by Pete Dexter
He turns to the stairs, catching the sight of Harry shadowboxing in the ring, all the rules of boxing and science distilled into seventy pounds. Nothing wasted, every moment in balance.
Nick hears steps on the stairs then; slow and heavy, they stop twice on the way up, resting. He watches the top of the staircase, and an old man gradually appears, his hand flat against the wall for balance.
When his head has cleared the landing he stops again—still on the stairs—and looks at the ring in the middle of the floor, and Harry moving around inside it.
The old man doesn’t say a word. He climbs the rest of the way up, carrying a paper bag with underwear spilling out of the top, and then carefully sets the bag in a corner and sits on it. The skin over his eyes is baggy and scraped; it looks like a week since he had a bath.
Nick moves off the window and crosses the room. The old man glances at him as he approaches, then focuses his attention back in the ring.
Nick stands over him and waits, not wanting to be disrespectful. The old man could be eighty; he could be sixty. He isn’t a fighter; he’s taken some beatings, but they aren’t old, they aren’t inside him.
There is a timer on the wall which goes off twice every four minutes, marking the beginning and end of each round, and the minute’s rest in between. It buzzes now and Harry drops his hands and begins walking quickly around the ring, close to the ropes, and there is an economy even to that. Nine years old, he treats training like he was fighting on television next week. Sometimes Nick worries that the kid is too serious.
“How you doin’?” Nick says.
The old man looks up at him but doesn’t answer.
“You like the fights?”
The old man makes a noise Nick cannot understand; he spits as he makes it. Nick looks at him, nodding.
“You want to sit here a while and watch, it’s all right,” he says. The old man doesn’t seem to hear. His eyes go back to the ring where Harry is walking in circles, waiting for the timer to go off again.
He is the kind of kid that you don’t ever have to tell him something is serious. You have to tell him when it isn’t.
“What I mean is,” Nick says, “you can stay a little while. Until we turn off the lights, right? When I turn off the lights, out you go.”
The old man watches Harry shadowbox and jump rope and hit the heavy bags. An hour later a couple of colored fighters from North Philadelphia come in with a trainer and work five rounds without headgear.
The trainer stands in the corner, impassive, blood-red eyes, watching his fighter, whispering to him between rounds. The other fighter he ignores.
The bell rings, starting and stopping the rounds. Heads collide, an eyelid swells shut, blood shines beneath both their noses.
Nick imagines it through the old man’s eys. It must look like a war, and in a way it is. But the issue being decided is between the fighter and his trainer; the other fighter hasn’t got anything to do with it.
Probably paying him five dollars a round.
Harry watches the fighters too, doing his sit-ups on a board propped against the side of the ring. Nick sees him figuring them out, what will work.
Other kids from the neighborhood wander in. They sense violence, here and on the street; they are drawn to it.
Most of them have boxed a little themselves, were brought in here by their fathers with bruised lips or scraped foreheads after a fight, their hands in their pockets; embarrassed and scared.
And the fathers would take Nick to one side. “Nick, do me a favor. Don’t baby him.…”
As if that were the reason they couldn’t fight, they were babied.
As if the family names had been insulted.
As if the fathers had been fighters themselves.
Nick remembers the fathers, though. He remembers what kind of fighters they had been.
And they would leave their sons, as scared of Nick as anything outside, and Nick would show them, each in his own time, that it wasn’t so bad getting hit. That was as much as he could give most of them, without their giving something back.
A month later, they would quit coming by, except to watch. They disappeared into games that were played with balls, games Nick did not play himself.
Or turned into dancers.
Not that he blames them. Fighting isn’t for everybody, it isn’t supposed to be.
“Who’s the old guy?” one of them asks.
Nick shakes his head. “He just walked in.”
“What’s he doin?”
“He ain’t hurting nobody,” Nick says. “Maybe he was cold.”
The middleweights finish five rounds, the trainer presses a cold silver dollar into his fighter’s swollen eyelid.
The fighters dress without showering, and start down the stairs. Nick can’t see going out into the weather with a fresh sweat, but he can’t think of a good way to tell them it’s all right to use the shower. Trainers don’t like anybody telling their fighters anything. They tell them not to use the showers, they don’t use the showers. Somebody tells them it’s all right he might as well of changed the Ten Commandments.
The trainer crosses the room to shake Nick’s hand. “Thanks, Nick.”
“You getting him ready for something?” Nick says.
“Gettin’ him ready for my fucking heart attack, he don’t listen to what I tell him.”
Nick shrugs. “He don’t look too bad.”
“The minute he’s out of my sight,” the trainer says, still holding on to Nick’s hand, “he’s fuckin’ everything he can find a pulse. He got a communicable disease right now; he ain’t fought without the clap, one kind or another, in a year. He’s got to make up his mind, does he want to fuck or does he want to fight.”
Nick shrugs, thinking he is just as glad he didn’t say anything about the shower.
“You’re thinking rubbers,” the trainer says. They always liked to tell you what you were thinking. He shakes his head. “You can’t talk to George about no rubbers.”
The trainer leaves, the neighborhood kids leave with him. Nick likes kids, the life in them, and when they are gone he feels the change. Something goes out of the place besides the noise.
