Pop had brought up a few handguns, and soon he and Thomas Williams and I were taking turns shooting at a playing card Williams had clamped to some brush with a clothespin. We were using the .380, a semiautomatic with a hair trigger that allowed you to empty the clip in seconds, your hand kicking back, the smell of cordite in the air. But when it was my turn I didn’t want to look young and impulsive, so I shot it slowly and deliberately. I aimed it with one arm and sighted down its short barrel, the playing card a white rectangle in green, and I held my breath, then squeezed the trigger, the card fluttering.
“He could’ve been a Marine, too,” Williams said. He and Pop were behind me, Williams sitting on a homemade picnic table smoking a pipe. The sun on the trees had darkened, and I felt pride from what Williams had said. I took my time with my next five shots, hitting the card with three of them.
I lowered the .380, released the magazine, then pulled back on the slide and checked the chamber to make sure it was empty. I handed it to Pop handle-first, the safe way he’d taught me when I was a boy, and I could see the pride in his eyes too, but it was as if there was a fishhook lodged in my skin somewhere: Williams’s words, could’ve been a Marine. They echoed up against something inside me I hadn’t been aware of, that even though I had plans for graduate school in less than a year, there was the feeling I had done very little with my life so far and still wasn’t doing much. Could’ve been. Like it was too late. Like I’d been letting chances to do things slip by.
My father reloaded the .380, stepped past me, and said, “Rape who, motherfucker?” Then he raised the weapon and fired six rounds in seconds, the reports echoing out over the field of wild grass into the trees.
“Hello? Hello?” A man in hiking boots and shorts was waving at us thirty feet to the right, our target just on the other side of what was a trail. Pop lowered the pistol and Williams apologized to the man and we gathered up our guns and ammo and went inside.
We ate at a weathered oak table on a small deck overlooking the field and mountain ridge, black now against a red sky. Dinner was grilled steaks and French bread and tossed green salad. I sat beside Pop and Peggy, who sat across from the Williamses. The conversation was warm and relaxed, though a lot of it was between Peggy and Elizabeth, and Williams and Pop, and there were glasses of red wine, and we passed around the bread and broke it off with our hands. I kept looking at Elizabeth and Tom Williams. They were a good-looking couple, their kids grown already, and I thought about them building this cabin together one summer, the sharing of all that work, the joy in it. I ate the tender meat and sipped my wine; so many of the writers from my parents’ early days in Iowa City had gone on to sleep with other people, their marriages cooling piles of ash they left behind. It was something my father had been writing about for years. But the Williamses were obviously different, and I did not know till that moment that I had assumed writers just could not stay married, that something inside them—maybe the dark side of their creativity—simply made them unstable.
Before dessert I thanked Thomas and Elizabeth Williams for dinner and excused myself to go sleep outside somewhere. Elizabeth insisted I take their guest room and Tom said something about bears, but I said good night, borrowed one of their flashlights, and carried my rolled sleeping bag down the path into the trees.
The trail descended alongside the field for a while, then cut south and rose steeply into the pines. The beam from the flashlight bounced ahead of me, and I was breathing hard and had no idea why I was doing this. The trail began to level off onto a small clearing of flat rocks. Between two of them was a patch of dirt. A young pine sprouted there, and it looked as good a place as I would find in the dark, and I set my flashlight on one of the rocks, unrolled my sleeping bag, untied my work boots, and climbed in. I lay back, but when the moist earth touched my head, I grabbed one of my work boots and set it on its side, then rested back against it. I reached up and switched off the flashlight.
The air was cool. It smelled like moss and pine needles and through the trees I could hear my father laugh, then Peggy or Elizabeth. They had to be at least a half mile away, but they sounded much closer than that. I closed my eyes and listened to the voices in the trees. Only the men’s now. Pop and Thomas Williams, two people who, when they were young, had both found something they were good at and then just kept doing it. They seemed more whole to me because of that. But what was I good at? Why was I even here? Not in the White Mountains but here, on earth?
