Fighting Words

by A. S. Acheson

  Myles clung to the bar. The whoops of the crowd turned slowly into jeers. He struggled not to pitch over and vomit.

  “All that matters for us is that you stay away,” Oakley said. “I’ve seen good men waste all their money on malarkey from people like him.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Oakley sent Myles to an empty storage closet so Myles could prepare for the fight. Myles followed in silence. When the door shut safely behind him, he stomped his feet in anger and hurled the relic against the wall. He’d treated a slimy huckster like a genuine man of the cloth. How could he be so stupid?

  He thought of Father O’Hanlon, all the way back home. The man would’ve listed, in painful detail, all the sins that Myles had committed. Worshipping false idols. Looking outside the church for supernatural guidance. Treating a dyed-in-the-wool sinner as he would treat Father O’Hanlon himself. Buying smuggled goods, which Myles figured was stealing.

  His chest was wracked with pain. Oakley had left him a glass of water, and Myles downed it, glugging the murky liquid as though he’d spent the last week stranded on a raft. He conjured up images of his mother, his da, his siblings, his friends, his teachers, his neighbors, and his girlfriends. He had let these good people down. Myles wasn’t a fighter, at least not a real one. Now a man who was born and bred for boxing was about to reveal him as a fool.

  Myles hated how easily O’Carroll had tricked him. But he felt more foolish for tying up his future with a sport as savage as boxing. It was not even much of a sport at all. It was simply what people had been doing to each other from the very beginning of time. Myles was no better than the bullies he knew, those boys who threw nicer and weaker kids to the ground because it made them feel stronger.

  He remembered his father telling him stories about the great Irish fighters when Myles was young. Cú Chulainn. Grace O’Malley. Eoin, the boxer of Kerry. His father said Eoin trained every day, getting ready for matches by throwing his fists into haystacks and running for miles. Eoin did this to protect his poor little town from highway robbers and bandits. A year after Eoin married his wife, she died at the hands of a vagabond. From that day forward, the fighter kept a lock of her hair in a necklace that he wore as a charm.

  Wait a minute.

  If a local hero in Kerry kept a charm inside a necklace, what was so different about Myles and his so-called relic? The relic was fake, of course. But the urge Myles felt to protect his family was all too real. What was so wrong about taking no chances to ensure that he survived his fight? It must be a good thing if he did it for the welfare of others, even if boxing itself was not a very good thing to do. As the Bible said, a thief is not a thief if he steals bread to feed his children. The McRearys were hungry. Why shouldn’t Myles be forgiven?

  The relic lay in the corner of a shelf. Myles reached in and picked it up. Arnie Wilkins had probably just grabbed a piece of junk left on the roadside. But in a way, the trinket’s twisted metal looked beautiful to Myles because of what it meant. It proved once and for all that Myles was not a sinner. The words of his sister were right. He was simply doing his best to serve the people who had cared for him. He was serving the people who taught him the word of the Lord.

  Out on the floor, the spectators called for Myles to come out and fight. He tucked the relic in his pocket. Flexing his arms, he hopped up and down and wrung out his hands. He crossed himself and stepped through the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Prepare to meet your maker, scrawny!”

  “Give ’im one for the Emerald Isle!”

  “Don’t let me down, Carly! I got twenty bucks on this!”

  “What, are you sweating? The heat too much for you to bear?”

  “The eyes! Always get the eyes!”

  Inside the fighter’s circle, Carly ground his fists together and hopped on the balls of his feet. Myles looked him over. Two scars marked the Italian, the one around his torso and another that formed a ceiling above his stomach. Both of the man’s arms had enormous, bulging veins. For the first time, Myles felt he could look at Carly the way he looked of his other opponents—as a man he had the power to knock down, plain and simple.

  For his part, Carly looked down at Myles’s legs, then at his face, then finally at his stomach. An ache ran through Myles, running up from his ribs and spreading across his torso. He puffed out his chest and rubbed his hands together. The downtown crowd egged them on.

  Oakley stepped into the space between the two crowds. He opened his palm and extended his hand to Carly, then to Myles, as though it was only this gesture that kept them from attacking each other. He clapped his hands.

  “Gentlemen! Some of you have come very far to see this evening’s match. I want to thank our friends up in Harlem for donating their star for this occasion.”

  The uptown crowd booed. “Donate?” one man yelled out. “What the heck does that mean?”

  “It means that a certain barkeeper struck a deal with yours truly,” Oakley said. “Point is, today we are gathered for the best fight in Manhattan history. Judging from the bets you fine men put down, I expect this to be a match to remember.”

