confetti - Dancing O’Hanlon

by Dennis McFadden

Before anybody knew what was happening, O’Hanlon was all over Westphall, pushing, punching, hitting at his face as fast as his fists could flail. Westphall, stunned, staggered backwards, a bar stool toppling. O’Hanlon kept at the bigger man, gathering momentum, and the fight might have been a good one despite the towering odds against him had not O’Hanlon strained too hard on a roundhouse right and soiled his pants.

        “None o‘ that in here!” cried Jum from behind the bar.

        “Aw, let ’em fight!” someone said.

        “I don’t mind the fighting!” Jum said.

        O’Hanlon scurried to the men’s room. Hen Westphall brushed himself off, looking around the bright, noontime barroom in high disbelief, as though he’d just glimpsed pigs in flight. O’Hanlon’s great pal, Weasel Fleager, stood frozen in the same position in which he’d been at the moment of O’Hanlon’s attack, the glass of beer in his hand halfway between bar and lip. A frown fell over his face as his mind strained, perhaps harder than his friend’s roundhouse right, to process what he’d just seen.

        A few minutes later O’Hanlon stalked back out, chin high and clenched, to lingering snickers, Westphall burbling about beating the crap out of him without ever taking a swing.

        O’Hanlon sniffed. Retrieved with all the dignity he could muster his drab green hat from the floor where it had landed, brushing an imaginary speck from the bill beneath the Camelot Chevrolet logo. He pointed at Westphall, whose fat cheeks were still flushed with mirth. “You better take that back, what you said.”

        “Or what?” said Westphall, smile beginning to blossom.

        “Or I’ll finish what I just damn well started.”

        “I thought you finished that in the shitter!” said Westphall, inspiring new gales of glee. Even Jum, the owner from whom O’Hanlon might have expected a modicum of loyalty given his decades of faithful patronage, was laughing. His close pal too.

        “Et tu, Weasel.”

        “Et what?” said Fleager, suddenly sober.

        “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

        Fleager, the droopy bloodhound to O’Hanlon’s feisty poodle, looked at the glass of beer in his hand, at O’Hanlon’s half full on the bar beside him. For a moment he tried to decipher the indecipherable. “Ain’t you gonna finish your beer, Doodle?”

        O’Hanlon stamped his foot. “You coming?” He turned and strode with dignity toward the door, with all the dignity he could muster without underpants. Dignity was, at the end of the day, imperative for a man called Doodle.

* * *

Fleager had trouble keeping up with his friend hurrying angrily down Main Street. “What the heck was that all about?” he said.

        O’Hanlon believed patience to be a virtue. He believed the good Lord had brought him and his pal, Weasel Fleager, together in order to teach him patience and, therefore, virtue. He stopped in front of Sandt’s Drug Store, turning, staring for a moment at the sky, the high white clouds of May, then down past the glittering dome of the Court House to the blank face of Fleager. Down the street, behind his friend, they were tearing down the American Hotel, over a hundred years of history, and a cloud of demolition dust wafted out over Main. How could he begin to explain it? How could he tell Fleager that a routine jest on Westphall’s part, the last in a line of a thousand, had simply snapped the rubber band that had been stretching and fraying for the past fifty years? That this was his first fight in half a century, and that Westphall had gotten the better of him in the last one, too? And had been getting the better of him one way or another ever since, marching around Hartsgrove in his blue mailman’s uniform, hale, hearty and well-met, while O’Hanlon, a janitorial engineer, toiled obscurely in the bowels of the schoolhouse in his dirty bib overalls. Since their respective retirements, the increased recreational hours at Jum’s had only heightened the tension, at least so far as O’Hanlon was concerned. “He’s been bugging me for years,” O’Hanlon said. “I finally had it, that’s all.”

        “I figured that,” Fleager said. “I knew that. What I meant was, what was that ‘et two’ stuff all about? Et two what?”

        “Oh,” said O’Hanlon. “Some old Greek said that. What it means is you oughtn’t to be laughing at your friends.” Fleager frowned. When O’Hanlon added for good measure, “It was your damn fault anyways,” the frown deepened.

        “My fault? How you figure that?”

        “If you’d delivered the damn paper on time, I could have read it in the bathroom like I usually do, and I wouldn’t have had that accident.”

        “The papers was late. That wasn’t my fault.”

        “Oh well,” said O’Hanlon, “no use crying over spilt—” Realizing the unfortunate direction of his metaphor, O’Hanlon glared at Fleager, at the Court House and demolition dust, at the white clouds up in heaven.

        O’Hanlon lived with his older sister, Annie. Other things they shared, besides the little house on Clark Street, were the O’Hanlon face, wide and freckled, eyes blue and clear as a country spring, and the O’Hanlon hair, sparse, red and greying. From the sweet aroma greeting him, O’Hanlon knew Annie was in the kitchen, baking. She usually was. Annie baked. It was who she was and what she did, now more than ever, since she’d retired from the glove factory. She was known far and wide for her culinary skills, as well as for her charity work; she baked for this bake sale and that, for the food pantry at the Y down on Main, for various homeless shelters in surrounding towns, and, when there was no outstanding need, just for the sheer pleasure of it. O’Hanlon had never had much of a sweet tooth, though he nevertheless enjoyed his samples. Fleager, on the other hand, might well have been in heaven.

