The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  “Good idea,” London said. “A safeguard for the white-race contingent.”

  Johnson grinned when London came out with Ketchel. “Why, Mr. Jack, I’m jubilated to beat the band you’re joining us. I have heard you got a liking for the colored girls.”

  London got in the back seat. “My favorite color in women is the same as yours, Johnson.”

  “What color’s that, Mr. Jack?”

  “Pretty.”

  Johnson laughed and gunned the motor and they roared away. He wore a driving duster and goggles and gauntlets, his cap visor pulled low. He had long fancied himself a driver of professional racing talent, and whenever he got behind the wheel he drove as though bent for a finish line. He often bragged that he’d gotten more speeding tickets than any man in America, even though he more often outran the police than not.

  Yelling to be heard over the rumble of the motor and the rush of air, he said the Packard was fun, but couldn’t compare to any of his racing cars, especially his ninety-horsepower Thomas Flyer, which he was going to race against the one and only Barney Oldfield at Sheepshead Bay, New York, in late October.

  “Man said didn’t want to race against no Ethiopian. So I bet him five thousand dollars and he quick say it’s a deal. Ain’t no paint in the world as white as money.”

  They sped over a winding, uneven road, the Packard pitching and yawing, raising great clouds of dust behind them. Ketchel with a tight grip on the door as they slued through curves. Johnson shouted a complaint about the lack of a sufficiently long straightway where he could get the car up to its top speed. He hollered that he wished driving fast didn’t make him so happy. “My teeth gets all muddy!” He let out a wolf howl with such gusto that Ketchel joined in, even as he held to the door for dear life. In the back seat, London covered his head with his coat and sipped from his flask and coughed in the swirl of dust.

  THE NEGRO QUARTER was a small settlement east of town between the river and the railroad tracks. Raul’s Riverfront Drink and Dance Emporium was the largest building in the hamlet and the only one of two stories. The sun had set and the rolled-down shade of every upstairs window was yellow with interior light against the twilit evening.

  Johnson parked the Packard between two horse wagons almost directly in front of the building. From its confines came the clamor of ragtime piano, raucous laughter, loud voices. They alit from the car and Johnson took off his driving outfit and brushed the dust from his bowler and set it at a rakish angle on his head, then checked the lay of his boutonnière and took up his walking stick and they went inside.

  The crowded room was cast in a dim amber light. The laughter and loud talk fell off and the two couples on the floor stopped dancing. Every eye fixed on the three of them. The skinny piano man continued playing but not as loudly nor as fast.

  None of the patrons had ever before seen Johnson in the flesh, but most of them recognized him on sight and in low voices informed those who did not. Some were obviously thrilled by his presence but some were as clearly displeased by the company he’d brought with him. Ketchel and London were the only whites in the room, and there were mutterings and glowers. Even through the pall of smoke and the odors of whiskey and sweat and the reek of urine from the piss trough behind the wooden partition at the rear of the room, Ketchel detected another smell, too, one he had come upon many times before in many other places. A smell of rank carnal pleasures and blood in high heat.

  A large man in a red-and-black pinstriped suit rose from a table and hurried over to them. His complexion as pale as Ketchel’s but his features distinctly Negroid. He introduced himself as Raul, the owner and manager. He congratulated Johnson on his victory that afternoon and said he was honored to have him in his establishment.

  “Well I don’t see nothing to be so goddamned honored about,” said a tall man at the bar. He wore a pink shirt with black garters and had a white scar on his chin. “You in the wrong place, Little Arthur.” It was a nickname that had trailed Johnson all the way from Galveston. “Ain’t no whitemeat chicken here.”

  “You hush your head, Louis,” Raul said.

  “That’s all right, Mr. Raul, the man just flapping his big African lips,” Johnson said, prompting sniggers through the room. He pointed his walking stick at the Louis fellow. “Not that it’s any your damn business, Sambo, but I come here to get me a rest from all that whitemeat chicken chasing after me. It ain’t the kinda problem you ever gonna have.”

  Hoots and cackles. The Louis fellow glared but held mute.

