The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

"Now what makes you think he's gonna need a cutman?" Frankie knuckled a pair of black-frame glasses up the bridge of his nose. "I'd surely like to be part of it, is all." "Everyone wants to be part of it."

  Their conversation was interrupted by the Buffalo heavyweight, Scarpella. "Seen your brother 'round?"

  "I have not," said Reuben. "He owe you money?" "Supposed to be workin' wit' him but don't see him nowhere." "Ah, Jesus—he's over at the Fritz. Let me go grab him for you." "I'll go get him," Rob said.

  "Yeah, that's the ticket," Reuben said. "Tommy might have a tough time sparring with my boot up his ass."

  The Fritz was the local appellation of a sagging row house named after its owner, Fritzie Zivic. A mooselike Croat, Zivic had had a brief and un-stellar boxing career as a mob-controlled heavyweight.

  His heavily scripted run came to an undignified end when an aging Archie Moore knocked him cold under the lights at Madison Square Garden; after that, Zivic's mafia backers sent him down the river. He drifted back to his old neighborhood and parlayed his slim notoriety into a gambling den on the corner of Pine and 6th. No high rollers at the Fritz: clientele was strictly nickel and dime. Zivic sold cans of Hamms at two bucks a pop and ran a clean game: his well-known manner of dealing with hustlers was to pin the offender's fingers in a door jamb and kick till a few bones went snap.

  Zivic was sitting on the porch steps in a navy pea coat. Zivic's dog, a dyspeptic bull mastiff whose blue eyes expressed a deep cunning, prowled the front lawn. It growled as Rob crossed the lawn, muzzle skinned back to bare rows of yellow teeth.

  "Murdoch," said Zivic, "shut your hole."

  The dog blinked its milky eyes and padded over to piss in the weeds.

  "My uncle here?"

  "Does the pope shit in the woods?" Zivic rubbed his smashed nose and blew a string of snot into the nettles. The skin of his face was leathery and deeply creased; razor-thin scars ran over his chin and cheeks like the seams on a baseball. "He's been here all night. I doubt he's got two pennies left to rub together." He gave Rob an appreciative up-and-down. "You're looking hale. When do you fight next?"

  "The Golden Gloves qualifiers."

  "Gonna win?"

  "I guess, maybe."

  Murdoch sat on his haunches beside Zivic. The dog yawned and broke wind against the cracked flagstones.

  "You foul creature." Zivic shrugged as though to say, Here's what boxing gets you, kid: a decrepit row house full of sadsack gamblers and a flatulent old dog. Welcome to Shangri La.

  The kitchen was empty. Padlocks on the cupboards and icebox. The place stunk like wet dog. His uncle dozed on a sofa in the adjoining room. Rob shook his shoulder. "Man, wake up."

  Tommy cracked one bloodshot eye. "Robbie? Oh, god. You shouldn't be here."

  "It was either me or Dad."

  Tommy wiped away white lather crusted at the edges of his mouth. "In that case, I'm glad it's you."

  Outside Zivic was flicking dog turds into his neighbor's yard with the toe of his boot.

  "Get some shuteye," he said to Tommy. "I'll see you tonight." "Not here you won't."

  "Damn well better not—you're on at the barn, aren't you?" Tommy rubbed his face with the flat of his hand, dug his fingers into his scalp. "Right," he said, "the barn."

  They walked down Niagara Street toward Top Rank. Tommy's hair stuck up in rusty corkscrews. He shielded his sleep-puffed face from the sun.

  "Feeling none too fine," he said. "We're talking ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, pardon my French." "Fritzie said you were playing all night." "Never again. It's a sucker's bet, Robbie. You remember that." They passed a repo lot: sun glinted off the hoods and windows of derelict cars, a shining lake of metal and glass. Tommy stopped at Wilson Farms for breakfast: a box of Hostess cake donuts and a bottle of Gatorade.

  "Replenish those electrolytes," he told his nephew. "So who am I sparring?"

  "The heavy from Buffalo, Scarpella."

  "Ah, jeez."

  "What?"

  "He's not worth it, is all." Tommy licked powdered sugar off his fingers. "Remember six months back I was working that young heavy, Mesi? Now that kid could hit—bashed me pillar to post and sent me home with a head full of canaries. But that was okay, way I saw it, because Mesi's going places—all that damage meant something 'cause I was building him up. But Scarpella's just a big kid with an okay set of whiskers. He's going nowhere. I know it, you know it, could be he knows it too. I'm not helping because he's beyond help. What does that make me? A punching bag for fifteen bucks a round."

