Fighter's Alley

by Heather Duffy Stone

  Will heard chatter filling the hallway as he came out of his room. Men’s voices and deep laughter rolled up the stairs. He knew already he’d be in trouble for not standing like a statue in the drawing room before the first guest even arrived.

  When Will snuck into the drawing room, it was filled with the broad backs of men who looked like his father. A row of chairs faced the podium at the fireplace where, in a few minutes, his father would address the guests with his phony, booming voice. His father would talk about the pride he felt in the city of New York and how hard he would work to clean up the crime that the new immigrants had brought with them. Will knew his ancestors were immigrants once too and he knew crime meant places like the Woodrat and he hated everything his father stood for. But he puffed out his chest and moved across the room to where his mother was standing with other wives, all of them holding teacups.

  “This is our son, Will,” his mother said. Will shook all the delicate hands of the wives and bowed to each of them. “Straighten your tie before your father sees you,” she whispered into his ear. But she winked too, reminding him that she didn’t mind if his tie was straight or not; she just knew that’s how it needed to be.

  Will often did better by his mother’s side. The wives said he was charming, while their husbands mostly clapped him on the back and noted that he wasn’t built like his towering father. So Will talked to the wives for as long as he could, and soon his father was taking the podium. People rushed to fill the chairs, and Will took a seat by his mother in the front row. His collar scratched at his chin and his tie choked him and all he could think about was finding the Italian.

  “Thank you all for coming,” his father bellowed, smiling out over the room with his mayor’s smile. “This is a very special day for me because my father himself was chairman of the Republican Club of New York many years ago. My wife and I are honored to have you in our home. Gentlemen, I am honored as well to be your choice for mayor of the City of New York.” Will’s father paused here to let the room applaud. “This city has a legacy of strength and of overcoming all odds, and I aim to continue that legacy, to keep our city safe and clean and free of crime even as the boats crowd our docks.” Here he paused again for applause. “We, gentlemen, are the city’s founders, and we will preserve its greatness…”

  Will stopped listening. He let his father’s voice become a hum in his ears and did one of his favorite things. He imagined his father in the ring at the Woodrat, a place where he would not be applauded, a place where he would not be the strongest man in the room, a place where he would probably even be defeated. Will smiled. His mother patted his knee.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  If someone had asked him, Will would not have been able to say if he was drawn to boxing because of the skill and excitement of the sport or because he was tired of being smaller than everyone or because nothing would have upset his dad more. But no matter the answer, he fell asleep thinking about boxing, and he woke up thinking about boxing. And on the day he’d planned to convince the Italian to train him, he woke up knowing his life was going to change.

  Since it was campaign time, his parents were usually busy, his dad attending meetings and his mother doing with the other wives whatever they did when their husbands were in meetings. So he was mostly free. He even kept a change of clothes in the gardener’s shed. His fighting clothes, he secretly called them in his head, even though they’d only ever served that purpose the one time.

  Will set out to find the Italian with a purse full of his savings and only his fighting clothes on his back. He came upon the man just where he thought he would, stacking sacks of flour in a doorway off the very same alley where Will had knocked him to the ground.

  “Hello, sir,” Will said to the Italian’s back. The man didn’t turn. He kept lifting one sack of flour from a crate and piling it onto the already-sloping tower.

  “I was wondering if I could speak with you for a moment,” Will went on.

  The man slapped a sack of flour onto the top of the pile and finally turned. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at Will. His eyes were dark and wide.

  “First of all,” Will said, suddenly nervous, “I want to apologize for, well, for crashing in to you the other day. And, well, knocking you over and breaking all that flour.”

  Will extended his coin purse. He noticed his hand was shaking. The man stared at it but didn’t move. It suddenly occurred to Will: he was Italian. Maybe…

  “Do you speak English?” Will asked, his hand still extended.

  “Thank you for your apology, son. But I don’t need your money,” the Italian said. He turned his back to Will once again.

  “Wait!” said Will. “I really do want to pay for whatever I wrecked. But that’s—that’s not the only reason I’m here.”

  The Italian kept his back to Will but didn’t move.

  “Can I ask you a question? Actually, no, never mind. You’ll probably say no. I can’t ask you a question because that will be the end of this conversation. So I just want to say something. I know who you are, and I know you were a great fighter. I know that you’re a legend. I know that people talk about you all over the place. And I have been going to the Woodrat for almost four months now, and there’s nothing I want to do more than be a great boxer. And there’s these fights coming up, and what I really need is a trainer. A great trainer. And I can pay. And I just—I just really think we could help each other.”

  There was a long silence, an endless silence, before the man turned around. And an even longer silence while he stared at Will. Will stared back. He wasn’t scared of many things, other than his father’s temper. But this man scared him. Or was he afraid this man wouldn’t see the perfection of his plan? That the Italian would reject him. Will tried to read something in the man’s eyes, in the thin lines around his expressionless mouth.

