Deep down, p.1
Deep Down, page 1
Deep Down
David M. Salkin
Deep Down
ISBN-13: 978-1490595641
Copyright © 2013 David M. Salkin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Dedication
I’m an author, not a scientist. I claim no expertise in the area of “fracing”, a controversial deep drilling practice. That said, I find it hard to believe that forcing saltwater and toxic chemicals beneath aquifers can be a great thing for our water supply. I encourage readers to do some research and draw their own conclusions. The bottom line is always “the bottom line”—big oil will do what’s most profitable, and we all need the gas and oil. But at what cost to our future?
In thinking of the dedication of this book, one thing is clear. The characters Noah and Zeke love each other. Two brothers who share this type of bond are very blessed. It’s better than a best friend, even. So for that, I say thanks to big brother Eric. Of course, there’s the rest of my family as well. My wife Patty and children Rachael and Alex inspire me every day. Dad, Stacey, Missy, Jesse, Jake and Mike… all such special people, I’m glad we’re related! And so many of my friends—too many to list, thanks for the every day laughs. Some of you will again find yourselves in these pages. (In name only, so don’t take it personally if you’re a villain…)
Lastly, I can’t dedicate any book without thanking those who have served our Nation. Those who didn’t make it home—and those who came home injured or hurting inside. Without you, there is no freedom to write books about anything.
One
· · · · ·
Zeke & Noah
My big brother rocked back and forth in his new red sneakers beaming with the joy of great expectation. Could he run faster or jump higher with these new red shoes? He had closed the Velcro tops all by himself, as I had given up on re-teaching him how to tie his own shoes. The six-year-old trapped inside this six-foot-three, two-hundred and forty pound specimen of athleticism looked very happy indeed.
“Niiiiice…,” he said. With his hands hanging open at his sides, he began to shuffle back and forth like the boxer he used to be. He didn’t dare lift his hands up and make fists—I had to remind him of that all the time. “You’ll scare people,” I’d say.
I was always afraid that he might throw a punch and kill someone, and then he’d be taken away from me to some nut house to spend his days locked in a cell somewhere. He had learned over the four years since the injury that “hitting was bad”, and it was pretty rare that he rolled up his big paws into tight fists. He was the same rock of a man that could level a human being with one shot, but was now totally unaware of his own strength.
As I watched him shuffling in his new shoes, working his way around the invisible ring (and visible shoe store), my heart hurt me. Such a talent. Such a great guy. My big brother. Now a six year old.
“Niiiiiice…,” he repeated.
“Feels good?” I asked as I snapped back to the present.
“These are great. I like red,” he said with a huge smile. I wondered if he remembered always wearing red trunks and red tasseled high-tops in the ring.
“Okay, they’re yours,” I said. He was on me so fast I couldn’t get my hands up. He picked me up and twirled me around weightless, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said “Thank you!” so loud you’d have thought I gave him a three-week vacation to the islands. The other customers laughed and looked away, realizing Zeke wasn’t quite right. Oh yeah—“Zeke”. Ezekiel Gabriel Barnes, actually. Think our parents were a little religious? They hung Noah Moses Barnes on me. You believe that shit? Thank God there were only two of us. I can only imagine the parade of Old and New Testament images my parents would have conjured up. “Yeah, this is my bother Deuteronomy and my sister Bathsheba.” Hell, if they had known how big Zeke was going to be, they might have named him Goliath.
When Zeke finally put me down, we walked to the cashier, Zeke holding my hand and grinning from ear to ear as I paid for his sneakers. He wore them out, and I could tell it was taking every ounce of self-restraint not to start running around the mall jumping and running and stopping short to squeak his new sneaks.
When we got outside, the parking lot was still fairly quiet. I had taken him to the mall as soon as it opened to avoid the crowds. Zeke tended to get jittery around huge crowds. I guess the crowd noise reminded some part of his brain of that last night in the ring. It was loud that night—that’s for sure. Zeke’s title fight. Damn. Like a hundred years ago. I looked around, and seeing no cars coming in any direction, I dropped his hand and yelled “Race ya’!” as I took off for the car. We weren’t that far away, and I had a good jump on him. It didn’t matter. Zeke passed me like I was standing still and slapped his hand of the roof of my car while I was still thirty feet away.
“You cheated!” I yelled.
His face fell.
“You have new sneakers,” I said with a smile.
He slowly smiled. “Ohhh! You’re kidding me!” he yelled back as the light bulb went on his head. “I don’t cheat!”
I caught up to him and gave him a hug. “I know Zeke. You play fair and square.”
“Fair and square,” he said. His face turned very sad. “I hate cheaters,” he said.
I wondered how much he remembered sometimes. The guy he fought in the Heavyweight Title fight was a cheater. He had head-butted Zeke so many times they almost stopped the fight because of the bleeding over Zeke’s eye. The bastard was blatant about it, too—but we were fighting in Philly, his home crowd, and the ref acted like he didn’t see a thing. I can remember standing on my chair screaming obscenities at the ref and Zeke’s opponent, with the Philly fans behind me screaming at me to sit down.
