Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “ ‘Until the night finally came when they climbed up through the ropes and inna the ring for an opponent who’d been up already. Maybe even’d been up for a while, too, not just for a cup of coffee. Before his bell got rung too hard once or twice, or whatever’d happened to’ve been too many times for him, and so now he’s back on his way down. A guy like that, one of those old, experienced hands that isn’t just a brawler and he really does know how to box, long past the point where he’s fighting on adrenaline, or some thought of being champ, well, when he comes up against one of those tough young kids who’s won a lot of fights in bars, taken it into his head that because he took a drunk’s best punch and maybe blocked a couple more, he’s a natural boxer?

  “ ‘One of those old guys, maybe even ranked once, I can tell you,’ Bomber says,” Brennan said, “ ‘he can show a new kid there’s an awful lot he doesn’t know. And since the reason that he’s on the way down is because most likely three or four guys higher up’ve already shown him how much faster and stronger—and most likely younger, too, rubbin’ it in—they just happened to be’n he is now, his last few times out he’s been takin’ a poundin’. One bad lickin’ after another. So this’s a real pleasure for him, you know? To take off his robe and see this young spring-lamb shuckin’ and jivin’ right there. It’d be all he could do to hold himself back, maybe carry the kid for four or five rounds if that’s what his manager said the backers’d like—all smart boxers like happy backers.

  “ ‘So, as long as the kid had enough actual talent to make it look good that long, and keep at least most of the people from booin’ and throwin’ things into the ring, shoutin’ bad words like “tank” and “the fix,” that was what that journeyman did. He’d waltz around for as long as he could, not really hitting the kid a clean shot but mostly making sure he didn’t get careless and let the kid hit him with a lucky shot, until it was time to go home. Knowin’ sooner or later, whenever he wanted, he’d rock the baby to sleep.

  “ ‘And then, when it was that round, six or seventh if the kid hadn’t stumbled his glass chin right into a light flickin’ jab and the next thing gone flat on his ass, the old guy’d just come out and go to work on him. The same way the meat-carvers used to slice up those big juicy, steamboat roasts of beef, under the hot red spotlights at the real good buffet dinners that they used to have in all the restaurants for six bucks on Sunday nights? Almost the very same thing. He’d just take that young punk apart, the old guy would. Usually didn’t take him long, either, before he had the kid’s handlers—who’d most likely seen it coming, knew that this’d be the night and so they’d bet against their boy, at least had that consolation, some extra money comin’ in—throwin’ in the sponge and hoping at the same time they’d be able to find a Takeout Transfusions Window open someplace at that hour of the night—assuming their boy didn’t bleed to death first.’

  “I dunno if you’d be too young to remember this, Harry,” Brennan had said, “but do you remember Chuck Davey? That kid, back in the Fifties, I think it was, Big Jim Norris, James J. Norris, was commissioner back then. Same as all the rest of them, the ones that came before him: just the outfront stooge for Mister Grey, Frank Costello, guy who really ran the game. But, ‘Gillette Cavalcade of Sports,’ every Friday night there? That was big stuff then, and I do, I remember that. They sold some kind of beer on them too, I think. Just can’t remember which kind.

  “Well, anyway, that’s the kind of thing that Bomber reminds me. How things were, back then in general, when he gets his first look at Short Joey. There’s fights on every week then, every single week. Not all for championships, of course, couldn’t have one every week, but still the fights were on and you can imagine what that did. They were eatin’ up fighters faster’n new fighters could be made, faster’n they could grow new ones, than it’s humanly possible for them to turn new fighters out.

  “ ‘I remember,’ Bomber says, ‘that time they groomed this white-hope college-boy—least that’s what they claimed Davey was—like he was tryin’ to be Miss America, or something. Which with the amountah talent he had as a fighter there, and how good-lookin’ everybody said he was, was what he should’ve been doin’. ’Stead of pretending really to be a genuine contender for the middleweight crown. As they called it then, which I never understood where that came from. I saw any number of championship fights, every division, I bet, never once saw one single crown once. But anyway, cripes, that Davey fight, I bet more the high-rollers got new Cadillacs off of bets they made against that kid that night, when they finally had him ripe and ready for the slaughter, ’n they did from bettin’ on the Reds against the Black Sox back in Nineteen-nineteen there. It was that big a lock.

