The Contender (2 page)

He pinched his calves to stop his legs from falling asleep. Five minutes, give him another five minutes.

James didn’t even look for a job, started hanging around with Major and Hollis, believing them when they said the white man would never let him build anything but garbage heaps. He started going to the clubroom in the basement of the building where Henry’s father was superintendent. Maybe the partnership started busting up then. If only James had come to the movies tonight, like every other Friday night. And that burglar alarm—how could I forget about that burglar alarm?

He moved his head again, and tasted more dirt. Maybe the police caught James. Or maybe he got away, and had a better place to hide now. With Major.

Slowly, he crawled out.

It was pitch-dark. The big rock was hard to see against the black sky. The transistors were silent. He crept carefully, until no one who might be watching could tell where he had come from. Then he stood up and walked toward home. The side streets were quieter now. His legs began to lose their stiffness. He turned down his street.

“Why it’s good old Uncle Alfred.”

He froze. Major’s arms were folded across his chest, and Hollis’ lips were pulled back in a buck-toothed grin.

“Where’s James?”

“‘Where’s James?’” mimicked Major.

“They caught him, you…” snarled Hollis, pushing Sonny toward Alfred, and then the four of them were in a tight pile of swinging arms and legs, kicking, cuffing, punching, and Alfred smashed into the pavement, under Sonny, and the elbows and fists began crashing into his sides, his head, his stomach.

“You knew ’bout that alarm,” grunted Major, hammering down on him.

“I forgot, I would of…” Alfred tasted his own blood, warm and salty, and he felt the pavement scrape the skin off his shoulder
blades. He struggled, trying to kick upwards, but the three of them were too much, bearing down, slugging, stomping…

“Split,” hissed Major, and they were standing. “We’ll get you…” and they were gone.

Far down the block, two patrolmen, one black, one white, walked lightly, looking over each other’s shoulders, glancing up at the rooftops. Alfred dragged himself into an alley, and crawled painfully behind a garbage can. He swallowed back his nausea as a rat scurried over his arm, squealing. The two policemen whirled at the sound, hands on their guns. They looked at each other, shrugged, and walked on. Alfred fainted.

H
E WOKE UP IN HIS
aunt’s bed, blinking against the white glare of the morning sun. He felt her calloused hand move gently over his swollen jaw long before he saw her red-rimmed eyes peering down at him.

“How do you feel, Alfred, honey?” Her voice, usually so warm and light, sounded husky and tired.

“I’m okay, Aunt Pearl.”

“Thank the Lord.” She lowered herself to the edge of the narrow bed. “We was so scared for you, Alfred. Prayed all night, prayed to God and to your sweet momma, rest her soul, got right down on—”

“It’s okay, Aunt Pearl, I’m okay.” He moved his legs under the sheet, then his arms. Numb, aching pain everywhere, but everything moving, nothing broken.

“What happened, Alfred? When Henry and Mister Johnson carried you—”

“Henry?”

“He found you. You was wandering around with your eyes shut, and he went and got his daddy to help carry you home. What happened, Alfred?”

“The, uh, old stone fence off Lenox, Aunt Pearl. I was walking on it, and…a…a big dog jumped up. Knocked me off.”

“Uh, huh,” she said, but he could see by her eyes she knew he was lying. She turned, and he saw his three little cousins jammed in the doorway, staring at him. “You heard what happened, now you go out and play. Go ahead, give Alfred a chance to rest. Charlene, you be sure you’re all back for supper. Mrs. Elversen’s havin’ a party, and I’ll be bringin’ home all kinds of good things.”

The twins began to edge back, but Charlene kept staring. It seemed to Alfred that her eyes were red-rimmed, too. “Go on, now.”

Aunt Pearl waited until they had clattered out of the apartment and down the tenement stairs before she turned back to Alfred. She was frowning. “James was arrested last night, Alfred. For trying to break into Epsteins’.”

“I know.”

“You knew about it, him going?”

“Yes.”

“But you wasn’t with him, that right?”

“That’s right.”

“He wanted you to go, that right?”

When he didn’t answer, she leaned closer. “Who beat you, Alfred?”

“I fell off the fence.”

She shook her head, her hands again on his aching face. “Oh, Alfred, it’s like you’re my own son. I know you try so hard, you so good. I know it ain’t easy, living here. Someday, someday we’re gonna move away, Alfred, and we…” She began to cry, softly.

After a while she rose and smoothed the front of her cotton dress. “I got to work now, Alfred. Be back about eight tonight. You rest. There’s some food by the bed, you eat something right now.”

She paused at the door, and forced a smile. Weakly, he waved back, and slipped again into sleep.

