Fighting Words Page 2

  “A week from now, the Woodrat will host the greatest fight in New York history,” Oakley said. “Giancarlo Sperio—a man you may know as Carly—will appear on this floor for a once-in-a-lifetime event!”

  “Sweet God,” said a man near the bathroom.

  “How in Joseph’s name did you manage to pull that off?” said a man nursing a tonic.

  Oakley smiled. “Suffice it to say a certain club in Harlem will be getting a little something in return. As for betting, you boys are free to lay down your greenbacks now.”

  The screech of shifting chairs filled the club. Half the patrons moved to the bar. As Myles watched, men he knew as his audience during fights passed by on their way to put money on Carly’s triumph. Oakley saw Myles and took a seat at his table.

  “Hear that, Myles?” Oakley said. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “The fight,” Oakley said. “The match is you versus Carly. Did you think I’d send in some kind of stumbling greenhorn?”

  Myles felt his vision go blurry—light from the nearest lamp clouded his eyes. He closed his fist around his glass of seltzer and struggled not to break it into pieces.

  “Might want to get some bandages for the fight,” Tracey said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The following Monday, Tracey brought Myles two hundred blocks uptown to get a glimpse of Carly in action. Though Myles had been in New York for close to three years, he’d never once ventured north of the boundary of 14th Street. As they rode a horse-drawn carriage up Broadway, he peered out the window at dense crowds of people and new, disorienting neighborhoods. He sat beside a friend of Tracey’s named Anthony, a squat man with patchy hair on his lip. Like Carly, Anthony spoke Sicilian.

  “Carly’s a foul-mouthed scoundrel if ever I heard one,” said Anthony. “Not on the floor. In person. In a fight, he barely opens his mouth.”

  Outside on the street, vendors called out the prices for handmade wares. Grime-covered paperboys waved copies of that day’s New York Times. Myles tried to figure out how many people out there on the street were thieves. Tower’s tale about the fruit stand made Myles wonder.

  Growing up, he had known boys who swiped loaves of bread and the like, but he’d never known boys who stole because they wanted to steal. The notion was strange to him, risking a jail sentence to make life more difficult for a person you barely knew. Myles feared the police in Manhattan, especially those with a bad eye out for the Irish. But when he thought of a cop nabbing one of those men, he felt that justice was at work in the world, somehow.

  The carriage passed by the southwestern corner of Central Park. Myles could just see over the top of the gate. In a distant treetop, a boy with frayed shoes and soot on his face looked out solemnly on the road. Myles waved. The boy didn’t see him. Tracey and Anthony chuckled.

  “You look like a man trying to get out of a cell,” Tracey said.

  “Do not worry, Myles, I feel the same way,” Anthony said. “These things are bad for the soul. Man shouldn’t be trapped in a rickety box.”

  The carriage moved through the Upper West Side and passed by the gate to Columbia University. Looking in through the gate, Myles took in the crowds of professors and students in well-kept coats. An elderly woman sold notebooks out of a cart beside a shoeshine booth. Scholars from all over the country hurried on red brick paths. Watching them, Myles wondered how many of the rich and powerful men in the city had begun their lives as poor as he was.

  How did a fighter become a scholar? Was it even possible? Did boys who spent time in seedy clubs ever hit it big in New York? A dapper man idly checked his pocket watch. Myles decided there was simply no way that man was once like him.

  Certain men were born in nice coats, he said to himself.

  The carriage driver asked Tracey if he knew how to get them to the club. Tracey gave the driver complicated directions. The Harlem club was famous, but there was always a chance—as Tracey had mentioned before they left the Woodrat—that a driver might act as though he’d never heard of it before. Anthony told the driver the club was across from a butcher, and the driver lit up.

  “A-ha!” the man said. “The bacon loin there is a gift from God himself.”

  They pulled up at the club five minutes later. Tracey dropped a sack of coins in the driver’s upturned hand. On the street, a band of unruly boys took turns diving into hay piles. Before they pushed open the club’s heavy doors. Tracey grabbed Myles and whispered gruffly in his ear.

