Known to Evil

39

In the taxi ride downtown I drifted into a reverie about my parents: Tolstoy, the self-styled union organizer and radical Communist revolutionary, and Lena, the pious Harlemite who loved her man as much as any jazz lyricist could imagine. He went off to join a Cuban brigade down in South America soon after my twelfth birthday, leaving me fatherless, and virtually motherless, because Lena took to her bed and died soon after. She was the only proof I ever needed that a person could die from a broken heart.

That began my long and uneasy relationship with the various branches of New York City government-including the NYPD. I was continually running away from foster homes, getting into fights, and doing odd jobs for petty criminals. I was in and out of youth facilities. The foster parents I had weren't bad people. Many of them, I think, truly cared about me. But my father had trained me and my younger brother, Nikita, as revolutionaries from the time we could toddle. I hated Tolstoy, but at the same time he was my hero, and so there was little I had in common with the petit bourgeois churchgoers who tried to set me on the right path.

Then one day I stumbled into Gordo's Gym. He was only in his early forties then but he already looked old, craggy. He strapped some gloves on me and put me in the ring with an older, more experienced boy. I lost the round but never stopped coming forward, and so Gordo trained me, for seven years.

Maybe if I had paid closer attention to Gordo, if I would have let his hand guide me, I wouldn't have taken my homegrown revolutionary training and turned it into piecework for the mob. But I couldn't stay on boxing's bicycle-because there was no road, or even a path, that led to my destination.

THEY HAD HIM IN a southwest corner room with three other men on the eighth floor of St. Vincent's Hospital. He looked even smaller than usual in the big mechanical bed. His eyes were closed when I pulled up the chair.

Gordo's brown skin was tinged red from decades of blood rising to the surface as he exhorted his boys to give more. He was the color of rage, the man in your corner, win or lose.

"Leonid," he whispered.

He sat up a bit by shifting his knobby shoulders one way and then the other.

"Why you look so glum, boy?" he said. "I'm the one down for the count here."

I laughed, feeling a pang of guilt that my sick friend was comforting me.

"What they got you in here for, man?"

"First it was pre-ulcers, then it was plain ulcers, that went into bleedin' ulcers, and now they say I got cancer. An' I believe it, too, 'cause it hurt like a mothahfuckah."

"Stomach cancer?"

"A hole in one, boy. You could go up against Tiger Woods, with the right caddy."

"They gonna operate?"

"Not at first. They wanna nuke it an' then poison it and then if me an' it is still alive they might get the cut man."

"That's a bitch," I said.

"Body shot like you wouldn't believe." Gordo's wry smile turned sour.

"What do you need?"

"What's that lawyer's name you got?"

"Breland Lewis."

"I want you to get him to fill out some papers for me."

"Like what?"

"Augustine."

"Your nephew?"

"He's a good man but he don't have the sense of a termite. I wanna leave him the gym, it's all I got, but you know he'd mess it up in a week. Rack up some kinda fool debt, or maybe just sell the whole buildin' an' blow the money on his good-for-nuthin' kids or that money-hungry fourth wife'a his."

"You own the building?"

"What other landlord than me gonna let a sweaty ole gym don't make a nickel a day stay up there?"

I was astonished. It was a dilapidated old building but it was in the West Thirties, not three blocks from Penn Station. It had to be worth millions upon millions, even in the current real estate slump.

"So what do you want from Breland?" I asked.

"I want him to work out some kinda scheme to leave the place to you and then for you to take care of Augustine. You know, you get a li'l bit and then pass the rest off to him in parcels."

"Why you gonna trust me, G? You know my track record is not a good one."

"Shit. You think I don't know it? Man, if I could find somebody better they'd be sittin' here right now. But you know, boy, even though you about as crooked as one'a them curly bamboo plants, I figure even they grow toward the sun."

I laughed instead of tearing up and we changed the subject to De La Hoya and Pacquiao.

"Oscar should hang up them damn gloves," Gordo said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because there comes a time when you just don't win anymore."

"But there's always a chance at a comeback," I said with emphasis.

Gordo considered my words for a few moments and then said, "True that."

"THEY'RE GOING TO GIVE him radiation and then chemotherapy," the head nurse at the front station told me. "He's going to be very weak and will probably have to be sent to a nursing home."

"No," I said.

"No?"

"Gordo's my stepfather. When you release him, me and my wife will take him in."

The woman, her name was Naomi Watkins, gave me the papers I needed to have signed and ratified. I gave her my card and got my name put at the top of his list of relatives.

WHEN I GOT HOME I told Katrina about my decision. Maybe I should have asked her before making plans. Maybe I would have asked her if she hadn't run off with that banker for nearly a year.

"That's as it should be," she said, surprising me with her calm. "But we may have to get a nurse to be here for those hours that we're both out."

Before going off to bed, Katrina added, "Dimitri called."

"What'd he say?"

"That he's in love and off with his girl and that they're in Montreal. I wanted to be mad at him, but I was just so happy to hear his voice."

"Did he say when he was coming home?"

"A few days."

"You see?" I said. "I told you that everything was going to be fine."

At least one of us should believe in happy endings.