Men born in the wrong century, Reuben had heard it said. Put 'em in a coliseum, fighting with spears and nets. It's all that suits 'em. Men whose sole value lay in their willingness to absorb punishment; men in whose faces could be glimpsed an inevitability of purpose impossible to outrun. Some had no more intellect than a child. Reuben had seen one eating soda crackers spread with axle grease: his trainer insisted it thickened the blood. Later that fighter stood in the ring, his face black with blood, calling his trainer's name in a high, childish voice. Only his trainer wasn't there: he'd already hopped into his truck and driven away.
Reuben motioned his brother to a hay bale. "Gimme those mitts." He taped Tommy's hands with great care, first winding clean white bandages around and around, then placing sponge across the knuckles, then wrapping on the adhesive.
When the barn was full Manning bolted the door and crossed the wide sawdust floor. He ran down the rules, such as they were. "Fight goes until one man can't answer the bell. A man goes down, both fighters take a rest. I won't accept no outright foul play but whatever happens between two men in the course of a tussle, happens. Those men ain't got nobody to stand by them, gypsy cab's waiting to run ya to the medic need be—fare come out your purse, but."
Something tightened in Reuben's chest to hear Manning's spiel. He knew his brother never went out to make a show—he went out to get a job done. He was a boxer: a rough occupation, yes, but one governed by laws of fairness and respect. There was a refinement and cleanliness to it. You don't hit a man when he's down. You don't punch after the bell.
Here, men fought like weasels down a hole. It was dangerous and dirty and men were hurt in ways they would never recover from. Here you might see a guy staggering to his corner with his scalp split pink down the dark weave of his hair, his eyes half-lidded and tongue hanging like a dog's. Here you might see an overmatched fighter struck a blow so vicious it cracked the orbital bone and pushed his eye from its socket, the blood-washed eyeball swinging on its optic nerve like a lacquered radish. Reuben knew such things were a possibility because he had, in fact, seen those exact things on past nights.
Top Rank operated under laws. The barn was international waters.
Top Rank was for boxers. The barn was for fighters.
Rob was watching TV when Kate Paulson rapped on the door.
"Andale, Tully, andale" she called. "Freakin' cold out here."
He opened the door and smirked. As typical, she was overdressed: blue winter shell, scarf, and mittens. "You must be looking for the polar expedition team. They're two doors down."
"I walk all the way over and you give me grief? May just go home."
"What, head back out in that weather?" He clutched his shoulders and shivered. "Brrrrr."
Kate lived three blocks east on 22nd. Kate's mother, Ellen, had known the Tully brothers since the first grade; they'd grown up in the same ten-mile radius, attended the same schools, caroused the same bars. She worked in the florist department at Topp's, where she and Reuben often chatted amid the daffodils and zinnias.
The Tullys and Paulsons might have existed like any two families in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls—that is to say, distantly— if not for a pair of coincidences, one happy, the other not so. The happy coincidence was the near-simultaneous births of their first, and only, children; Robert Thomas was born Monday afternoon, Katherine Harriet during the witching hours Tuesday morning. The infants spent their first night together in the Mount St. Mary nursery, side by side in transparent plastic tubs. Tommy, the most whimsical member in either family, believed they had imprinted on each other like baby chicks; this he held accountable for their enduring closeness.
The other coincidence was that, shortly after the births, both Ellen's husband and Reuben's wife had realized parenting wasn't in their blood. Phil Paulson stepped out for a pack of Kools days after his daughter's birth and never did manage to find his way home. And speculation had it that Phil's itchy feet must have been highly contagious, spreading all the way down to Carol Tully's house; one afternoon Reuben came home to find baby Robbie at the next-door neighbor's and a note from his wife informing him she'd moved to Nashville to pursue a music career.