He realizes he’s given up on training today; there isn’t anyone around except Harry to box with anyway, and that’s not what he wants.
He wants what he almost had earlier—was it last week already?—with the colored kids on the street.
He wants somebody he can hate a little while, but that’s harder to find than it used to be. Somehow, he has ended up understanding too much; and what he can understand, he can forgive.
He unbuttons his shirt and pants and hangs them on some nails pounded into the wall near the shower. He takes off his socks and underwear and hurries into the single-stall shower before he turns on the water.
He doesn’t want anybody coming up the stairs and seeing him naked.
When he comes out a few minutes later, dripping water and scalded red, the old man is sweeping the floor. Nick wraps a towel around his waist and hurries across the room to stop him.
“Hey, don’t do that,” he says. He steps in front of the pile of dust and balled tape riding the old man’s broom, holding the towel together. “You don’t have to do that.”
The old man makes a shooing gesture with his hands and spits out a word Nick cannot understand.
Nick steps out of the way, and the old man pushes the broom through his wet footprints.
He sweeps from the edges of the ring out into the room, finishing in the corners, working around Harry, who is standing on a box underneath the speed bag. He picks up one of the boxing magazines piled beside the toilet and uses it as a dustpan. The old man is thorough and slow, and Nick wonders if he’s got a couple of dollars in his pocket to give him, or if he’s got to go downstairs into the cash register in the garage.
He wonders how to give the old man the money without having him show up again tomorrow.
The old man wipes up the last of the di
rt with a towel caked with dried blood, and then hangs the towel on the middle rope of the ring.
Nick reaches into his pants to see what he’s got. “Thanks,” he says. “These fuckin’ kids, they don’t pick up nothing.”
The old man doesn’t seem to hear him. He puts the broom back in the corner and picks up a pile of hand wraps lying in a corner. One by one, he smooths the hand wraps flat and hangs them over the chinning bar to dry. He has to stand on a chair to reach it.
Harry has finished on the speed bag now and steps into the shower. The water goes on, steam rises above the glass door. Nick looks out the windows and sees the lamppost swaying in the wind.
When the shower stops, he hears the building creak.
The old man finishes hanging the hand wraps over the chinning bar, replaces the chair, and turns to inspect the room. He checks the floor and the ring and the walls; he doesn’t look at Nick.
Nick stands still, watching him. His hand is touching the folding money in his pocket, but it’s hard to bring it out. He knows what it’s like to be cold and not have a place to go.
He remembers a New York hotel they put him in after a fight; 1951. The place cost fifty cents, and with his hands swollen, he couldn’t even turn on the radiator.
He can’t remember the fight itself—the fights are all the same now, they have blended somehow into the same fight—but he remembers the hotel room down to the frost on the window and the pattern of the water stains on the ceiling.
The old man is suddenly staring at him, having put off the moment until there is nothing else to do. Nick looks into tired eyes; he looks until he can see himself alone in New York City.
“Just tonight,” he says quietly.
The old man blinks, then moves slowly to his bag of clothes. He sits down heavily and drops his head back into the corner of the wall.
“You can unroll one of them mats,” Nick says, pointing to his mats, “but it’s just tonight. Tomorrow, you got to go back to your own place.”
Harry is out of the shower and dressed. Nick takes one of the bills from his pocket and leaves it on the bench, and then starts down the stairs. Harry is behind him, carrying a bag with his schoolbooks. At the bottom they stop, and Nick takes the two-dollar reading glasses out of his pocket and holds them in front of the thermostat, magnifying the numbers until he can read them.
The place costs him a fortune to heat, the winter months it goes a hundred dollars. He feels his son watching him. He shakes his head and puts the glasses back in his shirt pocket.
“Shit, we’ll leave it on,” he says. “It’s only one night.”
Nick wakes up in the night, thinking of the hotel room in New York again. Emily is lying on her side, her hand under her cheek, prettier now, he thinks, than she was in those days. Softer. Her face makes him happy.
He remembers the hotel room; he tries to remember the fight. It won’t come; just the room and his hands and the sounds in the hallway. He lay on a cot freezing, afraid of the noises outside.
He’d had thirty fights, and still couldn’t get used to being away from home. Thirty wins, no losses. But in those days thirty fights wasn’t anything. He was still making seven, eight hundred dollars, sometimes he got cheated out of that. Now, a kid gets fifteen wins, they got him fighting for a title.
But not his kid, he thinks.
It isn’t something he’ll have to tell him, it’s something he already understands. Nick has spent enough time in fifty-cent hotel rooms for them both.
He looks at Emily again, and sees his son in her face. Her relatives didn’t want her married to somebody who was beat up all the time, so he gave up fighting. They were college people, connected to the city, and after they were engaged, her father got him a job in the police garage. Nick could always fix engines.
He didn’t run, he didn’t go near the gym. And then one Sunday afternoon at Emily’s house, her mother makes a nice chicken, and who walks in the front door but Slappy Grazano.
Nick leans back into his pillow and sees it happen again. He smiles.
Slappy looks at the table and then all the people sitting around it in their church clothes and napkins; this is a man who does not understand the uses of a fork. Not which fork to use, but why use them at all.
