The Fighter (7 page)

He
rested for a minute at the Niagara Aquarium. Ptarmigans had built nests on
outcrops along the river's sheer cliff face, cobbled together from sedge grass
and foil burger jackets and neon drinking straws. Closer to the falls, on the
Canadian side, a sandy inlet known as Long Point sat hemmed by spidery oak
trees. Rob's uncle Tommy said that back in 1858, steamboats filled with thugs,
thieves, gunmen, and other so-called sportsmen crossed the river in the dead of
night to watch John C. Heenan and John Morrissey fight for the American
championship. They fought at Long Point since, ironically, boxing was banned
in America at the time. Heenan—"The Sapulpa Plasterer"—the champ,
suffered from a festering leg ulcer, which bellied the hopes of Morrissey and
his backers. They fought bareknuckle, hands soaked in walnut juice to toughen
the skin. The ring was pitched in the shifting sands and the men fought
twenty-eight rounds. Morrissey flattened Heenan with an uppercut to open the
twenty-ninth, knocking him cold;
administering
the quietus,
as sportswriters of the day might've written. Rob's uncle showed him an
artist's rendering of the fight: Morrissey with his wilted handlebar mustache
and upraised arms, Heenan's face like a savage tomato cradled in the arms of his
seconds while spectators in stovepipe hats and dueling jackets seethed outside
the ring, brandishing pistols and daggers and clubs.
A Brutal Close to the Heenan-Morrissey Mill,
the caption read.

Rob
continued south down Main, past boarded shopfronts and dusty antique stores,
peepshow theaters with opaque windows and nightclubs advertising
drink all nite for one low price
. The sun rose over the falls,
lighting the spume; it looked like the sparkling space above fresh-poured soda.

Top
Rank was located in the basement of Shaw's Discount Furnishings. You will
rarely find a ground-level boxing club: they're always in basements and
refurbished cellars, dank subterranean chambers where men gather to study the
edicts of hurt. No sign above the entryway: unless you were a boxer, knew a
boxer, or paused to consider the procession of sweaty men who came and went at
all hours of the day, you'd have no idea of its existence.

Rob
skipped lightly down the littered concrete stairs, walking beneath exposed
joists and sewage pipes padded with strips of unraveling friction tape. The
walls were hung with photos of famous and not-so-famous pugilists: Ali and
Holmes and Liston hung beside unknown warriors Jackson Buff, Chuck "The
Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner, Mushy Callahan, Chief Danny Thunderheart.

The
place was quiet at this hour of morning: a few groggy boxers shuffled around
the slick concrete floor. Sickles of sunlight poured through the cracked
casement windows, picking up a patina of dust motes suspended in the air.
Heavybags hung like slabs of meat. A black welterweight shadowboxed in the glow
of a single fluorescent tube.

Rob's
uncle Tommy was getting dressed in the change room.

A
few years ago, Rob went through a phase where he'd read a ton of hard-boiled
detective novels. Anytime a "goon" character was introduced—a
not-so-bright kneecapper with "the rough dimensions of an icebox"—Rob
pictured his uncle. But seeing as how outside of a boxing ring Tommy exhibited
a docility that verged on pathological, the only true similarities were
physical. The story of Tommy's long and not particularly successful career was
written all over his face: buckle-nosed and egg-eared, his left eyelid dropping
from a dead nerve to give him the look of a man caught in perpetual half-wink.
A face hard enough to blunt an ax,
the gym bums said of it.

"Morning,
lazybones."

"Lazybones?"
Rob peeled a sweat-soaked shirt over his head to reveal a muscle-corded torso.
"You weren't anywhere to be seen when I got up—all-nighter at the Fritz?"

"I
was on a roll, Robbie. Then I pushed all my chips in on a pair of ladies when
the other guy's holding kings." Tommy shook his head. "Gotta get your
money in on ladies, am I right?"

Robert
slipped into gym togs and stabbed his feet into boxing boots. A gloom fell over
him, as it so often did at this time in the morning; a gloom brought about by
the knowledge that while his schoolmates slept in warm beds he would soon step
into the ring to get his nose bloodied and lips split, bashing away at some opponent
until the bell rang.

Tommy
said, "I thought maybe you would be tired, y'know, from staying out late
with ole Katey-pie."

"You
know it's not like that. We're friends."

"Friends,
uh? That what you kids're calling it nowadays?"

"Who're
you sparring with?" Rob said.

"Our
boy wants to change the subject, I see." Tommy finished wrapping his
hands, butted his fists together, rose to the sink. "Louie Scarpella,
heavyweight from Buffalo. Trainer wants to work his guy against a flatfooted
grinder and thought I fit the bill. You imagine that, Robbie? He says it to my
face." Tommy rubbed his pancaked nose with a closed fist, pinched one
nostril shut and blew a string of snot into the basin. "Right to my face
like that."

"So
go knock his guy's block off."

"You
know that's not how it works. My job's to give Scarpella a lift—raise his
spirits. I knock him on his ass, his trainer holds out on my fee."

