The Harder They Fall (24 page)

‘Wait a minute, Benny,’ I said. ‘Let me smell your breath.’

‘I should drop dead this second if it ain’t like I’m telling
you,’ Benny says, offended that I should doubt his veracity. ‘So when we get into the crapper together he says, “Now cut off a little piece.”

‘“How small?” I says.

‘“Small enough to fit ’n my mouth,” he says.

‘“What the hell?” I says.

‘“Now have you got a rubber on you?” he says.

‘“A rubber?” I says. “Sure, but …”

‘“Okay, now slip the wire into the rubber,” he says. “There, that’s it. Now keep it in yer pocket, an’ when you put the mouthpiece in my mouth make sure you got this underneath it so it’ll lie flat against my gums.”’

‘Holy Jesus,’ I said.

‘I seen ’em do a lot a tricks but this is a new one on me,’ Benny said.

So that’s the way it was when the fight began. The first time Toro held his left in the Indian’s face, the chicken wire did its work and the blood began to trickle out of one corner of his mouth. But it wasn’t bothering him yet. He fought back. He could punch a little with his left hand and he let it go a couple of times, forcing Toro back. The customers stood up and yelled. It looked as if the Indian could take him. Again you could feel the mass frenzy to see the giant punished and humiliated. Men who were good to their mothers and loved their children shouted encouragement for the Indian with passionate hatred for the hulking, inept figure who retreated before him. But every time Toro pushed his left glove into the Indian’s face, blood came forth to meet it. By the end of the round he looked as if he had stopped an oncoming truck with his face.

Miniff and Benny did what they could for the cuts between rounds. The Indian came out of his corner with a looping right hand that made Toro grunt, but in the clinch that followed, Toro pawed at his opponent’s face and the Indian’s mouth became a bloody mess. Toro’s gloves were sticky with it too and each time he brushed the Indian’s face they left an ugly red blot. The Indian kept boring in, but the blood pouring out of his mouth was beginning to bother him. Before the round was half over his mouth and Toro’s gloves were so soggy they made a sickeningly squashy sound when they came together.

‘Stop the fight, stop the fight,’ some of the ringsiders were beginning to yell. Women hid their faces behind their programmes. The Indian sprang out of his corner with
show-off
courage, but his face was a bloody mask. He missed a wild swing which sprayed the white shirt of the referee and some of the ringsiders beneath him. Toro backed away and turned to the referee with a question in his eyes. He had no stomach for this. The more tender-hearted among the fans, and those who had wagered on an early knockout were on their feet now, chanting, ‘Stop it, stop it!’ The Indian, seeing the referee move toward him, shook his head and charged in recklessly. But the referee caught his arm and led him, apparently under protest, back to his corner. It was all over. The Giant of the Andes had scored his sixth consecutive victory by a TKO.

Toro crossed himself as he did before and after every fight. Then he went across the ring to see if the Indian was all right. The Indian, his mouth still bleeding profusely, rose to embrace Toro. The crowd loved it, all their blood-thirst
suddenly run to sentimentality. Toro got a fair hand when he left the ring. But everybody stood up and cheered or applauded the Indian as he climbed down through the ropes with his mouth wadded with blood-soaked cotton. The Indian smiled through his pain and mitted the crowd happily. The boys from the reservation, up in the bleachers, screamed his name exultantly and he responded with a wave that was full of pride.

Nick looked over at me and winked. ‘Good fight,’ he said. It had looked convincing, all right. I wondered what touch of sadism in Nick made him dream up a gimmick like that. Maybe it was just a hard, sound business idea. There was no bloodlust in Nick, just moneylust.

‘That was too bloody,’ Ruby said. ‘I hate to see a fight like that.’

‘Aah, that was nothing,’ Nick said, pleased with Ruby’s reaction. ‘Ruby misses all the knockouts,’ he said. ‘She’s always hiding her eyes under her hand.’

‘I hate to see those boys get hurt,’ she said. ‘At least I’m glad it wasn’t Toro.’

I walked back to our dressing room. Toro was lying on the table getting a rub-down. Danny was slumped in a chair, staring at the floor. He had been drunk ever since we got to Las Vegas.

Vince fell into a burlesque pantomime of Danny’s condition. In this act of condescension, performed for my benefit, there was more than a hint of comradeship between us. You and I are the guys who keep this show going, the grimace seemed to say. And I suddenly realised with a sickening shock that my old hostility to Vince, boldly unconcealed on the train
going west, had been pushed further back in my mind and discreetly suspended as our common interest in the success of our venture inevitably drew us closer together.

