He will feel the previous few years in his bones—fifty fights to Dempsey’s four—and will know again, in his body and mind, that this is his highest and last chance to be something other than a professional opponent.
Six weeks in this wind-battered, rain-battered, sun-battered little town, and he has begun to show the strain. Everything by a spit and a hair. A crisis a day. Fight’s on. Fight’s off. Backers have the money. Maybe not.
Why would a dozen men in a town of one thousand people think they could raise $200,000, in the first place, and then $300,000 when Kearns jacked it up? It was a miracle when they came up with the first third. Selling their fool heads off, peddling tickets all over the state, sending their emissaries out in a little roofless airplane to carry the word.
And the second $100,000, by the very skin of their teeth. Zooming around the state in the plane, two of the ticket-peddling zealots, and the thing crashes and they’re lying in plaster in the hospital. Mayor Johnson putting up every single asset, his life’s work—at least $50,000 and probably a lot more—and the rest kicked in at the eleventh hour by some money fellows in Great Falls.
And the whole thing still uncertain, less than two weeks before the fight, because Kearns—the icy-hearted fop—won’t guarantee that his fighter will fight. Not until he’s seen the last dime.
And yesterday the head money-raiser resigns. Nine days, now, to come up with another $100,000, unless Kearns relents.
Tommy has a tired, stubborn look on his face. He was exhilarated and ready when he arrived. Now he has the weary look of the kid who has fought over his head all his life. The look of a kid whose brother, The Phantom, always led the way.
By afternoon, though, he will be game. He will have himself together and he will give another show for the fans—sparring, dipping, sweating, showing his stuff. And they will love him, as they always do. They will watch him, cheer him on, the hardworking, true-hearted, knotty-muscled fighter from Saint Paul. The family man. The underdog.
This, he tells a reporter, is the opportunity of my lifetime.
In Great Falls, the trees along the avenues are a young green. The hotels, the theaters, look newly washed.
Jerry has some very appealing land offers with him. Parcels to tempt the representatives of the oil companies. Good deals, truly. They could never do better, and he wouldn’t even be taking the offers around now if he weren’t so short on money.
T.T. waits for him at the hotel, smoking another big cigar in the wingbacked lobby chair, looking like a businessman at rest while Jerry makes the rounds.
T.T. is sleeping when he returns. Hat tipped down over his eyes, cigar cold in his hand. Jerry’s face is set. The last guy actually laughed out loud. One of them referred to “that circus” and said he heard that Tracey, the head promoter, had washed his hands of the whole fight. One of them thwacked him indulgently on the back and told him to go back to Shelby and try to make some money any way he could.
Shelby was off-limits. The field was off-limits. Nobody was going near the place until this fight was over, or aborted, or whatever was going to happen. Not until it was history, and all the adventurers had moved on, and you could get a clear siting on that piece of country.
Go home, one of them said. Go home and ride this little show out, then check back in and we’ll see where we are.
T.T. had met a high roller from Denver in the lobby, and he got himself and Jerry invited up to the guy’s room for a few drinks after lunch. The stuff was concocted and poisonous, probably boosted with cocaine. A few sips, and the lips and tongue began to go numb. Jerry put the shot glass down carefully and lit a cigarette, his head already light, his mouth reluctant to form words.
T.T.’s initial cheerfulness had seemed to turn into something more frenzied. Perhaps it started when he met the Denver swell. Or when he saw Jerry’s face after he’d made the rounds to the oil guys.
T.T. was talking loudly. He drew a little flask from his vest and the high roller filled it with the cloudy white stuff and the three of them took off in a shiny Suiza to the Dempsey camp, north of Great Falls at a huge abandoned roadhouse on the banks of the Missouri.
The Denver guy—he said he was in town on unspecified business and was staying for the fight—drove furiously. They bounced and thumped and careened along the road, the driver goggled and intent and smashed.
T.T. loud and whooping. Jerry in the back, trying to fix on the horizon, hold himself steady until the rotgut had done its worst.
