Bell Bottom Bimbo

He had thirty pounds on the next man and he had not lost a fight in eleven months. He did not enjoy fighting. He did not enjoy much.

The manager came in with the drink. The drink was the colour of an old bruise turning yellow at the edge. There was a sweetness coming off it and under the sweetness something else.

“Drink it,” the manager said.

“What is it.”

“It will help.”

He drank it. It was sweet, and then it was not sweet. It went down like a fist and sat low and warm where the fists usually sat.

“Where did you get this.”

“A man at the docks.”

“A sailor.”

“He was a sailor once.”

He nodded. He had been a sailor once too. He had been many things once. Now he was the thing in the room before the fight and the thing in the room after, and in between he was whatever the crowd wanted him to be.

The bell rang in the hall.

“Go,” the manager said.

He went. The lights were too white and the canvas was too soft and the other man came out of his corner like a man who had been told something true about himself that morning and had not yet decided what to do with it. They circled. They touched gloves. The fight began.

He won. He did not remember the second round. He remembered the first because the other man had cut him over the left eye. He remembered the third because that was when the other man stopped looking at him and started looking past him, and a man who looks past you is already gone.

In the dressing room the manager was waiting with a towel and another drink.

“You don’t remember it.”

“No.”

“You don’t need to.”

“No.”

He drank. The ginger came up first this time and then the banana and then the long quiet burn underneath. He thought of the sailor at the docks. He thought of his father, who had also been a tough guy once, in a different country, in a war nobody talked about anymore.

“He cried,” the manager said. “The other one. In his corner. After.”

“All right.”

“I thought you should know.”

“No,” he said. “I shouldn’t.”

The manager folded the towel and did not say anything else. There was nothing else that needed saying, and the room had got small in the way rooms got small after, and the drink was almost gone.

He set the glass down. He looked at his hands. The right was swelling already at the third knuckle and the left was clean and tired the way the left always was. He had good hands. He had had good hands since he was a boy. His mother had told him so, and his mother had been the last person to tell him anything he believed.

“Same time Friday,” the manager said.

“Who.”

“A kid from Newark. Twenty-two.”

“All right.”

“He’s good.”

“They’re all good,” he said, “until they aren’t.”

He stood up. The room did not move. He could walk out into the street and find a cab and go home to the apartment with the one chair and the one window, and he could sleep, and in the morning he would not remember any of it, and that was the deal he had made, and the deal had not yet broken him.

He did not need any of it. He did not need any of it at all.