The Fighter

Chapter 3

Robert Tully woke in the cool exhaust-scented morning. He reached blindly for clothes he’d laid out the evening before, laced his sneakers with sleep-clumsy fingers.

Coming downstairs, he misjudged the second-to-last step and stubbed his toe, cursing softly. Water pipes clattered behind the thin walls. The small bedroom off the kitchen was empty: his uncle was either pulling an all-nighter at the Fritz or already at Top Rank. He pulled a sweatshirt off its hook in the front hall, tugging the hood over his head and cinching the drawstrings.

A clear fall morning, air thick with a silvery chemical smell borne down from the SGL Carbon plant along Hyde Park Boulevard. He ran north on 24th, past abandoned shopping carts and junked cars with garbage bags taped over shattered windows, old tires and cast-off water tanks rusting in the weeds. He juked around spots where the sidewalk buckled and lapped, on past bodegas with ads for Wonder Bread and menthol Kents taped to bulletproof windows and stores without names: just neon signs blinking L-l-Q-u-o-R.

He turned west on Pine Avenue, warming up, perspiration beading on his forehead and below his eyes. At the corner of Pine and Portage a wrecker’s crane sat immobile on the remnants of a pizza joint shut by the health authority. Always plenty of demolition going on: buildings torn down and rubble carted away, but nothing new ever put up. Empty lots dotted the streets and avenues, lifeless but for the profusion of weeds. It was as though a consortium of concerned citizens was buying up the neighborhood, bulldozing the homes and shops, sterilizing one block at a time in hopes that someday they might start over fresh.

Robert had a good sweat going by the time he hit Main. Running on the wet grass bordering the sidewalk, shadowboxing, flashing quick left jabs and the occasional right cross. Cars and trucks fled by on the double-lane road, people heading to work at factories or outlet malls. In the early light he made out the Rainbow Bridge as a harp of steel and concrete spanning the surging river.

He rested for a minute at the Niagara Aquarium. Ptarmigans had built nests on outcrops along the river’s sheer cliff face, cobbled together from sedge grass and foil burger jackets and neon drinking straws. Closer to the falls, on the Canadian side, a sandy inlet known as Long Point sat hemmed by spidery oak trees. Rob’s uncle Tommy said that back in 1858, steamboats filled with thugs, thieves, gunmen, and other so-called sportsmen crossed the river in the dead of night to watch John C. Heenan and John Morrissey fight for the American championship. They fought at Long Point since, ironically, boxing was banned in America at the time. Heenan — “The Sapulpa Plasterer” — the champ, suffered from a festering leg ulcer, which bellied the hopes of Morrissey and his backers. They fought bareknuckle, hands soaked in walnut juice to toughen the skin. The ring was pitched in the shifting sands and the men fought twenty-eight rounds. Morrissey flattened Heenan with an uppercut to open the twenty-ninth, knocking him cold; administering the quietus, as sportswriters of the day might’ve written. Rob’s uncle showed him an artist’s rendering of the fight: Morrissey with his wilted handlebar mustache and upraised arms, Heenan’s face like a savage tomato cradled in the arms of his seconds while spectators in stovepipe hats and dueling jackets seethed outside the ring, brandishing pistols and daggers and clubs. A Brutal Close to the Heenan-Morrissey Mill, the caption read.

Rob continued south down Main, past boarded shopfronts and dusty antique stores, peepshow theaters with opaque windows and nightclubs advertising drink all nite for one low price. The sun rose over the falls, lighting the spume; it looked like the sparkling space above fresh-poured soda.

Top Rank was located in the basement of Shaw’s Discount Furnishings. You will rarely find a ground-level boxing club: they’re always in basements and refurbished cellars, dank subterranean chambers where men gather to study the edicts of hurt. No sign above the entryway: unless you were a boxer, knew a boxer, or paused to consider the procession of sweaty men who came and went at all hours of the day, you’d have no idea of its existence.

