THE OLD MAN HAD just come in off the docks with Eddie and they were drinking beer in the kitchen. The old lady didn’t like them drinking beer in her kitchen—precious little work space in these cold-water flats—but it was better than having them drink themselves into the blind staggers down at Paddy’s Waterfront Bar & Grill. She didn’t like them sitting there slopping it down until they were too full to stand up straight and she’d have to shake some life into them so Pop could grope his way to bed while Eddie wandered out into the night in search of such evils as only the Devil knew.
Eddie was saying, “Pop, what gives with our West Side boys these days—can’t punch their way outa a paper bag. Last night that Mickey Cochrane, a real chumpola, and he’s supposed to be the pride of the West Side. Harlem—Little Italy—that’s where they got the fighters now. Jeez, in my day …”
The old lady looked up from the meat loaf she was preparing, but she didn’t say anything. She had heard all she wanted to hear about his day. She remembered all too well the days of glory for Eddie (Honeyboy) Finneran. He had been the “crowd-pleasing kayo artist from the West Side” then, making three, sometimes four thousand dollars a fight. In his best year, ’42, he had earned nearly thirty thousand. Quite a take for the son of a longshoreman who had worked hard all his life for his two or three thousand a year. Ma hadn’t gone for the fighting. She hadn’t been impressed when Eddie said, “Just think, Ma, in forty-five minutes Friday night I’ll make more money than the old man makes in a whole year.”
Pop would go to the fights, and their older daughter Molly and her husband Leo, but not Ma. She’d stay home with Vince, the baby of the family, and wait for the excitement to be over. One night when Eddie was fighting Joey Kaplan, his East Side rival, and she was worried for him because the sports writers had wondered if Honey-boy Finneran wasn’t “being taken along too fast,” that night she had turned on the radio for a minute and she heard: “Finneran’s got a bad gash over his right eye—but he keeps boring in—lots of heart—and another hard right hand to Finneran’s eye!” She had heard the hoarse, blood-thirsty yowl of the crowd and that was enough. She had snapped the radio off and waited. Pop came home late and very drunk because the referee had stopped the fight in the ninth to save Honeyboy from further punishment. “Magine a skinny little sheeney from the East Side lickin’ our Honeyboy,” the old man said. For days he had stayed away from his favorite saloons, he was that ashamed. And Eddie had hid out in a hotel until his face looked good enough for him to come home. Stayed up in a hotel and belted whiskey with all the trash of the neighborhood, man and woman alike, who were perfectly content to tell Eddie how he would have beaten the little East Side Jew-boy if only for some lousy breaks, all the while helping Eddie get rid of his more-money-in-forty-five-minutes-than-Pop-made-in-a-year.
Oh yes, Ma remembered his days all right. She remembered how he made thirty thousand in the ring and lost it in the horse rooms. And she remembered how Pop quit work because Eddie was a main-eventer at the Garden and what was the sense of making a lousy ten dollars a day when Eddie had a grand on him all the time. She remembered how Pop spent nearly all his waking time in the bars buying drinks for his longshore pals and reviewing Honeyboy’s triumphs round by round. And she remembered how a cold-water flat wasn’t good enough for the Finnerans any more, how Eddie insisted they move away from their old block between 10th and 11th, even over Ma’s objections. She had lived there since before Eddie was born and if she needed help or company there was always Mrs. Boyle and Mrs. Hanrahan right in the building, and Fred the janitor was a friend of theirs, and she liked to know that Father Corcoran was just around the corner. But they had moved because Eddie was proud and the money was burning his pocket, and because Pop and Molly had argued that if Eddie was so famous why shouldn’t they have a taste of better things? Yes, and Ma remembered, not with bitterness but with a sense of realism, how long those better things had lasted. Less than two years after Eddie’s retirement Pop was back in the shape-up again, kicking back to the hiring boss to make sure of a day’s pay, and the Finnerans were back in their railroad flat. And what did Eddie—their briefly famous Honeyboy—have to show for it but a flattened nose and one bad eye and a state of mind that wasn’t exactly punchy, but wasn’t quite up to normal, either? Eddie was excitable, unstable, with fits of delusion, and his vision was turned in upon the past. He lived more in his day than in the present and he had no capacity for work. The quick big money of his ring purses had spoiled him for ordinary living. A docker’s wage was sucker’s work. Not vicious enough for crime or conscientious enough for honest labor, he had drifted through the years of his retirement in search of a soft touch—working for the books, doing a little gambling, tied into the numbers racket on the waterfront. Ma hated to think the word, for she had tried to bring her children up to fear God and honor their responsibilities, but Eddie Finneran was a bum. So she said nothing while they sat at the table talking fights and the dearth of good Irish fighters on the West Side and the glories of the old days when the wearers of the green dominated the ring, Mickey Walker and Tommy Loughran, Jimmy McLarnin and Billy Conn.
