Million Dollar Baby (11 page)

For the Mirage fight, the champ Astrakhov would get $125,000, or $75,000 more than she’d ever got before. The champ was outraged that she got the short end and vowed revenge for the insult.

Frankie knew that Maggie only had two, maybe three more title fights in her. For sure he wanted her to be the first Million Dollar Baby, wanted her to be somebody before she hung up her gloves, so she’d always be somebody afterward.

“You’ll be quittin, too, won’t you, boss?” Maggie asked.

“Nah. I’d miss the stink.”

Billy “the Blue Bear” Astrakhov was a big-busted, masculine-looking Russian girl living in Hamburg, who grew a faint mustache and dated fashion models. A former Moscow prostitute, she paraded herself in white tuxedos and lavender ties. She was a banger who waded in winging shots from all angles, and she’d been easily beating girls from Berlin to Australia. Considered the dirtiest fighter in the female ranks, she was known to head-butt and throw elbows. She was a big draw in Germany. Her favorite trick was to get inside and jam the palm of her glove into her opponent’s nose, breaking it. That she might kill them didn’t worry her. She promised to knock Maggie out.

“After I vip her,” she said at the weigh-in, grinning and winking at Maggie, “I take her to my room. On a leash.”

Maggie was asked to comment.

“I’ll break her down like a Winchester and clean both her barrels.”

Billy wore a Russian fur hat and was dressed in an electric-blue outfit with bright bolts of red-and-purple lightning down each sleeve. She took the hat off to reveal a polished shaved head and clowned confidently around the ring, flexing her arms and smiling to the crowd. Maggie, in her pale green, was iridescent under the colored lights. Slightly flushed, she had broken a sweat in the dressing room and stood in the corner serious and hard.

The Irish were everywhere, different groups of them breaking out in Irish songs. The haunting sound of bagpipes filled the indoor arena.

“Box her,” Frankie said. “Stick that jab straight into her big tits till they turn blue and fall off.”

The way Frankie sang his war song made Maggie smile. “Now you ain’t sorry you saved this ol’ hillbilly gal, are you, boss?”

Frankie kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “Macushla, you’re my blood. Now go out there and kick the shit out of her.”

The bell rang, and the Bear charged across the ring throwing a right-lead haymaker. Maggie slipped under it and, stepping to her left, drilled the Bear with her own right hand to the gut. It was a little low for the sweet spot of the solar plexus, but the Bear still went down gasping for air. The crowd was standing up and cheering, but at the count of nine the Bear got up, too.

“Tough bitch,” Frankie said to one of the seconds he’d brought in from Los Angeles.

“Bulldaggers
be
tough.”

Maggie hurt Billy twice more with combinations, but the Bear grabbed and held and made it through the round.

Because of the metal legs, Frankie had trouble shoving the heavy corner stool beneath the lowest strand of ropes but had it ready when Maggie got to the corner. He watered and greased her and admonished her to fight from the outside. When the bell rang, the cut man took the stool from Frankie and set it where Frankie could sit on it to watch the fight from ringside.

The bell for the second round rang, and Maggie fired her jabs. Billy continued to grab and hold, in an attempt to turn the match into a brawl and thereby switch the momentum of the fight back to herself. But Maggie was too slick for her, and kept drilling her with jabs and left uppercuts that kept Billy back on her heels. Billy missed so often that she was gasping as much from missing as from the punches Maggie landed. Billy caught Maggie with an elbow but missed when she tried to jam her palm into Maggie’s nose. Maggie continued to work on her from the outside, shooting her jab to Billy’s breasts like she was ramming her with the end of a two-by-four. The Blue Bear caved at the waist and grunted in pain.

In the third round Maggie’s jab had Billy off-balance and stumbling, allowing Maggie to dart in with combinations to the head and body. Billy went down from a one-two-hook combination. Frankie thought Billy had been hurt badly enough to stay down. Since it was a title fight, there was no mandatory eight-count, and after five she was right back in Maggie’s face.

Billy grabbed Maggie and tried to throw her to the canvas. The referee warned her that he’d start taking points away if she kept it up, but Billy didn’t give a shit and cursed him in Russian. She stepped on Maggie’s foot and tried to shove Maggie down again. When Maggie was still off-balance, Billy caught her with an elbow the ref didn’t see and cut Maggie’s left eye slightly. The real damage was to the tissue around the eye, which caused it to puff up. Frankie’s cut man had no trouble stopping the blood, but his ice packs and his ice-cold metal stop-swell did nothing to keep the swelling down, and the eye threatened to close completely.

