Brotherly Love (13 page)

Nick throws punches that stop just as they touch his
face, giving him the feeling. He doesn’t flinch. Nick watches
carefully, and he doesn’t flinch. He just moves slowly around the
ring, his right foot trailing the left, following Nick wherever he
goes.

The bell rings, and Nick drops his hands, nods at the
boy, and takes a towel that the old man has hung over the ring ropes
and wipes the blood off his nose and mouth.

"How’s that feel?" Nick says, looking at
his face. The bridge of the boy’s nose is swollen and starting to
turn blue. Nick remembers the solid feel as he fell into him; the
boy’s face didn’t slide left or right, he took the shoulder
square on.

The kid nods.

"Does that mean it hurts‘?" Nick said.

The kid shakes his head, as if he doesn’t know.

"It’s all right to say it," Nick says.
"If I bumped my nose like that, I’d say it hurts." Nick
waits a minute, there is no answer.

"Then I’d get even."

He sees the beginning of a smile in the corner of the
boy’s mouth. It’s there, and then it’s gone. "Put your
head back," he says, "see if we can get it to stop."

The boy does what he is told; a nice kid, Nick
thinks. A nice, polite kid. He looks at the other one, sitting in
front of the television.

"You want to move around the ring for a round?"
Nick says.

The kid looks at his cousin holding the towel against
his face, the blood-soaked shirt sticking to his chest. "Are you
crazy?" he says.

He looks back at the television. Nick doesn’t blame
him, it isn’t for everybody. He likes that he said it. He climbs
out of the ring, and looks at the television set too. He studies the
dancers a moment, and sees Jimmy Measles.

"You see that guy right there?" Nick says,
pointing with his glove, "he comes around here all the time."

The kid looks more interested. "Jimmy Measles?"
he says.

Nick nods. "That ain’t his real name, but he
lives right around the corner. He’s always out here in front of the
place, practicing his dances."

The boy nods, but Nick sees he doesn’t believe him.

"So," Nick says, "you want to box?"

The boy shakes his head no; his eyes go back to the
screen.

"Maybe tomorrow," Nick says, hoping they
won’t be back tomorrow.

The kid never looks up.
"Maybe," he says.

* * *

P
hillip Flood comes back
up the stairs an hour later. The boys are dressed in their street
clothes; Peter’s nose is stuffed with toilet paper. Michael is
watching cartoons—
Bandstand
is over now—and hardly notices when his father walks into the room.

"They do what you told them, Nick?" Phillip
Flood says.

Nick sees that he is talking about his son, not his
nephew. Nick looks at the kid in front of the television set. "Sure,"
he says.

Phillip Flood is smaller than Nick, and ten years
older. The acne scars turn his face gray under the lights.

"He looks like he’s been to a birthday party,"
Phillip Flood says. Nick looks at him a long minute, thinking of the
way he’d put the money in his pocket and patted his chest.

He doesn’t trust himself to answer. The gym is his,
he built most of it with his own tools. The floor, the staircase, the
ring. Everything but the wiring. Some of it was an accident, the way
it turned out, but it was his. When it changed it was because he let
it.

"He looks like he’s been to a fucking party
.... "

Nick puts on a pair of six-ounce gloves and walks
over to the heavy bag. He begins hitting it without waiting for the
timer to start the round. His hands feel broken, but he hits the bag,
over and over, until the pain spreads and dulls.

Phillip Flood watches him a moment, and then turns
back to his son. "Turn off the fuckin’ television," he
says.

The boy leans forward and turns it off. "You got
your mouthpiece?"

The boys follow Phillip Flood out.

Nick never looks up from the bag.

A minute or two later, the old man appears on the
stairway holding a sack of groceries. Nick is surprised to see him
there; he didn’t notice him leave. The old man is like that,
though. He comes and he goes, and mostly he stays out of the way.
Like an old dog.

He sees Nick at the heavy bag and sets the groceries
down on the floor and hurries across the room to hold it.

Nick does not acknowledge the old man, or the sound
that ends the round. He hits the bag until the pain in his hands is
in his head, a dull ache. He hits the bag until the punches are
useless, and then, in the middle of the round, he suddenly walks away
from the bag and the old man, and throws the gloves into one of the
metal lockers at the other end of the room.

"These fucking guys," he says quietly.

The old man stays where he is, staring at him,
hugging the bottom of the bag, wondering if he’s still allowed to
stay.

Before Nick leaves, the
old man tries to give him a dollar bill.

* * *

T
hey are back two days
later, Phillip Flood leaves them in  front of the gym.

Nick hears the deep sound of the heavy doors slamming
and knows it’s a Continental or a Caddy. He goes to the window to
see if it’s a colored lawyer, but it’s Phillip Flood’s boys,
crossing the sidewalk beneath him.

Nick turns back into the room and sits on the window
ledge, looking at his place. The old man has cleaned again this
morning, swept the floors, scrubbed the ring, stacked all the gloves
in one locker; the headgears and cups in another. Nick thinks he must
get up before dawn.

He is standing on a small ladder against the far wall
now, straightening the old fight posters there, most of them held in
place for ten or fifteen years with thumbtacks.

Nick watches him work, his fingers touching the faces
on the posters, slow and thorough, taking care of them as if he knew
who they were.

Nick hears the boys on the stairs.

Charley’s boy comes up first; he steps into the
room holding a gym bag and then moves to the corner, understanding
the place is not his. Both his eyes are discolored. A nice kid, Nick
thinks again.

The other one comes in behind him and drops his bag
on the floor and moves in front of the television.