Rob skipped lightly down the littered concrete stairs, walking beneath exposed joists and sewage pipes padded with strips of unraveling friction tape. The walls were hung with photos of famous and not-so-famous pugilists: Ali and Holmes and Liston hung beside unknown warriors Jackson Buff, Chuck “The Bayonne Bleeder” Wepner, Mushy Callahan, Chief Danny Thunderheart.

The place was quiet at this hour of morning: a few groggy boxers shuffled around the slick concrete floor. Sickles of sunlight poured through the cracked casement windows, picking up a patina of dust motes suspended in the air.

Heavybags hung like slabs of meat. A black welterweight shadowboxed in the glow of a single fluorescent tube.

Rob’s uncle Tommy was getting dressed in the change room.

A few years ago, Rob went through a phase where he’d read a ton of hard-boiled detective novels. Anytime a “goon” character was introduced — a not-so-bright kneecapper with “the rough dimensions of an icebox” — Rob pictured his uncle. But seeing as how outside of a boxing ring Tommy exhibited a docility that verged on pathological, the only true similarities were physical. The story of Tommy’s long and not particularly successful career was written all over his face: buckle-nosed and egg-eared, his left eyelid dropping from a dead nerve to give him the look of a man caught in perpetual half-wink. A face hard enough to blunt an ax, the gym bums said of it.

“Morning, lazybones.”

“Lazybones?”

Rob peeled a sweat-soaked shirt over his head to reveal a muscle-corded torso.

“You weren’t anywhere to be seen when I got up — all-nighter at the Fritz?”

“I was on a roll, Robbie. Then I pushed all my chips in on a pair of ladies when the other guy’s holding kings.” Tommy shook his head. “Gotta get your money in on ladies, am I right?”

Robert slipped into gym togs and stabbed his feet into boxing boots. A gloom fell over him, as it so often did at this time in the morning; a gloom brought about by the knowledge that while his schoolmates slept in warm beds he would soon step into the ring to get his nose bloodied and lips split, bashing away at some opponent until the bell rang.

Tommy said, “I thought maybe you would be tired, y’know, from staying out late with ole Katey-pie.”

“You know it’s not like that. We’re friends.”

“Friends, uh? That what you kids’re calling it nowadays?”

“Who’re you sparring with?” Rob said.

“Our boy wants to change the subject, I see.” Tommy finished wrapping his hands, butted his fists together, rose to the sink. “Louie Scarpella, heavyweight from Buffalo. Trainer wants to work his guy against a flatfooted grinder and thought I fit the bill. You imagine that, Robbie? He says it to my face.” Tommy rubbed his pancaked nose with a closed fist, pinched one nostril shut and blew a string of snot into the basin. “Right to my face like that.”

“So go knock his guy’s block off.”

“You know that’s not how it works. My job’s to give Scarpella a lift — raise his spirits. I knock him on his ass, his trainer holds out on my fee.”

Tommy twisted the spigot and rinsed the sink. He stared at his reflection and blinked, as if somehow surprised at the man he caught staring back. He drove a Bobcat model 13E tow-motor at the Niagara Industrial Park, a string of corrugated tin warehouses off Highway 62A. His fellow workers were fat and balding, high school heroes gone to seed. During piss breaks, standing at the long line of porcelain urinals, Tommy’s nose would wrinkle at a smell that, to him, indicated dire maladies: prostate trouble, gallstones, urinary infection, sick excretions from old bodies. It drove him to the point where he’d pissed in a Dixie cup and sniffed, making sure it wasn’t his own sickness he was smelling.

Tommy had boxed since the age of ten. He grew up in the gym. He loved every part of it: the training and roadwork, the sparring, the fight. He was getting older and his body didn’t react the way it used to. His mind told him what moves to make but his reflexes couldn’t follow through. But he trained hard and kept in fighting shape to take a match on short notice — because, hey, you just never knew.

“How many rounds you getting in?” Rob asked him.

“Five.”

Tommy wiped his fingers on his gray trunks. “Unless Scarpella punches himself out before that.”