Ma felt better when she heard the door creak open and Vince come in. Vince—she never looked at him or thought about him without adding automatically: Vince is a good boy. Like day and night, she would think, comparing Vince with Eddie. Her youngest was a quiet, serious boy who worked hard and minded his own business. He was making a good record at St. Xavier’s. Well, at least one Finneran was going to finish high school. Vince was her baby, her prize; somehow she had managed to keep him off the streets and out of Eddie’s circle of street-corner admirers who still thought it was something special to be an ex-pug whose name had once flashed from the Garden marquee. Vince never had a dirty mouth like Eddie and his crowd. Vince didn’t call every girl a broad and leer at every passing skirt with heavy-humored obscenities. Vince was good in chemistry. His teacher thought he should specialize in it and become a teacher or a laboratory technician.
Vince came up behind his mother, spun her around and kissed her. “Well, Mom, we beat St. Tom’s, fifty-two-forty-nine, a basket in the last thirty seconds.”
“And I bet I know who made the basket,” his mother said.
“I got lucky,” Vince said. He was tall for his age, nearly six feet, and thin and wiry, only a hundred and forty pounds; he was captain of the school basketball team and an all-around athlete, with speed and timing, though lacking Eddie’s aggressiveness.
It made her feel proud, Pop on the docks, just as her old man had been, and Eddie, who never even finished high school, roaming around up to no good, nobody on either side of the family who even saw four years of high school, and now Vince going through with honors. She looked at the tall, slender boy with the serious eyes and the thoughtful, remote way of wandering in and settling down with a book, apparently unaware of the same old conversation (Did Pop remember Eddie’s fight with Red Collins? and was Marciano going to give it to Walcott again? and could Armstrong have taken Sugar Ray if they had met in ’38 instead of ’43?).
Vince was settling down to some homework when Eddie came over and squatted on the edge of his chair.
“How’s the muscle, kid?”
“No complaints, Eddie.”
“How you feel about the Golden Gloves?”
“The Golden Gloves?”
“Yeah, I entered you.”
“Me in the Golden Gloves? You might’ve asked me, Eddie. You might’ve asked.”
Eddie had been sparring with Vince ever since the kid brother was old enough to hold his hands up. Eddie was proud of the way Vince had learned to jab, to cross with his right and to slip punches.
“Against those amateur punks you’ll be a cinch,” Eddie said. “Just do what I learned you and you’ll be a shoo-in. You’ll have height and reach on ‘em. You c’n stand back ’n pepper ’em.”
“I never said I wanted to box in the Golden Gloves,” Vince-said.
The old man got into it. “You go in there and knock their blocks off, Vinnie m’boy. Show ‘em the Finnerans are scrappers.” With one punch the old man finished off an imaginary opponent.
Ma moved in. “What’s all this talk about scrappers?”
“It’s just the amateurs, Ma. We entered Vinnie in the Gloves.”
“You leave Vince alone,” Ma said. “Vince is gonna amount to something. Vince plays basketball, a nice clean game. Who wants him in the filthy prize fights?”
“It ain’t a prize fight, Ma,” Eddie argued. “A prize fight’s for money. For blood. Three-minute rounds. Small gloves. This is for sport, see? Jus’ three two-minute rounds, gloves like pillows, and the contest (he remembered, like the announcers, not to say “fight”) “is stopped at the first sign of a scratch. Nobody gets hurt in the amateurs.”
Mrs. Finneran looked at Vince. Vince wasn’t saying anything. “Vince, is this something you want to do?”
