The Fighter (13 page)

The number
twenty bus dropped Reuben off a block from Top Rank. He carried a
grease-spotted bag of day-old bearclaws for his son. Not exactly the breakfast
of champions, but Rob's metabolism ran hotter than a superconductor; he'd burn
through them before lunch.

In the gym two
heavies were training for an upcoming card at the armory. A pair of nightclub
bouncers, they were set to square off against a couple of garrison Marines.
Reuben pictured the matches: two pug-uglies in the dead center of the ring,
bashing away like Rockem Sockem Robots. The war vets and jarheads on furlough
would gobble it up.

Rob was up in
the ring with bespectacled Frankie Jack, a retired welder who hung around the
gym drumming up cut work. Frankie, with a pair of leather punch mitts over his
hands, instructed Rob to turn through on his right cross, make it
sing.

"Frank, ya
fool," Reuben called, "you filling my fighter's head with
nonsense?"

"Not at
all, just warming him up for you." As if Rob were an old Dodge on a winter
morning. "He's in fine shape, Reuben. Tip-top shape."

Rob spread the
ropes so that Frankie could step down. Frankie jammed the punch mitts into his
armpits and tugged them off; he rubbed his hands, wincing.

"I'll tell
you, this kid can
hit.
He hurts just to breathe on you." Cotton swabs were pinned behind
Frankie's ears like draftsman's pencils. "Hope this ain't out of line, but
if you ain't yet settled on a cutman for Robbie's next fight I'd gladly step
in."

"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.