        Hence the reverence with which he entered the home and aroma on Clark Street, having followed O’Hanlon home. He entered meekly, boney hands folded. O’Hanlon had long since noticed that Fleager entered any room containing Annie O’Hanlon the way others might enter a church, something he’d always attributed to his friend’s timidity and backwardness, as well as his awe at his sister’s oven magic. Annie looked up from the stove at the two men, the short and the shorter, smiled and muttered “William” with a nod by way of greeting. Weasel’s given name. Fleager’s pinched nose and cheeks and narrow forehead flushed beneath the patchy stubble of hair and whiskers. The threadbare suspenders creasing his skinny shoulders hiked his pants up, exposing a pair of mismatched socks.

        Annie glanced at the clock above the refrigerator, from which O’Hanlon was pulling two bottles of Iron City Beer. “Jum’s burn down?” she said.

        “Not exactly,” O’Hanlon said. Where to start? “You know Hen Wesphall?”

        “Of course I do,” Annie said. “He delivered mail to this house for more years than I care to remember, in case you forgot. Such a friendly man. I always liked him a lot.”

        Not what O’Hanlon wanted to hear. “Well, him and me just got into a fight.”

        “You?” said Annie. “And Hen Westphall? Why, he’s twice again your size.”

        “The bigger they are,” O’Hanlon said.

        “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

        “Me? Wait’ll I tell you what he said. What started it.”

        “Fine. What did he say?”

        “Something—let me put it delicately—he said something about you and me living up here, about you and me being consenting adults.”

        “Why, I can’t believe that. He’s one of the nicest men I know.”

        “Well, he did. Didn’t he, Weasel?”
        Fleager, squeezing his beer bottle, turned the color of cooked lobster. “He did?”

        O’Hanlon shook his head. “Take my word for it.”

        “Well, if he did,” Annie said, “I’m sure he was joking. Ain’t that what passes for humor down there in that place? Jum’s?” She said the last word with a sour look, as though she’d tasted a store-bought cookie. Men in barrooms, apes in jungles. “I don’t know why you go down to that awful place anyways.”

        “Well, I fixed him,” said O’Hanlon. “I flushed my underpants down his crapper.”

        Annie gasped.

        O’Hanlon said, “I didn’t finish telling you—”

        Annie held up her hand, a traffic cop. “Stop. I don’t want to hear another word.”

        O’Hanlon didn’t mind stopping. It hadn’t been his proudest moment. “You know,” he said, “that’s the only bar fight I ever got into.”

        “That’s one too many,” said Annie.

        “Pappy’d disown me if he was still alive.”

        “Pappy,” she said with a hard stare, “was in more’n enough for the both of you.”

        Annie finished placing cookies from the tin onto a platter. Oatmeal cookies. She turned and handed one to each man. “No more,” she said, “that’s it. The rest are for St. Mary’s.”

        The cookies were hot and moist. Annie left the kitchen and O’Hanlon saw saliva at the corner of Fleager’s lip. “Here, Weasel.” He handed him his cookie. “I ain’t in the mood.”

        Fleager accepted the gift like a child at Christmas, never questioning his friend’s self-denial, never wondering at all, his eyelids floating closed. He took a bite, chewing slowly, lovingly, with the scattered remnants of his teeth. O’Hanlon took a long slug of beer, gazing out over top of the bottle at the dingy white ceiling that sagged. They still stood where they’d planted themselves upon arrival in Annie’s kitchen, and still O’Hanlon was too restless to sit—sitting would not occur to Fleager, not until his friend had led the way. The clock on the wall above the refrigerator ticked aloud—he couldn’t always hear it, but sometimes the air was quiet enough. O’Hanlon closed his eyes too, saw the faces, all the raucous red faces laughing at him. Charley Waters, Smoky Bowersox, Harvey Hetrick—who else had been there? Jum, of course. Joe Milliron, Ron Bullers. All the laughing faces, and his chum’s too, Weasel’s. First and foremost the fat, laughing face of Hen Westphall, and O’Hanlon found his fist clenching again, his arm twitching to punch. Anger still lingered in his blood. Embarrassment. He saw Westphall in his mailman’s blues, marching, whistling, happy, king of the world, and O’Hanlon squirmed in place, a drop of sweat tickling down the hollow of his back.

        Fleager stood munching in bliss, his eyes still shut. “You know,” he sighed, “if I lived here, I’d probably be fat as Hen Westphall.”

        The words were a balm. O’Hanlon didn’t know why. He wouldn’t know until later, a day or two later, until after all the pieces had fallen together, why this particular observation had served to soothe him so.

