A Better Goodbye Page 5

Kill someone and he never really goes away, not if you have a conscience. Alonzo Burgess had haunted Nick since that night in Oakland, toppled by one last four-punch combination and doomed to hit his head on the bottom rope. The result was the worst kind of whiplash, his brain stem snapping and the lights going out on his life.

  Fourteen years later Burgess still ghosted through Nick’s dreams and shadowed his waking hours, and the only time Nick got to come up for air was when trouble found him. He’d lost his bloodlust, and yet he had felt whole there in that parking lot, the gangbanger in a post-knockout fog and Eddie the shopkeeper pressing a hundred-dollar bill into Nick’s hand and telling him to take his wife or girlfriend out to dinner. “Both if you got ’em,” Eddie said. For just a few minutes, Nick embraced the return of his capacity for violence. But soon enough he was alone again, alone except for the specter of Alonzo Burgess.

  Sometimes Nick would swear it was Burgess’s voice in his ear, though he didn’t remember hearing him speak even at the weigh-in, when boxing protocol smiles like a death’s head at fighters with big mouths. Nick didn’t remember saying anything either. They were just two warriors out to make seventy-five hundred apiece, him on his way up, a fight away from Las Vegas, thinking he’d be a champion someday—promoters would cut off body parts for a good white fighter—and Burgess the old campaigner, who had to sweat and spit and starve to make one-sixty. A human stepping stone, that’s all Burgess was supposed to be, a middleweight education for a kid with eleven knockouts in eleven pro fights. But this was the thing Nick never told anyone, the thing he had a hard time admitting to himself even now: Until he saw Burgess’s leg start twitching, he’d wanted to kill him.

  Boxing could do that to you, make you forget everything nice you ever did outside the ring and turn you into a treacherous motherfucker. The man in the ring with you was intent on destroying you, and you had to destroy him first. Forget just beating him, even if you respected the guy. You wanted that son of a bitch on his back and the referee counting ten over him.

  Alonzo Burgess sure as hell had that in mind for Nick, though you wouldn’t have known it from the way he pawed and shuffled through the first four rounds. Then, not quite a minute into the fifth, as Nick peppered him with punches that puffed up his eyes and impressed the judges, Burgess dug a right hand into Nick’s liver. Everybody in the arena must have heard him grunt with pain. But nobody except another fighter could have imagined the instant paralysis he felt or the breath he was gasping for and not getting.

  To the half-filled house that was suddenly on its feet and howling, the next punch Burgess threw looked like a left hook that missed Nick’s chin. It was the elbow trailing the fist, however, that was meant to do the damage, and it did, knocking Nick’s mouthpiece halfway out. He had just enough of his wits left to tie up Burgess and waltz him into the ropes, reflexively throwing punches but far more eager to find a moment’s peace before the referee made them break. He rested his head on Burgess’s left shoulder, looking away from those unshaven jowls, treasuring every second he had to regroup.

  Burgess responded by turning his shoulder into a weapon, abruptly bringing it up into the side of Nick’s face. Nick reeled backward, unable to protect himself against the overhand right that Burgess brought crashing down on his head. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. It was what he deserved for getting suckered, and it would have been worse if he hadn’t unscrambled his thoughts and climbed off the deck at the count of eight. The referee warned Burgess about the shoulder, but there was no disqualification, not even any points taken away. Fuck it, Nick thought, he’d take care of the dirty motherfucker himself.

  He was so wrapped up in his anger that he scarcely realized his left eyebrow had been split until he was back in his corner and Cecil Givens, his trainer, was closing the cut with a mixture of Vaseline and adrenaline 1:1000. All the while, Cecil kept telling him not to let Burgess work him that way—just hit and run and let the old son of a bitch wear himself out. And don’t fall for any more of his damn tricks.

  Burgess just missed thumbing Nick’s right eye in the sixth, and he tried stepping on his feet too, but Nick was too nimble, or maybe Burgess was too slow. Every round seemed to take a little more out of him, depleting any quickness he’d had to begin with, stealing the sting from his punches. What the hell, he was thirty-eight years old and he worked days on the docks. Motherfucker had a right to be slowing down as the sixth round bled into the seventh, the seventh into the eighth, and the eighth into tragedy. No fight of Nick’s had ever lasted this long, but he was twenty-two then, and young legs trump old ones every time. Old legs turn to stone.

