Atlas by Teddy Atlas Page A

things like that.
    When I had left for Catskill, Sean’s condition was deteriorating. Sometime during the year I was up there, I got a call from his father that Sean was in the hospital and very sick. I took the next train back. He was in Doctor’s Hospital, one of the two hospitals my father founded. Even though it was past visiting hours, all the nurses knew me, and they let me in. I found Sean in an oxygen tent. He could barely talk. One of the things he had told me, after he realized that he wasn’t going to be cured, was that he didn’t want to die in a hospital. I put my hand underneath the tent and took his hand and began reading him this poem that Cus always gave to all of his fighters. It was called “Don’t Quit,” and the last couple of lines went, “You can never tell how close you are / It may be near when it seems afar / So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit / It’s when things go wrong that you must not quit!”
    I didn’t even know if Sean could hear it, but I just kept reading the poem to him. Over and over, I don’t know how many times. The next morning, someone touched me and I opened my eyes. It was Sean’s father.
    â€œTeddy, the nurses told me you’ve been here since last night!”
    â€œYeah, I guess I fell asleep.”
    He was amazed. He told me how much it meant to him that I was such a loyal friend. “Now you should go back home,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do here.”
    I traveled back to Catskill, and when I got there, Sean’s father called and thanked me again, saying whatever I’d said to Sean had helped, because he’d made a small recovery. “Enough so that he could come home.”
    â€œThat’s what he wanted,” I said.
    â€œHe always hated cages,” his father said.
    Two days later, Sean died. His parents asked me to be one of the pallbearers. At the funeral, they had an open casket. Sean’s mother slid the ring off his finger while I was standing there—his fingers had gotten so thin in his illness that it just came right off—and she gave it to me.
    That’s the reason why, even with four hundred stitches in my face, I was concerned about finding that ring. I knew there was only a slim chance that my buddies would find it—I mean, a gold ring lying on the street in that neighborhood?
    When they came back a few hours later, they looked grim. Then Bruce Spicer smiled and opened his palm. The ring!
    â€œI’m as surprised as you are, Teddy. I never thought we’d find it. Not there. I mean, there was dried blood all over the street. But there it was, lying on the yellow line.”
    That wasn’t the end of the story with the ring. A couple of months later, I was hanging on the corner with Spicer and Mousey and Ronnie Sabino. I had this big scar now, running from my scalp down to my jaw. It matched the person I was becoming. On this particular day, these guys, who weren’t as rough as some of the guys I was running with, decided they wanted to go camping. They wanted me to go with them.
    â€œCamping?” I said. “You gotta be kidding.”
    â€œNah, it’ll be great.”
    They pooled some money together, went to the army surplus store, bought sleeping bags, canteens, canned food, the whole thing. My attitude was, I’m not going. I’d rather go rob a delicatessen. But they dragged me along. We went to Lake Minnewaska, upstate. As soon as we got out of the car, these guys were into it. They got their hatchets out, started chopping branches, looking at their compasses, everything. “Who do you guys think you are,” I said, “Grizzly Adams?”
    I might have been making jokes, but what I was really thinking about was Sean, how this was really his world, how he would have loved it. It made me miss him. Meanwhile, these wackos were shooting slingshots and trying to start a fire with two