Probably lost him some brain cells too. A right uppercut slammed into Elijah’s jaw and he shook it off like a bad idea. He reminded me of my father shrugging it off after Larry shot him.
“So he must get paid pretty well to get beat up like that, right?”
“Ain’t just the money,” said John. “It’s the pride.”
Yeah, right, I thought. I’d heard about the kind of money fighters made off casino deals and pay-TV contracts. Before they locked Mike Tyson up, he was making twenty, thirty million dollars a bout.
“He feel like he has to come on and prove himself.”
“So’s he got any new bouts lined up?”
John B. rubbed his chin. “Well you know there’s a spot that opened up on that casino bill in the fall, but I dunno if we can git it.”
I’d heard something about that. They were looking for somebody to fight Terrence Mulvehill, the current light heavyweight champ.
“Why can’t your brother get the slot?”
John shook his head. “You know anything about boxing?”
Before I could answer, Elijah landed a strong right uppercut that caught his opponent on the chin and sent him staggering toward the corner.
“You got to give in order to get,” John B. said. “You know what I’m saying? It takes money to make money. You got sanctioning fees, training expenses, you got to pay the lawyers and the sparring partners, and then you got to be down with the right promoters and managers and man, they are the worst. His old manager Frog Nelson ran off with half his money, man. We still suing that motherfucker.” He put his hands in his pockets and his body sagged a little from the burden. “It’s fifty thousand dollars just to get started on the way back.”
“You can’t borrow that kind of money? That doesn’t make any sense. A guy like your brother, used to be champ, they’re gonna get at least a million back on their investment.”
Elijah Barton was chasing the younger guy across the ring, swatting him with his glove like a big old lion playing with his cub. In the meantime, John B. was watching me carefully, like something just occurred to him.
“Say Anthony,” he said, more confidently. “Your family’s got some money, don’t they?”
“Oh no, John. You don’t wanna get mixed up with them.”
I could see what he was thinking. He was desperate to launch his brother on a comeback and he didn’t care who his partners were. All he knew was he’d once been on top of the world with his brother and he liked the view from up there a hell of a lot better than he liked painting boats.
“Why can’t I talk to your father or Teddy?”
“Because once they get their hooks into you they never let go. You think you can just borrow some money from them and return it, but it doesn’t work that way. There’s never an end to it. They always keep coming at you.”
Besides, I thought, boxing was getting to be more of a legitimate business. The pillars of industry were promoting it: Time-Warner, Donald Trump, and my personal hero, Dan Bishop, who grew up on the streets of Atlantic City like me and ended up the most successful casino owner in Vegas. I knew there were still some rough characters around, but I remembered all the movie stars, magazine models, and CEOs sitting ringside at the last fight I’d seen on TV. That was what I wanted to be part of. Not watching two old men trying to bite each other’s ears off on a filthy barroom floor.
“Well, maybe you know somewhere else we could get the money.” John B. sucked the gold ring on his left hand.
I just stood there a moment, thinking and watching his brother in the ring. Elijah had this kid trapped in the corner again and was whaling the shit out of him. There were rights, lefts, hooks, uppercuts, open-glove slaps, closed fists, rattlesnake jabs that slithered past the kid’s ear, and smashes that tore into his rib cage like flying Ninja stars. I never knew there were so many ways to hit somebody.
And I was thinking: This is what it’s all about. You get put down and stomped on all your life; people try to obliterate and annihilate you. And then, just when it seems like you can’t take it anymore, you find that you can take it. And you come back. You learn to take three shots for every one you give. And when you see an opening, you lunge for it.
If I’d been born a rich man’s son, I might have gone to law school. If I’d grown up among honest working people, I might have wound up being a cop or running a grocery store. But I grew up with gangsters and boxing was the only legal way I knew of to make a million dollars without real qualifications. Money I could use to pay off Teddy once and for all. But it was more than that; it was a way out of one world and into another.
Elijah Barton once got three million dollars to fight a man. So when the opportunity came up to be part of his comeback, I lunged at it.
“You know, John,” I said. “There might just be another way to raise that money.”
Later on that day, we stopped by his brother’s house on Maine Avenue. We found Elijah stretched out on a couch in his living room, wearing a pressed yellow shirt and navy trousers. His wife was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to a religious program.
“So you’re the young fella who’s gonna help me get my name back,” Elijah said, getting up slowly to shake my hand.
“We’ll see. I hope so.”
His face was wider than it used to be. Not just puffy, but expanded sideways, like in a carnival mirror.
He began to bend back his arms and limber up his shoulders, like he was about to step into the ring again.
“You know, a lot of these young boys who get in the ring now, they got a lot of spunk, but ain’t none of them know how to go the distance,” he said in a voice as light as pillow feathers.
I noticed that he hardly ever blinked. I guess that reflex didn’t work as well anymore since he’d been hit in the head so many times.
“Can you go the distance?” he said, starting to throw a right hook at my head.
I ducked and then realized he’d just been faking. “Yeah, I can go the distance.”
“Then how you gonna raise the money?” Elijah asked.
“Don’t you worry about that. I’m very motivated.”
A grin broke up Elijah’s face and he weaved and bobbed and popped me on the shoulder with a quick left. It only hurt a little.
“That’s real good,” he said. “It’s important for a man to be motivated. I remember I had a motivation for every fight I ever had. My first fight was for a diamond ring. My second fight was for a car. By my twelfth fight, I was buying my family a house.”
“So what would this fight be for?” I asked, wondering what I was getting myself into.
“To get back everything I had before,” Elijah said solemnly.
John B. broke in, basking in the glow of his brother’s celebrity. “When my brother was champ, there wasn’t nobody who didn’t know who he was. We could go to Zambia or New Zealand and brothers would come out the kitchen, saying, ‘Elijah, Elijah, we love you.’”
A cloud passed over Elijah’s face. “But the last time at the airport, that girl behind the counter couldn’t spell my name right,” he murmured.
“So that’s why you want to fight again? To get your name back?”
“That, and the money.” Elijah put up his guard and rocked from side to side. His wife’s religious program in the kitchen seemed to get a little louder. “Like I say, I’m in it to go the distance. Some of these young boys, who fight now, they just wanna kick butt. I’ve kicked enough butt. Now I want security.”
“All right,” I said, playing devil’s advocate to make sure this deal was going to be worth all the effort I’d have to put into it. “But what about all those people who are going to say you’re too old to fight and you’re just risking more brain damage?”
He threw a big brown fist in my face and for a second my whole world was his knuckles. Then as fast as it came it was gone. The punch stopped short of my nose by less than a quarter inch. If it had connected, I would’ve spent two months in a hospital easy.
“Does that look like brain damage?” He danced away.
“So you’re not afraid of getting knocked out?”
“Hell no.” He threw a quick combination at the lamp in the corner. “Though it must be something. Having the
