Million Dollar Baby

by F. X. Toole

  “Somethin died in me, too. When I was sixteen, I quit school and went to waitressin myself. Then I was a box girl at Shop ’n’ Save and part-time cashier. Only thing I was ever gonna git was burger-flippin jobs, I knew that.

  “I got a little stake together and moved around. I took karate for a time when I worked up Springfield, and I was good at it. I played baseball and basketball in the night leagues up Kansas City, where I was a security guard in a mall. And then I saw the gal fighters on TV, and I figured my luck had changed. Luck has a lot to do with things.”

  “It does.”

  “Frankie, I was wonderin,” Maggie said, her eyes squinting against the glare, “would you do me a favor?”

  “Anything at all, you know that.”

  “Favor bigger’n a tranny in a Peterbilt?”

  “Bigger than that, if you want it.”

  “Frankie,” she said, now looking him straight in the eye. “I want you to put me down like Daddy did Axel.”

  Frankie bent forward in his chair, felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “I’d die if I did that.”

  “I’ma dyin ever’ day. Now they’re talkin ’bout cuttin off my ulcerated leg. I know you can smell it.”

  Frankie nodded.

  “I’m gettin worse, boss,” she said, speaking in what seemed slow motion to Frankie. “I don’t wont to live on like this.”

  “Don’t ask me this. I love you.”

  “That’s why I’ma askin.”

  The next day she asked him again. “You’d do it for a dog.”

  “You’re not a dog. You’re my blood.”

  They remained silent for twenty-eight minutes.

  Frankie said, “You can’t give up hope. Even the doctors say—”

  She cut him off. “Ain’t no hope. I’m deadweight, can’t you see? Ain’t no insides to this body you’re lookin at. The bird in me can’t fly.”

  Frankie’s heart began to race, and he felt his face flush with blood and his mouth go dry. He had no answer for her. He’d die for Maggie, but he couldn’t kill her. He felt like a coward for the first time in his life. He tried to breathe normally but couldn’t. After a deep breath he heard her voice again, still in slow motion.

  “Night nurse makes her rounds at midnight, at two, at four, and at six. Quads like me is the first on her list. Takes her forty minutes, and then she’s back doin paperwork at her desk. You could come in while she’s busy. You could stick a Buck knife into my heart. I wouldn’t even feel it.”

  “Ah, God.”

  “I ain’t one to beg, Mr. Dunn,” she said, a little smile at the corner of her mouth. “But I’ma beggin.”

  Frankie covered his face with his hands and shook his head.

  “I understand,” she said.

  When Frankie returned the next day, the nurse told him he couldn’t visit Maggie.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  The doctor hurried in. “She’s been transferred to Cedars-Sinai in West Hollywood. She’s in Intensive Care.”

  “Why?”

  “She tried to commit suicide,” said the doctor.

  “How could she do that?, she can’t move!”

  “She bit off her tongue in an effort to bleed to death.”

  At Cedars Frankie was allowed to look in on her. What remained of her tongue was sutured and so swollen it protruded from her mouth. Frankie camped in the waiting room at Cedars, though Maggie was sedated most of the two weeks she was there.

  She was returned to Evergreen alert, but she was unable to speak. The nurses taught her to communicate with her eyes. To say Yes to a question, she was to blink her eyes twice slowly, then look away. To answer No, she learned to close her eyes and count to three before looking back at the person who was speaking.

  On the second day after she returned to rehab, Frankie asked if she was feeling better. She closed her eyes and counted to three. No.

  She opened her eyes and Frankie said, “Fightin Maggie Fitzgerald. God, I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

  She closed her eyes for a three-count. No.

  “’Tis,” said Frankie. “If only it had been me.”

  She closed her eyes for another three-count.

  “Ah, Christ,” said Frankie, swallowing hard to keep from losing control. “Isn’t there anything I can do at all, at all?”

  She blinked twice and looked away.

  Yes.

  She looked back at him and blinked twice again.

