He had a lot at stake on the outcome of this fight. A lot of pride. His cross-town rival, Arch, was managing the other fighter and it was well-known how much trash-talking Arch did on the other side of town, calling Lefty everything from a drunk to a hack to a trainer of losers. But with Donnell, Lefty had a good one, a really good one. The kid was big and strong, a little slow with his hands, but big on heart, and if he caught you with one of those roundhouse rights you would be seeing stars, if that much. Against him, Arch had a slick, fast veteran, Jackie Riddle, who didn’t have the gameness to wear a championship belt, but could be a terrible, punishing test on the way to the top. He had a left jab that was annoying like a mosquito until it caught up with you, if you took it too lightly, and discovered your face was swollen like a balloon. His straight right was like taking a swat from a sock filled with pennies.

The crowd on fight night was divided on a partisan basis, mainly by race and neighborhood, and to a lesser extent by its loyalty to styles, one half favoring the brave, relentless puncher that Donnell was, the other half siding with the speed and flash that were Riddle’s trademark. Besides that, some there were rooting for Donnell because they thought he was on the way up into the ranks of the Top 10 and a shot at the title; while Riddle was well-established as the best of those who would never be champion. As one veteran fight observer once told the press, "Arch is a great trainer and motivator of men, but even he can’t get Riddle to the top. The only one who could make that slacker champion is Dr. Christian Barnard."

Still, the odds were even, because Riddle had more talent than Donnell, while the young one had the desire.

"Three rounds," Arch told Lefty, as they brought their fighters out into the middle of the ring to listen to the referee’s instructions before the scheduled 10-round bout. "You don’t know how to train fighters worth crap. Look at your boy, not a drop of sweat on him, cold as a corpse. Maybe we’ll take him in one."

"He’s trying to psyche you out, Green Boy," Lefty told his fighter.

Riddle, glistening with sweat and unable to stand still, said, "Big, slow, dumb, send him to me like a f**king piñata. Thanks, Lefty."

Donnell didn’t say a thing.

The two fighters exchanged the mandatory touch of glove tips, then went back to their corners. "He’s going to come out trying to nail you," Lefty told his kid. "He thinks you haven’t warmed up. Remember what I said: the left hook. He thinks you got nothing but the big right hand. And remember what we worked on. Tighten it up. Don’t telegraph it with the foot."

The bell rang.

"Give it to him!" Arch was yelling from the other corner, as his fighter came out like a hungry panther.

"Fake and counter," Lefty told his boy. "He’s expecting you to lead." Then, more loudly, he shouted, "Go get him, Green Boy!"

The fight was on, and the fight crowd, even before a single punch was thrown, was already deeply into it, standing on its feet; life out there is so frustrating and demeaning for most of us, that the ring has become a sacred place where we recover our manhood via proxies.

The first round was a good one for the up-and-coming kid. Though Riddle wanted to scorch him, Riddle was, in spite of being drenched with sweat and all worked up, a little tight, he didn’t know if Donnell’s punches were made of clay or iron. Win-Loss records and KO percentages only say so much. While he was trying to find out, Green Boy threw a half punch guaranteed to draw a counter, then countered that with a real punch. It only half-landed, because Riddle was fast, and rolled with it. But the crowd was screaming, half of it, while the other half held its breath. Late in the round, Riddle landed a good right, but Donnell took it well and countered with a left hook to Riddle’s body, which wasn’t as magical as the veteran’s mongoose-fast head. It was just where you thought it would be. Ringside seats could hear the thud and see the pain write itself into Riddle’s face. As the bell rang, Lefty hugged his kid, and shouted over to Arch: "What round, pimp? Want to call it again?" Green Boy was looking good.

When the bell for Round Two sounded, it was a different Riddle who came out, serious and focused, his eyes riveted on Green Boy and not blinking at all, like the eyes of a cadaver locked into an eternal stare by a bullet that’s passed through the heart. Green Boy took several hard jabs before he finally cornered Riddle on the ropes, and landed two powerful body blows, delivered with the devastating impact of a wrecking ball. But the building didn’t fall. Somebody wondered about the little brown bottle in Riddle’s corner, from which he drank between rounds, or maybe it was something Arch had said to him. More probably, it was the sports columnist who’d recently written of Riddle: "Never before, in the history of sport, has a man with so much done so little." Of course, it was a play on Churchill’s praise of the RAF, a cruel flip-flop meant to get under a man’s skin. Back in Riddle’s part of town, people he hung with were quoted as saying he made them look bad, and that they wished he’d spray-paint himself another color. It’s amazing what a little humiliation can do for a man’s spirit.

