Brotherly Love (27 page)

Nick is in another corner of the room, soaked in his
own sweat, hitting the soft bag with punches he seems to throw
without trying. That is where he always finishes after they box, on
the heavy bags. Old habits. There is no one else in the room.

The door opens downstairs, and Peter smells the rain.

They come up slowly, Monk first, his eyes squinting
as he clears the darkness of the staircase, then Michael, dripping
rain, walking on a cane, then a weight lifter named Leonard Crawley,
who has Bobby the Jap’s place, then Jimmy Measles.

They stand in a spot near the ring; puddles collect
on the floor. Nick hits the bag.

Peter has never spoken to Leonard Crawley, but he has
heard him talking to Monk in the front seat of the limo. He wonders
out loud sometimes, in a wistful sort of way, what sound a human back
makes as it breaks.

The timer goes off and Nick comes around the platform
which holds the ring, nodding at Monk and Jimmy Measles, taking off
his bag gloves to shake hands. "Hey, Michael," he says.

"Nick, how you been?"

"I been pretty good."

Michael sees Peter on the bench then. "What’d
you do, poison my cousin?" he says. "He looks like he ate a
fuckin’ dog."

"He killed me today," Nick says, a small
courtesy. He always says he got killed.

Leonard Crawley looks at Peter, showing his teeth in
a way that could be a smile. Peter has the sudden thought that if you
take enough steroids, first you grow muscles in your arms and legs,
then you grow muscles in your face.

"What I was wonderin’," Michael says to
Nick, "if the kid was around, could he give Lenny here a couple
of rounds." Nick looks at Leonard Crawley for the first time.
"He’s run to Jersey for some parts," he says.

"He comin’ back or what?" Leonard says.
His voice seems higher pitched than it ought to be, and out of place
in the gym. Nick crosses his arms and considers him. Leonard shows
him his neck, veins as thick as a finger.

Michael says, "Hey, he don’t mean nothin’,
Nick, he just wanted to move a few rounds with the kid. Two, three
rounds is all, takin’ it easy."

"He isn’t here," Nick says. "I told
you he’s in Jersey."

Michael moves a step closer to Nick, dripping rain,
nodding the way he does when he wants something. "You think he
might be back, could work a little with Lenny?"

Leonard waits, enjoying the moment, as if Michael has
just asked someone what it was going to be, his right arm or his
left.

Nick says, "He could be a while, in this weather
. . ."

"You mind if we
wait?" Michael asks. "Let Lenny hit one of them bags or
something."

* * *

L
eonard Crawley undresses
against the bench, hanging his clothes on a nail, taking off his
rings and his bracelet and his necklace and handing them and his
money clip to Michael.

Nick walks to the other side of the room; he doesn’t
say another word.

Jimmy Measles follows him over, trying to tell him a
story about his dogs. Nick has a dog of his own, but he isn’t
listening.

Leonard takes a long time undressing, enjoying it.
Without his clothes, he resembles a root system. There are stretch
marks on his shoulders, and his arms are black with tattoos.

Peter stands up and talks quietly in Michael’s ear.

"The fuck are you gonna do?" he says.

Michael watches Leonard wrap his hands.

Peter says, "There’s no reason to do something
like this."

"I want to see the kid work," Michael says,
still watching Leonard wrap. "That’s a reason."

Peter says, "How come you can’t just come over
sometime and watch him, like anybody else? How come you got to bring
a fucking monster? It’s insulting."

"So somebody’s insulted," Michael says.
"So what?"

Peter walks away and
finds a seat in the window. There are cars parked on both sides of
the street, halfway up the block, waiting for Nick to fix them. Old,
beat-up cars; Cadillacs, Fords, Chevys. He still won’t work on
anything foreign. He knows who has money and who doesn’t, and he
can fix cars a little or all the way, depending on what someone has
to pay. He does that without explaining it; he never embarrasses
anybody he doesn’t have to.

