The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  Still, it was the worst beating he’d yet absorbed, and Pete told him not to blow his nose for a few days or he’d make his eyes blacker. Ketchel secretly welcomed the pain. It was physical, could be dealt with and endured. But as always the bruises healed with amazing swiftness.

  The following month he went to Miles City for a twenty-rounder against a hulk named Rudy Hinz who had a twenty-five-pound advantage and bragged he couldn’t be knocked out with a brick. Ketchel agreed to a draw if the fight went the distance. Then tried to break Hinz’s skull with his fists, knocking him down thirteen times, but Hinz each time beat the count. “I told ya!” Hinz crowed when it was over. But his mauled mouth made him almost unintelligible and his eyes were so swollen he had to be led from the ring like a blind man.

  In May he fought a rematch with LaFontise and knocked him out so soundly the man could not recall his own name for a half-hour after being revived.

  THERE WAS A distant cast about him during this period of his life, except when he was fighting, and then he seemed near to insane in his ferocity. So ruthless was he even with sparring partners that the Goat ordered him to take it easy before they all quit. As a favor to Richardson he still worked as bouncer at the Queen three nights a week, but he now took a fiendish gusto in quelling disturbance, and the only way a troublemaker could leave under his own power was by outrunning him to the door. The natural fury of his violence had become a red wrath, and O’Connor and the Goat both knew its engine was incessant grief. But they knew too there was nothing for it. He would overcome the sorrow of losing Kate or he would not.

  The first time O’Connor saw him slip the Colt along with his clothes into a locker before a workout he said, “Why you carrying that around?” Ketchel said, “Protection.” O’Connor wanted to ask from what, but didn’t.

  Then came a fight against Curley Rue in a two-dog town called Gregson Springs. No one knew much about Rue except that he talked tough and claimed he’d had plenty of fights here and there, none of them on the official record. That he could take a punch is beyond dispute. Ketchel floored him at least once in eight of the first ten rounds, but Rue got up each time, and Ketchel grew enraged at his failure to knock him out. At the start of the eleventh he pinned Rue against the ropes and pounded him steadily for an everlasting fifteen seconds, continuing to make a jellied smear of his face even after it was obvious to everyone looking on that Curley Rue was out on his feet. When he finally stepped back to let him fall, Rue fell over like a plank.

  “Get up now, honyocker,” Ketchel said.

  Curley Rue was carried unconscious from the ring. A week or so after the fight, a rumor reached Bogan’s gym that he had died of the beating.

  O’Connor didn’t believe it. After several tries, he was finally able to get a phone call through to the promoter of the fight, who was also the local constable at Gregson Springs, and asked if it was true. The constable said he didn’t know. He said Rue had regained consciousness in the dressing room but wasn’t what anybody would call alert and he had trouble forming coherent phrases. At his own insistence he was helped to get dressed and transported to the depot and he got aboard the train for Lewiston. The next day, word started going around that he’d changed trains at Lewiston and shortly afterward died in the coach car. But nobody knew which train he’d been on or where he’d been headed or where he called home. None of the railroad agents knew of anybody having died on a train recently. Nobody even knew where the story got started.

  “Ten to one the guy ain’t any deader than you or me,” the constable said. “I figure it’s one of them stories somebody makes up for the sheer hell of it and next thing you know a whole bunch of people are swearing it’s true.” He promised to let O’Connor know if he should learn anything about the matter for certain.

  Ketchel didn’t see why O’Connor was so rattled. “It’s either true or it’s not. But if it’s true it ain’t like I murdered him. It was a legal fight.”

  “Of course it was, Stevie. That’s not the point.”

  “What is?” Ketchel said. “Nobody held a gun to the guy’s head and made him get in the ring.”

  “He might be dead, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And if he is, what’s anybody supposed to do about it?”

  O’Connor gestured in vague exasperation. “I don’t know!”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  O’Connor turned to Pete the Goat, who was paring his nails with a pocketknife. “What do you think?”

