The Chief (2 page)

T
HE ARENA IS PACKED;
every folding chair has a fat white butt on it with a loudmouth on top. “Injuns!” someone screams, and there's an
F Troop
Indian war whoop and someone else gets up and dances in the aisle. The crackers call it comedy. Sonny ignores them.

The TV camera is set up near Iron Pete Viera's corner. The woman directs her crew like it's a major motion picture.

Iron Pete is a steroid yahoo with a ponytail almost as long as Sonny's, and a tattoo on his arm of an eagle gripping a sailboat in its talons. When he flexes his arm at the crowd, they start chanting “I-un PETE, I-un PETE.”

I say to Alfred, “Sonny's going to have to drive a stake through his heart just to get a decision.”

“Shut up,” says Alfred.

I never pay attention to the introductions. This is when I recheck the ice bucket with our
taped water bottle, our sponges, the spit bucket. I steady the wheelchair as Alfred hauls himself out and finds a handhold on the ring apron so he can see the action and shout instructions between rounds. I don't know how he manages to hold himself up through a long fight.

Iron Pete comes right out at the bell, misses with a long, loopy right, takes two jabs and then clinches. He's six feet tall, an inch shorter than Sonny, but he's wider and heavier. While he's holding on he tries to drive the top of his head into Sonny's eyes. Sonny twists his body the way Alfred and Jake taught him and rams his shoulder into Iron Pete's nose. There are tears in Pete's eyes and he breaks the clinch.

It's a dull first round. Iron Pete shows off his two moves, a head butt and an uppercut to the groin, and Sonny can keep away from those in his sleep. Which is his problem. He's fighting like he's asleep. No fire, no energy. He's flat. He's going through the motions.

“Wake up—stick and move,” Alfred screams, but Sonny is on automatic pilot, keeping Viera at arm's length, at the end of long, slow punches.

Between rounds, I sponge Sonny's neck and face, rinse his mouthpiece and tilt the water bottle up to his face. He spits some of the water out on me. Jake and Alfred are yelling at him to wake up, move, take the fight to Viera.

The second round he throws a few jabs, but mostly brushes Viera's punches aside. He doesn't seem to care.

At the bell, Alfred yells at me, “Throw some ice in his cup.” When Sonny plops down on the stool I get ready.

Jake rubs his shoulders. “Move your head after you punch, Sonny. You forget everything?”

Just before the bell for the third round, I scoop out a handful of ice, pull out the waistband of Sonny's trunks and dump it under the leather belt of his protective cup. When the ice hits his crotch, he jumps up bellowing. It's my tail he wants, but Viera is roaring across the ring at him.

They meet in the middle slugging. It's one mad minute. They stand toe-to-toe and whale. Viera is strong, he can take it, but Sonny is driving him into the deck,
crack
, a jab breaks
Viera's nose, a left hook to the body crushes his liver, this is going to end soon. Sonny hooks over the jab, then throws a right. He's setting up Viera for a left hook to the cheekbone that will send us home early.

The right connects, and Viera's head snaps into the pathway of the hook to come. But Sonny never throws it. His face twists in pain. The middle right knuckle.

Viera takes advantage of that instant and throws an uppercut into Sonny's cup. I can imagine the ice crunching, driving up into his groin. Sonny leans forward and Viera brings his head up into Sonny's left eye.
Thunk.
Sonny staggers backward. The skin over his eyebrow opens like a red mouth. Blood sluices down over his eye.

We're yelling at the referee to call the butt. The camera crew is circling the ring to get more blood, and Viera is closing in, but Sonny knows how to move and spin and tie Viera up, and he manages to survive the round and get back to the stool.

Jake moves fast, pinching the cut with his fingers to stop the bleeding, then fingering in the ointment. I'm sponging like crazy, rinsing
and pouring. Alfred has pulled his way up on the ropes and is talking right into Sonny's ear: “Jab with the right, just to push him back. When he drops his shoulder to throw the uppercut, hook to the head.”

The crowd is screaming for Viera to go for the eye and he tries, but Sonny is awake now, survival time, throwing out the right as if he's swatting flies, but Viera doesn't know it's useless, he's circling left, waiting for an opening. It comes soon. Viera bulls in, drops his shoulder to throw another uppercut to the groin, and Sonny lands a left hook to the iron head. Viera stumbles backward.

Sonny jabs, on him now, another hook drives Viera against the ropes. Two good hands and the fight is over, but Sonny has to get too close for a short punch like the hook. Viera lunges and scrapes the left eyebrow with the laces of his glove. It opens the cut.

“Take him out, now,” Alfred is screaming, and Sonny surges forward, he's got Viera on the ropes, pounding him with his left, ignoring the blood and white stuff oozing over his eye and down his face. He's going to win, he's going to win!

But suddenly, an instant before Iron Pete gets smelted, the referee plunges between them and waves off the fight. He points to Sonny's bloody eyebrow. He holds up Viera's arm. If he didn't, Viera would fall down.

And that's it. A technical knockout for Viera. TKO. I'd score it a TRO, a technical ripoff.