  “Reason I come here,” Johnson said, “is I was told this place got the prettiest gals in Nevada.” He made a show of slowly scanning the room, then smiled big and rolled his eyes. “And I’ll tell yall one damn thing. They wasn’t lying.”

  Laughter and a cry of “That’s right!” Flirty smiles and winks from the girls.

  “You welcome here, man,” somebody called out, “but what you doing with them ofays?”

  “They my guests, huckleberry, and this my party. If I’m welcome, they welcome.”

  “That fella there’s Stanley Ketchel, ain’t it?” somebody else said. “He the hunky boy knock you on your black ass!”

  A hum of impressed remarking rippled through the room. Ketchel heard a woman say, “That the boy knock Jack down?”

  “This the very fella,” Johnson said. “Stan the Man. Anybody fight good as him, least I can do is buy him a drink and a barbecue rib. Howsomever, looks like some yall don’t like it he’s here. Well, tell you what…any you mammyjammers wanta throw his white ass out, you welcome to try.”

  A low roll of laughter, a few men goading each other, one nudging and whispering to the Louis fellow, who cursed low and shoved the man away.

  “Now this here other fella,” Johnson said, nodding at London, “this Mr. Stanley’s big brother. Name Jack, too. He the one taught Mr. Stanley how to fight and he the only white man can kick his ass. Any you coons try giving him the boot, you be twice the fool.”

  More laughter. London stood with hands in pockets and his feet apart, his aspect one of easy confidence in the prowess Johnson claimed for him. In fact he was simply drunk.

  “Now yall looka here,” Johnson said. “You mighta heard I had me a significant discussion with Mr. James Jeffries this afternoon.” He smiled all around at the laughter, and somebody yelled, “He sure enough heard what you had to signify, too!”

  “I believe he did,” Johnson said. “And all that sweaty signifying with Mr. Jeff has done give me a elephantous thirst and a gargantuate hunger. Now if we done with all the bullshit, we’d like to sit down and have some of Mr. Raul’s famous ribs and about three four pitchers of cold beer and a bottle or two of the best rum in the house.”

  “Right this way, gentlemens!” Mr. Raul said, and led them to a table.

  And the piano man resumed banging at the keys with brio.

  THEIR COATS AND ties came off—Ketchel furtively pulling out his shirttails under the table to hide the revolver snugly tucked into his waistband. They rolled their sleeves. They gorged on pork ribs, London and Ketchel agreeing they were the best they’d ever put tooth to. Johnson said it was okay barbecue but he knew a dozen places in Texas where he could get better. Each man of them had his own pitcher of beer and drank directly from it rather than use a glass. Johnson had uncorked the bottle of rum and they now and then passed it among the three of them. London was also sipping rye from his flask. It seemed as if every few minutes he was compelled to visit the piss trough, and Johnson kidded him about having a bladder the size of a goober shell.

  Johnson produced three Cuban coronas and each man lit up. London commended him on his fine taste in cigars. Even before he’d finished eating, Johnson had been entreated by various girls to dance with them, and now he and Ketchel let themselves be led onto the floor, London begging off with a sore foot. Johnson was smooth and flashy but Ketchel was a dynamo, and he and his partner were soon engirt by a crowd of spectators whooping and yelling about the white boy’s nat
ural rhythm. When he demonstrated his expertise at dancing with two girls at once, there was howling admiration and piercing whistles.

  “Christ damn, Stanbo,” Johnson said, “where you learn to dance thataway?”

  “It’s an old Indian way of dancing,” Ketchel said. “I ever tell you I used to live with the Indians?”

  “That so? Which ones? The Heap Big Bullshit tribe?”

  “You’d been in that tribe, they’da made you chief.”

  They were joined at their table by a half-dozen girls. There weren’t enough chairs for them all, so each man had a girl on his lap. The one perched upon London took the skimmer off his head and put it on her own, cocking it over one eye. She said he had a nice head of hair and mussed it with her fingers. Her dress was cut low and the bare tops of her breasts were almost in his face and to the vast amusement of the table he was staring at them like a man entranced. He was very drunk.

  “You just gonna look, baby,” the girl said, “or you gonna do something?”

  Whereupon London ran his tongue along her cleavage and the table roared.