Following from the initial, heart-defibrillating shock of abandonment, Ellen Paulson recovered rather quickly. Her husband was a contract handyman whose keenest aspiration was to lose a digit in a work-related mishap and live off the settlement; as Ellen saw it, now she had only one child to care for instead of two. Every so often she'd receive a postcard from deadbeat Phil; these she read aloud to Reuben and Tommy in a deft imitation of her husband's voice: I still love you, don't think for a second I don't, but the aloor of the open road, that freedum... its got me in its spell. She'd point out all the misspellings and clichés and finally, cathartically, burned each postcard in the fireplace. After a year she didn't bother to read them anymore, just pitched them in the trash.
"So." Kate clapped her hands. "Where's that leftover spag?"
In the kitchen Rob set the pot of sauce on the stove. She sat at the table rubbing the cold from her hands. Her pageboy-style hair stuck up in wild spikes. She had green eyes, like her mother: cat's eye green, Reuben called that color.
"You want noodles," he asked, "or on toast?"
"You're kidding."
Rob shrugged. "Tommy likes it that way."
Which was true. Tommy ladled spaghetti sauce on top of bread— and not any old bread: Wonder Bread. This caused friction in the household, since Tommy preferred it to the bakery loaves his brother brought home. Why, Reuben harped, would you fill your face with that crap? I doubt it's even bread; I bet it's labeled "food substitute."
Rob set another pot on the stove and dumped in a handful of spaghetti. Kate, who'd been watching with a critical eye, asked what the heck he was doing.
"You didn't sound keen on toast."
She joined him at the stove, hip-checking him out of the way. "Got to boil the water first, dummy. Then the noodles." It was hot over the stove top and she pulled off her school sweatshirt, rucking her undershirt up. Rob caught bare skin, the dip under her ribcage, a groove of muscle down her stomach.
He was unruffled that she'd taken over the kitchen; Kate had always been alpha to his beta. Their easy acceptance of these roles was one of the reasons they got on so well. And since Rob had never seen his own father and mother interact, he'd always wondered if, in their way, he and Kate behaved as a married couple might.
She sprinkled the cooked spaghetti with Kraft Parmesan—"Cheese in a canister," she said disapprovingly, "that's what you get in a house full of men"—and slid Rob's plate across the table. He'd eaten only two hours ago, but most boxers existed in a more or less permanent state of appetite.
"Where's your pops," Kate said, "or Tommy?"
Rob kept his eyes on his plate. "Busy tonight."
Kate arched her eyebrows. "Second Thursday of the month. I didn't think your uncle was mixed up in that anymore."
Most people in the neighborhood knew of the barn; a few, desperately strapped for cash, had even tried their luck there. For all but Tommy, once had been enough.
"Tommy's shifts at the warehouse got cut back," Rob said. "He's in some to Fritzie Zivic and hasn't been drumming up much sparring work—"
She cut him off. "The supermarket's looking, and nobody's gonna try and knock his head off there—or if so, some turkey-armed fogy because he cuts the salami too thick."
Rob laughed, but he was shaking his head. "It's not the money so much..."
"So much as?"
All Rob could think was that boxing got into people's blood like a poison, except that the poison was the only thing that kept them alive, or at least made them feel that way.
"I mean it's a tough life for a man to leave behind, is all."
Kate looked up at the ceiling, scanning for bits of Rob's brain that clearly must have drifted out his ears. "Women find it hard to leave things, too—shitty marriages, and boyfriends, and degrading jobs. W
e can be every bit as pigheaded as men."
"Let me get this straight," said Rob. "You're defending a woman's right to act as stupidly as a man?"
"I'm saying men don't have a hammerlock on weakness. But it's still no excuse."
In their neighborhood, gender roles were pretty well defined. Men did this; women, that. There wasn't a lot of friction over it—just the way things were.
"Hey," he wanted to know, "are we having an argument?"
"No, Tully. We are having a discussion." "... Oh."
One commonly held theory in streetfighting is that you must get the first punch no matter what the price.
Christ, Tommy thought, staggering back on his heels, I really should've known better.
The blow struck him dead between the eyes—a poleax, in the same spot that a slaughterhouse stunner aims his kill hammer. The air shimmered with darts of white light as his mouth filled with the taste of cold lightning.