It was noon when he awoke again. His head felt clear. The pain in his arms and legs seemed to have eased. Biting carefully on aching teeth, he ate the bread and cheese and baloney she
had left by the bed, and drank some of the milk, now warm. Street sounds floated up through the open window, children yelling, the thud of a rubber ball against the pavement, four voices singing, “Hey, bay-bee, you’re num-ber one, you’re…,” cars honking Saturday strollers out of their way. Far off, he heard a police siren knife through the street noise. He felt it in his belly.

James was in jail. He burrowed deeper into the bed. It was his fault, letting it slip about the money in the cash register. His fault again for not remembering about the new burglar alarm. Nice bed, soft and safe, away from all of them, he thought. Major and Hollis out on the street, looking to get me. The Epsteins, they’ll be asking questions on Monday morning. They know James is my best friend.
Was
my best friend. No partner, nothing. Stay in bed, man, curl up like a baby, close your eyes, make the world go away. The big white world full of cans to stack and floors to sweep and pails of garbage to drag out back. Big job. Maybe James was right to try to get some of that money, only wrong to get caught. Just stay in bed, man, until you’re eighteen, then join the
Army. No, stay in bed forever.

He made himself get up then, pushing his long, wiry legs over the edge of the bed, standing on the little throw rug until the quivering stopped. He went into the bathroom, and patted cold water on his face before he looked at himself in the mirror. There were specks of dried blood on his hair. His left eye was swollen and bloodshot. His bony face was puffy, especially around the jaw and lips. There was a long scratch down the side of his nose, and another high on his right cheek. Not so bad. Looked worse that time I really fell off the stone fence. He grinned. Major and Hollis, for all their talk, they can’t even rob a store or beat up a guy right. Just punks. Then he remembered that James was in jail, and the grin disappeared.

He walked into the front room, and sat down on the worn couch that opened into a double bed for Charlene and the twins. He turned on the television set.

A slim, pretty, white woman was standing in a shiny kitchen as big as Aunt Pearl’s apartment, telling her tall, handsome husband how worried she was about Billy. He was spending all his free time in the garage and he wouldn’t
let anybody in except Gus, the dog. The husband puffed on his pipe and said he’d look into it, dear, and went outside, walking across a big lawn and under trees. He knocked on the garage door. Billy yelled, Who’s there? Dad yelled back, The F.B.I., and there was tinny sounding laughter. Billy yelled, Just a minute, Dad, and there he was, about fourteen, scrambling around trying to hide the robot he was building….

“Yeah, sure,” said Alfred, snapping off the television.

He went back into his aunt’s bedroom. The four voices on the street were getting louder “…num-ber one, on my top ten, you’re…,” but as soon as Alfred’s head touched the pillow he was falling again into sleep.

The third time he awoke it was dusk. An occasional peal of drunken laughter drowned out the hoarse yells of tired children and the stoop chatter and the muted noise of a dozen transistors on different stations. He got up and went into the kitchen, enjoying the coolness of the cracked linoleum under his bare feet. The foldaway bed he usually slept in was tucked behind the refrigerator. He wondered if Aunt
Pearl had slept in it, or stayed up all night. The sharp blue slacks he had worn were in a corner, next to Aunt Pearl’s box of dusting rags. They were shredded. He put on a pair of clean cotton pants, and the blue tennis shirt with the little alligator on the pocket that Mrs. Elversen had given him for Christmas. He slipped on the black loafers that Jeff had outgrown. Cousin Jeff. Be hearing enough about him tomorrow.

He let himself out of the apartment quietly, so quietly that he surprised two drug addicts fumbling in the hall toilet. They looked up, startled, then saw it was only Alfred, and went back to their spoons and needles. For a moment he thought they were lucky, they’d be getting out of the world for a while, but then he remembered all the old-looking, sick junkies he saw on the streets, hunched-up, desperate for a fix.

“Major and Sonny been lookin’ for you,” said a little boy on the stoop. Alfred nodded, trying to look cool.

He went a few blocks out of his way so he could walk down an avenue where he knew he wouldn’t meet Major. There were big cats there that even Major was afraid of, out to get him for something or other.

The cars were still cruising, guys with their Saturday night girls, guys looking for Saturday night girls. Live music floated out of an upstairs apartment, and there was a burst of laughter. Alfred jammed his hands into his pockets and walked faster. Half a dozen boys his age lounged on a corner, and one of them called to him. He just put his head down and walked on. Couples strolled by, arm in arm.

He looked up once, and saw Henry across the street, dragging his bad leg and smiling as if being crippled was the best thing in the world. Probably coming back from the gym, thought Alfred. Maybe tonight Mr. Donatelli let him wash the fighters’ socks. Then he remembered that Henry had brought him home, and he dropped to his knees behind a parked car. When passers-by stared at him, he pretended he was searching for a lost coin. He waited until Henry had turned the corner. He didn’t feel like thanking anyone for anything tonight.