Fleager was a paperboy. He delivered papers six days a week, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for five hours in the morning, the Pittsburgh Press for three more every afternoon. He delivered them for Dave Barber, the owner and manager of Sterck’s, the store on Main that sold newspapers, magazines, gift items, hot peanuts, and, upstairs, sporting goods, uniforms, trophies and shoes. Fleager hadn’t always been a paperboy. At one time, forty years before, when Abel Sterck was still alive, he and Dave Barber had both been clerks at the store. Things had changed. Barber had mastered the fine art of clerking and moved on, as Abel aged and failed, to accounting, inventory control, advertising and community relations. Fleager had been laid low by the Great Depression, by the complexities of making change, and by his stubborn refusal to worry about it.

        He lived in the cellar of Sterck’s. He had no place else to live. The cellar was unfinished, but there was a cot near the old coal furnace and a rag-tag assortment of vintage throw rugs on the packed dirt floor. Fleager had procured a cast-off chair and table, and a hot-plate, which, along with his lonely brass floor lamp, were plugged into an extension cord that meandered all the way to the single outlet near the door. The walls were cobweb and stone, two high, dirty windows on either side of the coal chute. It was rumored that the cellar, cot and all, had at one time been the scene of Abel Sterck’s trysts with a certain middle-aged clerk, plump, female and married, who had worked the counters prior to the advent of the Barber-Fleager era, but no one knew for sure if the rumors were true. Fleager brightened up his dingy quarters with shiny things he found along his routes, on curbs and in trash bins, a broken mirror, a radio that didn’t work, license plates, picture frames, old calendars and magazine pictures—not mounted in the frames—an odd DeSoto hubcap here and there.

        O’Hanlon showed up after ten the next morning, when he knew Fleager would be back from his morning route. He had to step around the red wagon Fleager used to haul his papers, which he parked just inside the door.

        “How’s your heart?” O’Hanlon said, his usual greeting.

        Fleager stirred on his cot, squinting through the gloom. “Ain’t too bad. Yours?”

        “Ticking like a Timex.”

        Fleager yawned. “I was purt near back to sleep.”

        “You’ll get plenty of sleep up there in the graveyard.”

        Fleager couldn’t argue. “What are you doing here?” he said.

        “Can’t a body just come calling?”

        “You never just come calling.”

        O’Hanlon nodded. “Lots of things we never done we oughta start doing.” He sat in the chair, a rusty metal folding chair that had once graced a parish hall with a hundred of its cousins, resting an arm on the rickety card table the Hugheses had once played bridge upon with the Carriers. Fleager sat up on the edge of his cot, and O’Hanlon detected a puzzled look on his friend’s face. “We’re in a damn rut,” O’Hanlon added, by way of clarification.

        It was true. Every day, day after day, rain or shine, hell or high water, up in the morning with achy bones, an aspirin for his breakfast, coffee, pooping with the sports page, an errand or two, running Annie’s goodies to the Y, lunch with Fleager at Jum’s, a nap, supper with Annie, dishes, television, too many more beers at Jum’s. He’d been lulled into a stupor by the sameness of the days, ambling in a trance toward the edge of the cliff. Yesterday had knocked him off the track. He didn’t want to get back on.

        “We are?” Fleager said.

        “Damn tooting,” said O’Hanlon. “The fight got me to thinking what a rut we been in.”

        “The fight with Hen did.”

        “Damn tooting.”

        “Wasn’t much of a fight,” Fleager said.

        “No. It wasn’t. That’s why I been thinking what I been thinking, I guess.”

        “Which is what?”

        “Thinking I oughta finish it.”

        “The fight?”

        “Yes. The fight. It was embarrassing. There I am, all those years putting up with him, finally do something about it, and look what happens…”

        “You shit yourself.”

        “Yes. Damn it. I can’t let that stand. I can’t let it end that way.”

        O’Hanlon explained, a leisurely explanation. Fleager’s head gave in to a series of well-practiced nods and bobs, as if it were deep in thought. In the instant he’d taken Westphall by surprise, there had been no fight or anger on the fat man’s face, O’Hanlon said, but one thing had been for sure: Fear. He was certain. Westphall, he went on, was fat and out of shape, getting fatter every day, and more out of shape. O’Hanlon wasn’t in bad shape, could get in better. (He’d always considered himself wiry.) The turkey was ripe for the plucking. Even as he spoke the words, O’Hanlon’s heartbeat crept up high in his throat, as if straining to make sure it was hearing them right.

        “You could always conk him on the head with a beer bottle,” Fleager said.

        “No. You got no imagination—besides, they got laws against that kind of thing. No, I want to give him plenty of warning. Plenty of time to think about it. I want to make sure everybody else knows about it too, everybody else is there.” O’Hanlon’s heartbeat cheered.

        “He’s twice again your size,” Fleager said.

        “The bigger they are,” said O’Hanlon.

