This was originally supposed to be a subchapter in four parts posted as a single chapter, but then it grew to almost 22,000 words in length. So, here are parts 1 & 2 of Dimitri's tale, and my first-ever attempt at writing a fight sequence. Not even close to my last.
Early March, 1974
A Phone Call
LORETTA
"Tanner residence. I don't know what time'ah the night yuh call this, but if Johnny Carson is on TV, it's too late to be ringin' me up for a chat. And God help yuh if you're sellin' something!"
(Silence)
"This better not be who I think is… yuh know there's a special place in hell reserved for punk kids who prank-call old ladies, Ritchie Stiedman. Yuh ask me if my refrigerator is runnin' one more goddamn time - I'm gonna back over your new 10-speed with my car, and then it'll be bye-bye, paper route!"
DIMITRI
(His voice a raspy, partial whisper)
"Loretta -"
LORETTA
"Oh. It's just yuh. Mickey's not here, Dimitri. He's over at Antonia's helpin' Ray put up some new shelves in their den. Dollars to doughnuts he'll be sleepin' on the pull-out there tonight - yuh know how those two always start hittin' the hooch when they're together. Yuh can try him there, or I can just tell him yuh called when he comes stragglin' in tomorrow around lunchtime."
DIMITRI
"Actually, I need to speak with you. I'm sorry about the hour. Everyone here just finally went to bed."
LORETTA
(She yawns)
"I was headed that way myself."
DIMITRI
"I'll try and keep this brief - if I can. I called to ask you for a favor."
LORETTA
(Silence)
"Yuh sound funny."
DIMITRI
(He sighs)
"I feel it."
LORETTA
"Hold on a minute. I'm getting the impression I'll need my smokes for whatever this is about. And a bottle of something stronger than Mr. Carlo Rossi."
(She sets down the receiver)
(Silence)
(She returns)
"Okay. All I could find was an old bottle of Bushmills, so Irish wine it is - a little of this in a little of that."
(A cigarette lighter clicks, she inhales loudly)
"...Well, yuh called me, and not the other way around. Get to talkin'."
DIMITRI
(Beat)
"I planned what I was going to say to you before I dialed your number, and now I can't remember any of it. This is...as I said, I need to ask if you'll do me a favor - a big one - "
LORETTA
"How about for starters yuh cut it with all this 'favor' talk, alright? Friends I do 'favors' for, but yuh, my dear boy, are family. Family, I take care of because it's my job as a mother and a grandmother, and because it's the only thing that separates us from the animals. Of course, that doesn't mean I won't rake yuh over the coals first before doin' it, though, so get the marbles out of your mouth and tell me what's goin' on. I could knock yuh over with a feather right now."
DIMITRI
(He clears his throat)
"Do you know a man from around the neighborhood called Pawl Kozlowski?"
LORETTA
"Pawl Koz… oh, yuh mean Keach? The bookie? Yeah, I know him enough. He's a pig."
DIMITRI
"That sounds right."
(He swallows)
"If I were to come by the house tomorrow to drop off an envelope, would you be willing to take it over to his office and place a bet for me?"
LORETTA
(She snorts)
"Some 'office' he's got for himself - a filthy camper parked year-round down by the riverfront that gets raided by the cops once a month. That man's syphilis has probably got tetanus."
DIMITRI
"This is serious, Loretta. I know it's not an ordinary request, but you're the only person who can help me right now. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't really important."
LORETTA
"I've never known yuh to gamble before, apart from the odd card game now and again, and even then, it's usually dollar buy-ins. All this whisperin' isn't just about throwin' some loose notes down on the next Celtics game, is it?"
(Beat)
"What's with all the cloak and dagger stuff - are yuh in some kind of trouble, Dimitri? If yuh just need money I can lend yuh -"
DIMITRI
"The bet isn't for me."
LORETTA
(Beat)
"Am I allowed to know who this mystery beneficiary is, as I'm supposed to be breakin' a Commandment for yuh in their stead?"
(Pause)
"Don't think I won't hang up on yuh if yuh don't get on with it already. I've got no qualms about hangin' up on family."
DIMITRI
"It's for -"
(Beat.)
"Who they are isn't important, honestly. Look, I have $5,200 in my savings account right now. I'm asking you to please take that money to Keach and lay down a bet on next Saturday's fight."
(Beat)
"My fight."
(Pause)
"I need you to put it all on Mendoza to win. You don't need to pick which round, just that I'll lose."
LORETTA
"...Holy fuckin' shit…"
(Silence)
DIMITRI
"Can you do it?"
LORETTA
"…are yuh sayin' to me what I think you're sayin'?"
DIMITRI
"Judging by your reaction - yes. I am."
LORETTA
"Have yuh damaged your fuckin' brain?!"
DIMITRI
"Look, can you do it? Please, just tell me yes or no!?"
LORETTA
"Don't yuh take that tone with me. I'll say yes to nothing until I'm schooled on all the details of a situation - you're feedin' me scraps right now. How come?"
(Pause)
"...Dimitri, how come?!"
(Longer pause)
"So, I have to take a guess, is it? Well… Spoon is always in the hole for something, as sure as God made little green apples. Now that I think about it, I'd be willin' to bet $5,200 of my own money at 10-1 odds you're plannin' on payin' down a whole lotta juice for that man with this bet because yuh love him."
(Beat)
"But this fight means more to him than it does even to yuh. He'd never ask yuh in five lifetimes to do this - he'd die first. Who was it cooked up this cockamamie scheme of yours?"
(Pause)
"This is some real greasy underhanded shit we're slip-slidin' around the edge of, and yuh don't have the constitution for it."
(Longer pause)
"Whatever this is all about, it's probably pretty bad. How deep a' hot water are yuh in? And don't yuh dare lie to me - I'll know."
DIMITRI
(Pause)
"A while back, I was running some side jobs for Bobby Lom -"
LORETTA
(She cuts him off sharply)
"I'm going to go ahead and stop yuh right there…"
(She continues, voice cold)
"Choose your next words wisely, young man. I'll hear what yuh have to say, but there isn't a whole lot yuh could say to get me onside after that start. Inauspicious they'd call it."
DIMITRI
(Silence)
"Can you just believe me when I say I had my reasons, and no other options? You…you know me enough to…don't you?"
(Beat)
"Loretta?"
LORETTA
"Slow down, will yuh?! I'll start talkin' again when I know what to say."
(Silence)
"DAMNIT, Dimitri! Does Mickey know about any of this? He better fuckin' well not or I'll… I don't even wanna know this shit! Yuh think I haven't heard this story before?! This whole disgusting town is lousy with it, and always has been…"
(Beat)
"Oh, god. Your poor mother…I oughta TAN YOUR HIDE!"
DIMITRI
"Can you do it!?"
LORETTA
"My arm sure would be sore when I was through, but yeah I think I still remember how to use a belt on a bare ass! OH, yuh mean can I do this vile, loathsome thing for yuh AND not tell your mother about it? Can I do some reprehensible, clandestine shit and keep it a secret from my best friend who I see every single day and who trusts me with not only her life but the lives of her babies and their babies!? Can I go behind her back and help her darling golden son throw away his good name and his dreams on a bunch of weak bargainin' that would break her goddamn heart if she ever found out about it?"
(Beat)
"Yuh better be fuckin' sure about this, yuh hear me? There better not be a single doubt in your mind. Yuh better be DESPERATE!"
DIMITRI
"I am! That's exactly what I am! I'm desperate! I'm stupid - just like you said, and I'm scared and I'm desperate. This is what they want, Loretta. This is the only thing they'll accept!
I have no choice in it now, but - "
(Beat)
"At least this way I can try and pay down some of my guilt...? So I don't feel quite so disgusted with myself every time I look in the mirror…or breath. It sounds trite, but I didn't know it was possible to fail a person you love this profoundly."
LORETTA
"None of this adds up. None of it. Yuh don't care about money, and you're no dummy - most of the time. Yuh got nothin' to prove to anyone about being a big man because you're plenty fuckin' big. There's no deceit in yuh. How has it all come to this? Yuh dealin' with a bastard like him?"
DIMITRI
"It's a sleeping dog, Loretta."
LORETTA
"Well, why should it get to rest easy tonight when neither of us will? Tell me or my answer is no."
DIMITRI
"Randall came back."
LORETTA
(Pause)
"...Yep. That'd do it."
(Longer pause)
"Yuh saw him?"
DIMITRI
"He came into the shop."
LORETTA
"Did any of the girls see him?"
DIMITRI
"No.
(Beat)
"No, that honor was all mine. Twice."
LORETTA
(Silence)
"Is he dead?"
DIMITRI
"Yes."
LORETTA
"Good."
(A cigarette lighter clicks)
"It was him or her. She would've taken him back. I've always known it. She never could say no to him, and she never would if it was put to the test - not the father of her children. Evil as he was… it was just the Atlantic Ocean keepin' them apart."
