Fighting Words Read online

  Text copyright © 2014 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

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  Cover and interior photographs © iStockphoto.com/Steve Krumenaker (brick background); © iStockphoto.com/tomograf (paper texture); © iStockphoto.com/Abomb Industries Design (woodrat); © iStockphoto.com/CSA_Images (fist).

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  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Fighting Words is on file at the

  Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978–1–4677–1461–7 (LB)

  ISBN: 978–1–4677–2409–8 (EB)

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/13

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2409-8 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-4006-7 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-4005-0 (mobi)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The jab landed hard on Lester’s right side. Lester reared back and struggled to stay on his feet. Myles McReary, his opponent, circled him on the floor of the Woodrat. Lester needed two more hits before he went down, Myles figured. The crowd, split evenly between natives of Manhattan and tourists all the way from Brooklyn, cheered as the teenagers grappled and knocked each other off-balance.

  “Get him, you pasty patsy!”

  “Lester eats sawdust for dinner!”

  “Throw these hoppers back in the river! Show ’em what’s what, McReary!”

  Lester choked up spit and wiped the sweat off his brow. Lester Wallis. Oakley had told Myles a story about Lester the first day Myles went on the floor. As Oakley explained it, two years ago—back when Lester was the youngest fighter at the Woodrat—he used to tell his opponents, “You’re gonna die before me.” Now that Myles, seventeen, was squaring off against him, Lester didn’t know what to say.

  “His eyes, you dog!” a man in the crowd shouted. “Italians can’t handle the eyes!”

  “Lester Wallis is a Pole, you idiot!” another replied.

  “Who cares?” the first man said. “Get him in the eyes!”

  Oakley grinned and chewed on a cigar in the corner. Oakley. Myles trusted him, thought he didn’t exactly know why. Oakley was rough, and sometimes he wasn’t the nicest man in the room, but Myles got the feeling he didn’t want his boys to get hurt.

  It helped that the Woodrat handed out great payouts for this particular part of the Bowery. Myles knew clubs where they gave fighters IOUs, shooing you out as they told you you’d get payment at the next match. Not at the Wood-rat. Oakley and his boss, Lew Mayflower, paid enough for a kid like Myles to get bacon and milk for a week.

  “What’s wrong, Lessy? Not so bold now?”

  “Hey, Myles, what’s the matter? Can’t hit a boy your own age?”

  Quickly, Lester feinted and walloped Myles in the chest. Myles sidestepped left and then right. His right fist, the one Oakley said was a ball of potential, clenched hard as Lester lifted his dukes to his face. Myles jumped back and prepared to give Lester a sidewinder.

  Whenever he gave his opponent a sidewinder, the audience cheered, and his opponent fell down. Myles wound up and socked Lester in the stomach. Lester crumpled up like a brown paper bag in the wind.

  The Brooklyn fans jeered and threw bottles against the wall. The Manhattan fans went wild. The room filled up with the tinkle of breaking glass, growing louder as Oakley made his way to the center of the club.

  As Oakley counted down from ten, looking down to make sure Lester wasn’t planning to get up, a fan on the Brooklyn side hurled a rotten apple in the ring. Oakley looked over at Tracey, watching from behind the bar, and tilted his head. When Oakley got down to three, Tracey picked up the apple thrower and flopped the guy on his shoulder like a towel. The apple thrower kicked and screamed as Tracey went to the door, clearing out spectators and customers along the way.

  “Myles McReary is the winner!” Oakley bellowed.

  Myles grinned and raised his fists in the air. Half the crowd did the same. The Brooklyn side, disappointed and angry, called Myles so many names he could barely make out what they were. Their voices formed into one big, angry sound—an adult version of what Myles used to hear when his teacher brought up Satan in class.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Thirty clams,” Oakley said as he counted stacks of bills. “That’s the highest I’ve seen in twenty years, kid. You’re a mint.”

  It was past midnight, and the Woodrat was closed. “A mint?”

  “It’s an idiom, Myles. It means you make money. You’ve heard of that building in Washington where government stiffs melt coins?” Oakley waved his hand. “Never mind.”

  “I suppose that takes care of the rent,” Myles said.

  “The rent and a lot more. You know what your gift is, Myles? You have the ability to whip up the crowd like nobody else I know. I’ve seen good fighters, and you’re a good fighter too. But it takes a special kind to whip up the crowd like you do.”

  Tracey wiped off shot glasses with a rag and stooped behind the bar. “The kind who barely says a word?” he said.

  “Be serious, Trace,” Oakley said. “Myles can build suspense. Kids like him get dewy-eyed barflies hollering as though he’s their brother.”

  “It’s a gift, in a way,” Tracey said.

  “Doesn’t feel like it,” Myles said.

  “It is,” Oakley said. “How many fighters have the presence that you have? At most, I can think of three. Maybe two. Just two.”

  “You and Carly,” Tracey said. “If Carly would make an appearance already, we could all retire to Cuba.”

  “True, but the boys up in Harlem won’t let him come down,” Oakley said.

  “Didn’t he sign an agreement?” Tracey said.