‘What you doing tonight, son?’ Vince said. ‘How about me ’n you going out and getting into trouble?’

I was Vince’s friend. It was a terrible thought. All my insults had bounced off him harmlessly. Their pointed vulgarity had only succeeded in making our relationship more intimate than it would have been if I had merely ignored him. Vince, suffering the unbearable loneliness of the gregarious heel, had taken me for a friend.

‘Tell me where you’re going to be so I’ll be sure not to go there,’ I said.

‘Catch me at the Krazy Kat around twelve,’ Vince said, just as if I had begged to accompany him. ‘That’s where these divorce dames hang out. Let’s have ourselves a little poon hunt.’

That’s the way nearly everyone talked along the streets I worked. That’s the way I was beginning to sound myself. But somehow I heard Vince’s words one by one in all their forlorn and godforsaken vulgarity, coming out of that fat white neck rising over the open yellow sports shirt. They were not familiarly meaningless phrases, but separate counts indicting me for my degradation. Instead of meeting the charge head-on, I sidestepped and walked over to the rubbing table and looked down at Toro. Doc was massaging a red splotch along his ribs where the Indian had let those right hands go.

‘Nice fight, Toro,’ I said.

‘Too much blood,’ Toro said. ‘No like bleed heem too much.’

‘He’s worried about the other guy,’ Doc said. His damp, homely face creased into a cheerless smile.

‘How about the Indian?’ I asked Doc. ‘Think he’s okay?’

‘I guess he’ll live,’ Doc said. ‘But I’ll bet he’ll be eating his dinner through a straw for the next couple of days. Those blood vessels in his gums are probably cut all to hell.’

I went across the hall to have a look for myself. If the club doctor was going to send him to the hospital I ought to know it. The headlines even popped into my mind – a box on the sports page –
MOLINA TKO VICTIM RUSHED TO
HOSPITAL
. For a second I was horrified to realise this was a daydream, or rather a nightdream of vicious wishfulness.

Over in the other dressing room, the house doc was still working over the Indian. A small crowd of handlers and well-wishers were grouped around the table, their tense, silent faces turned toward the Indian’s terrible mouth.

Miniff was standing at the sink, with his shirt off, washing his hands and face. For once he was without his hat and his small bald head looked naked and pathetic with nervous blue veins trellising across it. He was so short that he had to stand on tiptoes to look into the mirror.

‘How’s your boy?’ I said.

‘He ain’t mine no more,’ Miniff said. ‘Soon as I pick up my cheque and pay him off, I kiss him off for good. I want no part of him.’

‘This is the first time I ever saw you throw away a dollar,’ I said.

Miniff picked up the short, straggle-ended cigar butt he had placed carefully on the edge of the sink, and shook his head. ‘I never want to go through nothing like this again.
That bum like to drove me crazy. I don’ want no part of him. That screwball almost gets me in wrong with a big man like Latka and then he lets ’em chop his puss up like a hamburger when he coulda stretched out on the canvas in round one, nice and comfortable, like he was home in bed. I’ll never figure that one.’

‘He had to save his pride,’ I said.

‘Pride!’ Miniff seemed to chew the word and spit it out again. ‘Would you let your mouth get cut to ribbons when allatime you could let yerself down easy without even scraping an elbow?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t know.’

‘Pride, nuts,’ Miniff said.

The doc had decided to send the Indian to the hospital for a couple of days. Nothing serious, just superficial haemorrhages, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

I rushed out to make sure there were a couple of photographers on hand to catch the Indian being loaded into the ambulance. That was the kind of publicity that falls into your lap. You can’t buy it and you can’t dream it up. A small crowd of busybodies pressed around him. A couple called out, ‘Attaboy, Chief!’ The Indian waved feebly. He must have been pretty sick from swallowing all that blood. In his own stupid, and unnecessarily brutal, martyrdom, he had won his victory. To us it had been just another little skirmish in the long campaign, but the Indian had given his blood in a cause neither Nick nor Miniff nor Vince could ever understand.

I didn’t bother to go back to the dressing room. Danny had already drunk himself beyond companionship, and the realisation that I had drifted into Vince’s zone of intimacy had me back on my heels. I left the arena and started on a lonely prowl for a quiet place to buy myself a drink. But the first bar was too much of a crum-joint, the next too crowded, the third too desolate, and so it went until I found myself at the end of the short street that led right into the desert.