(Beat)
"And this time he probably woulda killed her."
(Pause)
"I know what you're thinkin', and you're half right. Yuh could have done it yourself. With yuh hands or with a gun - maybe. But then it would have been quick. And yuh might have gotten caught. I know a lot of things in this world, but I don't know anythin' about hidin' a body where it never gets found. This way… he got what was comin' to him. Lombardo makes sure they die screamin'. The bad ones he does, anyway. And they just vanish."
(Beat)
"Randall, who?"
(Pause)
"So now the wolf's come home, and he's askin' yuh for favors. Ones that fuckin' hurt. Yuh know yuh can't just give Spoon a big paper bag full of money, right? He'll turn right around and hand it back to every bookie in town, and then he'll pour what's left of it down his throat. He's been self-destructin' since we were kids."
DIMITRI
"There's a man I know who works down at the county office. He comes into the shop all the time. I was going to start by arranging with him to pay off the back taxes Spoon owes on the gym and his aunt's house. After that I'll need to get a little more creative about tracking down his creditors."
LORETTA
"I know just about every bookie, bail bondsman, and loan shark in town - at least by name. Something about scumbags, they never own a washer and dryer. Maybe all the scum gums up the mechanisms? I swear the clientele at the laundry reads like a fuckin' FBI most wanted list."
(Beat)
"I'll put the feelers out and see what I can find."
(Beat)
"Yuh sound ridiculous whisperin' like that, by the way. You're in the downstairs hall closet with the door shut and the phone cord pulled as far as it'll go so Olena and Victoria won't hear, aren't yuh?"
DIMITRI
"...Yes."
LORETTA
"Hidin' out in dark corners like a little mouse. Or a pervert. Well, I've got news for yuh - that may work on them, but Yeva can sniff a secret on the wind like chum in the water. I hope it's a fun reckonin' she brings down on yuh when we're through here. That old crone is gonna chew up what's left of yuh when I'm through and spit yuh back out. Then she'll yell at yuh!"
DIMITRI
"Which is exactly why I didn't bother using a pay phone! Yeva would find me no matter where I went, as she always does. She dragged me out of Linden's Cafe by my ear once."
LORETTA
"The rec hall Halloween party beer bust. I remember."
(She nods audibly - voice moving in and out)
"All eighty-three pounds of her, and yuh still didn't learn. I swear, boys never really grow up, they just increase everywhere. The woman can't drive a car, Dimitri! Yuh just gotta go couple'ah towns over to keep your business private. Olena does."
DIMITRI
(Beat)
"Blyad."
(He sighs)
"The bank opens about a half hour before my shift, so -"
LORETTA
"Oh, shut up about your savings, already. Between my widow's pension, the rent from the apartments, and what we earn from the laundry I've got more cash comin' in now than I can spend before I die - unless I really do live to be two hundred like Mickey's dad always said I would. I can dig up enough bread to fix us all a great big money pie without even feelin' it."
(A cigarette lighter clicks)
"Yuh owe me a pack of smokes, though. I'm all out now, and it's your fault."
(She huffs)
DIMITRI
"Do you know how the points work? It can be tricky if you don't -"
LORETTA
"Listen to yuh over there hidin' from your women in a broom closet and trying to tell me how to suck eggs. Yuh Russians may have invented the term 'vigorish', but I'll have yuh know I come from a long line of degenerate gamblers. My first diaper was a pile of betting slips from the racetrack pinned together - dogs not horses. Ponies were too ritzy for my pops."
DIMITRI
"My apologies. I forgot who I was dealing with, here."
LORETTA
"You'd be in good company. A fair number of men in the state of New Jersey have that etched on their tombstones because of me."
(Half-hearted laughter is heard on either side of the line)
"Dimitri, I'm tryin' to lighten the mood by crackin' wise, but there's only so much a person can do with something this heavy. You're a man now. Yuh gotta plan your moves and stand by your choices."
(Beat)
"I'm tellin' yuh, though, plain as fuckin' tapioca pudding - yuh are not allowed to let this break yuh, understand? I forbid it. Yuh don't get to disappear in on yourself and shut down like yuh did back when yuh were a boy. That ghost act yuh pull scares your family and it serves no purpose. Get drunk as a skunk and wallow around for a few days without changin' your socks and underwear but be done with this once it's done.
Yuh need to move on and find yourself the next best thing - not the second-best thing - the next best thing. As long as you're still able to get out of bed in the morning and wipe your own ass, there can always be a next. That's the beauty of living. Find it, grab a hold with both fists, and don't let anybody take it away from yuh this time no matter what."
(She laughs)
"Christ. Mikhail Christopher was right! Even when I'm tryin' to be supportive, I sound like I'm threatenin' to cut a man's balls off."
DIMITRI
"It's no less than I deserve. It's still more, probably."
(His voice hitches)
"I'm sorry, Loretta - for all of this. I'm just so sorry for everything."
LORETTA
"I know yuh are, sweet boy. That makes two of us."
(Silence)
"Well, looks like I'm gettin' drunk tonight."
(Dial tone)
Spoon and Paul vs. The World
He'd hit the wall.
"Belikov, loosen up that hip."
It was no wonder given how hard he'd pushed himself all morning.
"Belikov! Your left hip is tighter than a librarian's asshole. It's not doin' a damn thing for yuh right now. Shake it out and move your heel!"
Up before dawn, he trod lightly through the house, showering, packing his gear, and filling his thermos with yesterday's coffee - taking extra care to be as quiet as possible, for woe be unto the man, woman, or beast that awakened Yeva Belikova before time when she was three days into pretending not to have a head cold. According to family legend, propagated by her, she hadn't been sick a day in her life since back before Constantinople was Istanbul, and that time had been morning sickness which didn't count. Fortunately for him, his stomach never seemed to want food before daylight, as rummaging through cabinets or, god forbid, opening the refrigerator door which tended to catch and require force, would be about as advisable as slapping a sleeping grizzly bear across the face with a dead trout.
His breath was visible in the air as he crept down the hall to the front door, mindful of avoiding the two loose floorboards that always had something to say when stepped upon. Pulling on his army surplus boots and sheepskin coat in the entryway, he vowed to finally get around to replacing the windows in the house with the double pain variety they were using in all the newer homes. In the long run, it would save his mother a lot on heating costs.
He yanked open the door and walked out into the small hours of the morning, the sky above straddling a pitch-black divide between tomorrow and today wherein everything in the world could look different to a person depending on whether or not they'd been to bed yet. Dimitri had seen his bed, albeit briefly; for him, it was today.
It snowed heavily all night. The flurries had ceased, but not before dumping a foot of fresh powder on the ground that swallowed entirely what little ambient noise there might have been in its absence. Cold, silent, and white all over, he and this early February morn had a lot in common. They were both miserable. Misery loves company - maybe that's why he was already awake.
There was no newspaper on the stoop for him to retrieve, no bottles of milk in the small box by the gate. The snow blanketing their small front yard from the steps down to the chain link fence, the sidewalk, and the street just beyond was pristine. His large footprints spanning the distance between his mother's partially-obscured welcome mat and the perpetual oil stain marking the spot where he parked his truck would be the only ones for a good while.
As a boy, stomping through fresh, unblemished snow gave him a strong sense of satisfaction - marking the world with a visual expression, however fleeting, of his individuality and belief in personal freedom. But this morning the prospect of marring the crystalline landscape just made him feel like an intruder - the asshole who had no business disturbing the natural order of things, yet still felt entitled to do so because he had places to be… and because he was an asshole.
A miserable, white asshole.
Good thing he wasn't feeling sorry for himself.
The Russo & Sons Bakery delivery van was already out making the rounds to various markets and restaurants about town, there were a few patrol cars on the beat looking for drunks to fill the tank back at the precinct - a cement hole Spoon had seen the inside of on more than one occasion. Mickey too, for that matter. Those exceptions aside, Dimitri passed nary a soul on the way to Loughran's.
Were he of a more glass-half-full turn of mind, he'd recognize the empty streets as a bit of sad man's luck. Last night had been a late one, just as this morning was an early one, and he'd been too damn tired after eating the supper his mother left warming in the oven for him to load the bed of his pickup with sandbags in preparation for the weather. Without the added weight in back, his junker was fishtailing all over the unplowed roads. At least with no other cars to worry about, his careless actions only posed an immediate danger to himself and every telephone pole he slid past heading toward the outskirts of town.
But he wasn't and he didn't. His glass was half empty, the brackish murk at the bottom of it was frozen over, and maybe wrapping his truck around a pole would solve all his problems.
'Bye-bye, paper route.'
The patron saint of roadside accidents was in an obliging mood. He rolled up to the gym looking and feeling no worse than he had when he left his house - shot at and missed, shit at and hit.
