The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Such a clean-looking guy to chase. Tee shirt sparkling white, white stripes on his trunks, white laces, white shoes, white sock tops, purple gloves and new black trunks—so clean it made you feel like you were trying to mess up something nice. Kelly did a little better defensively, picking off some jabs like baseballs caught, and slipping others past his cheek and out of sight. His face was flushed from what got through.

  The best bit happened at the finish of that second round, where it was placed most happily. Santos must have gotten careless. As he tried to duck as usual past Kelly near the ropes, Kelly reached him with an elbow and shoved him back. He tried again and Kelly grabbed him like a crate, both hands, and shoved him into place and uppercut to his heart. He fell against the ropes and bounced. And Kelly timed the bounce and uppercut to his heart. And left-hooked to his cheek, to show the world he could head-punch, and left hooked to his heart. And uppercut to his heart. And smashed him on the heart. The guy pitched up and down and dove for Kelly’s arms. He pinned the left till Kelly punished him so bad he had to let it go. Kelly battered at the upper belly and the heart. Santos covered up, but that was no defense. Kelly whammed and whammed, shoved him with an elbow to set him right and punched him on the bottom rib and left-hooked to his heart. And Santos pitched around and quit his covering up and dove again to catch the arms—pinned them momentarily, but Kelly worked one loose and hit the heart. And then the bell.

  They tapped each other on the head and shoulder, tickled each other on the neck, as awkward as it was with gloves, and walked together to the stairs. Crackers gave them each a hand to lean on climbing down. Kelly’s legs and arms were quivery. He couldn’t seem to stop dead still. Aimlessly he strolled till Crackers grabbed him by his gloves and made him stand just where he was. He was like a child being stripped of stuff; he stared off absently, letting Crackers do the work, twisting his lips as a child might when Crackers took the mouthpiece out. Kelly was allowed to lick the sponge, but not to put it in his mouth. Crackers watered him and dried the middle of his body; when he began to need to reach to dry the arms and legs he handed Kelly the towel.

  “Was okay. Course the man didn’t hit. Hope you wouldn’t fight with your face like that against some ones.”

  Kelly grinned. He scrubbed his sweat and walked, driven by his muscles to keep moving. He proudly glanced around at everybody to see how much they liked his stuff. He couldn’t tell. Nobody even looked at him. Peapod from the locker room was searching the floor for cigar butts—not cleaning up: he smoked them in his pipe. The managers were chatting. China was boxing now, but complimented Kelly, clinching deliberately to have a chance to nod approval. There was a friend. Kelly was happy. The feeling of those final punches had been etched right on his arms. He was going to knock off twenty pushups on the rubdown table. He leaned against it for the shake and shake of the contortions of the fighters on it and flexed his hands and felt real good, real rough, real big. He’d plant one and he’d lobo anybody.

  Straws was coming with a crony who wore a suit so shiny that you couldn’t tell the color, whether blue or black or green. “Don’t tire yourself,” Straws told Kelly. “Listen!”

  The crony started in: “I have a boy who’s got a fight in two weeks, and if you wanna get yourself in shape too you can fight with him this week and then next week if you’ve done okay, I’ll let you have five bucks a day for fighting him. Of course, he’s better than the chicken-charlie you just fought. You wanna try?” He talked as rapid-fire as a sightseeing guide.

  “Who is it?”

  “Rudd. You know him?”

  “Yeah, I’ll try him,” Kelly said. Rudd was a comer burning up the field, the kind that Kelly’d have to fight soon anyway.

  “Damn right you will,” Straws told him. “This afternoon. He’s not fighting till the end, so you’ll have a rest. Plenty of time. You relax.”

  “Good opportunity for you,” said the crony.

  When he left, Straws confided: “These crumbs drop tips. I never miss a word. That’s how I picked you up and that’s how I heard he wanted a boy to work his boy with. I don’t miss nothing. Don’t nothing these bastards do get by me. And another thing I was thinking was about this previous manager of yours. Are you positive I’m not going to have to buy you from him?”

  “No, he died.”

  “He didn’t sell you to somebody before? I don’t want no lawsuits and the last thing in the world I’m gonna do right now is buy a fighter. Maybe he sold you on his deathbed.”

  “No.”