  Yes.

  Then she blinked nonstop, Yes-Yes-Yes-Yes-Yes-Yes!

  Frankie placed his hand over her eyes. He felt the flutter of her eyelashes as she continued to blink.

  Frankie squinted against the slanting sunlight as he climbed the steps of St. Brendan’s Roman Catholic Church like an old man. It was October 28, the Feast Day of St. Jude. Though it had been a typically hot autumn day for Southern California, a chill was now coming in off the nearby Pacific, where distant passing tankers, shrouded in fog, wailed. In his heart, Frankie Dunn was already doomed.

  In a few days it would be All Saints’ Day, a Holy Day of Obligation. Frankie hadn’t received the Eucharist since Maggie’s injury He felt gut-shot for staying away, his rage at God having ruined his faith like a drop of Monsell’s solution in an eyeball. He yearned for the sacred host, to taste its unleavened blandness, was not whole without it—feared he would never be whole again. He dreaded going to confession like this, a half confession, something he’d never done and something he knew would do him no good, not in his eyes and not in the eyes of God, not with God knowing what was in his heart. He hoped that Father Tim O’Gorman wouldn’t be the one hearing his confession; then he reversed himself and wished it would be Tim. Whoever the priest was, Frankie ached for absolution of all his sins, venial and mortal, but especially this mortal sin slithering through his soul.

  Flies bobbed and weaved in the heavy, open doorway that separated the outside light from the inside shadows. Frankie pushed through the flies, dipped his fingers into the cold marble basin containing holy water, and made the Sign of the Cross. His fingers trembled.

  He made his way down a side aisle to the tiered rows of votive candles in front of the shrine of St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. He lit five candles—one for his wife, whom he missed terribly; one for his parents, brothers, and sisters; one for his sons and daughters and grandchildren; one for his friends, dead and alive, though most were dead. And he lit one candle for his girl. He knelt, made the Sign of the Cross again, and prayed.

  “Intercede for me, Jude Thaddeus. Though I hate God, I ask for one impossible thing. That if it pleases God, I may be allowed to sleep again. I ask this, and only this, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” The incongruity of his hate for God and his kneeling in church was not lost on Frankie.

  It hurt his knees and back to stand. By now his eyes had adjusted to the diffused light, which filtered through the stained glass and swirled like tails of cats around the statues of the tortured Jesus, the agonized Mother, and the suffering saints. St. Brendan’s was an old church, one in which the smells of burning candles and incense were ever present. For Frankie it was a holy place, and he took solace from it, knowing that his torture was mirrored in the broken body of the crucified Christ.

  “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee … ”

  Father O’Gorman was the same age as Frankie. Still spry, shaped like a grape, he walked down the aisle as if he were wearing a derby.

  “Ah, Frank, lad, have you any stalwarts for me on the television?”

  “No, Father Tim. None.”

  Two penitents preceded Frankie—an old Italian gardener in his work clothes and a pregnant young black woman. Both were finished in minutes.

  Frankie entered one side of the confessional, closed the door behind him, and knelt. Father Tim, seated on the o
ther side of the partition, slid the solid grating aside and prepared to listen. He knew Frankie from childhood in Ireland. Both had been schooled by the hard Christian Brothers, both had played at the enormous Neolithic Proleek Dolmen near Dundalk. At nine Frankie had come to the States with his parents, in 1938. Father Tim arrived as a young priest in the early fifties. He had never lost his brogue. Frankie had lost his, having finished school in California. But when he was around the Micks, and hearing them talk, the brogue came back on him.

  Frankie could barely make out the dark figure of the round priest beyond the screen that separated them. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said. “It’s been a while since my last confession.”

  “Maybe more than a while, Frank?”

  “Yah, you’re right, Father. More.” He wondered if the priest could smell the drink on his breath.

  Frankie wanted to continue but couldn’t. The priest heard him choking on his words.

  “Nothin to say to me, at all, at all?” asked the priest.

