off to reveal a polished shaved head and clowned confidently around the ring, flexing her arms and smiling to the crowd. Maggie, in her pale green, was iridescent under the colored lights. Slightly flushed, she had broken a sweat in the dressing room and stood in the corner serious and hard.

  The Irish were everywhere, different groups of them breaking out in Irish songs. The haunting sound of bagpipes filled the indoor arena.

  “Box her,” Frankie said. “Stick that jab s
traight into her big tits till they turn blue and fall off.”

  The way Frankie sang his war song made Maggie smile. “Now you ain’t sorry you saved this ol’ hillbilly gal, are you, boss?”

  Frankie kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “Macushla, you’re my blood. Now go out there and kick the shit out of her.”

  The bell rang, and the Bear charged across the ring throwing a right-lead haymaker. Maggie slipped under it and, stepping to her left, drilled the Bear with her own right hand to the gut. It was a little low for the sweet spot of the solar plexus, but the Bear still went down gasping for air. The crowd was standing up and cheering, but at the count of nine the Bear got up, too.

  “Tough bitch,” Frankie said to one of the seconds he’d brought in from Los Angeles.

  “Bulldaggers be tough.”

  Maggie hurt Billy twice more with combinations, but the Bear grabbed and held and made it through the round.

  Because of the metal legs, Frankie had trouble shoving the heavy corner stool beneath the lowest strand of ropes but had it ready when Maggie got to the corner. He watered and greased her and admonished her to fight from the outside. When the bell rang, the cut man took the stool from Frankie and set it where Frankie could sit on it to watch the fight from ringside.

  The bell for the second round rang, and Maggie fired her jabs. Billy continued to grab and hold, in an attempt to turn the match into a brawl and thereby switch the momentum of the fight back to herself. But Maggie was too slick for her, and kept drilling her with jabs and left uppercuts that kept Billy back on her heels. Billy missed so often that she was gasping as much from missing as from the punches Maggie landed. Billy caught Maggie with an elbow but missed when she tried to jam her palm into Maggie’s nose. Maggie continued to work on her from the outside, shooting her jab to Billy’s breasts like she was ramming her with the end of a two-by-four. The Blue Bear caved at the waist and grunted in pain.

  In the third round Maggie’s jab had Billy off-balance and stumbling, allowing Maggie to dart in with combinations to the head and body. Billy went down from a one-two-hook combination. Frankie thought Billy had been hurt badly enough to stay down. Since it was a title fight, there was no mandatory eight-count, and after five she was right back in Maggie’s face.

  Billy grabbed Maggie and tried to throw her to the canvas. The referee warned her that he’d start taking points away if she kept it up, but Billy didn’t give a shit and cursed him in Russian. She stepped on Maggie’s foot and tried to shove Maggie down again. When Maggie was still off-balance, Billy caught her with an elbow the ref didn’t see and cut Maggie’s left eye slightly. The real damage was to the tissue around the eye, which caused it to puff up. Frankie’s cut man had no trouble stopping the blood, but his ice packs and his ice-cold metal stop-swell did nothing to keep the swelling down, and the eye threatened to close completely.

  Frankie told Maggie to go out in the fourth firing, to try for a knockout, because he was afraid the eye would close and the ref would stop the fight. She nailed Billy repeatedly, but Billy stayed up and continued to head-butt. The ref took points away and warned her. Billy would give a fake apology and then go right back to her dirty ways. Between rounds, Maggie complained of blurry vision. She also told Frankie she didn’t know how to counter Billy’s dirty tactics. Frankie illegally flooded her eye with Visine, and when she said she still couldn’t see, he told her she only needed one eye to fight.

  “Okay, but what I do about the Bear?” said Maggie.

  “You know how to step outside her right hand, and go to the liver with a left hook, right?”

  “Been doin that. She’s made of steel.”

  “Not for fookin long,” said Frankie. “This time, instead of goin for the liver, I want you to go to the right cheek of her big dyke ass with your left hook, stick it into her sciatic nerve like a dagger, and keep on stickin it.”

  “What if the ref sees me?”

  “Keep the bull bitch between you and him, and he won’t. And keep on stickin into that degenerate ass. Got it?”

  “You betcha.”

  Near the end of the fifth, Billy’s right leg was dragging and white with pain. Exhausted, she went to one knee for a voluntary eight-count in an attempt to regain her strength and to relieve the pain. It was a good sign, but Frankie was still worried about Maggie’s eye, afraid it might close like a clamshell and cost her the title shot.

