Six Rounds

by Bobby Mathews

  The ref wasn’t having it. “Your guy’s hurt. He can’t even fucking breathe. How’s he supposed to fight? I’m stopping it. He goes down in the record books as the winner.”

  Sally Ray shook his head. “You get the doc over here,” he said. “If he clears Blackjack, let ‘em continue. I want to see that asshole flat on his back.”

  The ref looked more than a little dubious, but finally relented. He motioned for the doctor. Sally turned to me and whispered in my ear. “I know you’re hurt, kid, but you gotta come out for the next round. You do what you gotta do, but you make sure that doc lets you continue.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t really say anything, not with my ribs hurting the way they were. The doc—an older man in a sharkskin suit and rubber gloves on his hands—came over to me.

  “You sure you want to continue?”

  “Yes, sir.” I squeezed the words out through tight lips.

  “That kick looked like it hurt.”

  “It did.” I got some breath back. “But it’s mostly embarrassing. I don’t want to stop like that. If I win, I want to earn it.”

  The doc watched me breathe—or mostly pretend to breathe—for a moment, then stepped back and conferred with the referee. After that, he climbed down out of the ring again. Must have been a lot of exercise for a guy his age.

  The ref came back over to my corner. “Doc says you can fight. I’m deducting a point from McDaniel, but I’m gonna have you on a short leash out there. Rules say you get a five-minute recovery period after getting fouled like that. Already used about three minutes of it. When I call for you to come out of your corner, we pick up where we left off—about a minute left in the fifth.”

  I nodded and spent the rest of the recovery period trying to breathe while my corner worked on me. Sally Ray told me to keep my distance, which I thought was pretty obvious advice. But I was getting madder and madder while I was sitting on my stool trying to catch my breath and never really being able to.

  When the ref called for the fight, I shrugged off my stool and crouched low, my left arm down low over my broken ribs. I even switched stances to southpaw, to keep my left side father away from the Jet. You ever see a cat playing with a bird whose wing has been broken? That’s what the Jet was like out there in that last minute of the fifth round.

  He had me hurt, and he knew it. It was a good time to him. He jabbed me a couple of times, danced around a little, threw a light combo here and there. There wasn’t much I could do about it. What the hell. I was going down in the sixth round anyway. About six seconds before the round ended, he clinched me up and tried to go back to my ribs. I clubbed him as hard as I could in the balls and watched him turn away and puke in a neutral corner. Take that, showoff.

  The bell rang as the ref signaled that he was deducting another point from me. “Do it again, and I’ll DQ you,” he said, but he was grinning. Under his breath, so just I could hear it, he said, “It serves him right.”

  My corner didn’t say much, just made sure I knew the sixth round was coming up. My breath was tearing through my lungs in staggering gasps, and sweat was pouring down my body in sheets.

  “Gonna need the doc after this,” I heard somebody say. It took me a minute to realize it was me.

  That sixth round. I still don’t know what to say about it. I don’t know where I got the balls, but I met the Jet head-on in the middle of the ring, still standing southpaw. I tagged him with the right, but he was younger and for all of the damage I’d done to him, he wasn’t the one with the broken ribs.

  His shots came quicker and quicker, and I began to wilt backward. “Oh no you don’t,” he mumbled through his mouthpiece. He clinched me and shoved me into the corner, throwing bombs. I tried to slump down, but he pressed his weight against me, keeping me upright. He wouldn’t let me fall. I was ready to take the 10 count and get out of there, but the Jet was fueled up on anger and adrenaline, and he was ready to go. I took most of his punches on my arms and shoulders, but the occasional blast got through.

  I could hear the rising heat of the crowd as they sensed the end was near. The ref was watching us closely, and I thought he might step in at any minute. He didn’t, though, and the crowd’s buzz began to peak. The Jet went downstairs, then, ripping away at my left arm, trying to get me to move it.

  He knew I was hurt, but he wanted to inflict a little more pain before I got away to the safety of the canvas. When one of his shots got through, I felt myself turning green and empty. The world tilted, and I didn’t have to fake the fall I was about to take. But something in my body wouldn’t let me fall.

  To tell the truth, I don’t know what it was. Anger, sure. Heart? Maybe. I doubt it, though. I’d sold out on my heart a long time ago. The Jet fight wasn’t the first one I’d agreed to throw.

  Maybe it was something else. In the ring with Johnny the Jet, I realized that he and I were two sides of the same coin. And that coin gets tossed up, up into the air, but it always comes down again, doesn’t it? The Jet was on his way up, and I was on my way down. He wasn’t good enough to win the title. And pretty soon he’d find himself in the same situation as me. On the downside of a career, taking less and less money to throw fights and build new contenders.