“He that out of shape?”

“I’ll keep it light; drag it out to four, at least.”

Tommy’s professional record was 28-62-7. It once stood at 22-1, belted out against tomato cans handpicked by his brother and manager, Reuben, Rob’s father. He’d fought in local clubs throughout the state and across state lines in Akron, Scranton, Hartford. His only big-money fight had been at Madison Square Garden, on the under-card of the Holmes-Cooney tilt in ’83. Tommy squared off against Sammy “Night Train” Layne, a slippery southpaw from east Philly; Tommy’s shove-and-slug style, effective against unskilled biffers, was badly exposed by the ducking and weaving Layne. By the end of the eleventh round Tommy’s face was cut into ribbons, a severed artery above his left eye bringing forth blood in spurts. After that matchmakers lost interest and Reuben had a rough time lining up fights.

From there Tommy turned into a trial horse, the sort of workman who’ll take a stiff belt without folding. A good horse will give you ten solid rounds but never pose a serious threat to a contender. Tommy was in demand due to his rep as a bleeder: by the end of a fight he was a mess and his opponents came off looking like executioners. Until a mandatory pre-fight CAT scan showed a blood vessel had snapped inside his head. The NY boxing commission revoked its sanctioning license, citing medical unfitness.

Reuben Tully poked his head into the change room. Squat and potbellied, he was the polar opposite of his younger brother. He wore a rumpled button-down shirt and snap-brim hat; his short hair was shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian internment camp.

“What’s this, social hour?” Reuben banged a fist on the lockers, set the brass locks jumping. “Ass in gear, Robbie. And Tommy, that big shitkicker from Buffalo’s waiting.”

“Tell him to hold his water.” Tommy snapped off a few ponderous jabs and smiled over at his nephew. “Time to make the donuts.”

Rob rose to the sink and studied his face hemmed by a red hood: unbroken nose, forehead peppered with acne, eyes of such pale blue his father joked they must be unscrewed nightly and soaked in bleach. Some days he felt handsome, or at least that he was working his way toward it. Yet he knew he was one hard punch away from a busted nose or split brow or knocked-out tooth. No way you can eat leather round after round and expect to keep your looks.

Fruit bats squeaked and fluttered in the dark roost between locker-room ceiling and furniture-store floor. Rob stared down at his hands: thick and calloused, joints swollen from all the rough treatment. Old man’s hands. He was only sixteen, but at times felt years older.

“Robbie!”

“Keep your shirt on,” he whispered to the mirror. Then: “Coming!”

Top Rank lit up now, vapor tubes popping and fritzing as they warmed. Three huge ceiling fans with oarlike blades stirred stale air around. A pair of middleweights skipped before a long mirror. Beyond them a young Mexie straw-weight performed burpees with a fifteen-pound medicine ball. A two-hundred-pound anvil with the words that bitch painted on its side sat beside him; boxers in a dick-swinging mood occasionally goaded each other, “Go on — lift that bitch!”

The gym was dominated by its ring: twenty feet by twenty feet and enclosed by sagging red ropes. The canvas stank of blood and sweat; to the best of anyone’s knowledge it had not been replaced in thirty years. Spitbuckets were strapped to opposite ring posts: wide-mouthed funnels attached to flexible PVC hose trailing down to five-gallon drums once containing oleo lard. The walls were hung with cobwebbed Golden Gloves belts and framed photos of young boxers who now made their living as plumbers or foremen or short-order cooks. Handwritten signs rife with misspellings: club dews must be paid at the START of the MONTH!!! CLUB TOWULS ARE FOR SWET ONLY, not BLOOD!!! use lockers at own risk — not responsibul for LOST gear!!!

Written above the wall-length mirror in neat block letters:

Top Rank was operated by a consortium of managers and trainers — Reuben Tully was one of them — who collected dues to pay the rent and sent whatever was left over to an absentee landlord in Boca Raton. In exchange for this stewardship, they were given free rein to train their own prospects.

