TKO (6 page)

Smitty took me through some pad work, finishing with two full rounds drilling the recoil on my left cross. This was Smitty’s pride and joy, and he felt like if he could train a fighter to bring his hands back after a punch, then that fighter’s defense could be almost impenetrable. He was right and all his fighters did it well. If they didn’t, and didn’t practice, pretty soon they weren’t his fighters anymore. Smitty would drop them because he felt that strongly about it.

After the last round on the pads he told me to shake down a little bit and to do some stretching. He gave me the speech of what not to eat before a fight and how to get as much sleep as possible—like the nerves I went through the week of the fight would possibly allow me to concentrate on nutrition or leave me calm enough to get any sleep. The last few days before the fight I was miserable. Irritable, cranky, and generally just pissed off, and dealing with the Michelin Woman today hadn’t helped matters either.

I was undoing my wraps and heading up the stairs to the locker room when I was distracted by the yelling in the karate room. Looking through the little square window with the crosshatched lines, I saw Mitchell and Harter, the two barney-badass black belts. They were standing over the goofy kid, the one with the really bad pizza face. He was doing knuckle pushups and his arms quivered from the fatigue. The kid wasn’t blessed with a whole lot of physical strength, but it was clear that he was a karate diehard. If a karate instructor wants to work the kid’s ass off that was one thing. Corny and as politically incorrect as that sort of thing is, I do believe facing and overcoming adversity does build character in people. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the only thing that builds character. Even in a goofy karate class where the adversity was contrived, it could still breed character.

The thing with these guys was that they seemed to be enjoying making a mockery of the kid. It wasn’t about any kind of respect—it was about the opposite. I opened up the door and quietly went into the karate class and leaned against the wall.

“You are weak,” Mitchell barked at the kid. “You do not have the black belt’s heart.”

The kid looked up from his pushups and fought back the tears. The poor kid—here these guys were abusing him and he had the loyalty to be hurt by their disapproval.

“Too weak,” Harter snickered. “You can’t even finish your pushups. You will never make black belt.”

The kid started to cry, though he hid it by putting his head down in his pushup position. My neck started to twitch, and I noticed that my left hand was clenched. Today, something was going to keep me from minding my own business.

“Hey—that’s probably enough, don’t you think, fellas?” I said as I crossed my arms. I hadn’t moved otherwise and stood still, holding up the wall.

The room got quiet. The rest of the students tried not to look at me while they maintained their quasi-military forward stares.

“Sir, this is a closed class. There are no visitors,” Mitchell said. He glared at me like he thought I would melt in front of him.

“Good for you, but why don’t you leave the kid alone,” I said. I felt the vein twitch in my neck again.

“No one speaks to the sensei in this class like this. You are putting yourself in danger,” he said. His partner took an exaggerated stance with his hands on his hips. He stood up straight in a posture that was impossibly rigid.

“Yeah, well, excuse me if I don’t tremble,” I said.

I walked across the gym floor, grabbed the kid by the back of the uniform, and lifted him to his feet.

“C’mon, pal. You’re getting outta here.”

The kid tried to pull away and he tried to say something to his instructors, but nothing came out. They stood with their hands on their hips.

“You’re doing us a favor. He’s kept the rest of the class down,” Harter said.

I stopped. I put the kid down and I turned around.

The vein in my neck was doing the Twist and I had had it.

“Tell you what, tough guy, how about you come over here and make me do a pushup. Or does the fact that I’m over 140 pounds disqualify me?” I said.

“A time and a place for you, there will be,” Mitchell said.

“Hey Confucius, you want to try me? C’mon!” The neck was getting intense. “You weren’t all philosophical two minutes ago when you were abusing this kid,” I said.

“Go now, while you still can,” Harter said.

I didn’t move or say anything for a while, but I looked Mitchell right in the eye.

“C’mon, kid,” I said. The kid didn’t want to go, and I had to pull him away. I dragged him out to the stairwell. He struggled to stand up straight, he wiped his eyes, trying to make it look like he wasn’t crying, and he wouldn’t look at me.

“Why did you do that?” he said. “I am a karateka. I will be a black belt one day.”

“Hey kid—”

“Who are you? Why don’t you mind your own business?”

He looked up at me and his face was covered with zits. The very tip of his nose had a huge whitehead on it, and it was about the size of a nickel. He had a traumatized look on his face as he held back the tears.

“Kid—you don’t need to be treated like that. That’s not what being a black belt is all about,” I said.

“How would you know?”

“I am a black belt, have been for years.” Which was true. I was a black belt as a teenager before I got into boxing.

The kid froze and looked frightened like he just farted in the Pope’s presence. He came to attention and bowed.

“I am sorry, sir. I meant no disrespect.”

“Kid, it—”

He interrupted me again. Something came over his face.

“You will be my new sensei. You have been sent to lead me to my black belt.”

“Uh … kid … uh …” I couldn’t find the words.

“Yes, it is destiny. I will put my trust in you,” he said, and a calm came over him.

Oh boy. I couldn’t think of what to say, but I was fully aware that I did stick my nose in this kid’s life without him asking me to.

The kid gave me a big exaggerated bow.

I bowed back, which … uh … I guess is what you do to a karateka under your tutelage.

Oh geez.

It had been a long day for about eleven different reasons, so I headed to my bastion of stress management. I needed a little insanity to balance out what the rest of the day had been, and I was still cooling down from the workout when I walked into AJ’s.

“So you’re saying they’re what you call Native American Canadians,” Rocco said.

