Sweet Chin Music

The fight went eight rounds. He won the first three. He lost the next four. In the eighth he caught the other man with a left hook he had been waiting his entire career to land.

The other man went down. The crowd stood up. The referee counted.

He did not hear the count. He heard, instead, his own breath, and the blood in his ear from the cut over it, and a woman somewhere in the third row shouting a name that might have been his and might not.

He did not remember the walk to the locker room. He did not remember the manager opening the door, or the cutman pressing the cold steel under his eye, or the doctor lifting his chin with two fingers and saying something kind that he did not catch.

He remembered, later, only the drink the manager handed him afterwards.

“Drink it. Slow.”

He drank it slow. The peanut came up first, soft and round and almost sweet, and then the orange bitters cut through clean, and then there was a bitter herbal something underneath that he could not place, and that he kept tasting for, and that kept moving away from him the way certain things do.

“What is in this.”

“Don’t ask.”

“No.”

“It’s the thing. For after.”

“For after what.”

The manager did not answer. The manager was sitting on the bench with his hands on his knees, and the manager had not looked at him directly since the eighth round, and he understood now, slowly, the way a man understands things after a fight, that the manager was not going to.

“He’s up,” he said.

“No.”

“He’s up. I saw him.”

“He sat up. He’s not up.”

“He’ll be up.”

“Sure. Sure he will.”

He drank again. The drink was getting better the more he drank of it, the way certain drinks do when a man needs them to. The pink of the Campari was the pink of the inside of a lip. The gin was the gin.

“The wife.”

“She’s outside.”

“Has anyone told her.”

“She knows.”

“How.”

“She knows. Wives know.”

He set the glass down. His left hand was the hand that had thrown the hook, and his left hand was now lying on his thigh like a thing he had borrowed from somebody and would have to give back. The third and fourth knuckles were already the colour of the drink. He looked at them for a long time.

“That,” he said, “is what I will remember.”

“The hand?”

“The drink.”

The manager nodded. The manager had heard it before. The manager would hear it again.

“They all say that.”

“Do they.”

“The first time. After. They always say that.”

“And after the first time.”

“After the first time, they don’t say anything.”

He thought about this. He thought about the eighth round, and the hook, and the eleven years he had been waiting to throw it, and the way it had felt, in the second before it landed, that everything in his life had been a small careful preparation for this one motion of his arm, and the way it had felt, in the second after it landed, that nothing had been prepared for at all.

“Will he live.”

“Probably.”

“Will he fight.”

“No.”

“All right.”

The manager stood up. The manager took the empty glass and set it on the shelf above the bench, carefully, the way a man sets down a thing he means to come back for and knows he will not.

“Get dressed. She’s waiting.”

He got dressed. He went out. The wife was in the hall. She did not ask. He did not tell her. They walked out together into the cold, and the cold was clean, and somewhere behind them a man was being carried out on a stretcher under a sheet that was not yet a shroud and might still not be, and he carried the taste of the drink in his mouth all the way home and into the next day and, in a quieter way, for the rest of his life.