Leonard Crawley climbs into the ring and begins to
throw punches, watching himself in the mirrors, checking the muscles
in his arms and back and legs from different angles. Nick sits with
his own arms crossed, bone dry in a wet shirt, the afternoon ruined.

Jimmy Measles sees something is going on and leaves
him alone about the dogs.

For half an hour, no one
speaks. Michael waits in an old stuffed chair and Leonard stands in
the corner of the ring, his arms resting across the ropes, the
muscles underneath sagging from their own weight.

* * *

P
eter sees Harry turn the
corner. He pulls the van up onto the sidewalk, opens the back door
and unloads half a dozen mufflers and tailpipes in the rain.

Then he shuts the door and, leaving the truck on the
sidewalk, he climbs the stairs three at a time.

He pauses at the top, one long second, seeing it all
at once—Michael and Peter and Jimmy Measles and his father all
sitting down, Monk looking at the posters on the wall, the guy with
the muscles standing in the ring; the whole place dead quiet.

Michael stands up and holds out his hand. "Harry,"
he says, "how you been?"

Nick’s kid puts his hand halfway into Michael’s
to shake, protecting it. Like his father, he lives his life with sore
hands.

"I was wondering could you give my man Lenny
here a couple of rounds."

Peter sits in the window, Nick doesn’t move off his
chair. The kid takes his hand away from Michael and looks at Leonard
Crawley.

"Three rounds?" he says.

Leonard moves off the ropes and stretches. He says,
"Three, four, five, whatever you want."

Nick gets up off his chair
and stands in front of his son while he dresses, as if he doesn’t
want him looking at Leonard Crawley until they fight.

* * *

M
ichael checks the clock
on the wall. Twenty minutes have passed.

Leonard has been standing in the ring so long Peter
has gotten used to the way he looks. Harry is in the ring with him
now, loosening up.

Leonard follows the kid’s movements, looking bored.
"Yo, Michael," he says, "we gonna do this or what‘?"

Harry stops and looks at him, and then nods. He
climbs through the ropes and pulls the plug on the timer, and then
takes a cup and the gloves out of his locker. Nick helps him pull the
cup on and then laces him up.

He climbs back in, looking pale and thin in the same
ring with the weight lifter, and then leans over the ropes toward his
father to receive his mouthpiece.

"You ready?" Michael says.

Nick nods without looking at him, and Michael plugs
the timer back into the wall. It goes off once, a minute passes and
it goes off again.

Nick looks over his son’s shoulder at Lenny
Crawley. "Anybody looks like that could fight, we’d know about
them," he says. Michael stands in the corner, smiling, having a
good time now.

A peculiar sour smell fills the air, something
Leonard Crawley secretes when he gets excited. He walks across the
ring, hands at his chest, and then his right hand makes a long, slow
arc through the air.

Harry steps back and watches as Leonard follows the
force of the punch, stumbling.

He steps inside the next time Leonard tries to hit
him—another sweeping right hand—and then puts the top of his head
under the weight lifter’s chin and allows him to throw all the
right hands he wants, fifty or more, some of them at his kidneys,
some of them at the back of his head, furious punches without
leverage or meaning.

They walk around the ring in this way, Leonard
jerking at him, pushing and pulling; Harry watching it, allowing it,
relaxed. He lets it go on as long as Leonard wants, and then, when he
quits to catch his wind and drops his head onto Harry’s shoulder to
rest, the shoulder suddenly moves, and Leonard’s forehead bounces
off.

Harry takes half a step back and waits until
Leonard’s head drops toward him, and then hits him in the face with
an uppercut. Harry doesn’t ordinarily throw uppercuts in the gym,
the punch can ruin a nose.

