Nick danced up and down in his corner, feigning jabs, huffing air out of his nose. “I knew you’d be here,” he said.
“I’m your cut man,” I said.
“You better believe it,” he replied.
As soon as the bell rang, Angel Morales took him apart. It was awful to watch. Angel kidney-punched him in the clenches, opened a cut over Nick’s right eye, then head-butted it into a split all along the eyebrow. In the third round he knocked Nick’s mouthpiece into the seats, then chopped him against the ropes, driving one punch after another into Nick’s exposed face, while sweat showered like diamonds from Nick’s hair.
“Stop the fight!” Terry shouted.
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” Nick yelled.
Before the bell for the fourth round I wiped Nick down and tried to dress the cut above his eye, then flapped the towel in his face. His eye was swollen shut and his teeth were pink when I fitted his mouthpiece inside his lips.
“You got to get under his reach,” I said.
“I look like a pygmy?” he replied, and tried to grin.
I could hardly watch what Angel did to him in the next round.
In the background, while Nick was being cut to pieces, Frank was talking with his gangster friends, smoking a gold-tipped cigarette, his legs crossed, telling a joke that made them all laugh simultaneously.
Before the round ended I leaned forward over the spit bucket, pretending to pour water onto a fresh towel. Instead, I emptied the water bottle into the bucket, splashing it down the sides, washing the residue of dried bleach into the bottom, where the bar of Lava lay glued to the tin. Then I dropped the towel into the water, soaking it with bleach and soap.
When the bell ended the round I climbed through the ropes with the wood stool, bucket, and towel. I upended the water bottle for Nick to drink, held the bucket for him to spit, then wiped down his chest, forearms, and gloves.
“Bust him in the eyes. Rub your gloves in his eyes. You hear me?” I said.
I doubted if Nick understood what I had done, but when the bell clanged he came hard out of the corner, slipped Angel’s first punch, took the second on his shoulder, then unloaded with a right cross that exploded on Angel’s nose.
Angel stepped backward, his eyes blinking, as though a flashbulb had popped in his face. Nick jabbed him with his left, then ducked as though going in for a body attack. Angel instinctively tucked in his elbows, covering his stomach, and that’s when Nick hooked him in the face with a murderous punch that drenched Angel’s eyes with bleach and soap.
Angel stumbled around in the ring, unable to see the punches raining down on him. It didn’t take either the crowd or the referee long to figure out what had happened. The crowd began booing, and a cascade of beer cups and half-eaten hot dogs showered into the ring. The referee stopped the fight, and Frank and his friends headed for Nick’s corner and me. I was sure I was about to be lynched.
In my mind’s eye I saw myself facing them down, shaming Frank Wallace for the degenerate he was, saving Terry Anne and Nick from the mob. But that’s not what happened.
I kicked the bucket and the soaked towel under the ring apron and ran for my life.
Terry Anne and Nick caught up with me in her car, seven blocks away. Nick was still in his trunks, his face swollen out of shape, his body crawling with stink.
“We screwed the whole bunch of them! It was beautiful! We’re gonna be legends! Who needs the Gloves?” he said after I was in the car.
But I saw Terry Anne looking fearfully in the rearview mirror and I knew it was not over.
That night, while kids played softball under the lights at the park and music played through the speakers on the Popsicle truck, I used the pay phone to call the Italian restaurant owned by Mary Jo’s family. I put a pencil between my teeth when I spoke.
“Is this Mary Jo Scarlotti’s father?” I said.
“I’m her uncle. Who’s this?” the voice said.
“A man name of Frank Wallace bothers kids at the park. He’s been giving Mary Jo swimming lessons at his apartment. Why don’t you people wise up and do something about that?” I said, and hung up, my heart beating.
One year later the Communists would sweep across the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy and his friends would teach us how to fear one another. Terry Anne would marry a grade-B cowboy actor and open a dude ranch outside of Reno, Nevada. The year after that, Frank Wallace would be found inside a concrete mixer next to the Galveston Freeway.
Maybe my phone call brought about his death. Or maybe not. I didn’t care either way. Frank was dead and Mary Jo Scarlotti was valedictorian of our class. The park is still there, little different from the way it was fifty-five years ago. Just the other day I drove past the ball diamond and a group of kids were gathered around an ice cream truck, licking cones and Popsicles, convinced the world was a grand place, full of sun-showers and flowery gardens, inside of which the only purpose of a satyr was to make them laugh.
The Burning of the Flag
When bombs fell on the ships at Pearl Harbor, we lived on a quiet dead-end street in a city not far from salt water, where palm trees, palmettos, and live oaks grew side by side in meadows that stayed green through the winter months. It was a wonderful street, lined with brick houses, each with a roofed porch, closed off at the end with a cul-du-sac and a dense canebrake, on the other side of which horses grazed in a pasture. On a rainy day, on the far side of the pasture, you could see the lighted tower of a movie theater glowing against the evening sky.