  "You trot out that line all the time."

  "What line?"

  "Tommy Tully, the poorly paid punching bag."

  "What, now my own flesh and blood is giving me the gears?" He moaned dramatically. "I expect it from your pops, but—et tu, Robbie?"

  Rob was unwilling to cut his uncle slack—he loved winding him up. "You don't like it, why step through the ropes?"

  Tommy gave his nephew a look that said, I might ask you the same thing. "I read in the newspaper about this subway conductor in New York. Suicidal crazies keep leaping in front of his train. Apparently in the Big Apple they aren't satisfied with jumping off a bridge or sucking on a tailpipe—now they're flinging themselves in front of subway cars. They say a conductor can expect to have this happen two or three times in a career—this guy had it happen seven times in a month."

  "Where'd you read that, the Weekly World News? Let me guess the next headline: Alien Love Secrets."

  "Listen, I'm serious. The guy's driving merrily down the tracks and whammo—a body's thumping off the side of the train or exploding all over the windshield. One time the body hit so hard it busted the glass and sailed right into the driver's compartment. Imagine that!"

  Rob was laughing now. It was awful, he knew it, but still.

  "This guy gets to thinking he's cursed—seven in a month, who can blame him? Maybe he thinks the jumpers are plotting against him, this sect of rotten bastards hurling themselves in front of his train. But he keeps driving that subway. He's got a wife and kids and it's his job. Simple as that. So if he can get up every morning and face that possibility, well... I... I can ..."

  Tommy trailed off, staring at a string of boarded shopfronts.

  "Tom. Hey, Tommy?"

  Tommy seemed startled to be where he was, like a man who'd been caught sleepwalking. "I'm fine, Robbie. Spaced out for a minute, is all."

  This happened a lot lately: Tommy's train of thought derailed, that weird thousand-yard stare. Rob feared it had to do with all the shots he'd taken in the ring. The brain is a subtle organ, was a saying he'd overheard at the club, and it goes wrong in subtle ways. He knew how postmortem examinations of dead boxers' brains often revealed severe cortical atrophy: the friction of heavy punches damaged the delicate tissue, which scarred up and sloughed away. Some boxers' brains ended up no bigger than a chimpanzee's. Sometimes he dreamed about a Monkey House for Beaten Fighters: glaze-eyed, banana- eating, diaper-wearing pugs roaming a steel cage, grunting and gibbering and swinging from radial tires.

  In the worst dreams, his uncle was one of them.

  Reuben got on his younger brother the moment he cleared the gym doors.

  "Well if it ain't the leather-assed road gambler!"

  Tommy nodded over at Scarpella. "Give me a minute to change up."

  "So tell me, Amarillo Slim," said Reuben, "make out like a bandit?"

  "Lay off, willya?" Tommy headed to the lockers. "Quit it with the fifth degree."

  "Fifth?" Reuben said. "This is the zero-eth degree! You couldn't handle my fifth!"

  Life in the gym took on its familiar rhythms. Trainers hollered: Five rounds with the rope! Two hundred stomach crunches! Burn, baby, burn! A boom box kicked on: pulsing rap beats overlaid with growling lyrics and random gunfire. Trainers held heavybags bucking against their chests and coached with their cheeks inches from their fighters' smacking fists. Managers talked on silver cellphones, arranging deals or pretending to. T
he buzzer sounded at three-minute intervals. Stop playing pocket pool and HIT something! Boxers caught their reflection in a manager's mirrored sunglasses and put a little more oomph into their shots. Throw the right, baby—let it GO! He's flagging, get on his ass! Counterpunch on one and rip that shit! Boxers finished their sparring sessions, geared down, and stepped onto the ring apron. A look on their faces like they'd exited a decompression chamber or come down from outer space.

  Rob finished his circuit and sat on the risers with the managers and gym bums. Tommy worked the ring with Scarpella. He fought out of a crouch, the way Scarpella's trainer wanted. Scarpella let go with a clumsy roundhouse; Tommy let the punch slip through and took a knee.

  The gym emptied out. The next wave of boxers would arrive after lunch. The gym bums swapped barefaced lies.

  "Sailor Perkins could eat fifty pig's knuckles at a sitting, may god strike me blind for a lie."

