The Fighter

Chapter 9

Fight night.

Tommy Tully bounded down the stairs into the kitchen, pushing off the bottom stair to glide awkwardly across the worn linoleum in his sock feet. Reuben and Rob sat at the kitchen table. The black valise lay open at Reuben’s elbow; he inspected rolls of gauze and white tape, strips of sponge and vials of adrenaline chloride. Rob sat with a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a cup of lemon tea.

Tommy stalked over to the Amana fridge and threw jabs at its white unmoving bulk. He hooked to the icebox, puffing through his nose, “Yip! Bing! Thwack!” shuffling his feet Muhammad Ali style, “Biff, Bing, Pow!” raising his arms, dancing, grinning. “You better check the warranty, ’cause the fridge is toast!”

“Stop clowning,” said Reuben.

Tommy grabbed a loaf of his beloved Wonder Bread off the counter and hefted it above his head like a trophy. “I dedicate this win to Gummy Sue and Stinky Mulligan and ol’ Armless Joe down at the VFW hall — we did it, guys!”

Rob found a wooden soup spoon and put it to his uncle’s mouth, assuming the folksy bearing of an interviewer. “Gee golly, Tom Tully, that was some fight. You and the Fridge exchanged heated pre-fight words — you remarked that the Fridge didn’t have the legs to make it through the late rounds. The prediction seems to have rung true.”

Tommy said, “First of all I’d like to thank God almighty, without whom no things are possible. The Fridge put up a hell of a fight. I respect the Fridge as a fighter. But this was Tom Tully’s night.” He hugged the loaf of bread to his chest. “If the Fridge wants a rematch, okay, fine, but it’ll have to get in line. The Stove’s my mandatory challenger, and the Toaster Oven’s been flapping its gums. Tom Tully don’t duck no appliance! None!”

Rob said, “Stern words from a stern man — Tom ‘Boom Boom’ Tully.”

Tommy and Rob dissolved into snorting giggles. Reuben wasn’t laughing.

“Pull yourself together,” he said.

Tommy patted his brother on the back. “Lighten up, killjoy.”

Reuben finished packing while Tommy fetched their coats and boots.

Tommy returned with their gear. “What’re we waiting for?”

“Waiting for you to wise up,” said Reuben. “But since there’s about as much chance of that as there is me sprouting fairy’s wings, guess there’s no use wasting our time.”

Tommy said, “That’s the spirit.”

“Meet at Macy’s after?” Rob said.

“If your uncle’s face doesn’t look like ten pounds of ground chuck.”

Rob wished his uncle good luck. He felt the lump lodged deep in his belly.

Tommy winked. “Another day in the salt mines.”

Two men drove the southbound QEW in a rattletrap Ford.

They crossed the Niagara overpass, high over freighters plying the Welland Canal.

The highway cut west, curling around a Christmas tree farm, on past wrecking yards and discount tire outlets.

Weeks had passed since the paintball incident. Nothing had come of it all, aside from an article in the St. Catharines Standard: crazed motorist runs amuck on canal footpath. (A quote from the recumbent bicyclist: “Thank heavens the maniac was driving a small foreign car and I was able to outrace it.”) He’d seen no headline titled musclebound idiot found dead in field and so assumed the Einstein was okay. He had moved out of his parents’ house the next day; his nights had been spent on the couch in Lou’s office.

Lou drove with both hands on the wheel, a prudent five miles below the speed limit on account of the icy roads and his driving license being suspended. Between them on the front seat: a black leather valise stocked with gauze and tape, adrenaline chloride, ferric acid.

“You’re off that shit, aren’t you?”

Paul nodded; he’d quit the ’roids cold turkey following his binge. And though he’d surrendered muscle mass, he was streamlined and agile and his skin had lost its yellowish tinge.

