She was sure he couldn’t really be seeing her. He had to be thinking about the fight and what was going to happen next. But she still had an eerie feeling like he was about to jump off his stool and come charging after her for the way she’d set him up. His father put his hands on the boy’s shoulders to get his attention, but Terrence kept glaring at her, even drawing his own lips back to show he still had his teeth. And when she was directly in front of him, he said something to her. At first, she couldn’t hear it above the crowd noise, and she hurried the rest of the way around the ring to get out sooner. But by the time she climbed out through the ropes, she’d put it together in her mind.
“You and me after this is all over, bitch,” he’d said. “We gotta go another round in the sack.”
61
JOEY SNAILS BROUGHT THE car to a full stop right outside Anthony’s house on Texas Avenue. There was a roll and a thump in the trunk and Teddy, sitting on the passenger’s side, gave a look back. Then he reached around to unlock the back door and Richie Amato, who’d been waiting for them on the sidewalk, got in.
“I can’t believe you whacked Vin,” he said in a dazed voice.
“I can’t believe I carried the body downstairs by myself,” Joey Snails whined.
“Will youse two shut up?” Teddy admonished them. “You sound like a couple of Girl Scouts, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah, but this was Vin!” Richie protested, sliding in behind Teddy. “He lived and died for you, Ted.”
“He hadda go,” Teddy said numbly. “He kept sticking up for that mutt. Hadda go. It was the only way.”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as the two younger men. A couple of brown leaves fell from the trees overhead and brushed the windshield. The three of them fell silent for a minute.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Richie murmured. “The old man was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“Oh, what are you?” Teddy turned around. “You gonna be a rebel too? Am I gonna have to discipline you, Richie?”
“No,” Richie pouted.
“All right.” Teddy faced front again. He let out a deep breath and sagged back in his seat.
The downstairs lights in Anthony’s house were still on. Through one of the front bay windows, Carla could be seen putting the kids to sleep.
“I think I’m gonna go inside and sit with my niece awhile,” he said in a weary voice.
He looked back at the trunk. “You all right to take care of this thing?” he asked Joey and Richie.
“Yeah, I guess.” Richie swallowed hard. He still seemed to be in a state of shock.
“Come back later to pick me up, after you get rid of him,” said Teddy. He was on automatic pilot too. His instructions were without thought or inflection. He rolled down the window and spit in the gutter. Then he put his hand over his stomach as if the effort had cost him too much.
“What if Anthony comes back here?” Richie tried stretching his arms, but wound up punching the car’s ceiling.
“He probably ain’t coming back until this fight’s over. And if he does come back, he’ll have Tommy Sick with him.”
“And what happens if he don’t have Tommy with him?”
A car swept by and its headlights shone in the rearview mirror. Teddy barely recognized his own eyes, looking small and furtive.
“You shoot him right in the face, so there’s no question,” he said, feebly making the sign of the gun with his hand. “Don’t worry about him giving you any problems. He ain’t half the man his father was.”
62
“THREE MORE MINUTES, CHAMP, and you got ’im,” said John B. “Three more minutes and you got it won.”
Elijah turned on the stool to face his brother. His eyelids were so swollen they looked like pursed lips.
“Three minutes,” his brother repeated above the crowd’s ceaseless noise.
“That bullshit,” Elijah somehow managed to say through a grotesquely swollen jaw. “I gotta knock him out.”
John B. shook his head and squeezed another wet sponge over his brother. “Say, you better not talk so much, bro. You liable to hurt your jaw some more.”
It didn’t matter, P.F. thought as he came up the steps to the ring, using his security badge to get access. For the last five rounds, Elijah had taken a relentless pounding, interrupted only by the occasional low blow he’d dealt Terrence. Even if his jaw wasn’t actually broken, he’d been behind on points most of the night, and as he prepared to go out for the twelfth and final round, it was obvious he’d need months of reconstructive surgery.
He stood slowly, as if he was reconsidering how he’d spent the last forty-three years.
The crowd’s din, merely deafening before, approached a new unbearable pitch for the last stage of the slaughter.
“You can still quit,” John B. told his brother just before the bell.
Elijah didn’t bother looking back. He staggered forward and touched gloves with his opponent one last time.
Terrence began the round the way he’d ended the last one, trying to unhinge Elijah’s jaw from the rest of his face.
Only this time there was a difference. Elijah was talking to him, taunting him, challenging him.
At first, all P.F. could see was the jaw opening and closing slightly. But as the fighters moved nearer to his corner, he began to catch a few of the words.
“You ain’t nothin’,” Elijah somehow growled in a muddy, distorted voice.
Terrence, breathing heavily, with the first-round cut closed above his eye, reared back and hit Elijah with a jab that would’ve put the lights out in a pinball machine.
But Elijah merely bounced into the corner above P.F. and the others. “You ain’t hurt me yet,” P.F. heard him mutter.
Whomp. “Fuck you,” said Terrence, hitting him with the jab again.
Knowing ringside microphones would pick up anything they said, the fighters began to talk more and punch less.
“You a pussy, Terry,” said Elijah, miming the part of a punch-drunk fighter with wobbly knees, getting a laugh out of the crowd.
Terrence came back with a furious left hook. Elijah deflected it with both gloves.
By all rights, he should have been down four rounds ago, P.F. thought. It was only a thin membrane of humanity that kept him standing. And P.F. wished that in his own moments of weakness he’d had a fraction of Elijah’s fortitude.
“Shut up, old man,” Terrence said. His uppercut caught the tip of Elijah’s nose and seemed to drive the bone a little closer to the brain.
Elijah turned his head just enough for P.F. to see he was smiling through the blood. Maybe a demented reflex.
“Who you think you fighting?!!” he glowered at Terrence. “What’s my name?”
WHOMP. The jab tore into bone and nose cartilage again.
“Ah, that ain’t nothing. What’s my name?”
Whomp. A body shot drilled into Elijah’s right kidney.
“WHAT’S MY NAME?!”
Whomp! Terrence opened up and hit Elijah with the right cross again, but the old fighter countered with a left hook that drove the kid out into the middle of the ring. The crowd was on its feet.
“WHAT’S MY NAME, MOTHERFUCKER??!!”