Tommy led Kilbride around the ring, absorbing the young man's lunging blows on hip and elbow. Taking him into the deep waters, any boxing aficionado would've known. Gonna drown him.
Kilbride threw a sloppy hook and when Tommy ducked he saw the ridge of Kilbride's wide-open torso. After a moment's hesitation Tommy lashed out with his left, banging Kilbride's liver. The bigger man bent forward at the hip; ropes of snot jetted from his nose.
Tommy grabbed Kilbride by the scruff of the neck—the hairs back there were coarse as hog bristles—and, jerking his skull forward, smashed a fist into his face. Something gave under his knuckles with a dim splintering and Tommy saw a shard of bone poking through the skin below Kilbride's right eye.
Kilbride struck out instinctively, a bone-cutting shot that sheared off Tommy's jaw. Tommy belted Kilbride's left ear, fattening it instantly. They fell into a clumsy embrace, foreheads touching, arms tangled.
"Go down, kid," Tommy whispered. "No shame in it. You're one tough hombre."
Kilbride only grunted. Blood sprayed from his fractured cheekbone into one eye but the other one held Tommy in its gaze with the belligerence of a petting zoo goat.
Kilbride pushed off and hit Tommy with a left, following up with a right. Tommy held his hands at his waist, not bothering to cover up, and the shots glanced off the crown of his skull, reopening the cut above his eye. Kilbride threw another weak left and Tommy swatted his fist out of the air and came over the top with a right hook that slammed the side of Kilbride's head and the ridge runner's swollen ear exploded, the pressure of compressed blood splitting it off the side of his head. Hanging by its lobe on a rope of skin, it looked like a crushed baby mouse.
Kilbride crumpled to his knees, cradling the side of his head. Tommy stared in horror: it was the worst damage he'd ever inflicted upon another human being. It was as though Kilbride were made not of flesh and bone but of weaker substances that broke and tore and bled at the barest provocation.
Tommy threw a helpless glance at his brother. Reuben had already packed the valise and now tossed the towel. "It's over," he signaled to Manning. "We're quit."
The crowd booed lustily. Beer cans and flaming matchbooks pelted the ring.
"We better hightail it." Reuben shielded his brother's head from the flames that rained down. "These crazies are bound to riot."
On the way out Tommy stopped before Papa Kilbride, who was weaving drunk and hadn't yet attended to his stricken son. His eyepatch had slipped down around his neck; he stared at the brothers with a pair of boozy but working eyes.
"Your boy's feebleminded and we both know it." With his face veiled in blood, Tommy's eyes were very wide, very white. "If I catch you running him out here again, you and me will have business."
"Goddamn butcher shop," Reuben said once they were clear of the barn. "Look at you carved right to hell."
"I'm fine. But the kid—"
"Some are made of flimsier stuff. The kid won't win any beauty contests, but skin heals."
Reuben grabbed a low-hanging branch and pulled it aside, allowing his brother to walk past before letting it whip back. "You're bleeding something fierce. Get you cleaned up."
He guided Tommy to a fence post and hung his valise on a point of barbed wire. With a clean towel he wiped the blood from Tommy's face. His brow was so sodden with adrenaline Reuben could only patch it with a butterfly bandage. He set two fingers under Tommy's jaw to ease the chatter of his teeth.
"What about your fight purse?"
"Manning knows to give it to Fr-Fruh-Fitzie Z-Zuh-Zivic. I owe him."
A spotted cow ambled over and jammed its blunt, ski-boot-shaped head through the wire. It snuffled loudly, rooting about under Tommy's armpit.
"Shoo," Reuben told it.
"L-luh-le-leave it be," Tommy said. "Its breath is nice and wuh- warm. You know, it was the st-struh-strangest thing." Shivering, he spoke with his eyes shut. "I'm lo-lo-locked up with that kuh-kid, his f-f-face pissing bl-bluh-blood, look into his eyes and see no way is he quitting. I could've beat on that poor boy till there was nuh- nuh-othing left that was really hu-hyu-human and he'd've kept getting uh-uh-up. So I had to quit."
"I would've been disappointed if you hadn't."
The cow chewed at the seat of Tommy's pants, pulling the material so taut Reuben saw the shape of his brother's crotch.