He crossed the street and started down a block he hardly ever walked on, a block of low apartment buildings, a store-front church, a delicatessen, a pawn shop, and on the corner, a bar. Above the bar, on a dusty plate-glass
window, were the faded letters,
DR
.
ARTHUR COREY
,
DENTIST
. Above that, on a dustier window, in even more faded letters,
DONATELLI
’
S GYM
. A light was burning.

He stood on the corner for a long time, looking up at the dim light until his neck hurt and his eyes watered. A jukebox was blaring through the open door of the bar, but he barely heard it.
DONATELLI
’
S GYM
. The door leading up to the dentist’s office and the gym was sagging off its hinges, half-open. Beyond it was darkness.
DONATELLI
’
S GYM
. Joe Louis had worked out there once. He remembered his father talking about how he had gone over to watch. Maybe Sugar Ray Robinson, too. They weren’t no slaves, and they didn’t have to bust into anybody’s grocery store. They made it, they got to be somebody. He thought about going into the darkness, up to the dim light on the third floor. Maybe if James was around, we could both…

He turned to walk away and saw the familiar, muscular figure moving toward him with that rolling swagger. Major! Wildly, Alfred bolted across the street, side-stepping a taxicab by inches, ignoring the horns and curses of braking drivers. On the other side he glanced
over his shoulder, and stopped. It wasn’t Major after all. Slave. Always gonna be running, Alfred? And running alone?

He waited until the light turned green for him, and he strode back across the street, up to the door. A quivering chill ran up his legs, and his teeth began to grind and a ball of ice formed in the pit of his stomach and he took a breath and plunged through the door, into the darkness, a choking, musty darkness that stank of stale wine and antiseptic and sweat and urine and liniment. He hit the first step, feeling it sag under him, but he kept going, up wooden steps worn so smooth his loafers slipped backwards, but the chilly legs were getting warmer now. Put one after another, Alfred, panting, huffing, low steps but hundreds of them, thousands of them in the darkness, the stairs so steep he sometimes fell to all fours, scrambling higher, past the sign,
DR
.
COREY
, past the sign,
GYM
-
THIRD FLOOR
, faster until his breath tangled in his ribs, higher until his throat was dry, faster, higher, until a door loomed before him.
GYM
.

A faint light leaked through a crack, and he hurled himself up at it, paused, took another breath, and plunged into a large, murky room.

“Yeah?” A short, stocky man with crew-cut white hair looked up. His pale face was smooth and hard.

“I…I’m…I’m Alfred Brooks,” he said, gasping. “I come…to be…a fighter.”

The stocky man did not smile, or change his expression.

“Okay, Alfred Brooks,” he said. “Take off your shirt.”

D
ONATELLI CIRCLED SLOWLY
around him, his hand on his square chin, as if he were inspecting a slab of meat in a butcher store. He grabbed one of Alfred’s hands, studying first the knuckles, then the palms.

“Big hands, you’ll grow some more,” he said. His voice was cold and rasping. He pointed at a battered white medical scale against a wall. “Get on.”

Donatelli adjusted the vertical measure and fingered the sliding weights. “Five feet seven and three-quarter inches. One hundred twenty-four and a half pounds.” There was no expression in his voice. He pointed at two wooden folding chairs facing each other. “Sit down.”

Numbly, Alfred lowered himself to the edge of one chair, clutching his shirt in his hands. Donatelli sat down in the other, resting his heavy forearms on his neatly pressed gray slacks. His pale blue eyes flicked over Alfred’s
face and body. Alfred’s eyes dropped down to the man’s shoes, planted solidly on the wooden floor, black shoes curling with age but highly polished.

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody.”

“Did you come by yourself?”

“Yes.”

The pale blue eyes worked their way down to Alfred’s hands, twisting and wringing the tennis shirt.

“Are you frightened?”

“Me? No, not—”

“A man must have some fear,” said Donatelli, “and learn to control it, to make it work for him. Do you understand?”

Alfred nodded.

“Have you ever boxed?”

“No.”

“I can see you’ve been fighting in the street.”

Donatelli stood up and marched across the room, his square, boxlike body erect. He pulled a string dangling from the ceiling, and a dozen naked bulbs flooded the large room with pools of yellow light. In the center of the room was a
boxing ring, its white canvas floor stained and lumpy. Donatelli leaned against four black-taped ropes, and turned his bulldog face to Alfred.

“There’s no place to hide in a boxing ring. You’re all alone in there with another man who wants to hit you more times, and harder, than you hit him. There are rules, and there’s a referee to make sure you follow them. It’s not the street. You follow me?”

“Yes.”

Donatelli nodded, his bushy white eyebrows arching over the cold eyes. “Sometimes kids come up here and they want to get in that ring right away and knock somebody’s head off. No chance. You have to earn your way in there, you have to work hard for it. Most of the kids leave.”