  • • •

  Paid, no less! In one in ten of these bouts the sparring partner got paid. The money wasn’t much—three-and-a-quarter a day, or less after Straws took his cut—but being paid alone would feel good. Kelly clapped for China and was partly clapping for himself. With China every defense move was utilized, and every kind of punch, very complex fighting. In the early rounds he’d rest along, and later when his opponent’s defense became shoddy from exhaustion there’d be murder. China wasn’t one of those old men so out of shape they tried for first-round knock-outs, although he’d pick one up that begged him to. Kelly looked out at Forty-Second Street, the traffic, sunlight, sky. The sky was wonderful and big; the sun was fun, not hot. High up, seagulls sailed, so sharp they looked the shape of bats.

  The Spanish-speakers’ hair grew neatly long down the backs of their necks, while American coloreds as often as not had a wild scrap of hair back there like a pirate might tie with a string. Italian fighters were normal enough about the back, but grew their hair so high in front it doubled the height of their foreheads—which was to scare you with. What did the Irish do? Goodness knows; Kelly was the only one. The Irish punched. He wished he were acquainted with more guys. The Ecuadorians he couldn’t talk to, and the coloreds had Harlem to gossip about. Besides, he was older—like the man over in the corner who’d fought Joe Louis. Louis fought a bum a month, the saying went, and this guy had been one of those bums—still scraping up an occasional fight because of the one Louis bout.

  Two beginners were boxing now, kneading with their fists, safe distances apart. Their styles were full of fragmentary little poses they were trying out. When they did get close, they footballed with their shoulders and covered face and body with crossed arms until they couldn’t throw a punch. They ducked too much and took each other’s guard too seriously. From nervousness they let their hands, rigged tightly for defense, go out so far that they were useless both for punching and for stopping punches. If the youngsters did move fast it was from agitation. They’d flinch back even as they hit, in fear of counters, which destroyed their power. Kelly laughed; most anyone got hit; a winner absorbed better. One kid was still learning not to shut his eyes. And when the pair worked into clinches, without a referee to help, they couldn’t come apart.

  “Yeah, this is it,” a manager at the door informed a Negro kid, and indicated James DeJesus. Jim had walled himself away behind his rope; he was studying snapshots, probably of relatives. The kid had trouble getting his attention, but then Jim listened, nodding in impatience at every sentence as if he’d heard it many times before, although not otherwise being rude.

  “Yes, you’re from Birmingham,” Jim said, “and you came here and you want to fight. But where are you going to eat, where are you going to sleep, boy, huh? How?” With a motion of exasperation, “Pick him up!” he snorted at the managers who’d grouped around. They were the cheapest (including, Kelly noticed, Howard Straws), who didn’t have their stables full. The first to examine the kid, a bald and bag-eyed man, made a fart noise through his mouth and lifted his leg like a doggie weeing. It was his favorite sneer. DeJesus had turned back to his photos and didn’t seem upset immediately—he’d seen the act before—when all of a sudden he shook with rage and, stuffing the pictures into an envelope, went over the rope with his lead pipe after the manager, cussing his filth. The guy ran down the stairs ahead of him, and two minutes later was peeking around the door again like a child chased out of a playh
ouse.

  In the shadow-boxers’ ring a bunch was shuffling blank and timeless as a marathon except one lively kid who leaped and scissored like a dervish. The bookies’ representative was there. The bookies pooled their information and only sent one man to sessions. He was easy to spot because he didn’t dress to be conspicuous, the way the managers did, in bowler hats and velvet collars, and always kept a hand around his pockets checking on his multitude of slips and on his rolls of money. The hand that wasn’t guarding pockets was used for feeling fighters. He’d wave them over, ask about their families and if they’d win their scheduled fights and what was new and what they knew and what was funny, laugh with them, and then rest his hand on them and slap them to congratulate them that their health was fine. Meanwhile he’d be feeling muscles in their arms and shoulders and the special muscles in their necks which might absorb the K.O. from a knockout punch. Legs he’d judge by eye as often as he’d squeeze them. When he was through he’d stop and make a mental note of his appraisal, pick his teeth.