Tommy
twisted the spigot and rinsed the sink. He stared at his reflection and
blinked, as if somehow surprised at the man he caught staring back. He drove a
Bobcat model 13E tow-motor at the Niagara Industrial Park, a string of
corrugated tin warehouses off Highway 62A. His fellow workers were fat and
balding, high school heroes gone to seed. During piss breaks, standing at the
long line of porcelain urinals, Tommy's nose would wrinkle at a smell that, to
him, indicated dire maladies: prostate trouble, gallstones, urinary infection,
sick excretions from old bodies. It drove him to the point where he'd pissed in
a Dixie cup and sniffed, making sure it wasn't his own sickness he was
smelling.

Tommy
had boxed since the age of ten. He grew up in the gym. He loved every part of
it: the training and roadwork, the sparring, the fight. He was getting older
and his body didn't react the way it used to. His mind told him what moves to
make but his reflexes couldn't follow through. But he trained hard and kept in
fighting shape to take a match on short notice—because, hey, you just never
knew.

"How
many rounds you getting in?" Rob asked him.

"Five."
Tommy wiped his fingers on his gray trunks. "Unless Scarpella punches
himself out before that."

"He
that out of shape?"

"I'll
keep it light; drag it out to four, at least."

Tommy's
professional record was 28-62-7. It once stood at 22-1, belted out against
tomato cans handpicked by his brother and manager, Reuben, Rob's father. He'd
fought in local clubs throughout the state and across state lines in Akron,
Scranton, Hartford. His only big-money fight had been at Madison Square Garden,
on the under- card of the Holmes-Cooney tilt in '83. Tommy squared off against
Sammy "Night Train" Layne, a slippery southpaw from east Philly;
Tommy's shove-and-slug style, effective against unskilled biffers, was badly
exposed by the ducking and weaving Layne. By the end of the eleventh round
Tommy's face was cut into ribbons, a severed artery above his left eye bringing
forth blood in spurts. After that matchmakers lost interest and Reuben had a
rough time lining up fights.

From
there Tommy turned into a trial horse, the sort of workman who'll take a stiff
belt without folding. A good horse will give you ten solid rounds but never
pose a serious threat to a contender. Tommy was in demand due to his rep as a
bleeder: by the end of a fight he was a mess and his opponents came off looking
like executioners. Until a mandatory pre-fight CAT scan showed a blood vessel
had snapped inside his head. The NY boxing commission revoked its sanctioning
license, citing medical unfitness.

Reuben
Tully poked his head into the change room. Squat and potbellied, he was the
polar opposite of his younger brother. He wore a rumpled button-down shirt and
snap-brim hat; his short hair was shaved up the side of his head like a zek in
some Russian internment camp.

"What's
this, social hour?" Reuben banged a fist on the lockers, set the brass
locks jumping. "Ass in gear, Robbie. And Tommy, that big shitkicker from
Buffalo's waiting."

"Tell
him to hold his water." Tommy snapped off a few ponderous jabs and smiled
over at his nephew. "Time to make the donuts."

Rob
rose to the sink and studied his face hemmed by a red hood: unbroken nose,
forehead peppered with acne, eyes of such pale blue his father joked they must
be unscrewed nightly and soaked in bleach. Some days he felt handsome, or at
least that he was working his way toward it. Yet he knew he was one hard punch
away from a busted nose or split brow or knocked-out tooth. No way you can eat
leather round after round and expect to keep your looks.

Fruit
bats squeaked and fluttered in the dark roost between locker- room ceiling and
furniture-store floor. Rob stared down at his hands: thick and calloused,
joints swollen from all the rough treatment. Old man's hands. He was only
sixteen, but at times felt years older.

"Robbie!"

"Keep
your shirt on," he whispered to the mirror. Then: "Coming!"

Top
Rank lit up now, vapor tubes popping and fritzing as they warmed. Three huge
ceiling fans with oarlike blades stirred stale air around. A pair of middleweights
skipped before a long mirror. Beyond them a young Mexie straw-weight performed
burpees with a fifteen-pound medicine ball. A two-hundred-pound anvil with the
words
that bitch
painted on its side sat beside
him; boxers in a dick-swinging mood occasionally goaded each other, "Go
on—lift that bitch!"

The
gym was dominated by its ring: twenty feet by twenty feet and enclosed by
sagging red ropes. The canvas stank of blood and sweat; to the best of anyone's
knowledge it had not been replaced in thirty years. Spitbuckets were strapped
to opposite ring posts: wide-mouthed funnels attached to flexible PVC hose
trailing down to five-gallon drums once containing oleo lard. The walls were
hung with cobwebbed Golden Gloves belts and framed photos of young boxers who
now made their living as plumbers or foremen or short-order cooks. Handwritten
signs rife with misspellings:
club dews must be paid at the
START
of the
MONTH!!!
CLUB TOWULS ARE FOR SWET
ONLY,
not
BLOOD!!!
use
lockers at own risk—not responsibul for
LOST
gear!!!

Written
above the wall-length mirror in neat block letters:

WE
ARE EDUCATED IN PAIN.

Top
Rank was operated by a consortium of managers and trainers— Reuben Tully was
one of them—who collected dues to pay the rent and sent whatever was left over to
an absentee landlord in Boca Raton. In exchange for this stewardship, they were
given free rein to train their own prospects.