  "You'll never see a Mexie heavyweight champ. They just don't grow that big south of the Rio Bravo. Something to do with the intense heat shrinking the bones and that's not just me talking—that's science."

  "Johnny Pushe's skin was so tough it could blunt a nail."

  "Every welterweight champ in history had O-positive blood. A-negative or AB-positive welters, forget it—pack on thirteen pounds and move up to middleweight."

  The walls of Robert's bedroom were hung with portraits of Muhammad Ali and Roy Jones Junior. They had been hung by his father and functioned, Reuben hoped, as a subliminal training method. Rob was working on his homework assignment—a haiku poem—while his father and uncle prepared for their trip over the river. "Where's the adrenaline chloride, Tommy?" "In the fridge behind the milk." "Looks a mite yellow. Out of date?" "How should I know?" "Your face, not mine."

  Rob had so far composed a single line: My toenail is broken. This had come to him staring down at his bare foot. Was that too many syllables? "What about ice?" "We'll grab a bag over there."

  "We got any Canadian cash? Any whaddatheycallem—loonies?' Robert amended: My toenail is split. Tommy poked his head through the door.

  "What're you working on?"

  "Haiku."

  "Gesundheit."

  "It's a Japanese poem."

  Tommy strode into the room with his chest puffed out. "Why not write an ode to your handsome uncle?" He got down on one knee. "Tommy dearest, tell me true, why do all the gals love you ..." "Quit horsing around!" Reuben called. "I'm helping Robbie with his poetry!"

  "You wouldn't know Shakespeare if he crawled out the grave and bit you on your ass!"

  "I'm a poet and you don't even know it!" Tommy hollered back. "There once was a man from Nantucket—"

  "Enough," Reuben said, appearing in the doorway. "Robbie, we're gone until eleven. If your uncle's face isn't bashed so bad it'll put a man off his food, we'll meet up at Macy's."

  Rob wished his uncle good luck. Be careful, he wanted to add, but among boxers those words were considered the father of bad luck. He could already feel the lump of fear in his belly, a lump that would persist until he received his father's call from Macy's diner.

  Reuben's Dodge Shadow backed down the driveway, its rusted muffler rattling down 24th Street. Rob picked up the phone.

  "Tully," Kate Paulson said from her end. "What's up?"

  "Working on that poetry thing. What're you up to?"

  "Meh."

  "Why don't you come over and help out?"

  "You mean do your homework?"

  "Did I say do? Did that word cross my lips? I said help" Rob tried to sound indifferent. "Or whatever."

  "Or whatever," she mimicked, teasingly. "You know you need me, Tully. If poetic passion were punching power, you couldn't plow your posterior out of a paper peanut pack. Bet you don't even know what that's an example of."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "All those P words strung in a row—it's called ...?"

  Kate hummed the theme from Jeopardy. Rob snapped his fingers, struggling to recall his last English lesson. "Alliteration?"

  "Baaah! Sorry, you didn't answer in the form of a question and must forfeit your fabulous Caribbean vacation for two." Kate kept silent for a bit, then said, "Anything to eat over there?"

  "Leftover spaghetti."

  "Oooh, now there's a deal sweetener. No offense, but your dad ..." She sifted various word combinations through her head. "... is a crummy caustic cook."

  "But he's a blazingly brilliant baker."

  "Not to mention a terrifically tyrannous trainer."

  Rob let it slide; Kate's thoughts about his boxing aspirations were well documented, as were those regarding his father's role in them.

  Kate's fingers drummed the wall beside her phone. "I'll be over in half."

  Tommy and Reuben drove streets slick with twilight rain past pawn shops and discount liquor outlets and All-For-A-Buck stores. Spitting rain froze into a milky glaze at the windshield's edge. Tommy caught his reflection in the window, his forehead piled with scar tissue in the glow of passing streetlights.

  Reuben paid the toll and drove out over the Rainbow Bridge. High- intensity spotlights trained on the Horseshoe Falls caused the ever- falling water to sparkle. The pines of Luna Island and Prospect Point were coated in crystallized spray.

  They passed through the border toll and turned up Clifton Hill. Clusters of discount tourists peered through the darkened windows of shops closed for the season. Blinking neon reflected off frozen puddles; the road was pocked with fitful pools of blue, red, and green.

  Reuben said, "A few fellas in the butcher department retired the other week. They're looking for meat cutters."

