Casino Moon

62

“THREE MORE MINUTES, CHAMP, and you got ’im,” said John B. “Three more minutes and you got it won.”

Elijah turned on the stool to face his brother. His eyelids were so swollen they looked like pursed lips.

“Three minutes,” his brother repeated above the crowd’s ceaseless noise.

“That bullshit,” Elijah somehow managed to say through a grotesquely swollen jaw. “I gotta knock him out.”

John B. shook his head and squeezed another wet sponge over his brother. “Say, you better not talk so much, bro. You liable to hurt your jaw some more.”

It didn’t matter, P.F. thought as he came up the steps to the ring, using his security badge to get access. For the last five rounds, Elijah had taken a relentless pounding, interrupted only by the occasional low blow he’d dealt Terrence. Even if his jaw wasn’t actually broken, he’d been behind on points most of the night, and as he prepared to go out for the twelfth and final round, it was obvious he’d need months of reconstructive surgery.

He stood slowly, as if he was reconsidering how he’d spent the last forty-three years.

The crowd’s din, merely deafening before, approached a new unbearable pitch for the last stage of the slaughter.

“You can still quit,” John B. told his brother just before the bell.

Elijah didn’t bother looking back. He staggered forward and touched gloves with his opponent one last time.

Terrence began the round the way he’d ended the last one, trying to unhinge Elijah’s jaw from the rest of his face.

Only this time there was a difference. Elijah was talking to him, taunting him, challenging him.

At first, all P.F. could see was the jaw opening and closing slightly. But as the fighters moved nearer to his corner, he began to catch a few of the words.

“You ain’t nothin’,” Elijah somehow growled in a muddy, distorted voice.

Terrence, breathing heavily, with the first-round cut closed above his eye, reared back and hit Elijah with a jab that would’ve put the lights out in a pinball machine.

But Elijah merely bounced into the corner above P.F. and the others. “You ain’t hurt me yet,” P.F. heard him mutter.

Whomp. “Fuck you,” said Terrence, hitting him with the jab again.

Knowing ringside microphones would pick up anything they said, the fighters began to talk more and punch less.

“You a pussy, Terry,” said Elijah, miming the part of a punch-drunk fighter with wobbly knees, getting a laugh out of the crowd.

Terrence came back with a furious left hook. Elijah deflected it with both gloves.

By all rights, he should have been down four rounds ago, P.F. thought. It was only a thin membrane of humanity that kept him standing. And P.F. wished that in his own moments of weakness he’d had a fraction of Elijah’s fortitude.

“Shut up, old man,” Terrence said. His uppercut caught the tip of Elijah’s nose and seemed to drive the bone a little closer to the brain.

Elijah turned his head just enough for P.F. to see he was smiling through the blood. Maybe a demented reflex.

“Who you think you fighting?!!” he glowered at Terrence. “What’s my name?”

WHOMP. The jab tore into bone and nose cartilage again.

“Ah, that ain’t nothing. What’s my name?”

Whomp. A body shot drilled into Elijah’s right kidney.

“WHAT’S MY NAME?!”

Whomp! Terrence opened up and hit Elijah with the right cross again, but the old fighter countered with a left hook that drove the kid out into the middle of the ring. The crowd was on its feet.

“WHAT’S MY NAME, MOTHERFUCKER??!!”

By now they’d both abandoned any semblance of defense or strategy. They were standing head-to-head, trading blows, like beasts battling in a primordial swamp. Each shot went straight to the head, a brandished club finding its target each time. The crowd was caught up in the blood mania, its sound ricocheting off the walls and filling P.F.’s ears, like voices coming from inside his own head. Terrence clapped Elijah on the ear with a muffled right hand. Elijah punished him with a driving left under the chin. Terrence countered with a twisting right to the midsection. Elijah mashed the kid’s eye socket with a left and a halo of sweat exploded from the back of Terrence’s head.

“THAT’S WHO I AM! THAT’S WHO I AM!” Elijah kept saying every time he hit him. “THAT’S WHO I AM!!!”

And just when it seemed they’d finally exhausted themselves and couldn’t go any further, the bell rang.

Elijah immediately began to drop where he stood. Whatever spirit had been animating his body was now gone. His brother John rushed forward and caught him in his arms just before he hit the canvas. P.F. never had a chance to help him. Though he weighed less than his brother by some thirty pounds, John hoisted Elijah onto his shoulder and as tenderly as a mother holding a child he began to carry him back to his stool in the corner. As he turned, P.F. could see John crying uncontrollably as Elijah hung limply over him.

Above the cresting roar of the crowd, he could hear John’s voice saying, “I love you, my brother. I love you.”