  The Goat pondered the question. He shifted the chaw in his cheek. “Well, I’ll tell you, one of the first fights I ever saw, bareknuckle I’m talking about, back when I was a kid, my uncle was working a corner and let me sit next to him. My uncle’s fighter was a fella called Moe, and in the fifth round he some way or other knocks an eye out the other guy’s head. Swear to God. There wasn’t much blood, a smear of it under the empty socket is all, and the eye’s hanging halfway down the guy’s cheek on some little stringy veins, I guess they were. You never saw nothing like it. Anyway, the ref stops the fight for a minute to try and figure out what to do. He asks the pug can he keep on fighting and the pug says yeah, but not with his eye hanging down like that because he can still see with it and it’s showing him his feet while the other eye’s showing him what’s in front of him and the whole thing’s terrible confusing and starting to make him dizzy, which I found easy to believe. His cornermen all have a close study of it and they don’t see any way to put the eye back in his head, so the pug tells them to just go ahead and pull it off and hold on to it so he can give it a proper burial later on. So they do, and the pug says that’s better, at least he’s not seeing in two different directions at once anymore. The ref asks is he sure he wants to go on with the match and the pug says yeah. Now, you’d figure a fighter with two eyes has got a pretty big advantage over a guy with just one, but turns out my uncle’s fighter, this guy Moe, had a delicate stomach. When the ref tells them to resume fighting, they swap a few jabs and Moe lands one on that empty socket, then steps back with this kinda sick look, then bends over and starts puking. And while he’s doing that, the one-eyed guy steps up and hits him with an uppercut from down around his ankles and Moe goes about a foot in the air and comes down like a sack of bricks. You coulda gone out and had yourself some supper and a cigar and still got back in plenty of time before he woke up.”

  He paused and spat a streak of tobacco. “Boxing’s a rough game. Kinda funny sometimes, kinda strange sometimes, kinda sad sometimes. But all the time rough. Like the man said, it ain’t for everybody. Anyhow, that’s what I think.” And went back to paring his nails.

  Ketchel grinned like a mule chewing briars.

  O’Connor glared from one to the other. “Jesus Harrison Christ, I ask a goddamn simple question….”

  IN TRUTH, KETCHEL was not sure how he felt about the rumor that Curley Rue had died in consequence of the beating he’d given him, and because he was not one to be unsure about himself the uncertainty made him angry and troubled his sleep for the next two nights. Then late the following afternoon came the news that James Jeffries had retired, the only heavyweight champ up to that time to retire undefeated. And Ketchel recalled a recurrent dream he used to have about Jeffries, a dream he’d never told to anyone except Kate.

  The particulars were always the same. It was a fight to the finish for the heavyweight title and they slugged it out all day and all night, beating each other bloody into the 212th round while spectators came and went and the faces at ringside changed continually. But at the bell to begin round 213, Jeffries could no longer muster the strength to raise his arms, and Ketchel set himself and threw a tremendous overhand at big Jeff’s unprotected jaw. But on every occasion of the dream, in the instant before the punch struck he woke up.

  Kate had not been uninformed about boxing and knew the might of Jim Jeffries and that at his fighting weight he outscaled Ketchel by sixty pounds, and she was aware of Ketchel’s veneration of him. She was delighted by the
dream. She said she believed the only reason he always woke up before the punch landed was that he respected Jeffries so much he wanted to spare him the humiliation of a knockout, even in a dream.

  “You think so?” Ketchel said. “Boy, wouldn’t that be something? To knock out the Boilermaker! I mean, that man is a goddamn killing machine.”

  “Well, so are you, Mr. Michigan Assassin.”

  “Yeah, but…Jeffries! He’s the biggest of them all.”

  Kate smiled and kissed him. “Oh baby, he’s no bigger than you, he’s just taller and weighs more.”