  Mayflower stormed out of his office. “Did I hear talk of those uptown rats?” he said.

  “You did,” Tracey said.

  “They burn me behind the ears,” said Mayflower. “Pull business from downtown up to Harlem. These days, half the Bowery’s itching to make its way up there.”

  “Who’s Carly?” Myles didn’t like asking questions like this—they made him feel like he was still fresh off the boat. Most of the time, when he didn’t know the answer to a question, he sat and listened until he understood, acting for all the world like the New Yorker he wanted himself to be. Like the real New Yorker his family wanted him to be so badly.

  Oakley explained that Carly was a fighter named Giancarlo Sperio. Carly was twenty-three, a few years older than Myles. He was a star in his part of the city. He’d grown up in Yorkville, way up in the ninetieth blocks of the Upper East Side. Everyone who saw him said his skill on the floor was hair-raising.

  Local legend had it that Big Benny, for a while the best fighter this side of the Mississippi, went down in a fight against Carly in thirty seconds flat. Spectators came in from everywhere—even from Connecticut—to see Carly take down a foolish contender for themselves. If by some magic Oakley found a way to get Carly in the Woodrat, it might well become the most popular club in the city.

  “The m
oney at stake is tremendous,” Oakley said. “Imagine: customers from Boston, from Philly, from Baltimore. They want to catch a fight, and where do they go? The Woodrat. They ask your well-schooled man on the street where to go, and what does he say?”

  “The Bronx?” Tracey said.

  “Quit your jokes,” Oakley said. “Carly is the key to a fortune. Think of how we could fix up this place if he appeared for just one night.”

  “What do you mean by we?” Tracey said.

  “New lamps,” Mayflower said. “We could purchase lamps that don’t burn out every night.”

  Myles looked around at the gas lamps dotting the walls. Many, especially those near the entrance, were dim, and one over the door flickered like a broken cable. Even so, Myles thought the Woodrat was perfectly fine as it was.

  He thought of Oakley’s dream of money, money Myles didn’t want to spend on new-fangled toys or fancy lamps for the club. He wanted to send it home, back to his family in Ireland. But he knew that if Oakley and Tracey heard him express such a misty-eyed sentiment, the two would just call him yet another sensitive Irishman. More than anything else in New York, Myles wanted their respect, and to get it, he was happy to look around, to nod and say yes, of course, new lamps do wonders for us.

  “Your payout this week is ten dollars,” Oakley said as he handed Myles his cash. “A good sum. Now get out of here and go buy yourself a treat.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Late on Monday evenings, when the rest of his parish was tucked away in bed, Myles paid a visit to St. Anthony’s Church on the corner of West Broadway and Bleecker Street. He preferred to pray alone. During his first week in the States, he went to his parish priest, and Father Wiley gave him a key that allowed him to come in as he pleased. Tonight he was hungry, as hungry as he always was after a fight, but not so hungry that he didn’t want to get a word in with the Lord before he got food. After turning the key and opening St. Anthony’s massive front door, Myles eased it shut and walked to a pew up front.

  He sat on the hardwood and clasped his hands between his knees. There was a book of psalms on the shelf in front of him, which Myles took out and spread open on his lap. Moonlight streamed through a trio of stained-glass windows, lighting up the pages of the psalm book as Myles flipped through. He recited the Our Father in Latin, English, and Irish, afraid that he was mangling the Latin and Irish versions. When he was young, his mother used to tell him that God forgets you once you forget the Our Father.

  He went through the Irish again, to be sure: Ar nathair, ata ar neamh. Then the Latin: Pater noster, qui es in caelum. Our father, who art in heaven. The high ceilings echoed his words. Myles worried that the glass in the room, the goblets and chalices and bowls, might vibrate and crack if he ever raised his voice.

  He tried to find psalms that prayed for health and healing.

  My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart.

  O Lord, heal me, for my bones are vexed.

  I will triumph in the works of thy hands.

  A girl named Grainne taught him these psalms the day after he lost his first fight. Grainne lived down the street from the McRearys. When Myles had appeared in her window one day with a bloody nose and puffy skin, she invited him in to her living room. There, he listened as she recited the few psalms she knew from memory.

  Myles had tried to burn the psalms into his mind that day, but after a week of daily recitations, he began to forget certain words. Every time he forgot something, it felt like he was spitting on Grainne. To make up for the forgetfulness, he checked the book every time, aware that his memory was nothing compared to the Scriptures.

  He pulled out a drawing of his family from his pocket. On the back of the drawing, he’d written a tally of his earnings thus far. In the corner, he’d also noted the amount of money he needed to bring them over. Three hundred dollars. He scribbled Oakley’s payout at the bottom of a long column of numbers. Forty more dollars and he could stop fighting for good.

  He didn’t like fighting—he never had. Fighting was just something he was good at. He dreamed of a day when he didn’t have to ask the Lord to keep him safe. He felt guilty about that dream, though. He knew that when you started to think those thoughts, that was the devil whispering temptation in your ear.

