The Fighter (17 page)

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.

Paul's head hit
the canvas and things went dark and in the blackness he saw a chicken
hatchery. The walls were ribbed sheet metal stretching into the dark, a
cavernous place like a warehouse thick with an ammonia smell. A pool of light
hung above a hatching pen as though a spotlight were trained on it, only there
was no spotlight. The pen was constructed of small-gauge wire and filled with
yellow chicks clustered at a tube spitting out cracked corn which they fought
over with stunning viciousness. He saw a hen in there, too, a big sleek mama
clucking and ruffling her pinfeathers as if agitated. She shifted her weight
and a tiny beak poked out from under her dirty feathers, a beak opening and
closing like a fish dying on a beach. A wing popped out under the hen, a wing
without feathers flapping feebly, bone ends snagging the wire. The hen tucked
the wing gently beneath her and kept on clucking and shifting, and finally she
shook her feathers out and stepped off the pitiful thing she'd been sheltering.
The chick was withered and milk-pale and one of its claws, crushed close to its
body, had torn a ragged hole in its side. One eye was a swollen mound trickling
pus and the other had ruptured from being sat on, a shiny ball of blood. Its
wings were smeared in shit and the print of the wire was pushed into its flesh,
a deep hexagonal grid over one side of its body. Paul felt shocked and terrified
and all shredded up inside as the thing thrashed, its beak opening and closing
but not a sound coming out. The other chicks saw it lying there. They clustered
around as it struggled to stand but its legs were withered and its wings
nothing more than bones and it flopped on its side, breathing rapidly. The
chicks bobbed up and down and shook their wings all out and stared on with
dusky wet eyes. One pecked the sick one's head and opened a hole there. One
pecked at an eye and broke it. Then they were pecking fanatically and peeping
with excitement while the mama watched without emotion and in the midst of the
fluttering yellow bodies Paul saw that beak opening and closing, opening and
closing—