Everyone seemed to be gone now. Everyone was in. She could hear distant shouts and the thud of feet on boards.
The man gestured, a question, toward the interior of the arena. She nodded. They walked in and he tipped his hat and was gone.
Strangely exhilarated, she scanned the arena and, yes, it was fuller, but it was still mostly space. The crowd—all those clambering feet, those shouts, those thousands—had pushed inside. Everyone moved freely down toward the ring, and they still reached only halfway up the arena’s long slopes.
She picked her way carefully down the steps, excused herself daintily as she stepped over feet until she reached Vivian.
Jerry had gone to look for her. He had heard the stampede and run out to find her, and now he was coming back, his face anxious and then, when he saw her, relieved.
She smiled. She was fine. Her heart was hammering. Her eye got scratched and her clothes certainly gathered some dust—she batted again at her dress—but she was fine. The eye hurt in the light and she squinted it closed. Jerry handed her a pair of sunglasses.
It is almost time. Some have been sitting in the sun for hours and have turned pink. The vendors have jacked soda pop up to twenty-five cents. A bald man on the other side of the ring dumps a bottle of water over his head.
A search is on for a stool. The stool is missing from one of the boxers’ corners. There is some scurrying around. The shadows are beginning to lengthen.
The announcer, the man in the heavy flannel shirt, gives a man in a soldier’s uniform a hand into the ring. He walks him to the center and calls out that he is a sergeant who was blinded in the Great War.
The sergeant is a slim man in his early twenties, clean-shaven. He must have kept growing after he enlisted, because his arms are too long for his uniform. He has a megaphone in one hand. He wears round blue glasses, and he turns his head slowly, side to side, scanning with his ears.
The announcer takes his hand from the soldier’s arm, leaving him to float in the center of the ring. Crackles of applause, some shouts—this is a foot-shuffling, testy, sun-stunned, distracted crowd—and he moves his head again. His face is very narrow and smooth. His mouth is mild and quizzical.
What does he think is out there? Where does he think he is? How can he possibly imagine where it is that he stands? How he is the center of a structure that reaches halfway up the sky. This is a twenty-four-year-old from Sunburst, Montana, blind since July 21, 1918. He saw the Eiffel Tower, but he never saw anything like this.
He bows. He makes a smile, then he makes it go away, and he raises the megaphone to his mouth. A sweet, high tenor drifts out of it, stripped by the amplifier of all nuance. But still it is high and sweet, just a natural gift that appeared in a farmer boy in Sunburst like his first eager, jagged teeth. It is that natural.
What happened to him in the Great War? Mustard gas? A blinding light? Trauma?
He makes the gestures of someone who sees. A hand drawn slowly to his heart. A gesture toward a sunrise on a spring day. The sightless eyes following something beautiful through the air, leading the way. A hand behind an ear, as if listening for something new in his own voice.
The megaphone points there, and then there. He moves slowly around in a circle, sending the voice outward. It seems that the megaphone is pointed for quite a long time right at Jerry and Vivian and Amelia. He seems—they all would have told you this—to be singing directly to them.
They are listening, their hands in their laps: A young man in his thirties, in a suit and a starched white shirt and a straw boater with a sunshade. The mottled, freckled hands of a redhead. Pale dry red hair beneath the hat. A face green from the shade. Legs crossed. Arms folded. A model oil derrick near his foot.
Next to him a woman wearing an unfashionably wide-brimmed hat, a pretty straw hat with a wilted flower in the band. Long hair drawn up under it. Glossy drawn-up hair, beginning to gray at the temples. A round sweet face. A careful smile because she has lost a tooth and they don’t have the money for a new one. Her Sunday summer dress, blue, and heavy black shoes for walking in a town without pavement. She seems not to hear the young soldier, though it could be that his voice or the words have pushed her into another place in her mind.
And next to her a young woman with a mussed bob, a battered hat, a rip in her stocking, and blue sunglasses. She is listening intently to the singing soldier. Her dirty gloves are clasped in her lap. She is stock-still. She is blinking back tears.