Any last lingering doubt was quickly banished from O’Hanlon’s mind when he and Fleager strolled into Jum’s for their lunch. As soon as he spotted them, Westphall, a parcel under his arm, sauntered down the bar from the place where he usually bellied up to the place where O’Hanlon and Fleager usually bellied up. “Here you go, Doodle—I got you a birthday present.”

        To assorted hoots of delight, he presented O’Hanlon a box of Pampers.

        “It ain’t your birthday, is it?” Fleager said to his pal.

        “Ha, ha,” O’Hanlon said, looking Westphall in the eye. “That’s pretty funny—who thought it up for you?” Did he detect a reluctance in the fat man to make eye contact?

        “We all chipped in,” Westphall said.

        O’Hanlon glanced around the barroom. Every eye was on him. The time was ripe.

        “I got an announcement,” he said. “I’m challenging this here fat bastard to a fight.” He looked at Westphall. “I’m gonna whip his big, fat ass unless he takes back what he said yesterday. And I’m gonna do it—let’s see. Let’s make it one month from today.”

        “What do you want to wait a month for? Till your mail-order rubber pants get in?”

        “To give you time to think it over. All you gotta do is take back what you said.”

        “Now wait a minute, let me get this straight—you’re planning on me apologizing to you, so you won’t beat me up.”

        “You know, you ain’t near as dumb as you look.”

        “You know, I got a half a mind—”

        “You can stop right there.”

        “I got a half a mind to hold you to it.”

        “Let’s drink on it,” said O’Hanlon.

        Westphall’s fat fist slammed the bar. “Jum, two beers!”

        “One beer, Jum,” said O’Hanlon. “I’ll have a water.”

        “Water?”

        “I’m in training.”

        “Potty-training?”

        O’Hanlon was not much troubled by the copious mirth engendered by Westphall’s final wisecrack. “He who laughs last,” he said.

A couple hours later, having dug out his old sneakers, O’Hanlon’s training regimen commenced with a power walk. Smartly down Main, arms pumping, past the Five and Ten, inhaling the air of early summer past the Court House, past the diminishing American Hotel, holding his breath through the dust, smiling and nodding at denizens of his hometown. Then a right up the Valley Street hill, one of the steepest in Hartsgrove, stepping lively. He had a route in mind. After he conquered the hill, he would hustle through the Hartsgrove Cemetery out past the new school, show the dead what living’s all about, then circle around and back down the hill. Tempted to break into a trot, he thought better of it. Best not overdo it on the first day.

        Halfway up the hill, he passed Fleager on his route, skinny shoulders hunched hauling his wagonload of papers. “How’s your heart?” he called by way of greeting, striding briskly by, enjoying the awe emanating from Fleager’s gaping mouth.

        Fifteen minutes later, Fleager’s mouth fell open again, this time at the sight of his stricken friend wambling back down the hill toward him, legs trembling, pale as a baseball, holding his side, wheezing. “You all right there, Doodle?”

        O’Hanlon sank gingerly to the curb in front of Fetzer’s fine, green, many-gabled house. He managed enough breath to wave off his pal. “Overdone it’s all,” he wheezed.

        That night he couldn’t sleep for the pain. Snyder’s damn dog was barking. Somebody down Clark beeped a horn and yelled, middle of the damn night. His feet were raw, one step away from blisters, the muscles in his thighs and calves throbbing, aching, even his stomach and arms weirdly weary. And he was sober. Too sober. He’d stayed away from Jum’s, wanting the suspense, the mystery, to build. Now he considered an altogether different reason.

        What the hell had he gotten himself into?

        O’Hanlon knew from his sixty-three years on the planet that things were always blackest in the black of night, but next morning they weren’t a lot brighter. Next morning, a cloudy morning, nearly noon, he left his little house on Clark Street with a box of Annie’s brownies to deliver to the Y. On the way, he ducked into Sterck’s cellar to see Fleager, to explain why he wouldn’t be having lunch with him at Jum’s that day, or maybe for a while, how he wanted the suspense and mystery to build. Fleager nodded his head with a frown. Normally O’Hanlon would have thought this was merely an indication of his friend’s mind grinding, trying to keep up, but somehow, this day, he wondered if Weasel didn’t see right through him, wasn’t realizing the real reason: that O’Hanlon hoped if he avoided Jum’s long enough and well enough, the whole thing might just blow over, everybody might forget about it, and things might return to normal, back to the lovely sameness of the days, the way they’d been before.

        He crossed the street under cover of the American Hotel demolition dust, passing through the shadow of the Court House safely—he thought—across the street from Jum’s on his way to the Y. Somebody called out his name. It was Charley Waters, standing in the doorway of Jum’s, from where he’d just emerged. “Doodle!” he called. “Hey, Doodle! Where you going? Come here! Come on over here, you gotta see this!”

        Somebody had made a sign, a big, bold sign, mounted in the middle of the mirror behind the bar, every word shouting to every corner of the barroom, every corner of the world.

