by F. X. Toole
Because of the metal legs, Frankie had trouble shoving the heavy corner stool beneath the lowest strand of ropes but had it ready when Maggie got to the corner. He watered and greased her and admonished her to fight from the outside. When the bell rang, the cut man took the stool from Frankie and set it where Frankie could sit on it to watch the fight from ringside.
The bell for the second round rang, and Maggie fired her jabs. Billy continued to grab and hold, in an attempt to turn the match into a brawl and thereby switch the momentum of the fight back to herself. But Maggie was too slick for her, and kept drilling her with jabs and left uppercuts that kept Billy back on her heels. Billy missed so often that she was gasping as much from missing as from the punches Maggie landed. Billy caught Maggie with an elbow but missed when she tried to jam her palm into Maggie’s nose. Maggie continued to work on her from the outside, shooting her jab to Billy’s breasts like she was ramming her with the end of a two-by-four. The Blue Bear caved at the waist and grunted in pain.
In the third round Maggie’s jab had Billy off-balance and stumbling, allowing Maggie to dart in with combinations to the head and body. Billy went down from a one-two-hook combination. Frankie thought Billy had been hurt badly enough to stay down. Since it was a title fight, there was no mandatory eight-count, and after five she was right back in Maggie’s face.
Billy grabbed Maggie and tried to throw her to the canvas. The referee warned her that he’d start taking points away if she kept it up, but Billy didn’t give a shit and cursed him in Russian. She stepped on Maggie’s foot and tried to shove Maggie down again. When Maggie was still off-balance, Billy caught her with an elbow the ref didn’t see and cut Maggie’s left eye slightly. The real damage was to the tissue around the eye, which caused it to puff up. Frankie’s cut man had no trouble stopping the blood, but his ice packs and his ice-cold metal stop-swell did nothing to keep the swelling down, and the eye threatened to close completely.
Frankie told Maggie to go out in the fourth firing, to try for a knockout, because he was afraid the eye would close and the ref would stop the fight. She nailed Billy repeatedly, but Billy stayed up and continued to head-butt. The ref took points away and warned her. Billy would give a fake apology and then go right back to her dirty ways. Between rounds, Maggie complained of blurry vision. She also told Frankie she didn’t know how to counter Billy’s dirty tactics. Frankie illegally flooded her eye with Visine, and when she said she still couldn’t see, he told her she only needed one eye to fight.
“Okay, but what I do about the Bear?” said Maggie.
“You know how to step outside her right hand, and go to the liver with a left hook, right?”
“Been doin that. She’s made of steel.”
“Not for fookin long,” said Frankie. “This time, instead of goin for the liver, I want you to go to the right cheek of her big dyke ass with your left hook, stick it into her sciatic nerve like a dagger, and keep on stickin it.”
“What if the ref sees me?”
“Keep the bull bitch between you and him, and he won’t. And keep on stickin into that degenerate ass. Got it?”
“You betcha.”
Near the end of the fifth, Billy’s right leg was dragging and white with pain. Exhausted, she went to one knee for a voluntary eight-count in an attempt to regain her strength and to relieve the pain. It was a good sign, but Frankie was still worried about Maggie’s eye, afraid it might close like a clamshell and cost her the title shot.
By the time Billy got up, Maggie’s vision still hadn’t cleared completely, but she kept the pressure on. She jumped the Russian with combinations that had her head wobbling and the crowd on its feet. The ref was about to stop the fight, when the bell rang.
Maggie had thrown four solid shots in the middle of the ring, all of them landing, and was about to finish Billy off with a left hook to the jaw, but on hearing the bell, she was able to catch herself. Instead of letting the shot go, in an instant she turned to her right, looked with her good eye to see Frankie pushing the ring stool under the rope, and dropped both her hands.
Billy had been ready to throw a righthand at the bell. But instead of holding back like Maggie had, and knowing that Maggie couldn’t see properly out of her left eye, she stepped in and ripped a right that caught Maggie on the left ear.
Since Maggie was moving away, the force of the blow was lessened. But it was hard enough, landing where it did, to affect Maggie’s inner ear. Suddenly, her equilibrium gone, the ring was a roller-coaster, and she felt like she was stepping into post holes. Though she was fully conscious, her legs began to snap and buckle. She’d never been knocked off her feet, and her mind and body rebelled at the idea of hitting the canvas.