Vince’s old man looked at him hard. A good student, that was all very well, but you couldn’t buy a round at Paddy’s on the strength of a B-plus in chemistry. But another fighter in the family. That was something to throw out your chest about.
Vince looked at his old man and felt the pressure of it. He wanted to please Ma and get through St. Xavier’s, but he wanted his Pop to be proud of him, too. The summer was coming on and he had a half-day job. He wouldn’t have to train too hard for the amateurs. He was in pretty good shape from the basketball season.
“I’ll get you down to the C.Y.O. and I’ll work out with you.” Eddie talked fast. “It’ll do me good too. Get this blubber off me. You’ll be a cinch, kid, a cinch. The talk o’ the neighborhood.”
“Well, I guess it can’t do me any harm,” Vince said.
“All right, all right, now leave him alone, let ’im do his homework.” Ma broke it up.
Eddie was on time for his training dates with Vince at the C.Y.O. It was the only thing he had ever been on time for, except his own fights. He taught the kid how to stand and move, how to tie up an opponent in the clinches and how to turn his right toe in a little and get his body into it when he threw the right. He taught him to punch, not in single blows but in combinations, to an inner rhythm. He taught him how to weave and feint and pick off punches with his gloves, how to suck an opponent into leading and how to counter. Vince didn’t look like a natural fighter. He had never loved and lived fighting on the streets as Eddie had. But he studied his brother’s instructions the same way he tackled math or chemistry. And he was little and quick. Eddie saw he would never be as aggressive as he himself had been, but he had a faster, more accurate left hand, and by following Eddie’s tips on punching power he could hurt you with a right hand.
A perfectionist, Vince found himself enjoying the mastery of a new sport. It was good exercise, something like fencing. You fenced for an opening, you tried to draw your opponent off guard. It was fun to make him miss and step in to nail him before he recovered. There was something to it all right. It wasn’t just sock and be socked. It was science. It wasn’t so different from chemistry, in a way. You worked out a formula and then you experimented on the basis of it and then you adjusted the formula to the new facts. In a month he was stepping around Eddie, reddening his brother’s nose with his snaky lefts and smothering his bull-like rushes.
Eddie lost weight, looked younger, was beginning to find himself. For the first time since he had hung up the gloves, his life began to have focus. He would be the discoverer, the trainer, the manager of Vinnie Finneran, successor to the old, crowd-pleasing Honeyboy.
It was the talk of the neighborhood the way Vinnie breezed through the Golden Gloves, how he went eight straight bouts without dropping a round. He was a shade of the old Irish boxing masters, Slattery and Loughran and Tunney and McLarnin. In the City Finals he met a strong Puerto Rican boy who crowded him but every time the other boy rushed in Vinnie peppered him until finally a faint streak of red trickled from the Puerto Rican’s cheekbone and the bout was stopped. Eddie lifted Vinnie up and carried him around the ring and Pop climbed through the ropes and hugged him and shook his big hands together to salute friends in the crowd.
That night in the Finnerans’ flat it was like old times. Too much like them to please Ma. There were cronies of Pop’s, and Eddie and his crowd in their striped T-shirts, and Molly and her husband Leo, and Sally, the younger daughter, with a boy friend, all of them telling each other just how good Vinnie was and what he had done to this boy and that, as if they had not all been there and seen it with their own eyes. Drinking beer and wallowing in this new little puddle of glory, Eddie had the center of the stage. It reminded him of the days when he was a winning fighter and the guys made a circle around him to hear what he had to say. Even if this was only amateur stuff, they were beginning to listen again as Eddie talked up the prowess of his kid brother. “He did just like I told ’im, he’s got class, he’s cute, he could turn pro and make a bundle, a second Billy Graham.”
Then everybody was talking at once, each with his or her own small life made to seem a little larger through the magnifying glass of success. Eddie with his taste of the old prestige, and Pop crowing over his pals and feeling less of a failure for being able to show around the winning wristwatch with the inscription on the back. The brother-in-law Leo had brought a couple of his best customers to the fight—there was nothing like having a fighter in the family to help the liquor business. Everybody likes to know the fighters, an unconscious attraction to our brutal beginnings. Molly and Sally were enjoying it too; it was exciting, relief from the humdrum. Some of the silver light of Vinnie’s local fame had begun to spill over onto them. People kept asking them how it felt to have a champion in the family.
