The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  I’d have your bollocks, she mouths, silent.

  One of his eyebrows lifts. It reads like an invitation.

  She is sweating. The whiskey and Barker’s gin are making her feel bigger, stronger, like she could climb into the ring herself and beat any son of a bitch who answered her challenge.

  A chorus of boos, stamping. The crowd shifts, bodies pressing into Alma’s as the Tacoma man and his party parade into the room. Dobbs is not seven feet tall as Driscoll claimed but up there, six-two at least, blond and sunbaked, his yellow beard bright against the brick red of his cheeks. The two fighters shake hands, as do their cornermen and umpires. The coin toss goes to Mac. He chooses the nearer side, positioning Dobbs at the back corner, where unfriendly faces are thick and growling. As challenger, Mac takes off his cap first and chucks it over the ropes. Dobbs follows suit—that same yellow hair, limp with sweat—and the fighters and their cornermen duck into the ring.

  “Come on, boys,” Alma shouts.

  The cornermen tie their fighters’ colors to the posts: blue and gold for Mac, and the Irish flag for Dobbs. The pugs strip off their jackets, their shirts, their boots. Dobbs is pale white under his shirt, broad chested, heavily muscled in the shoulders and sides. Mac, in the corner to her left, is a solid slab of a man. Black hair thick on his chest, on his forearms. He has the flattened nose of a bruiser, a muscle-roped neck, chunky knuckles.

  “London rules,” the referee calls from his spot outside the ring.

  Alma hollers her approval, knocking elbows with the men beside her as she claps. No gloves. No timed rounds. None of that Queensberry nonsense, after all. The men will fight, barefisted, until they fall.

  “Nothing below the belt, sirs,” the referee says, raising his voice above the crowd noise. “No butting, no gouging. Right? Come up to the scratch.”

  Mac and Dobbs shuffle forward, shake hands. Alma is grinning, her bound ribs pressed hard against the knotted ring ropes. Her eyes latched to the fighters’ bodies. Flanked by the umpires, the referee nods. Calls time.

  Dobbs comes up fast, feints, throws a hard cross that Mac catches with his outer shoulder, rolls away from. Roaring in her ears, in her throat. Mac ducks away with the momentum of the dodge, comes back with a quick snap of a shovel hook to Dobbs’s ribs, thick meat smack of bone into flesh. Dobbs grunts and brings his hands up as Mac, already reloading, shoots his elbow from his hip and out into a right hook that ought to take Dobbs’s nose clean off except he’s not there, he’s danced back a step, and Mac is off-balance. Pressure at her back as latecomers crowd in from the bar, hips and fists digging into her. Mac recovers his fighting stance. The pugs circle. Settle in.

  Jab, jab, hook from Dobbs, and the third punch connects, Mac’s jaw snapping down at a painful angle, Alma flinching and shouting, her voice already raw. Mac staggers forward, unsteady but moving in the right direction—is he playing?—and, yes, part of that was a show because he delivers another powerhouse blow to Dobbs’s midsection, just where Alma would aim for the kidney. Dobbs clenches in, dropping his face enough to catch Mac’s jab to the nose. There is blood, at once, a gush of it, and a man at the far corner starts hollering more wildly than the rest: that’s a fellow with a sharp bet on first blood.

  Dobbs wipes his nose on his forearm, a smear of sweat and red, and Alma is lit up with the violence of it, with the hot proof of a man’s life splashed on his skin. The referee will call a pause if he’s a neat sort, a fastidious man, but he doesn’t look it with his florid, thickly bearded face. Sure enough, he holds his place at the ropes while letting the men continue.

  A true cross from Dobbs, who’s bleeding all down his chest but not slowed, and Mac’s left pectoral blooms pink then quickly purple, a fist-size stamp of glory. He returns with a sly jab to Dobbs’s jaw and the Tacoma man is down, panting, on his knees. The timekeeper clangs his handbell. That’s the round.

  The men retreat to their corners. Dobbs’s sponge bucket is immediately red tinged. Mac’s head is doused in water as he refuses a sip of whiskey. Shouts and stamping so the building shakes. Alma stands firm among the tremors, grinning, fierce, ready. It’s been two years since she went to a fight—a real matchup, not some basement mill with no form, no science—and these pugs know what they’re about. It’s an even contest. She hopes that will make it a bloody one.