I had been sitting in the third row, ringside. I heard the crack when Garcia used his forehead for the fourth time against Zeke’s brow, and then watched his overhand right bounce off of Zeke’s face. When Zeke went down, it was like watching a tree fall. He spun around in slow motion, and when the front of his head bounced off the edge of the canvass, the noise was so loud I thought he was dead.
Zeke laid there, out cold, with the ref holding up that dirt-bag’s hand while my brother’s brain bled inside his skull. I’m not sure how many punches I threw on the way to the ring. My friends who were sitting with me got caught in my wake, fighting with dozens of Philly fans who were happy to see their Home-Boy victorious, regardless of how he won. I stood ringside, face to face with my prone brother, watching blood trickle from his ear, nose and mouth, and wondered how bad it was.
Two
· · · · ·
When Zeke and I got home from the mall, Zeke took off his sneakers. This was after playing with the Velcro closure for five minutes listening to the noise it made as he ripped it open over and over. I swear, I never know what’s going through his head. When he was barefoot, he looked at me totally clear-headed and said, “I think I’ll work out for a while.” Then he headed downstairs to the basement where we had built a home gym.
It was gut wrenching to me when he sounded so normal. The way he said, “I think I’ll work out for a while,” sounded exactly like my big brother before the fight. Little flashes of the old Zeke. I had taken him to dozens of doctors. Brain specialists from a dozen hospitals and trauma centers had studied his scrambled head and gave me a menu of possibilities to choose from. The bottom line was, the human brain is pretty damned complicated, and no one had any real answer to give me about his future.
Trauma to the prefrontal cortex, (the front of his brain that had been head-butted several times) had caused bleeding. The bleeding caused pressure and damage to the temporal lobe, which was probably responsible for him losing twenty five years of maturity. The bleeding and swelling in his brain almost killed him, and they did brain surgery on him the night of the fight to save his life. When he woke up from a coma six days later, my big brother had become my little brother. It was a mind-bending change for me. Noah, “the little brother”, had become his brother’s keeper.
For years, when we were little, Zeke was always the one looking out for me. Being dragged to church every Sunday until our mom died had left some lasting impressions, not the least of which was my big brother, arms outstretched with great drama, constantly saying, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” No one ever messed with Noah Moses Barnes, even if I did have the goofiest name in the neighborhood. Not as long as big Brother Zeke was around. That boy had some firepower.
I remember the first time we saw a boxing match together. It was a year after Mom died, and while she would never have allowed her sons to watch something as violent as professional boxing, my father didn’t see things the way she had. In his view, a man had to be able to take care of himself, just in case turning the other cheek didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. Besides that—he just loved the sport, and hadn’t been able to watch it in his own home with Mom around.
So anyway, Dad had packed up “his boys” and drove us down to Atlantic City for a road trip to see Iron Mike Tyson fight Larry Holmes. Zeke and I were the only little kids in the whole place, and it was thrilling to be in an auditorium filled with screaming adult s. The place was electric that night, and we watched the under-card fights in total amazement. When the main event started, the place went nuts. The fight was over before the end of the first round. Another Tyson TKO. Zeke was hooked. That was in 1988.
With Mom gone, and Dad working so much, Zeke became my “parents” every day until Dad came home. He ran the house at ten years old, and I pretty much did whatever he said. Even though I was only six, and much smaller than him, Zeke never bullied me—never hit me—never did anything but take care of me. Sometimes, when I would cry about Mom in my room, he’d come find me and give me a hug and just stay there with me, quoting whatever scripture he could remember from church as he tried to console me. I couldn’t have asked for a better big brother.
After the Tyson fight, Zeke convinced our dad to let him join the Police Athletic League boxing program. I would go with him every day and sit and watch my big brother dance around the ring in headgear that looked as big as he was, throwing punches at other goofy little kids. He was my hero.
A funny thing happened over the next five years. Zeke grew. I mean, he really grew. He went from being a scrawny little ten year old, to a huge fifteen year old that didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. And while being in the PAL gym every day convinced my brother he was going to be a professional prize fighter, it convinced me I was going to become a cop. All the coaches and volunteers in the gym were cops, and they were a great bunch of guys. As I’d listen to them motivate Zeke and the other kids, I just knew I wanted to be like them when I grew up.
As the years went on, “The Boys”, as the three of us became known, lived a very happy life together. Zeke trained every day, and I was always nearby, some days even doing my homework in the gym while he knocked the stuffing out of other kids’ headgear. Eventually, the PAL coaches recognized that Zeke was the real deal, and convinced dad to let Zeke pursue “the next level” in his sport. From the time Zeke was sixteen until he was nineteen, we traveled all over the eastern seaboard watching Zeke take apart every kid that got in the ring with him. At nineteen, he was signed by Joe Varoff—one of the biggest trainers in the boxing world—and went pro. From the day he turned pro until the day he was almost killed in the ring, Zeke never lost one fight. At 29-0, he was destined to become a Heavyweight Champion—I was sure of it.