It was a mild night with millions of stars in the sky. The quiet took me away from the meaningless noise of many mouths, away from the bars and the jukes. I had to think. It was a long time since I had tried to think. In the fight game, I didn’t think; I merely got bright ideas, hot flashes, used them, kept the wires burning. When I was a kid I used to raise turtles. I’d pick one out of its bowl and instantly it
would draw in its head and feet and become a cold, dead lump. A moment before it had been a live, scurrying thing. I’d drop it down into another bowl and its head would pop out; its feet would shoot forth and it would be scrambling around again. It had no idea where the hell it was going, but moved with frantic, aimless haste, exactly as I had been dropped down and had kept going in the fight game. For some reason I couldn’t understand, and only at odd, out-of-the-way moments protested against, automatically my brain would begin to spark, my legs would start working, and I’d be off on my feverish, pointless journey around and around my little bowl.

I put my hand to my mouth. I didn’t know why for a moment, and then I remembered Chief Thunderbird. I had no chicken wire pressed up against my gums, but I was flicking myself with steel-tipped self-reproach in a
last-minute
effort to hang on to what was left of my pride. The events of the evening passed before me in all their tawdry melodrama. Nick, Vince, Danny, Doc, and Toro, that monstrous figure I had helped create. I had to get away from all of them; I had to rack up on this rat race before the trap was sprung. How had Beth described my job? Interesting at thirty, a blind alley at forty, a last refuge for a bum at fifty.

Beth’s words. Beth and her damned New England conscience following me all the way out here into the desert. How much had I ever wanted Beth? Were we ever ‘meant for each other’, like lovers on the screen? Had I ever wanted to marry Beth? Were my occasional marital tendencies merely the automatic reflection of Beth’s need for permanence? The tentative, the casual relationship was
all against her upbringing. Back of all her dissatisfaction with me was her dread of uncertainty, aimlessness and impermanence. Far away from her in a world she could never make herself know, I was rootless and rotting.

I wanted to hear Beth’s voice again. I think I even missed the brisk impatience with which she liked to dismiss me. I walked back along the neon-glowing street until I came to a little saloon called Jerry’s Joynt. I kept on walking past the bar to the phone booth in the rear. I gave the operator Beth’s number. The circuits were busy; it would be a few minutes, she said. I went back to the bar to wait. All the customers seemed either silently morose or garrulously unhappy.

A fellow in cowboy boots down the bar was telling the bartender about our fight. ‘Best goddam fight I ever saw,’ he was saying. ‘The goddam bloodiest fight I ever saw. Boy, you shoulda seen it, Mike.’

Next to me a seedy little drunk was confiding his domestic troubles to a half-listening truck driver with a union button on his cap.

I turned the volume way down on everybody and tried to listen to my own thoughts. What a setting for a play a place like this would make! Gorky’s
Lower Depths
with an all-Las-Vegas cast. Beth would approve of my thinking in terms of a play instead of a fight fix.

The phone was ringing. I rushed to answer it.

‘Hello. On your call to New York City. The circuits are still busy. Do you wish me to call you again in twenty minutes?’

Another twenty minutes, another drink, another hard-luck story from the guy who didn’t want to go home
to his wife. I don’t know why I drank. Drink makes some men talk honestly and well; it urges others to foolish lies. Drink slows my rhythm, depresses my nerves, releases fears that crawl inside me. I thought with envy of Toro sleeping up there at the hotel in serene ignorance, Man Mountain Molina, the Hyper-Pituitary of the Andes, who would remain asleep when he woke in the morning. As I thought of Toro I recalled, with that trick compartmentalisation of the free-associating mind, a reading assignment in Freshman English: John Milton’s
Samson Agonistes
, the great giant in the hands of his enemies who had put out his eyes and exhibited him in chains for the amusement of the Philistine crowds.

But how could Samson’s plight be compared to Toro’s, with all those stumble-bums flopping on their flattened faces for him? What danger was he in? Danger? A red light flashed in my mind. I was seized by an inescapable foreboding, and yet, for the life of me, I could not imagine what could possibly happen to him. Was that red light really in my mind or was it just the flashing red tubing outside the window spelling out the words ‘Jerry’s Joynt’?

The bell in the booth was ringing insistently. I lurched toward it and finally had the receiver off the hook. Yes, yes, this was Mr Lewis. Could I have my party now?