“Let me tell you something about muscles,” Lou told him. “They look good and I guess they’ll frighten off a lot of guys; nine out of ten — ninety-nine out of a hundred — take one look at a pair of sporty arm-cannons and walk the other way. But muscles aren’t skill or heart. So your problem is when you run across the one guy in a hundred who recognizes that — and that guy is going to hurt you a hell of a lot worse than those other ninety-nine would’ve. Hurt you half for spite.”

They drove along the river. The spiraling coils of a hydroelectric plant reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Farther on, a rutted dirt path rounded into a sprawling farmstead. Cars were parked along a barbed-wire fence.

At the barn door they were met by Manning in his long duster coat. He dragged on a corn-husk cigarette and said, “Who we got here?”

Lou hooked a thumb at Paul. “From the club. Tough kid. The guts of a burglar.”

Manning sized Paul up. His eyes were obscured by a haze of smoke spindling the cigarette. “On you go, then.”

The barn was packed. A highway work crew in bib pants and reflective vests; high rollers with narrow silk ties and suits of exotic cut; tattooed, bandanna-wearing members of the local Hells Angels chapter — one sported a tattoo that read i’d rather see my sister in a whorehouse than see my brother on a jap bike. The dark, dumb eyes of cattle peered through knotholes in the barn walls.

Fighters stood on the peripheries, clustered in pockets of shadow beyond the lit ring.

“Wait here,” Lou said.

Paul sat on a hay bale. A fighter sat on the floor beside him. Not too tall or short, thin or fat, lean or muscular. He wore a deerstalker tugged low over his lumpen features and a pair of boxy black-rimmed glasses. He sat there, rocking.

Paul had heard that schizophrenics gave off a stink that often got so intense doctors claimed to see colors — scarlet, aquamarine, magenta — wafting off their patients. An imbalance in their bodily makeup, the enzymes being out of kilter or otherwise fucked. This guy stunk like rotting peaches.

“Fight like a dog,” Paul heard him say.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the best mindset to put yourself in.” In the stark white of the barn lights, the guy’s sockets looked like they were packed with dry ice.

“You’re a dog. A dog isn’t frightened by pain. A dog is frightened by thunder and fireworks and the vacuum cleaner, all the things its tiny brain can’t quite comprehend. But a dog — and I’m talking a real dog, here — is not the least bit frightened of pain. So: fight like a dog.”

Paul considered this man closely. He looked as though, in some former life, he might have been a doctor or a professor. Paul felt like he’d seen him before, somewhere.

“Makes my dick hard.” The fighter gestured to his jeans, the rigid outline of his cock swelling the denim halfway down his thigh. “It’s the anticipation.”

Paul had no response to this — he was fairly certain the guy wasn’t looking for one.

And he was utterly certain he’d rather not fight the bastard.

Lou returned. “You’re on as an alternate. But we should get your hands wrapped in case it turns out you’re called in.”

Reuben looped bandages over and around, pressing gently the oft-broken bones of his brother’s huge hands. Tape next, over and around, a thick encasing layer. How many times had they done this together, in preparation for training, sparring, title fights? A few thousand, surely. The act held an underlying ease, a familiarity: their heads bent and almost touching, they resembled lovers sharing some sweet intimacy.

Reuben scanned the barn. The dark peripheries hosted seventy or eighty spectators.

Fritzie Zivic stood beside a withered ancient in a wheelchair; Murdoch was chewing the codger’s slippers off his senseless feet. Reuben nudged his brother.

“Look who’s here.”

Tommy followed his gaze and saw Garth Briscoe sitting beside a young guy. Garth was wearing a pair of boxy glasses and looked repulsive; he rocked back and forth like someone suffering a neural disorder — as could be the case.

“Huh,” said Reuben. “Least he’s alive.”

“Take a break, Ruby. You don’t have to be a prick every day of your life.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” he admitted. “I always liked Garth; everyone liked him, till he went off the rails. But what does it say that you and him are in the same place?”

“Ruby…”

“All right, forget it, I’m laying off. You ready?”

Tommy punched himself under the jaw. “Time to make the donuts.”