The club office was a glassed-in cube accessible by a short flight of stairs. Its door split horizontally and opened in two portions; the trainers hung out up there and kept the top portion open so that they could holler directions at their charges. Reuben sold sodas, snacks, and gum out of the office. Prices were gratifyingly archaic: 50¢ for a bottle of Coke, 40¢ for a Snickers bar, 25¢ bought you a pack of Wrigley’s, and Cracker Jack set you back 35¢. Reuben iced the sodas in an ancient cooler and popped the tops off with an opener in the shape of a naked lady, cap slotted between her spread legs.

“Hit the rope, Rob,” Reuben called down. “Five rounds warm-up, then five hard.”

Rob unsnarled a skipping rope from the pile and took a spot beside the middleweights. After three minutes the buzzer sounded; the middleweights rested but Rob kept on, sweat coming back now, trickling down the knobs of his spine.

When the buzzer went again he kicked it up: running in place, double passes, crossovers. The middleweights matched his pace. In boxing gyms, an undercurrent of competition underlay all things: I can skip rope faster, run farther, move slicker, punch harder, fight prettier, absorb more punishment; my mind-body-heart is made of sterner stuff than yours. I can take you down any old time I want, better believe that.

Rob spied two of Top Rank’s gym bums perched on the worn bleachers overlooking the ring. Gym bums were a common sight in boxing clubs: old trainers and managers, distinguished by their gray hair, chicken chests, and outrageous tales. You’ll find the same breed in barber shops and Legion halls, anyplace men can get away with telling barefaced lies. Today’s bums were a pair of grizzled fogies, one black, the other white. Rob never saw the two of them enter or leave, nor did he catch them singly: he’d break from training and see them rowed along a bench that’d stood empty moments before, huddled together as though coalesced from stale gym air.

“Now take a look at that,” the white bum said, nodding at the heavyweight, Scarpella. “He’s got a punch, yessir, I’ll grant you. But now I trained a light-heavy, Johnny Paycheck, once knocked out a horse. Johnny had to pose with this racing horse, a photo op for his upcoming fight; he was smoking a cigar.

Smoke must’ve upset the horse ’cause it blew snot all over Johnny’s herringbone blazer. Wellsir Johnny near about knocked the poor beast into horsey heaven.” He raised his right hand solemnly. “My hand to God.”

Reuben Tully hammered the office window. “Two hundred sit-ups,” he hollered down at his son, “and a hundred push-ups!”

Rob grabbed a medicine ball and sat on a mat worn to wafer-thinness over the years. He performed the sit-ups, twisting to work his adductor muscles. Then he flipped over and burned off knuckle push-ups, woofing out breath on each pop.

In the ring Tommy and Scarpella got to work. Scarpella was in his early twenties with ham-sized fists and a shovel-shaped head. He moved as though the ring were a town whose geography he sought to familiarize himself with, pushing his jab out with all the zip of a funeral dirge. Tommy let the kid maneuver him into a corner and bang his body before dropping his right fist, bringing it up through Scarpella’s sloppy guard to thump him under the heart. Tommy was going to hit him again when the buzzer went. Like a factory worker who punches out the minute the whistle blows, he lowered his hands.

Rob couldn’t help but smile. His uncle earned fifteen bucks a round as a sparring partner. He’d surrendered all dreams of boxing glory, fast cars, and HBO pay per views, the fame and pretty things. The biggest surprise was that it failed to eat at him: anytime he and Rob watched a title fight and one contender took a canvas nap, Tommy’d say, “Jeez, poor guy. Wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.”

Rob dropped back in on the gym bums’ conversation.

“It’s common knowledge,” the other bum said, “that of all creatures to swim the sea or walk on land, horses have the thinnest of skulls. Thin as eggshell!