With the door closed I could hardly breathe in the booth. The closeness made me dizzy, made the walls float around me, around and around in my head.

‘Hello,
hello
, darling.’

‘Hello, Eddie. What’s been happening to you?’

‘I know, I know. I’ve been meaning to write you … But
this has been such a rat race … I started a long letter to you in LA …’

I didn’t need television to see Beth shaking her head on the other end of the phone, half amused, half resigned.

‘Eddie, sometimes I think you just want to be a character.’

‘How’s everything been, Beth? You could have written me too, you know.’

‘Things have been awfully calm, Eddie. Nothing much has been happening. I’ve just been working and coming home early. Doing a lot of reading.’

‘You weren’t home reading the Saturday I called you up at 2 a.m.’

‘Oh, I was probably away for the weekend. I’ve been going out to Martha’s a lot.’

Martha was a room-mate of Beth’s at Smith who had made quite a splash as a fashion designer. Martha had never been very subtle about what she thought of me. I knew it wasn’t going to help my cause any to have Beth out at Martha’s.

‘Martha’s finally decided to give up her job and get married. An awfully nice boy from Brookline. You wouldn’t know him. She actually wants to settle down and raise a family.’

‘What the hell are we talking about Martha for? How about us, baby? All this time away from each other and we haven’t even started talking about you and me.’

‘Is there anything new to say about us, Eddie?’

‘Well, I’ve missed you like all hell. But you’re right, I guess that isn’t very new.’

‘I’ve missed you too, Eddie. I really have. I wish I didn’t,
though. I feel it’s kind of a weakness of mine … to want you any more.’

‘Now listen, Beth. Why make a problem out of it? We’re in each other’s hair for good. Why don’t you relax and admit it?’

‘You sound awfully sober. Are you sober tonight, Eddie?’

‘More than sober, baby. I’ve been thinking. This fight we had tonight just about gave me a bellyful. I’m just about ready to tell Nick to find himself another boy.’

‘Just about ready, Eddie? Eddie, aren’t you ever going to
be
ready?’

‘Sure, sure. I’m ready, but you know how Nick is. You just don’t go up to him and quit. You’ve got to ease yourself out.’

‘But you’ve been easing yourself out ever since I’ve known you.’

‘Just wait, Beth. I’ll prove it to you. I ought to be back in a few months. Wait for me, Beth.’

‘Wait for Nick, you mean. Oh, Eddie, walk out on him. Please. It’s easy, believe me.’

‘I will. I’m going to. But I’ve got to feel my way. You don’t understand. I’ll need every nickel I can get out of it. Then …’

‘All right, Eddie. Get all the nickels you can. Keep on kidding yourself.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Beth, what else can I do? Just wait and you’ll see.’

‘I don’t know what else you can do. I honestly don’t. Let me know when you’ve had enough. Goodbye, Eddie.’

She hung up while I was saying ‘Goodbye.’ I pulled the
folding door of the booth open and stepped back into the hubbub of Jerry’s Joynt. I moved over to the bar to have another drink. Maybe I shouldn’t have called Beth. Maybe I should have gone straight to Nick to turn in my uniform, climb down off the gravy-train and head east. Maybe I should have talked only to myself and made up my mind, once for all, to do what I had to do. Well, after all, there were a few things still to be said to Nick, and this was the time to get them off my chest before making my getaway.

The party at Nick’s suite looked like a Cecil DeMille production of how modern robber barons entertain themselves. Coming in cold out of the loneliness of my one-man jag I had an impression of big, prosperous thick-skinned mammals of the masculine variety laughing loudly from expansive bellies, of women who were Aphrodites of the make-up box, all eyebrow pencil, eyeshadow, lipstick, hairdos and perfume that incited you to conventional passions. Floating toward me, cool and ladylike, was Ruby, wearing a black tulle evening gown and a Spanish comb in her hair, sensual in a removed and stately way. Ruby’s eyes had a strange lustre and she walked with a telltale but successful effort at steadiness.

‘Well, it’s about time you showed up, Eddie,’ she said, and she kissed me affectionately on the cheek. ‘Come on over and I’ll pour you a drink.’

Looking at Ruby and then hearing her talk never failed to surprise me. She was like a common showgirl who walks on stage into a high-born, glamorous part, but for whom the dramatist has neglected to write any lines.

‘We were all hoping you’d bring Toro,’ Ruby said.