Frankie, busy with the stool, hadn’t seen what happened and looked over just as Maggie had begun to stumble toward him, her legs like rubber bands.
“Jaysus!”
He took a step, but Maggie’s legs gave out before he could catch her. Falling like deadweight, she plunged past his outstretched arms. Trying to prevent her damaged eye from hitting the canvas, Maggie wrenched her body in an attempt to break the fall by taking it on her side and shoulders. But she twisted too hard, and the back of her neck came down full force on the metal band of the ring stool, her neck breaking at the first and second vertebrae, the sound of it like a boot squashing a snail.
“No!” Frankie cried, watching as she slumped to her side.
Ring doctors rushed to her as Frankie stretched her flat on the canvas. She had stopped breathing.
At all fights in the major boxing states, a fully equipped ambulance and crew stand ready. The doctors immediately called for a stretcher, and Maggie was carried out at a run. The crowd was silent, the pipers numb. Billy stood stock-still, the sweat on her going cold as her pale eyes.
At the ambulance, Maggie was hooked to an Ambu-bag and air was squeezed into her flat lungs just before the four-minute time limit that would have meant brain damage.
As oxygen reached her brain, she mumbled, “I love you, Daddy,” but remained unconscious.
Several hours later, specialists at the hospital announced that Maggie was in ICU and had not regained consciousness.
Frankie lied, said he was her grandfather. “Can she breathe on her own yet?”
“No.”
“Is there damage to her spinal cord?” Frankie asked, pressing.
“It’s too soon.”
“I’m a C-1 and C-2 complete, boss,” Maggie said. She was gaunt and sallow and the spunk in her was gone. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark and lifeless. “That means my spinal cord’s so bad they never can fix me.”
She’d been nine days in a coma. They’d kept her doped-up to keep her head immobile for two weeks after that. Because of her MRI and other tests, her neurologists determined that she was a permanent, vent-dependent quadriplegic unable to breathe without a respirator. As a C-1 and C-2, she was injured at the first and second cervical vertebrae, which meant she could talk and slightly move her head, but that was all. She had lost the ability to breathe on her own, to move her limbs. She could not control her bladder or her bowel movements. She’d be frozen the rest of her life.
It took several hours every day to get her ready for the wheelchair, to check the tubes into her bladder, her stomach, and through the front of her neck. After stretching and manipulating her arms and legs, her attendants would lift her into the wheelchair, where she’d be strapped in. Her bed respirator would be switched for the one built into the wheelchair. Since she couldn’t breathe on her own, her bed and wheelchair respirators would always be on Control rather than on Assist—Control meant oxygen was pumped into her twenty-four hours a day.
Because of complications, she remained in Las Vegas two months. She had no appetite but maintained her weight because of the calories they fed her through the stomach tube. She developed skin ulcers because she couldn’t change positions and the skin broke down. Her lungs filled with fluid and had to be pumped out when p
neumonia struck. There were blood clots in her legs and problems with hemoglobin. To induce a daily bowel movement, she was placed on her side and pressure was applied to her lower abdomen until her waste was pushed out of her. She was humiliated every day of her life.
It was late afternoon. Frankie was sitting by her bed when she woke up. “You okay, darlin?” he asked.
She was still groggy. “Well, you know, they got tubes stickin up me in places I’druther not think about. You ever heard of dysreflexia?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s somethin that happens real quick, like when you git a kink in your pee tube? Gits your heartbeat all to rushin.” Embarrassed, she looked away. “I didn’t tell you, but a couple a times I liked to have a heart attack in the night. Awful as it is when your heart’s fixin to explode, it made me happy, boss, ’cause I thought I’d be free of this mess. Almost made it once. But then I was brought back to bein this same old snowman in January, same old twisted-up snowman sittin here wishin to God it was July.”
“Ah, Jaysus,” Frankie said. “I knew I was wrong to train you.”
“Don’t say that,” Maggie said. “Hail, workin with you was the only time since Daddy passed I had respect. Hey!, and we almost did her, too, didn’t we, boss?, huh? almost made me the world’s first Million Dollar Baby!, ain’t that rat?” She smiled but then had to look away, her lips quivering. “Daddy’d a been proud.”
