by Ed Gorman
“Wouldn’t it be funny if there were people up there and they were just like us?”
“No,” Guild said. “I hope they’re not. I hope they’re very, very different.”
“In what way?”
He sighed. “I hope they don’t have politicians the way we do, and I hope they don’t let people go hungry, and I hope they don’t kill children.”
He felt her shudder. “Kill children? That’s a terrible thing to think of.”
“Yes,” Guild said. “It’s the worst thing you can think of.”
“Then stop thinking about it.”
She drew him back to her then, and the wonderful softness and heat and moisture of her mouth pressed to his again.
Chapter Thirteen
“Another one?”
“Please.”
“You’re all alone tonight, Mr. Reynolds.” The bar was small, a narrow walk-in just off Church Street. The smell of whiskey and sawdust and stale ham from the free lunch filtered through the air.
“Yes.” He left it at that. He did not want to talk about Helen anymore, or her marriage two months ago to a bank clerk. Everything had been fine with Helen until she learned by accident that he was a thief. She still loved him enough that she had not turned him over to the law, but nothing since then had gone right for Reynolds. Nothing. There had been, for instance, an easy breaking-and-entry job in Milan, Illinois, two weeks ago. He’d been going in through the back window when the entire casement fell down on his head, knocking him out. The incident had very nearly been comic. He’d come to with time enough to get out of the empty house with its walls filled with expensive paintings, its drawers filled with money and silver. Then he had tried breaking into the liquor store over on Harcourt Street. Two steps in he’d noticed a copper walking past the back door, a looming shadow. A copper. He’d cased the job for a week. Coppers were not supposed to come by for twenty minutes. But for some reason one did this night. He’d been forced to flee with nothing. And it all started when Helen told him she was going to marry the boy she’d graduated eighth grade with.
“You going to see the fight tomorrow, Mr. Reynolds?” the bartender asked.
“Isn’t everybody?” Reynolds tried to make a joke of it. “Dam near, from what I hear. You have tickets?”
“I bought one today, matter of fact.”
“You’re lucky. I have to work.”
“It’ll be some fight.”
“The colored guy’s going to get killed. You’ve heard about Sovich, haven’t you?”
“He’s killed several colored boys, from what I gather.”
“You gather right.”
Reynolds eyed him. “You like prizefighting?”
“Sure. Don’t you, Mr. Reynolds?” The bartender had sort of a high voice for somebody who was so chunky and had such massive hands.
“I don’t know. I always think I’m going to like it, and then the blood starts flowing—” He shook his head. “I just don’t know if I do or not.”
“Well, tomorrow’s going to be special.”
It sure is, Reynolds thought. I’m going to have to shoot somebody. And with the way things have been going, I ’m going to kill him by accident.
“Special? You mean Sovich?”
The bartender nodded, wiped out the inside of a schooner with his white towel. “Sure, Mr. Reynolds. It isn’t likely a town this size is going to see him again.”
Six customers came in through the front door. They were laughing and slapping each other on the back. One, very drunk, was singing. He sounded Swedish. He was off-key.
The bartender moved down the bar to serve them.
This was what Reynolds had wanted, anyway. Solitude. He liked to stand at a bar and think through his problems and plan his robberies.
Tonight he’d gone to an alley with the Navy Colt his old man had owned. He needed to practice firing. His ineptitude with firearms was obvious. People assumed because you were a good thief you were also good with a gun. In fact, most of the robbers Reynolds knew were peaceful men. They would rather give themselves up than be shot or shoot at somebody.
He agreed with Stoddard that the robbery would look more believable if somebody was shot. Victor Sovich was less likely to be suspicious.
But he wondered how it would feel, shooting a man like that. Just shooting him.
He had a few more drinks—thankfully, the bartender got to talking with the group that had just come in and left Reynolds alone—and then of course he started thinking about Helen again.
Things had been very, very good with Helen. They’d made a lot of plans, including a family and a cabin by a lake they could share with her cousin in Wisconsin. They were even talking about what parish they were going to belong to (Helen was partial to St. Michael’s; he to All Saints), and then it just had all gone to hell. He wished he were better at crying. Being a small man, though, he’d carefully taught himself not to cry. He needed every vestige of manliness he could summon. But sometimes crying would feel good, and he knew it. To just goddamn sit down and bawl like a baby. He’d seen his old man do it in the last failing months of the old man’s life, when the black lung had gotten especially bad and when he coughed up blood more and more. He could never have imagined the old man crying. But there he was in bed, with his wife holding him as if he were her child and not her husband, and he was bawling away without shame. The old man didn’t have her faith in the afterlife. He thought we were just like road dogs, nothing but ribs and a skull left of you, and then not even that after a time.
“Why don’t you have a drink on me, Mr. Reynolds?”
“Sure. What’s the occasion?”
“The fight tomorrow. Those men down there rode all the way over from Chicago to see it. They say it’s going to be one hell of a fight, and the colored guy’s going to be lucky he doesn’t get killed.”
