Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “No, thanks. They don’t hit that hard though, do they?”

  “They hurt each other, yes they do. There’s no cosmetics for that either.”

  Lauchlin touched his throat. He had his dad’s Adam’s apple. He’d been punched in the throat, rare in the ring, but it almost cost him that fight, an early one, clumsy, Malkie wouldn’t have seen it, what he had looked like under the ring lights, hanging on to finish the round, wheezing for air, his esophagus sore for days, his voice raspy as a gangster’s. Training didn’t prepare you for everything, men fought any way they could sometimes and it wasn’t pretty. Working laces into your face, stomping on your feet to foul up your footwork, taunting you in clinches, filthy words, fouling up your style, your tactics. Anything to break you down.

  “Listen, Malk. You think you’re something of an authority on women, and I know you aren’t, but I need a second opinion, like the doctors say.”

  “What leads you to suppose I don’t know anything about women?”

  “You know something, that’s why I’m asking you. My mother has opinions on this, but I’d rather not go into them.”

  “She’s never shy that way.”

  Lauchlin drained his glass. “There is a woman I’ve got some close to. But that’s wrong, so I’m told.”

  “You’ve been there before, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “This is different. It’s complicated.”

  “The wrong is complicated, or she is? An uncomplicated woman is not interesting.”

  “There’s no lack of interest, Malk. I’m not sure how she feels about me. Or how I should feel about her.”

  “She’s already let you know, one way or another, I suppose. Hasn’t she?”

  “A little. There’s a husband in it too.”

  “Well. That’s a tighter situation, Lauchlin. As you’ve known in the past, if you don’t mind the mention. Trouble there maybe. And let’s admit it’s Tena MacTavish we’re talking about.”

  “Jesus. Can anything stay a secret here?”

  “I didn’t know there was a secret.”

  “What have we done? Nothing friends don’t do. Clement knows, it’s all above board. He likes to see her happy.”

  “But maybe not too happy. She enjoys you, doesn’t she?”

  “So?”

  “No harm in that, Lauch, not in my book. When a woman doesn’t enjoy you anymore, it’s all over, my son. But see how deep the water is before you jump.”

  “I’m not jumping anywhere, I’m too old for that.”

  “Good, you’re a sensible man, you’ll do the right thing. I don’t know any more than I’ve told you. Now boxing? Yes. Cape Bretoners in the ring, the champions on your wall there? Lightning Lauchlin MacLean? Yes. Pour me another dileag, I’ve taken a liking to the Sixteen Men of Tain, a talented gang, those fellas. What about Morag, she still home to Inverness?”

  “She’s away to Greece, but she’ll be back for a little, in some way. I saw her off at a dance up there.”

  “You danced with her, I suppose?”

  “You could say I did, yes. I didn’t get the last waltz, but yes.”

  “She’d better watch those Greeks, she’s a fine-looking woman,” Malcolm said. “You must be a sharp dancer, boy. Eh?” His eyes were bright from the whisky and the pain of his foot. “You always had good legs under you, good footwork.”

  “I’m going to need it and more, I think.”

  In the shadows the bag seemed to sway ever so slightly. The most primitive of boxing equipment, the trunk of a man, hung to be hit. There was a long, narrow mirror on the far wall, cracked where a crate had hit it, too obscured by boxes now to reflect his moves. Not for vanity anyway, not for posing but a kinetic study of himself jabbing, crossing, hooking, bobbing, weaving, slipping side to side, those years he tried to stay in some kind of shape, here, secretly, to keep his punching sharp, a rough sort of timing at least, working within the limitations of his heart. For something. What that something was he had forgotten, a vestige of hope, desire, strength.

  Lauchlin swivelled his chair so he could see the photograph on the wall, Blair Richardson in profile, driving a right hand into a heavy bag, training for his second fight with Gomeo Brennan. Blair’s time of power in the world. British Empire middleweight champion. Yet he quit in his prime. He wanted to work for God, to study for the ministry. Had Lauchlin been champion he would have hung on to that glory until a better man beat him, not even God could have called him away from it.

  “I could move, Malk, I had good pins,” Lauchlin said absently, turning his chair back to face him. “I could’ve been better. I was always working on it.”

  “You know, Lauch, maybe you thought too much sometimes. You had to turn over every pebble on the beach. Sometimes just a little too tactical in certain fights. You could’ve been more aggressive, you had the tools. Like the Mellich fight. You were sharp, but tentative, you know?”