  He glanced at Myles and winked. “Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Myles said.

  “He’s ready!” yelled the downtown crowd.

  “Monsieur Sperio, you ready?” Oakley said.

  “As always,” Carly said.

  “It’s settled,” Oakley said. “You know the rules, boys. Fight!”

  At the bar, Tracey rang a bell. Carly hunched over and put up his dukes. Myles stood tall and turned to his side, guarding his chest with his right fist. Carly and Myles circled each other on the floor. Carly lunged, barely swiping Myles on the left cheek with his knuckles. Myles feinted, jerked back, and socked Carly in the armpit. He tried to move closer and land a stronger punch.

  Carly was fast, though. His legs moved sideways so quickly Myles wondered if the Italian was hovering off the ground. Myles leapt backward, positioning his right fist for a sidewinder. Carly came forward, and Myles popped him in the nose. Carly staggered back and nearly fell.

  “Look at that! Good Lord!”

  “He’s bleeding!”

  “I told you eejits never to bet against the Irish!”

  Droplets of blood fell down from Carly’s nose. They mixed with the sweat on his chest and spread across him in veinlike trickles. Myles felt the knuckles on his right hand go numb. When he rubbed them and cradled them in his left palm, Carly rushed forward and smacked him on the cheek.

  “There we go! One to one! Now this is a fight!”

  “Sicilians eat scoundrels like you for dinner!”

  “Get up! Get back up, you dog!”

  Myles propped himself up on his elbow. He scrambled back up and dodged a second blow from Carly. His vision was blurry now, and when he looked at Carly, he saw a black mass where sweat-covered hair should have been.

  Myles ran forward and swung again. Carly ducked away and crab walked to the right. Myles flailed, swinging his pained arms in front of him like a blind man, until finally his fist landed on Carly’s left shoulder. For a second, Myles felt satisfied, but then Carly spun and pounded Myles in the ribs. Myles crumpled and fell to the ground.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Myles’s vision filled up with dots and pulsing red figures. Pain shot up from his ribs. He tried to push himself up on his feet, but his muscles refused to move. His weak bones shook like broken bells in his chest.

  “That’s it. That’s the end.”

  “Downtown fighters are weak, I tell you.”

  “Graces. That child looks awful.”

  “How many bottom feeders just lost half their salaries?”

  Carly shot Myles a wolfish stare. On the end of the downtown side, Oakley watched Myles with the clinical eye of a doctor.

  This is it, Myles thought. I’m a cripple from this day forward.

  He crawled on his elbows over a small patch of floor. The relic pressed on his skin through
the fabric of his shorts.

  What did it mean to be a warrior, he wondered. Did it mean you were someone who won? Did it mean you knocked your opponents down every time with overwhelming strength? Or did it mean that you fought through the pain? That you struggled to victory no matter the cost to your body?

  It wasn’t glamorous to keep going until you collapsed, but it was honorable. Myles had the sense that it was better to go out with dignity than to give up on the future of your family just to save your own skin.

  He thought back to the sight of his father standing up to their landlord. He saw the rain and the wind beating down, the landlord huddled in his big winter coat while his father told him to leave.

  Myles rolled onto his stomach and coughed. He placed his hands in a push-up position and forced himself up off the ground. At that moment, Carly grabbed him by the waist and began to choke him in a vise grip. Myles twirled and wrenched his arm around Carly’s unguarded neck. The two locked together in a fierce standing grapple, each fighter spreading his legs apart to maintain balance on the floor. Hoping to pry off Carly’s hands, Myles put his weight into his shoulder.

  Carly loosened his grip. Myles realized what the man was doing—getting ready to jump back so Myles would hurl himself onto the ground. Sure enough, Carly pushed forward suddenly and backtracked away from Myles. Myles let go too, hopping to stay on his feet.

  Sweat and blood stung Myles’s eyes. He pressed them with the palms of his dirty hands. He stared at Carly, the two unmoving in the din of the shrieking crowd.

  “What’s wrong, Carly? Scared of a boy from the slums?”

  “Show him what Sicily is made of!”

  “Catholic showdowns, I tell you. Can’t beat ’em.”

  “Get him now!”

  Before Carly could move, before Myles even knew what he was doing, Myles hit Carly with a sudden, brutal uppercut. It landed beneath Carly’s chin and let out a terrible crack. Carly went down, unconscious, and the downtown crowd exploded into cheers.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After the fight, Oakley counted up the incredible earnings from the evening. In the wake of the match, the downtown spectators treated Myles like a king, lifting him up above the crowd and chanting his name throughout the club. Myles, who disliked celebrations, thought the whole thing was confusing and scary. In the back room, alone with Oakley, he gradually came back to his senses.