The soldier finishes and bows deeply. He places the megaphone on the ground, tapping it to make sure it is there. He bows again, flings his arm out in stylized gratitude for the applause, lifts his face and flings his hand toward the empty upper reaches of the arena. And then he is led away.
There is a pause, during which the sun pulls itself closer to the arena and its sweltering occupants. Programs are fanned frantically across faces. Some stand, hoping for moving air through their clothes. Hats sit atop handkerchiefs that have been draped over heads, over necks, desert fashion.
And then the boy who came in alone and sat in a fifty-five-dollar ringside seat—the young boy who walked in by himself—stands on his seat. He screeches. It is like a blast of trumpets. Here he comes! the boy shrieks.
He stands on his toes and points at a group of men walking tightly together toward the ring. The crowd whirls. The stern-faced strangers advance. They are packed tight around a taller one. His large dark head floats above theirs, a smoky idol.
And it is time.
21
IT SEEMED that the town began to evaporate almost as soon as the final bell rang and that dark arm was hoisted into the air; that the arm in the air was almost an act of nature, a signal for the dismantling to begin.
The bell rang, so faint it was almost inaudible, and the big arm went up, and almost at that very instant nails were pulled screeching out of boards. Souvenir oil derricks went into cardboard boxes. Fortune-tellers wearily unraveled the chiffon from their heads. Gibbons ribbons went flying into the big barrels of garbage. Traveling ladies tore up their murky, aromatic cots.
All those wooden and cardboard signs—rentals, admissions, entertainment, refreshments—were stacked for kindling. On top of one pile, a piece of cheap scenery showed a cottage in rose time. Another pile waited to be loaded onto the back of a rattling truck. A trunk of costumes. A megaphone. A Tom Mix sombrero. All of it waited to be lifted and moved away.
The dust. Huge clouds of it. The sun a wound in the sky, the way it looks when grass is burning somewhere, when trees are burning somewhere else. All that movement and all that dust. Wet rags over the nose and mouth. The long, irritable snorts of the deputies’ horses. A flung bottle, rolling down the boardwalk, stepped over by all those moving feet.
A briskness to the day now. Everyone on the move. That small tinkling bell, and then everyone to their feet and bent forward and moving out of the arena and into the already-emptying town.
The trains shrieking away, the first an engine and caboose carrying Mr. Doc Kearns and Mr. Jack Dempsey and their quarter of a million plus.
And as the day darkens, the wobbling lights of the automobiles aim themselves out of town. Frail wooden walls topple over. More nails squeal out of wood. A saw huffs through a board. Covers are flung off cots. Bedrolls rolled and hoisted. Feet. Wheels. Another howling train, weary musicians in the window, smoking.
Autos, trains, carts, horses, pulling all the people out of Shelby in long strands, their shadows long on the grass.
And then, as the moon begins to rise, the dust falling wordlessly to the ground, settling. The moon becomes tall and small and loses its first orangeness, to shine hard and white and electric. Down on Shelby.
On its scattered frame houses. Its narrow one-story, two-story buildings along Main. Dark now, all of them, except for the Green Lite and the King Tut. They are small, too, but their windows are warm orange and small shouts come out when the door wedges open for the figures that go in or out. Small shouts and the sound
of a clarinet.
The last big night at the Green Lite, the King Tut.
And yes, clearly, that is Amelia’s slightly wavery voice now, in front of the band. She is singing “Baby, Oh My Baby,” and there is wild clapping for her because there is wild clapping for everything, and she has a particular light of her own tonight, so new to town, and the way she knows how to move her hands, to make the right gestures, and the way her eyes seem to glisten, almost to overflow, while she smiles.
She is loose and jazzy because she is not trying to be excellent and she is leaving in a few days.
T.T. Wilkins leans against the wall, arms folded, watching her as if she might suddenly scurry out of sight.