  By the time Billy got up, Maggie’s vision still hadn’t cleared completely, but she kept the pressure on. She jumped the Russian with combinations that had her head wobbling and the crowd on its feet. The ref was about to stop the fight, when the bell rang.

  Maggie had thrown four solid shots in the middle of the ring, all of them landing, and was about to finish Billy off with a left hook to the jaw, but on hearing the bell, she was able to catch herself. Instead of letting the shot go, in an instant she turned to her right, looked with her good eye to see Frankie pushing the ring stool under the rope, and dropped both her hands.

  Billy had been ready to throw a righthand at the bell. But instead of holding back like Maggie had, and knowing that Maggie couldn’t see properly out of her left eye, she stepped in and ripped a right that caught Maggie on the left ear.

  Since Maggie was moving away, the force of the blow was lessened. But it was hard enough, landing where it did, to affect Maggie’s inner ear. Suddenly, her equilibrium gone, the ring was a roller-coaster, and she felt like she was stepping into post holes. Though she was fully conscious, her legs began to snap and buckle. She’d never been knocked off her feet, and her mind and body rebelled at the idea of hitting the canvas.

  Frankie, busy with the stool, hadn’t seen what happened and looked over just as Maggie had begun to stumble toward him, her legs like rubber bands.

  “Jaysus!”

  He took a step, but Maggie’s legs gave out before he could catch her. Falling like deadweight, she plunged past his outstretched arms. Trying to prevent her damaged eye from hitting the canvas, Maggie wrenched her body in an attempt to break the fall by taking it on her side and shoulders. But she twisted too hard, and the back of her neck came down full force on the metal band of the ring stool, her neck breaking at the first and second vertebrae, the sound of it like a boot squashing a snail.

  “No!” Frankie cried, watching as she slumped to her side.

  Ring doctors rushed to her as Frankie stretched her flat on the canvas. She had stopped breathing.

  At all fights in the major boxing states, a fully equipped ambulance and crew stand ready. The doctors immediately called for a stretcher, and Maggie was carried out at a run. The crowd was silent, the pipers numb. Billy stood stock-still, the sweat on her going cold as her pale eyes.

  At the ambulance, Maggie was hooked to an Ambu-bag and air was squeezed into her flat lungs just before the four-minute time limit that would have meant brain damage.

  As oxygen reached her brain, she mumbled, “I love you, Daddy,” but remained unconscious.

  Several hours later, specialists at the hospital announced that Maggie was in ICU and had not regained consciousness.

  Frankie lied, said he was her grandfather. “Can she breathe on her own yet?”

  “No.”

  “Is there damage to her spinal cord?” Frankie asked, pressing.

  “It’s too soon.”

  ~ * ~

  “I’m a C-1 and C-2 complete, boss,” Maggie said. She was gaunt and sallow and the spunk in her was gone. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark and lifeless. “That means my spinal cord’s so bad they never can fix me.”

  She’d been nine days in a coma. They’d kept her doped-up to keep her head immobile for two weeks after that. Because of her MRI and other tests, her neurologists determined that she was a permanent, vent-dependent quadriplegic unable to breathe without a respirator. As a C-1 and C-2, she was injured at the first and second cervical vertebrae, which meant she could talk and slightly move her head, but that was all. She had lost
the ability to breathe on her own, to move her limbs. She could not control her bladder or her bowel movements. She’d be frozen the rest of her life.

  It took several hours every day to get her ready for the wheelchair, to check the tubes into her bladder, her stomach, and through the front of her neck. After stretching and manipulating her arms and legs, her attendants would lift her into the wheelchair, where she’d be strapped in. Her bed respirator would be switched for the one built into the wheelchair. Since she couldn’t breathe on her own, her bed and wheelchair respirators would always be on Control rather than on Assist—Control meant oxygen was pumped into her twenty-four hours a day.

  Because of complications, she remained in Las Vegas two months. She had no appetite but maintained her weight because of the calories they fed her through the stomach tube. She developed skin ulcers because she couldn’t change positions and the skin broke down. Her lungs filled with fluid and had to be pumped out when pneumonia struck. There were blood clots in her legs and problems with hemoglobin. To induce a daily bowel movement, she was placed on her side and pressure was applied to her lower abdomen until her waste was pushed out of her. She was humiliated every day of her life.