Russell Andrews: Icarus

"So are you ever going to tell me?" she asked as they got closer to the meat district. "Or are you just going to keep telling me stories about whatever it is without ever telling me what it is?"

He took a deep breath and nodded. There was no point in putting it off any longer, so he just started right in.

In 1948, when Dominick Bertolini was twenty-two years old, he was two fights away from getting into the ring with the lightweight champion of the world. Dom's record was 34 and 0, with twenty-eight of those wins by knockout. Of those twenty-eight, nineteen came within the first five rounds. Three of the men he fought never stepped into a ring again. One of them lost his hearing in one ear, so ferociously was he pummeled. The other two escaped whole, but their spirits were as broken as their ruptured spleen or lacerated kidney. Dominick was a brutal club fighter, not an elegant one, a favorite of bloodthirsty fans and cynical newspaper columnists for his clumsy and unadulterated savagery.

Dom did not like hearing himself referred to as a savage, although he did nothing to correct the image, at least publicly; his managers said it put people in the seats, which also put money in Dom's pocket. And since Dom hated very few things in life more than fighting and was doing this for one reason and one reason only – money – he had no desire to see those seats empty. If he had to use a word to describe himself, it would have been "unrelenting." That indeed is what he was and what he had been since a small boy.

He was certainly no stranger to violence or even to savagery. Fear and brutality were fairly common neighbors on the west side of mid-Manhattan, the neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen, in the 1930s. They often invaded the walls of Dom's own apartment, in the form of his father. As near as young Dominick could figure out, Anthony Bertolini had absolutely no redeeming qualities. He was crude and loud and mean and he always smelled like an unpleasant combination of sweat, alcohol, and whatever harsh odors clung to him from the street. Tobacco. Dirt. Garbage. Sometimes even blood.

Sometimes it was Dom's blood.

Mostly it was his mother's.

On his eleventh birthday, after a particularly painful beating administered to both mother and son, Dominick realized he had to make a choice. It was clear to him that there were only two possibilities. He could remain quiet, stay frozen in his painful, silent world and keep on taking his father's punishment. Or, when he was ready, when he was able, he could fight back and win and put a stop to the misery.

By the time he was fourteen years old, he had become a fearfully tough child. There was no boy in his school, no matter how old, he could not take in a battle. It wasn't just that he was so strong or even so unrelenting, although he was both. It was that he didn't mind getting hit. He didn't fear the pain. He was used to it.

Three days before his fifteenth birthday, his father erupted at the dinner table. With almost no provocation – his mother had coughed nervously and Anthony took it as a deliberate slight – he lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked Rosemary Bertolini off her chair. He then began to slowly roll up his sleeves, got up from the table, and with a twisted sneer announced that he was going to beat his wife within an inch of her life. That's when Dominick decided the time had come. He stood up from his chair and without raising his voice said, "No, you're not."

His father looked at him incredulously. "Say that again?" he asked. "I must be goin' deaf."

"You're going to leave her alone."

"Fine." The word was stretched out into several syllables. Anthony finished rolling up his sleeves, then looked down at his wife, who was still on the floor but was now pleading for him to leave their son alone. He smiled at her, the first time Dominick had ever seen him smile at her, then he stepped around the dining table and moved toward Dom.

Dominick Bertolini was ready. He wasn't nervous. His voice hadn't quivered. His hands weren't shaking. He'd been preparing for this in his mind since he was a small boy. He wanted it, wanted it now, and as he took his first step toward his father, he knew that he would cherish this moment for the rest of his life.

Cower and die. Or fight and live. He'd made his choice. From now on, things would be different. Things would be better. It was time to win for the first time in his life. Not just win a fight but win a war. Win forever.

Unfortunately, Dominick was too young to have realized there were choices beyond the ones he'd envisioned. Yes, stay silent and suffer was one choice. And fight and win was another.

But so was fight and lose.

Which is what happened that night.

Anthony Bertolini moved slowly and deliberately at first, until he was two short steps away from Dominick. Then he attacked quickly. And viciously. He had palmed his drinking glass, which he now slammed into the side of his son's head. A deep gash opened up over Dominick's eye and blood poured out of the wound as if it were thick paint being dumped out of a can. Without giving him a chance to retaliate, Anthony picked up a chair and brought it down over Dominick's head. The wood splintered and the noise was like that of the sweet spot of a baseball bat meeting a fastball and sending it four hundred feet. Then Anthony's right leg swung back and the hard point of his shoe cracked into Dom's throat. The boy made a sad, gurgling noise, which only seemed to motivate the enraged father. The leg swung back several times and the shoe found the neck again, and then the ribs. The punching and the kicking went on long after Dominick lost consciousness. And then Anthony turned back to his wife.

This time he did not, as promised, beat her to within an inch of her life. He beat her to death.

When Dominick woke up, nearly two days later, he was in the hospital, his mother was buried, and his father was in prison. Anthony spent four years there for murdering his wife. When he got out, he never tried to find or contact his son. Even he understood that he would not survive the next meeting.

It didn't take long for the teenage Dom to find his calling. Within a year he'd had six amateur fights, winning them all easily. He turned pro. Over the next few years, he fought regularly, touring the clubs up and down the East Coast, and won always. At twenty-two, he was ranked number twelve. He would have been higher but no one in the top ten wanted to get in the ring with him. Until his manager came to him and said they'd gotten a fight with the number six contender, Sweet Lenny Sweets. If Dominick won that, he'd get the number one or two. And if he won that, he'd get a chance to fight for the title. He had no doubt that soon he would be champ.

Then, several days before his fight with Sweets, Dora got the word. He was supposed to lose. He wasn't naive and he hadn't been so protected that he didn't understand the ways of the fight game in those days. But he was arrogant and sure of his own toughness and, when he climbed into the ring, he knew one thing and one thing only: he was not going to lose.

He didn't. He knocked Lenny Sweets out in the seventh round.

A week later he was in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Not the one in which he'd grown up; after he'd gotten out of the hospital he never set foot in that apartment again, leaving everything he owned behind, even his clothes. There was a knock at the door; he got up from the kitchen table, opened the door. After that, it all happened very fast.

There were three guys. Fat, strong, slow, but slow didn't matter, the apartment was small, there was no room to move. Two of them held him down. One of them had a butcher's knife. Huge and gleaming.

"You got a good fuckin' right, don't you?" one of them said. "You're pretty proud of that fuckin' right."