I soon developed a reputation as a snappy counter-puncher, with a tight, close guard, a solid chin, a smoking short right jab and a blurring left hook that caught many opponents completely unawares. When not training, the good Father would tell me blow-by-blow stories about the fights at Madison Square Garden he’d watched, seeing undercard boxers eventually go on to become world champions; he told me about hitching to Philadelphia to watch Jersey Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano, and ‘the hardest punch ever thrown’, ditching school to watch Floyd Patterson fight Archie Moore, and Ingemar Johansson, Sweden’s first heavyweight world champion and take back the title, and blowing off his studies at the seminary to see Patterson’s punishing matches against the immortal Cassius Clay, now known as Muhammad Ali, and the notoriously brutal Mob puppet Sonny Liston, and as a boy way back in 1951, slipping into the Polo Ground, New York, to share in the magic of ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson’s famous fight against the English boxer Randy Turpin to regain the world Middleweight title. I knew all those names, I’d been an avid reader of ‘Ring’ magazine ever since I discovered the sport, and to be trained by a man who’d actually been there and watched those legends fight was an enthralling experience for me.
I was inspired by his stories, and I promised myself one day I’d be a champion at whatever weight I found myself when my chance came. In the meantime, I trained, I worked the bags and the weight-bench, and I sparred endlessly. Mom and dad were concerned at my lack of interest and mediocre progress in school, but they were also encouraging and supportive that I’d found something I liked and could do well, and that kept me out of the trouble all my friends seemed to find so easily.
Oddly enough, my biggest fan was Caitlin, or Kat, as everyone called her, although, with hindsight, maybe not so odd. Also, as a side benefit, almost no-one picked on me or my sister at school; when word got around that I was the real thing, all the school bullies and wannabe tough-guys avoided me, which was gratifying, but also disappointing; if only one of them had tried something with me, just once…
And so things progressed, until I was nearly sixteen. Sarah was in college over in Monte Vista, just a few miles away, and had a steady boyfriend, Joe Anderson, who seemed like a nice guy. Joe was always polite and respectful to Sarah, and obviously into her, friendly and interested in me without being condescending in any way, and effortlessly good with Caitlin, who had her own not-so-secret crush on him, which amused Sarah and tickled Joe pink.
Then it all seemed to go wrong for Sarah. One night she went to a party with some of her college friends; Joe wasn’t with her, they’d had some kind of argument in the car outside the house that afternoon, she’d gone to the party without him, and she’d come back in a hell of a state, dishevelled, in tears, mom ready to call the sheriff, and dad trying to calm everyone down. I admit it, I eavesdropped; no-one was going to tell me anything, but it was obvious something had happened to Sarah, something bad, something to do with whoever’s house the party had been at.
As I snooped further, I heard more than I wanted to, about what had happened to my big sis, where it happened, and most of all, who did it. I knew what they were saying, and the sound of my big sis, who’d never been anything but the best thing in my life, crying desperately as she told mom and dad what had happened to her, made my blood boil.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to hurt someone real bad; in all my bouts in the ring I’d never lost my temper, my opponents were just that, opponents, not my enemies, not objects of hatred, and I’d respected them. But now I wanted to grab that piece of shit and pound him until he was just a lifeless red ruin for what he’d done to my beautiful big sister.
The following afternoon I waited outside the campus until the man I wanted to see came ambling out like he owned the place. I walked next to him along the sidewalk as he walked to his car, until we passed an alleyway, then I pushed him as hard as I could, watching him sprawl full length among the garbage and litter. He may have had almost five years on me, but I had 20 lbs and four inches on him, and he hit the ground with a satisfying thud.
“Hey, what the fuck…?” he bellowed, jumping to his feet, and that’s when I let him have it, a looping roundhouse left, powered by all my rage and disgust, that spun him round and dumped him back in the garbage.
As he climbed to his feet, he got a quick one-two that slammed him back against the wall and as he came back off the wall, he got another left hook, this one right into the bridge of his nose. I heard the craacckk! as his nose broke. Today I feel ashamed of it, but right there and then I felt a huge burst of satisfaction watching him bleed like a stuck hog.