  “Remember what you see today,” he told him. “Pay attention to his moves. Stamp them onto your brain.”

  The fight was halfway done by the time they got there. Carly’s opponent, a skinny man with an eye patch and arms that looked like oak branches, flailed with every punch. It looked to Myles as though the man’s hands were too heavy to control how far they swung.

  Carly himself was spry as a Brooklyn squirrel. He pelted the one-eyed man with dozens of tiny jabs. His jet-black forelock mopped his sweaty brow as he moved about the ring. Near Carly’s armpit, a scar the length of a candlestick wrapped from his chest to his back. He raised his fists to guard against the one-eyed man’s attacks. The puffy skin on his scar stretched taut over the wound.

  On every side, men from all over the neighborhood cheered and called them names.

  “Sewer rat!”

  “Pig licker!”

  “Think I struck oil somewhere in Carly’s hair!”

  Myles could see that Carly’s opponent was close to reaching his limit. His legs were slow, his movement sluggish, his punches wild and sloppy. Myles guessed that the secret to Carly’s success was his knack for exhausting his opponents. If that were the case, then Myles was lucky. Oakley once called him by the nickname the Tireless Terror.

  “Here it comes,” Anthony said. Before the word comes had left Anthony’s mouth, Carly swiveled and twisted his torso like a pretzel. He released the tension in his fist in one killer blow, delivered with astonishing force at the bottom of the one-eyed man’s rib cage.

  His opponent crumpled. The audience whooped and sprayed Carly with a bottle of champagne. As Carly raised his fists in triumph, Tracey leaned over and asked Myles what he remembered.

  “I remember it all,” Myles said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Later that night, after Tracey and Anthony had dropped him off in the Bowery, Myles went back to his favorite spot in the church. On the ride back down, Tracey had asked Myles to talk about Carly. He had prodded Myles about the moves that made Carly the fighter he was. Myles had mentioned Carly’s strengths, like his side-to-side movements, quick wrists, and impenetrable guard, but his mind was elsewhere the whole time. In the church, he could ask the Lord for the guidance he needed. Only the Lord understood why he was feeling so scared.

  “My Lord, O Domini, please listen,” Myles said. He asked the Lord to think back to when Myles was eight years old. On a rainy day in October, Myles had come home from school to find three boys, all about his age, waiting for him at his front door. They knew him, but he didn’t know them—all three were brothers of a girl who Myles had shoved in a ditch a week before. Pinning him down on the ground, they pummeled his rain-soaked body until he blacked out on the grass. When he woke, he had a black eye, bruises, and a broken rib.

  The injuries had kept Myles stuck in his house for a month while his body recovered. Ever since that day, his bottom left rib ached, a reminder that at least one part of him couldn’t stand up to a punch. In a fight, he did a pretty good job of guarding his ribs, but if Carly pounded him with a blow like the one that took down the one-eyed man, Myles knew it was over for him and his fragile bones. And that would mean the end of his income—the end of money going into the tally in his pocket.

  His rib felt tender when he pressed it with his finger. He tried to remember the psalms, but then he realized that what he was asking for was much more than health and healing. He needed the kind of protection the Lord once gave David. For that, Myles needed his own praye
r, a prayer that showed God his devotion to his word was complete.

  “Lord,” he said, clasping his hands in his lap. “Lord and savior. I ask you to hear me on this darkest of darkest nights. I am weak, but I am loyal, and tonight I request your grace.”

  The knob on the front door jiggled and squeaked. Myles turned his head and waited to see if it would open. It didn’t, so he went back to his prayer.

  “There is a man, a very strong man, and he will engage me in battle. I hope to fight him well and yet I am hurt. I pray that you will deign to keep me safe as I set forth on my journey—”

  A side door opened with a bang. Before Myles could finish his sentence, footsteps echoed through the chamber. He crouched in his pew, hiding the way a small child hides behind a bush, and listened as the footsteps got louder. He crossed the aisle and glanced back. A silver-haired man in a black shirt was strolling leisurely to the altar.

