The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  And they all burst out laughing, pounding the table, stamping the floor, heads back and teeth bared, laughing till their bellies cramped.

  AROUND THIS TIME he met a hatcheck girl named Jewel. He told her she had a lovely name and started to introduce himself but she said she knew who he was. “The minute you walked in here, everybody was saying your name and that you’re some kind of boxing champion.”

  Ketchel apprised her that he was the middleweight champion of the world.

  “Well, I don’t know very much about boxing,” she said, “but you must be pretty good at it to be a champion.”

  “I’m pretty good, yeah.”

  She was slender and her shirtwaist clung to a fetching bosom. Her eyes were gray blue, her waist-length hair light brown and braided and adorned with a blue ribbon. She had a hint of Southern accent he thought delightful.

  When he asked her last name she seemed reluctant to say. “What’s the big secret?” he said. “Is it Vanderbilt? You the black sheep?”

  Worse than that, she said, it was Bovine. She had the good humor to chuckle along with him. He said the name sure didn’t fit her.

  She thanked him for the compliment and said she supposed she should be grateful it wasn’t something worse. “Like the poor daughter of that governor in Texas named Hogg. He went and named her Ima, can you imagine?”

  Ketchel said she was making that up, but she swore she was not.

  “Well, if you don’t like your name, why don’t you change it?”

  She gaped at him. “Change it? But…it’s my name. You can’t just go and change your name.”

  He said you sure could, lots of people did it. Maybe so, she said, but it didn’t change the truth of what their real name was and it didn’t change who they really were. So why do it? Changing your name was just a kind of lie.

  He raised his hands and said, “You win, girl.” Then asked if he could take her out on the town sometime.

  “I’m not…that kind of girl, Mr. Ketchel.” He followed her gaze toward the ballroom door where Britt and the two chippies they’d brought were waiting for him.

  “Of course not,” Ketchel said. “That’s why I’d like to squire you sometime.”

  “Squire? My, how elegant.” She said she’d consider it.

  The next day he went back to the club to see her. She said she was still considering. The next day he was back again and she said all right, she’d have coffee with him but that was all.

  So they had coffee and talked. He learned she was from Cumberland, Maryland, and had been raised by an aunt and uncle after being orphaned at age ten. She’d come to New York with her best friend because they both wanted a more exciting life than they could ever hope to have in Cumberland. They had also considered going to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore and Philadelphia, but they figured if they wanted excitement they might as well go to the most exciting city of all. They shared a room in a boardinghouse near Central Park. He walked her home and bid her goodbye on the sidewalk.

  The day after that he called on her and they went for a stroll in the park. The day after that he took her to supper. The day after that he took her to supper again and then persuaded her to come see the hotel where he lived and have coffee with him in the café next door. When they’d had their coffee he persuaded her to come up and see the view of the city from his room. When they were in his room and looking out his window he put his arm around her and drew her to him and kissed her.

  “Please, Stanley,” she said. But returned his next kiss as well. “Please,” she said, almost panting now, “I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “Of course not.” He gently steered her toward the bed.

  He’d known she would prove no virgin and she didn’t. She was in fact ardently adroit.

  Some time later, as they lay holding each other in the dark, she whispered, “I have to tell you, Mr. Ketchel, you really know how to squire a girl.”

  “Well, now, I must say you squire pretty good yourself, Miss Bovine.”

  “Oh, you!” She swatted his arm, and they giggled like naughty kids.

  When he woke in the morning she was not in the room but her clothes were on the chair and his robe was missing from its hook behind the door, so he knew she had gone down the hall to the bathroom. The sun was bright against the yellow window shade and the room already warm. He kicked off the bedcovers and was drowsing on his side when he heard the door open and close behind him. He felt her sit on the edge of the bed, but she did not lie down nor say anything.

  “Having morning regret?” he said.

  “No, I’m reading.”

  “Reading? Reading what?”

  “Your behind.”