  With this occupying her thoughts, she looks away from Mac and at Wheeler. He is staring at her. His mouth open. His ears red.

  The bell rings.

  She throws her head back and howls into the low rafters.

  In the second round Mac takes the advantage, knocking Dobbs off-kilter with a few good throws, his punches coming in tight, fast little bursts, one-two, one-two, one-two-three. Dobbs drops again and Alma pounds on the ropes before her, roaring, afire with the knockdown, afire because she knows without having to look that Wheeler is watching her. Blood spattered on the pine boards. Her nostrils flare. Copper sharp, copper sour. The fighters hunch, backs heaving, in their corners. The performance of the sport, blood like red paint, sweat like oil. Hot throb of the audience. Wheeler, and McManus with his woman in the alley, and the stripped-down bodies in the ring, all seethe into a thick pulse in Alma’s low body; she wants to knock Wheeler back against the office’s blue wall and take him in her mouth.

  Mac carries his second-round momentum into the next, and the crowd is behind him all the way, living for their local man. He has dripping cuts on his brow and lip but moves with a dogged energy, a workman’s perseverance, his punches still precise. And once more Dobbs falls; slower, this time, to get on his feet and to his corner.

  Alma looks for Wheeler but he is bent toward McManus, listening to the younger man. She follows McManus’s eyes to Mac’s corner, and there is Loomis, Sloan’s crimp, with two others she’s seen at the boardinghouse. No Sloan, but there are too many men between them to be sure. Sloan’s crew doesn’t seem to be moving; they keep their spot behind Mac, and when the fourth round starts, she doesn’t bother watching them. The whole waterfront is here, it feels like, and they’re far enough away from Wheeler and McManus that trouble seems unlikely.

  Mac opens with a solid hook to Dobbs’s abused ribs—his torso already a welter of red and black—and Alma is shouting encouragement when, with a neat two-step, Dobbs darts in and twists, delivering a left hook directly to Mac’s ear. Mac drops to the boards, falling badly, one arm tangled under him and his legs bent sharply at the knees. The air squeezes out of the room.

  The referee ducks into the ring, checking the fallen man’s eyes, slapping his cheeks. Mac is flopping, nonresponsive. It’s a knockout for Dobbs. Muttering starts in the back, behind the Tacoma man’s corner. The air, still charged, takes on a bitter tinge. An elbow clips Alma on the hip. Around her, men shift uneasily. The referee, not looking too calm himself, lifts Dobbs’s hand, and the muttering spills into boos.

  “You fucking bogtrotter!” a man yells from the hallway door, and then, in the back by Dobbs’s corner, a yelp, a surge in the crowd.

  The Tacoma man rips Mac’s colors off the post. Then he and his corners hustle out of the ring, shoving through the six feet of crowd and into the hall, Dobbs still barefoot and shirtless. Better to catch pneumonia than be murdered.

  Alma takes another shove to the back. Conaway—along with Driscoll and Barker, if they ever made it back to that spot—is pinned between Sloan’s men and the brawl developing in the far corner. Wheeler and McManus, on the other side of the ring, aren’t near any trouble. Yet. She is closest to the door. Someone knocks off her cap and it’s lost in a churn of boots. An elbow digs into her ribs, just below her binding cloth; a reminder of her hidden body that grinds against the desire to fight, to start a clot of violence all her own. She can’t see Wheeler anymore over the red faces, the jostling. In the far corner a crunch, a high scream. All right. Time to get out.

  She pushes toward the door. Breathless crush in the bottleneck of the hallway, then she’s in the saloon. The boards underfoot a
re dark. Men are flooding into the night more than they are returning to the counter for another round.

  At the bar Clay sets a tumbler before her. If he recognizes her as an acquaintance of Wheeler’s, he gives no sign of it.

  “That was a god damn disappointment,” she says. “Gin, double.”

  “Thought it might go longer,” Clay says, his voice neutral.

  “Mac should have taken it in the third round.”

  Alma pauses, her hand in her pocket, her teeth out and stinging in the cold air. Wheeler’s come up next to her, still wearing his gray coat. He sets down his hat. She sets down a dime, close to his fist. His gold ring glints.

  “That’s the truth,” she says. “What are you drinking, Mr. Wheeler? It’s on me.”

  “A drop of the pure,” he tells Clay.