The only quiet ones at the celebration that night were Vinnie and Ma. Vinnie didn’t see what all the shouting was about. He had won, and it hadn’t been too difficult but it didn’t feel much different from coming home after a winning basketball game. He didn’t feel like fighting the short rounds over and over again in conversation. He looked on with detached amusement as Eddie demonstrated to a crowd of admirers exactly how Vince had opened the other boy’s cheek. “He’ll go t’ the top,” he kept repeating in a kind of self-hypnosis, “if he keeps doin’ like I show ‘im he’ll go right to the top, we could make a bundle if he ever turns pro.”
Ma helped serve the beer and the coffee and was polite when she was spoken to, but she would have liked to have tossed the whole bunch of noisy fair-weather parasites out of the place. Backslappers and spongers. She remembered the flattery and the free loading when Eddie was in the money. Of course Vince had more common sense, more character, but she was afraid of this fight world with its quick fame and quick money. Oh, there was always Tunney to point to as the West Side boy who had made good, but right here in her own neighborhood, on the docks working alongside Pop and lounging around with Eddie she knew how many ex-pugs there were who had had a taste of four-figure money for a year or two and then had slipped back into the crowd, some of them with foolish gummy grins on their faces, and some like Eddie spoiled for everyday work at ordinary money.
Next morning Eddie clipped out of the paper the squib on the bottom of the third sports page: “Brother of Honeyboy Finneran, Ex-Boxer, Wins Amateur Title.” Then he put on his sports jacket over his wine-colored T-shirt and went uptown to the Forrest Hotel to look up his old manager, Specs Golders. Specs was crying the usual managerial blues. Except for a Robinson or a Marciano, there were no big draws anymore. And no young blood. The kids you got didn’t want to train; give them a few big wins and you couldn’t tell them anything. “I’m so disgusted I’m ready to go into the shoe business with my brother-in-law,” Specs summed it up.
Eddie told Specs about the kid brother and made it sound big. “You know I’d level with you, Specs. You know I ain’t just shittin’ ya ’cause he’s the kid brud. Vince is sharper ’n blue blades. Like the good old days. How many good white boys around these days? Vince is money in the bank.”
Specs said he was buddies with the Garden crowd again. Next time his light-heavyweight got a main event he could probably spot Vince in the six-round special.
“How much?”
“Five.”
Five hundred. Honeyboy had started at fifty and clubbed his way up, but now with the Finneran name and Specs’ connections it was half a G. Then a semi-windup, fifteen hundred, a few of those and up into the feature bout, three or four thousand, maybe five with the television. He keeps winning and he’s fighting for a percentage, 20 per cent of $60,000, 30 per cent of $90,000, title fights, and maybe some day, if they got the breaks, a real pay night in six-figure money. Eddie would have tailor-made suits, $175 and up, a big suite in a plush hotel, fur coats and ice for the pick of the broads, big men would call him for tickets, Toots Shor would slap him on the back and insult him with affection, the columnists would press him to recall some favorite anecdotes, he’d take Vince to Paris to fight this Humez or whoever they had over there, there would be French broads and a Jaguar and champagne wine and a big night in the casino, there would be sucker tours against soft touches from Boston to Seattle, they’d move, they’d live, Eddie and Specs in partnership, good new kids would beg ’em to manage them, they’d find a heavyweight and finagle a jackpot.
“How’s about we cut like this,” Eddie said. “Fifty for Vince, twenny-five for you, twenny-five for me.”
“For me, because you made money for me and you’re a friend of mine, I’ll only take one-third, point three three three,” Specs said. “The rest you and the kid split as you see fit.”
He and Vince could take the two-thirds and cut it down the middle, Eddie figured. After all, this was his idea. He was opening the doors. And he’d do the teaching, the worrying, the greasing. Vince was a careful kid, a saver. One third of five- and ten-thousand dollar purses would add up for him.
“A deal,” Eddie said.
“And expenses off the top,” Specs added.
“You would steal your own mother’s glass eye,” Eddie said, with admiration.
