145th Street (3 page)

The cops took Mary downtown to make some kind of statement and I went on down to the street. I knew what I wanted was to hear Pedro and Willie and Tommy and all the other brothers and sisters on the block talking about that kid. I wanted them to say how bad they felt about it and what a shame it was the way life could slip away so easily in Harlem, in our community, on our street. Maybe when we got together and let our pain out it would rise up and reach someplace where the kid could feel it, too. I don’t know if any of that made sense, but it was how I felt.

“Is it true what they said about shooting a dog?” Willie asked.

He took my arm and looked into my face. I didn’t have to tell him there was more to it.

B
illy Giles told his wife that he was just going to the gym to work out. If he’d told her the truth, that he was going to fight again, he knew she would have cried.

“You’re not going to eat anything?” she asked.

“No, I’m not hungry,” he said. He had seen her making supper, and had known that he wouldn’t be eating anything.

“Don’t stay out too late,” she said. She reached up and touched the tip of his nose with her index finger. “I’ll think you’re out with another girl.”

“I’ll bring you some ice cream,” he said, framed in the doorway of their apartment. From where he stood he could see into the bedroom where the baby’s crib stood against the wall.

He closed the door, waited for a moment for the click that said that Johnnie Mae had locked it, and started down the stairs. He felt a little sick to his stomach. There had been a time, not too long ago, when he would have been excited to be boxing. Somewhere between that time, between sixteen and nineteen, the nervousness had turned to a kind of nausea that he would dream about in the early hours of the morning.

Chops and Tommy were on the stoop talking to some girl he didn’t know. The air was cool and he sucked it in between his clenched teeth. The smell of fried fish was heavy in the air and he wished that he had eaten something.

He started the long walk up the hill toward the Eighth Avenue subway. Win or lose he’d take a cab home. Now he walked slowly. There wasn’t any hurry. It was seven and he wasn’t scheduled to fight until ten. It would take less than a half hour to get to the Bronx gym and minutes to get into his gear.

On the corner a guy played a saxophone, the sound sliding into the darkness and echoing off the bricks. It was too cold to be out playing a saxophone but Billy guessed the guy was dealing with demons that needed to hear a tune. You did what you had to do, he thought.

The program hadn’t started when he reached the gym and made his way to the fighters’ entrance. There was a bunch of girls hanging around on the first floor, and Manny was in the middle of them. Manny flashed him the high sign and he flashed back. He went upstairs where Al Gaines was listening to the radio.

“Get out your clothes and I’ll tape your hands,” Al said. “Manny talk to you?”

“No,” Billy answered.

“He said he might want to put you on early,” Al said.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” Billy said. He took off his street clothes as Al tried to find a better station on the little radio he had been bringing to the gym since Billy knew him. Billy put on his groin protector and slipped into the green trunks he always wore.

Al kept up a steady stream of talk as he taped Billy’s hands. Billy grunted his answers and tried to think about the first time he had fought for Manny. Manny had worked his corner that night, had kept yelling at him to “show strong,” and he had won. After that first professional fight he remembered walking out into the night, his face still stinging from the blows he had received, and feeling taller than he had ever thought possible.

Al finished with the taping and Billy shadowboxed in front of a mirror. Other boxers were in the locker room; some were changing clothes, others listened to music. A young, awkward kid was bragging about how he was going to start the night off by knocking out his opponent. Billy knew he was afraid.

The room was too small for all the nervous sweat, for all the odors, for all the heat that the bodies generated. Now he sat on the end of the rubdown table, smoothing the edge of the tape with his forefinger as if it were necessary, listening for sounds that would tell him the fight in progress was over and that it was his turn. He had been fighting preliminaries for nearly three years and knew his limitations and abilities. He would win or lose tonight—it made little difference. Either way he’d collect the one hundred and forty-five dollars for the bout. If he put up a good show there’d be another preliminary bout for him when a spot became available. He could pay some bills and still have enough to take Johnnie Mae to a movie.

A fighter he knew, Jimmy Walls, was warming up in the corner. Billy watched him for a while; his black skin already glistened with crystals of sweat as he threw deft combinations against an imaginary, helpless opponent. It was an odd thing with Billy: He could never imagine, even when he shadowboxed, an opponent he could easily beat.

Billy heard a strong buzz from the crowd outside and knew that something had happened. Probably a knockdown or a knockout, he thought; maybe the brash kid had made good his boast. Billy’s stomach tightened and he took deep breaths. He’d been knocked down in the last fight but had won on points. And after, when he’d gone home, Johnnie Mae made tea for him and offered it as he sat wearily in the faded, overstuffed chair they had somehow inherited from his married sister. When he reached for the tea he missed the cup, and Johnnie Mae had panicked.

“What’s wrong, baby, what’s wrong? You hurt?” She put the cup down on the table, tipping it over, ignoring it in her concern.

“Nothing wrong. I’m just tired,” Billy said as the moment of dizziness passed over.

“You’re not fighting anymore, Billy, you hear that? You’re not fighting anymore, that’s final now!” Johnnie Mae stood twisting a dish towel, letting her voice rise almost to a scream.

“You want to wake the baby?” he countered.

Billy knew that the money he was able to pick up in the ring meant more to him than to his wife. Being a man meant saying yes when your woman asked you for something. She didn’t understand that, at least she didn’t understand how it made him feel when he heard her making plans and dreaming about things that cost money he didn’t have.