He'd been matched against a young fighter, Caleb Kilbride. The Kilbrides were a clan of ridge runners who made ends meet smuggling reservation cigs and booze across the Niagara River. Shirtless, the kid was built like the butt end of a sledgehammer. His neck and arms were mottled with burn scars; the falling light picked out further scarring on his hips, a galaxy of pale white chips.
They'd met in the middle of the ring. Tommy noted Kilbride's small, close-set eyes, the slight upslope at their outer edges that bespoke inbreeding. He looked over at the kid's corner, where Papa Kilbride swigged at a flask of triple-X; a black eyepatch gave him the look of a landlocked, hillbilly pirate. He seemed the sort of father who might force his mentally defective son into a fight, and Tommy had been considering this very possibility when Caleb Kilbride came forward and popped him in the face.
The blinding sting in Tommy's eyes told him that Kilbride's work- gloves were soaked in caustic, weed killer most likely, but it was too late for complaining and besides, there was no ref to hear his grievance. Kilbride pressed in, bashing Tommy about the head and arms; the ridge runner's breath was warm in Tommy's ears, the excited exhale of his lungs like hickory wood cracking.
"Circle out of there!" his brother called as the crowd hooted and catcalled.
Kilbride let go with a flurry of haymakers, thudding them into the dense muscling of Tommy's arms and shoulders. By then the canaries had flitted from Tommy's head and he was able to step inside one of Kilbride's looping punches, set his shoulders, and hook to the kidneys. Kilbride's breath escaped in a gust: a sweet pablum-y smell.
He recovered enough to smash a fist into Tommy's forehead. The shot lacked gas and Tommy weathered it easily, but Kilbride followed up with another in the same spot, planting his feet and dropping his fist like a guillotine blade. The blow landed with the sound of an ax chopping into wet wood and split the skin over Tommy's left eye along the socket ridge; he felt the buzzing X-ray contour of bone beneath his skin.
He dropped to one knee and Kilbride hit him going down, an uppercut fired straight from the hip that flattened Tommy's lips against his teeth. He went down with the taste of blood and Killex on his tongue. The bell rang but Kilbride kept slugging until Manning dragged him off.
Reuben helped his brother to the corner. The railbirds hubbubed and pumped their fists. Fritzie Zivic sucked a toothpick beside the wheelchair-bound fogy who looked either comatose or dead save his eyes, which were riveted on the ring above the green plastic edge of his oxygen mask.
Reuben jammed a hand down Tommy's trunks and splashed ice water on his groin. "What's the matter? He's wide open."
"Something's wrong with him. He's not all there upstairs."
Reuben cracked the seal on a vial of adrenaline 1:1000 and dipped a Q-Tip. He jammed it into the wound above Tommy's eye, down through the layers of meat, pinching the flaps of skin over the cotton tip.
"How many of these punch-drunk tomato cans do you figure are all there?"
"No, I mean ... slow." Tommy rinsed water around his mouth and spat. "His breath smells like a baby's."
Reuben glanced at the opposite corner. Kilbride was taking pulls from a flask while Papa massaged his shoulders.
"You socked him, all right," Papa crowed. "The ole Missouri soupbone!"
Reuben smeared Vaseline over the burns left by Kilbride's gloves. "Slow or not, I couldn't help but notice that kid's only too happy to hit you."
Two bungling men in their mid-twenties, Reuben and Tom Tully's combined knowledge of child rearing could have fit on the head of a pin. To spare infant Robbie the indignity of newsprint diapers and herself the expense of a nanny, Kate's mother had come up with a solution. Weekday mornings she dropped her daughter off with Tom, who cared for Kate and Robbie until Reuben arrived home from his bakery shift; Tommy then set off for the loading docks and Reuben looked after the kids until Ellen returned from the floral shop.
The five of them knit into an odd, but oddly workable, unit. The sight of Ellen Paulson flanked by lumbering Tom Tully and Reuben in his peaked fedora became a familiar one: at the park, in the supermarket aisle, pushing prams up Niagara Street. Tommy and Reuben often took Robbie to Loughran's Park on their own; those newly arrived to the neighborhood had been overheard remarking upon the raffish homosexual couple and their adopted Serbian baby. Tommy made a joke of this perception at his prudish brother's expense: he'd grab Reuben's hand at inappropriate times, or rub his shoulder with the tender fondness of a lover. "So help me god" Reuben would seethe.
