The Fighter

Chapter 5

Reuben Tully worked in the bakery department at Topps Friendly Market. He rose at two a.m. weekdays, showering and dressing in the dark so as not to wake his son and brother. He caught the 2:30 Portage Express and nodded to the bus driver, who always touched the brim of his cap in reply. A woman who collected border tolls hopped on two stops later; she always sat four seats from Reuben with a coffee thermos and a lurid tabloid magazine. At the next stop the doors admitted a man in a threadbare suit who worked as night auditor for a strip of border motels; he always sat ramrod-straight — stiff as a bishop’s pecker, the gym bums would say — with a briefcase on his lap.

Reuben had traveled with these people for twenty years. They’d all put on weight together and lost hair together, their eyesight had waned and their faces had furrowed together. They’d ridden through marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. Reuben rarely spoke to them, yet felt an odd kinship. On those rare occasions when he’d spot one on the street he’d raise a hand and they would respond with a nod or smile.

At the supermarket he’d buy coffee from an Italian with his steam cart; he’d mill with the butchers and florists and forklift drivers in the pre-dawn darkness. When the shift whistle blew he’d wheel a barrel of Red Star yeast down a row of industrial mixers. Over the years a yeasty, breadlike smell had sunk into his flesh. No amount of granulated pink industrial soap or frenzied scrubbing could erase that smell, and in his most maudlin moods Reuben could hear mourners at his funeral whispering that his corpse held the odor of fresh-baked bread.

Every few years a new man was hired fresh out of high school. Reuben wondered what he’d do if Robert chose to quit boxing and work here — a prospect that filled him with an intractable, deep-seated fear. His son was better than this town, with its crumbling tenements and bulletproof shop windows, its rusted cars and malt liquor bottles lining front stoops.

Robert Tully was destined for mythical things. Reuben Tully’s only son would not die in upstate New York with the stink of bread on his hands.

The number twenty bus dropped Reuben off a block from Top Rank. He carried a grease-spotted bag of day-old bearclaws for his son. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but Rob’s metabolism ran hotter than a superconductor; he’d burn through them before lunch.

In the gym two heavies were training for an upcoming card at the armory. A pair of nightclub bouncers, they were set to square off against a couple of garrison Marines. Reuben pictured the matches: two pug-uglies in the dead center of the ring, bashing away like Rockem Sockem Robots. The war vets and jarheads on furlough would gobble it up.

Rob was up in the ring with bespectacled Frankie Jack, a retired welder who hung around the gym drumming up cut work. Frankie, with a pair of leather punch mitts over his hands, instructed Rob to turn through on his right cross, make it sing.

“Frank, ya fool,” Reuben called, “you filling my fighter’s head with nonsense?”

“Not at all, just warming him up for you.” As if Rob were an old Dodge on a winter morning. “He’s in fine shape, Reuben. Tip-top shape.”

Rob spread the ropes so that Frankie could step down. Frankie jammed the punch mitts into his armpits and tugged them off; he rubbed his hands, wincing.

“I’ll tell you, this kid can hit. He hurts just to breathe on you.” Cotton swabs were pinned behind Frankie’s ears like draftsman’s pencils. “Hope this ain’t out of line, but if you ain’t yet settled on a cutman for Robbie’s next fight I’d gladly step in.”

“Now what makes you think he’s gonna need a cutman?” Frankie knuckled a pair of black-frame glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I’d surely like to be part of it, is all.”

“Everyone wants to be part of it.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the Buffalo heavyweight, Scarpella. “Seen your brother ’round?”

“I have not,” said Reuben. “He owe you money?”

“Supposed to be workin’ wit’ him but don’t see him nowhere.”

“Ah, Jesus — he’s over at the Fritz. Let me go grab him for you.”

“I’ll go get him,” Rob said.

“Yeah, that’s the ticket,” Reuben said. “Tommy might have a tough time sparring with my boot up his ass.”

The Fritz was the local appellation of a sagging row house named after its owner, Fritzie Zivic. A mooselike Croat, Zivic had had a brief and un-stellar boxing career as a mob-controlled heavyweight.

His heavily scripted run came to an undignified end when an aging Archie Moore knocked him cold under the lights at Madison Square Garden; after that, Zivic’s mafia backers sent him down the river. He drifted back to his old neighborhood and parlayed his slim notoriety into a gambling den on the corner of Pine and 6th. No high rollers at the Fritz: clientele was strictly nickel and dime. Zivic sold cans of Hamms at two bucks a pop and ran a clean game: his well-known manner of dealing with hustlers was to pin the offender’s fingers in a door jamb and kick till a few bones went snap.

Zivic was sitting on the porch steps in a navy pea coat. Zivic’s dog, a dyspeptic bull mastiff whose blue eyes expressed a deep cunning, prowled the front lawn. It growled as Rob crossed the lawn, muzzle skinned back to bare rows of yellow teeth.

“Murdoch,” said Zivic, “shut your hole.”

The dog blinked its milky eyes and padded over to piss in the weeds.

“My uncle here?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” Zivic rubbed his smashed nose and blew a string of snot into the nettles. The skin of his face was leathery and deeply creased; razor-thin scars ran over his chin and cheeks like the seams on a baseball. “He’s been here all night. I doubt he’s got two pennies left to rub together.” He gave Rob an appreciative up-and-down. “You’re looking hale. When do you fight next?”

“The Golden Gloves qualifiers.”

“Gonna win?”

“I guess, maybe.”

Murdoch sat on his haunches beside Zivic. The dog yawned and broke wind against the cracked flagstones.

“You foul creature.” Zivic shrugged as though to say, Here’s what boxing gets you, kid: a decrepit row house full of sadsack gamblers and a flatulent old dog. Welcome to Shangri La.

