The gymnasium sits over the garage, connected by a
steep, unlighted stairway. Nick hears the door open downstairs and
promises himself that he’s going to put up handrails before some
one falls.
He has been thinking a lot about lawsuits lately,
expecting a colored lawyer to walk into the shop any day now and hand
him the papers for breaking the boy’s ribs on the day Harry took
apart the fuel pump.
He checks the cars outside, looking for something
that a colored lawyer might drive, but there is nothing out there he
doesn’t recognize. A dozen cars are parked on the sidewalk, waiting
for rings or voltage regulators or hoses. Most of them are old;
Chevrolets, Fords, Pontiacs. He won’t work on foreign cars; he
doesn’t even own a set of metric wrenches.
He turns to the stairs, catching the sight of Harry
shadowboxing in the ring, all the rules of boxing and science
distilled into seventy pounds. Nothing wasted, every moment in
balance.
Nick hears steps on the stairs then; slow and heavy,
they stop twice on the way up, resting. He watches the top of the
staircase, and an old man gradually appears, his hand flat against
the wall for balance.
When his head has cleared the landing he stops
again—still on the stairs—and looks at the ring in the middle of
the floor, and Harry moving around inside it.
The old man doesn’t say a word. He climbs the rest
of the way up, carrying a paper bag with underwear spilling out of
the top, and then carefully sets the bag in a corner and sits on it.
The skin over his eyes is baggy and scraped; it looks like a week
since he had a bath.
Nick moves off the window and crosses the room. The
old man glances at him as he approaches, then focuses his attention
back in the ring.
Nick stands over him and waits, not wanting to be
disrespectful. The old man could be eighty; he could be sixty. He
isn’t a fighter; he’s taken some beatings, but they aren’t old,
they aren’t inside him.
There is a timer on the wall which goes off twice
every four minutes, marking the beginning and end of each round, and
the minute’s rest in between. It buzzes now and Harry drops his
hands and begins walking quickly around the ring, close to the ropes,
and there is an economy even to that. Nine years old, he treats
training like he was lighting on television next week. Sometimes Nick
worries that the kid is too serious.
"How you doin’?" Nick says.
The old man looks up at him but doesn’t answer.
"You like the fights?"
The old man makes a noise Nick cannot understand; he
spits as he makes it. Nick looks at him, nodding.
"You want to sit here a while and watch, it’s
all right," he says.
The old man doesn’t seem to hear. His eyes go back
to the ring where Harry is walking in circles, waiting for the timer
to go off again.
He is the kind of kid that you don’t ever have to
tell him something is serious. You have to tell him when it isn’t.
"What I mean is,"
Nick says, "you can stay a little while. Until we turn off the
lights, right? When I turn off the lights, out you go."
* * *
T
he old man watches Harry
shadowbox and jump rope and hit the heavy bags. An hour later a
couple of colored lighters from North Philadelphia come in with a
trainer and work live rounds without headgear.
The trainer stands in the corner, impassive,
blood-red eyes, watching his lighter, whispering to him between
rounds. The other fighter he ignores.
The bell rings, starting and stopping the rounds.
Heads collide, an eyelid swells shut, blood shines beneath both their
noses. Nick imagines it through the old man’s eys. It must look
like a war, and in a way it is. But the issue being decided is
between the fighter and his trainer; the other fighter hasn’t got
anything to do with it.
Probably paying him five dollars a round. Harry
watches the fighters too, doing his sit-ups on a board propped
against the side of the ring. Nick sees him figuring them out, what
will work.
Other kids from the neighborhood wander in. They
sense violence, here and on the street; they are drawn to it.
Most of them have boxed a little themselves, were
brought in here by their fathers with bruised lips or scraped
foreheads after a light, their hands in their pockets; embarrassed
and scared.
And the fathers would take Nick to one side. "Nick,
do me a favor. Don’t baby him .... "
As if that were the reason they couldn’t fight,
they were babied.
As if the family names had been insulted.
As if the fathers had been lighters themselves.
Nick remembers the fathers, though. He remembers what
kind of lighters they had been.
And they would leave their sons, as scared of Nick as
anything outside, and Nick would show them, each in his own time,
that it wasn’t so bad getting hit. That was as much as he could
give most of them, without their giving something back.
A month later, they would quit coming by, except to
watch. They disappeared into games that were played with balls, games
Nick did not play himself.
Or turned into dancers.
Not that he blames them. Fighting isn’t for
everybody, it isn’t supposed to be.
"Who’s the old guy?" one of them asks.
Nick shakes his head. "He just walked in."
"What’s he doin?"
"He ain’t hurting nobody," Nick says.
"Maybe he was cold."
The middleweights finish five rounds, the trainer
presses a cold silver dollar into his fighter’s swollen eyelid.
The lighters dress without showering, and start down
the stairs. Nick can’t see going out into the weather with a fresh
sweat, but he can’t think of a good way to tell them it’s all
right to use the shower. Trainers don’t like anybody telling their
fighters anything. They tell them not to use the showers, they don’t
use the showers. Somebody tells them it’s all right he might as
well of changed the Ten Commandments.
The trainer crosses the room to shake Nick’s hand.
"Thanks, Nick."
"You getting him ready for something?" Nick
says.
"Gettin’ him ready for my fucking heart
attack, he don’t listen to what I tell him."
Nick shrugs. "He don’t look too bad."
"The minute he’s out of my sight," the
trainer says, still holding on to Nick’s hand, "he’s fuckin’
everything he can find a pulse. He got a communicable disease right
now; he ain’t fought without the clap, one kind or another, in a
year. He’s got to make up his mind, does he want to fuck or does he
want to fight."