Frankie told Maggie to go out in the fourth firing, to try for a knockout, because he was afraid the eye would close and the ref would stop the fight. She nailed Billy repeatedly, but Billy stayed up and continued to head-butt. The ref took points away and warned her. Billy would give a fake apology and then go right back to her dirty ways. Between rounds, Maggie complained of blurry vision. She also told Frankie she didn’t know how to counter Billy’s dirty tactics. Frankie illegally flooded her eye with Visine, and when she said she still couldn’t see, he told her she only needed one eye to fight.

“Okay, but what I do about the Bear?” said Maggie.

“You know how to step outside her right hand, and go to the liver with a left hook, right?”

“Been doin that. She’s made of steel.”

“Not for fookin long,” said Frankie. “This time, instead of goin for the liver, I want you to go to the right cheek of her big dyke ass with your left hook, stick it into her sciatic nerve like a dagger, and keep on stickin it.”

“What if the ref sees me?”

“Keep the bull bitch between you and him, and he won’t. And keep on stickin into that degenerate ass. Got it?”

“You betcha.”

Near the end of the fifth, Billy’s right leg was dragging and white with pain. Exhausted, she went to one knee for a voluntary eight-count in an attempt to regain her strength and to relieve the pain. It was a good sign, but Frankie was still worried about Maggie’s eye, afraid it might close like a clamshell and cost her the title shot.

By the time Billy got up, Maggie’s vision still hadn’t cleared completely, but she kept the pressure on. She jumped the Russian with combinations that had her head wobbling and the crowd on its feet. The ref was about to stop the fight, when the bell rang.

Maggie had thrown four solid shots in the middle of the ring, all of them landing, and was about to finish Billy off with a left hook to the jaw, but on hearing the bell, she was able to catch herself. Instead of letting the shot go, in an instant she turned to her right, looked with her good eye to see Frankie pushing the ring stool under the rope, and dropped both her hands.

Billy had been ready to throw a righthand at the bell. But instead of holding back like Maggie had, and knowing that Maggie couldn’t see properly out of her left eye, she stepped in and ripped a right that caught Maggie on the left ear.

Since Maggie was moving away, the force of the blow was lessened. But it was hard enough, landing where it did, to affect Maggie’s inner ear. Suddenly, her equilibrium gone, the ring was a roller-coaster, and she felt like she was stepping into post holes. Though she was fully conscious, her legs began to snap and buckle. She’d never been knocked off her feet, and her mind and body rebelled at the idea of hitting the canvas.

Frankie, busy with the stool, hadn’t seen what happened and looked over just as Maggie had begun to stumble toward him, her legs like rubber bands.

“Jaysus!”

He took a step, but Maggie’s legs gave out before he could catch her. Falling like deadweight, she plunged past his outstretched arms. Trying to prevent her damaged eye from hitting the canvas, Maggie wrenched her body in an attempt to break the fall by taking it on her side and shoulders. But she twisted too hard, and the back of her neck came down full force on the metal band of the ring stool, her neck breaking at the first and second vertebrae, the sound of it like a boot squashing a snail.

“No!” Frankie cried, watching as she slumped to her side.

Ring doctors rushed to her as Frankie stretched her flat on the canvas. She had stopped breathing.

At all fights in the major boxing states, a fully equipped ambulance and crew stand ready. The doctors immediately called for a stretcher, and Maggie was carried out at a run. The crowd was silent, the pipers numb. Billy stood stock-still, the sweat on her going cold as her pale eyes.

At the ambulance, Maggie was hooked to an Ambu-bag and air was squeezed into her flat lungs just before the four-minute time limit that would have meant brain damage.

As oxygen reached her brain, she mumbled, “I love you, Daddy,” but remained unconscious.

Several hours later, specialists at the hospital announced that Maggie was in ICU and had not regained consciousness.

Frankie lied, said he was her grandfather. “Can she breathe on her own yet?”

“No.”

“Is there damage to her spinal cord?” Frankie asked, pressing.

“It’s too soon.”

