Wind kicked up from the west, blowing grit across the fields. The pickers bundled up in scarves and tattered parkas; one drew a pair of ski goggles down over his eyes.
He dragged his body down the rows, arms and legs and joints aching, socks glued to his feet with blood and burst blisters. He emptied his bucket into a hopper and stumbled back into the field, momentarily relieved from the constant burden at his hip. But soon the bucket filled and though he felt his will deserting he pushed on, whiting out his mind, thinking not of pain or relief or other options.
Didn't every organism by nature seek the easiest pathway to survival? Then what of the organism reared in an environment without predators or obstacles, its every need provided? Paul pictured a flabby boneless creature, shapeless, as soft and raw as the spot under a picked scab.
In some religions it was a sin for a man to die without the knowledge of how much suffering he could endure.
When the sun dipped behind the pines of the escarpment, Paul carted his final bucket to the hopper. His shoes were ruined, his pants caked in mud. He became aware of the powerful funk of his body and relished that smell.
The pickers sat around a fire stoked in the rusted rim of an old tractor tire. An urn of coffee perked on a charred grill above the flames and one of them poured Paul's measure into a beaten tin cup. They sat in the lengthening twilight enclosed by flat autumn fields. The coffee was so strong it stung his gums where they no longer moored teeth. He gave the toque back to the young man who'd lent it, then took the
Ray Bans from his shirt pocket and handed them over too. It no longer concerned him who saw his pulped eye or busted mouth.
He waved goodnight and set off across the cool evening rows. Reaching the winery he found the doors locked. Callie and his father had gone home for the night.
Paul keyed the BMW's ignition and pulled onto the road. He drove past orchards and sod farms and cows sleeping along barbed-wire fences. For a two-mile stretch all light vanished as he drove under a moonless sky. The eyes of feral night creatures flashed in roadside gullies.
He drove on across a one-lane bridge spanning the QEW, over the isolated headlights of travelers driving south into the city, a trail of taillights twisting north to Toronto. The heater's warmth restored feeling to his fingers.
Driving too fast, Paul slewed into the shale of the breakdown lane. He tromped the brake pedal but the front end slid over the culvert and slammed into an iced-over ditch. The airbag deployed: a moon-white zit exploding into his face.
Paul sat with his face buried in the silken skin of the airbag. Something was burning, wiring most likely, the smell like a blazing iron scorching linen. He considered going to sleep: the airbag made a comfortable enough pillow. But then he considered the possibility of a ruptured gas tank, pictured a greasy orange fireball billowing into the night.
He gave the door a boot and stepped out. His loafers slipped in the ditch. He went down on his ass, cracking his head on the doorframe. He sat in the frozen mud with his feet in ditch water. A rime of ice slashed his trousers and cut into the backs of his calves. The air reeked of engine coolant. The BMW's grille butted a patch of crushed cattails.
Craning his neck, he saw amidst the cattails the squat outline of the tree stump that had decimated his car. He had no means of calling for a tow truck and felt mildly regretful for having garburated his cellphone.
On the other side of the ditch lay a cornfield. He recalled a movie where the characters walked into a cornfield and into new life. It was a pleasant thought. To become something else, a whole new person. No money or name or past or worries or hunger—a solitary wanderer upon the country's heat-shimmered highways, its open-topped boxcars filled with chicken feed and baled pulp, its slashes of wilderness, its lightning storms and lost spaces. He'd befriend a dog with two- tone eyes and together they could fight small-town corruption....
Then it dawned on him what a stupid notion it was. Walk into a cornfield and vanish. Ride the rails with a crime-fighting dog. What was he, an idiot?
He hauled himself from the ditch. It couldn't be more than a few degrees above freezing. He considered the possibility of dying somewhere along this isolated country lane. He pictured some gormless dirt farmer coming across his body tomorrow morning: Paul Harris in his dirt-caked suit and two-hundred-dollar loafers, frozen stiff in mid-stride with a rigor-mortis boner tenting his trousers. Ole Popsicle Paul Harris with a snot icicle hanging from his schnozz.
Shoving his hands deep in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, he set off. He had only a vague notion of how far it might be. But, if not resigned to his fate, he was at least accepting of whatever it might hold.