The glove travels just twelve inches, but he turns
into it. Leonard stops, balancing on some shrinking spot on the
floor, and before he can right himself Harry steps to the side and
digs a hook high into his ribs, popping the cork, and Leonard Crawley
begins to pour out all over the ring. He grabs Harry around the
waist, holding himself up. Half a minute later, he lifts him off the
floor and carries him back into the ropes, making a screaming noise
as they move.

Leaving two perfect footprints in the center of the
ring, his own blood.

Harry allows himself to be taken to the ropes,
patient, waiting to see what the weight lifter will do when he quits
yelling.

The timer goes off but Leonard doesn’t stop. He
reaches around Harry and grabs the ropes on either side of his body.
He begins to slam himself into him, over and over. Harry watches a
few seconds, covering himself with his arms, timing him, and then, as
Leonard Crawley comes again, he lowers his shoulders even with the
weight lifter’s and brings up an elbow, and the yelling stops.

That is the first thing Peter notices, the quiet.

Leonard lies on the ring floor without moving, and
then his knee raises and rolls, and he seems to follow it, over onto
his side. The lower half of his face is hidden under his gloves.

The timer goes off again and a new sound comes out of
Leonard Crawley, a long, hollow note which doesn’t seem to have a
beginning or an end or a purpose, just something that fades in and
then fades out.

Nick is leaning over the ropes, unlacing his son’s
gloves. Michael hasn’t moved. Jimmy Measles gets up and walks into
the bathroom to urinate.

"He changed his mind, right?" Nick says to
Michael. "Four, five rounds, he don’t want them today?"

Michael comes over on his cane and puts his hand on
Nick’s shoulder. "Hey, goomba, no harm, am I right? My cousin
tells me your kid’s ready to make some money, I just want to see
for myself."

Nick looks at Peter half a second; he doesn’t say a
word. Leonard sits up holding his face, blood dripping off the end of
his nose, his jaw hanging wrong, like a door off one hinge.

The timer goes off again with Leonard still on the
floor. Monk climbs through the ropes, carrying a clean towel. He cuts
the laces off Leonard’s gloves and gets him on his feet. On the way
out he warns him not to bleed in the car.

Jimmy Measles emerges from the bathroom, and the four
men leave more quietly than they arrived.

Nick watches them from the window. "These
fuckin’ guys," he says, looking back at the blood on the floor
of the ring. "Everywhere they go, it’s like they broke in."

Peter doesn’t know if he is included in that or
not.
 
P The timer sounds again and
Harry begins hitting the hard bag. The chains bang together as the
bag jumps. The only other sounds are the punches and Harry’s
breathing.

Peter finds a bucket and
fills it with hot water and washes the blood off the floor, and when
he has finished, has washed as much of his cousin and his cousin’s
business from the gym as he can, he showers and leaves.

* * *

A
week
to the day after Bobby is left in a garbage bag on the service road
at the airport, Michael climbs through the kitchen window of a small
brick row house on Snyder Avenue—Leonard Crawley boosting him up,
Monk already waiting inside—and takes the old Italian who lives
there out of his bed, a confused old man who cannot see them without
his glasses, and tapes him to the water heater in the basement.

His wife finds him there, his socks sticking halfway
out of his mouth, when she comes back from Levittown. She has been
there visiting her grandchildren. The bats they used, stained with
the old man’s blood, are still lying on the basement floor.

Peter reads the details of the old man’s death in
the Daily News. It says he was naked.

Peter closes the paper, closes his eyes. He listens
to the ocean through the open bedroom window; it sounds close enough
to be washing over his feet.

He has not seen Michael since the afternoon at the
gym. He came to Cape May that night, to his mother’s house to
sleep, and hasn’t been back.

Downstairs in the kitchen the telephone begins to
ring. He stays where he is, listening to it, lying in his shoes on a
bed that is too soft and creaks when he moves.

All the furniture in the house was his mother’s.
The desk is still filled with carefully stacked piles of scrawled
notes and receipts and newspaper clippings; the medicine cabinet is
lined with her bottles of pills. There isn’t a picture in the
place.