  So I hit him. I hit him hard, an uppercut to his unprotected throat. A dirty shot, sure, but the bastard really was trying to kill me. And that punch worked. The Jet stalled. I hit him in the same place, and again. He was frozen in place. And one more shot, throwing that last one from my heels and feeling it land home. His windpipe collapsed. I could feel it when I hit him.

  It was the only thing I had left in my tank, and it staggered the Jet backward toward the center of the ring. I slumped down onto my ass in the corner, watched Johnny the Jet struggle to the ropes and try to keep his feet underneath him. He couldn’t breathe, and his body was clamping down, trying to vomit, trying to do anything to just fucking clear the dead air in his lungs. He made a kind of nasty glumping sound deep in his chest, and that was all.

  The ref didn’t see what kind of trouble he was in. Neither did his corner. By the time the referee counted me out and called for the bell, the Jet was on the mat and turning gray. That’s when the ring became more of a circus than it had been all night. The Jet’s corner was working on him, the ringside doctor was trying to clear people away, and the TV cameramen were getting in the way as much as they possibly could.

  The doc finally got the scrum pulled away, but by then it was too late. Johnny the Jet was declared the winner of the fight, even as he lay on the canvas dying. We got out of there. Sally Ray led me up the aisle and my cut man followed. In the dressing room I collapsed on the floor. My ribs weren’t just broken. They were shattered. Sally Ray called for the EMTs, but they took their time coming. Everyone was working on the Jet, trying to get him airborne again. That was a flight everyone was going to miss.

  Eventually I got to the hospital. The ribs required surgery, and it was a good long time before I could take a deep breath without wanting to scream. For months, I was the most serious person on the face of the planet. I couldn’t afford to laugh. I got a visit one time from the Jet’s manager, a slick thin black man who wore Armani and constantly combed his mustache with his fingers. He came to my hotel room, a little beige box where I laid my head and thought long thoughts about where I could go now that nobody wanted to book a fight with me anymore. The guy wanted his thirty thousand back.

  “It’s only right,” he said. “You kill my meal ticket.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I did what I said I’d do. I went down in the sixth.”

  “I was afraid you’d see it that way,” he said. He took his hand—the one that wasn’t busy with his mustache—out of his coat pocket. There was a knife in his hand, and he clicked it open with one smooth move.

  I don’t remember when I started carrying the gun. I guess shortly after I left the hospital. It wasn’t much. Just a cheap Sig-Sauer knock-off. I’d bought it for less than three hundred dollars, but it looked
like a serious piece of work. And it was loaded. There was a round in the chamber. I took it out of the little clamshell holster and clicked off the safety. I didn’t point it anywhere. Just held it so he could see it.

  “You think that gun make a difference?”

  Now I pointed it at him. “Yes, I do.”

  He put the knife away, and I lowered the gun.

  “Where’m I gonna get another meal ticket?”

  “You manage fighters,” I said. “You got somebody else waiting in the wings.”

  He grinned a little at that. “I do, in fact.”

  “You better make sure he’s better than the Jet. McDaniel was never gonna win the title.”

  It took him a few minutes to answer. “I know that,” he said. “But you gotta know that’s not the point. The title fight was the money fight. He make it past you, he get a million or three for MacGregor. That where you make the money.”

  “I didn’t plan for it to happen. He didn’t want me to throw the fight. I was fighting for my life in there.

  .” “I know,” he said. “You hadn’t done it, the champ would have killed him. But I’d still have the money.”

  I thought about that a long time after he left. The hotel room felt smaller and smaller to me. I sat on one corner of the bed and pulled the gun back out. Like before, I didn’t point it anywhere. I just sat there, feeling the heft of it in my hand.

  After awhile, I clicked the safety off and put the barrel in my mouth. I could taste the gun oil. I took the gun out of my mouth, wiped the saliva off on the bedspread, and holstered it.

  Not yet.

  That’s not the way I wanted to go out. I still see Johnny the Jet’s face in my dreams. I see him stumble back away from me, fear rising in his face as he claws at his throat. There’s that one moment where he knows he’s dying, and he knows nobody can help him. Terror. I wake up to that face sometimes in the middle of the night. I killed him, and I did it on purpose, to keep him from killing me.

  Nobody really blames me, of course. They all saw him—saw how out of control he was. But on the nights when the Jet’s ghost won’t let me sleep, the gun in my hand is a comfort. It doesn’t matter anymore that I can’t get a fight. I fight for my life every night, and every night so far I’ve won. But I know there’s a night coming where I won’t win. Where the lure of the trigger will be too strong. I gave the Jet six good rounds. On the night I finally lose, one round from that gun will be all it takes.

  THE END

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