  Standing in the door was a young light-heavyweight with face not yet in the final fighter’s mask. He was in his best suit, preened, and leaving to box on the coast, Kelly’d heard. He carried his suitcases too easily to notice right away. He seemed afraid to enter his own gym without being welcomed, the bashful, gawky stance trying to be so suave. He was afraid because of his suitcases and best hat, best suit, best shoes, so vulnerable to being poked fun at, his very, very best, stripped of all excuse. For another reason, his wife was lingering in the shadows with their baby son. She was timid-looking, black like her husband, and had come to see him off. When the fighter did move into the gym he shambled. His legs couldn’t keep up with his body and his head bobbed, his arms waggled ludicrously out of rhythm, not because the suitcases were heavy, but because he was scared. Kelly was impatient. When Kelly slicked himself up in his traveling clothes he didn’t fall to pieces and go bashful; he was cool.

  The light-heavy’s manager greeted him and shook hands with the wife, told her how swell her husband was and praised the son. The light-heavy edged to the side, smiling with embarrassed pride. He set his suitcases down and clasped his hands to keep them out of trouble, planting his feet stiffly. The bookie wished him luck and he tried to stay alert and bright for whatever might be wanted of him. On top of the shyness, though, an excitement sang in his expression. This type of guy didn’t leave his neighborhood except to box; and now there’d be the taxis, the airports, cross-country flights, hotels, the big shots patting him, swank restaurants, and TV cameras and newsmen and the arena mob. In the newspapers you read sob stories about Negro ex-champs—how sad it was that Beau Jack, the gallant lightweight of the Forties, should be a shoeshine boy. Should Beau Jack have been a shoeshine boy straight through instead, and never been Beau Jack at all? And was it better that Joe Louis owed the government a million after being the greatest modern champion for thirteen years, or for Joe Louis to have spent his life in Detroit’s Browntown heaving coal?

  One event the fighter insisted upon. Again and again he looked at James DeJesus until his nerve was up, then touched his wife so she would follow. Jim acknowledged the trio by jerking his head for the guy to speak, not rudely, but to the point. It was his way with fighters. He didn’t make them speak up loud, like he would managers, and for shy ones he would lean his ear much closer than he’d lean it to a manager’s mouth.

  “Mister DeJesus, I’d like if you would shake hands with my wife so she would know you,” the light-heavy said. “This is Mister DeJesus. He runs everything.”

  Jim courteously responded, even to admiring the child, and would have slugged a man who cursed, but finished soon enough to show he took it as his job. He spat on the floor during the interview, but that was nothing—he’d have done that talking to George Washington. Children of white fighters he would often kiss with that same spitting mouth.

  He was concentrating on his photographs again when, hearing one of the managers say hello on a pay phone more than once, he felt obliged to give some lessons.

  “You can do it however way you want,” he started gently. “It don’t kill me. I’m only telling what I think is wisest.” Pacing up and down beside the booths, he waited for a call to demonstrate. There was one, and he whirled and sprang for it. “Better Champions!” he snapped. . . . “What?” Instantly he slammed down the receiver.

  “Now there was a case,” he lectured, “where the party did say something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. If you can’t hear him you can’t talk to him, can you? So hang it up.” Jim grew enraged. “If he can’t make you understand him, he don’t know what in the hell he’s saying! If he don’t speak up with his business quick, hang him up! He don’t have no business! Maybe might be the wrong number! Hang him up!” He raced into another booth which rang. “Better Champions!” he shouted furiously and slapped the receiver back again. “That was a different case,” he told the crowd of managers. “I couldn’t hear the woodhead; I couldn’t hear a thing. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand him, I couldn’t even hear him!” The idea flabbergasted Jim and he turned logical: “And who would want to call you bums but bums anyway? And what do you want to talk to a bum for when you got so many here? Who else is going to call you? Only a bum would call a bum. Hang up quick.”

  In the ring a beginner sprawled against the ropes, taking a thousand and never trying to clinch or get away. Feverish, holding his breath, he pawed and pummeled back. Every kind of fighting style came off the street. The other guy was sinking ’em in with long snake arms and myriad spidery feints. But the more he hit the beginner, the more the beginner tried to hit back. That was guts; now give him a trainer.

  Rudd, whom Kelly was to fight, was listening to another fighter. “I told him right in front of the ref, ‘You keep on running on me and I’m going to stand on your feet to hold you still till I can slug you.’”