Now a heavyweight of mine knocked out a donkey. The donkey head’s mostly bone, brain no bigger than a walnut — takes a mighty biff. We were training down west of San Angelo and he’d been drinking. He was a Mexie and Mexies’ll fight with two broke arms but are not at all keen on training. He’s drunk and staggers out the gym. There’s this old burro chewing cud; my guy goes to pet it — sour cuss bites him! Well didn’t he smack that donkey and it tips right over, four legs twitching up at the clear blue sky. Hang me if I’m lying.”

Neither questioned the other’s obvious fabrications. Since every word that exited a gym bum’s mouth was nearly by definition a lie, it was in their best interest to maintain an air of mutual acceptance, tolerance, or plain ignorance. Without lies, gym bums would have precious little to talk about.

“Robbie,” Reuben said, coming downstairs and flicking his head toward the ring.

“Quit eyeing your uncle Tommy. May as well watch a cripple fight, for all it’s worth — gonna pick up bad habits.”

“Well, aren’t you a peach,” Tommy said.

“You punch like a lollipop,” Reuben told his brother. “Head down to the Legion, find some veteran to fight — some blind old biplane pilot. That’s about your speed.”

In riposte, Tommy laid his substantial weight on the middle ring rope and extended a beckoning hand. “Why don’t you climb on in here and let’s go a few rounds, Ruby? Tell you what — the first shot’s free.”

“I got training to do.”

“You couldn’t train circus fleas.”

“How about you pinch that cut under your nose shut.” Reuben demonstrated by pinching his own lips shut. “Give it time to heal.”

“Ah… wah?” Tommy raised a glove to his lips, paused, then nodded. “…good one.”

Reuben smiled, the victor. “Robbie, don’t you know it’s impolite to stare at cripples? Go hit a bag.”

Rob pulled on a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves and approached a duct-taped heavybag.

Crouched low, left foot before right, and tipped forward on his toes, he snapped left jabs. He circled the bag, breaking at the waist, shouldering it, uncorking right hooks and doubling up on body shots.

All activity in the gym stopped when Rob hit the heavybag; everyone stopped and stared. He’d hear the whispers: Kid’s got bottled lightning in those hands; a little of the ol’ boom boom. Boy’s so quick you couldn’t hit him with a handful of sugar. Tall and in excellent condition, Rob weighed only 164 pounds. But his body had the characteristics of a puppy dog — big bones, huge paws — that indicated he had another growth spurt in him.

Tommy’s sparring session drew to a close. Scarpella was wheezing like a busted squeezebox; Tommy patted him on the head and, picking up the same tune he’d been whistling climbing through the ropes, ’ climbed out again.

“Don’t load up so much,” Reuben hollered at his son. “Power thrills but speed kills, Robbie. Get that through your thick head.”

“Dogging him somethin’ awful today,” Tommy said to his brother.

“Mind your business,” Reuben told him. “Don’t hear me telling you how to drive forklift, do you?”

“Just seems that, Robbie was a dog, I’d be calling the humane society right about now.”

“What’s he made of, glass? Throw your sweatshirt on,” he called over to Rob.

“We’ll hit the Green Machine.”

The Green Machine was an olive-green ’69 Dodge pickup donated to Top Rank under dismal circumstances: its owner, an ex-club member, was currently a guest of the state at Coxsackie penitentiary. The club could’ve found use for used gym mats or even foul cups, but the old green beater served no earthly good; it had sat in the crushed-gravel lot out behind the club for a year until Reuben devised a novel use for it.

Bolting a wooden beam to the cab roof and suspending an old heavybag from the end, he’d created an unorthodox training device. The bag hung four or five feet in front of the truck’s grille: the visual effect was of the classic carrot-on-a-stick incentive, with the bag as the carrot and the truck standing in for the donkey.

“Get the lead out!” Reuben shouted at his son. “Quit doggin’ it!”

Reuben hopped into the truck. The engine yammered and chuffed. “Come on, you old pig!” The Dodge shuddered to life; the cab filled with greasy exhaust fumes. He cracked a window and said “Put up yer dukes” as he slipped the truck into gear.