  “ ‘I forget who it was they got in to do the execution,’ Bomber says. ‘Kid Gavilan, maybe. The first Sugar Ray? I dunno. Doesn’t matter. What whoever-it-was did to that poor college-boy was the closest thing to mayhem that most people who’d led sheltered lives’d ever seen before. You know how the wise-guys always take the money off the straight guys and the squares? How they always, always, do it? Always do it the same way: by convincin’ the square guys, that they wanna clip, as many’s they can possibly get, that because they liked all these nice fat suckers so much, well, they couldn’t help themselves, and it’s ended up now that they’ve taught the pigeons so much, let them see the inside story, that they now can’t believe they did this. But it’s obvious: the suckers aren’t suckers anymore. Now they prolly know as much, these former suckers do, maybe even more, about this little crap-game with the loaded dice as the guy who loaded them.

  “ ‘And you know what those suckers do? What they actually do? They believe it, can you believe that? They actually go and believe all this shit because it just confirms exactly what they know, because they’re so smart, they all knew themselves all along. It just goes to show how smart they are, how much smarter they are than these stupid wise-guys ever even thought of being. And so those suckers get themselves right into that crap-game, or whatever it happens to be, they can’t hardly fuckin’ wait, to show off how much they learned. And: they lose their fuckin’ shirts, naturally. And to the same wise-guys, naturally. ’Cause that’s how God intended it, ever since the world began, and so that’s always been the way that it’s always turned out. And God has another good belly-laugh, His ninety-third-billionth-and-tenth one, most likely, if anyone’s been keeping score, and that’s how they always do that. I figure that by now suckers must be good for the environment or something: they not only suck up all the shit—they enjoy doing it so much they pay money for the privilege. We should breed them, I think.

  “ ‘Anyway, that’s what I figure’s probably what is going on, the first time I go see Short Joey. That this’s a new one, a local Chuck Davey, they’re starting to bring along here. First it’s already been him against some the other bar fighters and maybe some club boxers, which I didn’t see him in because those bouts I don’t go see. All they ever are is fistfights, really, fistfights with gloves on, never really any good or worth watching at all, unless you know the guy and he’s a friend of yours. Which this guy Mossi never was, and so I never went, but I still know that night he must’ve won them because here he was. Not Madison Square Garden, no, but still an honest-to-God real boxing arena. So he had to’ve fought well enough in them so that he impressed at least some people, because now there he is, on a real legit boxing card. Well, as legit as those cards ever were, back then. So what I’m seeing’s probably his first or second dance with one of the has-beens, or a guy that maybe for a while one time looked like maybe he could be, but for some reason never was. If he does all right this time, and maybe a few more times, then I’ll be seeing him again a lot. Because the people who control him’ll start moving him up in grade, and he’ll be taking on the usual string of the liveliest members in the Bum-of-the-Month Club. And he’ll win and he’ll win and he’ll win.

  “That’s when he’ll start getting the big play in Ring magazine. In six months he’ll be on
TV. Eighteen months after that, five or six more of so-called “big fights”—that he wins, naturally, because if he loses before he’s supposed to the guy who beats him is certified to be dead before morning, although maybe not found for a week, and all his opponents will know that. Then when those’re over, and all the geese’re fat, that’s when they’ll set up the kill, and he’ll lose like he’s now supposed to. But the wise-guys’ll be fat again, like they’ve always known they should be, right?

  “ ‘Then I see that perhaps I am wrong,’ Bomber says. This Short Joey’s a whole other ballgame. This kid’s the real goods, he was. The first time that I happen to see him, this’s in the early Sixties, Sixty-one or -two, in there, and I don’t know where the hell it was. Prolly some place they had onna the North Shore, maybe in Salisbury maybe—that’s where I was at the time, workin’ out of the Essex DA’s. But no, now I know: it was most likely the Alhambra Forum. Off Route One northbound there, up in Danvers. We used to go there quite a lot, couple of times a month at least. So we’re all up in there this particular night, four or five of us, prolly, he’s the third fight that’s on the card. Nothing great, but for the first time ever that anyone who knows much about boxing’s gonna really get a chance to see how this kid does in public, well, it’s sure nothin’ to be ashamed of. Someone’s got confidence in him. Someone thinks he’s got something, might make some people some money.