“Yeah, have to be,” TC said.

“Why not just Native Canadians?” Jerry Number Two asked.

“Isn’t that what they call the Canucks from Quebec?” said Rocco.

“I don’t think they care for the term ‘Canuck,’” Jerry Number Two said.

“Isn’t there a pro hockey team called the Canucks?” Jerry Number One asked.

“So,” said TC.

“They play in Vancouver,” Jerry Number Two said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Rocco said.

“That’s why they call themselves the Canucks—to piss off the Native Quebecians,” Jerry Number Two said.

“So how bad could the term be if they named a hockey team after it?” Jerry Number One said. “We don’t have a team in the NBA called the Alabama Spooks.”

“There’s the Globetrotters,” TC said.

“They’re not Canadian,” Jerry Number Two said.

“They’re Native Harlemenians,” TC said.

AJ slid a bottle of Schlitz in front of me and I sat next to Kelley, who was watching the old fights on ESPN Classic. It was Basilio and Robinson again.

“What do you hear from your hackin’ friend?” Kelley asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I spent some time reading his prison file today though.”

“And …”

“Not much there. In his first five years he was assaulted a couple of times,” I said.

“That’s pretty routine.”

“Then the guy in the cell next to him was beaten to death over some drug stuff. Apparently there was some bad drugs floating around Green Haven and some inmates died.”

“I think I remember that,” Kelley said. “Turned out the stuff they were taking was some homemade poisonous shit.”

“Bad shit,” I said.

“Yeah—but also pretty routine inside. Those guys are always trying to get high.”

“Are you involved in the search for Howard?”

“Not really. I mean we get bulletins and shit like that, but nothing official. There’s a big-deal task force,” Kelley said.

“Gotcha.”

“Hey—you’re fighting in the Garden, huh?”

“Yeah, some hot-shit contender.”

“Good luck.”

“I’ll need it,” I said.

7

“AHOOOOOOO, AHOOOOOOO, MMMMMM, WOOF,
WOOF, AHOOOOOO.” It was my alarm clock.

My alarm clock has no snooze control—in fact, it has very little control. It does have long ears, short legs, and a tendency toward flatulence. This morning Al was particularly intense around the front door to the Moody Blue. Intense enough that I decided to forgo my first stop to take a leak and my second stop to get the coffee going.

“GRRRRRRR, WOOF, WOOF, WOOF,” Al said. Three consecutive WOOFs usually meant something unusual was going on. Al tended to stick to the two WOOFs, a single AHOOOO, followed by two more WOOFs.

I peeked through the front-door curtains and rubbed the gook out of me eyes. It was the goofy karate kid from last night, just standing there waiting for something. I’m not a rise-and-shine kind of guy, and this was going to be a real challenge to my cognition first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, but it was early and I was curious about what might’ve brought him to my trailer. I opened the door to see just what I had here at such a God-awful hour.

“Sir,” the kid said. “Good morning.” Then he bowed. He was wearing a black karate-style outfit.

“Kid, what the hell time is it?” came out of my mouth.

“Five fifteen a.m., sir.”

“What are you doing here?” My pupils had constricted enough that I could clearly see him. This morning he had a new zit right in the middle of his forehead. In my morning fog, the kid looked Hindu.

“Here for training, sir.”

“Training for what?” I said. “And what’s with the getup?”

“Sir, this is the Karateka-Brand Nu-Breath Fabric Modern Ninja suit, sir.”

I was starting to wonder what planet I was on.

“Kid, what’s your name?”

“William Cramer, sir, known as Billy.”

“Did I say we were going to train this morning?”

“No, sir, I am just eager to learn,” he said. I couldn’t stop staring at the whitehead in the middle of his forehead. It was like some sort of evil cyclops had been sent to mess up my morning equilibrium.

“You got folks, kid?”

“My mother, sir. My father passed away.”

“Sorry, Billy. Mom know you’re here?”

“She works an overnight shift and she doesn’t get home until after I leave for school,” he said.

“All right, Billy,” I said. “Training will be tonight at the Y in the boxing room. Be there at seven thirty p.m.”

“Yes, sir!” he said. He gave me an exaggerated bow, bounded down the steps, and started to run down the side of Route 9R.

I turned to head to the toilet, and Al was staring at me with a look that was half confusion and half amusement.

“Don’t ask me,” I said.

“Duff, I was just reading this book on World War II,” Sam said.

“I didn’t know you could read,” I said.

“Did you know there was a group of Polish kamikazes?”

“Uh, geez …”

“Yep—in fact, Kamikaze Kowalski flew over a hundred successful missions.” Sam laughed and went back to his spot.

I had just gotten in and was going through my stack of human-services mail. There were the letters from the county social services department, which would be about the reports I hadn’t sent them or info on my clients that I probably should read but won’t. There were two postcards announcing open houses at two other agencies to celebrate either their new executive director, which most agencies got every eight months or so, or to announce their new highly specialized program for left-handed Vietnam vets with carpal tunnel syndrome and genital herpes. There were two pieces of mail announcing conferences, including the Seventh Annual Women’s Symposium on Emotionally Unavailable Men and the state conference on Music Therapy with the Hearing Impaired.

There was also a letter with a hand-written address on it, which I opened first. It was a short pencil-written letter and the words were printed as straight as possible. It was from Howard, and it made the vein in my neck twitch a little.

Duffy,

I didn’t do what they’re saying I did. They want me to be blamed and they want me out of their lives. I’ve assured them I won’t talk but they don’t want to take their chances. I have to stay away.