  “I do, Tim. But only because a jar I have lifted.”

  “Ah,” said the priest, who himself was known to lift a jar. He waited the eternity of one whole minute before he spoke. “Go on, lad.”

  “I can’t.”

  “So terrible, is it?”

  “What I’m thinkin ’tis,” said Frankie, falling even deeper into the old way of talking.

  “So terrible you can’t talk at all?”

  “Ah, Tim, I murthered a girleen.”

  “Jaysus!” whispered O’Gorman, making the Sign of the Cross. “Jaysus, Mary, and St. Joseph, Frank, say you didn’t.”

  “I did. In me mind.”

  “Sure and we’re not speakin of a wee lass, are we now?”

  “Nah, Tim, nothin like that. You saw this one on the television with me.”

  “The one who fell?”

  “Aye … the one who fell.”

  “Are you tellin me she’s already dead, Frank?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then what?”

  “Tim, I don’t know. But I think I do, only I can’t say.”

  “Not even here?” asked the priest, gently, gently, feeling the doom Frankie felt. “You know you can’t do that, Frank.”

  “I know it, Father.”

  Frankie sat beside Maggie on the balcony. After his whispered hello, and Maggie’s double blink, he remained silent the whole of the afternoon, watching trees. He wanted to tell her that he’d do it, but he couldn’t tell her, because he wasn’t sure he could.

  She wanted to say that she had asked too much of him, and would have told him, but she had no tongue.

  At his one-room apartment off Venice Boulevard in Culver City, Frankie tossed off another shot of Jameson. He removed a fresh, one-ounce bottle of adrenaline chloride solution 1:1000 from the refrigerator, where he stored it to maintain its effectiveness. He twisted off the metal cap, the metal tearing with a snap, but he sat there awhile before doing anything else. On the Formica-topped table was an old-style, glass-and-metal army-surplus hypodermic needle he’d taken from his gear bag. He’d used it maybe a dozen times to inject procaine into the crushed knuckles and fractured metacarpals of fighters so they could make a fight. He’d also used adrenaline more than a hundred times to stop blood from cut eyes, saving fights and even careers of bleeding fighters. And he knew what else adrenaline chloride could do.

  He placed the syringe and detachable needle into a clean nine-inch Pyrex pie plate and was about to pour alcohol over them. He would light the alcohol afire to sterilize the instruments. He caught himself, then set the bottle of alcohol aside. There was no need to sterilize.

  He drew the entire contents of the little brown bottle of adrenaline into the calibrated barrel of the syringe. Once it was loaded, he placed it back in its polished, stainless steel case. He put the case into the inside pocket of his navy-blue windbreaker in an upright position, so the adrenaline wouldn’t leak. Dressed in dark clothes, he drove his old Ford to Evergreen, arriving in the parking lot with his headlights out at 1:50 A.M.

  Frankie prayed he wouldn’t be noticed. When he saw the night nurse move along the long hallway at two o’clock, going first to Maggie’s room at the end of the wing, then working her way back toward the desk, he crept into the building and up the front stairs. He hid in a broom closet, leaving the door slightly ajar. When he saw the nurse move past on her way to the other wing, Frankie took off his shoes and tiptoed down the hall and into Maggie’s room.

  A pale night-light was on. Frankie moved to the table next to Maggie’s bed and put his shoes on the floor. Maggie’s ventilator was on, but she wasn’t hooked to a monitor. Frankie took his works from his pocket and saw that none of the adrenaline had leaked. He looked finally over to Maggie, whom he expected to be asleep. He was met by two eyes staring at him.

  Maggie blinked twice. Frankie nodded and blinked twice as well.

  He moved as quickly and as deftly as a surgeon, knowing that if he stopped to consider what he was doing he might not be able to do it at all, at all. He leaned close to Maggie, whose eyes were now closed.

  “Mo cuishle.”

