The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  EVERYWHERE HE WENT he heard talk, talk, a motley of recent and not so recent news, accounts witnessed firsthand and reports many times removed from their original source, an endless proffering of hearsay upon a range of topics and doings across the greater republic….

  He heard of the two brothers with their flying machine on the beach in North Carolina, an invention that some among the God-fearing likened to the Tower of Babel in its lofty presumption. He heard of the so-called safety razor that made shaving a faster undertaking and gave rise to predictions that American beards would soon be outnumbered by whiskerless cheeks. He heard of the pair of motorists who in the summer just past had made the first cross-country motor car drive, piloting their Winton from San Francisco to New York in fifty-two days. Heard of various bonanzas, of a gold rush in Alaska, of huge oil strikes in East Texas. Heard of massive horrors, of a Chicago theater fire that killed six hundred, of the Galveston hurricane, still spoken of in tones of awe some three years after the fact, that killed six thousand.

  He heard of various coal mine explosions in which scores of miners perished. Heard of brutal labor battles in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, of street fights between striking workers and police backed by Pinkerton men, of strikers shot down, clubbed bloody, borne away in Black Marias. Heard much repetitious and bitter talk about the killing of President McKinley two years before by a foreign wretch whose name few people could pronounce and nobody could spell, an oily anarchist and prime example of the immigrant trash flooding American shores to spread civic discord and racial pollution, a cowardly bastard who would shoot by surprise a man reaching to shake his hand. And heard much of McKinley’s successor, young Roosevelt, hero of the recent Spanish war, a man of the West in spirit and never mind that he’d been born in the East with a silver spoon in his mouth, a man who professed to walk softly and carry a big stick, an attitude Stanislaus greatly admired.

  There was constant talk about sports, about baseball’s new American League and the first World Series and Boston’s defeat of Pittsburgh in the best-of-nine. But no sport was of higher veneration than boxing, and no pugilist more talked about or more revered than James Jeffries, Big Jeff, the Boilermaker, the world heavyweight champion these past four years and more. Stanislaus heard few stories as often as of the pummeling the great Jeff had given to Bob Fitzsimmons for eleven bruising rounds at Coney Island in the spring of ’99 to win the title.

  And always of course there was talk of women. Of perfidious women and saintly women. Of treacherous women and women treated wrongly and women loved and lost. And in the hobo camps as in the rest of the country, no woman of flesh-and-blood could compare with that celebrated beauty of pen-and-ink, the Gibson Girl. No woman was as popular or as desirable or as utterly unattainable. In her pompadour and shirtwaist and cool self-possession, that national symbol of ideal femininity radiated a wholesomeness so alluring it stoked the lust of every man and boy in America. Many a bo carried a tattered magazine illustration of her to gaze upon in the low light of a late-night campfire.

  ON A FROSTY December eve somewhere in western Wyoming the freight he rode made a whistle stop and four tramps scrambled into his boxcar. They closed the door almost all the way, one of them placing a short strip of rope against the jamb to keep the door from being shut completely, as there was no way to open it from inside. They crouched and watched the bright line of light at the door crack, seemed set to pounce or bolt or surrender, depending on the number and kind of men who might yank the door open and how well armed they might be. But the door stayed as it was and the train at last began rolling.

  A match flared and one of them lit a fat stub of candle. They looked at Stanislaus in the murky light where he sat with his back to the front wall of the car. He saw they were of a wolfish breed he had met with before. They usually traveled solo, though from time to time in pairs, but here were four at once, rank beyond the stink of unwashed flesh and clothes. One of them was huge, over six feet tall and Stanislaus judged his weight at above 250 pounds. He had a head like a melon and his baseball cap was slit on the sides to accommodate the massive skull, the hair over his ears shorn to the skin.

  Stanislaus nodded. The only one to nod in return seemed the youngest, perhaps only a year or two older than himself. This one asked if he had anything to eat, but his accent was so densely hillbilly he had to repeat the question before Stanislaus understood him and said he didn’t, nor tobacco, when the boy asked for that.