  If Burgess saw any openings, he was a split-second late getting to them. The openings Nick saw, he filled with the punches that were his vengeance. And his vengeance began with a right to the heart that stopped Burgess where he stood and turned him into a statue to be disassembled. Nick followed with a right to the ribs. Was that a death rattle he heard somewhere inside Burgess then? No, he would tell himself later, just his imagination giving him a preview of the tape loop being embedded in his memory. And the beating went on.

  He kept moving, always moving, striking from angles Burgess was no longer able to defend, throwing “punches in bunches,” the way Cecil liked them, the phrase so innocuous that it sounded like something out of a nursery rhyme. Nick double-jabbed Burgess, stepped to the right and shot an overhand right to his head, stepped to the left and ripped a left hook to his ribs, back to the right for a right uppercut, back to the left for a hook to the body and another to the head, before tying a ribbon on the package with another double jab.

  The whole time Nick was thinking, You pulled that dirty shit on me, you motherfucker, and now I’m kicking your ass and you can’t stop me. How do you like that, you motherfucker? You can’t stop me.

  Cecil said later it was the referee who should have stopped it. Nick’s manager, Frank Delzell, said it too, but he wasn’t talking out of love, the way Cecil was; he was just trying to protect an investment. They wanted to blame everything on the ref, like he was a second-rate bum who froze at the worst possible time. And, okay, maybe he should have seen how Burgess’s head was lolling helplessly, unprotected, a perfect target. But it was Nick who didn’t scream, “Stop it or I’m going to hurt him!” Didn’t do it even once, the way he had heard other, better fighters beg for mercy on their victims.

  He kept his silence and put together that last four-punch combination. It was far from his best of the night, but by then it didn’t matter. Burgess already looked soft and helpless when Nick finished with a straight right hand and watched him fall. When his head hit the bottom rope and his right leg started to twitch, Nick stopped wanting him dead.

  Everybody kept telling him afterward that Burgess would be fine. But Nick had known different as soon as he saw the referee not bothering to count and the ring doctor scrambling through the ropes and the EMTs clamping an oxygen mask on Burgess’s face. Those weren’t images that could be erased just because a pretty girl at the Holiday Inn rubbed up against him later, wanting to kiss his boo-boos all better. Nick said no and uttered a silent prayer. In the morning he went to Mass and prayed even harder, him and Cecil. Delzell had a meeting to go to. When he heard that Burgess’s wife was holding his hand at the end, Nick wanted to tell her he was sorry and try to explain how things had gotten away from him, how what a fighter fights for doesn’t always turn out to be what he really wants to happen. But Cecil wouldn’t let him see her.

  Nick supposed that was for the best, if only because it gave him one less painful memory. He had learned over time to fight to a draw, stepping lightly, holding back in and out of the ring when the occasion called for violence. He’d lost at least a couple of women because he was too remote for them, and only when there was more at stake than self-interest did he tap into the reservoir of savagery that had made him a boxer to be reckoned with. The gangbanger opened the floodgate, but Nick would pay for it. The days ahead would be filled with the shopkeeper�
��s cry—“Jesus Christ, I think he’s dead”—and the nights would be a bed sheet twisted by regret.

  And then there was Coyle groaning with worry when Nick told him about the gangbanger. All he could talk about was how his job would be toast, and his wife would kill him, and the skank he had nailed that afternoon would mark him as more trouble than he was worth. He barely paused to ask Nick if he had shit for brains, going up against a Pancho who wanted nothing more than a teardrop tattooed on his cheek for killing somebody.

  “I would have given him the money,” Nick said, “but I was afraid it wasn’t just me he was going to shoot.”

  Coyle’s expression turned to dismay. “You’re going to be on the fucking news, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, you are. Channel 9 or some shit. Like you’re a goddamn hero.”