A bad narrow road, still puddled from the long rains. The glint of the river. An occasional grove of river trees. T.T. and the Denver guy yelling back and forth above the roar of the car. It’ll happen, they assured each other. That fight is gonna happen. Confidence! the Denver guy screamed. You got to say the money is there, whether you know or not. You don’t falter. Faltering is death. No faltering, no maybes. A big maybe, and nobody gets on those trains. Not if they think they’re traveling toward a Big Maybe.
It’ll happen, T.T. yelled again. There’s $200,000 in the coffers, or that’s what they’re saying.
And another $100,000 due in a week, Jerry called out from the back. Where do you suppose that’s coming from?
They would have talked slurred talk about the fights of the past, including the one that put little Goldfield, Nevada, on the map. They would have discussed Gibbons—told the Denver guy how tenacious and strong their boy was, how ready, how fit. How he had never been knocked out. Never. How Dempsey, the slacker, the brute, might be in for the surprise of his life in eleven days. He might!
Big talk. A kind of dedication to bluster during that ride because that’s what seemed to be called for. Confidence.
Yes, some trains had canceled. Yes, some reporters were saying it wasn’t going to happen—that maybe there wouldn’t be a fight. Well, they were wrong. They were dead wrong. The arrogant, second-guessing bastards.
The heavy curtains in the Denver salesman’s hotel room. The pattern on them and how it did not bear a long gaze. The smell of the booze, its nuances of rat poison and rubber and the terror of dentistry.
The mad drive through the mud, along the wet grass, and under the glittering leaves of the big cottonwoods. The shouts of the men in the front. T.T.’s wildness that day. His last real wildness.
They got stuck three times, extricated themselves, sat on the running board to drink a few more shots. Jerry had one more—he was way behind them—and he felt the alcohol settle at the front of his head, right between his eyes like an ice cube. It burned. It felt like a light, so strong that it made the world too bright to look at. The bright prairie, the metal of the car. Even the Denver guy’s goggles and the phony diamond on his thin hand. All of it too harsh, too shaky and bright.
And so, in some ways, the camp was a relief. The light had to make its way down through the leaves.
There was a dim, crepuscular, shrouded feel to the place.
They stopped the car in long grass and walked into what had once been the grounds of the roadhouse and beer garden. The big stone house where Dempsey was headquartered, a clearing around it, a training arena on the edge of the clearing, all of it rimmed by the big cottonwoods.
People milling everywhere. Something dreamlike about them. Maybe it was the booze. But they seemed to move without hurry. A languor. As if all of them—the floozies, the followers, the sparring partners, the sightseers from town—had all been here for days. That this was where they lived.
The grass was damp, and that made it flicker more.
Some floozies played cards under a spreading tree. They shouted tinkling insults at a group of passing men who had the low-hatted look of slickers with guns under their vests.
Chickens ran loose.
Somewhere, perhaps inside the thick walls of the stone house, someone played a saxophone.
A waist-high man with a large head rocked past them, leading a wildcat cub on a leash.
A woman with a torn stocking took the leash and tied it slowly around a slim t
ree. The cub’s collar was made of rhinestones.
The dwarf picked up a water bucket and made his metronomic way toward the practice ring.
The ring was situated at the bottom of a slope and the slope was covered with spectators, all hats and the low hum of voices. Some stood, a few handsomely dressed women among them.
On the far side of the crowd, two huge men with the planted look of bodyguards shook their heads slowly at three young women in filmy dresses. One of them handed one of the bodyguards a picnic hamper. Their postures were flirtatious and supplicating. The prettiest of them pointed toward Dempsey’s big stone house.
The man bent his head over the basket and pawed its contents. No, his head shook. No.
One of the girls hit him playfully on the arm and they all ran off then and jumped into a motorcar—one of the girls at the wheel—and it popped, popped away, sliding a little on the turn. The bodyguard pawed some more. Pulled something out and smelled it. Closed the lid and tossed the basket over his shoulder as if it were an apple core.
All those people, but there is something intent and hushed about them, They preside somehow, they have control. The tenders, the sparring partners, the handlers—they are slickers, men of the world. In Shelby, everybody’s a kid.