Jake is screaming and Alfred is screaming, and a voice that sounds a lot like mine is screaming, but Sonny just shrugs and walks back to his corner, his shoulders slumped.

It's over.

Maybe it's all over. Seventeen fights in two years, win thirteen, lose four, every loss a hometown heist. That's no record for a future champion of the world. It's the record of an “opponent,” a nobody who's good enough to put up a decent fight but not good enough to win the big ones.

The crowd is chanting, “I-un PETE, I-un PETE,” as Viera dances around the ring flexing the eagle's wings. Sonny vaults the ropes and rushes off to the dressing room. We scramble to get Alfred back into the chair. Usually we have to clear a path for Sonny through the
crowd. But this time no one bothers him. Sonny's invisible.

Maybe that's the last bad sign.

Hang it up.

T
HERE'S A CAR WRECK
and a stabbing ahead of us, so we sit in the emergency room for an hour before a nurse takes a close look at Sonny's eyebrow. She shrugs, makes a mark on her clipboard and walks away.

“So this is where it ends, in an all-night blood hole in a dead-end town.”
I don't realize I'm saying it out loud while I tap it into the laptop.

“Write it down if you have to,” says Alfred, “but shut up.”

“Leave him alone,” says Sonny.

Alfred wheels around.
“Now
you want to fight?”

“He did the best he could,” I say.

“I hope not,” says Alfred.

“Don't matter now,” says Sonny.

“Hi there. You okay?” The TV producer marches in and leans over to peer at Sonny's eye. “You were jobbed out there. I hope we
weren't part of the problem.”

“'S okay,” says Jake. “He's a professional.”

“Was,” says Sonny.

She gets it right away. “You're not going to quit?”

“Announce my retirement on your show.”

“The way you were fighting tonight, you might as well quit,” she says. “You started too slow. You didn't bring the fight to him until it was too late.”

“What makes you think you know so much?” I ask, trying to get some sneer into my voice to hide the tremble.

“I'm a producer. I know everything.” Her smile makes my liver quiver. “The deck was stacked. You had to knock Pete out to win. Ever since the fishing rights case around here, the locals've had it in for Native Americans. Think they had something to do with closing down their factory.”

“Always be something,” says Jake. “Got to overcome it. Learn from it.”

“Sonny learned how to fight one-handed tonight,” she said. “What happened to the right? Broken?”

“Don't want that in your movie,” says Alfred.

“Hey, I'm easy.” She smiles. “I might like to shoot your next fight.” As the desk nurse passes us again she calls out, “You know, we have a hurt person here.”

“Everybody in here's hurt, honey,” says the nurse, popping out her words as if she's snapping gum.

“But not everybody comes in with the media.” She flips open her wallet and shows the nurse a card. “Would you call your supervisor please, before I call my camera crew?”

The nurse scowls at her and marches away, but a doctor shows up a few minutes later. “Yes? Sonny Bear?” he says to her.

“I'm Robin Bell, Doctor…”

“Dr. Gupte.”

“And this is Sonny Bear.” She grabs Dr. Gupte's sleeve and tugs him over to Sonny. “He's a professional boxer, he will be on television, and we're concerned about septic conditions in his eyebrow. The skin needs to be debrided right away, and we have to have small, tight stitches, not much lip. Can you do that?”

“Of course. Please come this way.”

Alfred winks at Jake, who shakes his head.
We follow Sonny and Robin back to the examination room.

Dr. Gupte and a nurse clean out Sonny's eyebrow, but when the sewing needle appears I'm out of there. I'm leaning against a wall outside the room, taking deep, queasy breaths, when I hear, “You, too?”

She's leaning against the other wall. The skin of her thin face is very white, a sharp contrast to her black hair and to the sprinkle of freckles over her nose. She looks younger, nicer.

“I can't stand the sight of blood,” I admit.

“That's tough for a fighter's writer.”

“The sight of Sonny's blood, really. There hasn't been a lot of it. He's good, not like tonight.”

“What happened? Why'd he start so flat, as if he didn't care?”

I don't want to get into that, so I ask, “What's your film about?” These TV types love to talk about their projects, especially if you call them films, which makes them feel like Martin Scorsese.

“Well, it's about boxing, of course, but it's also about small-town America and ethnic pride
and tribalism and the rites of manhood….”

“Sounds like you haven't figured it out yet,” I say. “I guess if you shoot enough, something'll develop.”

Her face gets darker as the blood comes back. Not so nice, but more interesting. “What exactly do you write,” she asks, “ransom notes?”

“That's cute.” I decide there's no point being enemies. “It was supposed to be a book about Sonny becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in history. Two years on the title trail. But we're sort of running out of time. He's nineteen years old; he'll be twenty in January.”

“Who's your publisher?”

“Don't have one yet.”

“Has anyone seen any pages?”

“I have to turn in the first few chapters next week to my new advisor.”

Her eyebrows arch. “You're in college?”

“I'm trying to get an independent-study semester to finish the book.”

She looks interested. Her eyes flick over me, leaving warm trails. “Where do you go to school?”

Just then Alfred rolls out with Jake. Sonny is giving Dr. Gupte and the nurse his autograph. Robin hurries over to be with the star of the show.

