Blood Game

by Ed Gorman

  By age seventeen Rooney was a fixture on an eastern “colored” circuit of boxers. While the whites scorned him, as whites always did, the advantage to being a fighter was that it earned respect from certain types of black people, especially those who inhabited the taverns and brothels of Rooney’s choice. Men feared him and women adored him. Sometimes even white women came to watch him fight, and there was no mistaking what he saw in their soft blue eyes.

  But early on Rooney knew that despite his cunning, stolid body, his deft right hand, and a certain amount of ring skill, he would never be major. He watched other fighters, black and white, work their way up, but somehow it never happened for him. He stayed on the “circuit,” as folks called it, and watched as other men, lesser men, succeeded. He was told it was because he “just wasn’t ready for it.” He knew it because he was so ugly, the nose too splayed, the lips comically thick, the eyes seeming to pop from his head. People who followed the fights wanted their man to look, if not heroic, at least decent. No matter what he did, Rooney couldn’t look good. He fussed with his hair, he grew a beard, he had his teeth worked on, he took to wearing a gray cutaway and matching top hat. It didn’t matter. No matter what you did to Rooney’s face, you couldn’t alter it. It was the sort of face that, no matter how long you stared at it, you never quite got used to.

  He beat Jackson in ’88 and Salivar in ’89. He even beat a Chilean named Estafen. He awakened one day and noticed how gray his hair was getting. A few weeks later, fighting a plump kid he should have had no problem with, he nearly got knocked out. It wasn’t that the kid was so good. It was that Rooney was getting so bad. Strength, endurance, quickness—by the time he was age thirty they had all left him. And they would never come back.

  Wifeless, even finding few prostitutes who were willing to welcome him into their beds, he spent his life trying to make some sense of forces he sensed but could not understand. Why had he been bom not only colored but so ugly? Why were less gifted men promoted when he was not? Would he ever know anything remotely like a normal life? The other day, walking up the street, he’d noticed a small cottage surrounded by a picket fence. A man and woman had stood in the yard, hand in hand, watching a dazzling little blonde girl play with a calico dog. Rooney had almost been overcome by a feeling that started out envy but ended up sadness. Would he ever have a life like that? Ever?

  “You know what we’re looking for, Rooney.”

  “I know.”

  “We want a show.”

  Rooney nodded.

  “A good show, Rooney.”

  Rooney nodded again.

  “He hits you, you get up. Meanwhile, you hit him every chance you get.”

  “You ever see Carter anymore?”

  “Not anymore.” John T. Stoddard’s eyes dropped, and Rooney wondered what was wrong.

  “He head east?”

  “I’m not sure where he headed. He—died,” Stoddard replied.

  “Died?”

  “In the ring.”

  “Carter?”

  “Had you seen him in a while?”

  “Not for a while, no.”

  “He’d started to get old suddenly.” Stoddard shook his head. “You know how it gets with fighters.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “He found this kid from Pennsylvania. This really strapping bastard.”

  “A kid killed him?”

  “Nineteen. But a punch you just can’t believe.”

  Rooney got up from the chair. The three of them were in a small room on the east edge of the raw board building adjacent to the ring. The room smelled of heat and tobacco. The building was a warehouse for a tobacco wholesaler. Rooney was already stripped to the waist because of the heat.

  “Carter. Dead.” Rooney shook his head. “He was a decent man for a—”

  Stoddard grinned and turned to the man he called Guild. “He was going to say ‘a decent man for a white man. ’ You see, Guild, they think of us what we think of them.” He laughed in a booming way that revealed anxiety beneath.

  Rooney kept pacing. “Victor still hates colored folks?”

  “I’m afraid he does.”

  “What we ever do to him?”

  “You know how Victor is.” Stoddard tapped his skull to indicate he was crazy. “You go fifteen rounds with him, you could be sitting pretty, Rooney. Sitting very pretty.”

  “I go fifteen rounds with him, I could be dead is what I could be.”

  “Victor’s not so young anymore.”

  “That why he killed a fighter just last spring?”

  “To be honest, that guy wasn’t much of a fighter. He really wasn’t.”

  Stoddard looked over at Guild. There was some doubt in his expression. “Now you’re not going to go out there and just lay down, are you, Rooney?”

  “We have an agreement. I’m going to stick to that agreement. I’m going to do everything I can.”

  “I need at least twelve rounds.”

  “I need my head on my shoulders, too.” Rooney allowed a certain belligerence to come into his voice.

  Stoddard glanced over at Guild again, then back at Rooney. “Why don’t you show me a little something?”

  “I ain’t in the mood.”

  “Just a little something, Rooney. So I know you’re fit and all ready to go.” He patted his stomach. “You’ve been putting on weight, boy.”

  “I’m gettin’ old.”

  Stoddard smiled. “Old is going around. Like the flu. Everybody seems to be catching it.”

  Rooney finally relented and showed him a few things. He showed him a few right hooks and a few right crosses and a few uppercuts. He stood in the sunny comer and fought his quick moving shadow. The shadow was not quite as black as Rooney.