  Tommy cracked his knuckles. "Maybe you think I'm blind," he said mirthlessly. "Maybe you think I missed the copy of the want ads you left on my pillow."

  Reuben expressed mock surprise. "Is that where I left those? It'd be better than what you're earning now, plus it's forty hours a week, guaranteed."

  Tommy opened and shut his mouth, jutting his lower jaw out until he looked like some predatory deep-sea fish: jaw limbering exercises. "I'm too clumsy. Liable to cut my pinkie off."

  "Right," Reuben said, "and how would you cope without it?"

  "Wouldn't be invited to any more tea parties." Tommy mimed tipping a china tea cup, his pinkie extended. "The Duchess of Windsor would be heartbroken."

  The buildings and houses fell into the distance. The sawblade silhouette of a fir-lined ridge zagged above the fields.

  "I thought you were done with this stuff, Tom."

  "I thought so, too. This is the last time."

  "The last?"

  Tommy paused. "One of the last."

  Reuben wasn't satisfied to let it rest. "This is how you imagined capping your career? You boxed at Madison Square Garden, in case the fact slipped your mind."

  "Long time ago I did."

  "So this is how you want it?"

  "No, it's not." Tommy stared down at his hands lit by the dashboard, shrugging as if unable to conceive of another employment for them. "Just drop it."

  "I worry about my kid brother, is all."

  "Not a kid anymore."

  "You know, this is about the only time I ever see you serious. And you'll always be my kid brother," Reuben said, not unkindly.

  Flat frost-clad fields, fence posts, barns, the dark contours of sleeping cattle. A corduroy road cut off the rural route leading to a farmstead hemmed by a windbreak of pines. A tiny farmhouse with squares of light burning in odd windows. The dark outline of a peaked-roof barn stood east of some silos.

  Vehicles were parked along a muddy fenceline: pickups and rusted beaters, ATVs and dirtbikes. Moonlight danced over the polished paint of a German sedan. Bumper stickers: SOCCER DAD AND PROUD OF IT! and MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM.

  Reuben stepped onto wooden batboards laid down over the mud. He grabbed a black valise from the back seat. They made their way through a canopy of leafless trees to the barn.

  "I ought to put on one of those rubbe
rized aprons," he said. "The kind slaughterhouse workers wear."

  They were met at the barn by Manning.

  On the second Thursday of each month the thick-lipped, beetle- legged cattle farmer doffed his cattleman's hat and donned his fight promoter's cap. Manning's arms were netted with old razor scars and the tip of his nose was gone: depending on which account you believed it'd been variously hacked, gouged, or bitten off his face. Tonight he wore an ankle-length duster coat, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

  "Evening, lads." Starlight bent upon the barrel of a Remington over- under shotgun in his right hand. "Here to tussle or just catch an eyeful?"

  "My brother's feeling frisky," Reuben said.

  Manning kicked the barn door ajar with the heel of his boot. "Some fellas in there'd be happy to take that frisk right outta him."

  The space under the peaked wood ceiling was as spacious as a dance hall, filled with light and smoke and milling bodies. The crowd was clotted in groups distinguished by their dress: suits and ties or flannels and work vests. Manning's buck-toothed son sold six-packs of PBR from an ice-filled trough. Bales of hay studded with pink blossoms demarcated the ring. Cows snuffled at gaps in the barn planks.

  Spectators were rowed along a wooden skirt circling the barn's upper level, legs dangling over the edge. Tommy saw Fritzie Zivic standing beside a wheelchair-bound geezer with a breathing mask strapped over his face. Zivic's scrofulous old dog was chewing a wheelchair tire.

  The fighters huddled in corners beyond the light. Some were washed-up trial horses and clubbers, others tavern toughs with cobalt fists. All bore the mistakes of their trade: worn-out, mangled foreheads and split brows and pitcher lips and eyes like milky balls socked into the pitted ruin of their faces.

  Reuben scanned the prospects. All regulars, at least. Every so often a vagabond fighter would show up; he'd fight, collect his purse, and move on down the road. Reuben would never forget driving home after a night at the barn and seeing one of those vagabond fighters at the Niagara bus terminal: only hours ago that same guy had pinned another man's skull between bales of hay and pounded until the floorboards ran red, and now here he was stepping onto a Greyhound with blood on his hands, moving on to another town and another fight while his opponent lay on a hospital gurney with a pair of detached retinas. No remorse—everyone who stepped into the ring knew the stakes.