"Stupid animal's gonna chew your pants off."
Tommy grinned. "This is the most a-ah-action I've got in a l-luh-long time."
Reuben took his brother's head between his palms and considered it at a few angles. "Border guards ask, we'll say you fell down a set of icy steps."
Kate had bundled herself up and headed for home by the time Rob's father called.
"Come on down and get a slice—pecan's just out of the oven."
The sky coldly pristine, spokes of lightning flashing across a bank of night clouds far off to the west. Through lit windows of the houses strung down the block Rob saw familiar silhouettes watching television, preparing for night shifts, arguing, eating alone. The nature of his neighborhood was such that he knew why that woman was eating alone, the job that man was preparing for, the root of that couple's argument. To live on these streets was to know everything about those you lived among, to see inside their homes and lives and be seen in turn. Rob knew it was a big world from the books he'd read and movies he'd watched, but his own world often felt infinitesimally small: a limited orbit of opportunities and events, faces and places, friends and enemies. And the specific gravities of obligation and fear and love could keep you locked in that orbit your whole life.
Macy's was an institution. The original owner, Jefferson Macy, was a pipefitter who'd come from Altoona to labor on the bridge crews; he'd sunk down to the Niagara River in a diving bell to set foundation anchors in the stony riverbed. He'd received hazard wages: at shift's end sometimes nothing but an empty helmet was retrieved from the deeps, the diver's waterlogged body found dashed on the rocks beyond the whirlpool rapids. Most workers—Irish, Polish, Mi'kmaq, and Iroquois—bunked in clapboard shacks or tents pitched on Goat Island. On cold nights the tents frequently collapsed, weighed down by frozen spray off Bridal Veil Falls. Each week Macy's wife crossed the river by punt boat with pies for the laborers. Macy insisted his wife charge them for ingredients, if not her sweat and toil. By 1942 they'd saved enough to open a shopfront on Elmwood.
Reuben and Tommy sat in a corner booth. Tommy wasn't too bad off, considering. A few gloveburns, that old scar over his eye bust open again.
"You win?"
His uncle sipped black coffee and shrugged. "Some you win, some you lose."
Reuben clarified: "He lost."
The waitress freshened their cups. "Can I get you, Robbie?"
"Give him orange soda, Ellie," Reuben said. "Coffee'll stunt his growth."
"Old wives' tale," she said. "Your brother's been drinking it since he was in short pants and look at the size of him." She appraised Tommy's face. "Been in a scrape tonight?"
"Ran into a door, my darling."
"You're the only man I know runs into doors with a nasty habit of swinging back. Robbie, you steer clear of the doorways your uncle frequents."
Pecan pie for Reuben, pumpkin for Rob, cherry for Tommy. The slices were a good two inches thick, topped with a big ball of vanilla ice cream.
"What's that?" Reuben gestured with his chin to the words on Rob's palm. "Looks like a girl's writing."
Tommy brightened. "Kate must've been over."
Reuben pinned Rob's palm to the table and read Kate's haiku: "Though there will always / Be those things out of your reach / Never stop reaching." He nodded. "I like it. Yours?"
"It's Kate's."
"She's a clever gal," said Tommy. "Pretty as her mother, too."
"Get off it," Rob said.
"What's the matter," said Reuben. "Not like she's your sister."
"I know!" Rob nearly shouted. The brothers chuckled at this.
They sat with st
uffed bellies. Ellie came around with a bag of frozen strawberries for Tommy's lumps.
"You see that place up there?" Tommy pointed across the street, to the lit windows of an otherwise darkened building. "I ever tell you the story?"
Neither Reuben nor Rob wished to see the puzzled look come over Tommy's face should they say he'd told it a dozen times, so both shook their heads.
"That's the LOH on the third story—Loyal Order of Hibernians. You need a card to get in, even though it's just card tables and a wet bar. One time I was working the door and this guy showed up, didn't have no card, so I tell him to bug off. Come on, let me in, I'm Irish, the guy says. I tell him no card, no dice, and when he got pushy I threw him down the steps."
Tommy mopped crumbs off his plate with his thumb. "Well, pretty soon come that knock again. It's the same guy, looking a bit worse for wear. Come on, let me in, I'm Irish. Well, he gets a bit flagrant so I got to throw him down the steps again. A few minutes later another knock. The same guy. Well I stepped aside and let him in, saying, You're right. You must be Irish!'
