The Fighter

Chapter 11

Robert Tully dreamed he was in Sharky’s on Pine Street. The bar was dirty and dark and narrow, jammed between an off-license bettor’s and the Pine Street theater, where a roll of dimes bought you a half-hour in the peepshow booths.

The bartender finished polishing a glass and faced Rob and Rob was surprised because the bartender was him, Robert Tully, only twenty years older.

“Heeeey,” Old Rob said, recognizing his younger self. “Look at you, Champ.”

Old Rob was fat in the way a lot of ex-athletes were fat: grossly and awkwardly so, as if after the years of training their bodies ballooned up out of sheer confusion.

He set a glass of soapy draft before his younger self.

“God, it’s good to see you. Me.” He smiled. “Us.”

“I can’t drink this,” Rob said.

Old Rob dumped it down the well. “Not old enough, are you? And still training.

Stupid, stupid me.”

Rob thought something was the matter with his older self: the shambling gait, the slurred speech like a man kicked awake in the middle of the night. And somehow childlike: it was as though his ten-year-old self was trapped in the body of his forty-year-old self.

Old Rob said, “Will you look at our hands.”

Their hands were the same size; evidently, Rob did not have another growth spurt in him. Old Rob ran his finger over a scar running the length of his own left index finger.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said excitedly, “remember where we got this? South Korea; they flew us over to fight the Asian champ. The water gave us the trots so Dad filled the water bottles with chrysanthemum juice. God, that taste — flowers. We knocked the champ out but split our finger to the bone. Remember that?”

Old Rob saw his younger version’s left index finger was as yet unscarred.

“Oops. Let the cat out of the bag, didn’t I? Stupid, stupid me.”

“Please, stop saying that.”

A pained expression came over Old Rob’s face. “I’m sorry — I mean, I’ll stop.” He reached out to touch Rob, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to. “You look so good. Strong, you know? And all that hair.”

“You look good, too.”

“You’re not just saying it?” Old Rob was pleased. “I like to keep myself in the mix.”

“You’re still fighting?”

“Not professionally.” He touched the side of his right eye. “Detached retina. First time my sight came back; second time, too. Third time…” He shrugged. “My license got revoked, but I found other places.”

“I don’t want to know about them,” Rob said.

Old Rob wiped away the ring of condensation left by the glass. He was so goddamn servile. “No saying you have to,” he said. “Maybe this life, my life, isn’t yours.”

“I hope not.”

His older self got that pained look again; he wrung the rag out and folded it into a neat square. “The fight’s a tough thing to leave behind.” His shrug indicated that this was not an excuse, this was the plain fact of it.

“They say every fighter dies twice: once when he takes his last breath, the other when he hangs up the leathers. And that first death — that’s the bitch.”

“But,” Rob said, “I don’t like fighting.”

“You get to like it.” Old Rob smiled in a confused way. “Smart too late and old too soon, huh? Everything passes so quickly.”

The telephone woke him up. Probably his father, calling from Top Rank wondering why he was late for training. But Rob hadn’t really trained for weeks. Not since Tommy.

He threw on sweats, grabbed his jacket, and set off down the street. A machine-gun wind hammered his body. He did not know where he was headed: an aimless trajectory through deadeningly familiar streets, no terminus or friendly port of call. All he saw were the hard, unflinching angles of a city he now wandered as a stranger. A sense of unremitting hopelessness descended upon him. The realization that other families suffered tragedies on such a scale as to reduce the sufferings of his own to a pitiful dot did nothing to allay his sense that a cosmic injustice had been perpetrated. His family asked for so little: a little house, a little money, a little respect, a little, ordinary life huddled together as an odd but workable unit.

Others had so much. Their wants were modest. Was it too much to ask?

He wound up at Kate’s house. Seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, the neighborhood still asleep. He packed a snowball and hurled it at the transformer box bolted to a power pole.

“Tully?”

Kate’s head occurred in a second-floor window. “Jeez, Rob…”

“Did I wake you?”

“I was awake,” she lied. “Everything all right?”

“Copacetic.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

She came out wearing her powder-blue shell and unlaced boots. Crumbs of sleep in the corners of her eyes; a tuft of hair sticking straight out like a unicorn horn. “Fine morning for a walk.”

They moved together down Niagara Street. A fire burned somewhere to the north: columns of blue-gray smoke rose over the flat shop roofs. Kate hummed a tune under her breath — high, peppy notes — and kicked pebbles from her path.

“How’s your pops doing?”

“Tommy’s coverage isn’t great, so Dad’s battling the insurance company. But it’s not like they can pull the plug, can they?”