‘Toro’s a country boy,’ I said. ‘He needs his rest. This stuff won’t do him any good, Ruby. He’s confused enough as it is.’

She looked up at me, but I wasn’t sure whether she got it. That was another thing about Ruby. She could look at you steadily with those enlarged dark pupils in what would appear to be a reaction of profound intelligence, but it was only an elaborately convincing charade of intelligence.

‘He’s such a sweet boy,’ she said. ‘Takes his religion so seriously. I just love to go with him Sundays. Honestly we can all learn a lot from people with simple faith like that.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, reaching for my drink, ‘I guess we can. Where’s Nick, Ruby? I’ve got something to tell him.’

‘Over there,’ she indicated with her head. ‘With that fat fella in the corner.’

Nick had a glass in his hand too, but he must have been nursing it all evening. Nick was too smart and too organised; his pattern was woven too tightly for promiscuous drinking. Nick drank when he needed a drink to put someone at ease. Now in the small, sloppy, unravelling hours of the morning he managed to remain remarkably dapper, sober and wide awake. His tailor-made sharkskin suit fitted him almost too perfectly, and his lean, closely shaven dark face seemed even sharper than ever in contrast to the bleary, sagging countenances of his guests.

‘Hello, Shakespeare,’ he said, glad to see me.

‘Nick,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘So do I, kid,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out on the balcony for a couple of minutes.’

He stood on the balcony with his legs apart, blowing smoke into the night.

‘I wish these jerks would start clearing out of here,’ he said.

He offered me a cigar, but I refused it. I had been smoking Nick’s cigars for years and blowing smoke rings to spell Nick Latka or Toro Molina or whatever he had on his mind.

‘Nick, I …’ I tried to begin.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Nick interrupted. ‘And I’m ahead of you. You think you ought to have a raise. Well, you’re not going to get a fight out of me. You’ve done a hell of a job, Eddie. You actually have the public believing this bum’s a great fighter. I’m a bullish sort of a guy, but I didn’t think the fans would buy him so fast. You been away from the East, so you don’t know what’s been happening. We’re ready to get out of this chicken-feed circuit. Charley Spitz in Cleveland says he’s got five thousand on the line for Toro to fight anybody – Joe Floppola. The customers just want to see him. In Chi, we can get a fifteen-thousand guarantee against forty per cent of the gross for him to go with Red Donovan. Red’s manager, Frank Conti, owes me a favour. Then with a win over Donovan, who’s beaten some pretty fair boys, Uncle Mike will be ready to bring us into the Garden. Quinn was out to see Mike already and they talk about putting Toro in with Lennert two months after the Lennert-Stein fight Thursday night.’

‘But you own ’em both,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it bad business to let one eliminate the other, when …’

‘I’m still ahead of you,’ Nick said. ‘Don’t forget I
haven’t got nothing to do with Toro yet, officially. I’ve still got Vince and Danny fronting for me. So after Toro gets a win over Lennert, Gus retires – which he wants to do anyway – and you announce that Quinn and me have bought up Toro’s contract from Vince and Danny. Could anything be simpler?’

‘But Gus has always been on the level,’ I said. ‘Gus never went into the bag for anybody in his life. What makes you think you could get Gus to …’

‘I already been through all that with Gus just before I came out,’ Nick said. ‘Gus is thirty-three next month. He’s been in the ring fifteen years. He’s not thinking of his career any more. What he wants is a couple of real money fights, enough for him to take things easy the rest of his life, good investments, a couple of good annuities, so his kids will be all right. We got his financial set-up all figured out to his satisfaction and Mrs Lennert’s. You know, she’s always been a little sore at me for talking him into coming back. She wanted to keep him in that hamburger stand of his, even if he was making peanuts. Well, we showed her how in two fights Gus can make himself around a hundred thousand dollars. With Stein in the ball park, Uncle Mike figures to gross around four hundred Gs, with Gus getting twenty-five per cent. That’s a hundred divided between us and Jimmy. I decided on account of it’s Gus, and he’s racking up we’ll leave him take two-thirds without deductions. That’s around sixty-five thousand for openers. Then with Toro in the Garden we ought to do a hundred ’n fifty Gs easy. On account of Toro’s getting such a build-up from knocking over Lennert, I figure he ought to be satisfied with ten per
cent, which puts Lennert’s cut at fifty-five thousand, leaving Gus around thirty-six Gs.’