Bridge of Sighs

Most of the kids recounting the story hadn’t actually been there, though all claimed to have borne firsthand witness. In the days following the fight other scuffles had broken out when some East End kid, in the throes of an enthusiastic rendering of the event, would be interrupted by a West Ender saying, “You weren’t even there.” No one wanted to admit to having missed so seminal an event. On another point, however, there was universal agreement, and that was the amount of blood spilled:
a lot.
Fights between junior high boys were fairly common after the Friday night dances at the Y and Saturday matinees at the Bijou, but rarely was blood actually drawn, and a fat lip or swollen eye was generally considered sufficient justification for calling it quits. Yet everyone who described the epic battle between Bobby and Jerzy Quinn agreed that by the time it was over, both boys—their faces, fists and shirtfronts—were a bloody mess. So much blood was on the sidewalk that it had to be fire-hosed off.
    Young and inexperienced as I was, I didn’t understand that the facts everybody agrees about, especially if they’re lurid, are generally the most suspect. Hearing such details—a fire hose!—confirmed from one teller to the next convinced me they must be true. Nor did I understand how valuable I was as a listener, that a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect. The fight between Bobby Marconi and Jerzy Quinn, though drenched in glory, had about played itself out when school began. When it became known that there was a junior high boy who actually
hadn’t
heard about it, I became the beneficiary of an unexpected day’s worth of popularity. Here was a new receptacle, someone who could be
told.
    In addition to the blood, tellers of the tale, West and East Enders alike, agreed on one other fact.
Bobby Marconi had won.
This took my breath away. I wasn’t surprised to learn that my old friend was a tough and willing combatant. After all, the reason his parents had once enrolled him in St. Francis was that he kept getting into fights. And I had good reason to recall his tolerance for pain. But while Bobby
could
fight, his opponent
was
a fighter. In the years since Cayoga Elementary Jerzy Quinn’s reputation in this regard had only grown. He’d actually spent a year in reform school, where it was rumored he’d killed a boy in a knife fight. Gullible as I was, even I doubted this could be true, but that such a rumor would circulate about a boy was enough to give one pause.
    And then there was his appearance. At thirteen, Jerzy was stick thin, so lean in fact that you could see his ribs through his T-shirt. Though he’d been held back and was nearly two years older than the rest of us, his height was about average, and his hungry, undernourished look might under different circumstances have made him the sort of boy who would be culled from the herd and made a victim of predators. Not so Jerzy. Even Perry Kozlowski, who was much bigger and always spoiling for a fight, wanted no part of him, and we all knew why. You had only to look at Jerzy to know that here was a kid with nothing to lose, and that was what made him so lethal. From adults—his teachers in particular—he’d learned that he had no future, a judgment he seemed to embrace wholeheartedly. His wolfish grin acknowledged as much, and you didn’t want to see it directed toward you. That Bobby should have willingly fought him defied imagination. That he’d won defied reason.
    But somehow he had. By all accounts they’d fought savagely—punching, kicking, some even said biting—like dogs trained for no other purpose, until fatigue and pain made it impossible to continue, yet continue they did, more slowly, perhaps, but with the same steadfast resolve to do each other lasting harm, until Jerzy finally lay flat on his back, his eyes glazed over, no longer completely present. Bobby, on top of him now, used his knees to pin his arms to the sidewalk and continued to pummel him. At this stage, the story went, Jerzy was no longer struggling, though his wolfish grin seemed to say
Don’t stop now.
Eventually Bobby became so exhausted punching him with his right hand that he’d had to switch to his left. (With respect to this last detail I actually happened to know something even eyewitnesses couldn’t have—that he must’ve reinjured the wrist he’d broken in my father’s milk truck.) At any rate, one of the