“No,” said Kate. “That would be unethical, or something.”

They passed Loughran’s Park. Rob and Kate used to come here with Tommy when they were kids. Tommy would sit on the benches with the housewives while Rob and Kate played. He became a park fixture, an ox of a man with his smiling crumpled face. The housewives tried to teach him to knit, but his hands were huge and scarred and he never did get the hang of it.

“I met him,” Rob said.

“Who’s that?”

“At the hospital. I caught him visiting Tommy.”

“Why was he there?”

“Felt guilty, I would say.”

“Well, sure. Two guys in a ring, neither expects it to turn out that way.” Kate puffed air into her cupped palms. “Big guy?”

Rob was too embarrassed on Tommy’s behalf to give a truthful description: the raggedness, the toothlessness. “Big guy,” he said.

“Very rough-looking.”

“Tommy never should’ve been there,” Kate said. “Or your dad. It was a stupid thing to be mixed up in.”

“Boxing’s all Tommy’s ever known. It’s what my family’s always done.”

They crossed a baseball diamond. Rob stepped in old boot tracks pressed into the cold mud, idly wondering if he knew the person who made them.

“My father,” Kate said, “was a big asshole. That’s how Mom refers to him — The Big Asshole. Steps out for cigarettes one day when I’m three days old and never comes back. Talk about your abandonment clichés. He was a selfish man — but in a way it took guts to do what he did. Leave it all and never look back. Step out into the world with nothing. Of course, it was cowardly, too — walking away from his wife and kid, leaving us in the lurch. I don’t know… cowardly and gutsy at once, if that makes any sense.”

Rob gave a long sigh and looked away from her.

“You don’t even like boxing,” she went on. “Not like that’s any secret.

Your greatest problem stems from your not going after what you really want in life.”

“And so what?” Rob felt himself getting tight inside; iron bands clapped around his skull and rocks started growing in his chest. “Who loves their job — who has that luxury? You think my dad likes hauling his ass out of bed at two a.m. to bake bread, or your mom loves clipping the stems off marigolds, or Tommy loved driving a forklift? No, they do it because it’s their duty and you don’t shirk that. Everyone has obligations; why should I be above that?”

“Yeah, but whose obligations?” She stopped and looked at him. “For a tough guy, you sure let yourself get shoved around a lot.”

The whole point wasn’t worth arguing, especially with Kate, who had honed her skills on the school debate squad. Still, he couldn’t quite let go. “At some point you need to start being sensible about things. Take an adult frame of mind. Stop writing poetry and hunting up and down a beach with a metal detector.”

“At least Darren has dreams and they’re his own. His mom’s a toll-taker but he feels no need to be one himself.”

“Let’s drop it—”

“You want out of here as bad as he does.”

“Maybe so,” Rob said. “But how can you escape without a plan that makes any sense? Boxing makes sense. I can make it work.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s not your own plan.”

Rob lacked the energy to go on with this, and besides, he knew she was right.

“You’ll make a great boxer,” she told him, “whether you want to be or not. We all know that.” She paused, then added, “But it takes guts to step away from the safety of the world you grew up in. I’m not saying the life you leave has to be a bad one — maybe it’s just not right for you, personally. Any other way and it’s not really your life, is it? Just the one someone else thinks you ought to be living.”

They rounded back to Kate’s house. They talked about trivial subjects: a spring-break road trip to Daytona Beach, the prom’s lame “Under the Sea” theme.

“Mom and I are stopping by the hospital this afternoon,” said Kate. “Mom’s baking those sugar cookies Tommy loves. She thinks the smell…” She shook her head. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

Rob set off down 16th toward the Fritz.

He thought about what Kate said — about how being good at something shouldn’t dictate the course of your life. He didn’t love boxing, but he had talent and aptitude. His fists were a ticket out of this place, the tenement houses and blood banks and boarded shopfronts, no more of this scraping by, plenty of cash for fancy cars, eye-popping mansions, fine wines. He could save his father and Tommy from all this — it was within his power.

Or was it? Maybe it was each man’s duty to save himself.

Fritzie Zivic answered Rob’s knock in slippers and a housecoat. Murdoch squatted at Fritzie’s heel, his old eyes focused on Rob.

“Young master Tully.” Fritzie smiled sadly, scratched his backside through the housecoat’s frayed material. “How you holding up?”

“Fine, Mr. Zivic. I need to talk.”

“Tommy’s debts? I cleared the books. Your uncle’s such an awful player it makes me sick to think about collecting.”

