Icarus. Read Online Free PDF Page B

relieved. He just told me, 'Yeah, I guess that's right.'"
    "So are you ever going to tell me?" she asked as they got closer to the meat district. "Or are you just going to keep telling me stories about whatever it is without ever telling me what it is?"
    He took a deep breath and nodded. There was no point in putting it off any longer, so he just started right in.
    In 1948, when Dominick Bertolini was twenty-two years old, he was two fights away from getting into the ring with the lightweight champion of the world. Dom's record was 34 and 0, with twenty-eight of those wins by knockout. Of those twenty-eight, nineteen came within the first five rounds. Three of the men he fought never stepped into a ring again. One of them lost his hearing in one ear, so ferociously was he pummeled. The other two escaped whole, but their spirits were as broken as their ruptured spleen or lacerated kidney. Dominick was a brutal club fighter, not an elegant one, a favorite of bloodthirsty fans and cynical newspaper columnists for his clumsy and unadulterated savagery.
    Dom did not like hearing himself referred to as a savage, although he did nothing to correct the image, at least publicly; his managers said it put people in the seats, which also put money in Dom's pocket. And since Dom hated very few things in life more than fighting and was doing this for one reason and one reason only – money – he had no desire to see those seats empty. If he had to use a word to describe himself, it would have been "unrelenting." That indeed is what he was and what he had been since a small boy.
    He was certainly no stranger to violence or even to savagery. Fear and brutality were fairly common neighbors on the west side of mid-Manhattan, the neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen, in the 1930s. They often invaded the walls of Dom's own apartment, in the form of his father. As near as young Dominick could figure out, Anthony Bertolini had absolutely no redeeming qualities. He was crude and loud and mean and he always smelled like an unpleasant combination of sweat, alcohol, and whatever harsh odors clung to him from the street. Tobacco. Dirt. Garbage. Sometimes even blood.
    Sometimes it was Dom's blood.
    Mostly it was his mother's.
    On his eleventh birthday, after a particularly painful beating administered to both mother and son, Dominick realized he had to make a choice. It was clear to him that there were only two possibilities. He could remain quiet, stay frozen in his painful, silent world and keep on taking his father's punishment. Or, when he was ready, when he was able, he could fight back and win and put a stop to the misery.
    By the time he was fourteen years old, he had become a fearfully tough child. There was no boy in his school, no matter how old, he could not take in a battle. It wasn't just that he was so strong or even so unrelenting, although he was both. It was that he didn't mind getting hit. He didn't fear the pain. He was used to it.
    Three days before his fifteenth birthday, his father erupted at the dinner table. With almost no provocation – his mother had coughed nervously and Anthony took it as a deliberate slight – he lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked Rosemary Bertolini off her chair. He then began to slowly roll up his sleeves, got up from the table, and with a twisted sneer announced that he was going to beat his wife within an inch of her life. That's when Dominick decided the time had come. He stood up from his chair and without raising his voice said, "No, you're not."
    His father looked at him incredulously. "Say that again?" he asked. "I must be goin' deaf."
    "You're going to leave her alone."
    "Fine." The word was stretched out into several syllables. Anthony finished rolling up his sleeves, then looked down at his wife, who was still on the floor but was now pleading for him to leave their son alone. He smiled at her, the first time Dominick had ever seen him smile at her, then he stepped around the