Friday Afternoon Fights

June 19 1970 at Jum’s Bar & Grill

— Main Event —

Doodle ‘Dancing’ O’Hanlon

vs

Henry ‘Hen’ Westphall

        The place was packed with the usuals, plus. It was louder than the noontime norm, a volume more befitting the five o’clock shift. Buster Clover was there, the kid whose uncle owned the Hartsgrove Herald, and who spent many an hour in Jum’s and the other taverns of the town, collecting tidbits for his “Hartsgrove Happenings” column. Joe Milliron presented O’Hanlon with a tee shirt, an Underdog tee shirt, a big yellow U and a scrawny dog on the front, and they made him put it on over his old work shirt. From down where he usually bellied up, Westphall followed all the nonsense with relative dispassion and an enigmatic gaze somewhere between irritation and satisfaction. O’Hanlon figured it was a case of Westphall being miffed at having to share the spotlight with someone he considered unworthy, which is how O’Hanlon perceived Westphall perceived him. Then Westphall sniffed the air. Hands stashed in the pockets of his baggy green workpants, as if to hold them up beneath the girth of the belly, he ambled down the bar like a giant green penguin. “Whatcha got there, Doodle?”

        “My new tee shirt?”

        “What’s in the box?”

        “Oh—them’s brownies. Taking ’em down to the food pantry for Annie.”

        By the time Fleager arrived scarcely five minutes later, the brownies were gone. Inasmuch as it was lunchtime, O’Hanlon could maybe rationalize the mob mentality that had seized Jum’s crowd upon the revelation of brownies, but there was no excuse for the animal behavior of the foremost mob member, Westphall, and his inexcusable grabbing and devouring of at least four of the full, fat things in the feeding frenzy that followed. What it was, O’Hanlon figured, was another, personal, slap in the face.

        “Thought you wasn’t coming in,” Fleager said.

        “I wasn’t,” said O’Hanlon. “They dragged me in. Stole all my brownies, and ate ’em.”

        Fleager’s big brown eyes widened, sweeping around the barroom. “All of ’em?” he said. “Them bastards.”

        “One fat bastard in particular,” O’Hanlon said, a new, fresh gleam beginning to take hold in his own eye. “And getting fatter every day.”

* * *

Now of course there was no turning back. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Some people were rooting for him—he couldn’t let them down. No choice but to give it his best. He retooled his training regimen, added stretches and gentle calisthenics, moderated the mileage of his power walks, eased back on the power, heeded his speed. He kept to his training diet, limiting himself to a six-pack a day, foregoing Annie’s treats and sweets, depriving Fleager as well, much to Fleager’s dismay—although Fleager had as much opportunity as the next man in Jum’s to grab what he could from the boxes O’Hanlon took to dropping off every lunchtime, always in close proximity to Westphall. He felt like a farmer walking out to the turkey coop with a bucket of feed the month before Thanksgiving. Did the dumb bastard even know he was being fattened up for the kill? More than once Westphall poked O’Hanlon’s chest, licking his lips, a crumb or smear of fudge clinging to his lip, shook his head and said, “Man, that Annie sure can cook. You sure you’re related? You sure you ain’t the milkman’s?”

A few days later, O’Hanlon read the Clover kid’s piece in the paper.

After an absence of several years, the Friday Night Fights are set to return to Hartsgrove, only they won’t be on television and they won’t be at night. One of the Main Street establishments is featuring a bout between two of its regular customers. Excitement is running high because the fight appears to be something of a mismatch at first glance. It appears to be something of a mismatch at second glance too.

        Up through the cemetery on his power walks, he felt not so much he was showing the dead what living’s all about, more like the silent dead, their glinting, winking tombstones, were pointing and laughing at the feeble old fool hanging on for dear life. O’Hanlon soldiered on. He hustled through as quick as he could. The quick and the dead. He made it a point to circle Rita Schreckengost’s stone at the far end, 1922–1966, to touch it once for good luck, to remember the nights, few and far between, when she hadn’t been drunk, hadn’t been entertaining other men or boys, had been sober and somber and downhearted, and had turned to O’Hanlon to administer and receive comfort. Her sweet little Doodle. Wahoo was her nickname, a nickname nowhere to be seen now, buried with her. Just as well. Wahoo’s grave always made him wonder if Sally Brady, who’d broken his heart when he was a young man, was still alive, living somewhere in the world beyond Hartsgrove—though sometimes it seemed there was no other world beyond Hartsgrove—or if she was buried somewhere too, like Wahoo, in some forgotten corner of some graveyard that O’Hanlon would never know, her nickname missing from her stone as well, a nickname O’Hanlon would never know.