“Thanks.”

Rob was touched by this unexpected kindness from a man not known to dispense favors. “But that’s not it.”

“It’s not, huh? Well, you’d better come in.”

He led Rob down the front hall into the kitchen. Murdoch trotted behind, taking sly nips at Rob’s boots until Fritzie hollered at the splenetic old beast.

He set a beaten coffee pot on the burner and sat in the chair opposite Rob.

Rubbing his unshaven, blocklike chin, he yawned and asked what was on Rob’s mind.

“You go to those fights. You were there for Tommy.”

“Well, I do, I do.” Fritzie’s head nodded slowly, his hard features etched with some embarrassment. “And yeah, I was there when Tommy… drove him to the hospital, didn’t I?”

“Take me next time.”

“And why’s that?”

“Does it matter?”

“If you looking for my help, yeah, it does.”

Rob laid out his reasoning without meeting Fritzie’s eyes. Once he’d finished, Fritzie spoke.

“Revenge, uh? Men have fought for less.” The old Croat became pensive. “Let me tell you a story. Years ago, before you were born, this guy went around leaving refrigerators in parks and playgrounds. Your dad ever tell you about this?”

When Rob shook his head, Fritzie went on. “This guy would pick up fridges at the dump — the old kind, right, with the locking latches. He filed the safety catches down and left them where kids played. At night he’d leave them; the next morning, bright and early, there they were. Like an invitation.”

Murdoch made a couple of circles underneath the table, snuffled morosely, and plopped down at Fritzie’s feet.

“Now the good thing was, nobody was killed. Some kids hopped inside and mucked around but none of them ever shut the lid. But this whole town was terrified — meetings at city hall, a park patrol, and every old fridge at the dump filled with cement. They never caught the guy. But there are people out there like that; the type you don’t quite believe exist until you see proof of it — like an open refrigerator next to a swing set.

“The point I’m driving at is this: every time I go to that place where your uncle got hurt, I think of those fridges. A lot of the guys don’t look like anything — desperate bums and drifters, most take their beating and off they go.

But you can never tell the scorpion from the frog; you never know which one’s gonna sting. I think of those fridges because some a those guys are like that — they look harmless enough so you climb inside and muck around and it’s not long before you’re locked inside and down to your last breath.”

Fritzie poured himself a cup of coffee. He sipped, his eyes holding Rob’s over the rim of the mug, then said, “Now the question you need to be asking yourself, Robbie, is: do you think Tommy would want you doing that?”

“You’re saying you won’t take me?”

After a pause: “You’re how old?”

Rob lied. “Eighteen.”

“Old enough to make your own choices. Not my place to stop you. What I’m asking is, do you feel it’s worth it?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Rob said, honestly. “But I can’t see my way clear of it any other way. What do I want — retribution? Is that what Tommy would want? I don’t know. But nothing else seems to answer anything.”

Fritzie sat down and knitted his hands together on the tabletop. “Robbie, let me ask you one thing. Is this going to be enough for you?”

“I don’t catch your meaning.”

Murdoch pawed his master’s leg; Fritzie lifted the dog up and balanced him across his knees. Murdoch glared across the table at Rob, who had not received a more malevolent stare from man or beast.

“Look at your uncle or the pugs at the club — hell, look across the table: all of us single, no kids, no money, nothing to hold on to.”

“My dad—”

“Your dad’s no fighter. Your dad is…” Fritzie bit his lip. “… something else. Boxing’s a dream, Robbie, and a sweet one. But the dream takes everything; you got to feed every ounce of your life into it. Like a heat shimmer on a stretch of summer tarmac — you can chase that damn thing forever without ever catching it. And one day you wake up and see you’ve fed that dream everything and it’s no closer than it was years ago.”

Fritzie kneaded the ruff of Murdoch’s neck. “Your uncle and I did pretty good for a couple of neighborhood guys. Tommy fought at Madison Square Garden; I ate a fifty-dollar steak at the same table as John Gotti after a fight. But what’s any of it amount to — an hour, a week, a month where you’re king shit? Nah. The best thing about fighting is getting into that ring and you look the other guy in the eye and say, For the next ten rounds let’s bring something out in each other — something we didn’t even know we had. Show me what I don’t know about myself. That’s the juice of boxing.” He kissed the top of Murdoch’s head. The beast growled. “And if that’s not what thrills you, you shouldn’t be boxing. Not worth the risk — and I don’t just mean getting hurt. Look at me. I got this vicious old mutt and when he goes I’m going to fall to pieces. I got nothing else.”

