Million Dollar Baby (13 page)

It hurt his knees and back to stand. By now his eyes had adjusted to the diffused light, which filtered through the stained glass and swirled like tails of cats around the statues of the tortured Jesus, the agonized Mother, and the suffering saints. St. Brendan’s was an old church, one in which the smells of burning candles and incense were ever present. For Frankie it was a holy place, and he took solace from it, knowing that his torture was mirrored in the broken body of the crucified Christ.

“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee … ”

Father O’Gorman was the same age as Frankie. Still spry, shaped like a grape, he walked down the aisle as if he were wearing a derby.

“Ah, Frank, lad, have you any stalwarts for me on the television?”

“No, Father Tim. None.”

Two penitents preceded Frankie—an old Italian gardener in his work clothes and a pregnant young black woman. Both were finished in minutes.

Frankie entered one side of the confessional, closed the door behind him, and knelt. Father Tim, seated on the other side of the partition, slid the solid grating aside and prepared to listen. He knew Frankie from childhood in Ireland. Both had been schooled by the hard Christian Brothers, both had played at the enormous Neolithic Proleek Dolmen near Dundalk. At nine Frankie had come to the States with his parents, in 1938. Father Tim arrived as a young priest in the early fifties. He had never lost his brogue. Frankie had lost his, having finished school in California. But when he was around the Micks, and hearing them talk, the brogue came back on him.

Frankie could barely make out the dark figure of the round priest beyond the screen that separated them. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said. “It’s been a while since my last confession.”

“Maybe more than a while, Frank?”

“Yah, you’re right, Father. More.” He wondered if the priest could smell the drink on his breath.

Frankie wanted to continue but couldn’t. The priest heard him choking on his words.

“Nothin to say to me, at all, at all?” asked the priest.

“I do, Tim. But only because a jar I have lifted.”

“Ah,” said the priest, who himself was known to lift a jar. He waited the eternity of one whole minute before he spoke. “Go on, lad.”

“I can’t.”

“So terrible, is it?”

“What I’m thinkin ’tis,” said Frankie, falling even deeper into the old way of talking.

“So terrible you can’t talk at all?”

“Ah, Tim, I murthered a girleen.”

“Jaysus!” whispered O’Gorman, making the Sign of the Cross. “Jaysus, Mary, and St. Joseph, Frank, say you didn’t.”

“I did. In me mind.”

“Sure and we’re not speakin of a wee lass, are we now?”

“Nah, Tim, nothin like that. You saw this one on the television with me.”

“The one who fell?”

“Aye … the one who fell.”

“Are you tellin me she’s already dead, Frank?”

“Not yet.”

“Then what?”

“Tim, I don’t know. But I think I do, only I can’t say.”

“Not even here?” asked the priest, gently, gently, feeling the doom Frankie felt. “You know you can’t do that, Frank.”

“I know it, Father.”

Frankie sat beside Maggie on the balcony. After his whispered hello, and Maggie’s double blink, he remained silent the whole of the afternoon, watching trees. He wanted to tell her that he’d do it, but he couldn’t tell her, because he wasn’t sure he could.

She wanted to say that she had asked too much of him, and would have told him, but she had no tongue.

At his one-room apartment off Venice Boulevard in Culver City, Frankie tossed off another shot of Jameson. He removed a fresh, one-ounce bottle of adrenaline chloride solution 1:1000 from the refrigerator, where he stored it to maintain its effectiveness. He twisted off the metal cap, the metal tearing with a snap, but he sat there awhile before doing anything else. On the Formica-topped table was an old-style, glass-and-metal army-surplus hypodermic needle he’d taken from his gear bag. He’d used it maybe a dozen times to inject procaine into the crushed knuckles and fractured metacarpals of fighters so they could make a fight. He’d also used adrenaline more than a hundred times to stop blood from cut eyes, saving fights and even careers of bleeding fighters. And he knew what else adrenaline chloride could do.

He placed the syringe and detachable needle into a clean nine-inch Pyrex pie plate and was about to pour alcohol over them. He would light the alcohol afire to sterilize the instruments. He caught himself, then set the bottle of alcohol aside. There was no need to sterilize.

He drew the entire contents of the little brown bottle of adrenaline into the calibrated barrel of the syringe. Once it was loaded, he placed it back in its polished, stainless steel case. He put the case into the inside pocket of his navy-blue windbreaker in an upright position, so the adrenaline wouldn’t leak. Dressed in dark clothes, he drove his old Ford to Evergreen, arriving in the parking lot with his headlights out at 1:50 A.M.