He straightened up and the ropes quivered back into place. One square, thick hand waved at a corner of the room. A gray, canvas bag, as large as a loaded army duffel bag, hung from the ceiling on a long chain.

“The heavy bag. Go on over and hit it. Not too hard.”

Alfred walked across the room, the naked
skin of his chest prickling. He punched the bag with his left fist. His knuckles burned and a sharp current of pain ran through his wrist, up his arm, exploding in his shoulder. The bag barely swayed.

“Over there,” said Donatelli, pointing to another corner. A brown leather bag, not much larger than a paper lunch sack, hung from a swivel mounted on a round board screwed to the wall. “The peanut bag. Hit it a few times.”

Alfred punched with his right, and the bag slapped against the round board. He missed with his left.

“The heavy bag is for power, to build up your arms and shoulders. The peanut bag is for speed and timing. Before you can go into the ring you have to be able to slam that heavy bag around all day and make that peanut bag sound like a machine gun.”

“I could try,” said Alfred.

“Thousands of kids can do it. Doesn’t mean anything. The bag doesn’t have any arms to hit you back with. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Let me tell you what it’s like.” He walked toward Alfred until they were standing face to
face. His square head settled down into the crisp collar of his open-throated, short-sleeved white shirt. He had almost no neck.

“You get up at five-thirty in the morning, before the gas fumes foul the air, and you run in the park. That’s to build up your legs and wind. You run smooth and easy, a little faster and a little longer each day. You run every day, rain or snow, unless you’re too sick. Then you go home and eat breakfast. Juice, two boiled eggs, toast, and tea. You go to school?”

“I work.”

“You don’t eat too much lunch, it just makes you slow and tired. No fried foods, no beans, no cabbage, no pies and cakes, no soda. After work you come to the gym. Jump rope, stretching exercises, sit-ups, push-ups, deep-knee bends. You do them until you can’t do any more, then you start all over again. You go home, have a good dinner. Meat, green vegetable, fresh salad, milk, fruit. You’re asleep by nine o’clock.”

Donatelli strolled beside the dusty plate-glass window. Neon signs blinked on and off in the street below, throwing pink, green, and blue mists against his smooth-shaven cheeks.
His thin lips barely moved as he talked. “You’ll do it for a week, maybe two. You’ll feel a little better physically, but all your friends, your family, will say you’re a fool. You’ll see other people smoking and drinking and staying out late, eating anything they want, and you’ll start to think you’re a fool, too. You’ll say to yourself, ‘All this sacrifice, and I’ll probably never even get to be a good fighter.’ And you’ll be right, nine times out of ten.”

His voice was lower as he moved away from the window and walked along a green wall, looking at the rusting clothes lockers and the faded posters advertising old prizefights.

“People will try to drag you down. Some will laugh at you for wanting to be a fighter. And others will tell you you’re so good you don’t need to train, to go to bed early. How far did you go in school?”

“Eleventh grade.”

“What happened?”

“I quit.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t seem like any reason to stay.”

“What makes you think you won’t quit here, too?”

Alfred swallowed. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come up the steps, that he was somewhere else, anywhere. He thought of the cave.

“Well?”

“I want to be somebody.”

“Everybody is somebody.”

“Somebody special. A champion.”

Donatelli’s thin lips tightened. “Everybody wants to be a champion. That’s not enough. You have to start by wanting to be a contender, the man coming up, the man who knows there’s a good chance he’ll never get to the top, the man who’s willing to sweat and bleed to get up as high as his legs and his brains and his heart will take him. That must sound corny to you.”

“No.”

“It’s the climbing that makes the man. Getting to the top is an extra reward.”

“I want to try.”

Donatelli shrugged. “Boxing is a dying sport. People aren’t much interested anymore. They want easy things like television, bowling, car rides. Get yourself a good job. Finish high school. Go at night if you have to.”

“I’ll try hard.”

“Talk it over with your parents.”

“I don’t have any. I live with my aunt.”

The pale blue eyes came around again. They seemed softer now. But the voice was still cold and flat. “It’s not easy trying to become a contender. It’s never any fun in the beginning. It’s hard work, you’ll want to quit at least once every day. If you quit before you really try, that’s worse than never starting at all. And nothing’s promised you, nothing’s ever promised you.”

He reached up and pulled the string. The room was murky again, except for the single light bulb. Donatelli spoke from the shadows.

“I’m always here, Alfred. I live here now. Whatever you decide, good luck to you.” His footsteps echoed in the darkness as he walked away.

Alfred left. He moved carefully down the steps. They were still narrow and slippery, but no longer darkly threatening. He was halfway home before he realized that the twisted tennis shirt was still in his hand.