Nick feels a draft and walks to the head of the
stairs to check the door. The short one has left it open. The heat is
costing him a fortune.

"You’re Charley’s boy, right?" he says
to Peter. He decides to go down later and close the door.

The kid nods.

"How’s the nose?"

He shrugs.

"The way it got squashed, I didn’t think you’d
be back for a while." The kid doesn’t answer.

The old man makes a scrambling noise and climbs down
off the ladder, moves it a yard to the right, and then climbs back
up. The furnace comes on, shaking the room and filling it with a
faint, familiar smell of oil.

Nick is suddenly as uncomfortable as the kid. "So,"
he says, "you gonna be a fighter?"

The kid looks at him a moment, considering that, and
then he shrugs again. "I don’t think so," he says. The
kid seems to take the question too seriously, as if what he’s going
to be is already decided.

"You could," Nick says. He points to the
posters the old man is straightening. "All those guys up there
walked in the gym the first day just like you, and they weren’t
champions then."

The kid looks at the posters, taking his time. Nick
can’t tell what he is thinking.

"We could get you a couple of fights first,"
he says, "before Sonny Liston."

The kid smiles at that,
not much of a smile, and Nick sees it turn before it disappears.
"So," he says, "you want to move around a little
today?"
 
Behind him, the
television has warmed up and sound of the dance show from West Philly
gradually fills the room. The old man looks down from the ladder and
spits out words that Nick doesn’t understand. The music makes him
angry.

* * *

P
eter lies in his room at
night, his tongue running over a lump in his bottom lip where he fell
into Nick’s knee. He thinks of that moment, his own punch pulls him
off balance and his feet cross and tangle and he falls through Nick’s
gloves—Nick has reached out to catch him—and closes his eyes just
before he hits the knee.

There is a hard bump, like a car running over a
pothole in the street, and then a feeling that spreads from his lip
to his chin, and then Nick is helping him up, smiling at him, telling
him that biting knees is against the rules.

He lies in his bed and thinks of that, and in the
dark he feels himself smile. He goes over it again.

He thinks of Nick cleaning the blood off his chin
after the round, asking if he is sure he wants to be a fighter. He
allows himself to imagine that now. Nick smiling at him as he cleans
his face. He is bleeding in front of a thousand people and Nick is
cleaning his face.

He goes to sleep thinking
yes, that is what he wants to be.

* * *

I
n the evening, Peter’s
aunt disappears into the kitchen to wash dishes, leaving him alone
with his cousin and his uncle. The aunt is part of an indistinct
balance in this house which protects him, and in her absence, he
suddenly feels his uncle staring at him from behind.

He turns to meet the stare, and in the moment it
takes his uncle to change his expression, to close the thought off
his face, Peter has caught him. He doesn’t know at what.

It feeds him, to see his uncle afraid.

The moment passes; the taste remains. His uncle opens
a drawer looking for a cigar and then pushes open the kitchen door to
say he needs a beer. The taste of the moment is still in Peter’s
mouth later as he lies in bed waiting to sleep.

It tastes like blood.

His cousin sleeps down the hall, in the room that was
his sister’s. The smell of cigarette smoke comes through the door,
which is always closed. Beyond the door, his clothes are thrown
across chairs, his posters are hung on the wall. He hides his
cigarettes and magazines in places his mother cannot reach—she is
too heavy to get on her knees and look under the bed, too heavy to
climb on a chair in his closet.

There is nothing of Peter’s sister left in the
room, but in his sense of the place, the room is still hers.

He lies in the dark, fingering a lump in his eyebrow,
remembering another collision—this one with Nick’s head—that
afternoon in the gym. It was as if a door had slammed shut, and in
that instant he could feel the soft sleeves of the dresses hanging in
his mother’s closet.

He hears his uncle in the hallway, walking quietly
toward his door from the top of the stairs. His footsteps stop, and
then the door opens. His uncle’s face comes into the room, pushed
there ahead of his body, as if in a dream. Peter sits up in bed.

"Get dressed."

Peter smells the black, after-dinner cigar, and then,
as his uncle comes farther into the room, he smells the beer. His
uncle has been drinking alone downstairs, something he does more
often now that he is having the trouble with the Italians.

Peter has watched him, sitting with a bottle or a
glass in his hand, staring at the front door.

He pulls on his jeans and the socks from the day
before and then ties the laces on his tennis shoes. His uncle watches
him, swaying slightly, smiling.

"What are we doing?" he says. Thinking it
is possible that he is taking him to the same place he took his
father.

His uncle holds a finger against his lips and motions
for him to follow. They are out the front door before he speaks
again.

"You tell your Aunt Theresa," he says,
"we’re dead."

Peter follows his uncle, liking the sound of that, to
the Cadillac parked across the street, and gets in the front seat.
His uncle lights a cigar before he starts the engine. The boy looks
back at the house, at the dark window that is his room.

They drive east, crossing Broad, and then all the way
down to Two Street where they turn left, heading north. His uncle
looks at him twice during this trip, the last time as he is stopping
the car. They are in the middle of a block; there is noise coming
from a bar across the street.

His uncle opens the door and gets out. "Wait
here," he says. He looks back into the car a moment, deciding
something, and then says, "Get in the back."

Peter gets into the back seat. His uncle closes the
door and crosses the street. He stops at a door next to the bar’s,
and then opens it. He has his own key.

Peter waits, listening to the pitch of the voices
inside the bar. A dog walks past, then a drunk. He is unnoticed,
sitting in the dark of the back seat.