The Boxing Commission would pay for Maggie’s hospitalization and rehab. Frankie remained in Vegas for the time Maggie was there. He bunked with a trainer friend and spent all the time with Maggie her doctors would allow. He read newspapers and magazines to her. He brought in a small TV set with a VCR so she could watch movies. He wheeled her around the hospital grounds when it was cool enough.
He arranged for trainers in Los Angeles to work with his fighters and called his boys once a week. They were devastated by what happened to Maggie. All were proud to say they knew her. They called her Macushla.
Maggie could have gone to a rehab clinic in Las Vegas or Missouri but chose to return to Los Angeles for treatment to be close to Frankie. They made the six-hour trip by ambulance. Twice she spasmed into a grotesque caricature of herself, and the attending pulmonologist had to ask Maggie how to untwist her.
“Worse part is the dang bedsores, when they git to stinkin.”
At the Evergreen Rehabilitation Center near Third and Alvarado, there was a wide expanse of landscaped lawn, California sycamores, and palms. Maggie was given first-class treatment with genuine concern for her well-being. She was one of ten quadriplegics there, but there were many more paraplegics, and amputees of all kinds. Most of the patients were cheerful. Maggie was one of the ones who wasn’t, as each day the dread of a frozen life engulfed her.
Frankie tried to tell her that there was always hope, that new medical miracles were developed every day, but she would turn away and bite her tongue to keep from screaming.
“And even if they don’t, now that you’re off the heart monitor, you’ll be able to move around on your own. They got wheelchairs you can use by blowin into a straw, and TV sets and computers you can operate by your voice. You could go to school. I’d drive you.”
Maggie would nod. “I know you would, boss. But somewhere down the line I’ll finish up here like ever’body else. I surely can’t go home, and there’s nowhere else I can go.”
“You can stay with me.”
“Bein a burden ain’t somethin I could handle.”
“You’re same as my daughter to me,” Frankie said, pain and tenderness washing across his Irish moosh. “You’d be no burden, not to me.”
“You have no idea,” she said. “And all the money I made’d be gone quicker than a whitetail over barb wire.”
“I got money.”
When Frankie wasn’t there, and once her daily care had been administered, Maggie was wheeled from her room at the end of the wing out onto the second-floor balcony. On cold or windy days she sat before the domed window of her room. She never complained, never asked for anything, except for stronger sleep medication. She wished to God she’d get dysreflexia again, get it so bad her heart would squirt right out her ears. If she felt it coming on, she’d keep it to herself next time.
Someone from Maggie’s family called every day at first, then once a week. When her brother J.D. learned she was being moved to Los Angeles, he said the family would be out. Maggie told him not to bother.
“Naw, naw, big sister,” he said. “Mama wonts to make sure our bidness matters is bein tended to.”
The family had been in town a week, spending more time at Universal Studios and Disneyland than with Maggie. On what was to be their last day in Los Angeles, they arrived in Maggie’s room with a notary public and a lawyer, who had drawn up papers giving power of attorney to Earline. Maggie told them all to get their hillbilly asses back to the Ozarks. Frankie had watched in silence.
“Did I do wrong?” Maggie asked, when everyone had left.
“Whatever you want is right by me.”
“What I want is to donate my money to the American Paralysis Association, so no one else has to live like this.”
“Check with your doctor and do it.”
“Already did,” she said. “Family made that trip out here for nothin.”
“Not nothin,” said Frankie. “Saw Donald Duck and Mickey.”
A day later Maggie’s family confronted Frankie in the parking lot. Maggie watched from her balcony. J.D was six feet three and weighed 260. He was a big-boned man with beefy arms and legs. His hair was a pale blond, and his belly strained the shirt of his uniform. Frankie was five-eight and weighed 160.
“Hey there, bud,” said J.D. “We wont you to stay away from our kin.”
“Tell you what,” said Frankie. “Let’s go see Maggie. She tells me to stay away, I stay away.”
“Ain’t gonna be like that,” said J.D. “You’re suckin up to Sis just to git her money, an’ that dog don’t hunt.”
“You’re wrong, bubba. Just knowin her’s been enough.”
“If I gotta hurt you, I’ll hurt you, old man,” said J.D.
“You couldn’t hurt a ant with a hammer.”
“How old are you, bud?”
“Pick a number,” Frankie said.