Frankie prayed he wouldn’t be noticed. When he saw the night nurse move along the long hallway at two o’clock, going first to Maggie’s room at the end of the wing, then working her way back toward the desk, he crept into the building and up the front stairs. He hid in a broom closet, leaving the door slightly ajar. When he saw the nurse move past on her way to the other wing, Frankie took off his shoes and tiptoed down the hall and into Maggie’s room.

A pale night-light was on. Frankie moved to the table next to Maggie’s bed and put his shoes on the floor. Maggie’s ventilator was on, but she wasn’t hooked to a monitor. Frankie took his works from his pocket and saw that none of the adrenaline had leaked. He looked finally over to Maggie, whom he expected to be asleep. He was met by two eyes staring at him.

Maggie blinked twice. Frankie nodded and blinked twice as well.

He moved as quickly and as deftly as a surgeon, knowing that if he stopped to consider what he was doing he might not be able to do it at all, at all. He leaned close to Maggie, whose eyes were now closed.

“Mo cuishle.”

Maggie looked up and smiled, then frowned as they both heard the nurse approaching in her sensible shoes. Frankie held his breath and stood behind the door as the nurse looked in. Maggie looked at the nurse, who didn’t find it unusual that Maggie was awake.

“Are you alone?” asked the nurse in a whisper.

Yes.

“Do you smell whiskey?”

No.

“Funny, thought I smelled it in the hall. Did you hear anything?”

No.

“Oh, well,” said the nurse, who returned to her station, which was some forty paces from Maggie’s room.

Maggie looked to Frankie, who bent to kiss her on the cheek.

“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered in her ear. “First I’m going to put you to sleep. Then I’ll give you a shot.”

Yes.

Frankie stood behind her so he wouldn’t have to see her face. He firmly pressed his thumbs to both sides of Maggie’s neck, cutting off the blood flow to her brain at the carotid arteries. In a few seconds, Maggie’s eyes closed and her mouth came open. Oxygen from the vent escaped and became part of the whirlwind inside Frankie’s head. He stood pressing for three minutes, long enough to give himself the time he needed.

Frankie looked at her, had to choke back a howl. But he still pried her mouth open the width of three fingers, and injected the contents of the hypodermic needle beneath the stub of Maggie’s tongue. The adrenaline, all thirty milliliters of it, was enough to kill a dragon, but Frankie knew it would dissipate in Maggie’s system shortly after being injected. Should there be an autopsy, the tiny spot where the needle had entered would not to be noticed. But even if it were, the adrenaline would never be detected.

Frankie quickly placed the syringe back in its case and returned it to his inside pocket. Now he was calm, the same calm he’d felt in his toughest fights. He checked Maggie’s pulse. It raced faster than a speed bag. Then the stroke hit her and her face contorted, one eye sagging open.

The brief shadow of a bird’s wing sped high across the far wall and passed through the glass of the domed window. Frankie closed the eye with the tip of his finger, made sure Maggie’s pulse was still with his thumb. With his shoes in his hand but without his soul, he moved silently down the rear stairs and was gone, his eyes as dry as a burning leaf.

“W
E GOTTA TURN THIS
African to his left,” the cut man repeated to himself on the plane into Philadelphia. “We fix him so he can’t set, big S.O.B. can’t punch.”

Stick and move and turn him, that was their strategy. The African could hit, so make him go opposite to what he was used to; fight him low and from the side, angles; turn him, make him miss, and tire him. Take his power away and then you take his belt.

The cut man was a slick old white man, was Con Flutey. He had white hair and wore trifocals. He was in the fight game because of the beauty of it, a game where old men could still go to war. It was in his bones, the fight game. He’d been in it a long time. He’d been in the game of living a long time, too, and there were parts of himself that were so different from the other parts that he could not understand how they could all be in his one self. But there they were, and though the disparate parts often surprised him, he’d come to enjoy the merry-go-round that was his soul. What else was he to do?

Besides, the older he got, the more things made sense, the more they connected, even though in recent years he wasn’t able to train fighters the way he used to—couldn’t work with them on how to move because of his legs, couldn’t catch their punches with the mitts because of what it did to his back. Now he taught young ones theory, and some seasoned pros, too—angles and distance; how to shove off their back foot to move forward, how to shove off the front to go back; balance and how to pivot off their front foot, off the back, and why, and how to fight moving backward; how the ass moves before the hands when you punch and how the hook to the body looks like it comes off the front foot, but like the hook to the head, it comes off the back; and breathing, always breathing. And thinking, always.