  “But there weren’t any cameras there. Nobody talked to me. Reporters, I mean.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Everybody lies.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “This when you hit me?”

  “I’m not gonna hit you. Have I ever—” It was then that Nick realized his fists were clenched. He opened them and tried to smile. “You’re my friend, man. I don’t hit my friends. I didn’t even want to hit that kid with the gun. He didn’t give me a choice, that’s all.”

  Coyle looked at Nick for a moment before he said, “Whatever. I got to get this truck in.”

  “You got to pay me, too,” Nick said.

  He was ready for another argument. Maybe he’d even get screwed over. It wouldn’t have been the first time, picking up work the way he had lately, here and there, always in cash. Coyle practically radiated the sad story he wanted to tell about how the gangbanger had changed everything, but he caught himself before he could start.

  “Two hundred, right?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said.

  Coyle dug a roll of twenties out of his pants pocket. As he peeled off ten of them for Nick, he said, “I can’t believe you’re not going to be on the news.”

  But TV let the story slide, and the next day’s L.A. Times gave it maybe two hundred words, identifying Nick as a former boxer working as a fill-in truck driver and letting it go at that. If it hadn’t been a busy news day locally—an eight-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet in South-Central, the new chief of police raising hell about gangs, poor people dying in a hospital that was supposed to heal them—it might have been different. But Nick didn’t keep up with the news.

  The cops from Robbery-Homicide had him come downtown to give his formal statement. One of them said he’d seen Nick fight, and they all talked boxing, asking him to show them how he’d thrown the punch. He ducked that one by mumbling something about digging up an old Joe Frazier fight on tape if they wanted to see a hook that was really a wrecking ball. Next thing Nick knew, the cops were laughing about how that dumb fucking gangbanger’s head was still ringing. But that didn’t spare him from worrying someone would bring up Burgess until he was out of there and on his way home.

  A couple of days later Coyle called, sounding like there weren’t any flies on him. Said his wife was none the wiser: “If it’s not Survivor or J. Lo and Ben, she don’t want to know about it.” There hadn’t been any trouble at work either. Coyle had concocted a story about how he thought he had appendicitis so he called his buddy Nick to cover for him while he went to the clinica on Figueroa.

  “Like I just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Nick asked.

  “I said you lived around there.” Coyle didn’t give Nick a chance to protest. “Hey, we’re talking about my brother-in-law here. It’s not like he’s going to ask for your address.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Matter of fact, he wants you to stop by and see him. Next time he has an opening for a driver, you could be at the top of his list, you play your cards right.”

  Nick said he would. What the hell, he didn’t have anything else going for him.

  As soon as he heard someone knock on the door, Nick remembered that the security gate was broken. Going on four months now and the landlord hadn’t laid a glove on it. Another knock and he decided that whoever was out there wasn’t going away.

  He opened the door and found himself staring at a man in a faded Hawaiian shirt that was just right for a day that was sunny and seventy. He was a couple of inches taller than Nick, but his watery blue eyes negated any danger in the size advantage. There was a hopeful smile beneath a badly trimmed gray Fu Manchu mustache that told the world he had worn his hair long before he lost it.

  “Nick?” the man said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought it was you, but there wasn’t any name on your mailbox.” The man extended his right hand. “Andy Rigby. From the Times.”

  “Oh, right. Andy.” Nick shook with him, more polite than glad to have a visitor. “I didn’t recognize you. Been a long time.”

  “For both of us,” Rigby said, laughing self-consciously.

  Nick thought he smelled alcohol when he invited Rigby in. Pretty early for that. And there was what looked to be a fresh scrape on Rigby’s forehead, the kind he might have acquired falling off a barstool.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Asked around. I don’t live too far from here actually. Over in Venice.”

  Nick wondered which of the old fight guys had an address for him. It might have been Cecil. Nick had heard he was back in town.

  “Still writing sports?” Nick asked.

  “Whenever they let me,” Rigby said.

  They were sitting now, Rigby on the sofa, Nick on a kitchen chair that he had turned around so he could prop his arms on its back.

