A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,29

out I could take a decent shot to the head without going down, they didn’t mind having a six-foot-three, 215-pound sparring partner around for the real fighters to warm up on.

I just liked the place. The heat in the winter. The odor of liniment and sweat and talcum. The rhythm of leather slapping on leather and the sting and whoosh of a jump rope. That and the silence.

No one in O’Hara’s wasted their breath on words. A trainer might yelp instructions to his fighter in the ring, or have a low conference between the two-minute bells, but a man on the heavy bag didn’t trash talk. A guy rattling the speed bag only breathed swiftly and kept the rhythm. The shadow boxers had nothing to say to the man in the mirror.

I’d been going to O’Hara’s for a year before my father found out. On a November evening one of his patrol buddies led him and another cop in after their shift. They’d stopped off at Rourke’s Tavern like always. They came in yapping.

“I’ll show ya. It’s true,” said the smallest of the group. Schmitty, I think they called him.

“Bullshit,” my father was saying, and the sound of his voice turned me just as I was climbing into the raised ring to take a few rounds with a middleweight trying to tune up for a bout that month in Atlantic City.

Mr. O’Hara walked over to the trio, and even though they had changed out of their uniforms, he knew from their carriage and sense of ownership who they were.

“Can I help you officers?”

By that time my father had spotted me. His seventeen-year-old son up in the ring, without his knowledge, or his permission.

“That’s his kid there,” Schmitty said, touching my father’s arm and pointing up at me.

Mr. O’Hara looked into my father’s face and then back at me as if to confirm the resemblance.

“Yeah. OK. Nice to meet you Mr. Freeman,” he said. “You want to watch your boy, OK.”

My father had a look on his face that I’d never seen, a look of surprise, but with the narrowed eyes of his constant skepticism and an alcoholic sheen of disregard.

The bell for the round rang and snapped my eyes off his. From the other corner, Mohammed “Timmy” Williams came bouncing across the ring. Williams was a professional and had an agenda. He moved like mercury spilled from a bottle, slipping, circling to his right, body bunched but fluid and within itself. I tried to cut off the ring on him like Mr. O’Hara had taught us but Mohammed was much too fast, bouncing on his toes, automatically anticipating the moves that I had to think about. It was like trying to pinch that ball of silver liquid. You could never seem to touch it. He slipped in close and fired two left jabs into my high right glove. The first one I blocked, the second I hadn’t even realized he’d thrown. The punch knocked my headgear askew. Now I circled and shot out a jab, just to be moving.

“Atta boy, Maxey.” The one called Schmitty was yelling.

“Long arms,” quietly rasped Mohammed’s trainer from his corner.

The professional was there to work technique. His upcoming opponent was long-limbed like me. He was trying to perfect his ability to slip inside those long punches and punish the other fighter’s torso.

I was there to get hit. It’s what sparring partners do. I kept my elbows down and in, knowing his intent. He fired two more jabs that snapped into my headgear, high on the forehead.

“Come on, Maxey. Give ’em a shot.”

The cop named Schmitty was excited. The rest of the gym was, as usual, voiceless. My father only watched.

I threw another, instinctive left jab that Mohammed deftly stepped into and let slide by his ear before delivering a short right hook to my exposed ribs. My mouthpiece came halfway out onto my lips from the air that popped from my chest. My knees lost the connection between upper and lower legs for an instant and I stumbled back. Mohammed bounced away and waited. I tried to get my lungs to work again. We circled again. Mohammed started to throw stinging punches, combinations, left-right, left-right off my headgear.

“Come on, Maxey,” yelled the cop. “Give some back to this homey.”

I heard the machine rhythm of the speed bag lurch, just once, before regaining its patter. I heard someone on the heavy bag snap it with a vicious punch.

Mohammed moved back in. His punches to my head