Then I saw Steve Lynch go down with one punch, the two frat boys in the alley. There was Bill Connolly’s nephew I seemed to hit at will in the ring, Sam Dolan too, his eyes tearing up each time I jabbed.
Maybe I was meant to be a boxer. The signs were there, weren’t they? What was stopping me? I’d learned that to hesitate was to freeze and to freeze was not to fight, and so now I never hesitated; my body responded the way I had somehow taught it to, but lying there in my sleeping bag between two stretches of rock, it was clear it was time my head got involved in all this again, that there had to be a fine balance between passivity and reckless action, and maybe the place to find it was back in the ring.
THE LYNN Boys Club was a mile or so from my street, a brick building that when I first entered it smelled like cotton and sweat, glove leather and canvas and hair oil. From the front desk I could hear men’s voices, the chugging slappity-slap of a speed bag, then a heavy bag jerking on its chain, the shuffle of feet, a man calling “Time!”
I walked down concrete steps into the basement training room. It was dimly lit and crowded, the walls covered with fight posters. Beneath three bare bulbs, two boxers sparred in the ring. One was black, the other white, and when the black one lashed out with a quick jab or straight right or left hook, the white one would counterpunch instantly, his eyes two shadowed slits under puffy eyebrows, his blue mouthguard visible between his lips. They wore no headgear and the gloves were fight-size and both were young and fast and small, featherweights probably. Around the ring were six or seven folding chairs, half of them taken by other fighters, their hands wrapped. Against the left wall were four speed bags. A big man in a gray sweatsuit was working one of them in a steady rhythm, the inflated rubber bag bouncing up and back in triple time. On the concrete floor two boxers skipped rope, another was doing incline sit-ups, his hands locked behind his head, and two more were doing push-ups side by side, one going down while the other came up. To the right, in the fluorescent glare of an open doorway, hung three heavy bags, each one heavier than the last. A Latino boy was working on the smallest. He’d throw a body shot, then weave away from the swaying bag and come up on it with an uppercut or left hook. His hair was wet black ringlets he kept out of his face with a red bandanna, and I was turning my attention to a man on the heaviest heavy bag. He wasn’t much taller or bigger than I was, but he was throwing one-two combinations that rocked the long Everlast, the iron beam above vibrating. A knockout punch for sure.
There was the smack of leather on flesh, the hiss of air through the nostrils of the fighters every time they threw a punch, the scuff and squeak of their rubber soles, the tip-tip-tip of the skip rope, men grunting and breathing hard, the muffled pops of punches connecting with the heavy bags, and behind all this the constant staccato of the speed bag in the corner. The air smelled like testosterone and damp cotton and muscle liniment. I was about to walk to the lighted doorway when someone tapped my arm.
It was a short man in his seventies. He wore a thin brown sweater and his nose was a smudge on his face, his eyes deeply lidded. But it was his ears it was hard not to stare at; sticking to each side of his head was a gnarled clump of flesh.
“Who are you?”
“Andre.”
“French?”
“Yep.”
“You wanna fight?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He offered his hand, his knuckles twice the size of mine. “Tony Pavone.” He waved his arm at the room. “I train all these kids. We got the Gloves coming up down to Lowel
l. What’re you, a middleweight?”
I smiled and shrugged.
“Yeah, we need a middleweight. You want to start right now?”
I was still in my construction clothes and work boots, but I told him I’d be back the next night, and I was.
TONY PAVONE had been the New England Champion in his weight class back in the thirties, and he trained everyone the same way. The workout started with three rounds of shadowboxing in the ring. At first no one was in there but me, throwing combinations at the air under the lights, bobbing under imaginary counterpunches, weaving into some hopefully evasive footwork before going back in and throwing more punches. I’d never done it before, and I felt silly till I saw four or five others doing the same thing. One climbed into the ring and worked alongside me. The others shadowboxed in the center of the concrete floor. A few times Tony would shout from the darkness beyond the ropes, “Keep your right up. Throw more jabs.”