The kitchen was empty. Padlocks on the cupboards and icebox. The place stunk like wet dog. His uncle dozed on a sofa in the adjoining room. Rob shook his shoulder. “Man, wake up.”

Tommy cracked one bloodshot eye. “Robbie? Oh, god. You shouldn’t be here.”

“It was either me or Dad.”

Tommy wiped away white lather crusted at the edges of his mouth. “In that case, I’m glad it’s you.”

Outside Zivic was flicking dog turds into his neighbor’s yard with the toe of his boot.

“Get some shuteye,” he said to Tommy. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Not here you won’t.”

“Damn well better not — you’re on at the barn, aren’t you?” Tommy rubbed his face with the flat of his hand, dug his fingers into his scalp. “Right,” he said, “the barn.”

They walked down Niagara Street toward Top Rank. Tommy’s hair stuck up in rusty corkscrews. He shielded his sleep-puffed face from the sun.

“Feeling none too fine,” he said. “We’re talking ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, pardon my French.”

“Fritzie said you were playing all night.”

“Never again. It’s a sucker’s bet, Robbie. You remember that.” They passed a repo lot: sun glinted off the hoods and windows of derelict cars, a shining lake of metal and glass. Tommy stopped at Wilson Farms for breakfast: a box of Hostess cake donuts and a bottle of Gatorade.

“Replenish those electrolytes,” he told his nephew. “So who am I sparring?”

“The heavy from Buffalo, Scarpella.”

“Ah, jeez.”

“What?”

“He’s not worth it, is all.” Tommy licked powdered sugar off his fingers. “Remember six months back I was working that young heavy, Mesi? Now that kid could hit — bashed me pillar to post and sent me home with a head full of canaries. But that was okay, way I saw it, because Mesi’s going places — all that damage meant something ’cause I was building him up. But Scarpella’s just a big kid with an okay set of whiskers. He’s going nowhere. I know it, you know it, could be he knows it too. I’m not helping because he’s beyond help. What does that make me? A punching bag for fifteen bucks a round.”

“You trot out that line all the time.”

“What line?”

“Tommy Tully, the poorly paid punching bag.”

“What, now my own flesh and blood is giving me the gears?” He moaned dramatically. “I expect it from your pops, but — et tu, Robbie?”

Rob was unwilling to cut his uncle slack — he loved winding him up. “You don’t like it, why step through the ropes?”

Tommy gave his nephew a look that said, I might ask you the same thing. “I read in the newspaper about this subway conductor in New York. Suicidal crazies keep leaping in front of his train. Apparently in the Big Apple they aren’t satisfied with jumping off a bridge or sucking on a tailpipe — now they’re flinging themselves in front of subway cars. They say a conductor can expect to have this happen two or three times in a career — this guy had it happen seven times in a month.”

“Where’d you read that, the Weekly World News? Let me guess the next headline: Alien Love Secrets.”

“Listen, I’m serious. The guy’s driving merrily down the tracks and whammo — a body’s thumping off the side of the train or exploding all over the windshield. One time the body hit so hard it busted the glass and sailed right into the driver’s compartment. Imagine that!”

Rob was laughing now. It was awful, he knew it, but still.

“This guy gets to thinking he’s cursed — seven in a month, who can blame him? Maybe he thinks the jumpers are plotting against him, this sect of rotten bastards hurling themselves in front of his train. But he keeps driving that subway. He’s got a wife and kids and it’s his job. Simple as that. So if he can get up every morning and face that possibility, well… I… I can…”

Tommy trailed off, staring at a string of boarded shopfronts.

“Tom. Hey, Tommy?”

Tommy seemed startled to be where he was, like a man who’d been caught sleepwalking. “I’m fine, Robbie. Spaced out for a minute, is all.”

This happened a lot lately: Tommy’s train of thought derailed, that weird thousand-yard stare. Rob feared it had to do with all the shots he’d taken in the ring. The brain is a subtle organ, was a saying he’d overheard at the club, and it goes wrong in subtle ways. He knew how postmortem examinations of dead boxers’ brains often revealed severe cortical atrophy: the friction of heavy punches damaged the delicate tissue, which scarred up and sloughed away. Some boxers’ brains ended up no bigger than a chimpanzee’s. Sometimes he dreamed about a Monkey House for Beaten Fighters: glaze-eyed, banana-eating, diaper-wearing pugs roaming a steel cage, grunting and gibbering and swinging from radial tires.

In the worst dreams, his uncle was one of them.

Reuben got on his younger brother the moment he cleared the gym doors.

“Well if it ain’t the leather-assed road gambler!”

Tommy nodded over at Scarpella. “Give me a minute to change up.”

“So tell me, Amarillo Slim,” said Reuben, “make out like a bandit?”

“Lay off, willya?” Tommy headed to the lockers. “Quit it with the fifth degree.”

“Fifth?” Reuben said. “This is the zero-eth degree! You couldn’t handle my fifth!”

Life in the gym took on its familiar rhythms. Trainers hollered: Five rounds with the rope! Two hundred stomach crunches! Burn, baby, burn! A boom box kicked on: pulsing rap beats overlaid with growling lyrics and random gunfire. Trainers held heavybags bucking against their chests and coached with their cheeks inches from their fighters’ smacking fists. Managers talked on silver cellphones, arranging deals or pretending to. The buzzer sounded at three-minute intervals. Stop playing pocket pool and HIT something! Boxers caught their reflection in a manager’s mirrored sunglasses and put a little more oomph into their shots. Throw the right, baby — let it GO! He’s flagging, get on his ass! Counterpunch on one and rip that shit! Boxers finished their sparring sessions, geared down, and stepped onto the ring apron. A look on their faces like they’d exited a decompression chamber or come down from outer space.