He'd finished a long session of jumping rope and his usual weekend ramped-up speed bag routine with the cold gym all to himself, taking advantage of the quiet empty space while it lasted. Solitude. He didn't need to be embarrassed by the line of people at the water cooler respectfully parting for him as though he were a messianic figure; he didn't need to ignore the rotating idiots standing too close to him at the weights station, trying to see what he benched and casually mentioning their own slightly exaggerated maximum weight limit like he cared.
Saturdays were the only busy days at Loughran's, but that didn't make early risers out of the usual crowd. Newcomers generally arrived later in the day as well, either in an effort to blend in with the crowd while navigating the awkward early stages of mastering their fundamentals or because more often than not, they showed up with a regular who'd brought them along. Word of mouth was the only advertising Spoon did for the place. The gym's name stitched across the back of the black satin robe Dimitri wore into the ring before all of his fights finished the job.
He dragged ass through a rough 5k circuit of interval training out in the snow, alternating between sprints and jogging around the large vacant lots surrounding the gym. He somehow managed to crank out a decent finish time, rallying at the end, even after choking down and nearly vomiting back up the disgusting shake made from raw eggs, spinach stems, almonds, and cayenne pepper Spoon had left for him in the metal Hamm's beer promotional cooler he kept in his office.
The ice in the cooler had long since melted before Dimitri opened the lid revealing the semi-speakable horrors within, but the viscous mash was still cold enough to be safe for human consumption - that didn't mean he wanted to put it in his body. He'd been tempted to empty the contents of the blender pitcher into the sink and just lie about drinking the swill until he read the fine print at the bottom of a scribbled note consisting mostly of curse words below his name stuck to the outside of the cooler warning him against that precise transgression. It also featured a list of ingredients, which didn't help his cause at all.
Spoon came rolling into the gym somewhere in the vicinity of 9:00 am, unsurprised to discover Dimitri had already been there for hours, and looking uncharacteristically fresh himself. Underneath his green plaid wool peacoat he had on a clean shirt and he was wearing a belt. His head of thinning salt and pepper hair was neatly combed - with a comb, not with his fingers and spit. He was sober. Not hungover. Not still drunk from the night before. Sober. If it wasn't for the fact that he was in the middle of lighting a new cigarette with the cherry end of a cigarette he'd just smoked down to the filter as he walked through the door, there would have been a strong case to be made that this person wasn't Spoon at all, but an imposter - a pod person who was in possession of a replacement blade for his safety razor and had his shit together.
Dimitri couldn't account for the sudden metamorphosis, but all of Spoon's clean-shaven, new man-in-town business served as a stark contrast to how terrible he felt. He did throw up. In the shower. Standing with his face under the weak spray he got to thinking about what he should say to his mother to convince her not to come to the fight next week - something she'd always insisted upon doing in the past even though watching her only son take hit after hit, round after round always proved too difficult for her and she spent most of the duration staring at her hands in her lap, and suddenly he was blowing chunks all over the mildew laden floor tiles.
His coffee was cold when he drank it, but it was hot and full of interesting green textures coming back up. And there was more of it. He leaned down to pull a wad of hair from the drain stopper, which was a bad idea for a couple of reasons - one having to do with gagging and another with retching - before stomping his puke down the now unclogged shower drain with the rubber sandals he wore to guard against athlete's foot, and squeezing a healthy amount of Main 'n Tail after it to cover the smell.
Then it was time to spar.
"Quit loading your hand!" Spoon shouted from the usual spot, leaning against the northeast corner of the gym's dilapidated practice ring with one foot placed on the raised platform, gripping the vinyl-covered rope with both hands to keep himself from leaping into the damn thing to show Dimitri what he meant as telling him repeatedly wasn't yielding the kind of results he sought. Paul Belikov, Dimitri's nine-year-old nephew, was standing immediately to his right, vigorously jotting notes into a spiral notebook as fast as his hand could fly. Paul's mother dropped him off mid-morning to spend his afternoon amongst men while she got some housework out of the way - a typical Saturday occurrence. "I saw yuh prepping that uppercut from a goddamn mile away. Keep it yoked!"
Dimitri lost count of how many opponents he'd faced so far; he didn't know what time it was. Maybe they were getting better as the day progressed, or maybe he was beginning to succumb to the exhaustion he'd refused to acknowledge for days - the mental and emotional finally welcoming the physical into the fold. He wasn't a machine, no matter how hard he tried to operate like one.
A sharp shock of pain tore the inward focus right back out of him.
They were definitely getting better.
Dimitri wasn't a machine, but the man who just made solid, excruciating contact with his dominant shoulder was a beast. In his late forties, festooned with nautical tattoos and some frankly disconcerting scars, he had a blasted widowmaker of a right hand and the guarded, feline eyes of Charles Bronson. And he was fast, much faster than his age would let on.
Spoon and his methodical madness - the bastard called out for reinforcements.
He must have.
It seemed every dude between sixteen and fifty who was of the fighting inclination and lived within driving distance had shown up today to take their best shot against the champ while he still retained the title. But this man was a creature apart. Mark the Sailor is what Spoon called him when he entered the gym an hour or so before their match, welcoming him with a great big hug that confused the shit out of everybody who knew Spoon well enough to know he wasn't the hugging type - even with Dimitri who was the closest thing to a son he'd ever have. Mark the Sailor is what Spoon called him again when he announced to the room that it was his turn to step into the ring and take Dimitri Belikov, aka The Russian God, for a spin around the dance floor.
"But mind yuh watch those roaming hands, Navy Man. Gods don't put out on the first date."
The name.
Spoon knew Dimitri hated that moniker. Coined by a total stranger - some jagoff in Philly or some Masshole from Worcester, it never failed to raise his hackles. On top of setting an impossible expectation of infallibility, it made him feel like a sideshow oddity for people to come and behold rather than an athlete excelling in his sport. A god, not a person, a Russian not really an American no matter how long he lived in the country, a skilled fighter by the hand of divine gifts bestowed upon him rather than abilities gained and refined through years of dedication and self-discipline.
And it made him sound like a total prick.
Spoon was baiting Dimitri with the name, taunting him back into his practice gloves and through the sparring ring ropes to take on a man he'd managed to mythologize in thirty seconds flat with a warm embrace and a nickname of his own. A little touch of head games in the early afternoon to teach his novice a lesson about boxing, the meaning of life, zen, archery, art, motorcycle maintenance… all of that shit.
His strategy continued after the blatant setup. Spoon usually saved his sparring notes for after, sitting down with Dimitri at his Salvation Army-obtained folding table desk to go over a list of flaws he spotted in Dimitri's technique, the tells he was inadvertently offering up to an opponent, or inversely misreading in an opponent before assigning exercises to help him unlearn bad habits and develop positive replacements for them. Today he went with a different approach - shouting until he was red in the face.
Then purple.
…Blue.
"Keep an eye on your stance, Belikov." His mentor bleated from the sidelines, already going hoarse. "Your legs are so wide yuh look like you're squattin' over a Japanese toilet!" It was an overstatement, but Dimitri still took the note, slipping his ankles inward on the next advance. He'd never seen a Japanese toilet but dwelling on Spoon's style of prose was only going to earn him another pop in the jaw. He already caught two on the fly; his mouthguard was so full of spit it was a choking hazard.
Dimitri and Mark circled one another a few times at the start, both men fleet of foot and keen to lead offensively. After a brief parry for mostly reconnaissance's sake, each man throwing and blocking some test jab-hook combos to glean any information they could about the other combatant's style, things got sore pretty quickly.
They were well-matched, very well-matched. Wolves from the same ancestral pack, one with more natural talent, the other with twenty more years of experience and an acquired taste for pain.
"Belikov, did yuh wake up this morning and completely forget how to fake a punch? Yuh fellas keep touching hands like yuh got two straws in a fuckin' malted!" Spoon's perennial cool had thawed. He kept reaching for the top of his head to drag his hands through his hair, stopping short each time after remembering the tidy comb-over he was sporting today.
Dad hair. Mad dad's hair to go with his throbbing jugular vein.
He'd wanted a little challenge for Dimitri before the big fight next weekend, someone to sock it to him, but with Tanner working most Saturdays, pickings were slim. A week ago, when he was nearly tanked off his regular barstool down at McNulty's, it came to him! He scrounged up some coins for the payphone and called up his old buddy Mark. Mark the Sailor, who he watched almost kill a guy once in a bare-knuckle dispute over the honor of a prostitute while they were stationed together in the Philippines as peacetime draftees. Mark lived in Hell's Kitchen now and was married to Oksana - another former prostitute who was every bit as honorable as Nenita had been way back when. He still liked to get bloody when he had the chance of it, to keep himself spry. Working the graveyard security shift at a federal building was loaferish work for a descendant of wolves, even if it did pay pretty well.
In short, the challenge Spoon devised was too goddamn challenging. Hoisted by one's own petard they called it back in Shakespeare's days. If Dimitri didn't get it together soon, he'd hoist that kid's petard straight into next year!