  “Unanimous decision. I took every round from Mellich.”

  “But you had him in the fifth, he’d have gone down if you’d swarmed him. You buckled his knees. Then you got cut.”

  Tony Mellich, stocky and game and a tad too slow, he’d have been a decent club fighter. From his name now his face rose up, then their unintended clash of heads and the sudden blood in Lauchlin’s eye, the way Mellich whispered to himself in clinches, some unintelligible, exhausted rosary. Hank berating Lauchlin while he staunched the bleeding with adrenaline chloride, his thumb, ice, swipes of Vaseline. Lauchlin turned the fight over in his mind, but not, as someone had said, like playing old film over and over: each time it returned to the sight of memory, vibrant with its peculiar qualities, he noticed details he’d forgotten or never knew until he ran the fight through him again, its physicalness, its brutal intimacy. But now it was embellished, like all the fights Malcolm had witnessed from an arena seat, with Malcolm’s vision: he had his point of view, and wasn’t that where every telling—of anything—started from? But did what Malcolm said about them alter the fights themselves? How true was either of them seeing such events? Did poring over these episodes tell Lauchlin anything? It mattered that he make some sense out of all this, not just indulge their nostalgia, their cherished images. The sentimental came cheap, as it always did. But it was the sheer sensuous intensity that Lauchlin remembered tonight.

  “I didn’t need to knock him out, Malkie. I wanted to go the distance, prove I could do it.”

  “You were healthy as a trout. Terrific condition, every fight.”

  “Blair Richardson told me in the gym, Be in the best condition of your life, every bout, every single one.”

  Malcolm looked at the liquor legs in his glass. “Defence, Richardson’s weak spot. Scored too many knockouts early on, one after the other, he thought all he needed was that big right hand.”

  “But God, he was knocked flat-out cold himself three times and he came back, won the rematches, won the titles. One knockout like those would’ve finished the rest of us.”

  “But he wasn’t indestructible, was he?”

  “Not out of the ring, no. Who is?”

  “You never took too many head shots, not Lightning Lauchlin MacLean, you slipped them.”

  How true was that? He’d taken plenty head shots, even in a short career you took them, not just in bouts but in the gym, sparring. Had they harmed his brain in some hidden way, as they probably did Blair’s? Still, no shuffling, no slurring words, tremors in hands or head, bells in the ears, not yet. His concentration jumped the track at times, no doubt, and he would find himself staring into a window of his past, absorbed, distracted, out of the immediate, lazy, downstream flow of his life. But maybe he would have done that anyway, at this age, all this mulling and musing, racing back and forth in time, it was just who he was, not the result of getting hit more often than he should have by the likes of Alphonse Boucher or Buck Odom or Red Reid, or all those other, lesser, unlethal punchers who had jarred him. You shrugged them off, proudly, wherever you got them, chin, h
ead, kidneys, you could take a punch, that was a badge. Who could say how many times your bell could be rung before it cracked? No predicting, from one boxer to the next. Always fragile though, the mind. Going good, something breaks. Blair looked fine when he quit, talked well, did some teaching in a university in Boston, was on the radio there talking to young people. A bright, good-looking man. Who would guess to look at him the ring wars he’d been through?

  “I wasn’t exactly a thunderbolt, Malk, but if I put together a good combination or two, I could stretch a man out. I got five kayos that way.”

  “You were a boxer, not a slugger.”

  Lauchlin took a drink straight from the bottle. “I was doing good in the Maritimes.”

  “Third round. Venetian Gardens. Jab, overhand right, left hook. Down. Beautiful. You were in great feather, that fight.”

  “Tommy Flanagan?”

  “Okay, you had that setback later in Halifax, sure, but you moved on from it. If you’d taken that fight, you might’ve gone to Boston, Lauch, got a decent purse. A real boost. Maybe New York down the road. Madison Square Garden, like Richardson.”

  “I don’t think so. Blair, Jesus, if he’d beaten Joey Archer in that Garden fight, he’d have had a shot at Emile Griffith, world champ.”

  “That tough Frenchy? What was his name?” Malcolm was leaning forward, eyebrows raised. “The fella that got the knockout off you in Halifax? Lucky punch.”

  Lauchlin shook his head. “I don’t remember his name. It’ll come to me.” He did remember of course, more easily than he would wish. Alphonse “The Butcher” Boucher. Wide and bony shoulders, lean and awkward, shoving his bones in your face, elbows, arms, his big skull.