  Since Kate’s death, he had not had the Jeffries dream nor occasion to recall her response to it. But when he got the word of Jeffries’ retirement, he remembered. He lay in bed that night and remembered the dream and remembered telling Kate about it and remembered her wonderful kiss and bold green eyes and confident insistence that he was no less powerful nor even smaller than Jeffries, the physical difference between them be damned.

  The recollection was akin to recovering from a brief but unsettling episode of amnesia, a return to full awareness of who he was, and he suddenly felt like both laughing and crying. And did both. Then slept soundly.

  HE HAD SIX more fights in the rest of that spring and summer and won them all by knockout, fighting as fiercely as ever. And in two of those fights he had his opponent on the ropes and beaten to helplessness, at which point he both times ceased his attack and let the man fall for the count.

  Miss Molly Yates

  He met Molly Yates one morning when he took breakfast in the Silver Hill Café for the first time. Along with the family house, she had inherited the business after her parents were killed in a train derailment returning from a trip to Denver. She was tall and auburn-haired and twenty-five years old. She knew who he was before he introduced himself, having seen his picture in the local newspaper and heard her customers talk about him.

  He went to the Silver Hill for breakfast every morning thereafter, and they would converse for an hour or two every time. He learned she’d had a high school sweetheart she planned to marry, but two months after graduation and going to work in the mines he was killed in an explosion, and for almost a year she thought her heartbreak might kill her too.

  He’d known her for three weeks when she invited him to supper at her home on the following evening. He arrived freshly barbered and in a new suit. After they dined they repaired to the parlor and she played the Victrola and they danced. He thought she might slap him for his sudden kiss and was instead surprised by the fervor and finesse of her own kiss in return. She unpinned her hair and let it spill onto her shoulders in a dark abundance. And then they were naked in her candlelit bed.

  She afterward told him she had known several men, as she phrased it, since the death of her betrothed, though never again a miner. She had discovered the particular enjoyment of physical intimacy without emotional investment. She said she hoped he did not think her wanton.

  He said he thought she was just what the doctor ordered.

  “Well, in that case,” she said, rolling atop him, “I believe it’s time for your medicine.”

  IN NOVEMBER HE became an uncle when a daughter named Julia Josephina Kaicel, who’d been nicknamed Julie Bug, was born to John and Rebeka. Although the farm continued to provide a living for his mother and his brother’s family, Ketchel had in recent months been sending cash in his letters to her, and he now enclosed even more than usual, directing her to use the money to pay the legal costs of a divorce from Kaicel, who at this point had been missing without word for almost a year. He had spoken with an attorney in town and been advised that his mother very likely had grounds on the basis of desertion.

  HE COULD FEEL himself sharpening under the Goat’s rigorous regimen. His footwork quickened, his defenses improved. He was using his jab to better effect than ever. Still, his most potent asset, ever and always and excepting perhaps a nearly maniacal determination, was the flurry, a two-fisted salvo of punches one behind the other and linked tightly as a chain. A flurry at once punished an opponent and kept him on the defensive, unable to counterpunch in the midst of the attack. Few fighters owned both the hand speed and the reservoir of energy necessary for throwing more than a few effective flurries in the course of a long fight, but Ketchel’s hands were fast as vipers and he was a phenomenon of unflagging stamina. The locals liked to joke that while some fighters were pretty good at the old one-two, Ketchel was the master of the old one-two-three-four-five-six.

  He and Molly kept company whenever he wasn’t at the gym or working at the Copper Queen and she wasn’t taking care of business at the café. He repeatedly asked her to come see him fight but she steadfastly refused, saying she did not care to witness violence and had no desire to see him get hurt.

  “It’s usually the other fella gets hurt,” he said, trying for a laugh but not unaware that he was bragging, wanting to impress her.

  He fought six times in December, including three fights in a single week, and won them all by knockouts. Then asked Joe O’Connor when he thought he would be ready for Tommy Ryan, who had been the middleweight champion for the past seven years but who was now thirty-five years old and had not defended his title in a year.