  He jerked the sheet up and rolled over to face her. “Ah hell…that thing…it, ah…” He made a vaguely dismissive gesture.

  “I bet there’s a good story behind that work of art.”

  “Not one you’ll hear from me.”

  “I believe you’re blushing, champ.”

  “Hell I am. I’m just getting hot for you again, toots.”

  She screeched with laughter as he yanked open the robe and pulled her to him.

  ONE EVENING, TALKING with a barman who had not recognized him and whom he’d told his name was Tex Halliday, he learned about a poker game in a joint a few blocks north and over by the Hudson. He said he was interested, so the barman made a telephone call, then told him there’d be a chair for him at that night’s game and gave him directions to get there. He wore the most lavish handlebar mustache Ketchel had ever seen. Ketchel tried to thank him with two dollars but the man wouldn’t accept it.

  Back at the hotel he asked Britt if he wanted to go along, but Willus said no, it was no neighborhood in which to venture. “I don’t want you going there, either.”

  “Listen, Willie, I lived in Butte for three years. There ain’t a street in New York rough as that town.”

  But Britt was adamant. The last thing they needed was the kind of trouble to be found in waterfront joints.

  “Yeah, okay, you know the town better than I do,” Ketchel said. “Guess I’ll just get me a beer and turn in early.” Then went downstairs and out the door and hopped aboard a streetcar.

  The game was in a pool hall in an industrial neighborhood of darkened warehouses locked down for the night. The air smelled ripely of the river. The hall was doing meager business that evening, only two of its dozen tables in use. The players all stared at him when he entered. One asked his name and he said Halliday, and the man pointed toward a door in the rear. It opened to a smoky room lighted only by the funnel-shade lamp hanging above a lone table where six men sat at cards. There was one empty chair. The dealer, shaggy-haired and wearing a green visor that shadowed his eyes, nodded him toward it. The door he’d entered was the only one. There were no windows.

  When the hand in progress was finished, the dealer told Ketchel, “Five card stud, nothing wild, two-buck ante, no bet limit. Strictly cash. I’m the only dealer, I don’t play.”

  Ketchel nodded and was dealt into the next hand.

  Conversation was minimal, the dominant sounds the faint clacking of pool balls in the other room, the dealer’s riffling shuffles, bets and raises and calls for cards, an occasional profanity as a man tossed in his hand.

  An hour later, Ketchel was down more than a hundred dollars and was certain the dealer and one of the other players, a man in a checked suit, were working as a team. And figured as well that the barman who’d steered him here was probably in cahoots with them. He was both outraged and excited. Play him for a patsy, would they?

  He presumed the dealer and the checked-suit man were armed, and so had to pick his moment carefully. He waited until the end of the next hand, and as the checked suit leaned over the table to rake in his winnings and the dealer began to gather the cards, Ketchel eased his right hand off the table and under his jacket for the Colt at his left hip. His intention was to get the drop on them and exact a fine for being cheated—all the money he’d lost
plus all of theirs seemed fair enough. But the dealer was quicker of eye than Ketchel had guessed and made a grab into his vest the moment Ketchel’s hand left the table. A derringer was just clearing his vest as Ketchel shifted in the chair and fired twice from under the table. In the close confines of the room the gunshots were ear-stopping and cards jumped from the sudden holes in the tabletop and one bullet shattered the dealer’s elbow and the other removed a portion of his cheekbone and the derringer thunked on the floor as Ketchel whirled toward the checked suit who was raising a five-shot bulldog. Both pistols fired and Ketchel felt a soft brush at his ear and the checked suit pitched over backward and took the chair down with him. The bulldog round punctured the chin of John L. Sullivan, squared off on a wall poster behind Ketchel, who would later see in his hotel mirror the minute nick in the top rim of his ear.

  His heart was heaving. The dealer was slumped over the table, holding his bloody face with his good arm and swearing hugely. Ketchel stood up in the acrid haze with the Colt cocked. The man in the checked suit lay awkwardly on his side in a widening mat of blood. His mouth was moving without sound and his eyes were very bright and seemed to be searching the ceiling and then they went still and the light drained out of them.