  “Anybody can get caught once, Lauch. You were young, and you learned from that fight. That’s the main thing, that’s the test. Eh?”

  Lauchlin wanted to agree but took no pleasure in it. In the main it was true, technically he had never been knocked out, but he had been counted out, and in the record book it amounted to the same thing. Blair Richardson had put thirty-six fighters down for the count and been kayoed himself. Still Lauchlin never thought it could happen to him, he slipped punches well, he could counter with either hand, his defensive skills won him more than one fight, he had good feet, balance, he was a boxer, for Christ’s sake, he could box, he wasn’t some brawler winging away, mauling and clinching, ropes digging in your back, he could stick and move, dance away from punishment. Except for that one punch, the guy he was fighting, that slow Frenchy from New Brunswick, Boucher, he hadn’t shown an uppercut once in six rounds while Lauchlin was jabbing him to pieces, and then he did, and Lauchlin felt surprised but not hurt, he shook it off quickly, he had a good chin, but his mouthpiece seemed suddenly too large for his lips, and though his vision was clear and his gloves high like they should be, his legs felt cut off from him, that was the worst part of it, he sank rather than fell but so rapidly his back smacked the canvas hard, his head bounced off the wood underneath, that was the blank, black moment, like a circuit cut, a concussive split second of blackness, like the shutter of a camera, then clear sight again, and instantly he knew what had happened and what he had to do, he hadn’t stopped thinking or moving, he’d seen the black lights, yes, but the images around him were clear and discrete, lucid flashes, and they all made sense, Johnny’s alarmed face at the ring apron and his yelled words lost in the slow noise, Hank shaking his head no no, a man behind Johnny leaping from his ringside seat, two gold teeth in his wide mouth, and a pretty woman with long red hair beside him, he remembered her troubled face whenever that fight played over his memory, and the timekeeper’s raised mallet telling him there were less than ten seconds left, and how the ring lights illuminated the slowly drifting pall of cigarette smoke, and the ref’s hand near his face, a gold wedding band on his thick finger, chopping out the count, he heard the number six or seven, there was still time, and Lauchlin, on his knees now, turned away from the ref and saw Boucher there in the neutral corner, up on his toes, pounding his gloves, eager, his nostrils black with blood, snorting it into his mouth and spitting, a gob of it glistened on the dirty canvas where Lauchlin had gathered himself, appraising everything in an intense and heated calm, he only had to get up. But his limbs lifted so slowly, languidly, resisted him, and when his legs were under him again, steadied, his head clear, Boucher rushing toward him, the referee was already waving him off, he hadn’t made the count, it was over. Johnny sat him on his stool and tugged out his mouthpiece, Hank jammed the salts under his nose but Lauchlin said, No, no, I don’t need that, I’m fine, I could go five more, was that a quick count, or what? No, Johnny said, it damn well wasn’t, you were on queer street, you got careless, boy. Not until later, after Hank had cleaned up his face and rubbed him down with wintergreen and he had showered in cold water—there was no hot—and he’d towelled off and, the heat of liniment reeking from his skin, dressed carefully, easing buttons closed, tying his shoes, the hurt creeping now into his body, and combed his hair carefully in a scabrous mirror, did he know something had changed in him, that he was vulnerable in a way that might keep him at the bottom of boxing, not take him to the top, unless he could use it, absorb its truth, and move on, move up as Blair Richardson had. But he wouldn’t forget how his legs went out from under him, like rags, not muscle and bone at all, even while his mind kept clicking. No one did get a knockout off him again or even put him on the canvas. No one needed to. The second kayo sat right there under his ribs, waiting to bring him down.

  Lauchlin took another drink, slowly, swirled the bottle and listened to the liquid inside. “You know, I wanted to hit like Blair, that sweet solid right cross of his.”

  “Blair, you know,” Malcolm said, “he had a bad habit of hiking up his trunks as he came out of his corner, just after the bell? Funny, a little thing like that. He’d drop both gloves and tug up his waistband, just a quirk. Burke Emery’s corner spotted it. Round nine Emery moves across the ring fast and catches Blair with his gloves down. Wicked punch. I mean out, cold. But he decisions Burke in a rematch. Later Wilf Greaves knocks him out in ten, but doesn’t he kayo Greaves in eight the next time, take his Canadian middleweight title from him?”

