LOVING POWER
In these dark comedies, whether set in a small town, the city, a prison or a college campus, characters hunger for love and power and are caught in the clash between the two. Lee K. Abbott called the collection an example of "the superior work of Robert Flanagan whose virtues on the page are precisely those we remain most in need of: authority, compassion, wisdom, and grace enough to put all three in prose exact enough to be science." Available from the author and Bottom Dog Press.
HEAVY HANDS
by Robert Flanagan
A fairly recent and as yet unpublished short story.
Copyright, 2008
All Rights Reserved
Buddy Wing was a heavy-handed heavyweight with a decent chin and slow feet who slung his punches side-arm rather than turning them over straight from the shoulder. A Toledo Blade sportswriter did a piece on him, calling him “Bolo” after Kid Gavilan’s style of delivery, and the nickname stuck. Buddy didn’t have one punch knockout power but if he got an opponent in a corner and uncorked a volley of roundhouse rights and looping left hooks, he could put his man down. A good finisher, he ran up a string of TKOs in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia. At 13-0-1 Buddy “Bolo” Wing was seen as a comer and a Chicago promoter phoned his manager Sam Fadell to offer him a shot at Willie “Spider” McComb, the 12h ranked heavyweight contender.
On the day of the fight Sam picked up Buddy and brought him to his house for breakfast. Sam’s wife, Opal, made them bacon, eggs and toast, and served Buddy a big glass of orange juice. Then Sam took Buddy for a walk around the neighborhood, neat and clean one story brick and frame houses, Sam in his grey wool topcoat and black leather cap and Buddy in a heavy blue sweatshirt with its hood snugged up against the chill March air. Sam smoked one of his thin dark cigars, being careful to blow the smoke away from his fighter. A big arena was just another arena, he said, a ring was a ring. Just fight your fight.
Sam drove them to Chicago, the duffel bag and packed lunch on the passenger seat and Buddy sprawled in the Hudson Hornet’s back seat. They stopped at a park beside Lake Michigan, thinking to sit at a picnic table, but snow flurries whipped past the windshield and wind gusts shook the car and they stayed put. Opal had packed Buddy a broiled chicken breast, leg and thigh, bran muffin, banana and thermos of milk. Sam had a thermos of hot coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. Done eating, he got out and stood with his cap pulled down and coat collar up, sucking on a cigar, then rapped on the glass for Buddy to come out. With Sam, you walked after you ate, no matter what. They went along the rocky beach, leaning into the wind and watching the white-capped waves smash against the shore, but it was too cold to go far and they turned back to the car to wait until time to find Chicago Stadium on West Madison Street.
The basement dressing room looked like a football team locker room and had a bunch of other fighters in it, walking around in jock straps, suiting up, warming up. Buddy didn’t like being crowded but Sam said that only headliners got private rooms. He told Buddy not to let it bother him, his time would come. Sam found an empty locker and put his coat and cap in it. Buddy undressed, hanging his clothes on hooks as Sam unloaded gear from the stuffed duffel. Sam held up a white terry cloth bathrobe with Buddy “Bolo” Wing stitched in red on the back. Opal’s work, he said. Buddy stepped into the robe, tied the belt about his waist, and said thanks. Sam shrugged it off. A semi-finalist now, he said, Buddy had earned it. The next one would be satin with a hood.
A doctor stopped by to check Buddy’s eyes, pulse and breathing and had him strip and step onto a Toledo scale -- 209 and ½ -- though it didn’t really matter how heavy a heavyweight was. As the doctor walked out a boney little cocoa-colored boxer was brought in dangling between his handlers. The boy’s broken nose spouted blood and the tears ran from his eyes like a baby’s.
Buddy got into the worn leather belt and protective cup, black-striped white trunks and black shoes, and put on the new robe. He lay back on a bench, an arm crooked over his eyes, trying to block out the chatter and whap whap of gloves on punch mitts. Snatches of booing and cheering sounded as the door opened and closed, fighters going to and from the ring. Some came back whooping and laughing, others cursing a bad decision or bum luck. A voice called Hey, Spider, you late, man, but Buddy didn’t look up.