  Rudd listened with a real respect. His answers were too soft for Kelly to hear, except for the Negro-backsticks accent, but he understood when Rudd shrugged with his hands to get out of talking. His weight didn’t spread into height like Kelly’s, and his arms were short, but all of him was muscled as machinely as a fish. Kelly nodded and Rudd nodded back from politeness, obviously not knowing who he was. A modest face, but awfully flattened, and his career had only begun. His nose seemed to cover the front of it, dwarfed his mustache. Kelly felt his own nose. The thickening couldn’t be ignored, but he laughed because a manager had kicked another in the seat and started a slapping bee. He fidgeted his hands to keep them off his nose. That didn’t help enough, and finally he had to walk. Walking started him thinking how his muscles felt and balling them and stretching. He wanted to do well.

  “Well, we’ll see if this is glass.” Straws, switching on a smile, tapped Kelly’s chin, although his eyes were searching him. “But he don’t let his legs do nothin’, he don’t learn. Fights almost pier-six.”

  “You hit him, he goes down, he hits you, you go down?” Kelly asked.

  “No. He don’t go down.” Straws squeezed Kelly’s chin. “You can jab him silly—not what his manager wants you to do, but there is sure to be somebody in in the next two weeks who puts on shows and I can give the sign to jab and we might have ourselves a bout. If you’re good against Rudd, they’ll give you one. We’d lose the little money and we’d make the big.” He made a face and shoved his fist at Kelly full of threat. “Get him!” Kelly walked away. They tried to put across to you how much tougher they were—tougher—how superior in every way; wouldn’t even leave the fighter that.

  The Number Four Contender of the Welterweights, and Kelly’s favorite fighter, hopped into the ring: favorite fighter to watch; he’d never spoken to him. Usually the guy used bags, and so to see him was a treat. He’d whip his body up and down and pump out punches fast as Kelly’d tap a finger. He both started and finished exchanges and always knew what he was after. He’d paste your facial openings shut and leave you sorting out your parts. From the cou
ntry of Colombia, he chuckled Spanish to his sparring partner, and through the mouthpiece it emerged monkey yunks. Number Four’s equipment was in nifty piercing reds and greens. He himself was chocolate-brown, a well-formed five-foot nine. And what a face he had—eager, mild, unmarked, an unhurt nose. The man in with him was a little younger, maybe twenty-one, and jounced his warm-up footwork with a consciousness of being outclassed. His crushed face was merry as he returned the jokes. Their grins were each distorted by the mouthpiece, but Number Four’s was less so. He let his upper lip slip up until he looked as though his mouth were full of gum.

  They blocked their arms out in a box for touching gloves, touched elbows too. The partner’s style was raggedly gutty and wasteful, composed of constant straight-out pushes trying to wear his adversary down. So Number Four gave him the same—rifled level breastbone shots with longer arms. Then Four softened—didn’t want to discourage the guy with his own stuff—switched into more natural ways, and pushed the partner gently back when he got in too close for Four to bomb him. If the guy insisted upon pressing close, why Four’d collapse and lean on him with all his weight until in a bout the ref would have had to break them. Or, if the partner hunched low to escape the stoning. Number Four would simply lean down hard across his back, trapping his neck in an armpit, until, again, a referee’d have broken them. In between these sapping clinches he romped out punches in assorted styles, hooks, jabs and upward-movers—uppercuts and golfed-in bolos—and crossed his arms to stop the counters, grinning when the other guy threw stuff because it opened him up the more for attack. Of course Four didn’t need an opening to punch. He whacked ’em in, openings or not, hit the biceps if that’s all there was, but hit and hit, hit and hit; befuddle the guy and fox the judges’ eyes. Down he bent and up, chop-stepped, and shook the golden talisman that hung around his neck into a fling. His body almost rubber-shimmied in exigencies of golfing blows and of defense. But it looked easy. As part of readying his own, it seemed, he picked off punches, as breezily as that. Real horse-hoofs: tucked ’em in his palms. And when he slipped a punch you’d think he’d glanced across the street, so simple and so neat. Just casual. Or as if in a rhythm. And all the time he pumped in punches quick as sharks.