It seems to Jerry a time and a place for competence, worldliness. But T.T., usually so reserved and watchful, has gone completely nuts on the booze. Jerry doesn’t want to be with him. T.T. goes off with the Denver guy to see a bear in a cage and then to stand smoking and waiting on the banks of the Missouri. Jerry watches T.T. from a distance: T.T. and the Denver guy.
T.T. sweeps his arm toward the waters of the Missouri. He sways back on his heels. His hand chops the air too many times.
Some Great Falls sports say they are watching Dempsey fight now because there is no way he will ever fight in Shelby. The money isn’t there. The Shelby guys are bluffing. It’s a huge mess, and Kearns isn’t going to bring his fighter forth until he’s got the whole works. And there is no way that a bunch of yahoos is going to come up with $100,000 in a week. Come on.
They think they’ll get it in the gate receipts, someone says. They think Kearns will forgive the July 2 deadline and let them come up with it at the gate, the final payment. All those trains rolling in with all those people with all that dough.
All those trains! A low hoot. They’re canceling right and left! And the tickets? They’re going for ten dollars now. They’ll be five tomorrow, and those rubes will be tackling people on the Fourth, begging them to take one for fifty cents. You wait!
That arena? The spectators? A few peas at the bottom of a soup bowl! If the thing comes off at all, mind you.
Their self-satisfied chuckles. The growing rage in Jerry—pure violent chagrin. Like the time he was a child and someone pinned a donkey’s tail to the hem of his Sunday jacket and he walked around like that, in his own house, even his parents hiding their giggles. What a betrayal. His mother stopped the nonsense, but not before she let him walk around for a few minutes wondering about his brother’s red face, his sister running in giggles out of the room, even his kindly father, dropping his face down behind the newspaper to hide a broad grin.
That moment when he discovered the joke. It felt, the rage, like this.
He thought of his makeshift ice cream parlor, the ceiling dripping.
Smug, smug they all are, under this dappled light. Waiting for their champion. But you look around at this scene and think about Gibbons, the tendons tensing, his white iron-muscled legs, and you think, Maybe.
You look at a bobcat tied to a tree with a rhinestone collar around its neck, and the bear, and the buzzing, complacent decadence of the place, and think, You may be surprised by an underdog. You think it with fury. There is some sense of fatal leisure about this place. It has grown hot now, and the flies buzz and a few people on the edges of the crowd on the hill have stretched out on their backs, hats over their eyes, waiting for him. The champion. Dempsey. Blackie Jack.
Two men in ice cream suits smoking together near the makeshift ring. Epicene, slim, in their light-colored clothes. Hatless, their hair slicked to a patent shine.
Kearns, someone said. On the left. He leans forward, the one who is Kearns, to hear a question. Makes a throat-slitting motion. Throws back his head to laugh.
I hate him, Jerry thought. I hate that monster-hearted con artist.
Johnny Dempsey, someone says. The one on Kearns’s right. The older brother.
A hand in a pocket, a posed slouch, a face, eyes, that even from a distance are too avid and weary. A nervous dandy.
The dope fiend, someone explains. Jack’s Hollywood friends got him hooked. Oh, yeh, everybody knows. You hang around here and you know. Maybe Kearns keeps him supplied. Part of the deal. You pump up the champ. You sedate his monkey-ridden brother with the slim slouch, the moving eyes.
These people are jaded, complacent. Dempsey will be the same. He will be the beefy version of those two fops.
But then Kearns snaps to and Johnny fades off and something is happening, and Jerry feels fear in his throat because here he comes.
That big dark body and his way of walking toward a ring, the sullen, swinging walk. William Harrison aka Kid Blackie aka Jack. The Manassa Mauler and his handlers.
Jack.
His lean, knobbled father, Hyram, scurries behind the boys, green light rippling across his white-stubbled face. Johnny has reappeared, looking too alert and helpful.
Dempsey has a secret brine that he uses to tan his skin, make it leather that will not cut. He is very dark. All of him. There are purple pimples on the backs of his big thighs. He calls a greeting to someone. His voice is eerie and high, the voice of a boy.
It was supposed to be practice, but a lot of people in this crowd had been here before, had watched one of these sessions among the dappled light of the river trees, and they were intent and unsmiling. They were not the joking, easy men who watched Gibbons train in Shelby.