  “I thought you were a big deal at the paper,” Nick said. “Columnist or something.”

  “Used to be—you know how it goes.” Rigby looked like he had a sad story he wanted to tell, but thought better of it. “They’ve got me doing local stuff now, small colleges mostly. Some boxing too, except there aren’t many good fighters around anymore.”

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention.”

  Rigby nodded, biding his time, hoping Nick would go on. But everything Nick might have said stayed in his head. There was no forgetting how Rigby had gone to bat for him back in Chicago, when his manager was fucking him over, making side deals with promoters. Even when Rigby moved to L.A., he stayed in touch, calling Nick every six months or so, covering himself in case the kid won a title. He called after the Burgess fight, too, but Nick never got back to him. Now Nick was watching Rigby fidget nervously under the weight of those years of silence.

  “I’d like to write about you,” Rigby said at last. “You know, after what happened the other day.”

  “That’s old news, isn’t it?”

  “What was on the police blotter, yeah. But I was thinking there’s more to the story.”

  “Like human interest.”

  “Exactly.”

  Nick could see Rigby getting confident. Pulling a notebook from the hip pocket of his jeans. Extracting the ballpoint he had clipped inside his shirt, between the second and third buttons. Looking at Nick with an expression that would have been condescending if it hadn’t been rooted in such obvious neediness.

  For all the time Nick had been away from it, the game between sports writers and their subjects remained the same. They used you, you used them, and everybody profited—unless, of course, they were tearing you a new asshole. But most fighters talked even then, forever rooted in poverty, beholden to the writers who might help them tunnel out to a better life. Hell, Rigby knew about Nick’s father stealing from him to keep a bookie’s leg-breakers at bay, and Nick’s mother walking out on his old man, and his kid brother Frankie getting shot to death when he tried to rob a chop shop. Rigby knew all the Pafko family secrets, which was why Nick could hardly believe it when he heard himself say, “Sorry, Andy. Not this time.”

  Rigby’s watery eyes loo
ked ready to spill over. “Think about it. A story like this, it might help you. You never can tell.”

  “Help someone else,” Nick said.

  Two days later Coyle was on the phone so early the Mexicans hadn’t even cranked up their radio yet. “You see the paper?” he asked.

  “What paper?” Nick said, fogged in by sleep.

  “The one that says you’re some kind of hero. The fucking Times.”

  “Oh.” Nick had been afraid this would happen.

  “‘Oh’ is right. As in ‘Oh, shit, this is going to get back to Mrs. Coyle somehow and she’s going to realize her loving husband has been fucking around again.’ Jesus Christ, you telling me you couldn’t have stopped this asshole reporter from writing about you?”

  “What did you want me to do, Coyle? Tie him up and throw him in the ocean?”

  “Well, he makes it sound like you’re old friends or something.”

  “I know him from Chicago, that’s all. Now let me ask you something: Is your name in the story?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you bitching?”

  “I’m just—”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Can’t. I’m already at work.”

  “Okay, then I’ll go back to sleep.”

  Nick was about to hang up when Coyle said, “You don’t talk much about fighting. Were you really as good as that story says you were?”

  “How would I know?” Nick said. “I haven’t read the story yet.”

  But he did later that morning, though not from top to bottom. He zeroed in on words or phrases that grabbed his attention, then looked elsewhere when they began to make him uncomfortable. He nodded at the mention of the two fights that had made him a contender, and he scarcely remembered some of the anecdotes that were intended to prove he was flesh and blood. Had he really strutted around Chicago’s North Side shouting, “Who’s the toughest guy in the neighborhood?” Had the raggedy kids who’d made him their hero really answered, “You are, Nick”?

  Rigby had squeezed the essence of Nick’s life as a boxer into seven hundred words. Nick couldn’t make himself read the last of them, though. It hurt too much to be reminded of the days when he had a chance to be someone special. But there was no holding back the memories. There had been promises of big paychecks, and women had lined up to get in his bed, not girls from down the block or barroom sluts, but the kind you shine your shoes for. And then the good life that was supposed to be his went away in the time it took to send a man to his doom.