  “Dobbs was playing slow, that whole fight,” she says when Wheeler has a tumbler in hand. “Testing our man. Sneaky, but a good strategy.”

  “Seems like something you’d favor,” he says. “The bait and switch.”

  “I hardly want to say it. But maybe our man just isn’t that smart. Too easily fooled.”

  “That would be an unpopular opinion,” Wheeler says. “I’d be careful with it.”

  They are standing close. Elbows almost touching. Facing the bar counter, not each other. Here, in the saloon, the codes between them are different. It’s not Wheeler’s office but a public space, and none but the two of them knows what is under Alma’s clothes.

  “Careful? I’ve been hungry for a scrap.” She leans in closer, drops her voice, hot clove scent in her nose. “Maybe tonight’s the night for one.”

  “Four rounds not enough for you?”

  “Not hardly.” She tosses back her drink, shrugs off her jacket and slings it on the counter. Letting him see how ready, how strong-bodied she is—not mere empty talk. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “Did you catch the moment when Mac could have had it?” he says. “In the third round.”

  “After the hook. But he backed off. Why?”

  “Making a plan, maybe.” Wheeler sips his whiskey. “But maybe he should have moved sooner. Taken what he wanted.”

  She lifts her left boot, deliberate. Props it on the rail. Edging into the space at the front of his body, the hem of his overcoat brushing past her knee. Giving him something to lean into. If he will. Her heartbeats fast and thick and fevered.

  “They ought to have a rematch,” she says.

  He folds his arms on the bar top. Shifts his stance. There is pressure on her leg. A hard ridge warm against the outside of her thigh. She pushes back.

  “Most definitely.” Wheeler is keeping a straight face like a champion, tilting his whiskey tumbler forward and back so the liquid pulses.

  Alma admires the line of muscle in his neck from collar to jaw, sharp-cut in the lamplight, his skin freshly shaved.

  “Let’s go,” she says, quiet.

  “Mr. Wheeler.” It’s McManus. Angling through a knot of men to stand at Wheeler’s other side. Alma scowls at him. Wheeler pulls his body away from her leg. Tilts his head toward the other man. McManus speaks into his ear, too low for Alma to hear. She can’t get a fix on McManus’s mouth to piece-read it. Wheeler’s eyes drift between his boots and the bar top as he listens, losing the ghost of a smile he had during his banter with her, his face turning grave.

  “Where is he?” he says, setting his tumbler on the countertop.

  A quick sharpening of his eyes on hers—an urgency there, a message she is not sure of—and McManus nods to the far-left corner of the bar. Barnaby Sloan stands under a lantern, its yellow light oily on his blond hair. Wheeler takes his hat and walks toward him. She can’t grab at Wheeler, so she goes for McManus; he is following, but slower, and her fingers in his denim yank him to a stop.

  “What’s up?” she says.

  “Let go,” he says.

  “Fuck you. What’s going on?”

  Wheeler reaches Sloan. They do not shake hands, Wheeler running the brim of his hat through his fingertips. They are ten feet from Alma. She doesn’t like leaving him with Sloan—in the smoky dim there could be a knifing, a shot—but there is Clay, polishing a glass behind the bar at Sloan’s back, and there is Conaway, hulking tall over both men, a solid slab of bone and muscle should Wheeler need backup. A thin scream wavers in from the storeroom, abruptly stops.

  “Let go or I’ll shoot you,” McManus says, swinging close to hiss into her face.

  “You jealous?” She doesn’t loosen her hold on his sleeve. “You should be. The boss man likes me better.”

  McManus is sweating and steel eyed, his jacket rough in her fist, her pulse thumping hot in her neck. He darts a glance at Wheeler. His hand twitches toward his chest, toward the lump of his gun.

  “None of that.” Alma jerks him closer, the heavy weight of him bouncing into her shoulder. “You start a firefight in a crowded bar, you’re stupider than I thought.”

  “I owe you a bullet,” he says, breath sour on her face.

  “Oh, no. You want to have a go with me again, you use your fists.” She nods at the door, the cold darkness outside. “You’ll lose, but you’re always going to lose against me.”

  She glances back at Wheeler, who is still speaking to Sloan. Clay and Conaway still keeping watch. Someone smashes into her. She lets go of McManus’s sleeve, fists ready, but it’s only Driscoll, his hair mussed, his smile loose at the corners.

  “They’re tearing up a few Tacoma boys in there,” he says, panting, nodding at the storeroom.