So there he was. He stood on the lovely Ben Franklin Parkway and delighted in all the international flags fluttering against the green of early spring. After Old Glory, the South African flag was his favorite. He didn’t like the orange in the tricolor of Ireland—orange had no space in his Irish heart. Up the way was the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the steps Sylvester Stallone as “Rocky” ran up, the music of the soundtrack pushing him on, ennobling him. The trouble was that Stallone couldn’t spell fight.

Con had flown in from another flight, coming in on an earlier flight from Vegas. His partner and his fighter were due to arrive in an hour and a half from Los Angeles. They would all be on the same flight going home. Their faction was from L.A. and they flew into Philly for a twelve-round fight at the Blue Horizon for one of the alphabet titles—not a major belt, but if they beat the African, the cut man’s kid was sure to get another shot at one of the majors. Members of a faction always said
my
and
we: we
fought;
we’re
gonna fight;
we
won;
we
got beat;
my
kid. They say
we
because they fight when their fighter fights and when their fighter gets hit, they get hit. When the fighter wins or loses, they win or lose, and together they feel what that’s like. That’s why he thought of Mookie as
his
kid and why he said that
we
were fighting the main event on Tuesday night. And that’s why he knew you had to learn how to win and you had to learn how to lose, and why you had to learn to always do your best. Not
try
to do.
Do.
Because these kids put their lives in your hands.

Con Flutey had never won a major belt; neither had his partner, Odell Blue. Odell trained their kid and as his trainer he would be the chief second, the only one going into the ring between rounds. If there was a bad cut, the cut man would go in and Odell would handle the water and the ice and the grease from outside. Odell had been a ranked fighter with a big left-hand. He had a slight stutter from being hit. If someone wronged him, the stutter took control; it was best not to have wronged him because when Odell couldn’t talk he began to punch. But between rounds during a fight, he spoke to his fighters with no trace of the stutter, and he still had a physique that made women look.

Odell had suffered a detached retina back when there were only eight weight divisions, starting with flyweights at 112 pounds, and when there was only one champion to each division. He’d been ranked number five as a middleweight when you had to have fifty or sixty fights to get a title shot. He was due for his shot, but then he began to get hit with the right. Unable to slip right-hands, he was also unable to get his big left-hand off, and the nights got longer. When he realized he had to hang up his gloves, he worked the docks in L.A. Harbor fifteen years before he could come back to the gym and start all over as a trainer in a game he’d been at since he was eleven—when the only meat his family ate in Cairo, Georgia, was the rabbit or the coon his daddy brought down with a single-shot .22. Odell was respected by everyone in the game, and people who knew him figured he would have had a champ already. He’d been disappointed more times than an old priest. The cut man knew Odell hated to lose as much as he did, but Odell never quit and neither did the cut man.

“If I could only get me a white heavyweight,” Odell would say. “We’d be rich, you and me, old man.”

Con believed him, Odell was that good. He knew how badly white people wanted a white heavyweight champ, how much they’d pay. He wished they had a white boy, too. He would be able to help his own kids that way, help them get a leg up in a world that cared less and less about the things that he cared about more and more.

So now they were in Philly and Mookie Bodeen was leaving the gym at 157 and 158 and would make the 160-pound middleweight limit easy. Middleweight was Con’s favorite division. Mookie was from South Central in L.A. and raised by his mother, who also had four girls by two other fathers. Mookie hated his father, whoever he was, and loved his mother and his sisters, whom he was sending to beauty school so they could be somebody. He’d promised his mama a house, too, but she was still renting. He was 42 and 3, a left-handed boxer-puncher with 24 kayos. He’d been knocked out twice, once in his second title fight and once in an eight-rounder after he’d lost his first title fight by a split decision in Paris. Dejected, he quit fighting altogether. But then he went broke, tried to manage himself and switched to a different trainer, thinking to blame Odell for his Paris loss. Out of shape, he took an eight-round fight in Tijuana for eight hundred—a buck a round. With strangers in his corner who were trying to earn enough to buy a new tire, he got clocked in five by a 170-pound marine moonlighting out of Camp Pendleton. He quit again.