Rob finished his circuit and sat on the risers with the managers and gym bums. Tommy worked the ring with Scarpella. He fought out of a crouch, the way Scarpella’s trainer wanted. Scarpella let go with a clumsy roundhouse; Tommy let the punch slip through and took a knee.

The gym emptied out. The next wave of boxers would arrive after lunch. The gym bums swapped barefaced lies.

“Sailor Perkins could eat fifty pig’s knuckles at a sitting, may god strike me blind for a lie.”

“You’ll never see a Mexie heavyweight champ. They just don’t grow that big south of the Rio Bravo. Something to do with the intense heat shrinking the bones and that’s not just me talking — that’s science.”

“Johnny Pushe’s skin was so tough it could blunt a nail.”

“Every welterweight champ in history had O-positive blood. A-negative or AB-positive welters, forget it — pack on thirteen pounds and move up to middleweight.”

The walls of Robert’s bedroom were hung with portraits of Muhammad Ali and Roy Jones Junior. They had been hung by his father and functioned, Reuben hoped, as a subliminal training method. Rob was working on his homework assignment — a haiku poem — while his father and uncle prepared for their trip over the river. “Where’s the adrenaline chloride, Tommy?”

“In the fridge behind the milk.”

“Looks a mite yellow. Out of date?”

“How should I know?”

“Your face, not mine.”

Rob had so far composed a single line: My toenail is broken. This had come to him staring down at his bare foot. Was that too many syllables? “What about ice?”

“We’ll grab a bag over there.”

“We got any Canadian cash? Any whaddatheycallem — loonies?’ Robert amended: My toenail is split. Tommy poked his head through the door.

“What’re you working on?”

“Haiku.”

“Gesundheit.”

“It’s a Japanese poem.”

Tommy strode into the room with his chest puffed out. “Why not write an ode to your handsome uncle?” He got down on one knee. “Tommy dearest, tell me true, why do all the gals love you…”

“Quit horsing around!” Reuben called. “I’m helping Robbie with his poetry!”

“You wouldn’t know Shakespeare if he crawled out the grave and bit you on your ass!”

“I’m a poet and you don’t even know it!” Tommy hollered back. “There once was a man from Nantucket—”

“Enough,” Reuben said, appearing in the doorway. “Robbie, we’re gone until eleven. If your uncle’s face isn’t bashed so bad it’ll put a man off his food, we’ll meet up at Macy’s.”

Rob wished his uncle good luck. Be careful, he wanted to add, but among boxers those words were considered the father of bad luck. He could already feel the lump of fear in his belly, a lump that would persist until he received his father’s call from Macy’s diner.

Reuben’s Dodge Shadow backed down the driveway, its rusted muffler rattling down 24th Street. Rob picked up the phone.

“Tully,” Kate Paulson said from her end. “What’s up?”

“Working on that poetry thing. What’re you up to?”

“Meh.”

“Why don’t you come over and help out?”

“You mean do your homework?”

“Did I say do? Did that word cross my lips? I said help” Rob tried to sound indifferent. “Or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” she mimicked, teasingly. “You know you need me, Tully. If poetic passion were punching power, you couldn’t plow your posterior out of a paper peanut pack. Bet you don’t even know what that’s an example of.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All those P words strung in a row — it’s called…?”

Kate hummed the theme from Jeopardy. Rob snapped his fingers, struggling to recall his last English lesson. “Alliteration?”

“Baaah! Sorry, you didn’t answer in the form of a question and must forfeit your fabulous Caribbean vacation for two.” Kate kept silent for a bit, then said, “Anything to eat over there?”

“Leftover spaghetti.”

“Oooh, now there’s a deal sweetener. No offense, but your dad…” She sifted various word combinations through her head. “… is a crummy caustic cook.”

“But he’s a blazingly brilliant baker.”

“Not to mention a terrifically tyrannous trainer.”

Rob let it slide; Kate’s thoughts about his boxing aspirations were well documented, as were those regarding his father’s role in them.

Kate’s fingers drummed the wall beside her phone. “I’ll be over in half.”

Tommy and Reuben drove streets slick with twilight rain past pawn shops and discount liquor outlets and All-For-A-Buck stores. Spitting rain froze into a milky glaze at the windshield’s edge. Tommy caught his reflection in the window, his forehead piled with scar tissue in the glow of passing streetlights.

Reuben paid the toll and drove out over the Rainbow Bridge. High-intensity spotlights trained on the Horseshoe Falls caused the ever-falling water to sparkle. The pines of Luna Island and Prospect Point were coated in crystallized spray.

They passed through the border toll and turned up Clifton Hill. Clusters of discount tourists peered through the darkened windows of shops closed for the season. Blinking neon reflected off frozen puddles; the road was pocked with fitful pools of blue, red, and green.

Reuben said, “A few fellas in the butcher department retired the other week. They’re looking for meat cutters.”

Tommy cracked his knuckles. “Maybe you think I’m blind,” he said mirthlessly. “Maybe you think I missed the copy of the want ads you left on my pillow.”

Reuben expressed mock surprise. “Is that where I left those? It’d be better than what you’re earning now, plus it’s forty hours a week, guaranteed.”

Tommy opened and shut his mouth, jutting his lower jaw out until he looked like some predatory deep-sea fish: jaw limbering exercises. “I’m too clumsy. Liable to cut my pinkie off.”

“Right,” Reuben said, “and how would you cope without it?”

“Wouldn’t be invited to any more tea parties.” Tommy mimed tipping a china tea cup, his pinkie extended. “The Duchess of Windsor would be heartbroken.”

The buildings and houses fell into the distance. The sawblade silhouette of a fir-lined ridge zagged above the fields.

“I thought you were done with this stuff, Tom.”

“I thought so, too. This is the last time.”

“The last?”

Tommy paused. “One of the last.”