  “ ‘Now, like I say, I may know what’s goin’ on generally here, before this fight gets underway there, but I never heard of this kid at that time, naturally, because there’s nothin’ about him to hear then. I mean: What’s he done? So what’s to hear, I don’t hear, that I missed? Nothin’. And that’s why it’s nothin’. He’s this new kid? Well, sure. That all of us already know, word got around fast in those days, too, if you’re paying attention. But that’s really all that he is, far as any of us knows, a new kid comin’ up. But, and this’s the real question here then: ‘Is he on the way up?’ ‘Can he really fight some? Or he is just another palooka?’ That’s what we wanna know.

  “ ‘I go in and I figure he is,’ Bomber says, ‘another palooka, I mean. Ten years he’s another stewbum, like most of ’em turn out to be. Bums with no teeth and the watery eyes, runnin’ noses, just hangin’ around. The street-corners at night, the old trainin’-gym days, ’til someone takes pity and tells ’em: “Go clean out the men’s room, Brylcreem. Do a real good job onna shower room there, Lysol the floor down good, and then when you’re finished go in and see Richie, say I said give you two … Nah, what the hell, make it three bucks.” Next step’s out onna street beggin’ quarters for good old musky. Thunderbird or white port or who knows? That’s the route most of ’em take. But then, like I say, I see him. And this kid’s no pushover, no sir. He’s in with a guy who’s seen better days, but knows how to box, and this Mossi kid’s still holdin’ his own.

  “ ‘Now I don’t mean he’s refined or he’s classy. He isn’t. He’s no boxer, you can see that, and he’ll prolly never be one, because for one thing he’s too old. Even the first time we see him, he’s already twenty-two or so, and that’s too late, be getting started, learning all the things he should’ve learned, five, six years ago. What’s the most he’s got left, if he’s lucky, ten or twelve years at the outside? And that’s if he’s lucky. He’s not, he’s through in three. And it’s always hard, anyway, for an older guy to learn something. He gets to a point where he thinks he’s too old to be a kid anymore, and that’s when it’s gonna get awful hard for him to start to learn anything again. So, all right, you can see he’s never gonna be a boxer, he hasn’t got the time, but he knows how to brawl, all right, and when he finally gets inside, starts goin’ to the body, that’s when you begin to see it: ‘Jee-zuss, can this kid hit.’

  “ ‘That kid hit, the only fighter that I ever personally saw before I saw that kid, who could hit like that, was Rocky Marciano. I mean it: Rocco Marchegiano. Well, Short Joe Mossi, the night that I saw him everybody who was there knew he was never gonna be a boxer. Even if he had’ve been still young enough back then, to maybe take it up and learn it, it would still not’ve been something that you thought was maybe gonna happen. That it could. Because, he’s fightin’ that night as a middleweight, all right? And he was, that’s what he was, a middleweight right then. But as he gets older, and everybody knows this, he’s gonna bulk up some more, just like everybody does. So, if he’s twenty-two or so now, and he’s a solid middleweight already, one-sixty and all muscle? When he’s five or six years older, guarantee it he’ll be close, right around one-eighty. Easy. And this’ll only be if he really works at it, keepin’ the weight down. And also if he can do it, keep his weight down without sacrificing too much in strength, which a good many people can’t do. Fighters especially, but also jockeys, too. Can have a hard time doing that.