Dimitri was at least six inches taller than Mark, but the older man's speed and his canny sense of timing eliminated a few of the advantages his longer wingspan would usually provide. If he couldn't draw the guy in a bit, he may as well be tossing elbows around. A left hook Dimitri almost didn't spot in time glanced off the side of his head, catching his ear just enough to smart. He evaded backward, avoiding a viciously quick repeat of the same shot, his opponent feinting right and tossing out a second left to get his point across.
'Kid, you might be a God, but I'm a goddamn ringer.'
A successful shovel hook from Mark countered with a swift low left from Dimitri sent both men dancing back to shake off the damage. They got each other good - too good to surge forward on the opening.
Spoon groaned and pushed himself up to a standing position with both feet on the plank wood floor and another lit cigarette in his mouth as if by magic. Swiping a palm across the pale space where his raspy five o'clock shadow should have been, he leaned over to take a quick look at Paul's notes.
They were quite thorough - to a fault, one might even say. Paid by the word.
"Yuh don't need to write down the jokes, kid. Just the directions I give your uncle, okay?" He tapped a finger over a couple of the extraneous lines to which he was referring, then clapped Paul on the shoulder to make sure he didn't misinterpret the gentle correction as criticism.
It was no secret Paul worshiped his uncle Dimitri and his surrogate great-uncle Spoon. He took everything they said to heart, making him the only person in the world Spoon even came close to treating with kid gloves. "Just the directions. Right." Paul confirmed, attempting to cover his disappointment in himself for messing up so stupidly with an exceedingly serious face.
But for his blue eyes and the dark brown hair he had to keep clipped short in accordance with the strict dress code of the private Catholic elementary school he attended on a partial scholarship, Paul was a miniature carbon copy of Dimitri - right down to the heather gray sweat suit he wore with his white high-top Chuck Taylors, identical to the one Dimitri shucked off right before stepping into the ring.
"You're doin' really good, Paul." Spoon reassured him. "I've never seen anyone write so fast as yuh do. Shit, I can't spell half the words I'm shouting at your uncle right now, but I bet yuh got 'em all just right. What's a holmgang? I didn't say that did I?"
Paul was just about to explain the Viking custom of battles to the death he read about in a comic book when a loud grunt from the ring yanked Spoon's attention away. Whatever it was he just missed, it must've hurt. Both men were wincing hard.
This was Dimitri's seventh head-to-head of the day; in all fairness, he'd won each of the six leading up to number seven. But the first few guys were a bunch of greenhorns from nowheresville, who thought a couple of street fights under their belts and some days spent punching the bags made them hard. Dimitri had no trouble informing them otherwise with minimal effort exerted on his part.
They were looking at fight number seven with an asterisk as far as Spoon was concerned, and he was Dimitri's coach, not his blonde big-titted cheerleader. What he saw his fighter dishing out right now he wasn't prepared to take quietly. "Yuh see! There it was again!" He gestured wildly, flicking ash all over the floor and a little bit on Paul's new shoes. "Where is that famous reaction time I hear so much about, Dimitri!? Disengage!"
An audience gathered around the practice ring - a small one, but then, the space was small. Dimitri's exchanges leading up to this slugfest didn't last long enough to draw much attention but fight Number Seven* was nearing the seventeen-minute marker with neither man showing any definitive signs of battle fatigue. Loughran's Gym had quickly become a hotbox of male stink and male voices talking large.
Spoon projected even louder to make his sentiments known. "I'M SORRY, do yuh WANT Mark to counter with a hook that cleans yuh clock to next Tuesday?!" He hollered over the rabble, pacing about in tight half-circles to prevent himself from saying anything that would really upset Paul to hear, something he'd most likely still write down even though he just told him not to. "I said keep it fuckin' YOKED!"
Yolked he says.
Dimitri finally broke through with a right to his opponent's liver following his first truly successful feint left in their contest. It wasn't the squeaky-clean connection he'd hoped for, but Mark was still making him work for it. The man was fearless.
They were positively whaling on one another.
Twenty-three minutes down, and the match powered into what would have been round six if anyone aside from young Paul, wielding his family's USSR-issued AGAT chronometer stopwatch, was keeping count - which they weren't.
Then it happened. Dimitri busted Mark the Sailor's bottom lip wide open with a brutal double jab.
BAM-BAM!
Crimson spurted out all over the place, thick oxidizing droplets already browning in the muggy air by the time they hit the ground.
"OOOOOOOOHHHHHH, SHIT! HE GOT YUH GOOD THERE, TOMATO FACE!"
The tiny crowd was growing more bloodthirsty as time ticked by, their already tenuous grasp on verbal communication reduced to whooping cusses and howling slurs. Viking attacks and harvest sacrifice. None of them had any idea what a solstice was, anyhow.
As previously advised, Dimitri did get his uppercut yoked, with the full force of his core strength, and he let it loose on Mark's distinguished cleft chin - the man's one claim to classical male beauty. His head popped backward like a PEZ dispenser, slamming down on the return with spring-loaded action. Brutal, but still a fair shot.
"WHAT YUH SAY - GEEZER'S ON THE ROPES!"
"Okay! That's time!" Spoon shouted, climbing up onto the platform and swinging himself between the ropes in a fluid sequence of movements born of daily repetition, purposefully thunking and shaking the structural elements along the way to make sure the fighters knew they weren't alone in there anymore. He needed to buy a bell or a triangle or something.
And a cauldron of boiling oil for crowd control.
His interruption was a traumatism to the room, forcing everyone but dear, sweet Paul to emerge from an atmosphere creeping up to the fever pitch of mass hysteria. But it was necessary. If Spoon had waited any longer, they might all have been forced to 'take this outside' in one single rolling brawl, busting a hole clean through the wall where the door used to be.
"WHAT THE FUCK SPOON!? BELIKOV WAS JUST ABOUT TO FINISH THIS ONE!"
Fight Seven* was meant to be a learning exercise for Dimitri, not a clash to the death between two enslaved combatants for bloodsport. It was pretty clear Dimitri was no longer capable of banking new information. The analytical portion of his mind had either been punched shut or was past its saturation point. Spoon needed him in fighting trim for next week, not limping around like a dog in one of those post-surgery lampshades. And Mark was only doing him a favor! The other guys would just have to learn to live with the disappointed hopes of a snuff show.
"Hey! Time is called when time is called, okay? These two went ten rounds in a practice fight; that's a draw in my book and in any other. Yuh get what yuh get and yuh don't throw a fit."
Six rounds, ten rounds - who the fuck even cared? Spoon waved off the converging voices of anonymous douchebags razzing his backside while he tossed dry towels to Mark and Dimitri. They were in opposite corners of the canvas, each collapsed on a chair, leaning their heads back against a support post. Two vibrating livewires pouring sweat. Mark's lip was going to need stitches, but he was grinning.
"This is a real pussy move, Spoony!"
That bit of commentary was provided by a voice Spoon recognized without having to check first. "Oh, close your big fuckin' bazoo, Carl!" He turned around to lay into the blonde doink in the small red trefoil shorts. "I don't come down to the factory where yuh work and slap the dick outta your mouth, so don't come into my gym and tell me how to train my fighters." He opened the command to the rest of the bunch. "Now everybody scatters, or I'm closing the place up early."
Carl closed his big bazoo, looking like a freshly shamed strawberry from his hemline to his hairline, and the rest of the spectators scattered without further protest. They had to. Loughran's membership fees were dirt cheap, and during winter months it was on a shortlist of places a young man could go and spend the better part of a day doing something indoors that wasn't drinking or praying. No one wanted to get kicked out just for being the biggest jerk.
Spoon walked over to Dimitri and squatted down as far as his arthritic hips would permit, putting him roughly at eye level with his fighter's trembling brow. "Dimitri hit the showers then meet me in my office, " he instructed, aiming for a neutral tone but landing somewhere in the neighborhood of wooden. He looked down and to the right, through the ropes where Paul was reaching up to hand Dimitri his metal water bottle, and smiled at the boy's determination to be helpful at all times. "Paul, bring your notes and wait for us there. Maybe start in on that lunch your mother packed yuh, ehh? I don't want a flock of Russian fishwives tellin' me how I don't take care of yuh when you're here." He gave the boy a quick noogie before standing back up. "I gotta go see what Mark wants to do about that lip of his."
The three men parted with Dimitri limping away shower-bound, Paul obediently ambling pb&j bound, and Spoon sighing at the prospect of trying to convince Mark that putting Super Glue anywhere near his mouth was a bad idea, assuring him the walk-in clinic on Washington rarely had a long line when the weather was this bad, and not to worry because the gym would foot the bill. Or more accurately, the gym would cut the bounced check to postpone billing until an undetermined later date before it invariably went to collections - Spoon's system.
"What the hell did I just watch out there?"
Dimitri and Paul were already seated at Spoon's desk when he stormed in and hurled himself at the wheely chair on the opposite side like it owed him fifty bucks.