Jerry caught sight of a land agent he knew from Great Falls, and waved. The agent nodded curtly, his eyes quickly back on the ring.
Dempsey was always forward, on his toes. He leaned into it, always the aggressor. There was a kind of competent violence to him. He seemed to have a killing switch inside him, and whenever he went into the ring, the switch went on and there was no reprieve. It was never practice. Other people could say it was. Dempsey himself could call it sparring. But it was always a fight.
Jerry saw this. He also saw T.T. on the far edge of the crowd, gesturing. He ignored him. Something in the booze had hopped him up, and Jerry had seen it before. Seen guys swill some of that stuff down and go loony. Raving. He had never seen T.T. this animated. He tried to ignore him. T.T. embarrassed him—a dipsy kid at a hard man’s game.
In the sixth round, the sparring partner, a Pittsburgh heavyweight named Jack Burke, landed a punch that cut the leather skin over Dempsey’s eye. The crowd buzzed, not so much at the blow but at the look it brought. Not surprise or shock. Just cold killer rage. As instinctive as a cat’s drawn-back eyes. And Dempsey moved in then with a left hook, followed by quick rights to the ribs, and Burke was down on his knees. As he staggered to his feet, Dempsey lobbed another left, and Burke fell forward, to grab him in a clinch. His face was pulp and blood. His nose was broken.
Jerry closed his eyes. He could hear Dempsey’s fast volley to the back of the neck, the punch you kill a rabbit with. He could see, even behind his closed eyes, the agonized orgasmic expression on Burke’s face.
When it was over, Burke managed a ghoulish smile. Dempsey grabbed his partner’s hand and smiled his first smile of the fight. He was panting and serene. Then he did a strange thing. He brought Burke’s arm to his mouth and bit it, lightly, affectionately. The crowd whistled and clapped their relief, and the sparring partner limped off toward the big stone house.
There was more. It was as if the afternoon accelerated after that and Jerry has just snatches. There was a birthday cake—it was De
mpsey’s 28th birthday—and it was hoisted, flaming, into the ring between sparring sessions. The champion, a sweater over his shoulder, scooping out a bite with his taped fingers. A mournful, off-tune rendering of “Happy Birthday.” The fading light and the beginnings of the rain clouds in the west.
The blow that broke the jaw of another sparring partner, the seven-foot giant, Ben Wray. The sound of it. The way Jack continued to bounce on his toes, tipped forward, alert.
Johnny Dempsey, the brother, picking the gaunt fingers of his father from the arm of his impeccable, pin-striped shirt. Johnny Dempsey in some kind of fervent discussion with T.T., who was clearly so smashed Jerry knew he had to get him out of there. He was weaving, throwing his arms around, laughing, pounding a fist on a tree, fishing some bills out of his pocket.
The first big drops of rain and—hours later, it seemed—the train in the dark and the streaming rain back to Shelby. T.T. had finally sunk into a half-lidded silence. He was sobered.
Rain in sheets, the train burrowing through it, clacking, hissing. Jerry’s cheek against the window. A feeling of absolute, end-of-it weariness. A mild, detached vision of the ceiling of his refreshment dungeon oozing water, plunking it down on a pair of sunglasses.
T.T., trancelike, examines the watch. It has scrollwork on the silver case that looks like figure eights on ice. The numerals are large and ornate. It is old. Maybe valuable.
Johnny Dempsey sold it to him for four dollars. Made the deal spontaneously, enthusiastically, as if he’d just thought of it and why hadn’t he before? Such a good, reasonable idea, to pull someone else’s silver watch out of his pocket and offer it to a drunk stranger for the price of some bliss.
18
ON AGAIN. Now it was on again. Twenty ghostly investors were each ready to hand over $5,000 to save the honor of Montana. The last $100,000 by July 2, tomorrow, and the fight was on. It was a go.
Who were these men with the money? Did anyone know? Did anyone really believe in them?
Twenty lifelong friends, the banker Stanton says stoutly. Friends of Montana. The new fight czar, Major Lane, nods agreement. Lifelong friends. For the honor of the state.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 21
