Casino Moon

55

“SO I HEAR THAT kid’s been calling you ‘old man’ again. That’s beautiful.”

P.F. was in the dressing room a half hour before the fight, watching Elijah trying to tie his sneakers.

“Who this?” said Elijah, missing the loop on the right lace a third time.

“The kid you’re fighting tonight. Terrence. He said, ‘Old man oughta go back to the old man home.’ I heard it on TV.”

“Oh.” Elijah missed the loop a fourth time. “Perhaps tonight I ask him to call me by my proper name.”

He went to work on the left lace. Pathetic. The man couldn’t tie his own shoes and he was going to fight a kid half his age and twice his strength. P.F. wondered if he’d let someone beat his brains out for a million dollars. But then again, he’d sold his soul to Teddy for a couple of TV sets, so who was he to judge?

Eventually Elijah’s cut man Victor Perez came over to help him lace up his shoes.

“You know, I ain’t fightin’ this fight for respect anyway,” said Elijah in an already haggard voice.

“Oh no?” P.F. fixed the special security badge on the left side of his blue Doubloon windbreaker.

“That’s right. From now on, I fight for one reason and one reason only, M-O-N-E-Y.”

The dressing room had plain white walls and a red carpet with bits of brown woven into it. Terrence Mulvehill’s ancient white trainer Ben E. Schulman came by to watch Elijah get his hands wrapped. A young man from the cable TV outfit hugged a clipboard and took deep breaths. Two other guards stood near the door, regarding the scene reverently.

A waitress came in with a bucket of ice water and then left. Elijah muttered something to the guards about not wanting to see any more women between now and the time the fight started.

“I gotta get the meanness started inside me,” he explained. “I can’t do it if I see women around.”

The young man from the cable network got on his mobile phone and began whispering nervously.

“You know in Vegas they’re taking odds on what round you’ll get knocked out,” P.F. said.

“Yeah?” Elijah lay on his stomach to get a back rub. “And what kinda odds are they gettin’?”

“Five to one that you’ll fall in the first round.”

Elijah smiled.

Victor the cut man slathered him with baby oil and began pulling his shoulders like they were lumps of soggy clay.

“Yes, sir,” said Elijah. “I only got one rule anymore: Be comfortable.”

“If you say so.” P.F. held up his palms.

The sound of the crowd cheering one of the preliminary bouts bled through the walls. It sounded like a nation entombed.

“How you fixed, man?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m asking where you got your money.”

P.F. looked at him blankly. “I dunno, in a bank.”

Elijah shook his head. “Somebody oughta take you aside, talk to you, man. You gotta get yourself into some triple tax frees and mutual funds. Can’t just leave your money in some insured money market. You gotta make it work for you.”

P.F. wondered why Elijah seemed so comfortable here, talking to him like they were old friends. Maybe it was just a way of loosening up before the fight. In any case, it wasn’t bad advice, especially coming from a man who was supposedly punch-drunk.

“You know what the secret is?” Elijah stood up and began to shadowbox. He wore just a pair of socks and a black protective cup over his genitals. “You never put all your assets in one place. I remember when I was just a child I used to hide my money in the flowerpot. Now I don’t put all my money in one bank. I don’t put all my money in two banks. I don’t put all my money nowhere. If the bank falls down today and takes everything I have in there, I still will be able to survive. Because I got...” It took him an eternity to settle on a word. “Reserves,” he said finally. “I got hidden reserves. Ain’t nobody knows about ’em.”

He threw a right cross at the mirror on the wall. For a moment P.F. thought he’d actually break the glass and bloody his knuckles. He missed contact by less than half an inch.

“Yup, that’s the only reason to do anything,” he said. “For the C-A-S-H.”

Pigfucker just looked at him.

“What? You still think I gotta do this shit for my self-respect?”

P.F. didn’t answer.

“Man, fuck that.” Elijah threw a hard left jab that jerked a muscle in his shoulder. “I don’t have to do this to live. I’m forty-three years old, man. I already been the champion twice. I defended my title six times. I don’t need to come out of retirement to earn my self-esteem.”

Elijah scowled at the mirror and saw P.F. watching him from behind.

“I don’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying,” Elijah said, feinting with his left and throwing a stiff right at the mirror. “I got a beautiful wife, a beautiful son, three beautiful grandchildren. I’m proud. I started with nothing. I grew up in a shack out in the Inlet and I became middleweight champion of the whole wide world.”

The room was completely silent.

“I ain’t got nothin’ to be ashamed of,” Elijah said, firing two more furious punches at his reflection. “Just because some punk hit me with a lucky shot when I wasn’t ready and I hadn’t trained. That may be how some other people remember me. It ain’t how I remember myself.”

P.F. finally looked away as Elijah stopped throwing punches. He’d heard more convincing declarations, from swindlers and con artists in the back of the squad car.

Dr. Park, the boxing federation’s physician, came into the room smoking a cigarette. A rail-thin Korean man in a navypinstripe suit. Anthony Russo followed him in, wearing a dark suit and a B.U.M. sweatshirt. He seemed nervous and unsure where to put his eyes.

There was still something about the kid that made P.F. profoundly uneasy. Maybe it was just their common history with Teddy and Mike.

Dr. Park was shining a light in Elijah’s eyes. P.F. thought he saw the pupils respond a fraction of a second too slowly to its movement.

“How you feeling?” the doctor asked.

“Like I could dance all night.”

The doctor stepped away and Anthony moved in front of the fighter. Clicking his heel on the carpet and jiggling his knee. He was like a raw nerve in a good suit. You would’ve thought he was the one about to get in the ring. P.F. rubbed his eyes and swallowed a Tums.

“Look,” said Anthony in a bitten-off voice. “I don’t have to tell you your business. You’ve been in the fight game a lot longer than I have.”

Elijah made a low virile sound, but he wasn’t looking at Anthony. He was staring at some distant spot, miles past his shoulder.

“I’m not asking you to lay down your life tonight,” Anthony said. “I’m not asking you to risk permanent injury. All I ask is that you fight like a man among men.”

A man among men. He said it with such great feeling that Elijah’s eyes flicked over and locked on to his.

“That’s all I ever done,” he told Anthony.

Anthony shook Elijah’s wrapped right hand, made a note in his Filofax, and walked out of the room with the doctor.

“Hurt my hands.” Elijah stared down at his fingers. “Every man comes in, thinks he has to show how strong he is by giving them a squeeze as hard as he can. They don’t know this is delicate instruments.”

“He’s just scared, that’s all,” said P.F.

“Scared, huh?” Elijah began dancing in place. “You know, I used to be scared too. Scared of dying.”

“Yeah, so what happened?”

“I don’t know. I got over it.”

He threw an abrupt head fake as though an opponent had suddenly materialized before him. “Only thing that scares me now is not knowing how it gonna turn out,” said Elijah.

John B. returned from the other dressing room, where he’d been watching Terrence Mulvehill get his hands taped.

“Punched a hole in the wall,” he told his brother. “He just reached out and punched a hole in the wall. You can see the lights from Pacific Avenue in his dressing room.”

“He punch through the concrete or plaster?” Elijah wanted to know.

“I think it was plaster.”

Elijah looked slightly disappointed and went back to dancing. There was less than fifteen minutes until the fight began. Elijah hopped back up on the training table and John B. began rubbing his shoulders.

“The Lord have a way,” John was saying. “The Lord will find a way.”

The smell of liniment oils and leather gloves began to fill the air. Elijah wasn’t talking or moving. He bowed his head as if reaching down deep inside himself.

And from then until the moment the opening bell rang, P.F. only heard him say five more words.

“We can never really know.”