The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  “Look here,” Johnson said. “I want you to punch it hard as you can. Right in the middle there. I mean give it your sweetest lick.”

  “How come?”

  “Just do it. Your hardest lick. Go on.” Johnson stepped back to give him room.

  “You think I won’t?”

  “Quit talking and do it.”

  Ketchel set himself. Then lunged and hit the wall with a straight right that had everything in it. The impact sounded like a hammer blow and he felt the wood crack and knew he’d hit it just right. The indentation was almost an inch deep where the knuckles had struck, and it tapered out to the diameter of his fist.

  “Hell of a punch, little man. Lemme see you hand.”

  The middle knuckle was disjointed and the hand swelling fast. It hurt like hell but he could wiggle the middle finger and knew the knuckle wasn’t broken but only jammed.

  “What in the world…?” The girls were at the door, each bearing a tray with plates of ribs and bottles of beer.

  “Yall be still,” Johnson said. He faced the paneling and drew a deep breath. Then struck the wall with such sudden force the Maxine girl flinched and a bottle of beer fell off her tray and shattered to foamy shards.

  The panel was buckled two inches deep. The wood cracked and splintered almost all the way through. The full indentation half again as large as the one made by Ketchel.

  “Lord Jesus,” the Rubella girl said.

  Johnson held up his right hand for Ketchel to see. Three of the knuckles were skinned but none jammed.

  “Think about this, little man.”

  “Ah hell, Jack, this doesn’t—”

  “You think on it good. And then live with it.”

  “I don’t want to think about it, goddamnit, I want—”

  “I know what you wants, fucker! You can’t have it. You can not beat me. Not today, not tomorrow, not never. You can’t, man. I know it’s just killing you you can’t and I know you willing to die trying to make it be different. But see…I ain’t looking to have to kill you just ’cause you willing.”

  They held glares for a moment. And then Johnson feinted with the left and grazed him above the ear with an open right hand as Ketchel drew back with his fists up.

  Johnson smiled at him and turned up his palms. Then turned to the girls and said, “Yall gonna stand there gawking at our peckers for the rest of the night or you gonna bring that chow on in here before we starve to damn death?”

  WHEN HE WOKE in the morning he was the only one in the room. He was hungover and his hand hurt, the knuckles swollen tight and blue, but he could still work the fingers. The shade was up and pale yellow light slanted through the window.

  His revolver was on the washbasin table and had a lipstick jammed in the muzzle. He checked his pants and his money was still there, then put them on and went to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Behind one of the doors a saxophone played a soft melancholy tune he didn’t recognize.

  After dressing he went downstairs and found the two Jacks having coffee in the kitchen and a fat Negro woman frying ham and eggs at the stove. Johnson grinned and winked at him, seeming utterly refreshed. London was in a wretched state. His features blurred and complexion waxy, his eyes weighted with dark bags. Ketchel sat down and accepted coffee from the woman and saw that she was missing parts of the last two fingers of one hand.

  “Our man London here look like he wearing the thorny hat this morning, don’t he?” Johnson said. “Look about near to being the ashes he all the time talking about.”

  “Go to hell,” London said, his voice cracking.

  After breakfast Johnson drove them back to town, he and Ketchel harmonizing on “Frankie and Johnny” and “In the House of Too Much Trouble” as they barreled down the dusty road. London sat slumped in the rear seat and said nothing until they arrived in the alley behind the hotel, then shook Johnson’s hand and said he was a hell of a fighter and would probably be champion for a long time.

  Ketchel waited till London went inside. “Listen, Jack—”

  “You listen. I hear tell that Papke fella saying he the middleweight champ because you been fighting over the limit ever since you went against me. Now what you got to do, Stanbo, is set the man straight. You the middleweight champ. Be what you is.”

  “Jack—”

  “Be it, man,” Johnson said. Then flashed his gold smile and raised his fist in farewell, gunned the Packard down the alley, turned the corner, and was gone.