“If he’s as good as you say, we’ll make a few dollars,” Specs said.
“On the head of my mother,” Eddie said. “Right now he’s better ’n I was when I was good.”
“You were never good,” Specs said. “You drew the money because they liked to see you laugh when you got hurt.”
Eddie was hurt this time, too, so he laughed and they shook hands. “You watch, we’ll make a bundle,” Eddie said.
Eddie had to start working for his money right away. He had to go down and talk the kid brother into turning pro. Vince said, What about school? He had promised his mother to finish. He didn’t like the idea of turning pro. In the long run a high-school education could even mean more money.
Eddie said, “Who’s knocking the school? You go to school and you train in the afternoons. You can’t read them books all the time. ’Stead of going out for basketball or something you spar ’n punch the bag. Fidel La Barba, the flyweight champion remember?, he went to college ’n boxed and you take this kid Vejar, he’s at N.Y.U. right now and he’s making nice money boxing. Look kid, here’s the clincher, for one Garden main event—and Specs ’n me ’ll get you there, believe me—you’ll make more money than twelve months in a job.”
“And you really think I’ll have as easy a time in the pros and I did in the amateurs?”
“If you work,” Eddie said, “if you keep practicing what I learn you, a breeze, a romp, there’s nobody around c’n box anymore, you’ll be too fast ‘n too clever for ’em, they won’t lay a glove on you.”
“I guess the family could use the dough,” Vince said.
“Now you’re thinkin’,” Eddie said. “I’ll tell Specs to make the six-round Garden match for you. Don’t worry, we’ll dig up some crud to make you look good. And tell you what, kid, the first fight you take the whole purse, the whole five hundred except for expenses. After that Specs and I’ll take a regular cut.”
“Five hundred,” Vince said. “I wouldn’t have to work after school.”
“Peanuts,” Eddie said. “When it rolls in it’ll roll in big. Plenny for everybody.”
Ma didn’t want to believe it when she finally heard. She said she knew Eddie would try anything but she couldn’t understand Vince. Vince said he was doing it partly for her. “Not for me,” she said. All he had to do was finish high school for her. So he could amount to something. Vince said she didn’t understand, he would only have enough fights to salt some money away and then he’d quit. Ma looked at him hard. “I know these leeches. Eddie and that chiselin’ manager Specs. You win, you make money for them and they’ll never let you go. Not until your face is beaten in like Eddie’s and that good head you’ve got on your shoulders is …” A lump in her throat saved her having to say it.
“I won’t be like Eddie,” Vince said. “For one thing I’m a boxer, he was a slugger. I duck and slip away and pick the punches off with my gloves.”
His mother said, “I don’t want to hear about it. It’s that Eddie. My own flesh and blood, but he’s a no-good. You think he worries about you? You think he stays up nights worrying what might happen to you? He’s thinking about silk shirts and winters in Miami. People who work for their money, he calls them suckers.”
Just the same, the match was made and Vince went into training at the C.Y.O. gym. Vince was classy in the gym, he could make the light bag sound like a snare drum now and the sparring partners crowded him foolishly while he snapped their heads back with lightning jabs and moved in for rapid combinations.
Eddie went uptown and ordered a suit from Nat Lewis on the strength of Vinnie’s promise. He felt good, full of bounce, no more street-corner loafer and fringer of the mob. He was the old Honeyboy. The way he came into places, he already looked like money. A few big wins and he could swagger into Shor’s and get one of the choice tables against the front wall.
Pop was feeling pretty chipper, too. He wasn’t bothering to shape for the afternoon shift because he was over at the gym every afternoon presiding over Vinnie’s workouts. He’d take his pals with him, including Bart McGann, the business agent of his local and a political wheel. He had promised Bart a couple of ringsides. McGann was beginning to treat Pop like an equal now. “Well, with a chip off the old block fightin’ in the Garden I don’t expect we’ll see you in the shape much longer, Finneran.”
Old Man Finneran didn’t expect so, either. Nice break having a neighborhood hero and a big breadwinner in the family again. Not that Pop would ask much of Vinnie. Just grub and beer money and maybe a little house in Florida to retire in after a while.