“I’m a C-1 and C-2 complete, boss,” Maggie said. She was gaunt and sallow and the spunk in her was gone. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark and lifeless. “That means my spinal cord’s so bad they never can fix me.”

She’d been nine days in a coma. They’d kept her doped-up to keep her head immobile for two weeks after that. Because of her MRI and other tests, her neurologists determined that she was a permanent, vent-dependent quadriplegic unable to breathe without a respirator. As a C-1 and C-2, she was injured at the first and second cervical vertebrae, which meant she could talk and slightly move her head, but that was all. She had lost the ability to breathe on her own, to move her limbs. She could not control her bladder or her bowel movements. She’d be frozen the rest of her life.

It took several hours every day to get her ready for the wheelchair, to check the tubes into her bladder, her stomach, and through the front of her neck. After stretching and manipulating her arms and legs, her attendants would lift her into the wheelchair, where she’d be strapped in. Her bed respirator would be switched for the one built into the wheelchair. Since she couldn’t breathe on her own, her bed and wheelchair respirators would always be on Control rather than on Assist—Control meant oxygen was pumped into her twenty-four hours a day.

Because of complications, she remained in Las Vegas two months. She had no appetite but maintained her weight because of the calories they fed her through the stomach tube. She developed skin ulcers because she couldn’t change positions and the skin broke down. Her lungs filled with fluid and had to be pumped out when pneumonia struck. There were blood clots in her legs and problems with hemoglobin. To induce a daily bowel movement, she was placed on her side and pressure was applied to her lower abdomen until her waste was pushed out of her. She was humiliated every day of her life.

It was late afternoon. Frankie was sitting by her bed when she woke up. “You okay, darlin?” he asked.

She was still groggy. “Well, you know, they got tubes stickin up me in places I’druther not think about. You ever heard of dysreflexia?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It’s somethin that happens real quick, like when you git a kink in your pee tube? Gits your heartbeat all to rushin.” Embarrassed, she looked away. “I didn’t tell you, but a couple a times I liked to have a heart attack in the night. Awful as it is when your heart’s fixin to explode, it made me happy, boss, ’cause I thought I’d be free of this mess. Almost made it once. But then I was brought back to bein this same old snowman in January, same old twisted-up snowman sittin here wishin to God it was July.”

“Ah, Jaysus,” Frankie said. “I knew I was wrong to train you.”

“Don’t say that,” Maggie said. “Hail, workin with you was the only time since Daddy passed I had respect. Hey!, and we almost did her, too, didn’t we, boss?, huh? almost made me the world’s first Million Dollar Baby!, ain’t that rat?” She smiled but then had to look away, her lips quivering. “Daddy’d a been proud.”

The Boxing Commission would pay for Maggie’s hospitalization and rehab. Frankie remained in Vegas for the time Maggie was there. He bunked with a trainer friend and spent all the time with Maggie her doctors would allow. He read newspapers and magazines to her. He brought in a small TV set with a VCR so she could watch movies. He wheeled her around the hospital grounds when it was cool enough.

He arranged for trainers in Los Angeles to work with his fighters and called his boys once a week. They were devastated by what happened to Maggie. All were proud to say they knew her. They called her Macushla.

Maggie could have gone to a rehab clinic in Las Vegas or Missouri but chose to return to Los Angeles for treatment to be close to Frankie. They made the six-hour trip by ambulance. Twice she spasmed into a grotesque caricature of herself, and the attending pulmonologist had to ask Maggie how to untwist her.

“Worse part is the dang bedsores, when they git to stinkin.”

At the Evergreen Rehabilitation Center near Third and Alvarado, there was a wide expanse of landscaped lawn, California sycamores, and palms. Maggie was given first-class treatment with genuine concern for her well-being. She was one of ten quadriplegics there, but there were many more paraplegics, and amputees of all kinds. Most of the patients were cheerful. Maggie was one of the ones who wasn’t, as each day the dread of a frozen life engulfed her.

Frankie tried to tell her that there was always hope, that new medical miracles were developed every day, but she would turn away and bite her tongue to keep from screaming.

“And even if they don’t, now that you’re off the heart monitor, you’ll be able to move around on your own. They got wheelchairs you can use by blowin into a straw, and TV sets and computers you can operate by your voice. You could go to school. I’d drive you.”