David Bezmozgis - Natasha and Other Stories

— Right.

— She thinks you betrayed her. She’s very principled. Anyway, she’ll be safe here.

— That’s one way to look at it.

— I hope you’re not mad. It’s not personal.

— I still have some of your books and maybe few grams of weed.

— That’s cool. Don’t sweat it. Consider them yours.

— What a great deal for me.

— That’s a shitty attitude, Berman. You’re smarter than that.

— I’m a fucking genius.

— Take care of yourself, Berman.

I lingered in front of Rufus’s house after he left and watched the wheelbarrows come and go. I waited for the workmen to bring in the last of the Doric columns and then walked home. In another country, under another code, it would have been my duty to return to Rufus’s with a gun. But in the suburbs, at the end of my sixteenth summer, this was not an option. Instead, I resorted to a form of civilized murder. By the time I reached my house everyone in Rufus’s yard was dead. Rufus, Natasha, my stoner friends. I would never see them again. By the time I got home I had already crafted a new identity. I would switch schools, change my wardrobe, move to another city. Later I would avenge myself with beautiful women, learn martial arts, and cultivate exotic experiences. I saw my future clearly. I had it all planned out. And yet, standing in our backyard, drawn by a strange impulse, I crouched and peered through the window into my basement. I had never seen it from this perspective. I saw what Natasha must have seen every time she came to the house. In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness. It was the end of my subterranean life.

THE PALLIATIVE-CARE DOCTOR, a young Jewish guy in glasses, prodded around my grandmother’s stomach and explained that the swelling wasn’t only a result of fluid. Some of it was disease. Disease had now infiltrated her kidneys and pancreas. He said that it was a very horrible disease, this disease, but everybody in the room — except my grandmother — already knew approximately how horrible it was. My grandmother said tank you to the doctor and also said the word hoff several times. Her English was virtually nonexistent and I didn’t think the doctor’s Yiddish was good enough to understand that the word she kept repeating meant hope.

Outside, in the hall, the doctor explained that it was useless for me to wait around. It could be a month or it could be less, but there was no sense in my canceling my plane ticket. I thanked him and then returned to the living room to watch the second period of the hockey game. In the other room I could hear my mother and aunt lying to my grandmother about what the doctor had said.

The same summer that we were given the diagnosis I had gone to the induction ceremony at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. This is where I was told to check in with Charley Davis, who was recovering from a stroke but still lived independently in his house in San Francisco. Not that anybody knew very much, but if there was anyone who knew anything about Joe Choynski that person would be Charley Davis.

Joe Choynski was being inducted in the old-timers’ category that day. Chrysanthemum Joe, Little Joe, the Professor, the California Terror: he was known as the greatest heavyweight never to win a title by the handful of people who still remembered that he’d ever been around. He was America’s first great fighting Jew. He quoted Shakespeare in his correspondence. He was a friend to Negroes. Coolies on the San Francisco docks taught him to toughen his fists in pickle vats, which was why he never so much as chipped a bone — bare-knuckle or gloved. Legend had it that he also invented the left hook.

From Los Angeles, I called to find out that my grandmother hadn’t had a proper stool in three days and that the enema produced only an insignificant pellet which took her an hour to pass. Afterward, in her exhaustion, she wasn’t able to leave the bedroom until morning. Her dentist called to say that her dentures — which I had dutifully dropped off before leaving town — could not be repaired but needed to be replaced, and my aunt agreed to pay whatever it cost since neither she nor anyone else was prepared to tell my grandmother that she wouldn’t be needing new dentures.

My aunt asked exactly where this God is, especially since my grandfather prays twice a day in synagogue. And my grandmother said that God will help, that the shark cartilage will help, that the naturopathic professor will help, that it just takes more time before the good cells start fighting the bad cells inside there.

Charley Davis lived in South San Francisco not far from 3Com Park. Back when 3Com Park was Candlestick Park, Charley Davis covered the Giants and the fights for the San Francisco Chronicle. His house was half a mile from the highway and set high on a street of identical houses. Charley let me in and asked me to follow him into the living room. He was wearing blue pajamas under a faded brown robe. He dragged his left leg and his left arm hung as rigid as a penguin’s flipper. His house was covered in old fight posters and pictures of guys I recognized and would have traded lives with even though they were already dead. As Charley inched into his armchair and organized his limbs, I concentrated on a framed shot of the Johnson-Jeffries fight.

When he was settled, I sat down on the couch across from him and told him that I was stuck with my Choynski research. I pronounced the name the way he had taught me over the phone: Cohen-ski. He asked me if I figured I could identify Choynski in one of the pictures at the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Choynski had worked Jeffries’s corner for that Great White Hope fight in Reno. After I passed that test we went through our collective Choynski information.

— He was a candy puller.

— Yeah.

— Do you know what that is?

— Not really.

— Me neither.

— He was a blacksmith before he was a candy puller.

— He fought out of the California Club when he met Corbett on the barge.

— When he worked in the candy factory he trained at the Golden Gate Club.

— His father was a publisher. Some Jewish paper.

— He had his own later, Public Opinion. Isadore N. Choynski. He had a bookstore. He graduated from Yale.

— His mother didn’t like him boxing.

— He wore his hair long and got into plenty of fights on the docks.

— He lost those two fights to Goddard in Australia.

— He taught Jack Johnson what he needed to know to become champion when they had spent a month together in a Galveston jail in 1901.

The further we went on, the more we had to restrain ourselves from rushing into each other’s arms for the joy of it. I mean, I almost rushed — Charley wasn’t getting around that well anymore. Don’t look for him in the Boston Marathon, he said.

There really wasn’t that much material on Choynski, and I turned out to know more than Charley. Back then I was the world’s greatest authority on Joseph B. Choynski, and I still didn’t know him at all. I told Charley I didn’t know where else to go, I’d run out of places to look for Choynski and didn’t like to think that I’d never find him.

I didn’t tell him about wanting to know another kind of everything about Choynski. I wanted to follow him as he walked home at night, I wanted to know what he smelled like, to hear the sound of his voice, to know the dimensions of his wife. I wanted to know if the reason he never had kids was because he had taken too many low blows.

— Fighters then were like hobos. Fights were illegal almost everyplace. They just drifted around. There weren’t any of those commissions back then and all those letters they have now — WBO, WBC, IBF, whatever the fuck they are. Look, some places boxers were celebrities, most places they were just trying to make a buck.