Leo, the brother-in-law, called Eddie to hold half a dozen ringside tickets for him; he was taking two good prospective customers and their wives. “If the kid is really as good as Eddie says,” Leo told Vince’s older sister, “I’m liable to double my sales. Take the boys out to the training camp, get Vinnie to have dinner with ’em at Moore’s—it’ll give my business a shot in the arm.”
“I’ll never forget the first time Eddie fought a main event in the Garden,” Molly said. “He bought me my beaver coat. It’s beat-up now but I still have to use it. I could sure do with a new coat.”
And back in the Finnerans’ cold-water flat, Sally, the sixteen-year-old, was dreaming her tough-minded little dreams, too. This dingy tenement, steaming in summer and bone-cold in winter, may be all right for Ma and Pop. But these days a young girl with her looks wanted something better. A nicer neighborhood, nicer boys, some place you wouldn’t be ashamed to take a nice fellow if you should be lucky enough to find one. A five-room apartment on the Upper Drive. Maybe, if Vince turned out to be a drawing card, he’d do that for them. The sister of the champion.
In the Finneran household the tension mounted as with an army facing invasion day. It was Fight minus eight, F minus seven, six. … Eddie was a busy man, working out with Specs the tactics for the fight, hovering over Vince and watching his diet, on the phone to friends wanting tickets, selling a block of seats around the neighborhood so the matchmaker would be impressed with Vinnie’s following, buttonholing reporters in the restaurants and telling anybody and everybody what the kid brother was going to do to Georgie Packer.
Packer was a Negro veteran who had gone as far as small-club main events and then slid back into the preliminaries. He was slow and wild and his legs were used up after four rounds. He was rough and he was willing and his left hook could hurt you if it landed, but he was pretty well punched out now, his reflexes were gone and this was just another purse for him before he racked up. In public Eddie carried on about what a rugged test this was for Vinnie, but privately he told the chums that Spec had lined up a real soft touch so Vinnie could score in his pro debut. “Packer’ll be packed up and shipped home to Palookaville before it goes halfway,” Eddie promised.
As the days before the fight flew off like calendar sheets in an old movie, Ma was a ghost around the house, moving silently in a shroud of disapproval. She listened and she watched, and felt like throwing them all out of the house, Pop, Eddie, Sally, Molly, Leo, the whole selfish lot of them. She watched Vince closely, too. He listened to the advice Eddie kept telling him, nodding and going over it in his mind. He would look around as if the place were no longer familiar to him and he couldn’t find a comfortable seat to settle himself in. In a sharp voice that didn’t sound like his, he kept saying that he wasn’t nervous, that he felt fine, why should he worry?, Eddie said he had met better boys than Packer in the amateurs, it was just another fight. But his nerves talked back: Who was he kidding? This was six three-minute rounds instead of three two’s, hard six-ounce gloves instead of those sixteen-ounce pillows, and this Georgie Packer was an old war-horse with over seventy pro fights.
The day of the fight Ma was ready to do something about it. Something drastic. She thought of a lot of crazy things. Maybe there was something she could drop in Vince’s tea to make him sick to his stomach so they would have to call off the fight. Or she would pretend she had a stroke so Vince would be too upset to report at the Garden. Then he’d be suspended and the bad dream would be over. She even had crazy visions of going to the other fighter and telling him Vince’s weaknesses as she had picked them up from Eddie’s loudmouthing. But, of course, she couldn’t do that. That was just a whim of desperation. Finally she didn’t do anything but go around the corner to see her favorite priest.
Father Corcoran was a neighborhood boy in his middle thirties who had made a name for himself standing up for the members of his waterfront parish against the mobbers on the docks. He was an old friend of Tunney’s cousin, Ben, the longshore rank-and-filer, and he liked the fights, all right, but he couldn’t see it for Vince. He was a realist and he thought the business was only for those who had nothing better to do. But how to stop it? He could try reasoning with Vince, though it probably wouldn’t do much good if the boy won and found the going easy. Maybe all they could do was to pray that he lose and work it out of his system before the start of the fall term.
