He, once renowned for murderous right, and devastating
jab, a man despised for laughing at his arrest for striking his wife and
joking about the way she flew like a rag doll across the room, could not
resist the chance to step into the ring one more time despite eroded skills
and the passage of time so incomprehensible to him now.
And so, they came to the deteriorated concrete civic arena
in a town that never hosted a name as big as his. Laughing, joking, smoking
cigars, they paid ten dollars a ticket, twenty-five for ringside, to see
the man get what he deserved. All he wanted: the Tennessee state professional
heavyweight championship, not the world title he once held. Pathetic, the
city newspaper had said: How hard a man can fall. How far! What did they
know? He scoffed, he knew he was there because he loved every minute of
it, from the sharp sound of the tape ripping as his fists were wrapped
to the echoes of the ring announcer booming his name out into the darkness
around the ring.
The crowd laughed as he climbed into the ring. He was
paunchy, looking like a man who had not trained for months, years perhaps,
covered in a sweat they joked about testing for alcohol, and cocaine. He
had jowls. They shook when he spit as he entered the ring, hanging a bloody
gob on the skirt of the ring. The front row crowd winced, and cursed him
for the spit that sprayed them. He stepped through the ropes and entered
the ring - a moment he relished, taking the stage, and standing above the
crowd. Yes, those in the front rows would look up at him, and he loved
that. His heels at eye level, black shoes shushing the bright blue and
white canvas.
Time entered the ring with him, for there stripped of
satin robe - his nickname Assassin embroidered across the back - he stood
naked, revealed, a pretender to his former self. Every moment there, now
measured. Three-minute rounds, one minute break between rounds. The referee
ready, waiting to deliver his count. The lights bright enough to reveal
the pores in his skin to the fans in row one.
The opponent in the opposite corner looked like dozens
of others. He recognized him as one of them - the two hundred he faced
in amateur and pro fights: young, wise cracking, foolish enough to think
he had a career ahead of him. This opponent chosen as a walking target,
limited in skill, and powerful, but born with the endurance of a trotting
wolf on the trail of moose. He knew this one like the rest also desired
all that he once had, the world titles and all rights and privileges pertaining
thereto. The money, the women. Mostly the women.
The introduction. Ironic. Two men about to beat each other's
brains out introduced to each other as if they were at a party about to
converse. He laughed at the thought of it. How many times had he been through
the routine and this had not occurred to him? He grinned. His opponent,
perhaps thinking it was a mocking leer, shoved at his gloves when they
raised them to touch, shouted incomprehensible threats through his mouthpiece.
He saw the rabbit eyes, darting, and as the deep sweat pored from his limber
body, he knew the kid was scared.
The fans waited for the bell too. He could see them, shifting,
yelling. He had the urge to shout back at them like he'd done in the press
and on the television: "I am who you all want to be and you hate me
for it."
When the bell rang to start the opening round, he defied
them. Round after round, the skills buried beneath the flab and disuse
carried him to a lead on all cards. Moving in flashes as he once had, feet
gliding inches above the canvas, in and out of the grasp of his opponent,
who stumbling, amateurish, appeared as a gawking kid in the presence of
a great artist. A lumbering boy, outmatched except in heart and strength.
But, then as the rounds went on they wrestled. They did not box. He slipped
in punches, frustrated the boy.
He grinned at the crowd between rounds as he looked out
on their disappointed faces. They booed him, shouted insults. He taunted
them, shaking a fist in the air as he returned to his corner. Using the
old man's tactics, clinching, shoving, he conserved his energy. Oh, they
hated him, his magnificent arrogance, and petulant demeanor. They hated
him for crashing Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, wearing fur coats and fucking
white women.
The punches came, artless attacks, but steady. They thudded
off his forearms, slid off shoulders, and cut the thick air in front of
his face. He blocked, slipped, clinched. One got through in the middle
rounds, stung him. Lights flickered. The arena went silent. The crowd rose,
sensed the moment at hand, but he held on, grabbed an arm for a crucial
five seconds until his head cleared. The referee tried to pry them apart,
issued a warning. When the bell rang to end the round he waved at the jeering
crowd. A box of popcorn skidded across the ring in front of him. He kicked
it into the front row.
Then it came, finally, and just as brutal as they hoped
it would be. A slashing left to the body that brought his arms down enough
to let in the right. And the right came in quickly, skimming the top of
his red eight-ounce gloves, smacking his skin. The gloves hard, padding
meant to protect fists, cracked the jawbone on impact, sent his head snapping
back as if attached to a bungee cord not neck, bone, and muscle. Neck in
arc, body falling backwards, slowly at first, as if a redwood crashing
in the forest, first shaking free its roots, but gaining speed as it approached
the top rope where it hit and then whiplashed.
The vein severed, leaking blood meant for the brain, flooding
tissue not nourishing it, like a river that overran its banks. The referee
drifted in a pool of light, waving his white-shirted arms as if swimming
there. He was swimming too, backward and forward through time, trying to
make sense of it. No longer angry but confused, a boy again, running across
broken glass and shattered brick in the abandoned lots between ravaged
tenements, on his way to the braided river where clear water mixed with
mud. There, waiting for his turn to swing on the big rope, out over the
merging waters and drop. How long had he waited there on that afternoon,
any of them? The river unwound itself from the beginning of time, reached
backward into the past and forward into the future. It moved beyond him
then and now as if he was standing still, feet anchored in the muddy bank.
Was that his mother's voice, calling him to dinner, warning
him, chastising him? I told you not to enter that ring. That's no place
for a man with brains, unless he wants them beaten out of him, and him
made into a mumbling slow-witted gardener, potting plants all day, lost
in his dreams and nightmares, not sure of the time of day. But, she didn't
understand what it meant to be a man, to stand in the middle of the ring
and have his hand raised. Where else was that going to happen? And so he
won and won and won, and each time she smiled and shook her head, and asked
when he would have enough. When he said never, she knew he was right and
she cried, served him the steak and eggs he'd bought with earnings from
the latest fight, and let him eat alone. She would not move into the house
he bought her, or drive the silver Cadillac he parked in the drive. I know
where that river flows, she said. I know it up and down from source to
mouth.
His turn came and he was out over the river, releasing
the rough rope that bit into his palms and fingers, the burning feeling
of holding on too long. He was soaring, above it all for those few seconds,
free, taunting those landlocked souls standing on the banks. With a half-turn,
a wave, and a shout, "Sayonara, suckers," he splashed into the
river and sank down, the sunlight distorted above him, pouring down into
the depths, kaleidoscopic, trees overhead, visible on the periphery of
his vision, reduced to gray lines wavering on the watery surface. Breaking
surface tension, looking for the muddy banks, the trees, he rose grinning,
immortal.