The Fighter by Craig Davidson Read Free Book Online

consider the procession of sweaty men who came and went at
all hours of the day, you'd have no idea of its existence.
    Rob
skipped lightly down the littered concrete stairs, walking beneath exposed
joists and sewage pipes padded with strips of unraveling friction tape. The
walls were hung with photos of famous and not-so-famous pugilists: Ali and
Holmes and Liston hung beside unknown warriors Jackson Buff, Chuck "The
Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner, Mushy Callahan, Chief Danny Thunderheart.
    The
place was quiet at this hour of morning: a few groggy boxers shuffled around
the slick concrete floor. Sickles of sunlight poured through the cracked
casement windows, picking up a patina of dust motes suspended in the air.
Heavybags hung like slabs of meat. A black welterweight shadowboxed in the glow
of a single fluorescent tube.
    Rob's
uncle Tommy was getting dressed in the change room.
    A
few years ago, Rob went through a phase where he'd read a ton of hard-boiled
detective novels. Anytime a "goon" character was introduced—a
not-so-bright kneecapper with "the rough dimensions of an icebox"—Rob
pictured his uncle. But seeing as how outside of a boxing ring Tommy exhibited
a docility that verged on pathological, the only true similarities were
physical. The story of Tommy's long and not particularly successful career was
written all over his face: buckle-nosed and egg-eared, his left eyelid dropping
from a dead nerve to give him the look of a man caught in perpetual half-wink. A face hard enough to blunt an ax, the gym bums said of it.
    "Morning,
lazybones."
    "Lazybones?"
Rob peeled a sweat-soaked shirt over his head to reveal a muscle-corded torso.
"You weren't anywhere to be seen when I got up—all-nighter at the Fritz?"
    "I
was on a roll, Robbie. Then I pushed all my chips in on a pair of ladies when
the other guy's holding kings." Tommy shook his head. "Gotta get your
money in on ladies, am I right?"
    Robert
slipped into gym togs and stabbed his feet into boxing boots. A gloom fell over
him, as it so often did at this time in the morning; a gloom brought about by
the knowledge that while his schoolmates slept in warm beds he would soon step
into the ring to get his nose bloodied and lips split, bashing away at some opponent
until the bell rang.
    Tommy
said, "I thought maybe you would be tired, y'know, from staying out late
with ole Katey-pie."
    "You
know it's not like that. We're friends."
    "Friends,
uh? That what you kids're calling it nowadays?"
    "Who're
you sparring with?" Rob said.
    "Our
boy wants to change the subject, I see." Tommy finished wrapping his
hands, butted his fists together, rose to the sink. "Louie Scarpella,
heavyweight from Buffalo. Trainer wants to work his guy against a flatfooted
grinder and thought I fit the bill. You imagine that, Robbie? He says it to my
face." Tommy rubbed his pancaked nose with a closed fist, pinched one
nostril shut and blew a string of snot into the basin. "Right to my face
like that."
    "So
go knock his guy's block off."
    "You
know that's not how it works. My job's to give Scarpella a lift—raise his
spirits. I knock him on his ass, his trainer holds out on my fee."
    Tommy
twisted the spigot and rinsed the sink. He stared at his reflection and
blinked, as if somehow surprised at the man he caught staring back. He drove a
Bobcat model 13E tow-motor at the Niagara Industrial Park, a string of
corrugated tin warehouses off Highway 62A. His fellow workers were fat and
balding, high school heroes gone to seed. During piss breaks, standing at the
long line of porcelain urinals, Tommy's nose would wrinkle at a smell that, to
him, indicated dire maladies: prostate trouble, gallstones, urinary infection,
sick excretions from old bodies. It drove him to the point where he'd pissed in
a Dixie cup and sniffed, making sure it wasn't his own sickness he was
smelling.
    Tommy
had boxed since the age of ten. He grew up in the gym. He loved every part of
it: the training and roadwork, the sparring, the