The bartender poured him a drink.
“You be sure and go now, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Oh, I’ll be sure. Don’t worry about that.”
He wished there was some way he could explain to this Guild that he was really sorry he had to shoot him.
“Well, you not only be there but you enjoy yourself, you hear now, Mr. Reynolds?”
Sometimes Reynolds suspected that the bartender fixed himself good, hard drinks when nobody was watching. You could see this in the way he walked after a certain hour.
“I’ll try to enjoy myself,” Reynolds said. “I’ll do my damnedest.”
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Reynolds. That’s the spirit.”
Reynolds had two more drinks and then walked back to his sleeping room. He propped the window up with a book and stripped down to his shorts and lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. The smoke was gray in the leaf-shadowed light from the street. He thought of Helen and going with her dressed up to mass every Sunday. Jesus, but how sweet that would have been. Then he thought of this Guild he had to shoot tomorrow. He was going to get him in the calf and make it fast. In the calf there wouldn’t be any way he could go wrong. If he tried to shoot him in the arm, maybe he’d hit the chest. Then things could go very wrong.
He lay there finishing his cigarette and then they started, the tears. He had to keep them down because the man on the other side of the wall would hear them and tell everybody in the boardinghouse.
He lay on the bed in the leaf-shadowed light all curled up like a little kid. His thin body jerked and started with his silent tears. He tasted them in his throat and his mouth and his nose.
He kept thinking of Helen and how he still loved her and how he would always love her. All she’d asked was that he’d give up being a thief, and at first it had seemed easy, but after a few weeks he’d realized that that was all he knew and that working a time clock job was just never going to work.
He wondered now who he was crying for, himself or Helen. Probably both of them.
He had another cigarette. Gradually his tears stopped. He reached over to the nightstand and picked up the Navy Colt.
He pointed it at the wall and made a small popping sound with his mouth, imitating the sound a gun makes.
He wished it were tomorrow afternoon. He wished it were over with.
Chapter Fourteen
They started arriving early on Saturday morning. They came by train, stagecoach, buckboard, horse. They came in ones and twos and threes and whole families. They came from farms and factories and neighboring towns. The local newspaper would make note that one man had been four days traveling and had come better than two hundred miles. Many of them hit restaurants and hotels and the local YMCA, but the majority of them sought out taverns and pumprooms. This was the sort of occasion you started getting drunk for early in the day.
Out on the edge of town, where the bleachers had been set up and a large canvas ring was in the process of being erected, there were already more than three hundred fans who had come early for the best possible seats. It was not yet eight A.M., and two men had already been arrested for drunk and disorderly and another for indecent exposure, the result of taking a pee behind a tree without noticing the fact that a family was having a picnic nearby. The temperature was nearing ninety, the humidity oppressive. Many of the police wore the tan khaki of the auxiliary policeman. These cops looked especially young, trying to swagger around with their hands on their nightsticks but not quite knowing how to do it without looking somewhat ridiculous. The pickets had arrived, too, ten ladies in crisp summer pastels bearing signs that read BOXING IS IMMORAL and WE ARE NOT ANIMALS. A reporter from Quincy spent an hour with them, making note of their various complaints and trying to hide his own delight over the fact that today he was finally going to see Victor Sovich fight.
Downtown at the train depot, all the taxis were taken up as well as the ten buggies the city had provided for the occasion. The latter were reserved for the gentry, the men who wore three-piece suits and derbies despite the heat, the ladies in lace and contempt. These people were dispatched to the small city’s two best hotels, where they immediately proceeded to ruin the days of bellhops, desk clerks, serving maids, and other guests.
Even most of the people who claimed disinterest in the fight had to admit that the town had never seen anything like this. It was as if the place had been set upon by vandals. Every square inch of ground, it seemed, was being stood upon, sat upon, or claimed for later by somebody who’d come here to watch Victor Sovich. In three taverns downtown there were large photographs of Sovich behind the bar. As a joke, one man from Chicago got behind the bar and lighted a candle to Sovich, the way Catholics light candles to honor statues of saints. The prank got five solid minutes of applause from the crowd and free drinks from the bartender, who considered the man a real crowd pleaser and therefore good for business.
In the city park an additional contingent of churchwomen had gathered to decry fisticuffs in any form, but especially the form in which it was done for money.
Two more people got arrested, one for being with another man’s wife, and the second for drunkenly believing he was Victor Sovich. For no reason anybody could understand, the man simply began punching his friend until said friend was unconscious and perhaps dead. He’d taken a bad, twisting fall, striking his head on the curbing on his way down.
It was not yet nine A.M.
Guild said, “I’m not sure yet.”
He was having breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Clarise. She had just asked him where he would go when the fight was over. “How about you? Where are you going?”
She smiled. “I’m not sure yet, either.”
“We’re quite a pair.”
The waiter came. He was sweaty and angry, his hair plastered in wet ringlets to his skull. It was hot in here. Management didn’t want to open the windows because the black flies would get in.
