Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

The deepest blues, they say, are the ones you don’t feel, the ones that numb you, so that your old best self simply fades away, and you are left staring out the window, trying to remember the last time you leaped with joy, laughed until you cried, stood in the rain and just let it pour down. Maybe I’d reached that point when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night. And yet, I wasn’t so dead that the sight of him didn’t spark something, didn’t remind me of the old days, and of how much I missed them.

And the part I missed the most was the fights.

I’ll tell you why. Because all the old saws about boxing are true. There’s no room for ambiguity in the ring. You know who the winners and the losers are. There, in that little square, under the big light, two guys put it all on the line, face each other without lawyers or tax attorneys. They stare at each other without speaking. They are stripped even of words. Boxers don’t call each other names. They don’t wave their arms and posture. They don’t yell, Hey, fuck you, you fucking bastard, you want a piece of me, huh, well, come and get it, you fucking douche bag... while they’re walking backward, glancing around, praying for a cop. Boxers don’t file suit or turn you in to the IRS. They don’t subscribe to dirty magazines in your name and have them mailed to your house. They don’t plant rumors about drugs or how maybe you’re a queer. Boxers don’t come at you from behind some piece of paper a guy you never saw before hands you as you step out your front door. Boxers don’t drop letters in the suggestion box or complain to your boss that you don’t have what it takes anymore. Boxers don’t approach at a slant. Boxers stride to the center of the ring, raise their hands, and fight. That was what I’d always loved about them, that they were nothing like the rest of us.

Even so, I hadn’t seen a match in the Garden or anywhere else for more than twenty years when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night, and the whole feel of the ring, the noise and the smoke, had by then drifted into a place within me I didn’t visit anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a boxing story in the paper, or so much as glanced at Ring magazine. As a matter of fact, that very night I’d plucked a Newsweek from the rack instead, then tramped onto the bus, planning to pick up a little moo shoo pork when I got off, then trudge home to read about this East Hampton obstetrician who’d given some Jamaican bedpan jockey five large to shoot his wife.

Then, out of the blue, I saw him.

He was crouched in the back corner of the bus, his face turned toward the glass, peering out at the street, though he didn’t seem to be watching anything in particular. His eyes had that look you’ve all seen. Nothing going in, precious little coming out. A dead, dull stare.

His clothes were so shabby that if I hadn’t noticed the profile, the gnarled ear and flattened nose, I might have mistaken him for a pile of dirty laundry. Everything was torn, ragged, the scarf around his neck riddled with holes, bare fingers nosing through dark blue gloves. It was the kind of shabbiness that carries its own odor, and which urban pioneers inevitably associate with madness and loose bowels. Which, on this bus packed to the gills, explained the empty seat beside him.

I might have kept my distance, might have stared at him a while, remembering my old days by remembering his, then discreetly stepped off the bus at my appointed stop, put the whole business out of my mind until I returned to work the next morning, met Max Groom in the men’s room and said, Hey, Max, guess who was on the Crosstown 42 last night? Who? Vinnie Teague, that’s who, Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock. Mother of God, he’s still alive? Well, in a manner of speaking.

And that might have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t.

You know why? Because, in a manner of speaking, I was also still alive. And what do the living owe each other, tell me this, if not to hear each other’s stories?

So I muscled through the crowd, elbowing my way toward the rear of the bus while Irish Vinnie continued to stare out into the fruitless night, his face even more motionless when looked upon close up, his eyes as still as billiard balls in an empty parlor.

The good news? No smell. Which left the question, Is he nuts?

Language is a sure test for sanity, so I said, “Hey there.”

Nothing.

“Hey.” This time with a small tap of my finger on his ragged shoulder.

Still nothing, so I upped the ante. “Vinnie?”

A small light came on in the dull, dead eyes.

“Vinnie Teague?”

Something flickered, but distantly, cheerlessly, like a candle in an orphanage window.

“It’s you, right? Vinnie Teague?”

The pile of laundry rustled, and the dull, dead eyes drifted over to me.

Silence, but a faint nod.

“I’m Jack Burke. You wouldn’t know me, but years ago, I saw you at the Garden.”

The truth was I’d seen Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, quite a few times at the Garden. I’d seen him first as a light heavyweight, then later, after he’d bulked up just enough to tip the scales as a heavyweight contender.

He’d had the pug face common to boxers who’d come up through the old neighborhood, first learned that they could fight not in gyms or after-school programs, but in barrooms and on factory floors, the blood of their first opponents soaked up by sawdust or metal shavings in places where no one got saved by the bell.

It was Spiro Melinas who’d first spotted Vinnie. Spiro had been an old man even then, bent in frame and squirrelly upstairs, a guy who dipped the tip of his cigar in tomato juice, which, he said, made smoking more healthy. Spiro had been a low-watt fight manager who booked tumbledown arenas along the Jersey Shore, or among the rusting industrial towns of Connecticut and Massachusetts. He’d lurked among the fishing boats that rocked in the oily marinas of Fall River and New Bedford, and had even been spotted as far north as coastal Maine, checking out the fish gutters who manned the canneries there, looking for speed and muscle among the flashing knives.

But Spiro hadn’t found Vinnie Teague in any of the places that he’d looked for potential boxers during the preceding five years. Not in Maine or Connecticut or New Jersey. Not in a barroom or a shoe factory or a freezing cold New England fishery. No, Vinnie had been right under Spiro’s nose the whole time, a shadowy denizen of darkest Brooklyn who, at the moment of discovery, had just tossed a guy out the swinging doors of a women’s shelter on Flatbush. The guy had gotten up, rushed Vinnie, then found himself staggering backward under a blinding hail of lefts and rights, his head popping back with each one, face turning to pulp one lightning fast blow at a time, though it had been clear to Spiro that during all that terrible rain of blows, Vinnie Teague had been holding back. “Jesus Christ, if Vinnie hadn’t been pulling his punches,” he later told Salmon Weiss, “he’d have killed the poor bastard with two rights and a left.” A shake of the head, Spiro’s eyes fixed in dark wonderment. “I’m telling you, Salmon, just slapping him around, you might say Vinnie was, and the other guy looked like he’d done twelve rounds with a metal fan.”

Needless to say, it was love at first sight.

And so for the next two years Spiro mothered Vinnie as if he were a baby chick. He paid the rent and bought the groceries so Vinnie could quit his prestigious job as a bouncer at the women’s shelter. He paid for Vinnie’s training, Vinnie’s clothes, Vinnie’s birthday cake from Carvel, an occasion at which I was present, my first view of Irish Vinnie Teague. He was chewing a slab of ice cream cake while Spiro looked on, beaming. Snap. Flash. Page 8 over the lead line, UP-AND-COMER BREAKS TRAINING ON HIS 24TH.