Chapter 3
Robert Tully woke in the cool exhaust-scented morning. He reached blindly for clothes he'd laid out the evening before, laced his sneakers with sleep-clumsy fingers. Coming downstairs, he misjudged the second-to-last step and stubbed his toe, cursing softly. Water pipes clattered behind the thin walls. The small bedroom off the kitchen was empty: his uncle was either pulling an all-nighter at the Fritz or already at Top Rank. He pulled a sweatshirt off its hook in the front hall, tugging the hood over his head and cinching the drawstrings.
A clear fall morning, air thick with a silvery chemical smell borne down from the SGL Carbon plant along Hyde Park Boulevard. He ran north on 24th, past abandoned shopping carts and junked cars with garbage bags taped over shattered windows, old tires and cast-off water tanks rusting in the weeds. He juked around spots where the sidewalk buckled and lapped, on past bodegas with ads for Wonder Bread and menthol Kents taped to bulletproof windows and stores without names: just neon signs blinking L-l-Q-u-o-R.
He turned west on Pine Avenue, warming up, perspiration beading on his forehead and below his eyes. At the corner of Pine and Portage a wrecker's crane sat immobile on the remnants of a pizza joint shut by the health authority. Always plenty of demolition going on: buildings torn down and rubble carted away, but nothing new ever put up. Empty lots dotted the streets and avenues, lifeless but for the profusion of weeds. It was as though a consortium of concerned citizens was buying up the neighborhood, bulldozing the homes and shops, sterilizing one block at a time in hopes that someday they might start over fresh.
Robert had a good sweat going by the time he hit Main. Running on the wet grass bordering the sidewalk, shadowboxing, flashing quick left jabs and the occasional right cross. Cars and trucks fled by on the double-lane road, people heading to work at factories or outlet malls. In the early light he made out the Rainbow Bridge as a harp of steel and concrete spanning the surging river.
He rested for a minute at the Niagara Aquarium. Ptarmigans had built nests on outcrops along the river's sheer cliff face, cobbled together from sedge grass and foil burger jackets and neon drinking straws. Closer to the falls, on the Canadian side, a sandy inlet known as Long Point sat hemmed by spidery oak trees. Rob's uncle Tommy said that back in 1858, steamboats filled with thugs, thieves, gunmen, and other so-called sportsmen crossed the river in the dead of night to watch John C. Heenan and John Morrissey fight for the American championship. They fought at Long Point since, ironically, boxing was banned in America at the time. Heenan—"The Sapulpa Plasterer"—the champ, suffered from a festering leg ulcer, which bellied the hopes of Morrissey and his backers. They fought bareknuckle, hands soaked in walnut juice to toughen the skin. The ring was pitched in the shifting sands and the men fought twenty-eight rounds. Morrissey flattened Heenan with an uppercut to open the twenty-ninth, knocking him cold; administering the quietus, as sportswriters of the day might've written. Rob's uncle showed him an artist's rendering of the fight: Morrissey with his wilted handlebar mustache and upraised arms, Heenan's face like a savage tomato cradled in the arms of his seconds while spectators in stovepipe hats and dueling jackets seethed outside the ring, brandishing pistols and daggers and clubs. A Brutal Close to the Heenan-Morrissey Mill, the caption read.
Rob continued south down Main, past boarded shopfronts and d
usty antique stores, peepshow theaters with opaque windows and nightclubs advertising DRINK ALL NITE FOR ONE LOW PRICE. The sun rose over the falls, lighting the spume; it looked like the sparkling space above fresh-poured soda.
Top Rank was located in the basement of Shaw's Discount Furnishings. You will rarely find a ground-level boxing club: they're always in basements and refurbished cellars, dank subterranean chambers where men gather to study the edicts of hurt. No sign above the entryway: unless you were a boxer, knew a boxer, or paused to consider the procession of sweaty men who came and went at all hours of the day, you'd have no idea of its existence.
Rob skipped lightly down the littered concrete stairs, walking beneath exposed joists and sewage pipes padded with strips of unraveling friction tape. The walls were hung with photos of famous and not-so-famous pugilists: Ali and Holmes and Liston hung beside unknown warriors Jackson Buff, Chuck "The Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner, Mushy Callahan, Chief Danny Thunderheart.