Reuben wasn’t satisfied to let it rest. “This is how you imagined capping your career? You boxed at Madison Square Garden, in case the fact slipped your mind.”

“Long time ago I did.”

“So this is how you want it?”

“No, it’s not.” Tommy stared down at his hands lit by the dashboard, shrugging as if unable to conceive of another employment for them. “Just drop it.”

“I worry about my kid brother, is all.”

“Not a kid anymore.”

“You know, this is about the only time I ever see you serious. And you’ll always be my kid brother,” Reuben said, not unkindly.

Flat frost-clad fields, fence posts, barns, the dark contours of sleeping cattle. A corduroy road cut off the rural route leading to a farmstead hemmed by a windbreak of pines. A tiny farmhouse with squares of light burning in odd windows. The dark outline of a peaked-roof barn stood east of some silos.

Vehicles were parked along a muddy fenceline: pickups and rusted beaters, ATVs and dirtbikes. Moonlight danced over the polished paint of a German sedan. Bumper stickers: soccer dad and proud of it! and my other car is a broom.

Reuben stepped onto wooden batboards laid down over the mud. He grabbed a black valise from the back seat. They made their way through a canopy of leafless trees to the barn.

“I ought to put on one of those rubberized aprons,” he said. “The kind slaughterhouse workers wear.”

They were met at the barn by Manning.

On the second Thursday of each month the thick-lipped, beetle-legged cattle farmer doffed his cattleman’s hat and donned his fight promoter’s cap. Manning’s arms were netted with old razor scars and the tip of his nose was gone: depending on which account you believed it’d been variously hacked, gouged, or bitten off his face. Tonight he wore an ankle-length duster coat, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

“Evening, lads.” Starlight bent upon the barrel of a Remington over-under shotgun in his right hand. “Here to tussle or just catch an eyeful?”

“My brother’s feeling frisky,” Reuben said.

Manning kicked the barn door ajar with the heel of his boot. “Some fellas in there’d be happy to take that frisk right outta him.”

The space under the peaked wood ceiling was as spacious as a dance hall, filled with light and smoke and milling bodies. The crowd was clotted in groups distinguished by their dress: suits and ties or flannels and work vests. Manning’s buck-toothed son sold six-packs of PBR from an ice-filled trough. Bales of hay studded with pink blossoms demarcated the ring. Cows snuffled at gaps in the barn planks.

Spectators were rowed along a wooden skirt circling the barn’s upper level, legs dangling over the edge. Tommy saw Fritzie Zivic standing beside a wheelchair-bound geezer with a breathing mask strapped over his face. Zivic’s scrofulous old dog was chewing a wheelchair tire.

The fighters huddled in corners beyond the light. Some were washed-up trial horses and clubbers, others tavern toughs with cobalt fists. All bore the mistakes of their trade: worn-out, mangled foreheads and split brows and pitcher lips and eyes like milky balls socked into the pitted ruin of their faces.

Reuben scanned the prospects. All regulars, at least. Every so often a vagabond fighter would show up; he’d fight, collect his purse, and move on down the road. Reuben would never forget driving home after a night at the barn and seeing one of those vagabond fighters at the Niagara bus terminal: only hours ago that same guy had pinned another man’s skull between bales of hay and pounded until the floorboards ran red, and now here he was stepping onto a Greyhound with blood on his hands, moving on to another town and another fight while his opponent lay on a hospital gurney with a pair of detached retinas. No remorse — everyone who stepped into the ring knew the stakes.

Men born in the wrong century, Reuben had heard it said. Put ’em in a coliseum, fighting with spears and nets. It’s all that suits ’em. Men whose sole value lay in their willingness to absorb punishment; men in whose faces could be glimpsed an inevitability of purpose impossible to outrun. Some had no more intellect than a child. Reuben had seen one eating soda crackers spread with axle grease: his trainer insisted it thickened the blood. Later that fighter stood in the ring, his face black with blood, calling his trainer’s name in a high, childish voice. Only his trainer wasn’t there: he’d already hopped into his truck and driven away.

Reuben motioned his brother to a hay bale. “Gimme those mitts.” He taped Tommy’s hands with great care, first winding clean white bandages around and around, then placing sponge across the knuckles, then wrapping on the adhesive.

When the barn was full Manning bolted the door and crossed the wide sawdust floor. He ran down the rules, such as they were. “Fight goes until one man can’t answer the bell. A man goes down, both fighters take a rest. I won’t accept no outright foul play but whatever happens between two men in the course of a tussle, happens. Those men ain’t got nobody to stand by them, gypsy cab’s waiting to run ya to the medic need be — fare come out your purse, but.”

Something tightened in Reuben’s chest to hear Manning’s spiel. He knew his brother never went out to make a show — he went out to get a job done. He was a boxer: a rough occupation, yes, but one governed by laws of fairness and respect. There was a refinement and cleanliness to it. You don’t hit a man when he’s down. You don’t punch after the bell.

Here, men fought like weasels down a hole. It was dangerous and dirty and men were hurt in ways they would never recover from. Here you might see a guy staggering to his corner with his scalp split pink down the dark weave of his hair, his eyes half-lidded and tongue hanging like a dog’s. Here you might see an overmatched fighter struck a blow so vicious it cracked the orbital bone and pushed his eye from its socket, the blood-washed eyeball swinging on its optic nerve like a lacquered radish. Reuben knew such things were a possibility because he had, in fact, seen those exact things on past nights.

Top Rank operated under laws. The barn was international waters.

Top Rank was for boxers. The barn was for fighters.

Rob was watching TV when Kate Paulson rapped on the door.

“Andale, Tully, andale” she called. “Freakin’ cold out here.”

He opened the door and smirked. As typical, she was overdressed: blue winter shell, scarf, and mittens. “You must be looking for the polar expedition team. They’re two doors down.”