  The knob on the front door jiggled. Myles crouched in his pew. There were bruises on his face and arms, and he knew that if a priest came in, he might have to confess his involvement in bareknuckle boxing. If that happened, the word of the Lord might keep Myles out of the Woodrat. But if Myles feared the Lord, he also feared what might happen to his family if he didn’t get forty more dollars.

  They had never made a lot of money. And from what he could tell from the letters his mother sent over, the carpentry business that kept his family afloat for generations was going under. His father built homes. His grandfather had built homes before that. But these days, the people weren’t buying. The family needed all the help they could get. They needed it even if that meant their son hurting God’s own children.

  Myles’s father had never liked boxing. What the man liked were men who stood up for themselves when they had to. Or who stood up for the people he loved.

  Myles remembered his father standing up to their landlord. Myles had been seven years old. On a rainy day in February, the landlord appeared at the door with two policemen, who threatened to evict the McReary family with rifles and batons. Myles wanted his father to throw up his hands, but instead, his father rooted himself to the ground, informing the landlord in no uncertain terms that now was the time for him to leave. The policemen raised their batons, but at the last minute, the landlord called them off, giving McReary one extra month to drum up the paltry rent. A week later, Myles’s father went to the landlord and gave him two slips of paper: the rent and a handwritten warning to never bring the cops around again.

  The knob jiggled a second time. Myles snuck out of the pew and left the room through a tiny side door, behind which he saw a set of musty stairs. He went down the stairs and found himself in a cellar. A series of grimy windows lined the top quarter of the wall. Back in the church, someone called out, “Who’s there?”

  Myles unlatched a window and wriggled onto the street.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  About a week later, Myles sat alone at a table in the Woodrat, working his way through a penny novel he’d purchased the day before. His favorite stories took place on cruise liners or passenger trains. That included All Clear to Tempe, the book he was reading now. In this story, a bandit kidnapped a young heiress and stashed her away on a train chugging over the desert. The conductor overhears the bandit on a visit to the dining car and orders his deputy to save the heiress in his stead. As the train moves over the Arizona badlands, the deputy fights to keep the girl from getting hurt.

  The engine and its painful chugging struck misery into Henry’s heart. A peaceful boy by nature, the kind of man who never stood up for a fight, he barely believed there were men out there who could take little girls from their daddies. The heat rose dreadfully as the raging coal-fire licked at his face and neck …

  At the bar, Tracey listened to Edward Tower, a cop running through his arrests.

  “The fact is these rascals are slum rats. They barely understand what they steal. They pinch and they swipe and they hoard their treasure. But they never spend it in a way you and I would recognize. Did I tell you what happened to me on Monday?”

  “No,” Tracey said.

  “You know the man who runs the fruit stand on 2nd Avenue?” Tower asked. “Obadiah? He calls me last week, and when I get there, he tells me his bananas are missing. I write it down and go back to my business. The next day, his apples go missing. Then his grapes, then his tomatoes, and pretty soon everything’s gone. I tell Obadiah, I know this type of menace. I saw it last August on 8th.”

  “So many scalawag kids these days,” said a man at the end of the bar.

  “I tell him every fruit stand this side of 14th Stree
t is plagued. I get my deputy to wait outside and catch the criminal in action. Near four, the rat comes by and waits till Obadiah is engaged. He stuffs bananas in his pants, and my deputy cuffs him. When I meet him, I tell him, take me to your home. I want to see the mother that raised you to do this.”

  “A bit harsh,” Tracey said.

  “He takes me back to his garbage heap of a tenement,” Tower said. “Rotting fruit everywhere. Flies are feasting on pungent apples in the corner. From what I could tell, this crook was taking things yet refusing to eat them. He just wanted to steal, it seems.”

  Myles tried to block the men out and concentrate on his book:

  The rows of prickly cacti implored Henry through the windows. Save this innocent girl! they told him. Henry’s mind was aflame and his eyes reeled with visions. He shook with the rage of justice. Grasping a poker from the hot bed of coals, he noted its bright tip was radiating deadly warmth …

  Tracey had a theory. “Perhaps he wanted to start up his own fruit stand.”

  “You’re a card,” Tower said.

  Myles dog-eared his book and set it down on the table. As he did, Oakley stepped through the entrance to the Woodrat, grinning like a six-year-old on Christmas morning.

  “Patrons!” he said, sweeping through the crowd like a winning candidate for mayor. “As of now, sarsaparilla and snacks are half off in the Woodrat. Pick up a bottle and bring one home to your kids.”

  “Hey, hey,” Tracey said, calling to Oakley across the club. “What will Lew say?”

  “He won’t mind when he hears my news,” Oakley said while approaching the bar. “I just procured us a ticket to health and wealth. Come June, you’ll thank me for the work I did this morning.”

  The men in the club went quiet to hear his announcement. Myles quickly tucked his novel in his satchel.

  “Myles!” Oakley said. “What better man could I ask to see on this day?”

  “Am I supposed to answer that question?” Myles said.

  Oakley didn’t reply. He cleared an empty space for himself on the bar. After clambering onto a stool, he stepped on the slippery surface. He glanced to Tracey and nodded at the door, which Tracey shut and bolted. When the lock was secure, he nodded to Oakley and crossed his arms.