  The night progressed in a growing haze, in a din of ragtime piano and high hilarity, the sporadic crashings of glass followed by happy female shrieks.

  At some point London asked Johnson if he chased around with white women simply to provoke white society.

  “Oh man, hell no,” Johnson said. “What I care what white society think?”

  “It’s on accounta he can’t boss us like he do them narrow-ass whiteys,” one of the girls said.

  “Say girl, ain’t nobody rattle your cage,” Johnson said. “The real and actual reason, Mr. Jack, is that every colored girl I ever took up with done two-timed me, and I mean every single one. No pink-toes gal ever did.”

  “Poor lil Arthur,” the girl on his lap said, petting his smooth pate. “Us nigger bitches so bad to him.”

  “Damn right,” Johnson said, showing his gold teeth, running his hand over her flank.

  Ketchel wanted to know if it was true that some woman once ran out on him and took his clothes with her and then met up with a jockey and had the clothes cut down to fit him.

  “You talking about Queenie,” Johnson said. He shook his head and sighed. “I so crazy for that gal I went and married her. Back in Texas when I was a pup. Coupla months later she flew the coop. Then I come to hear she was shacked up in K. C. with this jockey call himself Kid somebody-or-other. So I go there and find the place but wasn’t nobody home. I bust open the door and take a look around and there’s a closet fulla clothes about the size for a boy, and then I see it’s my goddamn clothes all cut down. Right about then the jockey come running ’cause somebody gone to the barroom and told him his place was being robbed. I say where Queenie at and he say she long gone. Say for me to get out his house before he kick my ass. Little nigger four feet high, maybe ninety pounds. Didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or toss him out the window or what. I felt awful bad about Queenie, but there was nothing for it but go on back to Texas. You shoulda seen what she done to them clothes, though. Looked like something from a store for fancy midgets.”

  The girl on Johnson’s lap said, “That’s a real sad story, baby.”

  “It the kinda story I always have with you Negro womens.”

  “Yes, well, be all that as it may,” London said in a slight slur, “the fact is, Johnson, here you are, two-timing that woman you were telling me about, the one waiting for you in Frisco in saintly Caucasian forbearance while you’re sporting in this blackamoor den of iniquity, the woman you say you looovves so much. If you’re so keen on fidelity, sir, what are you doing here?”

  Johnson cut his eyes at Ketchel, “You hearing this drunk fool?” Then said to London: “Say man, I ain’t married to Etta, leastways not yet. You the one that’s married, Mr. Scribbles. What the hell you doing here?”

  “Me? Well…as I happen to be a writer, my good fellow, I am…doing investigative research, you see.”

  Ketchel and Johnson hooted and pounded the table with their fists and upset several drinks.

  “Oh honey,” the girl on London’s lap said, squirming her buttocks on his lap, “your research pokin its nose in my business real nice.”

  London’s face reddened but he joined in the laughter.

  At some still later point in the evening, London clambered up on a table, brandished a fist at the ceiling, and bellowed, “I would rather be ashes than dirt! Do you hear! Rather ashes than dirt!”

  Then lost his balance and fell onto a girl in a chair and they both crashed to the floor. She got up, cursing and kicking at him, but London was passed out. “Damn fool wanna be ashes,” she said, “I’ll put a match to his drunk ass.”

  “You do that and I’ll fry your ass in the fire,” Johnson said. He dragged London over beside the piano and told the player to keep an eye on him.

  None of them knew of London’s profound grief for his third daughter, who had died only two weeks before at the age of thirty-six hours. He and Charmian had named her Joy.

  The next time Ketchel came off the dance floor to quench his thirst, the girl he’d been dancing with sat on his lap and felt something hard nudge her hip. She said, “Is that a gun in your pants, sugar, or you just got a good idea?” She pulled up his shirttail. “Oh lordy.”

  Johnson caught a glimpse of the revolver as Ketchel yanked the shirttail back over it. “Goddamn, Stanbo. You come all set for us spearchuckers. Tell me something, and no bull-shit. You ever shoot anybody?”

  “Just shoot, or shoot dead?”