Ma went into the church and knelt before her saint, Veronica. “Oh, Sweet Saint Veronica, intercede with the Heavenly Father,” she prayed. “I don’t know if He knows anything about the boxing game. I don’t know if there’s any way for a boy to be thoroughly defeated without getting hurt. But if there is, please ask Him to bring that defeat to my Vince tonight. Lead him out of the valley of temptation. Give him the strength to turn his back on evil and to find that there are no easy ways and that every man should do a dollar’s work for every dollar. Have him knocked out tonight, dear Lord, and may it not injure his sweet face but only the selfish spirits leeching to fatten on him. In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.”
Vince was sitting stiff and strange in the bare dressing room. Eddie had been getting around giving the big hello to familiar faces and taking bows as the old Honeyboy. People remembered the great fight he had put up with Kaplan and listened respectfully when he talked up Vinnie. “Watch ’em t’night—tuhriffic—a year from now he’s in with the title—a second McLarnin.”
“Don’t just sit there, kid,” Eddie said. “Get up, move around, warm up, you’re on next.”
Vince did as he was told, but he felt stiff in his joints. Beyond the dressing-room door the roar of the crowd sounded like a waterfall that can be turned on and off. He tried not to listen. It had a strange effect on his stomach. It wasn’t fear of Packer, but of something larger, something that made him feel small and helpless, as if he were a leaf carried along by a rushing torrent toward the waterfall.
The last four-rounder was over and the kid who had gone out bouncing on his toes and full of beans came in gasping for breath and leaking blood from one eye. Vince had no memory of being moved through the door down the long aisle to the ring. He was only numbly aware of being in the ring under the bright lights with Eddie rubbing encouraging circles into his back and winking at writers he recognized in the press row. He was only numbly aware of Georgie Packer, a short, squat, dark figure with a boneless nose and thickening scar tissue over the eyes. He was completely unaware of Pop, with the McGanns, and Leo and Molly with the prospective customers, and Sally in a new dress, all looking for the win, with front seats reserved on the bandwagon.
The bell rang and the place hushed. Vince crossed himself automatically and automatically moved out toward the dark, bearlike form weaving in front of him. Packer lunged and Vince flicked a jab and danced away. The jabs irritated Packer like mosquito bites and he lunged in to swat them away and Vince jab-jab-jabbed and skirted sideways. Packer missed a vicious left hook at the bell. Vince was more tired than he should have been when he sat down. Maybe nerves. “Relax, relax, kid,” Eddie said. “It’s all yours. Keep that left in his face but cross with the right. You’re not throwing enough punches. You got the round but you gotta be more aggressive.”
Round Two looked like a retake on Round One with Vince jabbing and floating away. Packer wanted to fight, but he couldn’t. His fights were all in the record book now. Vince’s left hand and the footwork were fancy, but he was reluctant to mix it with Packer. Packer was doing all the leading and missing. Vince was countering, but in a light-hitting, mechanically defensive way. The crowd was stamping its feet in unison to show its boredom. Packer, the old club fighter, answered the crowd’s derision with a clumsy try, grabbing Vince with his left arm and bringing up a looping right uppercut. It was a wild, unorthodox punch, not the kind that Vince had been trained to counter, and it flushed him on the side of the jaw and knocked him sideways. Before Packer could follow it up the round was over.
Vince turned to a neutral corner instead of toward his stool. The crowd laughed and shouted. Vince thought he was in a basketball game and the other team had scored a basket. Eddie ran out and rushed him to their corner. The sharp tickle of smelling salts was in his nose and ice burned into his neck. “Sucker punch … Don’t let ’im get set … Move around and throw more rights …” He heard Eddie in his ear and then the mouthpiece was being pushed into his face, a wet sponge came down smack on his head and many hands were lifting him to his feet and shoving him toward the middle of the ring. Before he could do any of the things Eddie had told him, Packer was on him again, walking in and punching and brushing off the jabs and hooking to the body. Packer was after him and somehow none of the things that had held them off in the amateurs would work on this one. Packer charged in and bulled him into a corner with his body so the kid couldn’t dance around and use the footwork. Packer just leaned his head on the kid’s shoulder and banged away. It wasn’t a science, it wasn’t an experiment, it was a fight, and Vince felt cornered and helpless against the swarm of punches. The mouthpiece was choking off his breathing, felt too big for his mouth, if he could get rid of the mouthpiece he could suck the air in, get a fresh start … Then wham something harder than a leather glove could possibly be struck him in the mouth and the mouthpiece flew out and Vince was sagging to his knees to look for it when the bell rang at last.
