"You can't box anymore."

            I shifted my weight on the metal folding chair.  I looked at the doctor and put an unlit cigarette in my mouth.  "How seriously do you want me to take that?"

            The doctor sighed.  I didn't really hear him when he told me that "anymore" meant exactly that. Boxing was my life.  Everything around that little circle of light was shadows—empty pizza boxes, sweaty socks in little piles by my sofa, and occasionally old girlfriends who glided in and out like loose newspapers on the streets.  I paid the doctor—something—a couple wads of twenty-dollar bills, and walked out.

            It was raining.  An old sedan was parked out front: mine.  I lit the cigarette under the office's green awning.  I had all the time in the world.

            "He's hurting," Schonwetter said.  "Ribcage.  Left side.  Body shots."

            I tried to nod.  Water entered my mouth from an unknown source.

            "Get it done," Schonwetter growled in my ear.  "Body shots.  Break those fucking ribs."

            My nose was chaffed and stinging.  I knew there was skin missing, breaking off and flaking like burnt paper.  Didn't matter.  The cure for one ailment was the existence of many.  My left knee popping without reason.  Left cheekbone a disaster.  A purple inkblot blooming where Hunnington had hit me, but I wouldn't see it until later, through a dirty mirror.  The bell rang.

            Gravity changed and I was on my feet.  Sweat in my left eye.  Brush it off.  Move the legs. The ring shifted. Hunnington was coming straight at me.  A danger sign, when they stopped hesitating and walked at you like an angry, incredulous parent.  His red shorts were too short—boy shorts, dork shorts—that's what I was thinking when his glove snapped up into my face.

            My head whipped back, saw the ceiling.  Time sped up.  He came at me with a combination, the gloves thudding, rumbling off my body like hail on the hood of a car.  I swung blindly, hit nothing, and he backed off.  I reset.  Left jab, blocked.  Left jab.  Jab again.  Everything grazing now, Hunnington on me again, more thudding, thinking of hail, gloves up, and the bare skin of my back touching the ropes.

            A right hook slammed in from the side and hung Christmas lights across my eyes.  I fell backwards, got up, and suddenly, terrifically—got pissed.  I jabbed at him and spun, pushed him backwards with a right, took a partial shot to the lip, and slammed my glove into his ribs.  There was a soft sigh, like a baby coughing up porridge.  I hit him again.  And again.  He mumbled something, went backwards.  I heard the assholes in the crowd shouting. My left knee popped again.  His gloves were up. I kept punching.  Something crunched—his ribs?  Had to be his ribs.

            I frequently wonder what my childhood defining moment was.  People have to have them—little instances amidst the water gun fights and pigtail pulling—moments where subtle, internal shifts occur, tiny pulleys raising and trap doors opening, and one's personality and viewpoints get slowly set in stone.  My friend, Billy Jenkins, his moment was the time he got his baseball mitt stolen by a grown man driving a pickup truck. The glove was a present, his only present for his eleventh birthday, and it was a beauty: a jet black leather miracle.  No one else could wear it but him, and he wore it everywhere.  On a warm September day Billy and I were walking back from Birkin Elementary, down a long stretch of sidewalk with leafy elms tinting the world green.

            "Giants play today," Billy said.

            "No they don't.  Tomorrow."

            "Today.  I checked the paper.  Box scores. They say who is playing, like a boxing match, and they predict all the points."

            "What?  Box scores are for yesterday's games, dumb ass.  That's why they've got all the numbers.”

            Billy was silent.  "Shit," he said.  "I guess they do play tomorrow."

            "Yeah, no shit."

            "I got in trouble yesterday.  My mom said we swear too much."

             I laughed.  "Everybody swears now.  All the older kids swear. This isn't kindergarten."

            "She says people who swear a lot aren't trustworthy.  I'm pretty sure she's talking about Uncle David, though."

            I searched for a response, but we fell into stride and walked quietly.  This happened a lot.  It was a measure of best friends; how often you could simply move in one direction and walk and shut up. Up ahead, where the street ended, I would go left and Billy would go right. We lived in different subdivisions—Billy's was surrounded by Range Rovers and manicured gardens that, during summer nights, would glow turquoise from all the backyard pools. My subdivision was different.  There was a large shadow over us. 

            I looked up and was pushed out of the way, hard.  The neighborhood twisted and I was on my back, with the needles of a front yard prickling my ears and neck.  I looked up just as Billy screamed.