J.D. slammed Frankie into a car and tried to get him in a choke hold. Frankie dropped his chin to his chest, kneed J.D. in the balls, and spun free when J.D. involuntarily grabbed to protect himself. Frankie faked a left, then threw a right-hand lead, and J.D. raised his hands to cover his face. As Frankie threw the right, he’d also stepped to his right and drilled a left hook to J.D.’s big gut, popping the buttons off his shirt. J.D. grunted and bent over in pain as Frankie slipped to his right again, which placed him behind J.D. Frankie put everything into a right hand and a hook that were designed to rupture J.D.’s left kidney. J.D. screamed and rolled into a gasping ball on the asphalt.
Frankie took two quick steps to the mother and daughter and slapped both of them full force in the face. The sister sat flat down, and Earline yelled at J.D. for not protecting her.
Frankie was on fire. “Git!” he shouted, treating them like dogs. “Go on, git!”
Maggie’s mother struck a pose. “Take us back home, J.D., where folks is decent.”
Maggie had seen the beef and was proud of Frankie when he climbed the back steps to her balcony.
“Dang if you still ain’t got some of the moves, Mr. Dunn,” she said, smiling.
“Sorry about what happened, it bein your family,” said Frankie, sitting down.
Maggie said, “You remind me of my daddy, I ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Same slopey shoulders, same veiny arms,” she said, watching as her family drove out of the parking lot. “See, he was a over-the-road trucker, Daddy was, and he kept that rig of his lookin like a Easter egg. Had this big ol’ dog Axel, a German shepherd that traveled ever’where with him. Daddy was gone a lot, b
ut whenever he come home it was like Christmas, and we’d have us a high old time. Clothes and toys for us kids, dresses and silky things for Mama, and store-bought pie, if he’d come through Collins.
“Only thing Daddy spent money on for himself, besides work clothes, was chew, and he was a dude about chew. Back then there was this tobacco shop out here in Santa Monica someplace where he’d drive outta his way to stop in and buy ten pounds at a time ’cause it was so far from home. It was tasty stuff, flavored and sweet like candy. He’d buy licorish, and lime- and rum-flavored stuff called dakree, and the thick, dark natural stuff, and peach-flavored.
His favorite was peach-flavored, and it was my favorite, too. You ever chew, boss?”
“Not me,” said Frankie, smiling and shaking his head. He was delighted that Maggie was talking. It was the first spark he’d seen in her since the accident.
“Chew got a hail of a kick to her, yessir.”
“You used to chew?”
“Dip, too. Hail, when I was ten I could shift gears from compound low all the way up and on back down again, double-clutchin all the way. Daddy promised to take me on a run with him soon’s I finished sixth grade. I was a all-A student, too. And I could outrun, out-hit, and outfling a football farther than any of the boys my age, and a lot of them older. Daddy said I was a pistol.”
“How old were you when your daddy passed on?”
“Almost twelve. It was April, and I was due to make that run in June. Daddy said he’d try for a load out here so we could buy peach chew together, and eat lobster out Santa Monica Pier, and ride the merry-go-round till we caught the brass ring. We had a house, and Mama had a new pickup, and there was money in the bank. Then Daddy come down with cancer of the tongue and throat, and you don’t wont to hear more ’bout what that’s like. But Mama stuck it out.
“See, Mama wasn’t born bad, but what she needed was a keeper. She was the prettiest little ol’ thing you ever did see, and afterwards I saw after the kids, and she went to waitressin to keep the house. Lost it, a course, and we become standard trailer trash.
“When Daddy got sick, old Axel didn’t know what to do with hisself. He’d come and stand with his chin on the side of Daddy’s bed. Daddy couldn’t talk, but all he had to do was to look at that dog, and ol’ Axel’d start yippin and his tail’d start to waggin. It wasn’t long before Axel’s hindquarters started to give out on him. Happens a lot to shepherds, comes from inbreedin. Pretty soon ol’ Axel couldn’t barely walk from the pain. Daddy was so sick he couldn’t hardly stand, but one day he got Axel into his rig by hisself, and both of ’em sat there half a hour while Daddy got his truck warmed up. Daddy took a shovel and a forty-five with him. Axel thought he was a goin on a run and was actin like a pup. Then Daddy drove up into the hills so’s he could put his best friend down. Mama and us kids sat close on the floor waitin. Near sundown the shot come through the trees. It took Daddy a long time to git back home. His eyes was all burny when he come in, and he never got into his Easter egg again.