  The Italian reached out his hand to Will, his face still set in stone. “I’m Eddie Tancredi,” he said. Will had to shift the coin purse to his pocket to shake the man’s hand. “You may have heard my name in a lot of people’s mouths, with a lot of stories alongside it. Some of them might be true. Most of them probably are not. I used to be a fighter. But I gave that up a long time ago, and I won’t ever go back to it. Now, I thank you for coming here, and it’s very nice to meet you, but I am not the man for you.”

  Will realized he was still holding onto Eddie Tancredi’s hand. He hadn’t even introduced himself.

  “Sir—” he started. But suddenly the stillness in Eddie Tancredi’s face shifted, turned into something threatening. Something like Will’s dad.

  “We are done here,” Tancredi said. He stepped deeper into the doorway and then disappeared into what could only be the bakery.

  Will was in something like shock. He had never imagined his plan not working. It had come together in his mind so perfectly; it had to work. But the look in Tancredi’s eyes—there was no changing the mind of someone who looked like that.

  Will’s head hung low while his feet shuffled forward. He was so busy thinking about his failure that he didn’t notice them step out of a doorway just in front of him.

  “Well, if it isn’t the mayor’s daughter,” a voice sneered.

  “On our block,” another voice laughed.

  And Will looked up to see Durham and Colin and Paddy Dohrring—one of the meanest young fighters from the Woodrat. They were all twice his size, all mean as snakes.

  “He’s not the mayor yet,” Will said. What else could he say? Outside his imagination, he didn’t have nearly the bravery he needed. He paused, then tried to step around Colin’s thick arm. No luck. Colin shoved him so hard he had to take running steps backward to keep from falling.

  After that, it happened faster than he could describe. They were on top of him like one creature—a fist against his eye socket, an elbow (or a foot?) in his stomach. He punched back as best he could, but soon he was on the ground, still swinging with one arm, the other over his face. He held his breath as best he
could, because with each blow the pain would knock it from him. Maybe holding it would keep the pain away—but in a second, less than a second, the pain spread like a heat all over his body. He felt himself curled against it. And then, suddenly, it stopped.

  The noise of struggle echoed above Will—of shuffled feet, of muffled voices. When Will finally unwrapped himself and peeled his eyes open, the boys were gone. A lean, wide-shouldered shadow stood over him.

  “All right, kid,” the shadow said, “we start now.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eddie was waiting for him by the back entrance of the bakery. He held something wrapped in a towel and handed it to Will as Will approached. The package was warm and round.

  “You need to put on weight,” Eddie said.

  Will unwrapped the towel to find a loaf of bread, fresh from the oven.

  “You should be eating as much as you can.” Eddie was already walking, and Will fell into step beside him. “Eating as much as you can and getting stronger. You’re fast, but that is only part of it. You don’t know what to do with that speed yet, and it won’t help you if you’re not strong enough.”

  Will broke off a piece of the bread and popped it in his mouth. It was delicious, soft and salty with a sharp, thick crust.

  “We’ll get you strong, and I will build your skill. I can only do so much. I can’t make any promises to you.”

  There was a long pause. “Okay,” Will said around a mouthful of bread. His heart was racing with anticipation. “I’m a fast learner,” Will went on, because Eddie seemed to want him to say more. Eddie was watching him.

  “What did your parents say about your face?” he asked.

  Will had been lucky. Most of the damage from Durham and the boys had been to his stomach and arms. But he did have a fist-shaped purple bruise on his left cheek, which seemed to grow in color and shape each morning.

  “I told them I got hit with a baseball,” he said.

  “And they believed you?”

  “Sure. My dad used it as an excuse to talk about what a lousy athlete I am. But they believed me.”

  “There could be more of that,” Eddie said.

  “Bruises?”

  “Explanations.”

  Will knew this was true, but he didn’t want to think about it. There was still the part of him that believed when his father saw him fight, the man would be so overcome with pride that everything before would be forgotten. Though Will didn’t know how this would happen or how his mother would allow it.

  “Your father will not approve of this,” Eddie said as he climbed the steps to a white clapboard church, wedged between two narrow buildings. Will knew the church. He’d always noticed how out of place it seemed. And he couldn’t imagine what church had to do with any of this.

  The inside was empty and thick with heat. Eddie turned through a side door and down a set of damp steps. He stopped to light a hanging lantern at the foot of the stairs. The flame jumped across the low-ceilinged basement. Hay was scattered across the floor, and some chairs piled along the edge, but the basement was otherwise empty.

  “We can work here,” Eddie said, moving in to the center of the room.

  Will wrapped up the heel of bread that was left and put it down near the wall. He had a thousand questions, but the one he asked is: “How do you know my father won’t approve?”

  “You should hang your shirt there.” Eddie gestured toward a beam near the staircase and Will obeyed.

  “Now stand here.” Eddie pointed to a space just in front of him, a few feet away. Will obeyed again. “Boxing is not respected in your father’s world,” he said. “It’s a sport for the immigrants, the poor. Your father won’t see it as anything but that.”

  “How do you know about my father?” Will asked. But Eddie ignored him.

  “You need to be certain that you are not fighting for your father.”

  “I’m not,” Will said. He meant it. At least, he was pretty sure he did.