Eddie and Specs ran across and dragged Vince back and worked over him feverishly, Eddie wild-eyed, frantic, a lose to a punched-out bum like Packer meant curtains, no soap, no money, no ride, no meal ticket, back to the street corners with the Hell’s Kitchen cowboys. “Kid, you gotta do it, you gotta do it, take the play away from him, punch hard, baby, please kid, we’re countin’ on ya, Vinnie Vince Vinnie can ya see me?, are ya listenin’?, don’t let us down Vinnie boy …”
Over Specs’ and Eddie’s shoulders the referee was leaning in to watch the boy’s eyes. The handlers were so busy pumping false strength and bogus courage into their bewildered fighter that they didn’t notice the referee until, just as the ten-second warning buzzer sounded and Vince was trying to find his feet, he staggered up into the arms of the official. “Sorry kid, that’s all.” He went over and raised Packer’s hand.
An old sports writer turned to a colleague. “His name may be Finneran, but he’s sure no Honeyboy. Honeyboy liked to fight.”
“I saw this kid in the gym, he looked good,” the other man said.
“A gymnasium fighter,” the old sports writer said. “I’ve seen hundreds of ’em. They fight because someone teaches ’em how and everything they know goes out the window the first time they get tagged.”
“I wonder if this new boy from St. Paul is any good,” said the other writer, ready for the next fight.
Leo had planned to take the prospective buyers back to the dressing room to see Vince after the fight, but now he thought he’d forget the whole thing. He felt a little embarrassed in front of his customers for having done so much talking about the boy.
Pop was quiet too. McGann had been polite, but in a kind of laughing way, as he said, “Don’t take it to heart, Finneran. One lad who can use his mitts and another with a head on his shoulders, that should be enough for any man.” Pop nodded. It would be hard to go back to the Monday morning shape-up. Seven-thirty in the morning. The same old grind.
Specs stood outside the dressing-room door while Vince got dressed. “I suppose I could get him another fight, but I think I’d be wasting my time. The boy doesn’t take much of a punch. He c’n box but he’s got no heart for it. He’s gonna get hurt and he won’t make no money.”
“Okay, okay, I got my eyesight, I could see it,” Eddie said.
“I’m sorry, Honeyboy, it could of been a nice thing.”
“The hell with that,” Eddie said. Even the night he had decided to hang up the gloves, he hadn’t felt so lost, so empty and the hell with everything. “I’m gonna go out ’n drink whiskey.”
The flat was quiet when Vince came in. Sitting there waiting was Ma and nobody else.
“Vince?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Let me see how you look.”
She led him toward the lamp. There was a bruise on his jaw and a swelling around one eye.
“I lost, Ma. I was NG.”
“I heard about it on the radio.”
“Looks like I better keep that delivery job after school.”
“That’s right, Vince. Get into your pajamas. I’ll make you a sandwich.”
She went into the kitchen and she thought how Pop and Eddie and Leo and Molly and Sally must be feeling. Well, it served them right. It wasn’t that easy. When would they ever learn it wasn’t that easy?
Eddie didn’t come in until after four when all the bars were closed. He had trouble finding his way to the bathroom in time to throw up.
“Eddie, is that you?” his mother called from the bedroom.
“Yeah, ’s me. Go t’ sleep, Ma, I’m aw-right.” Eddie felt very weak. He felt as if he was going to pitch head first into the can. He’d sleep it off and then go down to Paddy’s for a beer. There was a kid washing dishes in there who was pretty handy with his dukes, Paddy said. Maybe Eddie could get a-hold of him and …
He threw up until his stomach was emptied and then he groped his way to the narrow bedroom he shared with Vince. He fell into bed, and in a little while he was snoring through his broken old fighter’s nose and dreaming his ex-fighter dreams. The dishwasher at Paddy’s was turning out to be a champ and Eddie was up there with the Nat Lewis sport shirts and the big suites and the fancy broads, and everybody was saying See if you c’n fix me up with a pair for Friday night, Eddie, Honeyboy, Eddie, old pal.