        Foolish thoughts such as these—for that was how O’Hanlon judged them—often carried him halfway back down the hill before he’d come out of his fog. He headed home to finish with some stretches and calisthenics. In the scant space on his bedroom floor, he achieved ten pushups, dust bunnies scampering scared before the force of his breath. Progress. Four more than he’d been able to manage two weeks ago. He rested before tackling his sit-ups. The sweet aroma from Annie’s kitchen reached up the stairs and down his lungs. Fifteen sit-ups, and he wasn’t sure, but it seemed the volume of his grunts had diminished as well. Good. Five more than before. Standing, O’Hanlon wiped the dust from his palms on his long blue silk boxing trunks, which had been his pappy’s, old and shiny and reaching nearly to his knotty knees. In the film of the cracked mirror on the door, he admired how they complimented his new black high-top sneakers: black and blue, a lethal combination. Doing ten deep knee-bends, bones popping like the Fourth of July, he tried to envision the fight. Half the battle was mental. Think positive for a positive outcome. He saw himself dancing, jabbing, bobbing, weaving, circling the immobile hulk that was fat Hen Westphall, toying with him, then moving in for the kill whenever the notion struck. Smack, smack, smack (here O’Hanlon shadow-boxed, assessing his form in the mirror) and it would all be over, Westphall out flat as his fat would allow. O’Hanlon even indulged the shameless vision of himself taking over the count from the referee in its final stages,

        “—nine, ten, a big fat Hen!”

A fine Thursday in June, Main Street buzzing, O’Hanlon, a box of snicker doodles under his arm, Fleager in his wake, walked a gauntlet of encouragement from shoppers and strollers, loiterers and merchants. Word of the challenge was all over town. Hartsgrove had a hero, a genuine underdog, looking to buck the odds. A ragged cheer went up as they entered Jum’s, as much for the box under his arm as for the underdog himself. Westphall came lumbering down.

        O’Hanlon did a double-take. He’d begun to notice over the last week, but now, overnight it seemed, the fat man looked fatter than ever. His green pants were still baggy, but only because they were lower than before, the belt clinging miraculously to the underside of a prize watermelon belly. The pants were rolled up in cuffs on the bottom where there’d been none before. “Putting on a little weight there, ain’t you?”

        “Been eating good,” said Westphall. “What’s in the box?”

        “Snicker doodles,” he said, handing it over. “You keep eating good. You keep eating, drinking and being merry, ’cause tomorrow—two weeks from tomorrow actually—”

        “Doodle’s snicker doodles!” cried Westphall.

        “Not like I never heard that,” O’Hanlon said. “Every damn time I’m in the same room with a snicker doodle—”

        “Annie’s,” Fleager said. “Them’s Annie’s snicker doodles, not Doodle’s.” His eyes were darting about like bees. A moment of silence fell over the barroom. It was the loudest thing he’d ever uttered there, maybe the loudest he’d ever uttered anywhere.

        “Okay,” said Westphall. “Annie’s snicker doodles. Want one, Weasel?”

        “No, he don’t,” said O’Hanlon, barring Fleager’s reaching arm. “He’s helping me train. Ain’t you, Weasel?”

        Now Fleager’s eyes looked as if they wanted to cry.

        Coming in later that afternoon from his workout, O’Hanlon was taken aback at the sight of Westphall sitting in his living room. “What the hell you doing here?”

        “Daniel!” said Annie. “Is that any way to talk to a guest?” Westphall took up most of the sofa, Annie sitting across from him in her pink wingback. They looked familiar. They looked comfortable. They looked like old friends. Annie kept her living room tidy and a bit too frilly for O’Hanlon’s tastes, lacy blue curtains on the windows. She called it her parlor. She and Westphall both had tea, delicate china cups balanced on dainty saucers. Annie’s best. O’Hanlon stood sweating in the doorway in his pappy’s blue boxing trunks.

        “Guest my ass,” he said.

        “That’s enough,” Annie said.

        “I just come up to compliment Annie on her cookies,” Westphall said.

        “Yes,” said Annie, frowning at her brother. “I been getting quite an earful.”

        “Guess she didn’t know you were bringing ’em down to Jum’s.”

        “No, I certainly didn’t.”

        “Not all of ’em,” O’Hanlon said. “I been dropping some off at the Y too.”

        “I wasn’t baking for Jum and his crowd, you know.”

        “Well, yes, I guess you were. You just didn’t know it.”

        “Annie,” said Westphall, “whether you knew it or not, you been making our day now for some time. We’re all standing around waiting for Doodle to show up with those goodies under his arm, drooling like a pack o‘ stray dogs.”

        Annie blushed. What the hell was Annie doing blushing?

        “Jenny used to bake some,” Westphall said. Jenny, his wife, had been gone for several years. Westphall sighed. O’Hanlon saw Annie, watching Westphall, sigh at the same time. What the hell was Annie doing sighing? “But I gotta admit,” Westphall went on, “her snicker doodles couldn’t hold a candle to yours. Hell, nobody’s could. Pardon my French.”

        O’Hanlon shook his head and went up to his room to stretch. A little later, when Annie was in the kitchen taking her cupcakes out of the oven, Westphall peeked in.