In Round 3, the slacker’s skills finally began to gel. As Green Boy, brave and sure of himself, continued to press with the thought of landing rib-breaking blows that would knock Riddle "off his bicycle", Riddle peppered him mercilessly with indignant jabs, that were like Nat Turner’s revolt. Then, he countered over Green Boy’s attempted body shots with two fierce, crisp rights that, if they could speak, would have said: "My people are going to respect me again. Your face is going to raise me from the dead."

The fight was heating up now, Lefty didn’t even notice the beautiful pair of legs walking by, and the sign the girl was holding up that said "Round 4."

In Round 4, once the bell opened the dam, it was more of the same, and Lefty began to worry. Green Boy did try the trick he’d learned in the gym: having surprised Riddle early with the left hook and punished him with it, he’d got him expecting it, so that now he used the left hook to set up the right, which followed in rapid combination, just as Riddle had opened himself up to it by trying to block the left. Trouble was, in spite of all the work – in spite of the string Lefty had tied between his fighter’s feet in practice, and the hours he’d stood there with his hands on the boy’s shoulder, trying to tighten up the delivery and turn the looping punch into a quick, straight shot – Green Boy was a born brawler with haymakers in his genetic make-up. He might as well have been a Civil-War soldier, pouring the powder and shot into his musket and packing it in with a ramrod before raising the weapon to fire. The combination was the right one, and the time to spring it on Riddle was perfect. But the delivery was way too slow, the arc wasted too many fractions of a second, Riddle stepped inside of it, into the eye of the hurricane and clinched. Green Boy wasted too much energy there, and got a warning from the ref, for trying to shake him loose. "Hey, watch the clinches!" Lefty shouted to the ref. "This isn’t prom night!"

Between rounds, Lefty applied ice to Donnell’s eye, which was beginning to swell up. Before the fight, Arch had predicted Donnell wouldn’t be needing a mask this Halloween, and it looked like his prediction might be on the way to coming true.

Out in the crowd, Lefty could hear Donnell’s supporters chanting, "Proudly the war trumpets..."; it was an Irish song and they believed in their boy, and would use him to fill whatever was empty and miserable in their lives with glory. He was a flag which they would hoist, with their cheers, to the top of the mast of their sad ship going nowhere. "Come on, Donny" someone shouted from nearby. "Come on, Green Boy!" Poor kid, whose mother had passed away last year. His father remained, and shouted loudest of all those who needed him.

Round 5 solidified a pattern, and had Lefty desperate, though he knew he must hide the prophecies of his instinct. Riddle showed no signs of slowing down, took a glancing right to the head which showered Donnell with his sweat, and part of a left hook to the jaw which couldn’t find the wimp button that was said to be located there. Riddle traded punches with Green Boy for a moment, like Billy Conn mixing it up with Joe Louis, then cleared out before Green Boy could find him, and kept up his methodical dry-ice attack, always moving, sticking, moving. He was like the guerrillas, and Donny was like the platoon that is walking into an ambush.

"You ain’t no trainer, and you ain’t got no fighter!" Arch yelled across the ring before the start of Round 6. One of his assistants, ‘Mouth’, added: "I got a balloon like that for my kid when we went to the Bronx Zoo." He was talking about Green Boy’s face.

Meanwhile, Riddle’s fans were chanting: "Slick is back!", while green Boy’s troopers were trying to drown them out, singing, "Oh, Donny Boy", off the obvious inspiration.

It was like two nations at war, here, two races, two audiences, each in its own way lost, some from poverty, some from the emptiness of success, some from jobs that were like shit on your shoe, some from women trouble, some merely because none of us is all we wish to be. The fighter we had chosen could fix it all for us; in the other was embodied everything that held us back.

