Chapter 21: Policy

The bottle hung in the air over the front row, and eight hundred people waited for the Kilbride girl to fail.

I put both hands behind my back.

"I don't do lids," I said into Stahl's microphone. "It's a policy."

The Cellar howled. A man in the third row started to clap in time.

Stahl kept smiling. "Surely, for a champion."

"Cal does lids."

Cal came up through the ropes with the cutman's bag on his shoulder.

He took the bottle from Stahl's hand and weighed it in his palm.

He turned the cap a quarter turn, no more, and stopped.

Then he held the bottle up to the lights and looked at the foil.

"There's a hole under the seal," Cal said. "It's been glued."

Nobody moved.

"Mr. Stahl," Cal said, and held it out, "you first."

Stahl looked at the bottle and then at the crowd.

It was the biggest silence I have ever heard in that building.

"I never drink in the ring," Stahl said lightly. "I'm the host."

"Drink it," a voice called from the back.

Another one took it up. Then forty people, and then all of them, stamping on the concrete.

Stahl raised both hands, laughing, and walked out through the ropes.

He did not take the bottle back.

Cal set it on the apron and left it there, in full view of the front row.

"Fight two," the ring announcer called, and his voice cracked.

The next six fights came quickly, and I remember them in pieces.

Fight two was the son of the Fishtown gym's owner, a heavy-set kid of twenty-two.