Tommy threw back his head and roared. Rob and Reuben joined in—not for the punch line, which they'd heard a thousand times, but simply for the telling.
Chapter 6
Paul's head hit the canvas and things went dark and in the blackness he saw a chicken hatchery. The walls were ribbed sheet metal stretching into the dark, a cavernous place like a warehouse thick with an ammonia smell. A pool of light hung above a hatching pen as though a spotlight were trained on it, only there was no spotlight. The pen was constructed of small-gauge wire and filled with yellow chicks clustered at a tube spitting out cracked corn which they fought over with stunning viciousness. He saw a hen in there, too, a big sleek mama clucking and ruffling her pinfeathers as if agitated. She shifted her weight and a tiny beak poked out from under her dirty feathers, a beak opening and closing like a fish dying on a beach. A wing popped out under the hen, a wing without feathers flapping feebly, bone ends snagging the wire. The hen tucked the wing gently beneath her and kept on clucking and shifting, and finally she shook her feathers out and stepped off the pitiful thing she'd been sheltering. The chick was withered and milk-pale and one of its claws, crushed close to its body, had torn a ragged hole in its side. One eye was a swollen mound trickling pus and the other had ruptured from being sat on, a shiny ball of blood. Its wings were smeared in shit and the print of the wire was pushed into its flesh, a deep hexagonal grid over one side of its body. Paul felt shocked and terrified and all shredded up inside as the thing thrashed, its beak opening and closing but not a sound coming out. The other chicks saw it lying there. They clustered around as it struggled to stand but its legs were withered and its wings nothing more than bones and it flopped on its side, breathing rapidly. The chicks bobbed up and down and shook their wings all out and stared on with dusky wet eyes. One pecked the sick one's head and opened a hole there. One pecked at an eye and broke it. Then they were pecking fanatically and peeping with excitement while the mama watched without emotion and in the midst of the fluttering yellow bodies Paul saw that beak opening and closing, opening and closing—
"... aul... Paul..."
The burn of ammonia filled his nostrils. He opened his eyes, blinked, squinted. The ring lights were set in steel lattices, a spot of total blackness at their centers.
He tried to sit up but couldn't. It was like someone had taken a heavy mallet and nailed his gloves and boots to the mat. His opponent— Everett, a tattooed black kid—stood with his arms draped over the turnbuckle.
Lou said, "What's your name?"
Paul worked his jaw. "Did I get... knocked out?"
"What's your name?"
"Paul Harris. How long was I out?"
"Long enough. Can you see my fingers? How many am I holding?"
He'd been training six or seven hours a day, including a good deal of sparring. He'd taken bodyshots that filled his mouth with bile and clubbing blows that dropped him to one knee, but this was a fresh twist.
"Sneak uppercut," Lou said. "Tickled you right on the knockout button."
Everett came over and, in a belated gesture of concern, asked was Paul all right.
"You hit pretty hard." Paul's tone was gleeful. "Let's get back at it."
Lou stepped back through the ropes. "Go to it, then."
The buzzer sounded. Everett streaked across the ring to catch Paul moving hesitantly out of his corner. Everett boasted an accurate jab, throwing it out on the end of his long left arm.
"Get down on your haunches!" Lou called at him. "You're boxing like Frankenstein!"
The morning after his first training session Paul had awakened near-paralyzed, his tendons so tight he could barely walk. But he dragged himself back to the club and, after some crass ribbing from Lou—You look like twice-pounded shit—kept at it. He took to running a five-mile circuit each morning, following a path along the train tracks to the Welland Canal where great shipping cranes slanted against the sky. He ran the steps connecting the club and paint store with a medicine ball; he hit the heavybag until his hands looked like ground chuck. Pushing his body, he found that it possessed limits beyond his reckoning. Muscle groups presented themselves: ice-cube-tray abs and a cobra's hood of latissimus muscle; a trickledown map of blue veins running under skin gone translucent as rice paper.
Everett's hand flashed and a polar whiteness expanded inside Paul's skull. He gagged on his gumshield but got his gloves up; Everett's punches glanced off his elbows.
"Keep your head down. You're holding it out there like a lantern in a storm!"