“I walk all the way over and you give me grief? May just go home.”

“What, head back out in that weather?” He clutched his shoulders and shivered. “Brrrrr.”

Kate lived three blocks east on 22nd. Kate’s mother, Ellen, had known the Tully brothers since the first grade; they’d grown up in the same ten-mile radius, attended the same schools, caroused the same bars. She worked in the florist department at Topp’s, where she and Reuben often chatted amid the daffodils and zinnias.

The Tullys and Paulsons might have existed like any two families in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls — that is to say, distantly — if not for a pair of coincidences, one happy, the other not so. The happy coincidence was the near-simultaneous births of their first, and only, children; Robert Thomas was born Monday afternoon, Katherine Harriet during the witching hours Tuesday morning. The infants spent their first night together in the Mount St. Mary nursery, side by side in transparent plastic tubs. Tommy, the most whimsical member in either family, believed they had imprinted on each other like baby chicks; this he held accountable for their enduring closeness.

The other coincidence was that, shortly after the births, both Ellen’s husband and Reuben’s wife had realized parenting wasn’t in their blood. Phil Paulson stepped out for a pack of Kools days after his daughter’s birth and never did manage to find his way home. And speculation had it that Phil’s itchy feet must have been highly contagious, spreading all the way down to Carol Tully’s house; one afternoon Reuben came home to find baby Robbie at the next-door neighbor’s and a note from his wife informing him she’d moved to Nashville to pursue a music career.

Following from the initial, heart-defibrillating shock of abandonment, Ellen Paulson recovered rather quickly. Her husband was a contract handyman whose keenest aspiration was to lose a digit in a work-related mishap and live off the settlement; as Ellen saw it, now she had only one child to care for instead of two. Every so often she’d receive a postcard from deadbeat Phil; these she read aloud to Reuben and Tommy in a deft imitation of her husband’s voice: I still love you, don’t think for a second I don’t, but the aloor of the open road, that freedum… its got me in its spell. She’d point out all the misspellings and clichés and finally, cathartically, burned each postcard in the fireplace. After a year she didn’t bother to read them anymore, just pitched them in the trash.

“So.” Kate clapped her hands. “Where’s that leftover spag?”

In the kitchen Rob set the pot of sauce on the stove. She sat at the table rubbing the cold from her hands. Her pageboy-style hair stuck up in wild spikes. She had green eyes, like her mother: cat’s eye green, Reuben called that color.

“You want noodles,” he asked, “or on toast?”

“You’re kidding.”

Rob shrugged. “Tommy likes it that way.”

Which was true. Tommy ladled spaghetti sauce on top of bread — and not any old bread: Wonder Bread. This caused friction in the household, since Tommy preferred it to the bakery loaves his brother brought home. Why, Reuben harped, would you fill your face with that crap? I doubt it’s even bread; I bet it’s labeled “food substitute.”

Rob set another pot on the stove and dumped in a handful of spaghetti. Kate, who’d been watching with a critical eye, asked what the heck he was doing.

“You didn’t sound keen on toast.”

She joined him at the stove, hip-checking him out of the way. “Got to boil the water first, dummy. Then the noodles.” It was hot over the stove top and she pulled off her school sweatshirt, rucking her undershirt up. Rob caught bare skin, the dip under her ribcage, a groove of muscle down her stomach.

He was unruffled that she’d taken over the kitchen; Kate had always been alpha to his beta. Their easy acceptance of these roles was one of the reasons they got on so well. And since Rob had never seen his own father and mother interact, he’d always wondered if, in their way, he and Kate behaved as a married couple might.

She sprinkled the cooked spaghetti with Kraft Parmesan — “Cheese in a canister,” she said disapprovingly, “that’s what you get in a house full of men” — and slid Rob’s plate across the table. He’d eaten only two hours ago, but most boxers existed in a more or less permanent state of appetite.

“Where’s your pops,” Kate said, “or Tommy?”

Rob kept his eyes on his plate. “Busy tonight.”

Kate arched her eyebrows. “Second Thursday of the month. I didn’t think your uncle was mixed up in that anymore.”

Most people in the neighborhood knew of the barn; a few, desperately strapped for cash, had even tried their luck there. For all but Tommy, once had been enough.

“Tommy’s shifts at the warehouse got cut back,” Rob said. “He’s in some to Fritzie Zivic and hasn’t been drumming up much sparring work—”

She cut him off. “The supermarket’s looking, and nobody’s gonna try and knock his head off there — or if so, some turkey-armed fogy because he cuts the salami too thick.”

Rob laughed, but he was shaking his head. “It’s not the money so much…”

“So much as?”

All Rob could think was that boxing got into people’s blood like a poison, except that the poison was the only thing that kept them alive, or at least made them feel that way.

“I mean it’s a tough life for a man to leave behind, is all.”

Kate looked up at the ceiling, scanning for bits of Rob’s brain that clearly must have drifted out his ears. “Women find it hard to leave things, too — shitty marriages, and boyfriends, and degrading jobs. We can be every bit as pigheaded as men.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Rob. “You’re defending a woman’s right to act as stupidly as a man?”

“I’m saying men don’t have a hammerlock on weakness. But it’s still no excuse.”

In their neighborhood, gender roles were pretty well defined. Men did this; women, that. There wasn’t a lot of friction over it — just the way things were.

“Hey,” he wanted to know, “are we having an argument?”

“No, Tully. We are having a discussion.”

“… Oh.”

One commonly held theory in streetfighting is that you must get the first punch no matter what the price.

Christ, Tommy thought, staggering back on his heels, I really should’ve known better.

The blow struck him dead between the eyes — a poleax, in the same spot that a slaughterhouse stunner aims his kill hammer. The air shimmered with darts of white light as his mouth filled with the taste of cold lightning.