After only three rounds I was breathing hard and my sweatshirt was sticking to my back. Now it was time for two rounds on the small heavy bag, then two on the medium, then two more on the heaviest. Earlier I’d wrapped my hands and it felt good to have those hitting gloves back on, that leather-sewn iron bar against my palms. Pavone walked around the gym in his wool sweater and worn gray dress pants and scuffed black shoes. He studied each fighter for a half minute or so. Whether they were in the ring or shadowboxing or working one of the bags, he’d offer a tip or he’d stay quiet. With me he was quiet till I got to the heavy bag, my eyes burning from the sweat, my shoulders sore from holding up my hands. I’d been trying to remember some of the combinations I’d learned from Bill Connolly, and I threw a jab, then a double left hook, weaved away from the bag, set my feet, and threw a right cross that sent an ache up my arm into my shoulder.
“That’s good power. That’s good.”
He walked away, and that’s all I needed to hear, though it was a surprise to me that I did; I already knew I had something good with my right cross, that it might be a knockout punch in the ring too, but it was just having a man older than my father take me in and say something about what he saw that felt like cool water on a dry tongue, one I hadn’t known was so dry.
Sam often talked about his own growing up, how his father had driven him to hundreds of practices and games, the coaches or ex-teachers or uncles he would sometimes go to for advice. But I’d had no coaches and until college had done my best to be invisible in the classroom. Whatever uncles I had were in Louisiana and they were uncles by a marriage that had ended years ago anyway. Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father; maybe if he’d stayed with us, it would have been different, but even then there was the feeling that writing and running and teaching is where he seemed to put the truest part of himself. After those things, there seemed to be little extra energy or time for anything else. When I saw him now, it was usually at Ronnie D’s on the weekends and when I walked in his eyes would light up and he’d call me over to the bar and buy me a beer, put his arm around me as if we both knew more about the other than we did.
I finished my rounds on the heavy bag, then followed old and slightly hunched Tony Pavone to the ring.
11
LIZ WAS IN one of my father’s fiction writing classes. She was from Maine and had brown hair and bright hazel eyes and whenever she blinked a tiny indentation appeared above her nostrils. Pop told me she was a good writer, one of his most talented, and one night at Ronnie D’s I sat across from her in one of the booths. Under the bar noise we talked and sipped beer, then went for a drive where we kept talking, and now on weekends it was in her room I slept.
It was in Academy Hall on the Bradford College campus. She had a suite and a roommate, a small living room between the two bedrooms. On Saturday nights, Sam and Theresa and Liz and I would meet there, then go down to Ronnie D’s or one of the bars on the river in Haverhill. We’d drink till last call, then end up at Howard Johnson’s.
One Friday in the loud smoky noise, we four sat in a booth when Pop walked over from the bar. He only came down to Ronnie’s after all his disciplined rituals and duties were over, when he’d felt he’d earned the drinking he did there, and he usually looked relaxed and glad to be among some of his students, a few lawyers and off-duty cops he’d gotten to know, men from the mills he never would’ve met otherwise, and now his oldest son.
But tonight he walked over looking pained about something, angry, his cheeks red above his trimmed beard. I immediately thought of Peggy. Marriage trouble.
Sam stood up in the booth and offered Pop his hand. Pop shook it, said hello to Liz and Theresa, then asked me if we could talk over at the bar for a minute. I said yeah and followed him. We stood at the corner of the bar, the entire length of it thick with men and women two or three deep, their talk and laughter a constant sound, the jukebox playing a Stones song. Most of the women were smoking, blowing it out their nostrils or the sides of their mouths as they told stories or listened to stories or laughed at stories or looked pissed off about something. The air smelled like cigarette ash and smoke, sour beer, perfume and leather and the oak bar Pop and I leaned our elbows against, our shoulders touching. Pat Cahill’s big hands rested two glasses of beer in front of us. “These are on Jimmy.” Then Pat was back at the register, and Pop raised his glass to a man at the opposite end of the bar fifty people away, a small face in the neon light of the Budweiser sign in the window. In a few years he’d be dead from cirrhosis of the liver. Pop raised his glass to him in thanks, set it back on the bar, and said, “He hit her.”