  The other five players sat unmoving, their eyes on Ketchel and their hands spread wide on the table. Not a man of them seemed unfamiliar with precarious moments.

  He kicked the bulldog across the floor and then the derringer, then told one of the men to take off his coat and put all the money on it and tie it up tight. The man hastened to do it.

  Ketchel tucked the bundled coat under his arm and said, “They were cheating you boys, too, but I’m the one did something about it, so I’m the one gets the prize.” He nodded at the maimed dealer. “You might settle up with him.”

  He opened the door slightly and peeked into the front room and saw no one. On the edge of one of the pool tables were two undrained mugs of beer and a smoking cigarette.

  He went out and closed the door behind him, then hurried across the poolroom, holding the revolver close against his leg. He paused at the front door and took a deep breath and stepped outside, set for anything.

  The street lay deserted. He jogged four blocks before coming to a corner where a trolley was making a stop, and he hopped aboard.

  He got off a block from the saloon where the barman had tipped him to the game, then went around to the saloon’s alley door. The door was kept locked from inside except when the saloon waitress periodically opened it to check for neighborhood children who nightly presented themselves to have beer buckets filled for the men of the house. The alley was dank and reeked of slops and garbage and the cobbles were slick under his shoes. Two small boys were sitting on the stoop under the back door’s dim overhead light with their empty growlers and chucking brickbats at a cluster of garbage cans to try to flush out the rats rustling within. Ketchel joined the game, heaving a whole brick and knocking over a can, its rancid contents spilling together with a pair of rats the size of weasels. The boys whooped and hurled rocks at them as they scooted into the darkness.

  The doorlock rattled and the door swung open and the blowsy waitress said, “Growlers?”

  Ketchel hopped up on the stoop ahead of the boys and pushed her back into a storeroom. “Say now, what’s this?” she said. “I’ll fetch the barman with his shillelagh on ye.”

  “The big lug with the handlebars?” Ketchel said.

  “Big enough for the likes of you.”

  “Do it,” Ketchel said.

  She went to the door between the storeroom and the barroom. “Terrence!” she called loudly to be heard over the player piano within. “It’s a bully one here.”

  He faintly heard the barman curse and tell her to come tend the counter.

  “You’ll be sorry now, bucko, you don’t scoot away quick,” she said, and vanished into the barroom.

  He set his bundle on a crate and stood to one side of the door with his back to the wall. The boys were watching from the alley doorway.

  The barman entered with a blackthorn in hand. “All right, now, who’s the hardcase asking for it?”

  Ketchel sprang, seizing the shillelagh with one hand and driving fast, hard punches to the barman’s kidney with the other. The man grunted and sagged to his knees and Ketchel wrested the club away. He gripped it like a bat and swatted him in the ornate moustache with a glassy pop and teeth rang off a stack of beer mugs shelved across the room. The barman crashed onto his side and groaned wetly.

  One of the boys said, “Wow-wee!”

  Ketchel grinned at them and said he hoped the son of a bitch had a taste for soup because he was going to be living on it for a while. He handed the club to one of the boys, snatched up his bundle, and made away.

  The money in the coat amounted to less than nine hundred dollars, a pittance compared to his recent purses, but it seemed to him as sweet as any money he had ever come by.

  The next morning at breakfast Britt asked if he’d slept well. “Like a top, Willie boy, like a top,” Ketchel said.

  FOR ALL HIS good-timing in the nightclubs and with Jewel Bovine, he had been training daily, preparing for another go against O’Brien, working hard to perfect certain tactics meant to offset Philly Jack’s superior footwork and keep him within punching range.

  But it was now May and O’Brien had still not agreed to a rematch. Britt had been trying to pressure him through various sportswriters in New York, telling them O’Brien was afraid to fight Ketchel again after what Steve had done to him the last time, and some of the hacks had begun asking in print if Britt might be right.

