Craig Davidson - The Fighter

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 — b ashed 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 — e t 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.