"If this is the noise you're gonna be bringing next Saturday, then I think it's safe to say we're up shit creek with a turd for a paddle. I've never seen yuh so out of it like this before, and I must say, I don't care for your timing. I don't care for it at all. Yuh shoulda had Mark on the ropes then on his ass in half the amount of time it took for me to finally put yuh both out of your misery. Don't get me wrong, Mark is good. Mark is better than just good, which is why I had him come down here to spar with yuh, but he's old as shit. He's older than even fuckin' me! And he's got a bum knee on his right side from a motorcycle crash he was in a few years back. It's just bone on bone with nothing in the middle; he's flattened out on Percodan half the time. How the fuck did yuh miss that?"
"I didn't miss it," Dimitri replied defensively. "I thought since he seemed to be a friend of yours it would be better not to permanently cripple him in front of a crowd of rabid strangers."
It was a lie, straight through the teeth, and not a very good one at that.
Dimitri didn't spot a bad knee or any other weak spots Mark might have been nursing. He saw nothing in that practice ring today but the world closing in on him fast from every available corridor. He punched at it in all directions, trying to stave off whatever was coming, and when something inhabited the space he punched, that something just so happened to be a piece of Mark. Before Mark, it was half a dozen other guys.
The magic was gone.
Ever since his meeting with Lombardo at The Mill he'd been on autopilot. Proprioception was a powerful thing. Kinetically he was able to fulfill all the basic physical requirements of being Dimitri, with lukewarm water pumping through his veins, going through the motions in each category of his life with only those closest to him noticing something was wrong. Really wrong.
Spoon was one of those people.
"Who the fuck told yuh to think!? You're here to fight, not think. And while we're on the subject, does Mark look like a guy who wants people takin' it easy on him? The man's a friggin' masochist. Yuh saw all those scars on his body, right? A few of those he did to himself with a fuckin' corkscrew while he was down on one knee proposing to his wife!"
"Why?"
A gormless question with only a single possible answer. If Spoon didn't already know something was off about his novice, that snippet of slow would have tipped him off.
"I can't answer that question, Dimitri, because I'm not a crazy person." He scratched the back of his neck with his cigaretteless hand. "Right now I'm a frustrated person. Yuh could call me a confused person. But I'm not clinically insane - yet. If yuh keep it up with all of this quality thinking you're doing, I'll get there soon enough."
"How is it I've never once heard you mention your best friend Mark the Sailor before? For all I know you paid an escaped convict from a local chain gang to beat the shit out of me today just to teach me one of your life lessons." Pissiness seemed to be the only emotion Dimitri had ready access to these days. "Who the hell is that guy!?"
"Hey, I'm the one askin' questions around here right now, alright yuh moody bastard? And I don't talk about Mark because Mark doesn't like to be talked about. He's a very private person. Don't fuckin' concern yourself with Mark - he played his part today. Yuh didn't! He came into my gym today expecting to be on the receiving end of a glorious fuckin' beatdown. We figured he'd get in a few good licks first, and then you'd put him under. He was lookin' forward to it, and instead, what did he get? TWO GUILLOTINES!"
Dimitri slowly raised an eyebrow. Paul looked up from his notes, brow also raised. This was a new one on them.
Spoon groaned or growled or grumbled - he made a noise. It was going to take both hands to explain this concept to them, and he didn't feel like it.
"If yuh already have one guillotine in the town square yuh don't order up another fucking guillotine for the town square. Yuh haul in people to execute!" He flicked an enormous length of ash onto the floor. "Mark came here as a volunteer to get his head chopped off by a Russian guillotine, but instead he got turned into a second fucking guillotine. Yuh ever hear of a guillotine fight before?"
The muffled sound of male voices could be heard through the closed door as Dimitri and Paul struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible.
"No," Paul finally said because it was true.
Spoon leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, silently communicating that Paul's response was his point exactly.
Dimitri stared. "What the fuck are you talking about, Spoon?"
"Boxing. We're talking about boxing, Dimitri. Have yuh not been listening?" Spoon stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. "I already yelled at yuh so much out there, I'm not even angry anymore. I'm just disappointed. And sober." He grimaced at the mouthfeel of the word sober and took a long drag off his new cigarette to wash it all away before moving on.
"Okay. I want yuh to take the day off from training tomorrow. You're burning yourself out at the speed you're going - it's unsustainable. Go home, sleep in late, and for god's sake eat something. You're supposed to be a heavyweight and look at yuh." He waved several fingers Dimitri's way in disgust, inviting him to inspect himself. "I know those women you live with cook. They'd stuff your sad carcass like a piñata every day and night if they had their druthers, so be a lamb and let 'em fuckin' do it."
Eat, sleep, don't think.
It was unwise for Dimitri to hope - or whatever the imitation of hope his fractured spirit was still capable of expectorating was called - that Spoon was finished with him already.
Unwise.
"Oh, and before I forget, no dippin' your wick on your day off, yuh hear? As a matter of fact, no carnal activity of any kind this week. That includes abusing yourself in the shower. A champion waits to blow his load until after he wins, when he gets to go home and fuck the prom queen."
"Spoon!"
"I know it'll be tough, but this is important," he continued, misinterpreting Dimitri's outburst as indignation. "I mean it. Put away the girlie mags and keep the blood flowing upstream from your ding-a-ling."
The scrape of pen on paper accompanied Dimitri's death glare. "You do realize Paul just wrote all of that down in his notes, right?" He reached over and grabbed the notebook off his nephew's lap. "Hey! I wasn't done!" Paul whined, upset but not a bit embarrassed. Dimitri held the book up for Spoon to see, and sure enough, the words BLOW HIS LOAD and FUCK THE PROM QUEEN were there in big bold underlined letters. There were also small illustrations of two guillotines and a piñata shaped like a burro in the margins.
"Damnit, Paul! I told yuh to only write down the - " Spoon inhaled on ten, and exhaled on ten, pinching the bridge of his nose. Then he made a valiant effort to filter as much annoyance from his tone as he could with a success rating of about seventy percent. A personal best. "Why… don't we take a little break from dictation for now, yeah? Go out there and start your warmup stretches. Your uncle Dimka and I will be done here soon."
"I'll be out in a minute to work your combos," Dimitri added quickly, trying to remove some of the sting from Paul's dismissal. "Mama said we need to be on time for family dinner tonight - she's making kulebyaka."
Paul ignored his uncles' patronizing remarks and exited the room in dignified silence, purposefully taking his notes and his pen and his stopwatch with him. Rather than slam the door, he closed it softly, eyeballing the two men for as long as the opening would permit.
He was an intense child.
"Are you incapable of censoring yourself even a little in front of him?" Dimitri demanded as soon as the door clicked shut. "Would a modicum of restraint be too much to ask?" He couldn't help but spot a recent trend in his life of being trapped in rooms and feeling jealous of people who were allowed to leave those rooms as he watched. Right now he was fed up to the neck with living, so he decided to take it out on Spoon. And Spoon, to his credit, was tolerating Dimitri's ill temper with more tact than he usually employed.
"I'm sorry for raising my voice just then, but I caught myself pretty fuckin' quick! I even used some of those fruit loop techniques they taught us in anger management class."
"I wasn't talking about the yelling," Dimitri ground out through a face slit.
"Well, I sure as shit never promised your sister I wouldn't swear in front of the kid. So if that's what's got your -"
"It's not the yelling or the profanity. It's the vulgarity I don't appreciate."
"Vulgarity?" It took Spoon a second. "Wait, you're mad at me for talking about yuh jerking off!?" He slumped down in his chair. Belikov was throwing stones through a glass house at his last goddamn nerve. "Oh, puh-lease, if Paul is anything like I was at his age, he's only a year or two away from putting some serious calluses on those tiny hands of his."
"He's nine years old, Spoon!"
"Alright! Alright…" Spoon chomped down on the inside of his cheek to avoid snapping his cigarette in half. Dimitri was acting like a little shit in a big shit's body today, on top of stinking it up in the ring. If a person was to temper their expectations with reality, his behavior this afternoon, where Paul was concerned, was the downright picture of wholesomeness - as fucking Ovaltine as he could possibly get without a lobotomy! "Some of my remarks may have been a tad bit crass for mixed company - I'll own that. But we are here to discuss your issues, not mine. I'm the same irresponsible dirtbag I've always been. Yuh are the one in the middle of some kinda major existential crisis or whatever-the-fuck! On top of being a GIANT PAIN IN MY ASS! So quit with all the deflecting!"
"Deflecting." Dimitri repeated. A statement, not a question.
"Yeah. Deflecting." Spoon repeated. A middle finger, not a statement.
"Did you learn that word in your anger management class?"
"Ohh, fuck yoooo!" Spoon shouted again, instantly regretting it. He needed to dial it back a little, at least for the sake of his ulcer. "They were court-mandated classes I attended down at the Y. And yuh slipped up there, my friend. This just proves my point about your attitudinal problems lately. The Dimitri Belikov I know wouldn't poke fun at a man's quest for self-improvement."