  Ambush Country

  He spent the next two weeks by himself in San Francisco. He went to the wharves before sunrise every day and watched the fishing boats set out, went back in the late afternoon to see them return, riding lower in the water with their catch. He ran in the park before breakfast. He exercised in the children’s playground, chinning himself on the crossbeam of the swing set as kids swung on either side of him and kept loud count of his repetitions. He straddled a seesaw and worked it up and down by shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He attended stage shows. He dined on seafood every evening. He walked the hilly streets and explored those areas of the city he was unfamiliar with. He went to the apartment house where the Arapaho Sisters had lived, hoping they’d changed their minds about marrying the rich brothers and stayed put, but when he rapped on the door he found that a young Russian family was now living there.

  One day he went to the zoo. When he arrived at the panther cage, the black beast within was pacing back and forth from one stone wall to the other, observed by a dozen spectators lined at a rail some three feet from the bars. Then the cat caught sight of Ketchel and came up to the bars and held him in an unblinking yellow gaze. A boy hissed and clucked his tongue to try to attract the cat’s attention, but its eyes would not leave Ketchel. When Ketchel started to walk toward the next cage the cat moved with him. He stopped and the cat stopped. “What the hell, Mac,” a man said, “you got a trout in your pocket?” Ketchel stepped to one side and the cat moved too. He sidled the other way and so did the cat. The panther paced with him to the end of the cage and then Ketchel whirled and sprinted in the other direction and the cat sprang with him and reached the wall in three strides and went halfway up and came down heavily on its feet as spectators shrilled and scampered away from the rail. Ketchel walked back slowly and the cat kept pace. The onlooking crowd now larger, its amazement louder. Some among them tossed peanuts and pretzels and chunks of ice at the cat to try to attract its attention, but the cat was oblivious to it all, even when a piece of ice hit it in an eye and made it blink rapidly for a moment. Ketchel told them to stop, but they paid him no mind, and there were too many to force them all to cease. So he said hell with it and walked away, following a long curving pathway until it passed out of sight of the panther cage, and then his blood jumped at the cat’s piercing scream. There were shrieks and laughter. He had a moment of wishing the beast might break free of its bars and tear into the bastards fang and claw. He dreamt that night of unblinking yellow eyes with pupils like black pits.

  ALL THE WHILE he was in San Francisco, he thought about Jack Johnson. And the more he thought about him, the more certain he was he would beat him the next time.

  You’ll fight smarter next time, he told himself. You’ll wait for the right opening, just like before, but next time you’ll stay in control. When you drop him next time and he’s ready for the kill, you’ll finish him, but you’ll do it right. No wild and wooly.

  No leading with your chin like some barroom chump.

  You’ll nail him on the chin. You’ll make damn sure of the chin.

  Christ, if only you’d nailed him on the chin. The jaw, at least.

  That wall business doesn’t mean a damn thing.

  A chin’s not a goddamn wall. Neither’s a jaw.

  He’s going to New York at the end of October for a car race. You’ll go to New York then, too. And put it to him straight.

  Face to face. Man to man. You’ll tell him you thought about it like he said. And you want it. />
  What if he says no?

  You won’t take no for an answer.

  What if he still says no?

  Seventy-thirty split his way, eighty-twenty, winner take all, whatever he wants.

  What if he still says no?

  What the hell, he can have every nickel, win or lose. You’ll fight him for nothing. He can’t turn that down.

  What if he still says no?

  You’ll call him a coward. You’ll call him a goddamn yellow coward sonofabitch in every newspaper in the country.

  What if he still…

  He won’t! He’s got to say yes!

  Man, I ain’t got do a damn thing but be a nigger all the way to the grave…

  He telephoned Wilson Mizner in New York and told him he wanted no fight but with Johnson. Mizner sighed and said he had just seen the film of the Johnson-Jeffries match. “Jeffries is a monster, kid, and the jig played with him like—”

  “I was there, Bill, I know how it went. Look, I’m just telling you don’t waste your time setting up a fight for me with anybody else.”