  They conversed no further with him, settling at the other end of the car and whispering among themselves. After a while they lay down and blew out the candle. The past few days had been rough ones and Stanislaus was weary for lack of sleep, but he stayed awake for a time longer, listening to their sighs and snorts, their shufflings about for a more comfortable lie. When they were finally quiet, he rolled up in his blanket and stretched out with his bindle under his head, though this night he wisely did not take off his jacket or his shoes.

  He had no notion of how much time had passed when he woke in the rocking, clattering darkness and sensed their nearness. Before he could get clear of his bedroll they were on him, the melon-head one dropping astraddle of his stomach and knocking the breath from him, pinning his arms with his knees, grabbing him by the hair and banging the back of his head on the floor. Stanislaus lay stunned, hearing their high giggling as the candle was lighted and the car walls leaped up from the dark. He could barely breathe for the weight of the man.

  “Set youself on him, Earl,” the melon-head said. “Hold them arms.”

  The Earl one sat on Stanislaus’s face and pinned his arms under his knees. The reek of his trousers was gagging. The melon-head’s weight shifted down to his legs and Stanislaus felt the man’s hands working at his belt buckle. He tried to wrest free and was struck in the chest and told, “Quit fussing.” He felt the buttons of his fly rip away and the big man’s weight rose off him and now his pants were being tugged down to his thighs. He heard the other two arguing over his bindle and the Earl one said something about his share.

  “Raise up so’s I can turn him,” the melon-head said.

  As Earl eased his weight off his face, Stanislaus arched his neck and locked his teeth in his crotch.

  The Earl one screamed and lurched into the melon-head and Stanislaus heaved sideways with all his strength and both men tumbled off him, upsetting the candle and plunging the car into blackness.

  The Earl one was shrieking and the melon-head shouting “Get him, get him!” as Stanislaus crawled fast for the door, pants bunched at his knees. He pulled himself up and yanked the door open just as one of them caught him by the back of the jacket. Stanislaus whirled and punched him in the ear and he fell away. Then another was clawing at him and he snatched this one by the shirtfront and slung him out the door to vanish without a sound.

  Stanislaus leapt. He sailed through cold darkness and hit the ground feetfirst and his knees buckled and he went tumbling through scrub brush and soft sand and his head jarred. He was out.

  He opened his eyes to a weak sun risen above the mountains, a chill wind stinging his face with grit. He tried to get up but his legs would not function properly and for a terrifying moment he thought he was paralyzed. Then saw that his pants were in a tangle around his shins. It was an effort to sit up and get them unsnarled, and he fell twice before gaining his feet.

  Everything hurt. His head was tender to the touch and his fingers came away sticky with gelled blood. But no bones broken, which he thought a wonder. The shoves of the wind were strong and he hugged his jacket to him.

  Stark bleak mountains near and far, stretches of rocky scrubland. The rails bare and straight to the opposing horizons.

  He remembered the one he’d thrown from the train. He searched and found him about twenty yards back down the tracks, awkwardly supine beside a greasewood shrub. It was the young one who had returned his nod. His eyes were open and his head oddly inclined on the broken neck.

  He went through the boy’s poc
kets and found a jackknife with a finely honed four-inch blade, a box of matches, four pennies. He stripped the boy of his floppy denim jacket and put it on over his own and buttoned up both, then found the boy’s cap to replace the one he’d left in the boxcar.

  He had no idea where he was, whether still in Wyoming or now in Utah. But he knew the direction he’d been coming from, and so followed the rails the other way.