Dimitri wanted to snap back that the classes had been compulsory, avoiding a jail sentence wasn't a quest. But he refrained. That retort was still beneath him no matter how low he'd sunk.
Or kept sinking.
"I'm sorry," he muttered after a weighty pause. "You're right - I've been overdoing it. I'm not sleeping. I keep having these dreams that…" he trailed off. "Money is tighter at home now that Paul's in private school, and I guess it's just the stress finally catching up with me." Not stress. Guilt. Debilitating, tongue-tying, soul-buckling guilt. The most effective lies were ones of careful omission, consisting mostly of the truth. Unfortunately, Dimitri was lying right to the face of the person who taught him that.
"No. No, I don't think it's any of that. Yuh got something in yuh, Dimitri - something gnawing at your guts. I don't know what it is, and I won't insult yuh by pretending I do. Whatever it is, it's a lot bigger than any of that shit yuh just tried softsoaping me with. What yuh have is deeper than the blues."
Spoon didn't mind being lied to. Not really. He lied to people all the time. It was the lack of finesse that made him say it. He'd sliced through the fatty tissue of deceit and the gristly bits of denial straight to the murmuring, palpitating meat at the center, and they were both unsettled by the calm accuracy of his assessment.
"There's a lot riding on next week. Should I be concerned?"
Panic spiked, temporarily eclipsing guilt. Dimitri dug his heels in as far as they'd go, and the response he came up with after nearly a full minute of spiraling was really, really mean. "How much did you put down this time? Did you finally bet the whole gym?"
"I'm not talking about fuckin' money, Dimitri. I'm talking about the future. We could really be going somewhere with this - as long as that's still what yuh want for your life. And yeah, if I had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, I'd bet it all on yuh because I have a fuckin' gambling problem, but also because I believe in yuh. But I don't have either of those things right now, so I haven't. Fuck money! Fuck that stupid title! Fuck Reuben and Mendoza! I'm proud of yuh and I'm proud of me. If this is the end of the line, then we had a pretty good run of it. I just want to make sure you're okay because I worry about yuh. I want yuh to be happy, which you're not, and… I… love yuh. I guess."
Spoon mumbled his way through the word 'love', scratching himself all over as he spoke; the verbal expression of deeply felt tenderness for another man affecting him like a case of shingles. Even so, he managed to let his heart song play. He loved Dimitri as much as any emotionally withholding adoptive father could possibly love a son who was over a foot taller than him. And he always would.
"... Spoon - "
Suddenly the door burst open, and in barged Paul, sliding across the floor like it had been buttered, only managing to stay upright by maintaining his grip on the knob. "Uncle Spoon!" He slammed the door behind him once his feet and torso were plumb.
"Paul, I'll be there in a minute, we're still going over a few - "
"I know! I'm sorry…but…it's him! He's here!" The boy's voice was an octave higher than usual and his arms and eyebrows were all over the place as he squealed.
"Who's here?"
"The guy... THE guy!" Paul hopped from foot to foot, overexcited and unable to remember most of his extensive multilingual vocabulary. "You know… the one with the bag! He's out there now. C'mon! He might leave if he doesn't see uncle Dimka in the ring!"
Spoon catapulted out of his seat, finally getting it. "Is he alone!?"
"No! He has somebody with him." The boy's eyes narrowed.
"Sonofabitch!" Spoon slammed his fist into the table. "Is it the guy with the mole?"
"I think it's a birthmark," Paul corrected, swirling his finger around in the air an inch away from his left cheekbone, "it's red and it looks like the map of Austria."
Dimitri, having no idea what they were shouting about, clung to the only thing he recognized - Austria. He scoured his memory for a reasonable outline of Austria's border, reaching the conclusion that Paul was likely staring at this person for a good long while - probably creeping the shit out of him by acting like a tiny detective. His nephew loved watching Colombo.
Spoon nodded slowly, mirroring Paul's suspicion and throwing outrage and fat dollop of regular rage into the pot along with it. "He was in here a couple of weeks back. I saw him poking around the lockers - his face is stupid with or without Austria's help. I knew I hated that fuckin' guy, and now I know why! Spies fuckin' everywhere." He clapped his hands together two times before touching one index finger to his nose and pointing the other at Paul. "Good work, my man. Yuh did the right thing comin' to get me." He turned to Dimitri. "Smart as a whip, this kid. Dimitri, yuh stay right there. Paul and I have something we need to take care of."
"Wait, what?!" What's going on?" Dimitri demanded, straightening in his seat, dumbstruck.
"Nothing yuh need to worry about, alright?" Spoon patted down his pants and shirt pockets for something. Coming up empty-handed he turned to rifle through his coat which hung on the back of his seat. Producing a small black comb, he ran it through the sides of his hair in slow purposeful strokes, gazing into an invisible mirror straight ahead. "Trust me, yuh don't wanna be around when what's about to go down goes down," he added, tossing the comb to the table and lighting a cigarette.
"But you're dragging my nine-year-old nephew into it?!" Dimitri nearly tripped over his own feet standing up.
Spoon gave Dimitri's shoulder a squeeze and his cheek a tapy-tap. "We can't afford to have yuh gettin' mixed up in anything this close to the fight. Plus you're too conspicuous. Paul's low to the ground; he can move in and out of the shadows undetected. Just stay there, I'll be right back."
"Karolina will kill us both if anything happens to her son!" Dimitri stuttered, incapable of even thinking about what his Mama and Babushka would do to them if Paul came to any harm.
"He can't be tried as an adult. It'll be fine!" Spoon and Paul crammed through the office door at the same time, nearly getting stuck in the process. They were already out on the gym floor with Spoon yelling at somebody new by the time Dimitri appreciated he'd just been relegated to the kid's table - literally considering Spoon's choice of desk, and somewhat ironically given his choice of words regarding Paul's status as a minor.
He retook his seat, years of practice ensuring that his first instinct within the walls of Loughran's was always to listen to the instructions of his mentor. Then it struck him. "Wait, what the hell am I doing?! I don't have to sit here just because -" He pivoted out of his chair, knocking it over in the process, and hightailed it out of the office to the main room just in time to be too late to stop anything from happening.
He was part of the audience now, with a dark little corner all to himself.
"Yeah, I mean yuh! The one with the bag. Come here a minute. I need to ask yuh something." Spoon was bolted to the ground in the small open area between the free weights station and the sparring ring, yelling at a young man who had just come from the locker room. Dimitri recognized the guy but couldn't place him. There was nothing remarkable to note about his appearance. He wore the appropriate gym attire and was average in height, build, and general pleasantness of face - no cartographic birthmarks. He was carrying an odd sort of leather bag, a satchel, or something similarly out of place in a gym where most people came in with weathered canvas duffles.
Paul was nowhere in sight.
"So, uhhhh…who are yuh?" Spoon asked the young man once he'd stopped quaking in his trainers long enough to politely acknowledge his summons from the proprietor. He'd stopped a good three feet away from Spoon's foothold. The buffer zone his position created was awkward and hard to dismiss as unintentional.
It was a head start.
"I'm Jeremy." The young man replied with a slightly raised hand and a shy smile, more asking permission than introducing himself, as though 'Jeremy' wasn't anything he was married to if Spoon should take exception to it. He didn't extend his hand in greeting. Not that Spoon would have accepted it.
"What are yuh telling me your name for? I asked yuh to tell me who yuh are."
"...My name is Jeremy, and I -"
"Yeah," Spoon interrupted, "yuh said that already, and I reiterate - I didn't ask for your fuckin' name, I asked who yuh are."
Jeremy looked around the room nervously. The crowd began to dwindle after Mark and Dimitri's fight ended in a draw; there were only ten or so people left - including Dimitri and Spoon. If he was seeking an easy out or a diversion, he was SOL. The others present busied themselves with their workouts or at least put on a pretty good show of doing it while keeping a side eye and tilted ear to this exchange. They dared not risk anything more blatant. Tommy "Spoon" Shanahan was a prickly bastard. Getting caught gawking at his personal affairs as he handled them was another good way to get yourself banned from the gym for life.
Unless... he wanted to make an exhibition of taking poor dumb Jeremy to task? There were just too many variables.
"I don't understand the question." Jeremy scanned the room again as he spoke. This time it was clear he was looking for someone in particular.
"Yuh don't know who yuh are?" Spoon asked, taking a small challenging step forward, closing the gap between himself and his stupid, stupid prey. "Stranger and yet more curious…"
"I do, it's just -"
"Are there people out chasing after yuh with a giant fuckin' butterfly net or something? It's not that hard of a question unless you're, I dunno, an amnesiac or yuh have multiple fuckin' personalities. So barring those exceptions, I ask one last time in my nice voice - who the fuck are yuh?"