  Myles passed through the right-side pew and snuck down the steps to the basement. Underground, he made his way to his favorite window and gently tugged on the latch.

  Locked. Myles yanked and yanked, but the metal wouldn’t budge. His breathing quickened as the man approached the stairs. When Myles realized he didn’t have time to crawl out, he spun around and faced the door. The silver-haired man came down the staircase and halted on the bottom step. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Is something the matter?” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Myles rubbed his elbows, a lifelong nervous habit. “No, not at all,” he said. “I’m very sorry I broke in.”

  “You broke in?” the man said. “Did you steal something?”

  “No, but I’m not meant to be here.”

  The man smiled. “Why not?” he said. “This place is a house of God. A Christian may enter whenever the Word compels him.”

  “Well, I’m sorry all the same, Mister—”

  “Father,” the man said. “Father O’Carroll. Not ‘Mister Father.’ I’ve heard that joke before.”

  O’Carroll approached Myles. He patted his robe to prove he was carrying no weapons. The two shook hands, and Myles noted the calluses on O’Carroll’s palms. They felt like the hands of the men who used card games with his father.

  “My name is Myles,” he said.

  “I’m very glad to meet you,” O’Carroll said. “Is that a brogue I hear?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you from the old country?”

  “Which one?” Myles asked.

  “Which one,” O’Carroll said, laughing. “You know very well which one.”

  Myles told him that he was from Enniscrone, a town with two pubs, one road, and a thousand cows. O’Carroll told Myles that he was from Ballina, a nearby town where Myles used to go to the library.

  “A boy who can read is a beautiful thing,” O’Carroll said. “Our people have many, thank God, but we need more.”

  “My father always said it was necessary,” Myles said. This was true, though not for the reasons O’Carroll might suppose. Old McReary used to say you couldn’t get out if you couldn’t read the signs on the road.

  “And now you’re in New York City,” O’Carroll said. “Are you here for fame and fortune?”

  “More fortune, though fame would be grand,” Myles said. “I’m here to bring the rest of the clan over, you know? I’m here to get a bit in the pocket.”

  “Saving up for a good cause,” O’Carroll said. “Good boy.”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Are you a sweeper? They say that Irish boys are the greatest sweepers in the city.”

  “No.” Myles hoped his face wasn’t red. “Not exactly.”

  “Could you be a policeman?” O’Carroll said. “The Irish do well in the city police force, you know.”

  Should I tell him? Myles thought.

  “You could join me in the clergy, of course,” O’Carroll continued. “I know it’s not exciting, but it has great rewards for the soul.”

  I should tell him, Myles thought.

  “I say it’s not exciting, but I tell you it’s never boring.”

  “Father, I have something to confess,” Myles said. “All is not well. I make my wages from sin.”

  He then told O’Carroll all about his fighting—about Oakley and the Woodrat—and told him it was not the first thing he wanted to be doing with his life. He told O’Carroll his lawless profession was a means to a noble end. When he got the chance, he wanted to stop, but he worried that Carly would end his career before he could.

  “Is God offended that I do such things for the sake of saving my family?” Myles asked. “Does a wrong thing become right if you do it for the health of your people?”

  O’Carroll scrunched his brow and considered this messy predicament.

  “I prayed for my safety for one more win,” Myles said. “After that, I promise to give it up. I promise.”

  “What makes you think the Lord is unwilling to provide this?”

  “Nothing,” Myles said. “But I don’t know if I deserve it. I wish there were some way for him to tell me I do.”

  O’Carroll tapped lightly on his pocket. Holding up a finger with one hand, he pointed to where Myles was standing.

  “Wait here for a minute,” he said.

  He turned and went back upstairs. Myles again heard the man’s footsteps echo throughout the church. Myles folded one hand on top of the other and rooted himself in place. Was O’Carroll coming back with a punishment? A blessing? Was he coming back at all? He might even leave the church, Myles realized, as a way of showing how the Lord might abandon Myles if he kept up his ways. But a short while later, O’Carroll came back. He kept one hand in his pocket and the other hand clenched in a fist.