Manning singled out Tom and Paul for the evening’s fourth bout. He recalled the rough time Tommy had had with the Kilbride kid and thought he’d throw the old warhorse a bone.

“Well?”

Lou asked Paul. “What do you figure?”

“God, that’s one big slab of humanity.”

Lou acknowledged this was so, but said, “Often the worst you ever absorb is one good punch: the one that knocks you cold. Most guys find it hard to keep hitting a man who’s gone unconscious — the skin goes slack, no tension to it, like punching a gutted fish. I’ve found there is an innately human resistance to such violence.”

The glasses-wearing schizo overheard Lou and said, “That guy’s a pro, too — he won’t hit you any more than he needs to.”

“Listen to Garth here,” Lou said. “He’s been around.”

The schizo gave Lou a smile so grateful it was sickening. Only then did Paul realize where he’d seen him before: that first day at Lou’s gym, the beaten fighter who’d shambled in to take a few licks at the heavy-bag before Lou stopped him. Ease down, Garth, he remembered Lou saying. You did good last night. Real good.

“So,” Lou asked, “are we on?”

Not long ago, the prospect of fighting a man like Tommy would have made his bowels quiver. Tommy was huge and scarred and looked exactly what he was: a tough veteran fighter in the Thunderbird Layne mold. But when Paul searched the place in his heart where stark fear once held court, he found the court was empty.

“I want to fight him,” he told Lou. “I do.”

They met in a circle of stacked bales. No headgear, no mouthshields or gloves. Paul felt his heart as a discrete presence in his chest.

Tommy considered the guy: young, not a whole lot older than Robbie. But a lot of his youth had been sucked out. He looked like the lone survivor of a nuclear Armageddon: missing teeth and acne scars and worst of all the haunted look Tommy had seen in far too many fighters.

A true fighter’s handshake was always soft. Perhaps this was because their hands were tender after months of punching bags and mitts and opponents. Or perhaps, after doing so much damage in the ring, they possessed not the slightest desire to do any damage outside of it — even so much as may be delivered through a stern handshake.

Paul and Tommy shook hands very, very softly.

“I’m sorry for what comes next,” Paul said.

“What do you got to be sorry for?” Tommy chucked Paul on the shoulder. His smile was somehow ashamed. “I’ll take it easy on you.”

“Please don’t.”

The first punch struck Paul in the shoulder. There was no oomph to it: were it possible to throw a well-intentioned punch, Tommy had done so.

But it was enough to unbalance him and he stumbled back, then rocked forward into Tommy’s chest. Tommy leaned on Paul, a forearm on the back of Paul’s neck forcing his head down and making it tough to draw breath. Paul was staring at his own belly button while the huge fucker hammered at his ribs — not too hard, just enough so he’d feel it. He felt his ribs shrink around his lungs, the staccato thump of his heart, the sensation of being closer to his body than he’d ever known.

Tommy’s forearm slipped off Paul’s neck. Paul reared up and lanced a right hand at his head; Tommy angled away and the blow hit the side of his throat, his own right hand rising between Paul’s arms to catch him under the chin. Pain blossomed inside Paul’s skull, not a flower but gardens of the stuff, a pain like searing-hot rivets sprinkled on his scalp.

Tommy was stunned when the guy didn’t go down. That Kilbride kid would have broken to pieces but this guy just smiled, blood climbing the cracks between his teeth.

He’s infected, Tommy thought, same way poor Garth Briscoe is infected.

Paul swung and missed, then Tommy hit him with an anvil fist. Tears flooded Paul’s eyes as a sharp note of pain danced across his face and hit the center of his brain. He was hit again, harder than he’d ever been hit before: nose compacting, capillaries bursting. The world went red and Paul fell through that redness as though in a dream. The floor rushed up to meet him. He watched a dark spot of his own blood shape itself into a fan, then a butterfly, glistening and soaking into the ripples and knots of the floorboards.