  “I can take that old man,” Ketchel said.

  O’Connor said a lot of other middleweights felt the same way and all of them wanted a shot at Ryan. Ryan, however, didn’t seem inclined to accept anybody’s challenge, and the odds were that he would retire without ever fighting again.

  “Don’t worry, Stevie,” O’Connor said, “the breaks’ll be coming our way real soon. For now, we just stay sharp and ready.”

  Right, Ketchel said. But he’d earned a rest and meant to have it. He persuaded Molly to take a short vacation to San Francisco with him right after Christmas.

  IN CONTRAST TO Montana’s glacial winter, San Francisco’s December seemed almost mild, never mind the chill Pacific breeze. They took breakfast every morning in the glassed-in gallery of the hotel café. On their second day in town the newspaper front pages were full of the Idaho bombing murder of Frank Steunenberg, who had been hard on miners’ unions during his governorship of that state a few years earlier. The Industrial Workers of the World, commonly called the Wobblies or the “I-Won’t-Works” and widely regarded as a union of red agitators bent on the destruction of the American Way, was suspected in Steunenburg’s killing. Ketchel said he bet every miner in Butte was talking about this news. He began to read the report to her but she asked him to please don’t. The whole thing sounded too awful and she did not want to know about it.

  They had a wonderful few days. He showed her around this city he loved so dearly, taking her to the wharves, to the park, out to the beach where he’d spent his first night on the coast and been soaked by the tide. They ambled through a Chinatown so much larger than Butte’s she joked that she felt as though she’d been shanghaied.

  New Year’s Eve was their last night in town. Molly wore a stunning blue dress he’d bought for her in the city’s best dress shop. They dined at an elegant restaurant with blazing chandeliers and waiters in tuxedos. The champagne came to the table on a wheeled tray, in glass buckets of shaved ice. The dessert came in a dish of flames. They afterward went dancing in a posh club and joined in the raucous midnight cheering. They were both slightly tipsy as they started back to the hotel.

  They were on a deserted street of closed shops and only two blocks from the hotel, skyrockets still bursting in sprays of bright color, firecrackers banging loud as gunshots, when a pair of men stepped from the darkness of an alley and blocked the way. In the weak light of a distant corner lamppost Ketchel saw the small pistol one of them held and the long-bladed knife in the hand of the other.

  “Your money or your blood,” said the one with the gun.

  “Oh my God,” Molly said softly.

  “Anything you say, gents,” Ketchel said. “Easy does it. Here’s my wallet.”

  He reached into his coat and pulled out the Colt,
cocking it in the same motion, and shot the gunman in the throat, the muzzle-blast bright yellow. The man’s hat fell away and his gun clattered on the pavement as he staggered back and collapsed in the alley.

  Ketchel pointed the Colt at the other man and he dropped the knife and raised his hands. “Oh Christ, mister, not me.”

  “Get,” Ketchel said.

  The man turned and ran down the sidewalk and around the corner and was gone. The crack and pop of fireworks continued in the surrounding streets.

  He was exultant, marveling at his own coolness, at his steadiness of hand. At having pulled the gun without hesitation or doubt of purpose. He knelt beside the robber in the alley darkness and heard the man’s small gargling gasps. He could not make out his features.

  “You hear me?” Ketchel said. The man said nothing. Was likely unconscious, likely dying.

  “Can’t say you didn’t have it coming, Mac,” Ketchel said. He stood up and tucked away the revolver. He looked at the little pistol lying at the foot of the alley and chose to leave it there. Let the cops know the bastard had not been unarmed.

  Only now did he remember Molly. He turned and saw she was gone.

  Back at the hotel he found the room door locked from inside, and she did not respond to his rapping and request to open up. He crooned through the door that everything was all right, he understood why she’d run away, she didn’t have to be ashamed of being afraid of them.

  To which she answered in a small voice that she was scared of him. He was a frightening man and it scared her even more that she hadn’t seen the truth about him until this evening.