        “She don’t even know about the fight?” he said, a loud whisper.

        “She don’t get out much.” Flat on his back, O’Hanlon looked up at the towering fat man.

        “Can you tell me why we’re doing this?” Westphall said. “Let’s just drop it. We already drummed up enough business for Jum to last him a couple of years.”

        “I don’t hear no damn apology.”

        “Apology? A joke’s a joke—don’t call for no damn apology.”

        “Then bring your boxing gloves.”

        “You ain’t gotta prove nothing.”

        “That’s where you’re wrong,” O’Hanlon said, closing his eyes, turning his head.

In the rain, Hartsgrove’s bricks and cobblestones gleamed like ancient artifacts, unearthed and scrubbed clean and displayed in their natural habitat as if to prove that civilization had once existed in this place. O’Hanlon, undeterred by the turn in the weather, went out for his walk as usual, thinking of Westphall, all those years of neither rain nor snow nor dark of night. The rain, not heavy, not light, but a steady, unending patter, had commenced during the night, and continued, soaking the trees and hills of Hartsgrove, the houses and buildings, the streets and lawns where nobody walked, a ghost town in the rain. He made his way up Church Street, one of his alternate routes. His clothes were drenched, his sneakers saturated, his progress slower, slipperier. No cars, no people. He couldn’t hear his own breathing, his own footsteps, just the splashing rhythm of rain. The bill of his Camelot Chevrolet cap was soggy and sagging, all the fat leaves on all the trees dripping, droopy, dispirited. From the top of the hill, where normally he could see across town to the steeple of the Catholic church, there was nothing to see but gray mist. What was he trying to prove?

        Damned if he knew. Westphall, a frequent visitor now to his house, no longer seemed like the enemy, but O’Hanlon was determined not to quit. There was no reason. Just the same as there was no reason why standing in the rain on a hometown hilltop where he’d stood a thousand times before could feel so foreign and gloomy and eerie. And no reason why, in all the gloom and strangeness, something could lift him up and make him feel high and fill him with something like hope. There was no reason at all, none that he could name.

All things pass. Annie tapping on the bathroom door. “You coming out of there anytime soon?” she said. It was quiet. He thought he could hear her standing there breathing, over the drumming of rain on the leaves beyond the bathroom window. It was as foreign and gloomy and eerie as the hilltop had been in the rain.

        “I got the runs,” he said.

        A sound like scratching at the door. “I put your things in the dryer.”

        “Thanks.”

        “William’s here. He come up to watch the Pirates with you. You coming out soon?”

        “Tell him I got the runs. Tell him I’ll see him later.”

        “If you say so,” said Annie. “You’re just being ornery if you ask me.”

        “Nobody asked you.” O’Hanlon returned the Reader’s Digest to the back of the toilet. He couldn’t concentrate anyway. He should go out, he supposed. His ass was numb, and his stomach was feeling a little better. It had felt for a while there, after Annie had told him her news, as though he’d been butted by an angry goat. He finished, went into his room, lay on his bed to brood. After Annie had told him her news, as he sat on the toilet, that was when it had come to him. It was not that he was trying to prove anything. What it was was that he was trying not to let go. He was trying to hold on to the feeling he’d had in the instant he’d set upon Westphall, seeing the surprise and fear, the respect, on the fat man’s face. In that one instant he’d no longer been a disregarded, throw-away joke of a man: he’d been a force. For the first time in his life. That was what he wanted to keep. That was what he couldn’t admit, that he’d always been a throw-away man.

        Weasel. The flashbulb popped in his head: Weasel!

        Annie was in the kitchen, standing looking in the ice box. “Did you tell him your news?”

        “Tell who? Tell him what?” she said. “What do you want for supper?”

        “Weasel! Did you tell him about you and Hen getting married?”

        “Yes, of course I did. It ain’t no secret.”

        “What did he say?”

        “Not much of anything. He turned kind of white. Course I would too, I suppose, if some old maid, sixty-five years of age, can you imagine, told me she was getting married for the first time in her life.”

        O’Hanlon hardly heard a thing after the turning white part.

        Jum’s was closed, it was Sunday, and while the Eagles was open, and Fleager might be in there nursing a glass of beer and watching the game, O’Hanlon didn’t bother to check. He knew where his friend would be. Main Street was desolate, streetlamps already lit, rain reduced to a drizzle, but a persistent one at that. Past the sodden ruins of the American Hotel, around the corner at Sterck’s, down the hill by the side of the building, he made his way to the cellar door, pushed it open. From inside, the blackness poured out. “Weasel?” he called. “You in here?”

        Nothing. Was he at the Eagles after all? O’Hanlon stepped inside, bumping his shin on the red wagon. “Ouch. Damn. Weasel, you in here?”

        “No,” came from the darkness where the cot would be.

        “What the hell you doing in here in the dark?”

        “Just go away, Doodle, okay?”

        “Let’s go watch the game.”