He’d been matched against a young fighter, Caleb Kilbride. The Kilbrides were a clan of ridge runners who made ends meet smuggling reservation cigs and booze across the Niagara River. Shirtless, the kid was built like the butt end of a sledgehammer. His neck and arms were mottled with burn scars; the falling light picked out further scarring on his hips, a galaxy of pale white chips.

They’d met in the middle of the ring. Tommy noted Kilbride’s small, close-set eyes, the slight upslope at their outer edges that bespoke inbreeding. He looked over at the kid’s corner, where Papa Kilbride swigged at a flask of triple-X; a black eyepatch gave him the look of a landlocked, hillbilly pirate. He seemed the sort of father who might force his mentally defective son into a fight, and Tommy had been considering this very possibility when Caleb Kilbride came forward and popped him in the face.

The blinding sting in Tommy’s eyes told him that Kilbride’s work-gloves were soaked in caustic, weed killer most likely, but it was too late for complaining and besides, there was no ref to hear his grievance. Kilbride pressed in, bashing Tommy about the head and arms; the ridge runner’s breath was warm in Tommy’s ears, the excited exhale of his lungs like hickory wood cracking.

“Circle out of there!” his brother called as the crowd hooted and catcalled.

Kilbride let go with a flurry of haymakers, thudding them into the dense muscling of Tommy’s arms and shoulders. By then the canaries had flitted from Tommy’s head and he was able to step inside one of Kilbride’s looping punches, set his shoulders, and hook to the kidneys. Kilbride’s breath escaped in a gust: a sweet pablum-y smell.

He recovered enough to smash a fist into Tommy’s forehead. The shot lacked gas and Tommy weathered it easily, but Kilbride followed up with another in the same spot, planting his feet and dropping his fist like a guillotine blade. The blow landed with the sound of an ax chopping into wet wood and split the skin over Tommy’s left eye along the socket ridge; he felt the buzzing X-ray contour of bone beneath his skin.

He dropped to one knee and Kilbride hit him going down, an uppercut fired straight from the hip that flattened Tommy’s lips against his teeth. He went down with the taste of blood and Killex on his tongue. The bell rang but Kilbride kept slugging until Manning dragged him off.

Reuben helped his brother to the corner. The railbirds hubbubed and pumped their fists. Fritzie Zivic sucked a toothpick beside the wheelchair-bound fogy who looked either comatose or dead save his eyes, which were riveted on the ring above the green plastic edge of his oxygen mask.

Reuben jammed a hand down Tommy’s trunks and splashed ice water on his groin. “What’s the matter? He’s wide open.”

“Something’s wrong with him. He’s not all there upstairs.”

Reuben cracked the seal on a vial of adrenaline 1:1000 and dipped a Q-Tip. He jammed it into the wound above Tommy’s eye, down through the layers of meat, pinching the flaps of skin over the cotton tip.

“How many of these punch-drunk tomato cans do you figure are all there?”

“No, I mean… slow.” Tommy rinsed water around his mouth and spat. “His breath smells like a baby’s.”

Reuben glanced at the opposite corner. Kilbride was taking pulls from a flask while Papa massaged his shoulders.

“You socked him, all right,” Papa crowed. “The ole Missouri soup-bone!”

Reuben smeared Vaseline over the burns left by Kilbride’s gloves. “Slow or not, I couldn’t help but notice that kid’s only too happy to hit you.”

Two bungling men in their mid-twenties, Reuben and Tom Tully’s combined knowledge of child rearing could have fit on the head of a pin. To spare infant Robbie the indignity of newsprint diapers and herself the expense of a nanny, Kate’s mother had come up with a solution. Weekday mornings she dropped her daughter off with Tom, who cared for Kate and Robbie until Reuben arrived home from his bakery shift; Tommy then set off for the loading docks and Reuben looked after the kids until Ellen returned from the floral shop.

The five of them knit into an odd, but oddly workable, unit. The sight of Ellen Paulson flanked by lumbering Tom Tully and Reuben in his peaked fedora became a familiar one: at the park, in the supermarket aisle, pushing prams up Niagara Street. Tommy and Reuben often took Robbie to Loughran’s Park on their own; those newly arrived to the neighborhood had been overheard remarking upon the raffish homosexual couple and their adopted Serbian baby. Tommy made a joke of this perception at his prudish brother’s expense: he’d grab Reuben’s hand at inappropriate times, or rub his shoulder with the tender fondness of a lover. “So help me god” Reuben would seethe.

Kate and Rob had grown up almost as brother and sister; for the most part, they treated each other with the brusque affection of siblings. But lately Rob had been reminding himself that she was not, in point of fact, his birth sister.

“You’re hopeless,” she said when Rob told her his haiku began with the line My toenail is split. “Of all the poetic topics in our vast universe, you settle on the most revolting feature of the human body.”

“You’re forgetting something,” he said. “The duodenum.”

They were covering anatomy in biology class; everyone agreed the duodenum was one ugly organ. “Fine, second most revolting. Come on — what sort of things excite you?”

Like a lot of guys his age, Rob twigged on stories tinged with a note of morbid irony — like the newspaper article about a frozen ball of shit that was accidentally discharged from the hull of a Swiss Air flight from Geneva to New York; the pinky-brown boulder had rocketed into a house in Rochester, crushing its owner, who happened to be relieving himself at that very moment.

“Frozen balls of turd?” Kate said, after he’d been foolish enough to tell her. She put the base of her palm of the flat of her forehead and held it there for several seconds. “Roll over, Basho.”

“Then give me guidance, O Poetic Spirit.”

“Look around you. And a bit farther than your toenail.”