Kate and Rob had grown up almost as brother and sister; for the most part, they treated each other with the brusque affection of siblings. But lately Rob had been reminding himself that she was not, in point of fact, his birth sister.
"You're hopeless," she said when Rob told her his haiku began with the line My toenail is split. "Of all the poetic topics in our vast universe, you settle on the most revolting feature of the human body."
"You're forgetting something," he said. "The duodenum."
They were covering anatomy in biology class; everyone agreed the duodenum was one ugly organ. "Fine, second most revolting. Come on—what sort of things excite you?"
Like a lot of guys his age, Rob twigged on stories tinged with a note of morbid irony—like the newspaper article about a frozen ball of shit that was accidentally discharged from the hull of a Swiss Air flight from Geneva to New York; the pinky-brown boulder had rocketed into a house in Rochester, crushing its owner, who happened to be relieving himself at that very moment.
"Frozen balls of turd?" Kate said, after he'd been foolish enough to tell her. She put the base of her palm of the flat of her forehead and held it there for several seconds. "Roll over, Basho."
"Then give me guidance, O Poetic Spirit."
"Look around you. And a bit farther than your toenail."
"Busted syringes on the basketball court at Loughren's?" he said, after brief consideration. "The god-awful stench from the rubber plant as you cross the bridge over the polluted river, before you hit the burned-down strip mall and pass into factory outlet wasteland? Is that poetry?"
"Probably," Kate said, "to some people. But why concentrate on that? How about something you know a lot about? How about boxing?"
"No," muttered Rob. "Not boxing."
Kate was pleased to hear this. They sat for a while in silence, then Rob stood up and tapped the windowpane. "How about that?"
"What, Mr. Cryptic—the curtains?"
"The view. The maple tree, the fence, the sky. I've grown up, so my perspective has changed. But tree, fence, sky. Those have always stayed the same."
Kate clapped her hands. "Grab a pen, son—strike while the iron is hot!"
When he sat down with a pen she plucked it from his grip. She took Rob's hand, flipped it so his palm showed, and pressed it flat to the table. She licked the pen tip and touched it to a big blue vein where his wrist met the meat of his palm. "So—how does that make you feel?"
A trapdoor opened in Rob's head, dumping endorphins into his brainpan; it felt like gettin
g hit in a sparring session, his pain centers bombed with peptides. No pain now, only the pressure of Kate's fingers on his hand. A surge of power flooded him, the kind that made him a terror in the ring, but here, now, he had no idea where to go with it.
"How about ..." He flushed; his eyeballs must be bulging like grapefruits. Why? She was only touching his hand. "... The view out of my kitchen window—"
Her fingertip tapped beats on his wrist like a second heartbeat. "The view out of my ... okay, that's your first line ... kit-chen window. Three more syllables."
"Remains the same ... no, is the same ..."
She wrote across his palm in smooth cursive. "... Is the same ... one more line. Five beats."
"... since I..."
"... since I..."
"... was a child—no, boy."
She contemplated the words spread across his palm. "Simple, but I like it."
Looking at her, he thought of a night months ago. He'd stopped by on his way home from the club and she'd been on the porch— waiting for him, or so he'd felt for a moment. She stepped into light thrown by the porch bulb and the scent of her—vanilla, remarkable only in that he'd never known her to smell this way—fell through the light, melding and bonding so that for Rob the light itself smelled of her.
Kate flipped Rob's other palm over and, with quick strokes, wrote her own haiku.
When the bell rang to start the second round Caleb Kilbride tear-assed across the ring windmilling his fists. Tommy got on his bicycle and circled away, taking a few harmless shots to the arms and brisket. Kilbride was in no kind of shape: greasy sweat shone under his eyes and where his nose met the rest of his face. The kid was used to fighting scratch-ass hill people who folded at the sight of those flatiron fists.
The Fighter Page 9