        “I don’t want to watch no game.”

        O’Hanlon peered in, trying to see. Precious little light from the door, which he’d left ajar, or from the two high windows, little more than a dull gray smudge that failed to penetrate the cellar. He made his way toward where the lamp should be, stubbing his toe on something he saw after he’d switched on the light was a rusty toy dump truck missing one wheel. The dank stone walls glistened with the rain seeping in. Fleager lay curled on the cot, knees to his chin, facing the furnace, suspenders crisscrossing his back which was turned to O’Hanlon. “How’s your heart?” O’Hanlon said, then wished he hadn’t. Fleager didn’t answer.

        “What’s the matter?” O’Hanlon said.

        “Ain’t nothing the matter.”

        “Why ain’t you up watching the game?”

        “I don’t feel like watching no game.”

        “Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter the other night. Friday.”

        “I know he did. I ain’t dumb. I know stuff.”

        O’Hanlon sat on the rusty church chair. For a time it was quiet. A sound of a mouse scurrying in the corner beyond the furnace, then a quiet gnawing. O’Hanlon drummed his fingers. It felt like eternity at his fingertips where the card table was, and he felt light-headed at the passing enormity of it all. “Too bad about Forbes Field,” he said.

        Fleager stirred, rolling over, shielding his eyes from the light with his hand and a squint. “What’s too bad about Forbes Field?”

        “They’re tearing it down—didn’t you know they was tearing it down?”

        Fleager’s face stalled, his mind searching for traction. “How come?”

        “Gonna build a new one.”

        “But how come they’re tearing it down?”

        “Too old. Like the American Hotel. You get too old, they tear you down.”

        “Where are the Pirates gonna play?”

        “In the new place.”

        “Oh. That’s okay then.”

        “You get too old, they tear you down,” O’Hanlon said.

        Fleager mulled it over, head bobbing. He couldn’t argue. Then he lay back down, his bony hand under his cheek, and stared at the lamp. “I’m gonna miss Forbes Field.”

        O’Hanlon frowned. “You was never there, was you?”

        “We almost went once.”

        O’Hanlon didn’t ask who the “we” was. It hadn’t been him and Fleager, and he didn’t know who else it might have been. O’Hanlon drumming his fingers, they talked for a while, quietly, about Forbes Field and the American Hotel where they planned to build a gas station instead of another hotel, and about the Pirates and their chances of winning the pennant this year, and they remembered 1960 when the Bucs had gone all the way, and a bunch of folks from Hartsgrove had gone down to Pittsburgh to celebrate Mazeroski’s home run. Wahoo had driven O’Hanlon. Then Fleager said, “Did Annie tell you she was getting married to Hen Westphall?”

        “Yeah.”

        “Yep. Said she’s marrying Hen Westphall.” Fleager’s face in the shadows was dry, desiccated, mummified. His eyes danced around the lamp like moths.

        “Ain’t that something,” O’Hanlon said. “Here I’ll be kicking the shit out of my own brother-in-law now.”

Next day, the cheers began even before O’Hanlon, Fleager in his wake, made his way into Jum’s through the overflow crowd, a roar greeting his arrival. Butterflies threatened to lift him off the floor, but he was determined to stay calm, cool—dignified. Fleager helped him out of the overcoat he’d worn in lieu of a robe, as he didn’t own a robe, helped him on with his gloves, and O’Hanlon danced and jabbed in his Underdog tee shirt and long blue silk trunks that had been his pappy’s, to the further cheers of the crowd. He knew Westphall, lacking imagination, would show up in his usual baggy green work clothes, that were none too baggy anymore, and sure enough, there he was, holding a beer in his boxing-gloved hand. O’Hanlon danced in place, shaking his shoulders, rolling his head. “Weasel,” he said, “rub my shoulders some. You’re supposed to be my second.”

        “Your second what?” Fleager said.

        “Just rub my shoulders.” O’Hanlon shook his head.

        They’d moved the pool table aside for the fight, chalked a ring on the floor. Ron Bullers, the referee, called them to the center of the square and gave them the rules.

        “No head-butting, no kicking, fight clean—got that?”

        “Ron, how the hell am I gonna head-butt him?” O’Hanlon said. “I’d need a damn stepladder.”

        “How about flying dropkicks?” said Westphall. “They okay?”

        From the edge of the crowd, the reporter kid Clover shouted to Westphall: “Float like a buffalo, sting like a beef!”

        Bullers sent them to their corners. They were ready. Joe Milliron stood poised with a ladle and a tray to clang it on, awaiting the signal from Bullers. The crowd fell silent, tense. Across the square on the floor, O’Hanlon and Westphall stared stone-faced at each other. O’Hanlon saw his future brother-in-law shake his head, almost imperceptibly, and O’Hanlon blinked first, looking away, looking to his second for succor.

        All he saw was Fleager staring at Westphall too, his brown, bewildered eyes wide and wet, a tear making its way down his cheek.