  “ ‘So, he’s a middleweight maybe, now, the night I first see him, but sooner or later what he’s gonna be, no matter what he does, is a light-heavyweight. At least. By the time he’s crowding thirty, in other words—if he’s still even fighting then. Which, and this may surprise you, considering what I already told you, that this kid hit like a truck, like a fuckin’ goddamned train, even that night, I first see him, I didn’t think he would be. That power that he had? It’s not gonna be enough, never gonna be enough. Because he isn’t big enough. He’s just not big enough. He had all that mass he had just packed together on this body—which was where he got his power with those just massive muscles; had this huge enormous ass on him, like Jim Ed Rice used to have when the Sox first bring him up; remember how he’d get it into his swing and just crush that fuckin’ baseball, just destroy it? Well, that’s what this Mossi kid had then, a butt on him like a Clydesdale or something, and when he hauled that right arm back, and cocked it, and he’s just watching, ready, waitin’, and then he sees his chance and throws it, shit, he practically comes right off his feet, he’s up on his fuckin’ toes when it lands, up on the toes of his right foot, like he’s just pulled himself right offa the floor and into the air just usin’ all that power that he had in his ass. I tell you, it was pretty close to bein’ the most astonishin’ fuckin’ thing I ever seen before in my whole life. It was, no exaggeration here now, fuckin’ beautiful.

  “ ‘But, and this was the problem, it still didn’t matter. It wouldn’t. And you could see that, right then, that same night. The body still wasn’t big enough for the work he wanted to do, and it was never gonna be, either. He couldn’t’ve been much more’n, I’d say, five-eight, maybe nine inches, but that would’ve been the maximum. He wasn’t no five-foot ten-inches tall, no matter what they said. Which meant his arms, his reach, his fuckin’ wingspan, it wasn’t long enough. He did have long arms, sure. That’s what they always said when a kid came up who had it in every other respect, had it in everything but his size, how big he was: “Yeah, but lookit his arms. Got arms on him like a gorilla. Knuckles scrape onna ground when he walks.” “Yeah, but that’s not because his arms’re so long; for this kid it’s that his legs’re too short—the ground’s up too close to him there.” For the rest of him, the legs were, I mean. Probably his arms were about what you’d expect on a guy six feet tall, maybe a little more, but not much. Thirty-four-inch reach, say? Never be enough.

  “ ‘So it was too bad, but it wasn’t gonna happen, not even from Day One. He was never gonna have the kind of reach that’d let him stand back at the right range and fight light-heavyweights. Or a heavyweight, obviously, too. Not with a reach like that. Put him up against a guy just as powerful as he was, which the real ranked light-heavies and heavyweights were, at least back then, and most likely a real boxer, too, with two or three more inches of reach? Guy like that’d just stand back in the next town over and beat the shit out of him from there. The only way he’d ever have even a chance of beating someone like that’d be if he could somehow get himself in under what was coming at him all the time, and hit the bigger guy so hard before he could react that even if he only got him once
the hands’d have to drop. And then he could just wade in. Not saying that that couldn’t happen, or that it wouldn’t happen, but not more’n twice. By then at the latest it’d be over, because the guy he met up with would’ve had a manager who would’ve seen this kid fight, and therefore would’ve known how to defense him: never let him get inside. And after that day, night, he would never get a rematch, because by then it’d be obvious to even assholes what to do.

  “ ‘You see what I’m tellin’ you?’ Bomber says. ‘Short Joey Moss had one tough break: got born with a body the wrong size for doing what he could’ve, and he would’ve, done with it, if he’d’ve had the right-size one. No question inna world about it. He would have been a champ, champion of the world, wearin’ that big Hickock belt with the diamonds and jewels on it—worth twenty-five thousand bucks, I think it was they said, they used to claim back then; that would’ve been, in those days, two years’ fuckin’ salary for a successful man—doin’ anything he wanted. Just struttin’ through his life, every day of it, for all the rest of it. People always would’ve known him. He would’ve always seen them nudge each other, right? When he came into a room.

  “ ‘ “See that guy, just come in? That guy over there? That there’s Short Joey Moss. He was champion the world.” That’s what they would’ve said. And if anybody ever asked me whether I think now, seeing how he’s ended up, what his life’s turned out to be, all the real bad things he’s done—that we fuckin’ know he’s done; we just can’t prove them yet—if I think part of the reason might be that he got pissed off at God, or fate, or just bad luck, whatever did it to him, and decided to get even? Yeah, I do think that. You can bet I do. That’s what I would’ve done, I think; I think I might have gone and done something like that myself.