            There was a man in a brown jacket tugging at his arm, trying to pull his arm off, it looked like.  Billy screamed again and I started moving backwards, farther into the front lawn.  I was scared.  The man had a lot of hair, and thick glasses.  Something about his look made him seem from another planet. Finally, he yanked extra hard, and Billy fell, and I saw what he was after.  The holy grail of baseball gloves was in his hand.  I was bigger than all the kids my age, a trend that would continue, and stupidly, I ran at the man.  I shouted “hey” but the words were scarcely out of my mouth when the brown coat turned and the man slapped me with the baseball mitt.  I fell backwards and he hit me again, using all his force, knocking me onto the sidewalk.  Something came down on my face that seemed like rain and turned out to be spittle.  I heard rapid footsteps and the gunning of an engine.  Down the street, a pickup truck was moving in the opposite direction.

            Billy was staring blankly.  I was, as would frequently become the case, pissed off.  To hell with getting slapped!  Where were all the lame ducks living in these houses?  Where the hell was everyone?  All the windows were blank, reflective, the interior lights off.  What were these pricks doing—hiding?

            For Billy, this wasn't quite the moment that defined his childhood.  And it wasn’t mine, either, even though I got spat on.  It was the catalyst, to be sure, but not the final act.

            "That's what I'm talking about," Schonwetter said.  "You broke something.  He's going down this round, right?  This round."

            "I can't see straight," I said.  More water.  I spit it out, let it dribble down my chin.

            "Get this prick," Schonwetter said.  "He's made of glass.  Keep up those body shots."

            My lip was split, stinging.  I saw Hunnington in the other corner, eyes closed in a grimace.  He was hurt.  Something was broken.

            The bell rang.  I rose to my feet and Hunnington did the same.  Schonwetter in my ear again: "For the love of God, watch out for that right hook.  Give him some of that punishment back."

            We circled for a moment.  Hunnington didn't come at me right away—he was slower, lumbering, content to flank me.  He threw the first punch and I could tell it hurt him just to raise his arm.  I sidestepped easily and uppercut his ribcage with all my strength and anger.  He dropped like a gym bag full of dumbbells.  He was on his knees.  I turned to look at the crowd—a decent sized gathering for this location.  I looked back and Hunnington whipped me with a right hook across my temple that made me see a flash of Billy's baseball mitt, the day it got taken.  I thought briefly of the man with the shaggy hair and the glasses, the man who had backhanded me in just the same way, with outrage.  My head hit the floor.

            For Billy, his defining moment came later that day.  When he came home and explained what had happened to his baseball glove, his mother didn't believe him.  Where are your bruises, she said.  A grown man attacked you and you don't have a scratch?  And why would a man steal a child's mitt in the first place?  She thought Billy lost the glove, or gave it away—didn't trust him anymore.  She thought I had something to do with it.  All those curse words, Billy said later.  He was grounded for two weeks, and I wasn't even questioned about it.  All she had to do was ask me what happened, but I guess she figured, what was the point?  I was the root of the problem anyway.  Billy lost some kind of faith after that. There was a degree of trust, of blind trust that all children have, that was gone, replaced with something else.

            I tried to talk to his mother once.  About a month later, when I knew I was in the process of being filtered out of their lives.  It was a Saturday, and she came to pick him up at Crescent Park, where all the kids played football.  She parked her dark luxury sedan by the curb and waited.  I approached first, knocked on the car door carefully. I knew the difference between this and my father's dented station wagon. The window rolled down. There was soft jazz playing inside.

            “Yes?” she said, in the same way my father addressed door to door salesmen.

            “It’s me, Mrs. Jenkins.  I…just wanted you to know I was there when the mitt got stolen.”

            “That’s old news now.  Billy’s already been grounded.”

            “But I was there when it happened.  I was there when the man—”

            “Just like you were there when the principal’s car was all scratched up?  Just like you were there when that little boy broke his arm?”

            “I got spit on,” I said, finally.

            Mrs. Jenkins was silent.  She shook her head, ever so slightly, and her earrings seemed to dance and leer. For the first time in my life I wanted to be somebody else.

            “It’s true, Mrs. Jenkins.”

            “What’s true is that grown men don’t steal little boy’s baseball gloves.  It wouldn’t even have fit him.”

            “Maybe he was stealing it for his kid.  Maybe he was poor.”

            “Enough.  For once, enough.  My son isn’t like you, and I don’t want your lies or your curse words around him anymore.  Do you understand?”

            She rolled her window up and soon I was looking at a stretched out reflection of myself, and beyond that, far in the background, the hanging trees and kids playing football.

              It seemed fine to me that afternoon.  I had other friends.  I was tough, I could deal with it.  But maybe it didn’t go as easy as I thought.  Nobody cared that I got hit and knocked down and spit on, nobody could even tell me why, and someone out there had a new baseball mitt without paying for it.  Pretty soon after I was beating up all the kids I didn't like—giving them their own childhood defining moments, handing them out like a Jehovah’s Witness passes out flyers.  So maybe it was that.  Maybe for me it was October in the park, with Mrs. Jenkins looking at me, shaking her head, telling me how it was.

