He got up. The crowd around her took this as a sign that the fight would turn back Victor’s way. They shouted and clapped and stamped their feet. But she knew better, knew exactly what was going to happen to him.
You get used to being bad. You get used to seeing your once stone-fisted punches become as nothing against the face of your opponent. You get used to the feeling of strangling on your own blood from cuts inside your mouth, and you get used to the blindness that sets in after you’ve been hit so many times. When you get paid by the round, all you can hope is that you somehow manage to stay upright long enough to make good money for your day’s work.
Today was different.
Today was the sort of day Rooney dreamed about when he’d had several schooners of beer and was sitting at a fishing hole. His punches were crisp and deadly once more. His opponent was driven to the canvas several times. Rooney, loose now with self-confidence and a real sense of how to take his man out, was once again a man others needed to fear.
He had lost count of how many times Sovich had pitched to the canvas by now. And it didn’t matter. All that did matter was that Rooney was moving in slowly, cutting off the ring and making escape for Victor Sovich impossible.
He kept punching, punching.
She did not want to watch him die.
She sensed that even the crowd, that great roaring white beast that seemed to have its masculinity at stake here, knew he was going to die.
Its chanting fell to ragged silence.
Its boastfulness became soft curses.
Its anger became fear.
She took it as a sign from God. He did not want her to desert her children, and this was His way of letting her know.
She stood up just as Victor was knocked down for the fourth time. She was crying, quiet silver tears, as much for herself as for Victor, and she slipped from the arena without a single look back at the ring.
No, she did not want to see because seeing was a curse. If she saw him in his last moments, she would never be able to forget. In the night when it was hot and she could not sleep, she would see his dying face. Or in the winter when the hard winds came and woke her, then too she would see his dying face and her heart would turn bitter over things that might have been but, alas, were not.
She did not look back once. She went home to her children and her mother.
When he put his head down, the nigger hit him on top of the head. When he moved his body away, the nigger hit him in the kidney. When he fell to the canvas, the nigger hit him in the face on the way down. There was no escaping the nigger now.
Victor knew it was the water that had done this to him. But as the rounds pressed on, as the pain carried him into a kind of purgatory where all normal human reactions were suspended, he thought less about the water. Now there was just the blindness setting in, the sensation of pissing his pants, the right hand from nowhere inflicting more pain.
For a time he’d hoped that he could still turn the fight around. By now he knew better. As he bobbed and ducked and tried to retaliate, odd images began forming. He saw his father, Slavic-rough and Slavic-mean, tossing a baseball to a six-year-old Victor. He saw his sister Peg singing “Ave Maria” at Victor’s first communion. He saw the first girl he’d ever slept with smiling at him knowingly in the shadows afterward.
More blows, abruptly. The referee, clamping his hands on Victor’s face and forcing his eyes open, shouted right into Victor’s face, “How are you feeling? Can you go on?”
Could he go on?
A nigger beating Victor Sovich?
Instinctively, Victor pushed the man aside and staggered in the direction of Rooney, swinging wildly as he did so.
The crowd roared for the first time in long minutes.
Rooney hit him very hard on the forehead again. Victor felt himself start to sink to his knees. A coldness came, then a darkness. He had experienced neither before.
His sister again, and the “Ave Maria.”
His father slapped him for spilling too much beer in the bucket Victor always ran down and got him. (He’d never been able to please the old man. Never.)
The chewy breasts of Teresa. What an odd thing to want now with the coldness and the darkness setting in-sex.
The referee’s hands on his shoulders, pushing him to the corner. “You’re bleeding from your penis,” the referee shouted into his face. “There’s blood all over your legs.”
He wanted, despite all the pain and confusion, to get Rooney. And wanted Teresa, the musk of her sex, the soft brown sadness of her eyes.
Blindness was total now, and the coldness.
God, the coldness.
Chapter Thirty-One
The crowd was without voice. Where only minutes before it had urged its raging best on Victor Sovich, now it was nothing more than a whimpering beast, softly cursing its disbelief.
Dr. Fitzgerald was in the ring, bending over the unmoving form of Victor Sovich.
Rooney crouched on his haunches in the comer, keeping his massive, ugly head down, obviously trying not to pay any attention to the taunts and jeers directed at him by various white fans nearby. “He better not die, nigger. You hear that?” said one man as Guild pushed past to the ring.
The first drops of rain began to fall now, too, the sun disappearing altogether, the plump black rain clouds bringing not only darkness but chill, too. Rooney started rubbing himself. Seeing this, his trainer brought him a robe and threw it over his shoulders.
John T. Stoddard climbed up through the ropes. He was dazed in such a way that his face looked dead, his mouth open, spittle a silver cord down the side of his jaw, his eyes shocked into a flat, unseeing blue.
“What happened here?” the trainer said to the referee as Stoddard wandered around looking lost.
“Rooney just came on strong.
“Bullshit.
“You asked me a question. I’m just telling you what happened.”
“And I say bullshit. There’s no way Rooney could have done this to Sovich.”
“It’s what happened. I’m telling you-it’s what happened. The only thing I can think of is that Victor complained about the water.”
“What water?
“You gave him a bottle to drink from right before the fight. Maybe you still have the bottle.”
“Back in the dressing room.
“Maybe we better have a look at it.”
Stoddard came over now. The dazed look was still in his eyes. He stared dumbly down at Victor.
“He’s dead,” the referee said.
Stoddard said nothing
“Dead, Mr. Stoddard. Dead.”
The rain came harder now, cold and almost painful to the skin. The fans in the bleachers began to scatter. Where before there had been thousands, now there were only scores. Those who remained seemed not to notice the rain. They stood in their places, watching the ring.
Guild stared down at Sovich. He had not liked the man, did not like him still, yet there was an angry dignity to the man’s Slavic face in the repose of death. His eyelids were cut badly and his nose had been broken and two of his front teeth were nothing more than stumps. His legs were covered with blood.
“Let’s get his body back to the dressing room,” Guild said to the trainer.
Guild got Sovich by the feet, the trainer by the shoulders. They eased him over onto a stretcher.
The referee said, “I’ve never had a man die on me before.”
The sky opened up fully. The silver rain came in waves, in walls, in chill, shifting patterns that quickly drenched the parched ground beneath the bleachers and obscured everything in steam.
Somewhere in the middle of the downpour, they could hear an isolated fan shout toward the ring, “Is he dead?”
And the referee shouting back, “Yes, he’s dead.”
There was no sense in hurrying. Guild was already soaked. They carried Victor Sovich back on a stretcher covered by a sheet. The sheet got soaked immediately and clung tightly to Sovich, lending him the aspect of sculpture.