"What you’d give your boy to eat before the fight?" Arch shouted to Lefty. "Snails, covered with molasses?"

"Kill him," Lefty told his fighter.

Round 6 saw Green Boy pushing things like an angry landslide coming down a mountain, but Riddle seemed tireless, tonight, and maintained the quickness and clarity of his moves. His instincts did not have a single dull edge. None of his watchdogs was asleep.

"You’re knocking out the air, boy!" Mouth called out, as Donnell’s big punches failed to connect.

"Lefty taught his boy to be a windmill!" Arch added, mocking the kid’s indiscreet haymakers, which were like bank robbers blowing trumpets before they walked into the bank. "Couldn’t beat no one but Don Quixote!"

Lefty saw Green Boy gritting his teeth, drawing up great buckets of rage from the deep well of his pride, but Riddle seemed to have a radar inside his head. Green Boy missed badly, and paid each time he did.

"Christ!" Lefty realized, "the kid’s eye is so swollen he’s not even seeing the right come in anymore! I got f**king Homer in the ring with Jack the Ripper!"

"Get him, Green Boy, get him!" Donny’s fans were cheering. They were excited by his drive, and failing to see the cost of it. It was like the people applauding when the space shuttle blew up, because they thought it was just the spacecraft separating from the booster.

After Round 6, Lefty had a cold pack pressed against Donny’s eye, and also had to swab his nose which had begun to bleed. "How does it feel?" he asked Green Boy.

"Great! I’m great!" the boy assured Lefty.

His nose might be broken. If it wasn’t, another good shot was sure to do it in.

"Can you see my hand, over here, boy?" Lefty asked him.

"Yeah."

"How many fingers am I holding up? No, don’t turn your head. Look straight ahead. Can you see my hand out here?"

"A little."

"How many fingers?"

"Three?"

"Not sure?"

"Three."

"Listen, Donny, you’ve got to keep your left hand up, do you hear me? You’ve got to cut off the ring. You’ve got to go back to work on the body. You’ve got to slow him down. Left hook to the liver or the ribs. Look for the solar plexus with your right. But don’t lunge and don’t reach. Not once! Get it?"

The bell rang, to roars of "Slick is Back" and "Heart, Donny Boy, Heart!"

Lefty could hear the distinctive voice of Donny’s father screaming, "Don’t let us down!" from the other side of the ropes.

"Worst trainer in the business!" Arch was shouting. "Ring Magazine must’ve been snorting coke when they said you were underrated. Drunk SOB, your boy couldn’t even beat Laila Ali!"

Green Boy was as game as Roddy McCorley, as any martyr ever hanged for his convictions. He threw himself at Slick like a storm, like a war cry. Once, changing direction, Riddle slipped to the canvas, and the crowd was on its feet, screaming as though it were from a punch. When the ref ruled "slip", the boos nearly made the roof cave in.

"Bastard!" thought Lefty, as Riddle teased his kid, two times drifting near a corner to excite his desperate rival who, forgetting everything Lefty had told him, lunged in at his opponent to try to cut off his mobility, and received punishing blows instead. For a moment, Riddle stood there pummeling him, as Green Boy struggled to recover, like a beetle flipped over on its back. At last, he countered with a furious blow to Riddle’s shoulder, which once more had his fans jumping up and down with joy, for no good reason except that they were too far away from the ring to see what was really happening. They knew only what they wanted, nothing of the truth.

"Come on!" the boy’s father urged his son, as Donnell sat in the corner bloody and nearly blind in one eye, before the start of Round 8. "Now, is the hour of the heroes! These are the times that separate the mice from the men!"

Lefty thought, "Why isn’t the ring doctor here? He should be looking at Green Boy right now. He should be the one to call it."

Once more, Donny’s fans were chanting, drowning out "Slick is Back" with a badly botched verse from "The Minstrel Boy", that was nearly as pitiful as the way Green Boy looked.

"Something’s got to change, Boy," Lefty was telling the kid. "I’m not in the business of feeding the sharks. You’ve got to do something!"

"Don’t stop it!" the kid pleaded, suddenly frightened.

"You got to give me something, Boy."

"What, Lefty, what?"

"He’s doing right leads all the time, now. You can’t see, can you, Boy? Can you hear?"