            I used the ropes, pulled my body like I was hauling a chest from the depths of the ocean.  I saw two and a half Hunnington's, and to my surprise they were all still on one knee, eyeing me warily.  My vision stayed blurry.  I slipped a bit, gripped the rope tighter and held myself up.  Hunnington finally rose to both feet, his left arm down by his ribs, protecting.  Briefly, I noticed the noise from the drunks in the crowd.  They'd come with faint hopes of a good fight, and were getting a bloodbath.  It didn't matter who won now.

            I'd been beating on people my whole life.  Always I was the bigger one, and this was the case here, but Hunnington was trouble.  He didn't seem to care that his sternum was floating with broken bone shards. He must have had his own moment of understanding at an early age—he knew things, he'd had realizations, and he was as pissed off as me about them. 

            I came at him straight away.  There were still two and a half of him, but I could see the center, the nexus.  He was covering his ribs.  I swung at him and missed; the crowd roared in response. Hunnington jabbed at me with his one good arm and connected, but the jab wasn't his strong suit.  He struck out again and I backed off, stumbling but not hurt.  I came at him with a combination, he tried to counter, and suddenly we were both on the ropes.  I went for body shots but he was covering his ribs with everything he had.  Two quick jabs in the mouth and I had to back off again, my lip gushing blood.  He was cornered, an injured animal, still dangerous.

            I came right back, blocked a couple crosses, and went straight for the ribs.  This time, as he went to block, I threw a left hook that snapped his head back and forth like a bobble head.  A double jab and a right cross and Hunnington was down again, flat on his back.  I backed off and once more, he rose to one knee.  The bell rang.

            Schonwetter in my ear, shouting at me, white noise coming from all directions.  Two and a half Hunnington's sitting on the other side of the ring, heads bobbing.  Water hitting my lips and bouncing off. 

            A new round.  As I stood up, facing Hunnington, my ears started ringing, started humming, and like a switch everything went black. I am told the crowd adored that ending, because after I fell on my face, Hunnington fell backwards into his chair and snapped it.

            I saw Billy once when we were adults, about a year before the fight that ended my boxing career.  It was November and I had on my leather flight jacket with all the Air Force badges stitched to the sides.  I saw Billy as he was entering a gray financial building in one of the more decent areas of the downtown.  I practically bumped into him, knocking a coffee out of his hands.

            “Jesus, pal,” he said, grimacing.

            “Billy,” I said.  “No way. How’s it going, buddy?”

            He stared at me.  He was wearing a dark pea coat and brown slacks and seemed to have trouble focusing.

            I nodded at him.  “It’s me.  Former best friends, right?”

            Billy smiled, finally.  “I didn’t recognize you.”

            “It’s been years.”

            “It has.”  He shifted his coffee and shook my hand, his forearm gleaming with the weight of a heavy wristwatch. “What’s new?”

            “Not much.  Boxing.”

            “You’re a boxer.  Wow.  In town?”

            “The outskirts.  You know the places.  Shannahan’s.  Iron Pete’s.”

            Billy nodded, frowning slightly.  “That’s great. Sounds like you're doing your thing.”

            “And you?”

            “Accounting.” His eyes were on my jeans, which I remembered were frayed along the knee line and stained with powdery dirt.

            “Managing money, eh?” I nudged him.

            “It's nothing special. Pays the bills.”

            “And the fancy coats, looks like.”

            Billy smiled again, but his eyes trailed to the door of his building.

            “You got to go,” I said.

            Billy shrugged.  “Duty calls.  It was good seeing you.”

            “Listen.  You want to meet up some time?  Grab lunch?  Watch a Giant's game? It’s been awhile.”

            “I’d have to check my schedule.  This week's filled. Let me get back to you on that.”

            “But you don’t know how to contact me,” I said.

            Billy looked pained.

            “Let’s just set a date, man.  Come on.  Like old times.”

            When he started to walk backwards I realized how stupid I looked.  I’d gotten the same feeling back when I talked to his mother by the car.

            “Billy,” I said.  “I’m not a stranger, man.  It’s not like that.”

            He shook his head.  “I don’t have anything. I really don't.”

            “What?”

            “I don't have any money, okay?  I don’t have anything I can give you.”

Erik Fassnacht has studied in Ireland, taught high school English, and collected over one hundred vintage Chicago Bulls games on DVD.  He lives in Chicago, Illinois while working on his M.F.A. for Columbia College.  This is his first published story.