"I'm Jeremy, and -"
"I swear to God, Jer-em-y, if yuh tell me your stupid fuckin' name one more time I'll knock your teeth down your throat." Spoon waved a flat palm at the young man's glitching face. Jeremy wasn't worth punching - if he was going to act like a little bitch, then he was gonna get slapped with an open hand like a little bitch. "What I wanna know is WHO ARE YOOO - aside from somebody who doesn't hear too good!?"
Jeremy swallowed. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and merely shrugged.
"Unbelievable! Who are yuh, Jeremy!? Who's your cousin, Jeremy!? Who's your brother, Jeremy!? Who's your best fuckin' friend, your landlord, your mailman?!" Spoon's body inflated a little bit more from frustration with every huffed demand. He looked like an angry St. Patrick's Day parade float. "Who do yuh know who comes here? Because don't nobody comes around here to hit the bags or drink beers or shoot the shit unless they know someone who already does! Who are yuh!?"
Jeremy bit his lip.
"So…?"
"I guess I - uh… I know Pete…?" Jeremy bit more of his lip. He was steadily ingesting the lower half of his own face.
"Pete." Spoon smiled. "Pete." He said a second time. Then he started laughing, a strangely menacing chortle that wound its way through the room, cutting through the clang of weights being lifted sporadically when the guys doing the lifting remembered that was what they were still pretending to do while they stared. "Is Pete the guy yuh came here with today? The one who snuck out the front door and left yuh here all alone the second he heard me hollering at yuh?" He leaned left and pretended to peer out the small window facing the gym's unofficial parking area, assuming the man with the birthmark was skulking about there somewhere by the getaway car.
"Or maybe one of yuh all is Pete?!" Spoon tossed open his stance to address the whole room. "ANYBODY HERE NAMED - does he mean yuh, Walsh!? Are yuh the mystery 'Pete' who's been so generous as to bestow upon us the pleasure of Jeremy here's company at the gym today?"
"Wasn't me, Spoon Doggy," answered Pete Walsh, the ginger-headed featherweight and longtime Loughran's regular leaning against the wall next to the water dispenser having a grand old time. Spoon issued Walsh a quick "up yours" hand signal for the stupid nickname before descending upon Jeremy anew.
"Looks like your good pal Pete isn't here right now, Jeremy. I have another question for yuh, if I may be so bold - what's in the bag?"
"Bag?" Jeremy replied far, far too quickly. "This bag?" He pointed to the ground, first indicating to the spot where his bag had been then adjusting to reference where it was now. "Not much. Clothes. A book." During Spoon's previous line of questioning, Jeremy set the bag down, and slowly inched his way around it each time he spoke until it was behind him. His movements were stilted and painfully easy to follow. He'd make an even worse fighter than he was a spy. So many tells.
The same could not be said, however, for Paul Belikov.
Young Paul spent the duration of Spoon's interaction with Jeremy moving in and out of the shadows, ready to strike when the perfect moment presented itself. Dimitri just spotted him as he rounded the nearest end of the practice ring. His gray sweats made for excellent indoor camouflage, low to the ground as he was.
Dimitri caught his nephew's eye and tried to knock him from his obvious track with the loudest look he could muster sans verbiage, cocking his head in the direction of Spoon's office. The signal fell on deaf ears - or eyes, Paul was never say die when it came to fulfilling that which he perceived to be part of his manly duties.
"Nothing. Really…" Jeremy insisted to Spoon, trying to sound breezy with everyone's eyes on him, and failing abysmally. "Boring - HEY!"
Paul saw his opportunity and seized it. In a beautiful over-under maneuver - flawless in its execution - he ran up behind Jeremy, slapped the back of his head just above the juncture of his neck with a parody of Spoon's flat palm, then dropped down to scoop up the bag, delivering it to Spoon before Jeremy even knew what hit him.
Or who hit him.
"Hahahaha! Attaboy, Paul! He didn't see yuh coming yuh were so fast. A blur!" Spoon tossed an arm around Paul and noogied him twice as hard as before - the lad was goddamn spectacular. "Well… this is a very nice bag yuh got here, Jeremy." He inspected the piece with one eye closed. "Yuh know, I don't believe I've seen a bag quite like this before. What kinda bag do they call this?"
"It's an attaché… case," Jeremy answered, trailing off, embarrassed.
Now that he knew Paul was safe, Dimitri felt a small burst of sympathy for Jeremy. He looked confused by his own actions in offering Spoon the proper name of his bag when he was well within his rights to stay quiet - just as Dimitri had when he sat down alone in Spoon's office because he told him to.
"A what?" Spoon asked.
"An attaché case." Jeremy wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. His bottom lip was totally gone, absorbed by his digestive tract.
"Huh. That sounds French." Spoon flashed a gleeful look at Dimitri's corner. French accessories tied in so well with his guillotine diatribe. "Is that a French word, Jeremy?"
"I think so."
"This leather looks Italian to me, though. Doesn't this look like Italian leather to yuh, Paul? Go ahead, take a whiff of that leather." Spoon thrust the bag toward Paul, who didn't hesitate to lean in and sniff it.
"Uh-huh." He nodded.
"Paul agrees - Italian leather. A French bag made of Italian leather. How very continental of yuh, Jeremy. Let's just take a look inside, shall we?" Spoon grasped the brass zipper pull, and yanked it open. "I wonder if the interior is as classy as the - Oh…?" He stared down into the bag. "Oh! Hot diggity dog, what do we have here? A camera." Spoon extracted the object before discarding the high-quality imported bag to the ground like cheap trash. Holding the camera up for all to see he examined it aloud. "Kodak XL Super8. A top-of-the-line model." He let out a slow whistle. "This thing… looks expensive. What do yuh think, Paul? Doesn't this camera look expensive to yuh?" He lowered the home movie camera for Paul to get a closer look. The boy's eyes widened, and he nodded vehemently.
Spoon shrugged, and turned back to Jeremy. "Paul thinks this looks expensive. It feels expensive, too," he added, lifting it one-handed like a dumbbell. "It's heavy. Whenever a thing is small like this but still really heavy it's usually because it costs a lot. Feel that, Paul. It's heavy, right?"
Paul took the camera from him carefully with both hands and did a few bicep curls. Again he nodded, this time adding a tiny "yeah" to his answer before returning it.
"Paul agrees that it's heavy." Spoon jabbed the thumb in the boy's direction. "Yuh know what's funny about expensive things, Jeremy?"
Jeremy seemed resigned to his ever-darkening fate of sustained humiliation and possible maiming. The pause before his next answer was only about as long as it would take an average person to say, 'fuck it, let's get this over with.'
He breathed out heavily.
"No."
"No matter how much something costs, you're still not usually supposed to get it wet."
Spoon leaned down, whispered something in Paul's ear, slipped him the camera, and the boy was off like a shot. One blink and he was next to Pete Walsh in front of the water dispenser. Two blinks and he was shoving Pete out of the way to make room for a stepstool. Three blinks and he was on the stool prying the lid off the top of the water dispenser. Four blinks and a person would've missed Paul dropping the camera in with a plop, followed immediately by the sploshing sounds of overflowing water pouring down the sides of the dispenser onto the table underneath it and the floor below.
"See? It sank right to the bottom. Heavy." Spoon lit a cigarette and looked on proudly as Paul leaped off the stool and steamrolled straight into the locker room to execute his part of phase two of their improvised scheme. "So..." he swung his eyes back Jeremy's way, enjoying his discomfort far too much, "I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume Reuben sent yuh here with that fancy camera and this fancy bag," he bent over and picked it up, "to take some reels of our boy in the ring. You've been filming Dimitri's sparring practices, haven't yuh? Trying to figure out all his secrets." Spoon didn't need confirmation. Of course, that's what Jeremy had been doing. "Well, I can't send yuh back there empty-handed, can I? That would probably get yuh in a lot of trouble! Here's what I'll do for yuh - let's go ahead and fill this bag with valuable intel."
Spoon climbed into the empty practice ring with the bag hanging from his shoulder. "This is Mark's towel from earlier." He held up a white towel covered in brown splotches. "See all blood stains from his lip after Dimitri busted it wide open? And this is Dimitri's towel. Would yuh look at how sweaty this thing is?" The towel he grabbed from the other chair was indeed moist. "Shit, yuh could ring out a full pint glass from it! Belikov, yuh might wanna get checked out by a doctor or something." He waved the towel in front of him for Dimitri to see from the corner he still had yet to abandon. "I think yuh have a perspiration condition. This can't be healthy."
Paul came running back from the locker room holding a bunch of white cotton garments in his hands, extending them out in front as though they were contaminated with smallpox or lice.
"Yuh got the goods, kid?" Spoon asked.
"Yep! His locker wasn't closed all the way." Paul squeezed around a couple bodies to meet Spoon by the sparring ring.