To give him his due, he came back out swinging, but he had no chance; he was used to having his teammates on the football field protect and defend him, the star quarterback, and his half-wit gang of bullies and yes-men to help him throw his weight around in the corridors in high school, but when he was alone, he was easy meat, and every punch he threw missed, while every punch I threw connected somewhere painful. I battered him to his knees, feeling immense satisfaction that this pig who had hurt my sister was on his knees before me, asking, no begging me to stop, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, his eyes bruised and blackening, large bruises all over his face where I’d connected again and again.
Eventually I decided I’d beaten him enough to get some answers out of him; if I didn’t get enough answers out of him, I was going to beat him some more. Right then I didn’t care if he scuttled home to mommy and she kissed his current trivial set of boo-boo’s better, or he got carried into the ER because I’d beaten the living shit out of him, but he was going to tell me everything or the ER was going to be the least of his worries.
I held him upright by his expensive bouffant hairstyle, which I guess was supposed to make him look like someone out of Wham! or something, but just looked stupid surrounding his meaty thick-lipped face.
As I questioned him, piece by piece I got the whole sordid story out of him, how he’d decoyed Joe out to a motel on the town line with a message supposedly from Sarah, that she wanted to meet him there and talk, and how he’d paid Laurie Hollister, the school tramp, to tell Sarah that she was Joe’s new girl, that she and Joe had been doing the business, and how she was going to be with him after the party in a room they had in an out-of-town motel, and then how he’d lured Sarah up to the bluffs, and what he’d done to her there.
To this day I don’t know how I didn’t just chop him in the throat and watch him choke to death there and then. When he’d finished, I dragged him to his feet and gave him another couple of vicious lefts and rights to the face, just for spite, to make him fear me, and to hurt him some more for what he’d done to my beautiful sister. As I left him sitting there in the garbage, slumped against a wall covered in dog-piss stains, bloody and afraid, he looked up at me, his little weasel eyes darting around like rats in a barrel.
“Who are you?” he croaked, “what’s Sarah Novak to you?”
He flinched as I walked back toward him and reached down to haul him closer by his collar so I could look him in his scared little eyes, now puffed and bruised where I’d given him something to remember me by.
“Sarah Novak’s my sister, and for what you did, I should kill you; maybe one day I will. You should know one thing, you little dog’s dick; I’m fifteen right now, and I fucked you up good, imagine what I’ll be able to do to you in five years time. Stay away from my sister, and from my family, or I’ll do this to you every chance I get, and every time it’ll be worse, you hear me, you little prick? And while you’re down there in the dog-piss, think on this; you were lucky it was me; my mom wants to cut off your balls, then shove a double-barrel up your quacker and pull both triggers for what you did, and if you think it’s just talk, then you don’t know my mother, so thank your lucky stars I got here first!”
He nodded, unable to speak for nervously swallowing. I left him there minus his dignity, his bravado, and several of his teeth, surrounded by garbage and dog urine, his expensive Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ jacket and trendy Lee Cooper jeans covered in smears from the rotting garbage and nameless filth he’d spent so much time sprawled in.
By the time I got home I was shaking in reaction and my hands were burning, the skin of my knuckles split and bleeding in places. As I came in, Caitlin spotted me.
“Frankie, have you seen… oh my God, Frankie, what happened to your hands? Frankie, honey, what is it?” she held my arms tightly, unnerved by the sight of me shaking.
She towed me into the kitchen and sat me down while she got a bowl of water and dumped some ice into it.
“Here, put them in here!” she ordered, taking my hands and pushing them into the ice water. It felt good, alleviating the stinging and allowing them to unclench. While my hands were soaking, she went and found some gauze and some antiseptic, and spent the next 20 minutes drying, cleaning and taping-up the worst of the cuts. When she’d finished, she sat back and looked at me appraisingly. One of the things I’d always found most appealing about Kat was her ability to look right into you and work out what was going on inside; she had that in common with Sarah, which was why I’ve never been able to sneak one past either one of them.
“I… got into a fight, okay?” I lied, Kat looking me with one eyebrow raised, a gesture she’d inherited or copied straight from mom.
“Don’t even bother trying to lie to me, Francis Xavier Novak!” she gritted, leaning forward and poking me in the chest. “I know no-one in that school will touch you. This is to do with whatever it was that happened to Sally, isn’t it? What happened? No-one will tell me anything, Sally just stays in her room crying, and mom and dad look like they’ve been fighting, now mom just sits there crying, so Don’t. You. Start. Lying. To. Me!”