  HE ACQUIRED A heavy sheepskin jacket and good woolen mittens and a bandanna to cover the lower half of his face in bank-robber fashion when riding on flatcars or freight roofs, both of which he came to prefer over riding in closed cars, never mind the enveloping black smoke, the live cinders that singed his skin and clothes, the drenching rains or the icy winds whose sudden gusts might loft him from the train. In closed cars his sleep was now always fitful and he was prone to dreams that woke him with a start and his heart at a gallop. He had never yet in his life shed tears, but on such wakings he would have an odd urge to weep. He could never remember what the dreams were about except that they often entailed his mother and sometimes his brother too. He supposed he missed them, but the idea that he might be homesick seemed to him absurd. He had yet to learn that the worst kind of homesickness a man might feel can be for a place he’s never been or even heard of, a place he may never know. He was not troubled by such dreams when he slept in the open.

  ONE NIGHT NEAR the end of winter, after a brief employment on a Mormon farm, he was in a ramshackle tavern on the outskirts of Boise when he spied the man with the melon head sitting at one of the rough plank tables along the wall. Stanislaus sidled into the shadows and watched him from under his cap brim. When the man got up and went out the back door, he followed, beer mug in hand.

  In the alley was the privy, though most men settled for pissing against the fence or the wall. It was dark but he could see the big man standing at the wooden fence with his back to him.

  The mug was of thick and heavy glass meant to convey an impression of greater capacity than it actually held. Gripping it by the U-handle, Stanislaus went up behind the man and with an overhand swing clubbed him on the back of the head. The man grunted and fell forward against the fence with his hand still at his dick and slipped down to his knees. He started to turn and Stanislaus swung the mug sidearm and the massive head bobbed with the impact and the man keeled onto his elbows. He groaned and muttered and tried to get up, moving with the awkwardness of a man with a monstrous hangover, and Stanislaus bashed him again and knocked him supine into the pissy mud. He got down on one knee and swung the mug into the man’s face a half-dozen times like he was driving home a large nail, the last two crunching impacts stippling his own face with blood. Then stood up and tossed the mug aside.

  The man lay silent and unmoving. Somebody in the darkness said “Jeee-sus.”

  He jogged down the alley, vaulted a fence, and loped down the road toward the railyard. Not half an hour later he was rolling north, huddled atop a boxcar against a gelid wind and a stream of acrid smoke. And what he felt other than cold could only be called satisfaction.

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  By the calendar it was early spring when he hopped off a Utah Northern just before it pulled into the freight yard, but the night was near freezing and felt even colder for the wind. The landscape was illuminated in an eerie ocher light from the gas lamps of the mines and smelteries. Huge plumes of black and gray and orange rising off a stark forest of smokestacks and lacing the air with harsh alien stinks. The “richest hill on earth,” Butte was called. It was born of gold and silver strikes but it was copper that made it rich. Meandering under the town was a river of copper fifty feet wide with lodes branching like tributaries, all of it now belonging to the Anaconda Copper Company, which in turn was part of the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which itself was a tentacle of Standard Oil. To most residents of Montana, however, Anaconda was simply the Company.

  He’d heard talk about Butte everywhere he’d been. Had heard it had the highest smokestack on the planet, the deepest mine shaft, the longest ore train. Every mine had its own name, like the Bluebird, the Lexington, the Spectator, the Diamond, the Neversweat and its famous seven smokestacks. Wherever the Company bored a hole it tapped into a new vein, started another mine, put up another of the colossal elevator rigs called headframes to lower the workers into the ground and haul up the buckets of ore. Gallows frames, the miners called them. Stanislaus had heard enough about the mines to know he would sooner resort to armed robbery than set foot in one, but there was no shortage of men willing to go down the shafts and break the ore out of the rock, men with nothing to bargain with but their physical strength and a willingness to risk their lives. To risk cave-ins, fires, explosions, lung disease from the rock dust, pneumonia from working in the sweltering shafts and emerging sweat-soaked into an icy winter. They came from all over the country, these men, from all over the world, drawn to the ready work. Yankees and rednecks, John Bulls and Dutchmen, Dagos, Chinks, Finns, bohunks of every breed, and above all, Micks. The population of Butte and its environs in this year of 1904 was around fifty thousand, nearly a third of it Irish, most of them named Sullivan.