“Jimmy? Who’d he hit?”
“No, Suzanne. Her fucking husband hit her.”
There was no sound, no voices or thumping music, no laughter or rattling ice in so many glasses, no empty beer bottles tossed into a box—there was the open back porch Suzanne got married on, a small wedding to this man she’d met at Hampton Beach. He was a roofer with a red beard and shoulder-length hair, and he liked her right away and she liked him and then the two families and a few friends were on an uncut lawn on a warm September afternoon witnessing their marriage. I watched from a picnic table I sat on with a few others, and I tried to push aside my concerns but there was something wrong with what I was seeing; Suzanne, twenty-three years old, was in a denim skirt and a white blouse. She’d lost some weight and looked pretty and hopeful standing there on the porch looking up into her groom’s face, smiling as the justice of the peace spoke. She held a small bouquet of flowers.
Keith was in jeans too and a light windbreaker, and maybe he wasn’t conscious they were even on his face, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses so that as Suzanne looked into his eyes and recited her vow, she was seeing only herself looking back.
And then at the reception, a fish fry at Pop and Peggy’s house on campus, the place overflowing with people, at the end of the night Sam and Theresa and I had decorated my Subaru for them, covered it with shaving cream and flowers, tied a dozen empty cans to the bumper, wrote with soap on the rear window Just Married. I met Keith in the downstairs bathroom to give him the keys. He stood at the sink trimming his beard. Maybe for the fancy hotel they were going to for the night, I didn’t know. But as he looked into the mirror at his own face, he appeared to me unburdened of something, a man just given a second chance.
“Your sister and me are gonna have such a good life together. Our kids’ll have everything they ever wanted. My son’s gonna get a fucking Maserati on his sixteenth birthday.”
How? I wondered. And why?
Last I’d heard they’d moved from Florida to California, that they’d rented a cabin up in the mountains and she was working in a fast food restaurant while he was roofing houses along the Pacific.
Now he hit her.
“She tell you this?”
“Wrote me a letter.” Pop’s eyes were on me, and it was then I could tell why he was telling me; he wanted to know what we were going to do about it.
My mouth was air, the rest of me too, my heart hummi
ng sickly. “In the face?”
Pop nodded. “She thinks he broke her eardrum.”
Now I was moving, my body solid again, stepping sideways between men and women in the loud happy haze to the bathroom, the stall door behind me, its wooden surface covered with inked initials and fucks and shits and dicks and phone numbers and crossed-out hearts. There were the smells of piss and deodorizer, of wet filter tips and varnished wood, and I saw Suzanne standing on the porch smiling up into Keith’s mirrored sunglasses, her bouquet, her clasped hands; then I saw her jabbing the broom straw into George Labelle’s face, kicking my attacker out of our house, and there was a pinch in my vocal cords, my yelling lost in all the barroom noise, my palms pushing against the stall till it pulled from its fasteners, the door wobbling as I hurried back to the bar and my father and the retribution that must now be delivered.
POP AND I stood in his tiny kitchen lit only by the fanlight above the stove. Peggy and Nicole were downstairs asleep. He picked up the phone and called his old friend in San Francisco, a writer and bar owner, and told him the story and asked if he knew anyone there he could hire to break Keith’s legs. His friend said he’d make a few calls and get right back to him. I was pacing back and forth. “Let’s just fly out there and do it ourselves, Pop. Let’s just fuckin’ go out there tonight.”