  “Hell man, it ain’t serious shooting if ain’t nobody dead.”

  Ketchel cut his eyes at the girls sitting with them, then back at Johnson, his aspect gone shrewd.

  Johnson leaned over the table and said in low cajole: “Aw, come on, man, let’s hear it. These gals ain’t gonna rat you to no po-lice.”

  “Your secret safe with us, baby,” the girl on Ketchel’s lap whispered in his ear, stroking his nape.

  Ketchel looked sidelong to right and left. He leaned across the girl and held his fist toward Johnson and slowly opened one finger and then another, and wiggled them.

  “And I mean deader’n yesterday.”

  Johnson tilted back in his chair and showed his gold teeth. “Just two?”

  HE DID NOT remember having gone upstairs but found himself in a large room with two beds, himself and a girl in one, Johnson and a girl in the other, everybody naked and going at it like wrestlers, the bedsprings screeching, frames scraping the floor, thumping the walls. The girls were lovely octoroons with skin the color of honey and nipples dark as chocolate. His was named Rubella.

  They were paused in their sporting when Johnson decanted a dollop of rum into his girl’s navel and invited Ketchel to come on over and have a drink. Ketchel knelt beside the bed and lapped at the little amber pool and the girl’s belly nudged at his nose as she giggled. Johnson poured more rum and it ran in a rivulet into her private hair and Ketchel lapped after it. The girl squealed and clamped her thighs on his ears.

  Until now none of them had noticed his tattoo, but positioned as he was, it could hardly be overlooked. The Rubella girl whooped and pointed, and Johnson said, “My, my, Mr. Stan, if that ain’t a real exotical memento you got there.”

  Ketchel sat up, feeling himself blush. “That damn thing,” he said.

  The other girl wanted to know what they were talking about, so Ketchel stood up and showed her. They insisted on knowing how he came by it, and he told them about the Arapaho Sisters.

  “Whoo-eee, honey,” the Rubella girl said, “you farmer boys go to a city and you just turn into some kinda wild things!”

  She fetched a lipstick from the dresser and made Ketchel lie on his stomach so she could draw a similar if much less artfully rendered heart on his other buttock. She wrote “Rubella” above the arrow, though the name carried well outside the boundary of the heart and was mostly illegible, and below the arrow wrote “Maxine.” She gave Ketchel a small hand mi
rror so he could have a look. Who was Maxine, he asked.

  “Me, sugar,” the other girl said.

  Ketchel said he wasn’t sure it was legal to have the name of a girl on your ass if you hadn’t done anything more with her than drink rum from her belly. Maxine said he’d drunk rum from more places than her belly but she knew what he meant, and she pulled him down onto the bed, saying they better make sure her name was on that ass all nice and legal. Johnson and the Rubella girl repaired to the other bed.

  Sometime after midnight they were all hungry again, and the girls put on robes and went downstairs to fetch something to eat. Johnson and Ketchel sat on the edge of the bed, passing the last of the rum between them. Ketchel got the final swallow and set the empty bottle on the floor.

  “Don’t know about you, Stanbo, but I’ve had a time or two worse than this.”

  “It’s always best right after you win.”

  “You oughta know, many as you won.”

  “Except it ain’t true and you know it. The best is in the doing. That’s always the best, the doing. All the rest of it’s just…I don’t know…waiting. Waiting to go back in and do it again.”

  Johnson smiled and regarded him sidelong. “Ain’t good to talk it too much.”

  “Yeah, I know. Give me a rematch, Jack.”

  Johnson’s smile faded. He sighed and rubbed his face. “Oh man, I thought we done settle that.”

  “We didn’t. Give me another go.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Look, you gotta give me another shot.”

  “Man, I ain’t gotta do a goddamn thing but be a nigger all the way to the grave.”

  “Jack, I’m asking you.”

  Johnson stared at the floor. Then at the paneled wood wall. Then got up and went to it and tapped it with his knuckles.

  “Come here check this out.”

  “What?”

  “Just come do it.”

  Ketchel went over and rapped the wall with his knuckles. It was made of some kind of dense wood. The panels were about six inches wide and joined in tongue-and-groove fashion.