  “Not now,” she says, shoving him off.

  He stumbles back, blinking, stupid with too much drink. There’s another scream from the storeroom, closer to the jointed hall. A man falls through the doorway, jacketless, his shirt ripped open, a trickle of blood leaking teardrop-like from one eye.

  McManus’s attention is darting between her and Wheeler and the howling in the hallway. The math of it ticking over his face: the chance of something going bad while they’re outside, dancing.

  “Eleven years of hard work, and I take over in a week,” Alma says, to help him make up his mind. He won’t be much sport, bruised to hell and with his bad leg, but if he can’t walk, he can’t make deals in Seattle. “How does it feel?”

  Now McManus isn’t looking at the hall or Wheeler or the door. Just at her. He twists from the hip, sends a sly hook at Alma’s chin. One knuckle grazes her jawbone and the fire is burning, hot in her teeth, hot in her gut as she delivers a quick snap to his stomach.

  Driscoll shoulders between them.

  “Christ Jesus, what’s the matter with you?” he says, one hand on each of their chests as McManus coughs for air. “Save it for the Tacoma lads.”

  “Get out of the way.” Alma knocks Driscoll’s hand off her breast. Only three layers of cloth without her jacket, so she felt the heat of his palm. She bares her teeth.

  “Camp—”

  “This isn’t your fight, Conall,” McManus tells him, straightening up, still unsteady.

  His posture, Driscoll’s sideways lean, leave her an opening for a jab. She launches a beauty right into his throat. Gristle and bone under her finger-backs and McManus is choking again; she is laughing aloud.

  Now McManus throws aside the protesting Driscoll, right into a group of dockmen. Space is tight. They are hemmed in by the dockmen—Driscoll skidding through their midst—and by a pocket of crowd, so Alma can’t dodge away when McManus spits in her face, hot in her eyes, and follows with a bonecrusher to her sternum, right at the notch that presses bad into the diaphragm.

  “Fuck,” she says, blinded, and there is more screaming in the hall. The bar’s crowd is shifting, uneasy, contracting away from her and McManus. In the blurred lantern light the men are a night-colored wave, eyes like far-off city lights, murmuring harshly. Crunch of glass. High whining.

  Shaking her head, shaking clearer her eyes, she lunges at McManus, coming a quarter inch from smashing his nose—it bends, jus
t slightly, under her lead knuckle—and they are turning. McManus trips and goes down. She sneers at his bad knee, at his clumsiness, waiting for him to stand, but he doesn’t. He is staring. Crawling to his side. His focus is not on her.

  “Get up,” he says, and she wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

  Down in the shadows of the floor he is holding a long thing, a dark thing: a leg. Her vision clicks into place with her thinking and she follows the leg up to a belt, up to a vest, up to a face. Driscoll’s face.

  “Get up,” McManus says again. He’s not talking to himself, as she first thought. He’s talking to the boy, but Driscoll’s eyes are wide, they are wide and frightened, and he does not get up.

  Alma steps toward them, shouldering past a pitch-smeared mill worker, and her boot skids over the boards. She can’t see the floor, can barely see Driscoll’s face, and she wants to think she’s stepped in spilled liquor, but McManus is still saying, “Get up,” and his voice is ugly, cracking. Against the bar, four feet away, Sloan’s man Loomis is watching her. He smiles. Wipes his ruined nose and his fingers are red, maybe, or maybe it’s just a shadow from the splintering lanterns.

  “Is this your work?” she asks him, and her knife is in her hand, haft warm with her body heat so it feels part of her palm.

  “Conall,” McManus says, at her knees.

  She can’t fight Sloan’s man. She can’t ruin the deal. Sloan purchased their tar with the promise of peace—mutual peace, with no more attacks on each other’s men. But Loomis knifed Driscoll, maybe. And his rotted-out grin brings a roaring to her ears.

  “Help the kid,” she tells McManus, but when she steps over Driscoll’s shoulder her gut surges—there is blood, behind him, under him, a dark scribbling laced with pieces of glass, and his eyes don’t follow her movement. McManus sways to his feet, bad leg crooked, and now Loomis is not smiling, he is showing all the yolky whites of his eyes.

  “He’s mine,” McManus says.

  Alma crowds in front of him, growling.

  “No,” she says, looking away from Sloan’s man to McManus’s waxen face.