The clanging of the weights downstairs snapped me back to the present, and I walked down to the basement to check on Big Brother.
Three
· · · · ·
I walked down the steps and entered the basement, now turned gymnasium.
“Holy shit, Zeke!” I screamed as I saw him bench pressing what had to be over three-hundred pounds. I ran over and got behind him in the spotter’s position. He was already on his tenth rep and still going strong. When he hit twelve, he put it back on the bar of the bench and exhaled slowly.
“Zeke! When you go heavy—you have to let me spot you! You can’t lift heavy by yourself.” I was shaking my head. “How many did you do?”
“Five sets of twelve,” he said quietly. Then added, “Sorry, Noah,” as he sat up.
I smacked his shoulder, which was like hitting concrete. “It’s okay, Zeke—I didn’t mean to yell. You just have to be careful. What if you dropped this on yourself?”
He laughed so loud it made me smile. After belly laughing like a little kid he looked at me with smiling eyes and said, “That’s not heavy! I didn’t even put all the plates on!”
I looked around the bench at the other large plates. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. “Zeke. Do you ever put all the plates on?”
“Of course! I’m gonna’ be strong!” he said.
I shook my head at him. Sometimes it was like talking to a six year old, sometimes he was the old Zeke. I did a quick count of all the plates on the floor. It was a little over four hundred pounds.
“Zeke—you seriously can lift all the plates?”
“How many times can you do it?” he asked, looking very serious.
“None. No way. When did you lift all the plates?”
“Twice a week, three sets of five. They’re heavy.”
“Zeke. From now on, when you lift heavy, you have to tell me, okay? I want to be here and spot your lifts, okay?” Who was I kidding? If he couldn’t press four hundred pounds on the bench, I sure as hell wasn’t going to curl it.
“Wanna’ go for a run?” he asked. I remembered his new sneakers.
“Gotta’ try ‘em out, huh?”
He beamed at me, nodding.
“Okay, let’s go—but a short one this time, okay? I think you’re trying to kill me.”
We changed into sweats, stretched, and started a five mile run. Our five mile runs were actually Zeke jogging, and me sprinting to catch him while trying not to have a heart attack. Whenever we went running, we’d talk about anything that popped into Zeke’s head. He didn’t realize how hard it was for me to carry on a conversation with him while I ran—I could barely breathe. But for Zeke, he’d run like he was sitting on the couch. As usual, his first question came from left field.
“Was I mad before the accident?” The “accident” was how I had described to him what had happened in the ring. He had no recollection of the fight, and very little of his boxing career.
“Mad at what?” I said, panting.
“I don’t know. I got in a big fight. Everybody was punching really hard. Hitting is bad. You shouldn’t hit anyone.”
I realized he must have been having bad dreams again. Some mornings he woke up feeling scared, after nightmares of ugly fights. For folks who don’t think boxing is a violent sport—stand in the ring for three minutes and catch a few of those heavyweight punches. Padded gloves or not—the punches hurt, big time.
“You weren’t mad, Zeke. You used to be a boxer, remember? We talked about it a million times.”
“Yeah, a boxer—like Iron Mike,” he said with a far-away smile. I knew instantly he was picturing the fight in Atlantic City. I could close my eyes and see it myself. I knew damn well he could, too.
“Yeah, like Iron Mike,” I said. “Only better.”
“I used to be a boxer,” he told me, like I didn’t know a thing about it.
“Yeah, I used to watch you, Zeke. You remember the fights? Remember how Uncle George used to coach you when you were really little?” George Bauman had been his PAL boxing coach, and would turn into my mentor and closest friend. Somewhere along the line, he had become Uncle George. “How about Joey? You remember Joey Varoff?”
“Coach Joey,” he repeated to himself. “Yeah, he was nice.” He stopped running, just like that, and I stopped short.
“What is it, Zeke?”
“Uncle George!” he said loudly with a big grin. “We should go visit him!”
I smiled and then rested my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath. He wasn’t even sweating yet—how could we be related? “That’s a great idea, Zeke. He really loves you. He knew you’d be a great boxer. Then Joey signed you as a professional—you remember?”
As kids, Zeke had known he wanted to be a boxer. He dedicated his entire life to it. Well, that and taking care of his little brother—me. Dad passed away when I was a junior in high school. Zeke had already been a pro for two years by then, so at least Dad got to watch him win a few fights. Anyway, the boxing coaches, especially Lieutenant George Bauman, had been very influential on us. It was Uncle George that guided me along to becoming a cop myself. His wife, Beth, would occasionally cook up a storm for us.
Zeke screwed up his face and looked up at nowhere. “I forget which is which…” he said quietly, his voice trailing off. Then a big goofy grin. “Nooo….” He said slowly. “That was Daddy!” He was picturing faces, and getting confused again. I felt another piece of my heart break. God, it killed me to see little flashes in his brain, and then watch them fizzle out. Zeke was in there somewhere, I knew it.
“Come on, Big Guy—let’s finish our run and get home.”