“You’re having a bad time of it, I take it,” Guild said.
The waiter, who was probably close to Guild’s age, said, “They kept warning us about the fight and how the crowd would be and all. I thought they were exaggerating.”
“They weren’t, huh?”
“Most of these people are drunk already.”
Clarise looked around. “You know, Leo, I think he’s right.”
The waiter poured them more coffee. Its stream looked red in the morning sunlight.
“Well, by the end of the day, it’ll be all over with.”
“Yes,” the waiter said with a certain theatrical flourish, “or I will be.”
“Stoddard’s going to make a lot of money,” Clarise said.
“Stoddard and Sovich. I don’t think Stoddard will be dumb enough to cheat him this time. I think Sovich would kill him if he tried.”
Her small, beautiful mouth wrinkled into a frown. “As long as Rooney doesn’t make anything.”
“He gets so much per round. That’s how these things work. If he can stay on his feet ten rounds he can make himself some nice money.”
“Maybe he’ll get killed.”
Guild sighed and looked out at the room filled with stout men in suits and thick mustaches, at women in chenille dresses, at curtains that looked like golden waterfalls with sunlight blasting through them.
Guild said, “You’ve got to forget about Rooney.”
“That isn’t very easy.”
“I’m not sure you’d want to see him get killed, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a difference between wanting somebody dead and actually seeing them dead. No matter how much you hate them, you always start to feel a little sorry for them.”
“I take it you’re talking about your bounty hunting now.”
Guild shrugged. “I suppose. You track them a few months and take them in, and by then you start to wonder if they are really guilty and what’s going to happen to them in prison and what’s going to happen to their families while they’re gone.”
“I haven’t met many people like you, Guild.”
“I haven’t met many people like you, either, Clarise.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Of course.”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
Guild reached over and put his hand on hers. “You know what you should do?”
“What?”
“Get on a train this morning and leave this town.”
“Why?”
“So you can break your tie to Rooney.”
“What tie?”
“Following him around, always waiting for something bad to happen to him. He’s got you.”
“Got me? What’re you talking about?”
“You hate him so much you can’t let go of him. It’s like being in love with somebody. You can’t let go of him then, either.”
“I hope Sovich kills him.”
“Given Sovich’s record, I’d say that that’s at least a possibility.”
“I know how I sound, Guild. So hateful. It’s not very Christian. But I can’t help myself. My brother was a decent man.”
“I’m sure he was.”
She paused, stared out at the blue sky and the golden sunshine. “You really think I should get on a train?”
“Right now.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere you can start a life for yourself.”
“But I’d always think about him. About Rooney, I mean.”
“But maybe after a while you won’t think about him so much.” He looked down at the remnants of his over-easy eggs, sausage, and toast. With the last remaining slice of toast, he wiped up a long, juicy streak of egg yolk and jelly. It tasted wonderful. He finished this off with coffee. He picked up a toothpick and got to work.
Clarise stared down at her long, delicate hands. They looked dark against the white tablecloth. In the hard light you could see all the crumbs from breakfast on the cloth. They seemed the size of pennies.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of not knowing where to go or what to do. At least trailing Rooney around g
ives my life a shape.”
“I still think you should take a train out right now.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to get rid of me, would you?”
The waiter interrupted, saying, “We are supposed to ask all customers if they would mind giving up their seats when they’re done with breakfast. The crowd in the lobby is out on the sidewalk and around the block.”
Guild shook his head. “No, I’ve got to be getting up to Stoddard’s room, anyway.”
Clarise nodded, dabbed daintily at her mouth with a blood-red cloth napkin, and then stood up. She looked wonderful again this morning in a blue silk dress with a brocaded top. “I’ll see you out at the fight this afternoon.”
“I still wish you were taking that train.”
“Don’t worry, Guild. I can’t shoot Rooney or anyone. You’ve got my gun.” She smiled at him with very white teeth.
He walked her out to the lobby. The place was worse than the waiter had said. Everybody was shoving. It was like being on board a sinking ship. He managed to kiss Clarise on the cheek. She vanished into the mob.
Chapter Fifteen
He had worked as a field hand until he was fifteen. Perhaps because of his ugliness, which was considerable, and perhaps because of his surliness, which was also considerable, the white people who ran the plantation had never considered using him in the house. His father and mother were in the house. His sisters and brothers were in the house. But not him. No, he went out into the sweltering fields, where they put the worst of them—as they defined the worst of them, anyway—those fit not for social skills or the subtle machinations of being a servant. He was fit only for stoop labor where his hands got bloody from pulling everything from turnips to cotton from the ground and where on a lucky day in the com he might have sex with a young girl.
He broke his first jaw when he was fifteen. A white man had watched as Franklin Rooney had at first resisted and then given in to the taunts of another black boy. Rooney went up to him and broke the boy’s jaw with a single punch. How the boy had wailed. How the boy had backed away, terrified.