"Yes, Lefty, I can hear real good!"

"You listen to me, Boy, listen to me calling the shots! You’re going to counter his rights with the left hook. Throw each punch like the devil was there, about to rape your sister."

"I’ll take his head off, Lefty! I’ll take his f**king head off!"

"World’s worst manager, world’s dumbest fighter: a match made in Heaven!" Arch was saying. "Geology is faster. And rocks are smarter."

The bell sounded for Round 8. It got worse. Green Boy’s counters were too late, a cut was opened up underneath the eye that could not see, he looked like one of those cadavers on Forensic Files (what madness that such sick shows should have come to TV!)

"Heart of a champion!" a part of the crowd was thundering underneath him.

"Have they come to see him win, or to be crucified?" Lefty wondered.

"Slick is Back!"

"What’s in the brown bottle?"

Lefty was nearly having a heart attack by now; he felt like a murderer, and he felt completely alone, because no one except for him in all this great arena had the slightest trace of a thought that this fight should end. Donny was working his way up the ranks towards a title bout, he was undefeated, he was made of gold, he couldn’t lose, he had to pull it out. He was Atlas, carrying a world of broken, defeated people on his shoulders, and Atlas cannot put the world down, no matter how much it weighs. He was the receptacle of manhood, in a world where men have been trained like circus animals to jump through hoops. He was the place where the manhood surrendered by the rest of us was stored. The precious vessel must not break! The precious bleeding vessel that could not see!

The bell ending Round 8 rang, leaving two more to go, and Donny far behind on points, as helpless, in spite of his enormous punches, as a child playing blind man’s bluff. Riddle wasn’t going to give it away.

"Loser!" Mouth was taunting Lefty, far across the ring. "You don’t have what it takes to make a champ! He’s as well-trained as a puppy shitting on the couch!"

At the same time, Green Boy was telling Lefty, "Don’t stop it! I can win! I know I can! I’ve got the knockout punch! One punch, and I can change things around! God will help me to land it, he loves my country!"

The boy’s unvanquished fans were exhorting him from all sides. "Heart! Heart! Heart!"

Meanwhile, Arch was laughing at Lefty from across the ring, sure he’d be number one in town after this. Mouth was still saying something, all Lefty heard was, "Loser!", and Donny’s dad was shouting, "The Comeback Kid, that’s what they’ll call you when tonight is over!"

The bell for Round 9 sounded.

Lefty, tears in his eyes, knowing he would soon be the most reviled of living beings but unable any longer to be deterred by it, stepped in front of his rising fighter, who rebelliously pushed him out of the way. Lefty threw the towel in after him, and the ref came over to ask: "Lefty, are you stopping it?" The soul of the arena was everywhere, possessing even the ref; even the ring doctor who hadn’t budged.

"It’s over!" Lefty told him.

"Don’t stop it! Don’t stop it!" Green Boy was bellowing, as though he’d just been shot, while the crowd was on its feet, mouths agape, not yet reacting, because it wasn’t sure what had happened.

"It’s over!" Lefty shouted again, turning away from the infuriating sight of Riddle raising his arms into the air, as Arch and Mouth jumped up and down beside him. "You gave it your all, kid, but it’s not boxing anymore, it’s slaughter. You’re blind as a bat."

"I can see! I swear I can!"

Lefty held and comforted the distraught fighter, as half of the boy’s fans booed the trainer who had dared to deprive them of a hero – booed him ferociously, as though he were a traitor and a dog, who deserved to die ("death to every foe and traitor") – while the other half, fearing that the boy might believe its boos were meant for him, instead chose to cheer his valiant effort, though it had fallen short of saving them.

"Please don’t stop it!" the kid was still pleading with Lefty. He had put so much into this.

"Kid, you’re beautiful, you’re great," Lefty told him, holding him and hugging him like a son, as an assistant held a pack of ice up to the beaten fighter’s eye. "You lost a boxing match, but of what boxing tells about a man, you’ve triumphed." And gesturing out to the crowd he said: "It’s not for you to carry the rest of us on your back. Every man must earn his own way. You’ve earned yours. I’ve earned mine. They’ve yet to earn theirs…"

Short Fiction Contents