Nick shrugs, thinking he is just as glad he didn’t
say anything about the shower.
"You’re thinking rubbers," the trainer
says. They always liked to tell you what you were thinking. He shakes
his head. "You can’t talk to George about no rubbers."
The trainer leaves, the neighborhood kids leave with
him. Nick likes kids, the life in them, and when they are gone he
feels the change. Something goes out of the place besides the noise.
He realizes he’s given up on training today; there
isn’t anyone around except Harry to box with anyway, and that’s
not what he wants.
He wants what he almost had earlier—was it last
week already?—with the colored kids on the street.
He wants somebody he can hate a little while, but
that’s harder to find than it used to be. Somehow, he has ended up
understanding too much; and what he can understand, he can forgive.
He unbuttons his shirt and pants and hangs them on
some nails pounded into the wall near the shower. He takes off his
socks and underwear and hurries into the single-stall shower before
he turns on the water.
He doesn’t want anybody coming up the stairs and
seeing him naked.
When he comes out a few minutes later, dripping water
and scalded red, the old man is sweeping the floor. Nick wraps a
towel around his waist and hurries across the room to stop him.
"Hey, don’t do that," he says. He steps
in front of the pile of dust and balled tape riding the old man’s
broom, holding the towel together. "You don’t have to do
that."
The old man makes a shooing gesture with his hands
and spits out a word Nick cannot understand.
Nick steps out of the way, and the old man pushes the
broom through his wet footprints.
He sweeps from the edges of the ring out into the
room, finishing in the corners, working around Harry, who is standing
on a box underneath the speed bag. He picks up one of the boxing
magazines piled beside the toilet and uses it as a dustpan. The old
man is thorough and slow, and Nick wonders if he’s got a couple of
dollars in his pocket to give him, or if he’s got to go downstairs
into the cash register in the garage.
He wonders how to give the old man the money without
having him show up again tomorrow.
The old man wipes up the last of the dirt with a
towel caked with dried blood, and then hangs the towel on the middle
rope of the ring.
Nick reaches into his pants to see what he’s got.
"Thanks," he says. "These fuckin’ kids, they don’t
pick up nothing."
The old man doesn’t seem to hear him. He puts the
broom back in the corner and picks up a pile of hand wraps lying in a
corner. One by one, he smooths the hand wraps flat and hangs them
over the chinning bar to dry. He has to stand on a chair to reach it.
Harry has finished on the speed bag now and steps
into the shower. The water goes on, steam rises above the glass door.
Nick looks out the windows and sees the lamppost swaying in the wind.
When the shower stops, he hears the building creak.
The old man finishes hanging the hand wraps over the
chinning bar, replaces the chair, and turns to inspect the room. He
checks the floor and the ring and the walls; he doesn’t look at
Nick.
Nick stands still, watching him. His hand is touching
the folding money in his pocket, but it’s hard to bring it out. He
knows what it’s like to be cold and not have a place to go.
He remembers a New York hotel they put him in after a
fight; 1951. The place cost fifty cents, and with his hands swollen,
he couldn’t even turn on the radiator.
He can’t remember the fight itself—the fights are
all the same now, they have blended somehow into the same fight—but
he remembers the hotel room down to the frost on the window and the
pattern of the water stains on the ceiling.
The old man is suddenly staring at him, having put
off the moment until there is nothing else to do. Nick looks into
tired eyes; he looks until he can see himself alone in New York City.
"Just tonight," he says quietly.
The old man blinks, then moves slowly to his bag of
clothes. He sits down heavily and drops his head back into the corner
of the wall.
"You can unroll one of them mats," Nick
says, pointing to his mats, "but it’s just tonight. Tomorrow,
you got to go back to your own place."
Harry is out of the shower and dressed. Nick takes
one of the bills from his pocket and leaves it on the bench, and then
starts down the stairs. Harry is behind him, carrying a bag with his
schoolbooks. At the bottom they stop, and Nick takes the two-dollar
reading glasses out of his pocket and holds them in front of the
thermostat, magnifying the numbers until he can read them. The place
costs him a fortune to heat, the winter months it goes a hundred
dollars. He feels his son watching him. He shakes his head and puts
the glasses back in his shirt pocket.
“
Shit, we’ll leave it
on," he says. "It’s only one night."
* * *
N
ick wakes up in the
night, thinking of the hotel room in New York again. Emily is lying
on her side, her hand under her cheek, prettier now, he thinks, than
she was in those days. Softer. Her face makes him happy.
He remembers the hotel room; he tries to remember the
fight. It won’t come; just the room and his hands and the sounds in
the hallway. He lay on a cot freezing, afraid of the noises outside.
He’d had thirty fights, and still couldn’t get
used to being away from home. Thirty wins, no losses. But in those
days thirty fights wasn’t anything. He was still making seven,
eight hundred dollars, sometimes he got cheated out of that. Now, a
kid gets fifteen wins, they got him fighting for a title.
But not his kid, he thinks.
It isn’t something he’ll have to tell him, it’s
something he already understands. Nick has spent enough time in
fifty-cent hotel rooms for them both.
He looks at Emily again, and sees his son in her
face. Her relatives didn’t want her married to somebody who was
beat up all the time, so he gave up fighting. They were college
people, connected to the city, and after they were engaged, her
father got him a job in the police garage. Nick could always fix
engines.
He didn’t run, he didn’t go near the gym. And
then one Sunday afternoon at Emily’s house, her mother makes a nice
chicken, and who walks in the front door but Slappy Grazano.