“Hands up!”
This fight isn’t going well and Sol needs a drink.
The air inside Heaney’s, one of Harrity’s joints, a hole on the south edge where the shittier parts of the East Side rot into the arms of the Patch, is hot and close, containing more tobacco smoke than oxygen. The tables and chairs are pushed to the walls, patrons crowded tight against one another around the periphery, the room sweaty and smoky and reeking of unwashed bodies. Without looking, Sol reaches backwards into the crowd, yelling, “Drink!” until someone’s pint is put in his hand. He takes a long pull of the warm, sour muck that Heaney passes off as beer, knocking some of the dry from his throat.
“Get your FUCKING hands UP, Nancy!” he shouts, watching his man lean into another series of fists: left, left, right, left, left, one coming after the next with quick, calm precision. Nancy’s never been much of a fighter, even back when they’d fought straight; he’s merely big and tough, with a tolerance for abuse that would kill any two other men. When he lands a punch, though, rare as it is, it’s truly that baby dropped from the building, the dead weight of his huge fist propelled by a tree trunk of an arm. Nancy’s slow, though, and has nothing in the way of cunning. The fighters around town figured him out soon enough and simply dance around him now, pick him apart piece by piece until he eventually crumbles. Which had accelerated Sol’s bad series of bets, of course, as he’d been too stupid to see it for what it was, naively trusting to Nancy’s heroic capacity for mistreatment.
Even Nancy had his limits, though.
He’s going down now, swaying, lurching to one knee as that excitable southpaw idiot continues to ring his skull with lefts. Sol looks at his watch, screams “Time! Time! Time!” He steps forward and tries to push himself between his fighter and Faraday’s fast left hand. Nick Faraday will get him killed if this keeps up.
“Time!” Sean shouts, flat-eyed and angry, though he’s trying not to show it. Sol wonders just who has actually been dumb enough to put money on this fight, the fix being so obvious. Although, from personal and repeated experience, he knows that the human capacity for stupidity is limitless.
“You want to call it now?” Sean calls over to Sol, fuming, trying to maintain at least a modicum of subterfuge about the events at hand. “Your man seems done, Mr Parker.”
Sol looks down at Big Nancy. One of the boy’s eyes is swollen shut and he’s huffing out of his broken nose like an animal, raking in air through a bloody mouth. Sol takes a handful of Nancy’s thick red hair and leans down, pulling his fighter’s face close to his own. “You OK, Nance?” he says, as quietly as he can over the din of spectators yelling at one another. “You don’t look so good, son, but just a little bit longer, hey?”
Nancy’s good eye rolls around for a bit in its socket before coming to rest on him. “Fuck you, Sol,” he mutters through puffy, split lips. He spits a glutinous red dribble of blood and mucous between Sol’s feet. “Got him right where I want him.”
Sol feels that isn’t really the point, but does his best to heave Nancy to his feet, leading him over to the chair someone has placed in their corner, passing him a beer when the big man sits. Nancy knows the score; going down doesn’t sit right with the boy but he’ll do it. Sol himself isn’t particularly troubled by the sporting implications of what they’re doing, because he knows that he has no choice. As he’d explained it to Nancy: you do this or you boys are going to find me in an alley somewhere. Nancy taking the dive won’t square Sol with Sean – far from it – but it’s at least showing some due diligence towards his obligations and, when it comes right down to it, Sean owns him, at least for now. Fucking owns him, body and soul. Sol has to do what he’s told and to hell with his pride.
Nancy, weaving on his chair, leans over to one side and pukes up a thin stream of beer, blood, and bile.
Sol squats on his haunches in front of Big Nancy, feeling the sharp crack in his tired knees. Nancy’s bloody face has gone vacant; Sol reaches up and gives him a few gentle slaps to focus the boy, wiping sweat and snot and blood off of him with his sleeve at the same time. “Goddamn it, someone get me a rag,” he shouts back over his shoulder. When one is passed into his hand he spends a moment trying to smear Nancy’s face back towards clean, stanch the flow of blood as best he can.
“Fighters, one minute!” O’Toole calls.
“Fuck off, Pat,” Sol mutters, slapping Nancy’s face with his free hand again until he sees the gleam of focus coming back into his open eye. Nancy raises his own hand, tries to push Sol’s slaps away.
“You got to get your hands up, son,” Sol says, cupping the back of Nancy’s head, steering that one wavering blue eye towards his own. “Up, up. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I am hurt,” Nancy mumbles.
“Ah, come on, now, Nance, don’t be such a fairy. You’re fine. Just hold on a little longer, and you know what to do.”
There’s a long, wavering pause as Nancy’s battered brain processes this. “But I am a fuckin fairy, Sol,” he said.
Sol slaps him a little harder. “Not tonight, you’re not! Come on, boy, I need you to focus.”
“Quit hitting me, Sol,” Nancy says, waving his hand loosely in front of his face, blowing blood out of his broken nose. “I know what to fuckin do, OK?”
“Time, gentlemen!” Pat calls out. “Fighters!”
Nancy stands up, rolling his head on his shoulders, pushing Sol out of the way as he watches Faraday step back into the open space between them. It’s shameful, what they’re doing, but it needs to be done and he won’t let Sol down. Nancy turns away to spit again, catching Sol’s eye for a brief moment and then moving forward, gritting his teeth as he gets ready to absorb some more punches. He hopes that he can go down in a realistic enough manner, and that it won’t hurt too bad when he does.
Later, he isn’t sure exactly just what happened. He remembers one fist after another smacking into the side of his head – left right left left left – and then the lazy loop of his own punch and then somehow Faraday is on the ground, twitching, eyes rolled back in his head as a bemused Pat O’Toole counts ten. Across the room, Nancy can see Sean Harrity staring at him, no expression on his face at all.
Heaney’s is too loud, the air is too close and his head feels huge and swollen, throbbing from the punches he’s absorbed. Behind the crowd, an old man with long white braids is grinning at him. It’s hard to catch a breath and, for a moment, Big Nancy worries he’s going to pass out. A little late for that, he thinks, as Flynn and Michael hustle over to him, drag him to the edge of the crowd, push him towards the door.
As they pull him away, Nancy swings his head around, mouth open, still trying to catch a breath. He looks for Sol, but he’s nowhere to be seen.