  “The Al Rose fight? Early in his career? Blair had a double jaw fracture from the first round and a broken hand after that. He never said a word about it. Stopped Rose in the sixth.”

  Malcolm nodded slowly. “Brittle bones.” They went silent for Blair Richardson. A car passed fast on the road, and another.

  “Best shape of my life,” Lauchlin said. “Then I had a little tightness at times, a hitch in my breathing, some pain, but I always worked through it. Here, give me your glass.”

  “When you got in the ring in Cape Breton, you’d better take it all the way. Remember that Gardiner fight? His opponent’s eyelid came off? Blood all over the place. They stopped the fight so they could sew it back on. You had it too, Lauchie. I saw you, you know, I cheered you on.”

  But Lauchlin was recalling the photo in the Post, Blair looking dazed after the final bell of his third fight with Wilf Greaves, he won it by decision but they put him in the hospital overnight, afraid he was brain-damaged. “Blair had nothing left at the end of that Greaves fight, nothing, but he would have come off his stool anyway for another round. Guts, and will.”

  “The price was high. Who knew then how high it would be?”

  “Anyway…after Buck Odom broke my nose,” Lauchlin said, “and…I might’ve got to Minneapolis, like Gordie MacDougall did, but never New York or L.A.”

  “Gordie had some bad luck, but he was tough as they come.”

  “I had that fight set up for Saint John, Charlie Wethers. I’d have settled for that, that’s all I wanted. I could’ve taken him, put myself in line for the Maritime championship.”

  “Just when you think you’re on the pig’s back, your heart fails out on you. What can we say, Lauch? What could you do? It was in your blood.”

  Lauchlin scowled at the bag, back
in the gloom, inert, leaden, impossibly heavy. It might weigh a ton, nothing human could nudge it.

  “Blair quit at twenty-five,” Lauchlin said, tilting the bottle in his lap, squinting at the tiny wedge of whisky at the bottom. “Rocky Marciano was twenty-three before he even got started.”

  “A man who can hit like that can start anytime.”

  “We’re not as tough as we used to be, Malk. We don’t have to be, so we aren’t.”

  Lauchlin got up. He swayed a little before he reached out with his right fist and gave the bag two sharp taps, just enough to shudder the chain. Malcolm watched him slip slowly around it, popping it but not hard, its shadow lengthening and shortening on the wall.

  “You remember Blair’s last fight, Malk?”

  “Heard about it, didn’t see it.”

  “We drove to Halifax to see him fight Isaac Logart, me and Brent Buchanan. He loved the fights, he trained hard himself, he was a good gym fighter, Brent. July, hot day. His fifty-three Chev was always heating up, noisy as hell, bad muffler but it got us there. Blair had beaten Brennan in March, remember? Jesus, got his title back. Then he TKO’s Paul Christie in Saint John, cut his lip so bad. That was June, right?”

  “June, Lauch. Yeah. Late June. I was working night shift.”

  “But something happened to him, Malk. In one month something went out of him. The Halifax crowd was rotten anyway. They were rooting for Logart, for Christ’s sake, a guy from Boston. They’d loved Blair in Halifax, he was the golden boy, all those fights, Bobby Barnes, Burke Emery, Greaves. Logart was cagey, slippery. Blair liked to set up at long range, that was his style, but Logart wouldn’t let him. Clinching, crowding him, every round. A cutie, you know, hard to spot him up. He’d clip Blair with short uppercuts in close, then jab him with a right as he backed away. Blair looked tired, he wasn’t sharp. I’d never seen him sluggish like that, never. Always trained like hell. And there was that damn crowd, booing. It was a poor fight by any lights, Malk, no denying. Dull, took the spirit out of me just watching. They both had eye cuts, Blair’s opened in the seventh. Butts, I think. Blair never heard boos before, not for his fighting, his heart, ever. Fickle bastards. Judges called it a draw. You should’ve heard the howl-up. But I could see it in Blair’s face, this was it. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. A ‘crowd-pleaser.’ That’s what they always called him in the sports pages, he drew the biggest gates in the Maritimes, people couldn’t wait for his next match. But that night the crowd was not pleased. All the good, tough, exciting fights he’d given them, every ounce of himself, didn’t count for a goddamn thing, the very fights that damaged him the most—he fought for them, for their respect. He should never have met Brennan again so soon after he got knocked out.”