  When he finished, there was a sheen of sweat on his back and arms. He went over and sat on the edge of a chair. He was panting. As he had told Stoddard, he was getting old. He’d fought many one-hundred-round matches in his youth. Today he was up against two things—the loss of that youth and the unforgiving hands of Victor Sovich.

  “You know something, Rooney?”

  “What?”

  “You look scared.”

  “I got a right to look scared.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  “He hates us folks.”

  “Victor isn’t exactly a spring chicken himself anymore.”

  “That’s what you said. That don’t necessarily convince me.”

  “I need a good show, Rooney. A damn good show. There’s going to be a lot of people out there.”

  “Sure. A man who kills other men always gets a crowd.”

  Stoddard paused. “You’re forgetting something, Rooney.”

  “What?”

  “You killed a man, too.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  Stoddard smiled. “That story kind of hangs on.”

  “What story?”

  “That you poisoned his drinking water before the fight.”

  “That’s bull.”

  “It’s what I hear.”

  “It’s not the truth.”

  “You just put on a show today, Rooney. That’s all I care about. The past is the past.”

  Rooney noticed how interested Guild seemed since the conversation had come round to the fighter Rooney was accused of poisoning.

  “I won’t look good if you don’t look good,” Stoddard said. “You just try and remember that, all right?”

  “All right.”

  Stoddard came up. He looked as if he were going to pat Rooney on the back. But you could see in his eyes the distaste he felt for the boxer’s sweating body. He brought his hand back to his suit coat and put it in a pocket.

  Rooney said, “You tell Sovich not to kill me.”

  “I’ll tell him, Rooney.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “I ain’t got nothing against him. He shouldn’t have nothin’ against me.”

  “I’ll talk to him, Rooney
. You can bet I will.”

  Rooney sighed. “Maybe I’ll retire after this one.”

  Stoddard said, “That’s something to think about, Rooney. That sure is something to think about.”

  He and Guild left soon after.

  Rooney sat in the chair. There was a fly in the room. Every few minutes Rooney tried to slap it down. He had no luck.

  He thought about the fighter he’d poisoned that time. The kid wasn’t supposed to die. All Rooney had wanted was to slow him down enough to beat him good. Then the kid up and died.

  Rooney got up and paced. The sweat was now chill on his back, even with the heat. He was thinking of picket fences and small thatched cottages. He was thinking of a good woman with wide hips and a real way with children.

  But he knew better, Rooney did. He knew it wasn’t going to happen for him. Ever.

  He stared out the window at the first hundred or so fans who surrounded the large ring.

  There was only one thing they’d come here to see today, and Rooney knew only too well what that was.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Twenty minutes later, inside the office where the gate receipts would be kept, John T. Stoddard handed Guild a Sharps and said, “I want you to shoot anybody who comes through that door during the fight.”

  “Somehow I don’t think your permission is enough. To kill somebody, I mean.”

  “Anybody who tries to get through there is doing so for only one reason. To take the gate money.”

  The office was snug, with two oak rolltop desks on the east and west walls, a bookcase filled with leather-bound legal volumes, a map of Dakota Territory, and one wall lined with advertisements for various brands of pipes and smoking tobacco. Sunlight fell hot on the floor. In the comer Stephen Stoddard sat at a noisy typewriter filling up a white sheet of paper with black-lettered information. He wore a white straw boater. Inside his coat was a lump that had to be a gun.

  “I’ll keep the Sharps, but I’ll be using it only as a last resort.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past Victor.”

  “He probably wouldn’t put anything past you.”

  Stoddard surprised Guild by taking his gibe seriously. “That supposed to mean something?”

  Stephen Stoddard turned away from the typewriter. He was curious about his father’s reaction to Guild’s harmless remark.

  “I said, is that supposed to mean something?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then why’d you say it?”

  “I was making a joke.”

  “I don’t find it one damn bit funny.”

  “You could always get somebody else for this job.”

  “A little late, isn’t it, Mr. Guild? Two goddamn hours before the first preliminary fight starts?”

  “Dad, I really don’t think he meant anything by that,” Stephen Stoddard said. He wore a white shirt with a high, starched collar, red arm garters, and a white straw boater. His trousers were dark blue and his shoes white.

  “Did I ask you, Stephen?”

  “No, I suppose not but—”

  “Then you keep your goddamn nose out of my business, you hear me?”

  “But Dad, all I said was—”

  Stoddard moved across the room with easy grace. He poked a plump pink finger in Stephen’s face. “Out of my goddamn business, you understand me?”

  Stephen managed to look more miserable than usual. He could not meet his father’s gaze.

  “You understand me?”

  Stephen scarcely whispered, “Yes, sir.”

  “Now you come on with me and walk the grounds.”

  For the first time, a look of anger showed clearly on Stephen’s face. “I’m going to stay here, Dad, with Guild.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me that way.”

  “That’s just the way I’m talking, Dad. Just the way.”

  Stoddard glared at his son and began to sputter something but stopped himself.