Rob could think of nothing to say but, “He looks fairly healthy.”

Fritzie smiled gratefully. “You think? Anyway, what I’m asking is, will you be able to walk out of that place when it’s over and be kaput?”

“I hope so.”

Fritzie nodded. “Fights go next Thursday night. You’re here, I’ll take you.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Zivic.”

“Don’t take it the wrong way when I say I hope to see not hide nor hair of you come next Thursday.”

Suppertime at Mount St. Mary’s hospital. Orderlies hastened down the halls with trays of Salisbury steak and lime Jell-O, or IV pouches of nutrient-rich Meal in a Bag.

Reuben Tully sat beside his brother’s bed reading a sheet of paper. Withered balloons and wilted flowers. The room smelled too sweet.

He glanced up. “Where the hell were you this morning?”

Rob said, “I wasn’t feeling up to it.”

“I don’t give a shit if you felt up to it or not. You be there. We need to maintain the basic routines, o’kay?”

“What that you’re reading?”

“Fucking insurance companies,” said Reuben. “Jackals. Blood suckers. They’re claiming since Tommy never made a living will…” A brief glance over at his brother.“…stupid, stupid…” And back to Rob.“…they say his care is technically governed by the state. It means that once Tommy’s been declared — oh, Jesus, what was it?” He skimmed the letter. “Right — a persistent vegetative state. If that happens Tommy becomes a ward of the state, which means he goes on the organ donor list, first come first served. Whatever’s left is donated to science.”

Reuben tore the paper up. “No way is some government ghoul harvesting my kid brother’s guts. No way is some medical school prick hacking up his head. I’ll die first.”

Tommy lay still. The EKG machine beeped fitfully; every so often the green line trembled, indication that a semblance of Tom Tully yet existed. His arms were pocked with needles — needles to feed and medicate and drain him.

Rob said, “Why did you let him?”

“Why’d I let who do what?”

“Why didn’t you stop him? Tell him how stupid it was, or refuse to go along with it?”

Reuben looked as if he’d been stabbed in the heart. “You think I didn’t say that — Christ, Robbie, you’ve been there, you’ve heard me say that. A thousand times I told him how stupid it was. I told him right up to the day it happened.”

“But you were never forceful about it. You talked; that was all.”

“Listen: this wasn’t my choice. If I’d had my way, Tommy would’ve been finished years ago. All I could do was be there to see he didn’t get hurt.”

“But he got hurt.”

“And you blame me.” Reuben nodded, taking it in. “Maybe that’s fair — I blame myself. But then each man acts according to his own wishes. My brother, not my slave.”

Reuben dipped his fingers in a cup of water and wet Tommy’s cracked lips. “Your uncle never learned how to throw a punch right. Purely an arm puncher; no hips.

Couldn’t dance for the same reason. But he took his body and his talent as far as they could go. A lot of it was for me. I was his trainer and he knew that if he ever hit it big I’d be right there beside him.”

“And isn’t it a trainer’s job,” Rob said, “to protect his fighter?”

Reuben ignored him. “We used to talk about what we’d do if Tommy were the heavyweight champ. I think we both knew it was a pipe dream, but where’s the harm? We’d go out for a big Italian supper and put every other nickel in the bank. “And we didn’t have the sort of relationship where… we knew each other too well — you take things for granted. He was always there so he’s always gonna be there. What were the last words I said to him? Something practical, I’m sure: keep your chin down, plant your feet. Christ. Should’ve been, Fuck all this, we’re out of here. I should’ve been the older brother. The protector.”

Reuben’s fingers dipped and wiped. Rob became aware of a very strange sensation looking at his father’s hand: the paleness of it, bleached from enriched flour. A baker’s hand. A breadmaker’s hand. A hand nothing like his own.

“He’s coming through this, Robbie. You still believe that, don’t you?”

Watching his father and uncle together under that harsh hospital light, Rob felt himself pulling away. A dark hole opened and a massive force pulled him down a vast corridor at such velocity he thought his skin might get sucked off, huge pressure tugging at his arms and legs as his father and uncle dwindled, all sense of intimacy gone and Rob not fighting it at all.

His hands were clamped tight on the chair’s armrests — not in fear, but rage. Rage at these two men, mere specks now, who’d been charged with his upbringing; rage that all they’d ever told him was that fighting was the only way to find a little space for yourself in the world. His whole life funneled, focused, preordained. How else to settle matters except through violence? It was all he’d been taught. His anger swelled, magnified beyond any point of reference or comprehension: a billowing mushroom cloud, a towering inferno, a brilliant supernova.