“Sir,” Simon said, “I don’t fight.”
“But if I trained you,” the officer told him, “you could. And when you win, these boys will follow you. Even to Mass.”
Simon said nothing. So the officer explained: “It’s a dance. Two men agreeing not to turn the other cheek. Not sinful. I would train you for a couple of months, then we would get you in the ring.”
“A couple of months,” my brother said.
“Son, you’re already good on the speed bag. If we work the heavy bag and some blocking, you could be ready in ten weeks.”
And Simon, never taking his eyes off that boy in the crowd, said, “If this place is still standing in ten weeks, I’ll burn it down.”
“Don’t fool yourself. They’ll find another place. They have no parents, no priests. But you: the arms on you, the strength. You could lead them.”
“I thought you wanted to create military priests. These are just boys.”
“Not them, son. You. Your strength is a gift. What do you say?”
And I know what Simon must have thought, hearing that officer call him son, son, son. Father was dead. The doctors hadn’t found cancer in our mother yet, but it was there, spreading its wings. And Simon, who had always been a year ahead in school, was a college man now, swimming in the general population, pulling friends out of fistfights and watching them drink until they didn’t bother getting out of bed to relieve themselves, just urinated like beasts on themselves and the girls they brought home, who looked more inconvenienced than degraded. I never asked Simon why he said yes to those fights. But I imagined him staring at that boy in the crowd and thinking of me.
So the guards trained him. They brought him down to the dojo in their barracks, where neither of us had been allowed before, and Simon learned the jab, the hook, the cross. Not the uppercut, because he drew the line at a punch you always aimed at a man’s head. But with strength like Simon’s, it was enough.
Nine weeks later, he had his first fight. I heard about it afterward, the way I heard about everything until that final bout. He fought a hairy Algerian whose day job, people said, was drinking fig liquor when he should’ve been unloading bags at the airport. What people said about Simon, I never knew.
It was ugly. Simon danced and jabbed until the Algerian got impatient; then, when the man leaned in for something big, Simon tattooed him with body blows. Late in the third round, it registered on the man’s face that this oversize boy was wearing him down. That those meaty forearms were throwing fire. But the boys in the back seats hated Simon’s style. The bobbing and weaving, the bloodlessness. They sympathized with the Algerian, who thought there might’ve been some hitting in the ring. But after the match, Simon went to them and told them he wasn’t a fighter, just a kid hoping to become a priest someday. He was fighting for them, for his boys. And he repeated this, match after match, until it sank in. He talked to them about how it felt to be scared by the men he fought. How he prayed before each fight, and how he prayed after. Soon he discovered how cheaply the affection of lonely kids can be bought. Before long they were bleeding their lungs for him, waiting for Simon’s signature punches each night, for the way my brother could turn a man’s aggression against him, eye for an eye, dialing up hooks and crosses like fire and brimstone.
That was when, after Simon’s sixth or seventh fight, my friend Gianni Nardi heard about the fights. Not about Simon, but about the street-boxing ring. So we went.
I must’ve known Simon had been elsewhere all that time. Most weekends, until the night he arm-wrestled at that bar, he’d come home from college to check on Mamma and take me to American movies at the Pasquino. Now it was every other weekend or less, and he was bringing me gifts from the city as if he felt guilty.