  His glare turned to Guild. “You’d better watch yourself, Guild. You’d better watch yourself pretty damn close.”

  Stoddard turned and was gone.

  Stephen Stoddard could not meet Guild’s eyes. He went back to the typewriter and began pounding away again.

  Guild watched him. He knew it wasn’t his place to say anything, but he didn’t have any choice. “You don’t owe him, son.”

  Stephen continued to type, his back to Guild. “It’s none of your affair, Mr. Guild.”

  “I don’t like to see people suffering.”

  “I’m not suffering.”

  “Sure you are, son. Sure you are.”

  Stephen turned around and faced Guild. “He’s my father.”

  “I know he’s your father. He’s also a bastard, and he’s particularly a bastard to you, his own son.”

  “He means well.”

  “The hell he does. Your father has never meant well in his life.”

  “You’re suggesting what?”

  “That you leave. Get a job of your own. Show him you won’t take his abuse anymore.”

  “It would kill him.”

  “Because you left?”

  “Yes.”

  Guild rubbed at his face and sighed. “Son, he doesn’t care about you.”

  “I’m the only family he’s got.”

  Guild sat down in the office chair. He angled it away from Stephen. He put his Texas boots up on the rolltop desk and took out a cigarette and lighted it.

  “You’re some kid.”

  Stephen was already back to his typing. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

  Guild inhaled deeply. He watched the blue smoke emerge from his mouth. He tried a couple of smoke rings. They almost worked, but not quite. “You want to stay here with me?”

  “Why? You don’t want me to stay?”

  “Fine with me. As long as you know what you’re getting into.”

  “What am I getting into?” Stephen asked this with just a hint of mockery in his voice.

  “There’s always some risk when you have this much money.”

  “I’ve been around this much money before.”

  “But we’re isolated here. Thieves could get in and out—”

  Stephen shook his head. The white straw boater jiggled some. “I’m ready for any eventuality, Mr. Guild.” From inside his blue coat he took out a Colt .45. “After all, it’s the family money at stake.”

  “I’m not sure it’s ‘family’ money, son. A big part of it is supposed to belong to Victor.”

  “Oh, yes,” Stephen said, almost as an afterthought. “Victor.” It was going to be a very long afternoon, Guild thought.

  “God did not mean for us to mingle the races, even in fisticuffs!” the man shouted to passersby. “The Bible expressly forbids mingling in any way!”

  He stood at the bottom of the bleachers, an open Bible in one hand and the skull of an ape in the other. “It is from the ape that the colored man is descended. But it is from God that we white men spring. Please, stop this travesty!”

  His pockmarked face, his sunken, exhausted gaze, his thin red lips that seemed always to be trembling, lent him the visage of a man not only mad but perhaps dangerous, too. Even the most swaggering of fans walked wide of him, unsettled by his presence in some way they could not define.

  And so he stood in his ministerial frock coat, crying out as he had cried out on street comers and on trains and stagecoaches and in mainstream churches; cried out to be heard; cried out so that he could share at least some of the burden of his hatred.

  “Help me end this travesty!” he called. “Help me end this tragedy!”

  They kept on walking wide of him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The streetcar was so crowded the conductor had to keep asking people to move back, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to steer.

  Reynolds stood near the rear, somebody’s elbow pr
essed against his rib, somebody’s shoulder against his shoulder blades. A stout woman’s huge picture hat covered half of his face.

  When the streetcar finally stopped, he was glad for the two-block walk to the arena. His legs needed stretching and he needed fresh air. He also needed to calm himself. The closer the time came to the shooting, the more anxious he became. He wished he had not agreed to this job, but backing out was the sort of thing he just couldn’t do. Word would get around, and then people would begin to wonder if he would back out on them.

  He bought a ticket and entered the carnival-like arena. A furious rumbling shook the wooden bleachers, the effect of so many people talking, shouting, screaming, laughing, cursing. He sat down and bought peanuts from a vendor. He dropped the shells on the bleacher and crunched them with his shoe. He stared down into the empty ring.

  He still wished he had not agreed to this.

  “You think he’s going to kill him?”

  Reynolds was distracted from his thoughts. A petite woman in a pink summer dress and a white straw hat held down by a gauzy piece of pink chiffon stared at him.

  “You think he’s going to kill him?”

  “Oh. The fight.”

  “Yes. The fight.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t actually follow boxing all that carefully.”

  “Well, I do and I think he’s going to kill him. Victor’s going to kill the colored man, I mean.”

  “It’ll probably be exciting.”

  He knew immediately that his style of response did not please the woman. She glared at him as if he were some kind of circus freak and then turned back to her female companion.

  He wished he had not agreed to do this.

  The woman was now whispering something about him to her companion. Her companion smiled.

  Blushing, Reynolds stood up. Now was a good time to check out the office, figure a way in and a way out.

  When he turned back to the woman to see if he might not have been imagining her whispered insults, he saw that they were now both smirking.

  Suddenly he became self-conscious about the way he moved. He tried to be more purposeful in his motions.

  God, he wished there were not so many people out here.

  God, he wished it were not so hot out here.