  “You sure, kid? Billy Papke’s people have been at me for another fight. Bastard’s claiming he’s the champ now but he’s willing to fight you again to settle it once and for all. Christ, we could make—”

  “Piss on Billy Papke! I can whip Billy Papke once a week. It’s Johnson I want.”

  Another sigh. “The thing is, champ, and no offense, but after what he did to you last time, and considering what he did to Jeffries since then, well, I mean, I don’t see much of a gate for a rematch.”

  You don’t see much of a payday for yourself is what you don’t see, Ketchel thought.

  “Are you listening to me, Bill? I will not fight anybody else, only Johnson. On any terms he wants, I don’t care. You get me?”

  The biggest sigh yet. “I hear you, kid.”

  That settled, Ketchel departed San Francisco for Pine Lake to wait for October.

  A WIRE WAS waiting from the colonel:

  NO JOY IN MUDVILLE RE JEFFRIES STOP BUSY WITH BIZ BUT SEE YOU SEPT STOP TELL ME MICHIGAN OR NY STOP RPD.

  Ketchel wired back that he would still be in Michigan in September and was looking forward to seeing him.

  The remaining summer passed pleasantly. He hired a cook and had his family over to dinner several times a week. His mother seemed happier and healthier than ever. Barzoomian’s business throve. John and Rebeka were content with their life on the farm, and Julie Bug, soon to be five years old, was already reading better than children twice her age.

  He ran ten miles every day before sunrise. He shadowboxed for an hour, constantly on his toes, now gliding like a dancer, now darting like a cat, his fists moving so fast you could hear them whipping through the air. He pounded the heavy bag with punches that popped like gunshots. He worked the speed bag with a steady racketing rhythm, his fists pumping like pistons. In the afternoons he did calisthenics and rowed on the river and took long walks in the woods. He ate well and slept soundly.

  And he thought about Jack Johnson.

  The colonel arrived, and they went fishing on Lake Michigan in his boat. They went to the cabin in the Manistee and hunted, never mind that it wasn’t legal season. They had long talks over campfires and across the cabin table. Ketchel drank sparingly and the colonel commended him for it. He said drink was beginning to make him melancholy in his advancing years, that lately he’d found himself wishing he were young enough to go down to Mexico where a hell of a revolution was about to break loose. He’d heard the rebels were already passing out flyers in El Paso to try to recruit American dynamiters and machine gunners. All that hullabaloo down there reminded him of his time with Teddy in Cuba and how it had been the most fun he’d ever had in his life.

  “It goes by too fast, son,” the colonel said. “You got no idea, not at your age. You wake up one day and wonder where it all went.”

  Ketchel agreed it was high time he paid Missouri a visit. In the second week of September Dickerson wired his ranch foreman that he would be home soon and was bringing with him his dearest friend and world middleweight champion, Stanley Ketchel.

  THEY STOPPED for two days in Jefferson City, the capital, where the State Democratic Convention was being held. Dickerson had numerous friends in politics and had a standing invitation to the celebration party that closed each year’s convention.

  “All those bigwigs will want to shake your hand,” the colonel said. “Hope you don’t mind me showing you off some.”

  Ketchel said of course not.

  The party began that afternoon on the enormous lawn behind the biggest hotel in town, its privacy protected by high brick walls and shaded by lofty elms. Some seven hundred people were in attendance. The weather was fine and bright. Every guest was given a silk tag with his name on it to pin to his lapel. There were a half-dozen open-sided, red-white-and-blue-striped tents set up on the lawn, each with its own bar and bandstand. The air was dense with the ragtime tunes of Negro ensembles, with laughter and loud talk, with the smells of roasting meats and charcoal fires. The colonel steered Ketchel from tent to tent and one political luminary to another, every man of them proud to make the champion’s acquaintance and welcome him to Missouri, many of them remarking on how close he had come to knocking out Johnson. Ketchel smiled and nodded and shook countless hands, retaining few of the names they belonged to.