  “Take this,” he said to Myles. He opened his fist to reveal a folded-up strip of paper. Myles took the strip and unfolded it. Inside was written an address on 8th Street.

  “By chance are you free tomorrow?” said O’Carroll.

  “What time?”

  “Early evening. Four or five. Do you think you could meet me at this address?”

  “I could,” Myles said. “But why?”

  “Because a man of the cloth suggested you do so. Can you make it?”

  “I can,” Myles said. “I can.”

  “Very good,” said O’Carroll. “That’s excellent. I saw you were trying to get out the window before I got here?”

  Myles blushed. “I was,” Myles said. “I apologize. I wanted—”

  “You know the latch is broken,” said O’Carroll. “The workmen are fixing it tomorrow. That is, if you still want to use your singular method of exit.”

  To this, Myles had nothing to say. He wondered if this odd, kind, gentle man had sprung out of dreams he’d harbored since childhood, when he wished he had a priest neither stern nor forceful. A priest who was simply a guiding hand. Myles feared he might be asleep or—perhaps more likely—a victim of the Woodrat’s paint fumes.

  “I would say, ‘I hope to see you,’ but that makes no sense,” O’Carroll said. “I know I’m going to see you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Around three the next day, Myles set out from his tenement apartment and walked the many blocks up to 8th Street. On the way, he passed by Grantly’s, a drugstore that sold his favorite hair cream, and Migni’s, a grocery store that stocked all sorts of exotic fruits. Alberto Migni sold kumquats, kiwis, and avocados, as well as a few other fruits that sounded even more imaginary.

  On the rare day when Myles journeyed this far uptown, he had trouble keeping himself from browsing the selection at both places. On this particular day, however, Myles couldn’t make it to 8th Street fast enough. The kindly O’Carroll struck him as a man who could save his life. Just thinking about Carly made pain shoot through his chest.

  Myles dreamt of the kinds of things O’Carroll might have to give him. He thought of a special oil or a secret, pain-relieving drink. He envisioned a magical eucalyptus tree, the kind Myles had heard they gre
w in Australia. Whatever O’Carroll gave him, the fact that a priest had appeared in his life at all meant that somehow, the Lord had blessed him.

  He searched for the address on the east side when he made it to 1st Avenue. Near a streetlight next to a barbershop, a horse trader sold saddles at a discount. Walking by the horse trader, Myles counted from twenty-two upwards until he got to ninety-eight. He found a small wooden door marked by a carving of a harp. He went down three small steps and knocked on the door. No answer.

  Myles knocked again. A man no more than five feet tall yanked it open and looked up suspiciously.

  “What do you want?” he said. “You notice I didn’t answer the first time.”

  “I’m looking for Father O’Carroll,” Myles said.

  “Father?” the man said. “Oh, right. O’Carroll. He’s coming at four. You can wait here. It’s quarter till.”

  “I appreciate the hospitality, sir,” Myles said. He nodded and bowed his head in hopes of putting the short man at ease.

  “I never said you could wait inside,” the man said. “Like I said, Patrick comes at four. Wait here.”

  Myles stepped back as the man shut the door in his face. He crossed his arms. Was it possible the whole thing was a trick? Could it be that O’Carroll enjoyed playing pranks on kids who didn’t know any better? It was too cruel to contemplate, but if it were true, it meant O’Carroll was like the priests Myles knew growing up. They didn’t enjoy pranks, but they did enjoy teaching boys a lesson, especially with the help of a paddle or a thorny switch.

  O’Carroll ambled down the street a few minutes later. Spotting Myles, he clapped his hands. He gave Myles a pinch on the back of his neck and gruffly shook his hand.

  “Good to see you,” he said. “I promise you’re doing the right thing.” After knocking on the door, rappity-rappity, the short man again came calling.