  Maggie looked up and smiled, then frowned as they both heard the nurse approaching in her sensible shoes. Frankie held his breath and stood behind the door as the nurse looked in. Maggie looked at the nurse, who didn’t find it unusual that Maggie was awake.

  “Are you alone?” asked the nurse in a whisper.

  Yes.

  “Do you smell whiskey?”

  No.

  “Funny, thought I smelled it in the hall. Did you hear anything?”

  No.

  “Oh, well,” said the nurse, who returned to her station, which was some forty paces from Maggie’s room.

  Maggie looked to Frankie, who bent to kiss her on the cheek.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered in her ear. “First I’m going to put you to sleep. Then I’ll give you a shot.”

  Yes.

  Frankie stood behind her so he wouldn’t have to see her face. He firmly pressed his thumbs to both sides of Maggie’s neck, cutting off the blood flow to her brain at the carotid arteries. In a few seconds, Maggie’s eyes closed and her mouth came open. Oxygen from the vent escaped and became part of the whirlwind inside Frankie’s head. He stood pressing for three minutes, long enough to give himself the time he needed.

  Frankie looked at her, had to choke back a howl. But he still pried her mouth open the width of three fingers, and injected the contents of the hypodermic needle beneath the stub of Maggie’s tongue. The adrenaline, all thirty milliliters of it, was enough to kill a dragon, but Frankie knew it would dissipate in Maggie’s system shortly after being injected. Should there be an autopsy, the tiny spot where the needle had entered would not to be noticed. But even if it were, the adrenaline would never be detected.

  Frankie quickly placed the syringe back in its case and returned it to his inside pocket. Now he was calm, the same calm he’d felt in his toughest fights. He checked Maggie’s pulse. It raced faster than a speed bag. Then the stroke hit her and her face contorted, one eye sagging open.

  The brief shadow of a bird’s wing sped high across the far wall and passed through the glass of the domed window. Frankie closed the eye with the tip of his finger, made sure Maggie’s pulse was still with his thumb. With his shoes in his hand but without his soul, he moved silently down the rear stairs and was gone, his eyes as dry as a burning leaf.

  Fightin in Philly

  “WE GOTTA TURN THIS African to his left,” the cut man repeated to himself on the plane into Philadelphia. “We fix him so he can’t set, big S.O.B. can’t punch.”

  Stick and move and turn him, that was their strategy. The African could hit, so make him go opposite to what he was used to; fight him low and from the side, angles; turn him, make him miss, and tire him. Take his power away and then you take his belt.

  The cut man was a slick old white man, was Con Flutey. He had white hair and wo
re trifocals. He was in the fight game because of the beauty of it, a game where old men could still go to war. It was in his bones, the fight game. He’d been in it a long time. He’d been in the game of living a long time, too, and there were parts of himself that were so different from the other parts that he could not understand how they could all be in his one self. But there they were, and though the disparate parts often surprised him, he’d come to enjoy the merry-go-round that was his soul. What else was he to do?

  Besides, the older he got, the more things made sense, the more they connected, even though in recent years he wasn’t able to train fighters the way he used to—couldn’t work with them on how to move because of his legs, couldn’t catch their punches with the mitts because of what it did to his back. Now he taught young ones theory, and some seasoned pros, too—angles and distance; how to shove off their back foot to move forward, how to shove off the front to go back; balance and how to pivot off their front foot, off the back, and why, and how to fight moving backward; how the ass moves before the hands when you punch and how the hook to the body looks like it comes off the front foot, but like the hook to the head, it comes off the back; and breathing, always breathing. And thinking, always.

  So there he was. He stood on the lovely Ben Franklin Parkway and delighted in all the international flags fluttering against the green of early spring. After Old Glory, the South African flag was his favorite. He didn’t like the orange in the tricolor of Ireland—orange had no space in his Irish heart. Up the way was the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the steps Sylvester Stallone as “Rocky” ran up, the music of the soundtrack pushing him on, ennobling him. The trouble was that Stallone couldn’t spell fight.