Rob backpedaled as the truck came at him at five mph; he threw punches at the frost-glazed bag chained to the beam. The idea was to punch while moving back on his heels — when pursued in the ring, he could lash out and catch his advancing opponent. To mix it up Reuben would set the Green Machine in reverse, forcing Rob into the role of pursuer. Around and around the crushed-gravel parking lot they would go, Rob alternately pursuing and retreating as his father hollered instructions out the window. The engine frequently died; Reuben would mash the gas pedal and crank the key, beseeching Rob to “keep punching, keep punching; your next opponent isn’t likely to conk out like this damn truck!”

A few other trainers had added the Green Machine to their workout regimen, much to the chagrin of their charges. Boxers complained of sore hands afterward, especially when it was cold and the bag nearly frozen. Every so often the Green Machine vanished from the parking lot — it wasn’t hard to steal, as the keys stayed in the ignition. It was always a boxer who’d taken it, frequently the night before his next training session. But the respite was short-lived: sooner or later the club would receive a phone call detailing the truck’s whereabouts and Reuben or one of the other trainers would retrieve it.

Reuben goosed the gas pedal and the truck lurched forward. Rob ducked the bag nimbly, stinging it with a hard right hand. Watching his son through the crack-starred windshield, Reuben marveled, as he so often did, at his unstudied perfection.

The way he moved, sly feints and weaves. Incremental movements, nothing frivolous or wasted. The beauty of his style lay in its geometries: the clean angular planes of his body, the straight lines by which he negotiated the distances between his opponent’s body and his own. To watch Rob box was beautiful in the way a predatory cat stalking its quarry was beautiful: generations of selective breeding honed to a killing edge. Whenever he despaired that he was pushing his son too hard, Reuben convinced himself that boxing was Rob’s life calling — how else could he be so damn good at it?

Of course, it never benefited a trainer to let his boxer know how good he looked.

“What’s the matter,” he hollered, “got lead in your damn feet? Pitiful, Robbie, just pitiful! Punch like that your next match, you better get used to the view from queer street.”

Reuben’s goading fell upon deaf ears. Rob knew he was a good boxer, a powerful and perhaps preternaturally skilled one: the whispers and stares told him so. But his skills also scared him. He’d never forget the first time he knocked a guy out: that bone-deep jolt traveling down his arm and his opponent’s distorted face rippling from the point of impact, how his eyes closed as he fell away from Rob’s glove. Afterward the fighter’s trainer found three teeth embedded in the semi-soft rubber of his gumshield. In Rob’s eighth fight, he broke his opponent’s jaw. Felix Guiterrez was a fellow senior at his high school; he’d seen Felix in the hallway with his mouth wired shut, sucking Boost through a straw in the cafeteria. He felt guilty knowing what he’d done. But on an instinctual level it felt like something he’d practically been bred for — how else could he be so damn good at it?

Unlike some fighters, Rob was not powered by rage, fear, hatred, a desire to break living things. And while he trained hard and fought regularly, he possessed no true love for the sport. He boxed because his father had boxed and because his uncle still did; because his grandfather boxed and so on down the line back to the Heenan-Morrissey mill and beyond; because for generations the hands of Tully men had stunk of walnut juice. He boxed because the Tullys were fighting stock, and had been for as long as anyone could recall. He’d grown up in the gym among fighters; it had been a foregone conclusion that he’d become one himself.

After a half-hour Reuben parked the truck. He stepped out of the cab and booted the door shut — the Dodge’s door and rocker panel were cratered with dents, the result of many years’ worth of kicks. Rob didn’t like it when his father hoofed the Green Machine; to him it seemed the equivalent of kicking an old trail nag who’d only done its job, albeit fitfully.

Reuben said, “You really screwed the pooch today, I don’t mind telling you.”

“I was concentrating on my footwork.”

“And playing pattycakes with the bag. Trust me on this: no boxer’s ever signed a million-dollar fight deal on account of his footwork.”