“Busted syringes on the basketball court at Loughren’s?” he said, after brief consideration. “The god-awful stench from the rubber plant as you cross the bridge over the polluted river, before you hit the burned-down strip mall and pass into factory outlet wasteland? Is that poetry?”

“Probably,” Kate said, “to some people. But why concentrate on that? How about something you know a lot about? How about boxing?”

“No,” muttered Rob. “Not boxing.”

Kate was pleased to hear this. They sat for a while in silence, then Rob stood up and tapped the windowpane. “How about that?”

“What, Mr. Cryptic — the curtains?”

“The view. The maple tree, the fence, the sky. I’ve grown up, so my perspective has changed. But tree, fence, sky. Those have always stayed the same.”

Kate clapped her hands. “Grab a pen, son — strike while the iron is hot!”

When he sat down with a pen she plucked it from his grip. She took Rob’s hand, flipped it so his palm showed, and pressed it flat to the table. She licked the pen tip and touched it to a big blue vein where his wrist met the meat of his palm. “So — how does that make you feel?”

A trapdoor opened in Rob’s head, dumping endorphins into his brainpan; it felt like getting hit in a sparring session, his pain centers bombed with peptides. No pain now, only the pressure of Kate’s fingers on his hand. A surge of power flooded him, the kind that made him a terror in the ring, but here, now, he had no idea where to go with it.

“How about…” He flushed; his eyeballs must be bulging like grapefruits. Why? She was only touching his hand. “… The view out of my kitchen window—”

Her fingertip tapped beats on his wrist like a second heartbeat. “The view out of my… okay, that’s your first line… kit-chen window. Three more syllables.”

“Remains the same… no, is the same…”

She wrote across his palm in smooth cursive. “… Is the same… one more line. Five beats.”

“… since I…”

“… since I…”

“… was a child — no, boy.”

She contemplated the words spread across his palm. “Simple, but I like it.”

Looking at her, he thought of a night months ago. He’d stopped by on his way home from the club and she’d been on the porch — waiting for him, or so he’d felt for a moment. She stepped into light thrown by the porch bulb and the scent of her — vanilla, remarkable only in that he’d never known her to smell this way — fell through the light, melding and bonding so that for Rob the light itself smelled of her.

Kate flipped Rob’s other palm over and, with quick strokes, wrote her own haiku.

When the bell rang to start the second round Caleb Kilbride tear-assed across the ring windmilling his fists. Tommy got on his bicycle and circled away, taking a few harmless shots to the arms and brisket. Kilbride was in no kind of shape: greasy sweat shone under his eyes and where his nose met the rest of his face. The kid was used to fighting scratch-ass hill people who folded at the sight of those flatiron fists.

Tommy led Kilbride around the ring, absorbing the young man’s lunging blows on hip and elbow. Taking him into the deep waters, any boxing aficionado would’ve known. Gonna drown him.

Kilbride threw a sloppy hook and when Tommy ducked he saw the ridge of Kilbride’s wide-open torso. After a moment’s hesitation Tommy lashed out with his left, banging Kilbride’s liver. The bigger man bent forward at the hip; ropes of snot jetted from his nose.

Tommy grabbed Kilbride by the scruff of the neck — the hairs back there were coarse as hog bristles — and, jerking his skull forward, smashed a fist into his face. Something gave under his knuckles with a dim splintering and Tommy saw a shard of bone poking through the skin below Kilbride’s right eye.

Kilbride struck out instinctively, a bone-cutting shot that sheared off Tommy’s jaw. Tommy belted Kilbride’s left ear, fattening it instantly. They fell into a clumsy embrace, foreheads touching, arms tangled.

“Go down, kid,” Tommy whispered. “No shame in it. You’re one tough hombre.”

Kilbride only grunted. Blood sprayed from his fractured cheekbone into one eye but the other one held Tommy in its gaze with the belligerence of a petting zoo goat.

Kilbride pushed off and hit Tommy with a left, following up with a right. Tommy held his hands at his waist, not bothering to cover up, and the shots glanced off the crown of his skull, reopening the cut above his eye. Kilbride threw another weak left and Tommy swatted his fist out of the air and came over the top with a right hook that slammed the side of Kilbride’s head and the ridge runner’s swollen ear exploded, the pressure of compressed blood splitting it off the side of his head. Hanging by its lobe on a rope of skin, it looked like a crushed baby mouse.

Kilbride crumpled to his knees, cradling the side of his head. Tommy stared in horror: it was the worst damage he’d ever inflicted upon another human being. It was as though Kilbride were made not of flesh and bone but of weaker substances that broke and tore and bled at the barest provocation.

Tommy threw a helpless glance at his brother. Reuben had already packed the valise and now tossed the towel. “It’s over,” he signaled to Manning. “We’re quit.”

The crowd booed lustily. Beer cans and flaming matchbooks pelted the ring.

“We better hightail it.” Reuben shielded his brother’s head from the flames that rained down. “These crazies are bound to riot.”

On the way out Tommy stopped before Papa Kilbride, who was weaving drunk and hadn’t yet attended to his stricken son. His eyepatch had slipped down around his neck; he stared at the brothers with a pair of boozy but working eyes.

“Your boy’s feebleminded and we both know it.” With his face veiled in blood, Tommy’s eyes were very wide, very white. “If I catch you running him out here again, you and me will have business.”

“Goddamn butcher shop,” Reuben said once they were clear of the barn. “Look at you carved right to hell.”

“I’m fine. But the kid—”

“Some are made of flimsier stuff. The kid won’t win any beauty contests, but skin heals.”

Reuben grabbed a low-hanging branch and pulled it aside, allowing his brother to walk past before letting it whip back. “You’re bleeding something fierce. Get you cleaned up.”