The bell rang.

Paul staggered to his corner like a man on a three-day drinking binge. He was grinning.

Lou helped him onto the stool. Paul’s face was like something Goya might’ve signed his name to: Neanderthal-like swelling above his brows and one tooth jarred from his gums, suspended on a strip of skin.

“Hold on.” Lou reached into Paul’s mouth and, with a vicious twist, yanked the tooth out. “Swallow more than a pint and you’ll be sick,” he said as blood gushed into Paul’s mouth. “What the hell — not like you’re liable to grow another set, right?”

He used ferric sulfate to cauterize the bloody hole in Paul’s mouth. Paul swallowed convulsively, the acid scorching his esophagus.

“I’m trying to go easy. But he’s a glutton.”

Reuben soaked Tommy’s head with a wet sponge. “What did you expect? Last time you fought a feeb, now you’re up against a punch Pug”

“Masochist,” Tommy corrected.

“Keep leaning on him. You don’t owe any a these jerks a show.”

“What if he won’t go down?”

“Then you have to make him go down.”

“I might really hurt him.”

“Christ, Tom — how else do you picture this ending?”

It ended thirty-three seconds into the second round. And it ended like this:

Two men warred in a starkly lit ring, the whistle of their fists a death song. Paul experienced a wholly perverse joy in the feel of another man’s hands upon his body — even in violence. Tommy found the soft spot under Paul’s heart with a tricky uppercut; Paul gasped as if a crowbar had been spiked through his chest.

Tommy saw the opening: the kid let his guard fall each time he threw a right hand.

Make it quick, Tommy thought. Make his world go black.

Tommy planted his feet and sat down on a right uppercut that rose from his waist like a Stinger missile shot from a hayfield silo.

The punch missed by an eighth of an inch.

Consider that distance for a moment.

Your own index finger, say. At the base of your nail, where the nail plate meets the nail bed — where nail meets flesh — that whitish half-moon. It’s called the lunula, after the Latin luna meaning moon. The lunula should be no more than an eighth of an inch thick at its broadest point; a little thicker if your nail has been manicured, the cuticle pushed down.

Tommy’s punch missed by a lunula. By a ladybug’s wing. An eighth of an inch. But more crucially it missed by a lifetime, or several. It missed by Tommy’s forty-three years and Reuben’s forty-five, by Paul’s twenty-six and Rob’s sixteen. It missed by all the possibilities that existed in the split-second before it missed and by all that might conceivably have been afterward.

When Tommy’s fist sailed past his chin, Paul stepped away and struck back instinctively. Tommy’s jaw was clenched: the maxillary artery running from tip of skull to base of throat was crimped, blood collecting at his temples.

It was a lucky punch, the sort you’ll see if you watch enough fights. Paul was in the right spot, Tommy the wrong one. The angles worked in Paul’s favor and against Tommy. Everyone in that place knew who was the better fighter; not a single bet had been placed on Paul to win.

A lucky punch, is all. It happens.

Paul felt as though a very small, very ripe grape had burst under his knuckles.

Put it another way:

They say every substance that appears solid is, at its most basic level, not solid at all. Everything is composed of atoms, a nucleus orbited by protons and electrons. Massive distances separate protons and electrons from their nucleus: imagine the moon circling the Earth, or the Earth orbiting the sun, and you get the idea. They say if you remove all those empty spaces and squeeze everything together, the Empire State Building would fit into a teaspoon — a spoonful of pure matter weighing roughly 19,800 tons.

Paul’s punch hit Tommy like the Empire State Building dropped from a teaspoon.