“So, Nick,” he says, “we got you a fight.”
Nick says, “Slappy, I don’t want no more fights.”
“One more, Nick. Somebody you already beat.”
“I can’t fight nobody,” Nick says, “I’m not in shape.”
Slappy says, “For this guy, you don’t need to be in shape. Come on, Steve wants to see you.”
Nick remembers the table getting so quiet he could hear the icebox running in the kitchen. He doesn’t want trouble with Steve Grazano, so he stands up and puts two chicken legs in the pockets of his jacket and goes with him.
He remembers the look on Emily’s face.
Yes, she’s prettier now.
At Steve’s place he says the same thing: “I can’t fight nobody, Mr. Grazano, I’m not in shape.”
But in the end, he’s got to do it anyway, and before he leaves Steve says, “By the way, you got another one of them chicken legs?”
So he gets his dinner too.
The fight itself.
He remembers a heaviness that was never there before settling over him in the fourth round. He can see himself getting tired, beginning to hold on to the kid. Del Conners is refereeing, and he keeps slapping Nick’s gloves off when he holds, telling him to fight, taking points. People booing; Nick never got booed in his life.
Finally, in the seventh round, Del pries him off the kid and says, “Nick, you don’t stop hugging this nigger, I’ll stop the fight. I mean it.”
And the kid says, “Nigger?”
And Nick says, “I don’t give a shit.”
Del says, “I mean it, Nick.”
Nick says, “So do I,” and Del Conners stops it right there and raises the kid’s hand.
“Who you calling nigger?” the kid says, allowing his hand to be raised.
Del hid from him for two years, thinking he was mad.
Nick lies in bed, wondering why it makes him smile now to think of the things that hurt him then.
He thinks it has something to do with the second half of his life—that at the end, the only way dying can make sense is if you feel grateful enough for what came before. He remembers the nuns in the hospital in Atlantic City had a different idea. He was there almost half a year when he was, what, eight years old? Nine? Harry’s age. He imagines leaving Harry in a hospital for half a year.
One of the nuns, an old woman with pale lips whose hands shook as she reached for the thermometer, told him one night that when he was sick enough he would long to go back home to God. “It’s what sickness is for,” she said.
And she was dead before he left the hospital.
He pictures her standing beside his bed, the shadow that moves across the wall as her hand reaches through the pale light for the thermometer. And then suddenly he is remembering the white kids giving up their shoes in the street.
He wonders if they will think of that someday and smile. He doubts that it will ever make Phillip Flood smile. He puts himself in his place, imagining Harry coming home without his shoes.
Half an hour later, knowing he is through sleeping for the night, he gets quietly out of bed and goes downstairs. He makes himself a cup of coffee and waits for the paper.
Two days pass and the old man is still in the gym. He ties the laces in Nick’s gloves before he boxes; he holds the heavy bag that Nick hits afterwards.
Nick prefers to let the bag swing, but he allows the old man his small jobs; he doesn’t want to be the one to tell him that he’s in the way.
He avoids conversations. The old man spits when Nick talks to him, trying to talk back.
Nick has begun to think that the old man knows something about fighting. He’s never done it himself—his nose is thin and straight and there’s no thickness
in his eyebrows, and he is the kind of old man that if he had fought, he would have been hit—but he seems to know what he’s watching. There is a certain impatience that crosses his face when a fighter is flat or tired or lazy in the ring. He reminds Nick of a trainer.
When the old man watches, nobody gets the benefit of the doubt.
Afterwards, when he sweeps the floor, he will push the broom into the feet of the boxers as they sit on the bench dressing.
He makes an angry popping noise, and the fighters move their feet.
“Ain’t there a number you can call,” one of them says to Nick, “they come pick somebody like that up?”
Nick is sitting near the window, watching the old man pick up the pages of the Evening Bulletin that have drifted across the floor. He shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” he says.
“How long you going to let him stay?” the fighter says.
Nick shrugs. “It’s pretty cold,” he says, “to put somebody out.”
The door opens downstairs, and then closes. Nick is expecting a trainer, an old guy named Louis Grizzert who’s got a kid he wants him to work with. He stands up, his legs feel tired and fragile from being outside in the cold all day working on engines, and walks to the head of the stairs.
It isn’t any Louis Grizzert on the stairs, though.
Nick stands with his hands on the railing, looking down, and out of the dark Phillip Flood rises into his life. Behind him are the boys who lost their shoes to the colored kids. They are carrying gym bags.
Phillip Flood is wearing a tie and a suit and a cashmere coat that drops to his knees. He looks up at Nick and smiles.
“Nick, my man.”
“How you doin’, Phil?” he says.
He tries to remember the last time he spoke to Phillip Flood; he thinks it might have been the week he moved into Charley’s house.
Phillip Flood takes the last eight steps in a sudden burst, and then pulls off one of his gloves and reaches for Nick’s hand. Out of breath.
Nick shakes hands, trying not to give Phillip Flood his knuckles to squeeze. People were always squeezing fighters’ hands to show they were strong. Nobody considered how sore fighting made them, not to mention working on engines.