He guided Tommy to a fence post and hung his valise on a point of barbed wire. With a clean towel he wiped the blood from Tommy’s face. His brow was so sodden with adrenaline Reuben could only patch it with a butterfly bandage. He set two fingers under Tommy’s jaw to ease the chatter of his teeth.

“What about your fight purse?”

“Manning knows to give it to Fr-Fruh-Fitzie Z-Zuh-Zivic. I owe him.”

A spotted cow ambled over and jammed its blunt, ski-boot-shaped head through the wire. It snuffled loudly, rooting about under Tommy’s armpit.

“Shoo,” Reuben told it.

“L-luh-le-leave it be,” Tommy said. “Its breath is nice and wuh-warm. You know, it was the st-struh-strangest thing.” Shivering, he spoke with his eyes shut. “I’m lo-lo-locked up with that kuh-kid, his f-f-face pissing bl-bluh-blood, look into his eyes and see no way is he quitting. I could’ve beat on that poor boy till there was nuh-nuh-othing left that was really hu-hyu-human and he’d’ve kept getting uh-uh-up. So I had to quit.”

“I would’ve been disappointed if you hadn’t.”

The cow chewed at the seat of Tommy’s pants, pulling the material so taut Reuben saw the shape of his brother’s crotch.

“Stupid animal’s gonna chew your pants off.”

Tommy grinned. “This is the most a-ah-action I’ve got in a l-luh-long time.”

Reuben took his brother’s head between his palms and considered it at a few angles. “Border guards ask, we’ll say you fell down a set of icy steps.”

Kate had bundled herself up and headed for home by the time Rob’s father called.

“Come on down and get a slice — pecan’s just out of the oven.”

The sky coldly pristine, spokes of lightning flashing across a bank of night clouds far off to the west. Through lit windows of the houses strung down the block Rob saw familiar silhouettes watching television, preparing for night shifts, arguing, eating alone. The nature of his neighborhood was such that he knew why that woman was eating alone, the job that man was preparing for, the root of that couple’s argument. To live on these streets was to know everything about those you lived among, to see inside their homes and lives and be seen in turn. Rob knew it was a big world from the books he’d read and movies he’d watched, but his own world often felt infinitesimally small: a limited orbit of opportunities and events, faces and places, friends and enemies. And the specific gravities of obligation and fear and love could keep you locked in that orbit your whole life.

Macy’s was an institution. The original owner, Jefferson Macy, was a pipefitter who’d come from Altoona to labor on the bridge crews; he’d sunk down to the Niagara River in a diving bell to set foundation anchors in the stony riverbed. He’d received hazard wages: at shift’s end sometimes nothing but an empty helmet was retrieved from the deeps, the diver’s waterlogged body found dashed on the rocks beyond the whirlpool rapids. Most workers — Irish, Polish, Mi’kmaq, and Iroquois — bunked in clapboard shacks or tents pitched on Goat Island. On cold nights the tents frequently collapsed, weighed down by frozen spray off Bridal Veil Falls. Each week Macy’s wife crossed the river by punt boat with pies for the laborers. Macy insisted his wife charge them for ingredients, if not her sweat and toil. By 1942 they’d saved enough to open a shopfront on Elmwood.

Reuben and Tommy sat in a corner booth. Tommy wasn’t too bad off, considering. A few gloveburns, that old scar over his eye bust open again.

“You win?”

His uncle sipped black coffee and shrugged. “Some you win, some you lose.”

Reuben clarified: “He lost.”

The waitress freshened their cups. “Can I get you, Robbie?”

“Give him orange soda, Ellie,” Reuben said. “Coffee’ll stunt his growth.”

“Old wives’ tale,” she said. “Your brother’s been drinking it since he was in short pants and look at the size of him.” She appraised Tommy’s face. “Been in a scrape tonight?”

“Ran into a door, my darling.”

“You’re the only man I know runs into doors with a nasty habit of swinging back. Robbie, you steer clear of the doorways your uncle frequents.”

Pecan pie for Reuben, pumpkin for Rob, cherry for Tommy. The slices were a good two inches thick, topped with a big ball of vanilla ice cream.

“What’s that?” Reuben gestured with his chin to the words on Rob’s palm. “Looks like a girl’s writing.”

Tommy brightened. “Kate must’ve been over.”

Reuben pinned Rob’s palm to the table and read Kate’s haiku: “Though there will always / Be those things out of your reach / Never stop reaching.” He nodded. “I like it. Yours?”

“It’s Kate’s.”

“She’s a clever gal,” said Tommy. “Pretty as her mother, too.”

“Get off it,” Rob said.

“What’s the matter,” said Reuben. “Not like she’s your sister.”

“I know!” Rob nearly shouted. The brothers chuckled at this.

They sat with stuffed bellies. Ellie came around with a bag of frozen strawberries for Tommy’s lumps.

“You see that place up there?” Tommy pointed across the street, to the lit windows of an otherwise darkened building. “I ever tell you the story?”

Neither Reuben nor Rob wished to see the puzzled look come over Tommy’s face should they say he’d told it a dozen times, so both shook their heads.

“That’s the LOH on the third story — Loyal Order of Hibernians. You need a card to get in, even though it’s just card tables and a wet bar. One time I was working the door and this guy showed up, didn’t have no card, so I tell him to bug off. Come on, let me in, I’m Irish, the guy says. I tell him no card, no dice, and when he got pushy I threw him down the steps.”

Tommy mopped crumbs off his plate with his thumb. “Well, pretty soon come that knock again. It’s the same guy, looking a bit worse for wear. Come on, let me in, I’m Irish. Well, he gets a bit flagrant so I got to throw him down the steps again. A few minutes later another knock. The same guy. Well I stepped aside and let him in, saying, You’re right. You must be Irish!”

Tommy threw back his head and roared. Rob and Reuben joined in — not for the punch line, which they’d heard a thousand times, but simply for the telling.