When Sam tapped his shoulder he sat up. A fat man in white shirt and black pants with a pair of black Everlasts hanging around his neck, was there to see Sam do Buddy’s hands. Sam wrapped each hand in two layers of cloth tape and a third one of white adhesive, using blunt-tipped scissors to snip little strips of adhesive to stick between the fingers. Buddy flexed his fingers, made a fist of his left hand, pounding it into his cupped right palm, did the same with the right on the left, and nodded okay. The commission official signed his name on the wraps with a blue ballpoint and handed Sam the twelve ounce gloves. Sam held the left one open and Buddy worked his hand into it, its lining damp with sweat from an earlier bout, and then they did the right. Sam tied the laces tight but not so tight they cut off circulation and covered them with white tape. The man signed the tapes, checked Buddy’s mouth guard, and moved to the back of the room. Flicking his eyes after him Buddy caught a glimpse of “Spider” McComb, a tall lean Negro muscled like a race horse.
Sam warmed up Buddy with the mitts, left, right, left, left right. You’re looking good, son, you got your stuff tonight. He stowed the mitts with Buddy’s clothes, closed the locker, slipped his padlock through the U and snapped it shut.
*
Buddy came to on the rubbing table in the locker room. The room was empty but for Sam, the doctor and himself. The doctor thought he should go to the hospital but Buddy said he felt okay and after a while the doctor left. He lost? Buddy asked. Sam nodded. Caught by a counter punch during one of his flurries; a second round KO. Buddy didn’t remember getting hit or being counted out or being carried from the ring and he felt no pain. He wanted to go up and catch the welterweight main event, college boy Chuck Davey against former champ Ike Williams, but Sam told him it was already over. Davey had stopped Williams in the fifth while Buddy was still out.
Though he said he didn’t need it, Buddy couldn’t keep Sam from helping him from the table and holding his elbow as they made their way to the exit.
In Toledo Sam told him to take a few weeks off before coming to the gym but as it turned out Buddy took off the rest of his life. Every so often pains hammered his skull and he’d lie in bed with a damp towel over his eyes until they stopped. Once when a really bad one hit he saw in his head the punch he never saw in the ring, a tight, perfect left hook; saw it coming in slow motion like in a movie and then saw, or maybe remembered, a white light like a giant flashbulb going off.
Irene dropped by his room a few times but then found somebody new. Buddy didn’t blame her. She liked to drink and dance and hump and he wasn’t much good to her now.
Sam offered him work as a towel and spit-bucket man and Buddy said no thanks, but to thank Opal for the good as new parka she found for him at Goodwill.
Come winter the pains faded. At times he’d feel a twinge in the back of his neck and would flinch, waiting for one to hit, but then it would pass like a slipped punch. He felt good enough again to carry out the garbage and shovel the snow for his landlady Mrs. Pike. He liked doing odd jobs for her. She always put a good meal on the table and charged him less than she did her other boarders.
The job Sam managed to get him at the Toledo streets department paid regular and was easy work, pushing a broom in and out of offices and between garbage trucks and salt trucks and weed-mowing tractors. Buddy liked being alone at night in the big garage; it felt like an arena but without people screaming at you to hit him, take him out.
Every so often in a bar some guy would shake his hand or slap him on the back, calling him “Bolo,” and want to buy him a beer. What a lousy break that Chi-town fight was. Hell, Buddy had it in the bag before that shine landed a lucky punch.
Eating his sack lunch at three in the morning Buddy sometimes splayed his big broken-fingered, jammed-knuckled hands out in front of him and looked at them as though they were things found by chance. Hands as big as Primo Carnera’s, Sam said, the hands of a champion. In grade school back in Wapakoneta Buddy had trouble hearing the teacher because his left ear was bad from his old man’s slaps and he was slow in his lessons because he was a slow kid. A bully called him dummy until Buddy whipped him on the playground, beating him to his knees with heavy, hammer-like blows. Once he had seen his hands as friends giving him a way up, but now saw them as weights dragging him down. It was his head that had saved him, his head that flashed a light showing him a way out.
The End