"Beautiful." Spoon jumped out of the ring to take the bundle from his hands. "Paul just brought me two pairs of Dimitri's worn skivvies from the laundry bag in his locker." He held them up for the room, Jeremy, and a very pale Dimitri to see. "I won't inspect them, but if you're lucky there might even be a few stains on these babies. Reuben can read 'em like tea leaves." He stuffed the underpants into the leather bag. "Oh, and we also have one, two, three, four, five, six dirty socks. Christ, Belikov! Look at how much even your fuckin' sweat !" He dropped them into the bag one at a time, grimacing at the tactile element of his business. "I'm not kiddin' around, yuh need to see someone about this. My goodness - the pièce de résistance - a genuine, bonafide used jockstrap straight from an eight-hour engagement of bein' wrapped around Dimitri Belikov's nutsack!" That item he brandished in the air like a flag. "Look at the size of this thing! It belongs in a museum." He tossed it into the bag and zipped it up. "Well, there yuh go. A whole bag full of research materials for your boss. Send him my regards and be sure to tell him - and Mendoza - to study it all in the pink of health."
The other guys in the gym abandoned their collective charade of not actively wishing to see Spoon unhinge his jaw and swallow Jeremy whole. Their laughter slowly built as he filled the fancy bag, snickering snowballing into out-and-out cackling. Each sock deposit upped the ante, and by the time he was referencing Dimitri's sizable endowment, it was bedlam.
Spoon walked the bag over to Jeremy rather than tossing him out the front door and hurling the bag out after him, as was encouraged by both Walsh and Carl. It wasn't an act of kindness. He had a final warning to issue, but he'd smoked and yelled way too much all afternoon; his throat was raw and his chest was tight. Whispering into a man's ear was freakier anyway. He made sure to really lean into it.
"I'm lettin' yuh leave here without a scratch on yuh because yuh stuck around and faced me like half a man, unlike your Austrian friend Pete, who's probably halfway to Canada by now. But this is a one-time deal. I catch yuh snooping around here again, and I'll fuckin' shoot yuh for trespassing. I don't like cheats any more than I do snitches. That camera makes yuh both."
"KISS HIM ONCE FOR ME, SPOONY!"
Jeremy left shortly thereafter, looking dejected to the core. With his head hung low and an attaché case full of Dimitri and Mark's DNA clutched tightly in hand, he cut a world-weary, Willy Loman-esq figure, drudging his way home to perhaps contemplate suicide as a sound financial decision for his family. People rarely laughed during stage productions of Death Of a Salesman, but the members of Loughran's Gym present that day had no such compunctions about laughing at Jeremy making his way to the snow covered bus stop, Austrian Pete having already left in the getaway car.
The men quickly settled back into their typical weekend routines. General conversation continued to revolve around 'that Jeremy kid', but it was broken up by lively bouts of sparring and powerlifting bombast. Business as usual.
Dimitri was still stuck in the corner. He wasn't numb anymore, which was something. He was embarrassed. He was annoyed. He was even hungry for the first time in a long time. Despair loomed, depression portended, but he was alive for now - for another week at least. A giant walking bruise.
Paul had taken a seat on the stool by the water dispenser to finish updating his notes, and by the looks of it, to force down the remnants of his lunch. His mother was sure to ask him if he'd been a good boy for his uncles today, Momish for 'did you eat your lunch?' Paul was incapable of lying to her about anything, even a sandwich. Moved by the quiet simplicity of his nephew's goodness, Dimitri used the stray chair close to his side as a lifeline. If anything was going to drag him out of a dank hole it was Paul's light. Paul's golden light and that barest flicker of his former self, reignited by the day's events, with its nagging desire to sucker punch Spoon in his paunchy belt overhang for showing a room full of people his dirty underwear.
Dimitri flopped down in the chair, and in the same move he'd used earlier to swipe the boy's notebook, grabbed the rest of the sandwich he clearly didn't want to eat and popped it into his mouth. Paul hated grape jelly. He wasn't much of a fan either, but anything would go down smoothly after the punishment juice he had for breakfast - twice. Paul giggled when he grinned back at him with a mouth stuffed full of Wonder Bread and purple.
"There better not be any incriminating evidence in those notes, Paul, or that little book of yours is going in here next."
Spoon stood behind them at the water dispenser, rolling up his right sleeve with gruff determination. Hiking it up as far as it would go, almost to his armpit, he reached down into the tank, pulled out the camera, and tossed it to the floor without a second glance. Small pieces of black plastic cracked off the ruined item as it bounced once, twice, and rolled to a stop against the base of a nearby piece of gym equipment. Then he reached back into the water, deeper this time, to fish out the prize he'd really been after - a six-pack of Schlitz at the very bottom.
"What?" He asked, catching sight of their bemused expressions. "There was no room left in my office cooler with all your shake ingredients and they'd be frozen solid by now out in the snow."
Necessity of alcohol was the mother of drunk invention.
Spoon switched hands to shake the water off his forearm before walking over to where they sat. He handed them each a relatively chilled beer. "And before yuh say anything, señor stick in the mud, remember I'm on babysitting detail today." He took a seat on the floor, scooting backward a couple of times until his back was against the wall, and cracked open his can. "Paul put in a hard day's work, he deserves to kick back with a cold one same as yuh and me."
Paul looked to Dimitri for permission before he dared touch the pull tab on his can. He was obviously very excited by the prospect of his first beer; there was no way Dimitri could deny those big blue eyes their twelve ounce rite of passage. His 'beer mitzvah' as Spoon had called it when he bought Dimitri his first beer on American soil a million years ago. Dimitri opened the can of Schlitz gradually warming in his hands, nodded his head, and tilted it Paul's way - uncle for 'permission granted, but just this once and for the sake of us all, don't tell your mother, babushka, or prababushka.'
"To Jeremy!" Spoon offered up.
"To Jeremy!" Paul laughed, taking a big ole sip and grimacing.
"Amen," Dimitri added. Then he laughed. His first honest laugh in ages - laughter that quickly dissolved into his can when he realized the 'amen' he just uttered to toast another man's misfortune was as close as he'd come to communing with God in exponentially longer than it had been since he last laughed.
So pathetic.
"Why do you think Reuben would send that guy in here to do his dirty work for him?" He asked Spoon to keep himself distracted, inching backward from the precipice. "He must have been pissing his pants the entire time."
Spoon considered the question. "At first I thought it might be a genius move, him deploying a sheep in sheep's clothing to sneak behind enemy lines. But he's too stupid for that kinda planning. My guess is Jeremy was the only one who knew how to work that fuckin' camera." He shook his head. "No way in hell do yuh just point and click that thing."
Someone over by the free weights turned on a radio. Whoever he was, he couldn't settle on a station. White noise, weather forecasts, and blips of commercial jingles tuned in and faded out until the dial landed on a music station mid-program and stuck with it. A groovy DJ with a jean jacket voice listed the song selections of the last half hour before cueing up the next track - Dang Me by Roger Miller. His sly honky-tonk scatting earned several hoots of approval and one less-than-stellar impression from the other guys.
"SPOON, THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, MAN!"
Spoon didn't bother to see who he was flipping off. He just stuck up a finger and took a drink. "Yuh know this means yuh gotta absolutely annihilate Mendoza, right?" He asked Dimitri. "Them sending in fuckin' Jeremy Bond with a camera that costs more than your truck on my fuckin' watch? No judges' decisions for him now. I'm talking TKO, Phantom Punch, goodnight ladies, someone check to see if he's still breathing -" he ended the list with a loud "Mmmmmmmrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… BOOSH!" Simulating an airplane going down and the following explosion with his damp arm.
"A plane crash..."
Dimitri wondered at Spoon's accidental mastery of the metaphor. He was two for two today, slicing him to ribbons with blunt words sharpened for precision. A plane crash fitted perfectly in line with how he saw next Saturday's fight going down. One big fiery slam into the face of a cliff. The precipice. No survivors.
No choice. You have no choice.
"The day the music died. Mendoza can say hi to the Big Bopper for me." Spoon chuckled, unaware of Dimitri's resurging 'existential crisis or whatever-the-fuck'. He crushed his empty beer can and three-point shot it at an empty spot where there had never been a trash receptacle for as long as the gym existed. He was reaching for a second beer when Paul let out an impressive belch, long and loud - a carbonated sonic boom.
Paul's cheeks reddened; at home that would have earned him a smack.
Dimitri's eyes widened.
Spoon's face lit up.
"Nice one, kid."
Soundtrack
Oo-De-Lally - Roger Miller / Robin Hood (Dimitri's walk to the car & drive to the gym)
Sing Me Back Home - Merle Haggard (Dimitri's lonesome workout)
Dang Me - Roger Miller (Paul's belch)
Notes
Parts 3 & 4 are much shorter than this half. I hope to have them up by the end of next week. Olena and Mickey will be featured in those installments. And Loretta yelling.
Special thanks to pennythedreadful for helping me out with this chapter, and for being so supportive.
I will probably re-edit this a hundred times over the next few days as per usual.