The place was quiet at this hour of morning: a few groggy boxers shuffled around the slick concrete floor. Sickles of sunlight poured through the cracked casement windows, picking up a patina of dust motes suspended in the air. Heavybags hung like slabs of meat. A black welterweight shadowboxed in the glow of a single fluorescent tube.
Rob's uncle Tommy was getting dressed in the change room.
A few years ago, Rob went through a phase where he'd read a ton of hard-boiled detective novels. Anytime a "goon" character was introduced—a not-so-bright kneecapper with "the rough dimensions of an icebox"—Rob pictured his uncle. But seeing as how outside of a boxing ring Tommy exhibited a docility that verged on pathological, the only true similarities were physical. The story of Tommy's long and not particularly successful career was written all over his face: buckle-nosed and egg-eared, his left eyelid dropping from a dead nerve to give him the look of a man caught in perpetual half-wink. A face hard enough to blunt an ax, the gym bums said of it.
"Morning, lazybones."
"Lazybones?" Rob peeled a sweat-soaked shirt over his head to reveal a muscle-corded torso. "You weren't anywhere to be seen when I got up—all-nighter at the Fritz?"
"I was on a roll, Robbie. Then I pushed all my chips in on a pair of ladies when the other guy's holding kings." Tommy shook his head. "Gotta get your money in on ladies, am I right?"
Robert slipped into gym togs and stabbed his feet into boxing boots. A gloom fell over him, as it so often did at this time in the morning; a gloom brought about by the knowledge that while his schoolmates slept in warm beds he would soon step into the ring to get his nose bloodied and lips split, bashing away at some opponent until the bell rang.
Tommy said, "I thought maybe you would be tired, y'know, from staying out late with ole Katey-pie."
"You know it's not like that. We're friends."
"Friends, uh? That what you kids're calling it nowadays?"
"Who're you sparring with?" Rob said.
"Our boy wants to change the subject, I see." Tommy finished wrapping his hands, butted his fists together, rose to the sink. "Louie Scarpella, heavyweight from Buffalo. Trainer wants to work his guy against a flatfooted grinder and thought I fit the bill. You imagine that, Robbie? He says it to my face." Tommy rubbed his pancaked nose with a closed fist, pinched one nostril shut and blew a string of snot into the basin. "Right to my face like that."
"So go knock his guy's block off."
"You know that's not how it works. My job's to give Scarpella a lift—raise his spirits. I knock him on his ass, his trainer holds out on my fee."
Tommy twisted the spigot and rinsed the sink. He stared at his reflection and blinked, as if somehow surprised at the man he caught staring back. He drove a Bobcat model 13E tow-motor at the Niagara Industrial Park, a string of corrugated tin warehouses off Highway 62A. His fellow workers were fat and balding, high school heroes gone to seed. During piss breaks, standing at the long line of porcelain urinals, Tommy's nose would wrinkle at a smell that, to him, indicated dire maladies: prostate trouble, gallstones, urinary infection, sick excretions from old bodies. It drove him to the point where he'd pissed in a Dixie cup and sniffed, making sure it wasn't his own sickness he was smelling.
Tommy had boxed since the age of ten. He grew up in the gym. He loved every part of it: the training and roadwork, the sparring, the fight. He was getting older and his body didn't react the way it used to. His mind told him what moves to make but his reflexes couldn't follow through. But he trained hard and kept in fighting shape to take a match on short notice—because, hey, you just never knew.
"How many rounds you getting in?" Rob asked him.
"Five." Tommy wiped his fingers on his gray trunks. "Unless Scarpella punches himself out before that."
"He that out of shape?"
"I'll keep it light; drag it out to four, at least."