It was good, too, to complain about not being made of money but then to reach down and give her enough cash to have her hair done or get something for the baby. Later, when the baby was a little older, maybe they’d get a baby-sitter and Johnnie Mae could work for a while until they were doing better. Then he would give up fighting.

The door to the dressing room opened, startling Billy. The two fighters came in. It was easy to tell who the winner was.

“Hey, Billy, what’s happening?”

The winner. The kid who had bragged about getting a knockout skulked to a corner, slipped out of his trunks, and fumbled with the lacing on his groin protector, the grease still on his eyebrow where he’d been cut. The fighter who had beaten him said he’d put up a good fight, said it loud enough for the loser to hear, as they always did. Billy felt sorry for the loser, knowing that at that moment he felt beaten and ashamed and hated the boxing he’d hoped would bring him to glory.

“Let’s go, Billy.” Manny Givens managed about six fighters, all of them fighting in minor fights, only a few of them still hoping for the big time. “Guy’s a comer, kid, watch him.”

Billy started the trek to the ring. This was the only good part of the fight—the crowd looking at him, wondering what he was made of, judging him by his swagger, by the expression on his face, his show of confidence. Unconsciously he tried to impress them as he walked to the ring, as if they were his adversary and not the other fighter. Manny guided him with pats on the back. Then he was in the ring. The other fighter was already there, a young Puerto Rican, close to his age.

Manny had said the guy was a comer. In Manny’s ring talk it meant that the guy was being groomed, that he had been carefully brought along and given only fights he was expected to win. In the office, when they planned the fights and decided what the money would be, the Puerto Rican would be considered the “fighter” and Billy would be the “opponent.” The Puerto Rican’s name was Danny Vegas.

“Okay, boys, you know the game, keep up the pace.” The referee had finished the introductions and called them to the center of the room. The heat was unbearable. “I don’t want to have to tell you to fight. Give the folks a show. Touch gloves now.”

Billy touched gloves and went back to his corner.

“If you get him,” Manny said, rubbing Billy’s shoulders, “there could be some breaks involved.” He didn’t sound convincing.

The bell rang.

Billy came to the center of the ring and snapped a glove out. It was a quick move and hit Vegas on the forehead. Crouching low for a minute and then quickly straightening, he faked Vegas out of position and banged his hands to the wiry body. They backed off and circled each other cautiously. Billy told himself that he would win, that he could take this guy. He threw jabs, feeling Vegas out, checking out his moves. Vegas, for his part, seemed not too anxious to mix it up with him and they spent most of the first round fighting at a distance.

Sitting in his corner always made Billy think of commercials being played on television between the rounds. His trainer gave him a swig of seltzer, which he spit into the bucket. He’d been shocked, after his first fight, to discover that he was expected to pay for even the seltzer he used between rounds.

In the second round, Billy found out why Manny had called Vegas a comer. They were in close, shoulder to shoulder, and Billy was again throwing punishing hits to the body, hearing Vegas grunt from the force of the blows. Billy could have continued fighting on the inside while he had the advantage but elected instead to back away for more power. He had, for a moment, an image of himself, fists flashing, rendering Vegas helpless against the ropes. Billy backed off, feinted once, jabbed, feinted again, twice, disregarded completely a right thrown by Vegas as he prepared a series of blows to the body and head.

He didn’t see the blow coming and it stunned him. There was a sudden lack of focus and a scary awareness of his knees. Billy pushed off and bobbed and weaved. Vegas didn’t know that he’d been hurt, and when Billy managed to throw a light jab it was Vegas who grabbed and held on. Then they were apart again and Vegas was snapping his glove in Billy’s face. Billy thought he was cut.

The glare from the overhead lights gave Vegas’s face an unreal appearance. Billy felt almost as if he were fighting a thing rather than a man. Vegas would try a move and Billy would know what he was going to do, but he couldn’t stop it. He could see the confidence in his opponent’s face.

Now he was against the ropes with Vegas punching him in the body, jolting nausea into him in sharply swelling waves. Billy was having trouble keeping his mouthpiece in. For a moment Vegas dropped his hands and with a frenzy Billy lashed out at him, more in fury than with any plan.

There were noises from the crowd as Vegas backed across the ring. Billy was surprised to find himself following, throwing punches. They were apart again, circling one another, when suddenly Vegas turned and went to his corner. Billy hadn’t heard the bell ring but walked back to his own corner.

“Maybe you could go to school. Take IBM or something.” Johnnie Mae sat on the bed, pushing the baby back into the middle whenever she crawled near the edge. “It would be hard but you have to make sacrifices.”

Some people could do it. When Billy thought of them he always pictured young guys with glasses and attaché cases sitting primly on the A train and thumbing through a thick book. He had told Johnnie Mae that he’d finished high school, but he really hadn’t.

And now that she had made such a big deal of it, he couldn’t tell her. School. Billy remembered standing in the back of the room at Junior High School 271, not being allowed to sit down until he had brought his mother in to see the teacher.

“What are you wasting your time for?” the guidance counselor had asked him. “You think it’s going to be easy out there?”

That was the last day Billy had gone to school. Not that his mother wouldn’t have taken the day off from the button factory where she worked to come down, but because it seemed true, that he was wasting his time. Learning for him had always been hard, like catching water in his bare hands, it would all slip through, all be so near and yet somehow not useful to him. If only they’d talked about things that he knew something about.

“The rounds are even,” Manny said. “Start fast.”

Vegas hadn’t been expecting it and was momentarily stunned when Billy threw a high right to his head.