Paul had been surprised at how quickly his body accommodated itself to pain—not only the mediated pain of training, but the immediate and unavoidable pain of the ring. He'd been hit with such force that blood leapt from his nose like a grisly magic trick, yet he gathered himself and fought back. He discovered the miracle of adrenaline.
They circled, feinting and juking. Paul saw the curve of Everett's torso, the smooth ladder of his ribcage. His fist could fit into that space, he reasoned, into the bundle of organs below Everett's short rib.
When he threw the punch, turning on his lead foot and twisting his hips, the coiled momentum released his fist like a boulder from a catapult. The punch landed solid and the shock rebounded down his arm like the kickback of an elephant gun.
Everett made a small sound like a sigh and fell away from Paul's glove.
"Whoa!" Lou hopped up on the apron and ducked through the ropes.
Everett gulped for breath on the mat. Lou took the kid's arms and held them up. A dark patch spread over the crotch of his boxing trunks. "Breathe, now, Ev. Find those lungs."
Paul felt pretty damn pleased with himself. He envisioned Everett's blood stunned in his veins, hardening like ice. He felt the displacement of Everett's guts through his glove, the organs shifting in deference to his fist.
Lou helped Everett back to the change room. "That was some punch," he said upon his return. "Like to bring down the walls of a city."
"Just doing like you taught."
Lou scratched under the brim of his paisley porkpie, lips pursed in an effort to recall what, if any, advice he'd offered Paul. "Well, you're a good kid—you're a listener!' He whistled. "Hit a guy that bad, you steal a piece of him forever."
"It was a lucky punch."
"Some of my prospects had half your hustle, they'd be champs. Hop in the ring."
Lou shrugged on punch mitts and worked with Paul. The kid was raw as hell, a hundred and eighty-odd pounds of flailing flesh and bone, but the sting in Lou's hands signaled one-punch power. That overhand left could scramble anyone's brain.
"What was it you said you did?" Lou asked during a break. "Businessman of some sort?"
"Worked at a winery. I quit, though."
"So why boxing?"
Paul spat on a blotch of blood marking the canvas. "I can't say," he said, scuffing the spot with his boot. "I needed to be stronger."
"Muscles? W
ill power? How do you mean?"
He wanted to tell Lou about a World War I documentary he'd seen, these veteran soldiers talking about mercy kills. Back then, they said, if a man in your unit was a liability, you put a bullet in his brain and made it look like an accident. The murdered men were officers, silver spooners; the killers were working-class enlisted men. Out in the trenches the degrees on your wall didn't matter, they said, nor that your father played tennis with the Duke of York. Out there it was, Do I trust this man with my life? Dog eat dog, the basic law of man, and the refinements of civilization a million miles away. The vets were not the least bit shamed by their actions—they considered it an act of mercy.
Paul couldn't help but wonder: if it ever came to it, would he be facedown in a bunker with a bullet in his skull? He'd never know, and that was the worst part—the wondering.
All he said was, "I've had it pretty cushy so far."
Lou nodded. "First time I saw you, I said give this guy a week. You had the look of a lot of guys your age—a lily. I don't quite get the things you boys get up to. Building superhero bodies at the gym and hurling yourselves off high rises with a parachute on your back." Lou snorted. "John Wayne never lifted a barbell in his life. Put Jack La Lanne and the Duke in a cage and see who comes out alive."
Lou worked Paul another round. Lordy, this kid could hit. His power reminded Lou of another fighter he'd trained, the young son of a carnival barker. Years back Lou had taken the kid down south of Rock Springs, where he'd fought in a dirt bowl at the base of the Rockies. July or early August and they'd fought like dogs, the barker's kid and a lanky Mexie who'd ridden boxcars up from Ciudad Obregon. Between rounds the idiots in charge had laid down a sheen of lamp oil to keep the dust down. Maybe it had been the righteously burning sun or a cigar ember—this low whoomph, then greasy orange fire licking from the earth. The spectators backed away but inside the bowl the Mexie and the barker's son kept swinging, their eyes bruised shut and blood coming out of them all places. Flames crawled up their arms in glittering sleeves but they kept punching as though the fight was the only thing keeping them alive or was the only thing worth dying for.
The Fighter Page 10