Tommy's professional record was 28-62-7. It once stood at 22-1, belted out against tomato cans handpicked by his brother and manager, Reuben, Rob's father. He'd fought in local clubs throughout the state and across state lines in Akron, Scranton, Hartford. His only big-money fight had been at Madison Square Garden, on the under- card of the Holmes-Cooney tilt in '83. Tommy squared off against Sammy "Night Train" Layne, a slippery southpaw from east Philly; Tommy's shove-and-slug style, effective against unskilled biffers, was badly exposed by the ducking and weaving Layne. By the end of the eleventh round Tommy's face was cut into ribbons, a severed artery above his left eye bringing forth blood in spurts. After that matchmakers lost interest and Reuben had a rough time lining up fights.
From there Tommy turned into a trial horse, the sort of workman who'll take a stiff belt without folding. A good horse will give you ten solid rounds but never pose a serious threat to a contender. Tommy was in demand due to his rep as a bleeder: by the end of a fight he was a mess and his opponents came off looking like executioners. Until a mandatory pre-fight CAT scan showed a blood vessel had snapped inside his head. The NY boxing commission revoked its sanctioning license, citing medical unfitness.
Reuben Tully poked his head into the change room. Squat and potbellied, he was the polar opposite of his younger brother. He wore a rumpled button-down shirt and snap-brim hat; his short hair was shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian internment camp.
"What's this, social hour?" Reuben banged a fist on the lockers, set the brass locks jumping. "Ass in gear, Robbie. And Tommy, that big shitkicker from Buffalo's waiting."
"Tell him to hold his water." Tommy snapped off a few ponderous jabs and smiled over at his nephew. "Time to make the donuts."
Rob rose to the sink and studied his face hemmed by a red hood: unbroken nose, forehead peppered with acne, eyes of such pale blue his father joked they must be unscrewed nightly and soaked in bleach. Some days he felt handsome, or at least that he was working his way toward it. Yet he knew he was one hard punch away from a busted nose or split brow or knocked-out tooth. No way you can eat leather round after round and expect to keep your looks.
Fruit bats squeaked and fluttered in the dark roost between locker- room ceiling and furniture-store floor. Rob stared down at his hands: thick and calloused, joints swollen from all the rough treatment. Old man's hands. He was only sixteen, but at times felt years older.
"Robbie!"
"Keep your shirt on," he whispered to the mirror. Then: "Coming!"
Top Rank lit up now, vapor tubes popping and fritzing as they warmed. Three huge ceiling fans with oarlike blades stirred stale air around. A pair of middleweights skipped before a long mirror. Beyond them a young Mexie straw-weight performed burpees with a fifteen-pound medicine ball. A two-hundred-pound anvil with the words THAT BITCH painted on its side sat beside him; boxers in a dick-swinging mood occasionally goaded each other, "Go on—lift that bitch!"
The gym was dominated by its ring: twenty feet by twenty feet and enclosed by sagging red ropes. The canvas stank of blood and sweat; to the best of anyone's knowledge it had not been replaced in
thirty years. Spitbuckets were strapped to opposite ring posts: wide-mouthed funnels attached to flexible PVC hose trailing down to five-gallon drums once containing oleo lard. The walls were hung with cobwebbed Golden Gloves belts and framed photos of young boxers who now made their living as plumbers or foremen or short-order cooks. Handwritten signs rife with misspellings: CLUB DEWS MUST BE PAID AT THE START of the MONTH!!! CLUB TOWULS ARE FOR SWET ONLY, not BLOOD!!! use lockers at own risk—not responsibul for LOST gear!!!
Written above the wall-length mirror in neat block letters:
WE ARE EDUCATED IN PAIN.
Top Rank was operated by a consortium of managers and trainers— Reuben Tully was one of them—who collected dues to pay the rent and sent whatever was left over to an absentee landlord in Boca Raton. In exchange for this stewardship, they were given free rein to train their own prospects.
The club office was a glassed-in cube accessible by a short flight of stairs. Its door split horizontally and opened in two portions; the trainers hung out up there and kept the top portion open so that they could holler directions at their charges. Reuben sold sodas, snacks, and gum out of the office. Prices were gratifyingly archaic: 50¢ for a bottle of Coke, 40¢ for a Snickers bar, 25¢ bought you a pack of Wrigley's, and Cracker Jack set you back 35¢. Reuben iced the sodas in an ancient cooler and popped the tops off with an opener in the shape of a naked lady, cap slotted between her spread legs.
The Fighter Page 4