The instant the punch landed, as Tommy’s eyes rolled involuntarily back in his head, Paul wanted to take it all back, as if the punch were an angry word he could revoke. Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean that. They were fighting, yes, trying to knock each other out or force surrender, but the sound of Tommy’s skull hitting the boards — a horrid fracturing noise like a squashed snail — broke whatever spell he’d been under and now Paul could only watch as Tommy tried to stand up but failed miserably, blood coming out his nose as he stared around with a queer disoriented smile. And when Tommy fell, reaching for Paul because he was the only thing to reach for, Paul was there to catch him. He cradled Tommy’s thick stalk of neck, his dense lifeless weight like a sweating sack of cement. Tommy’s head lolled, eyes wide open, tongue jutting past the flat black gumshield.

Seconds later Reuben shoved Paul out of the way and knelt beside his brother. He mopped blood with a towel but there was so goddamn much of it and it wouldn’t stop coming. The sweat on Tommy’s arms was ice-cold and his head looked all wrong; Reuben was sick to his stomach wondering if everything inside was busted and if it was only the unbroken skin holding the works together.

“Call an ambulance!”

“That’s not how it works,” Manning told Reuben. “You take care of your own.”

“Take care of him how?”

“Any way you can.” Manning crossed his arms. “Anywhere but here.”

Seven minutes later Reuben and Tommy were in the backseat of Fritzie Zivic’s Cadillac El Dorado. Zivic’s foot was tromped on the gas pedal and cold night air whistled through seams in the frame. Tommy’s head was wrapped in towels; Reuben had cut holes over the nose and mouth so he could breathe. As the miles clicked off, the towels became redder and redder until Reuben’s lap was soaked.

Six minutes later Tommy was strapped to a gurney wheeled through the Emerg doors at Mount St. Mary’s Catholic hospital. The admitting nurse was Helen Jack — bespectacled Frankie Jack’s youngest daughter. She told Reuben to calm down and tell her what happened.

“Tommy… he fell down a flight of stairs.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Reuben.”

Twenty minutes later, after an X-ray revealed the base of Tommy’s skull to be severely shattered — the medical term an eggshell fracture — the beeper of a Buffalo-area neurosurgeon went off. Tommy received a blood transfusion. The towels were cut from around his head with surgical shears. His eyes stayed open the whole time.

Heart rate: forty beats per minute. Tommy’s HMO coverage was inadequate but Helen Jack was able to hustle the paperwork through.

Thirty-seven minutes later a bonesaw cut a window into Tommy’s forehead. The portion of skull covering his frontal lobe was removed to allow his brain room to swell.

His gray matter turned a creamy shade of pink from oxygen exposure. Tommy’s face remained serene; a vague smile touched his lips. EEG readouts indicated brain function next to nil. Cerebral blood flow a trickle. Neurological activity proportional to a Stage 3 coma victim.

Rob was in his bedroom when the telephone rang. Racing downstairs to the kitchen, he caught it on the fourth ring.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not calling from Macy’s, Rob.”

His father had never called him Rob before. Not once in his life.

A gypsy cab dropped Rob off at St. Mary’s Emerg entrance. Reuben stood shivering under a cone of blue light near the doors.

“What happened?” Rob’s dread was such that he could hardly breathe.

“Tommy—?”

“He’s alive.” The past hours had shrunk Reuben, cored and hollowed him; Rob was afraid to touch his father for fear he’d crumble to dust.

In the Emergency room they sat on orange plastic chairs bolted to the wall. Reuben explained. Rob couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. In his mind’s eye he still saw his uncle as he’d been earlier that evening: shadowboxing the fridge, dancing on the tips of his toes with a loaf of Wonder Bread clasped to his chest. Rob could not conceive of Tommy as he was at this moment: in an operating theater five stories above, strapped to a steel table with a precision window carved in his skull.

“Who?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Reuben said. “Some guy. A kid. Never even seen him before.”

“What do we do?”

“Nothing else to be done. We wait and see.”

The hospital surged: nurses hustled down the halls in response to code greens and yellows and blues; orderlies ran cases of blood mixture to the dialysis ward; a janitor guided a doodlebug over the floor. Few paid any mind to the man and boy sitting on the bolted orange chairs. Their tragedy, whatever it might be, was unexceptional.