  Will wasn’t sure what he expected, but training with Eddie was nothing like he would have imagined if he’d had time to imagine it. Eddie made him do weird things like running in place and ducking side to side and folding in half up and down, up and down. Eddie said things like “You have to think like your opponent. You have to know what move he’s going to make even before he does.” He said: “You have to be faster than every man out there, because you are smaller.”

  Will faced Eddie, sweat pouring down the sides of Will’s neck. He was ducking left-right, left-right from Eddie’s sharp, straight-as-an-arrow punches. Punches designed to make Will duck. Will wondered what it would feel like to actually be hit by Eddie, a man made of solid muscle.

  “Were you the smallest man out there?” Will asked breathlessly. Eddie nodded, the rhythm of his punches not stopping.

  “And that’s how you learned to be fast?”

  “I was already fast.”

  “So how did you learn how to fight?”

  “On the streets.”

  Will was hoping for more than this.

  “How did you start fighting at the Woodrat?”

  “I suppose I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Eddie’s arms started to move faster. Will ducked faster. He breathed faster.

  “Aren’t you proud of being a great fighter?”

  Eddie stopped, grasping his hands together and flipping them to crack his knuckles. Will stood still, grateful for a moment to rest. They looked at each other.

  “I fought because I had to,” Eddie said. “And it was a great sport once. But it has changed.”

  “Well,” Will said. “Then why are you training me?”

  Eddie sighed. He put his fists up in front of his chin. “All of this talking is wasting time. Again.”

  And Will started again to duck, left-right, left-right, even faster this time. He had wanted to ask when he could start throwing punches. But it seemed like the best idea for now was to follow directions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The one thing Will and Eddie both agreed on was that Will needed a practice fight. Eddie had let him start hitting. But hitting Eddie was like hitting a brick wall. The man didn’t move.

  Will’s knuckles were bruised and swollen. And when Eddie hit Will, it was like a feather. He’d strike whenever Will didn’t duck or turn fast enough, but even though Eddie’s fists moved with impossible speed, he never hit Will with real impact. “I need someone to actually hit me,” Will said. On this, Eddie agreed with him.

  So two weeks before the tournament’s qualifying fights, Eddie and Will walked together to the Woodrat. They went in the morning, when it would be quieter and when Lew would sometimes let the younger kids fight. Will had never seen the Woodrat so empty as when they walked in. It was dim and smelled of mold. Lew sat on a stool at the bar, chewing on his cigar. Oakley was talking to a few hunched-over customers, and two boys sparred lazily in the ring. But when Eddie and Will came in the door, all eyes were on them.

  “Well, well, well,” said Mayflower, standing up and walking toward them. “Ain’t this a surprise.”

  “Hello, Lew,” said Eddie quietly. They stared at each other for a long time before Lew finally reached out his hand.

  “Eddie Tancredi,” he said and whistled around his cigar. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “The kid needs a fight,” Eddie said, looking at Will. Will stood silent. There was a strange energy between these two men, and he knew better than to say anything. Mayflower turned to Eddie and raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re training the mayor’s kid?”

  “He’s not the mayor yet,” Will said. He hadn’t meant to speak out loud, but he couldn’t help it. He was tired of being called the mayor’s kid. He wanted to be normal, if only for a few more months. But the two men ignored him.

  “He’s fast,” Eddie said.

  “He’s small,” Lew said. “And he doesn’t belong here.”

  Will had the feeling they weren’t only talking about him.

>   “He’s a good fighter, and you know it,” Eddie said. Will had never heard Eddie say anything like that. He could feel the pride at the back of his throat. In that moment, he knew Mayflower would give him a fight, and he knew he could win it.

  Mayflower consulted with a few men near the bar, then he gestured Eddie closer to him. Will moved back into the shadows. This was the part where he waited. At the edge of the room, as usual, Silas was sweeping.

  “How’d you get him to train you?” Silas opened one eye and gestured his chin toward Eddie.

  “I just asked him.”

  “Nobody has seen him near a fight in twenty years.”

  Will shrugged as if he knew this. He tried to look like he knew all of Eddie’s secrets, even if he didn’t know a thing.

  “He doesn’t look as tough as I thought he would,” Silas said.

  Will noticed then that Mayflower had left. The men around Eddie were gathering close to him, jeering. One of them began to yell. Eddie stood still as a statue. The men were angry. Suddenly one of them leaned back and spat at Eddie’s feet. Will saw the veins in Eddie’s neck pulsing. He seemed to rise up out of himself. But just then, just in time, Mayflower barreled back to the bar and stepped in between the men. Eddie turned and waved Will over.

  “You have no idea how tough he is,” Will said to Silas as he walked away.

  The boy was named Henry Cartwright. He was the same height as Will but nearly twice as wide. He was missing a tooth, and a hole in his mouth made him look lopsided. He wore tall boots, his pants hung in shreds around his knees, and streaks of dirt ran along his forearms. He hopped side to side in his corner of the ring and grinned at Will. He didn’t seem to have a trainer or have to think about the fight at all. He just hopped, shaking his hands at his sides, grinning crazily at Will.