W
E TRAIL
R
OBIN'S OLD
BMW to an all-night diner just far enough out of town so that we get some strange looks, but nobody hassles us. We settle around a table.

“So what's the story with you guys? Where are you…”

“Old story,” says Sonny. “Skip it.”

“No, I'd like to hear it.”

Sonny grunts, stands up and stalks to the video games in the front of the diner.

“All you need to know,” I say, “is that Elston Hubbard is fighting in Las Vegas in two weeks, and if he wins, he'll get a shot at the title.”

“I know that, I read the papers. So what?”

“Two years ago, Sonny was supposed to fight Hubbard for the Gotham Gloves championship. He would have beaten him, but he was declared ineligible.”

“Drugs?” She's making notes, which annoys me. It's my story.

“No. He fought some smokers—they're like pro fights, only…”

“I know what smokers are,” says Robin, annoyed.

“They found out about them at the last minute and disqualified Sonny because he wasn't an amateur. Hubbard went on to win the Olympic gold medal and here we are, picking up meatball fights in nowhere towns.”

I suddenly realize I'm doing all the talking. Jake's eyes are closed; he could be sleeping, he could be going into the Moscondaga “little death,” he might just be resting his eyes. Alfred has wheeled off to the bathroom. He'll be gone for a while. After a long, tough day the tubes and plastic bags that catch his wastes could be backed up, or at least tangled.

“You're kind of an interesting group,” says Robin. Her pen is poised over her notebook. “How'd all you guys get together?”

“That's another book,” I say. I notice that one of Jake's eyes is open a crack. “Ask Jake—it goes way back.” His eye shuts.

The waitress bustles up. I can do this order in my sleep: deluxe burgers for me and Sonny, sausage and eggs for Jake, dry toast and tea for
Alfred. Win or lose, always the same food after a fight. Robin orders yogurt and coffee.

Sonny stomps back. “Got any quarters? Don't even have a bill changer here.”

“All the quarters you need in Vegas,” says Robin.

Alfred wheels back. “What am I missing?”

“You should go to Las Vegas and make Hubbard fight you.”

Jake's eyes open.

Sonny snorts. “What kind of TV shows you make? Fantasy?”

“That's what Muhammad Ali did,” says Robin. “Made so much noise they had to fight him. It's all publicity and connections.”

“Just what we don't have,” says Alfred.

“You've got to make your own publicity and connections. Marty's got a big mouth.”

Sonny looks at her as if she's crazy and Alfred rolls his eyes, but Jake says, “Keep talking.”

“Well, what's Sonny's big selling point? What makes him different from every other wanna-be champ?”

“The Indian card doesn't always play,” I say. “You media types may love Indians, but out in the boonies…”

“We're talking big-time media now, New York, L.A. Stories in
USA Today,
on CNN, then the
Times
and the networks.” Her dark eyes were snapping. They're all out there in Vegas looking for things to write about. The champ is boring, Hubbard's a lox, and after you've seen John L. Solomon do his Yiddish shtick, it's over. They'd love a real live native warrior.”

The food comes and I say, “So what do we do, ride out to Vegas on our pinto ponies and threaten to scalp Hubbard if he won't fight us?”

“I'm serious,” she says.

“So are we,” I say. “You may think this is kind of cute, hustling Sonny like a lounge act, but he's no sidewalk Indian, he's got the blood of the Running Braves….”

Sonny drops into his seat. “C'mon, not you, too.”

“Running Braves?” The eyebrows almost touch her hairline. “What's Running Braves?”

“Forget that,” says Alfred. “You got a plan?”

“Not really, I just think you guys have to go out there and make things happen. Put yourselves into play.” When the food comes, Robin grabs the check. “When you're champ, you'll owe me.”

“Don't save your appetite,” says Sonny.

“If you get off your butt, you'll make it,” she says. “Because in your heart you really want it.” She bores right into Sonny with those dark eyes. “You've got the killer instinct, Sonny, and what looks like a helluva left hook. You fought hurt and you would've put him away, without a right hand, without a left eye, you still would've won, if the referee hadn't stopped it to save him. If you can do that, you can do anything you want.”

Nobody is breathing at the table. Alfred and Jake look at each other, then at her. Sonny glares right back at her. “How come you think you know so much?”

“My grandfather was a fighter, and I used to go to the fights with my dad, watched a lot on TV.” She looks at her watch. “Gotta push.” She gives each of us one of her cards. “Let's stay in touch. Don't sign any exclusive TV documentary deals till you check with me.”

We watch her march out of the diner, her boots pounding a drumbeat.

“Vegas,” says Sonny. He laughs the nasty little defensive laugh he uses like a jab to keep people off balance when he isn't sure what's going on. He looks at Jake. “Maybe the
Hawk'll fly me to Vegas.”

“Maybe so,” says Jake. “You got to listen to women. The Creator gave them special sight.”

“She didn't look like a Clan Mother to me,” I say.

Jake's eyes narrow. “Don't get in the way, Martin.”

“Let's go.” Sonny stands up.

“I'm not done yet,” says Alfred.

“Wake up,” says Sonny. “We are done and gone.”