  Then they were at the bar of another tent and Dickerson was embracing and slapping the back of still another senator whose name Ketchel didn’t catch, a lean and weathered man who was descended from a family of “damn jayhawkers,” according to Dickerson, before they finally had the good sense to move to Missouri. Dickerson addressed the senator as “Sarge,” for such had been the man’s rank when they soldiered together in Cuba. Alongside the senator was a man in a black suit and cowboy boots, a pale, wide-brimmed Western hat tilted forward to shadow his eyes. He held a drink in one hand and the thumb of the other was loosely hooked on the front of his belt, his posture somehow suggesting both ease and readiness for quick movement. His name tag was folded and stuffed in his breast pocket. After shaking Ketchel’s hand, the senator turned to the man in the Western hat, saying, “I’d like you fellas to meet my special guest at this shindig. This here’s the one and only Emmett Dalton, the last of the old-time badmen.”

  Dalton gave the senator an unsmiling sidewise glance and shook the colonel’s hand, saying, “Colonel,” then shook Ketchel’s. “Pleasure, champ.”

  Ketchel’s heart was hopping with a kind of excitement he’d not felt since boyhood.

  A young man appeared at the senator’s side and whispered into his ear. “Oh, all right, I’ll talk to him,” the senator said, and turned to Dickerson. “You might want to be in on this, Pete. It’s to do with the timber bill for next session.”

  The colonel told Ketchel to have fun, he would search him out later, then left with the senator.

  Dalton signaled a barman for another drink. He looked at Ketchel and said, “Bourbon?” Ketchel nodded and Dalton held up two fingers to the barman.

  They stood leaning against the bar and sipped from their drinks without conversation for a minute before Ketchel said, “It’s my pleasure to know you, too, Mr. Dalton.” And immediately felt stupid.

  Dalton raised his glass toward him in a silent toast.

  Another half-minute passed before Ketchel said, “It’s none of my business, but…well…I thought they put you in prison for life.”

  “They did,” Dalton said. “Felt like it, too, for fifteen years.”

  “You got a pardon?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “What do you do now? For a living, I mean.”

  “Lawman.”

  He said it with an absolutely straight face, and for a moment Ketchel simply stared. Then Dalton smiled. “Ain’t it a hell of a note? Tulsa police officer. And been married two whole years. I’m a regular upright citizen.”

  “How you like Oklahoma?” Ketchel said.

/>   “To tell the truth, I about had my fill of it,” Dalton said. “Believe Julia and I’ll head to California, see if there’s any gold still to be struck.”

  “You’ll like California,” Ketchel said. He was intensely aware that he might never have a chance to talk to this man or any such again. “I wonder something, Mr. Dalton.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Ketchel?”

  “I’ve read an awful lot about the Coffeyville scrape. There’s a few things different the way some stories tell it from the way others do, but they mostly all tell it the same. They say you fellas wanted to rob two banks in the same town on the same day because it had never been done before and you wanted to outdo the James and Younger boys. What I wonder is, is that true?”

  Dalton considered the question a moment as though for the first time. “Bob always was dead set on beating the best.” Dalton’s older brothers Bob and Grat had been killed at Coffeyville. So had the other two members of the gang.

  Ketchel knew the story well. When the gang came out of the banks to make its getaway, nearly every man in town opened fire on them. Citizens were blasting at them with rifles and revolvers and shotguns from the rooftops and windows, were lined up in the alleyway like firing squads. Bullets came at the gang from everywhere. Only Emmett made it to his mount. He was in the clear and galloping away when he looked back and saw that his brothers were fallen. So he turned around and rode back for them. The citizens could hardly believe it. They shotgunned him off his horse and then shot him some more when he was down. Every story Ketchel ever read about the Coffeyville slaughter agreed it was God’s own wonder Emmett Dalton survived it.

  “Some say you were shot a dozen times, some say more,” Ketchel said. “At Coffeyville, I mean.” He could not bring himself to ask the man outright how many times it was.