  “Unbelievable,” Oakley said. The fight had made them so much money that Oakley could only store a third of it in the chest where he stored their earnings. He piled the rest—minus Lew Mayflower’s cut—in a crate, which Oakley kept hidden from the rest of the bar underneath a thick black curtain.

  “Look at this, kid. You’re rich. We all are. With this kind of money you could move into a place on Wall Street.”

  Myles waited silently for his payout.

  “I mean it,” Oakley said. “A wonderful show. You could step out of the ring right now and do something incredible with your life. Start a business. Write a book. Whatever you want.”

  “I suppose.”

  Oakley counted up Myles’s share of the profits. Ten dollars. Twenty dollars. Thirty. When he counted up forty dollars, Myles felt a lump in his throat. When Oakley counted to fifty, Myles’s heart began burning. This kind of money was beyond his position, beyond his class. Could it really be possible that the money was his? Quietly, Myles imagined a banker or a politician swooping in and telling him sorry, there’s a problem, these earnings belong to us. Yet nobody knocked on the door.

  “Here you go,” Oakley said. “A hundred and ten.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No joke. Imagine what I can do with this place with all these profits. I can’t wait to show them to Mr. Mayflower. I’m thinking Versailles or maybe a Buckingham on the Bowery. Either way, expect renovations.”

  “Versailles?” Myles said.”

  “It’s a gag!” Oakley said. “We should work on your sense of humor on top of that gullibility. It’s a drag when a bright kid like you doesn’t know how to take a joke.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be happy. Go home and buy yourself whatever you think you deserve. You’ve earned it.”

  Myles cradled the hundred and ten dollars in his hand. He removed a bill and held it under the light. It was real. It was not a counterfeit. The money was his. Myles thanked Oakley and slipped out the club through the back door. As he left the Woodrat, hollers leaked through the front door and followed him down the street.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next day, after waking up early, Myles went to a fancy restaurant and ate a fancy breakfast. He ordered expensive bacon, fine tea, good coffee, and well-cooked eggs. He ate his food slowly in a room full of high-flying patrons.

  Myles ate alone. As he did, he kept his hands off the clean white tablecloth, afraid he might stain them with dirt or grime from his apartment. The waiter kept his distance, and Myles worried that perhaps he smelled bad. He made a mental list of the tasks ahead as he slowly devoured his meal.

  The first thing was to go to the bank and transfer funds overseas. The second was to write a letter telling his family where to pick up the money. The third was to get a decent haircut and shave, preferably at the barber on 11th Street, followed by a trip to the spa for a nice bath. Then a tailor, for decent clothes.

  When he wrote the letter, the jubilant tone he felt it needed somehow felt unnatural. He looked forward to his family arriving on the boat, and yet he knew how difficult it might be for his father to get a job. Likewise, his mother would have to work to keep their family in a decent apartment. There weren’t many neighborhoods Irish people could move to, but even so, Myles made a pledge to find his family a respectable space before they came. He’d proved to them yesterday that he could make good, and now he needed to prove that he could live decently.

  After paying the bill, he made his way down to the bank. He filed the wire transfer and tucked the receipt in his pocket. Outside, the day was sunny. The light’s reflection on the East River nearly blinded him. He went to the post office and slowly wrote the letter to his family. When he finished, he dropped it in the mailbox, then regretted it instantly, wishing it were possible to take it back and look over it one more time.

  A dock stood next to the post office. Myles went out to an empty pier. After taking off his shoes, he dipped his feet in the New York water for the first time since he arrived. Steamships and barges rolled by on the filthy waves. Pigeons and seagulls cawed and flew over his head. When Myles felt something on his leg, he lifted it out of the water. A strand of seaweed clung to his ankles.

  He took the trinket out of his pocket. While dressing that morning, he put it there unconsciously, as though he expected to fight for his life once again. Myles turned it around several times and winced as the tarnished metal sent harsh sunlight toward his eyes. In the distance, a factory in Jersey belched plumes of smoke into the air.

  Would Myles stop fighting? His mother wouldn’t want him to box, but if he made this kind of money, his father might try to change her mind. Moral rightness was hard to uphold in the face of a hundred dollars.

  Myles got up and pulled on his shoes. His wet toes squelched in his socks. Holding up the trinket, he looked at it one last time. A whistle went off in the distance. Myles threw the trinket into the river, where it skipped off the surface, once, twice, three times. It broke through the surface and sunk into the water. Myles turned away and headed back to the club.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A. S. Acheson is a writer and a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin.

 

 

 
-ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share