  He’d come to Butte for no reason but to see it for himself. The roughest burg in the West, he’d heard, and the most exciting. He’d heard it said that many a Butte saloon had chosen to brick in their front windows rather than keep replacing the smashed glass, that every day at first light the cop wagon rattled down the streets behind its brace of draft horses and collected the drunks off the sidewalks and from the alleys, the occasional dead. Heard that it was a rare week in Butte that passed without murder. He’d heard the town had the most whores to be found in any four square blocks in the country, the most saloons, the most gambling halls. It had dogfight pits and boxing arenas, vaudeville theaters, burlesque joints. Butte the Beaut, he’d often heard it called, sometimes in mockery and sometimes not.

  He hid his bindle in the bushes and headed into town. The crowded streets were in strident carouse, ringing with the cries of doorway shills and a blaring tangle of musical styles issuing from every joint. Ragtime and coochie, waltzes and ballads, banjo plunking of a sort he’d never heard, ringing out a kind of music he would ever after think of as Western hillbilly. It was only a Tuesday, but in a town where the mines operated around the clock and seven days a week, every night was Saturday night.

  His hands balled for warmth in his jacket pockets, his face stinging with chill for the rinse he’d given it at a frosty water trough at the edge of town. He relished the raucous high-timing, his eyes brighter than he knew. His first objective was to wash the taste of locomotive smoke from his mouth with a mug of beer. Then he would line the inside of his shirt with newspaper and search for a place to sleep out of the wind. Beyond that, his only plan was to find a job of some sort for a short while, put together a small stake, then get back on the rails.

  He was passing a place called the Copper Queen, whose window sign boasted THE PRETTIEST LADIES IN THE WEST—10¢ A DANCE, when the doors sprang open to an eruption of cheers and a fast-moving pair of men, one of them bent forward and being propelled by the other, who had him by the collar and the back of the pants in the customary manner of the bum’s rush and flung him into the street, spooking the animals of passing horsemen and wagons. He was a big man, the bouncer, with hair gleamingly pomaded and garters on his sleeves. “And stay out!” he said, and went back inside.

  The ejected patron rose unsteadily to his feet and set his cap on his head, brushed vainly at his muddy clothes, muttered, “All right, okay, fine and dandy, I get it.”

  Stanislaus went inside. It was a spacious dance hall and saloon, blue-hazed with gaslight and smoke, boisterous with laughter and shouted conversations and a honkytonk piano. The dance floor was off to one side and dense with couples, the heralded ladies earning their dimes. If they weren’t the prettiest in the West, they were the prettiest he’d seen since San Francisco. He was down to his last four bits and couldn’t afford ev
en to haggle with a whore, but after the cost of a beer he would still have enough money for a few dances and at least be able to feel a woman under his hands. He had never danced in his life but was certain he could do it better than most of the oafs lurching around on the floor. His mother regarded dancing as an essential social grace and had wanted to teach him and his brother the rudiments. But their first and only lesson had no sooner begun than Kaicel yelled from the porch for them to quit all their foolish stomping around in there or he’d bust up the piano for firewood.

  One girl in particular attracted his attention. A strawberry blonde with a sassy way of tossing her hair as she swayed and jigged with a sprightly gusto and seemed to be dancing more with herself than with the oafish partner stomping clumsily at what looked like some altogether different endeavor. As Stanislaus shouldered through the crowd at the bar, he tried for another glimpse of her and in his distraction jostled a man and caused him to spill his drink.

  The man glared and said, “Well, shit.” Stanislaus started to apologize and the man punched him, propelling him into a clutch of drinkers at the bar who cursed and shoved him right back at the man, who hit him again, dropping him on the seat of his pants amid guffaws and a cluster of dirty pants legs and muddy boots. His jaw ached vaguely but he was not addled and his foremost thought was to get up before the man could kick him. Then various rough hands were helping him to his feet and there was laughter all around and someone said, “Lad can take a lick.” So commonplace were fights in Butte saloons that the scuffle drew scant notice from the rest of the room, and the piano man played on.