  O’Brien scoffed at the notion. In an interview with a Philadelphia reporter he said that although Mr. Ketchel had landed a spectacularly lucky but inconsequential punch in the last few seconds of their bout, it hardly outweighed the fact that he had out-boxed Mr. Ketchel throughout the match.

  “Inconsequential?” Ketchel said, when Britt read the passage to him and the Goat. “That inconsequential punch knocked him colder’n a damn mackerel!”

  “Oily-tongue son of a bitch,” Britt said.

  “I notice he didn’t say anything about fighting you again,” the Goat said.

  All the while Ketchel was trying to get another fight with O’Brien, Billy Papke was badgering Ketchel for a rematch of their own. Frustrated by O’Brien’s persistent stalling, Ketchel finally said okay to another go with the Thunderbolt. A twenty-rounder on the fifth of July in Colma, California, where they’d had their second and third fights and would draw the biggest gate.

  A FEW DAYS after the news went out that Ketchel had signed to fight Papke, O’Brien’s manager, Butch Pollack, sent a wire offering Ketchel a rematch on three conditions. The fight had to be in June, in Philly, and for only six rounds. That was the deal. Nonnegotiable. Take it or leave it. Britt and Ketchel had one day to give him an answer or the offer would be withdrawn.

  “Those clever bastards figure you won’t fight O’Brien just a few weeks before having to take on Papke,” Britt said. “And if you don’t, O’Brien’s off the hook for a rematch. He can say he made you an offer and you said no and as far as he’s concerned that’s that.”

  “But in case you say okay,” the Goat said, “he wants a short fight. He knows you can wear him down in ten rounds, but figures he can keep away from you for six.”

  “Goddamnit, who they think they are, telling us take it or leave it,” Britt said. “To hell with them! You’re the champ. You don’t have a thing to prove against a washed-up—”

  “Tell them we’ll take it,” Ketchel said.

  Resolutions

  At the weigh-in, O’Brien was his usual silver-tongued self. “Well, my good fellow, we meet again. I’ve no doubt this engagement will prove as lively as our previous one, but I assure you I have no intention of getting resin in my hair this time.”

  The reporters smiled and jotted their notes.

  “Good to see you, too, Philly,” Ketchel said.

>   In the first minute of the fight, Philly Jack understood he was being bested at his own quick-footed game by this younger man with the harder punch. Ketchel had learned the trick of cutting off the ring and blocking O’Brien’s escape moves, each time jolting him with lefts and rights to the head, with stinging hooks to the ribs. At the end of the first round, Philly Jack’s face was a mess. Goodly sums had been wagered that he would still be on his feet after a mere six rounds, but when he went down for the third time in round two, it was apparent to every witness that an early end was at hand. Ten seconds into the third round Ketchel floored him with a right lead to the head, then stood looming as the ref counted and Jack struggled to his feet. The moment O’Brien came upright, Ketchel hooked him with a combination to the belly and jaw, and he crumpled again. Barely conscious and functioning instinctively, O’Brien tried mightily to rise as Ketchel stood by, set to hit him. Sensing an imminent killing if Philly Jack should make it up, referee Jack McGuigan stopped counting and waved an end to the fight, ruling it a knockout. Nobody protested the uncommon action. Every man present had seen Ketchel poised over the struggling O’Brien like a slaughterhouse worker with a ready hammer.

  Meeting with reporters after he was showered and dressed, Ketchel was asked if he thought Philly Jack was still as smart a fighter as he used to be.

  “Oh sure,” Ketchel said. “Philly’s a real smart fighter. He was thinking all time. And all the time he was thinking I was socking the shit out of him.”

  The hacks laughed and wrote it down, though of course “shit” would yield to such printable euphemisms as “dickens” or “heck” or “tar.” It was such a swell quote that in years to come it would be attributed to at least a dozen other boxers.

  If the referee had let Philly Jack continue, another reporter inquired, would Ketchel have eased up his attack so as not to cripple O’Brien, or maybe even worse?