The band stops and there is the sound, over in the corner, of coins thrown across a wooden floor. Laughter. Mayor James A. Johnson in his suit and walrus mustache, with his big pockets turned inside out, the white linings like windless sails. In another magnificent arm-flinging gesture, he throws his last coins. That’s it boys, he roars. That’s seventy thousand, give or take.
T.T. Wilkins offers Amelia a clean white handkerchief for her eye, which has grown scratchy and red. She says it will be better in the morning and she appreciates the handkerchief. They have a small stilted conversation. It comes up that KDYS radio in Great Falls has issued a plea for professional singers. It comes up, also, that the piano player at the Orpheum has been suffering fainting spells and must have absolute bed rest for a time.
Amelia thinks to herself that men in the West have a quality of inward strength that shows itself in a nonreliance on words. And honesty too. No false flattery to see what they can get.
A few of the fight boosters huddle together. They are just back from Williams’s auto out back, the rumrunner pleasant and silent as he took their money.
One of the men, slightly older than the rest, has his finger pointed to the sky and is declaiming. A flutter of doubt, he intones. That was the demise of the whole deal. That second payment. Fatal to be late, boys. Fatal to be late.
Somebody suggests another telegram. Shelby offers to stage a rematch, stop. Shelby prepared to offer $100,000 for rematch, stop. Three of the young men pull their long pockets out of their pants and let them hang empty. This has become the badge of the night. Two of them are laughing so hard they can’t get their breath.
Someone says solemnly that Stanton’s bank is going to fold. Where did he get that money for the second payment, anyway? He thinks that people aren’t going to reach a conclusion that makes them run for their last few bucks? The two laughing men break into new peals of hilarity.
Vivian and Jerry realize they haven’t danced together for months. They don’t do the new fast dances, but this is a slow one, a drifty one, and there they are, gliding around the floor. They feel giddy, exhausted from the endless day, ready to keep going, though, because this is the circus, and the circus will be gone, all gone, at dawn.
They know they will not have a night like this again. They could not have said why they are so sure, but they are, and there is in it a mixture of mourning and relief.
Every now and then, Vivian tosses her head back for a long look at her husband. She studies him and he studies her back, and then they hide their faces in each other for a moment and then straighten up and dance like ordinary people. Sometimes they smile, amazed at the day they have come through. Amazed at each other and the day and the place. They are travelers leaving a dire and exotic place, never to return, and they feel the moment of savoring that comes just before something is sure to disappear forever, that moment before a shocking country is left forever behind a river bend.
Everyone is giddy and strange and reluctant to close the day. The men walking around with their empty pockets flapping. Amelia so wild and good-humored and suddenly uncareful. The roars of laughter from the huddled men in the corners. Fewer and fewer strangers as the night goes on. They have filtered away to the King Tut, or onto the train, or even into their motorcars, to drive through a night that is flooded bright with the moon.
Amelia and T.T., Vivian and Jerry, walk home at three o’clock in the morning. Through Amelia’s left eye, the moon has grown smeary on the edges. She thinks she sees a shooting star, two of them.
The moon bathes the little town, the narrow rutted streets. It gives everything a shadow.
Some of the people in automobiles have stayed to camp under the white moon. They will leave at daybreak. Their cars are in circles, like covered wagons. They dream of drunken airplanes.
The moon gives the arena a very large shadow and turns it silver and timeless as a dead lake. A huge shallow bowl of silver. A man-made wonder of the modern world.
A tiny figure sleeps inside that huge silver bowl. A crazy man who hopped off a freight car, a tall black hat in his hand. His name is Jeremiah, the name he gave himself the day he unhooked the curled talons of the devil from his wrist. The day the scales fell from his eyes.
The first thing Jeremiah noticed as he limped through Shelby was a playbill for something called the King Tut. It said: “Thorns and Orange Blossoms,” “The Tie That Binds,” and “Which One Shall I Marry?” The messages seemed telegraphed directly into his brain. They seemed to sum up everything there was to say about life on this earth.
The second thing he noticed was the huge wooden bowl on the edge of town. Transported by God. He shied from it, making his way onto a bench above the town so he could see it from above. An octagon, each side as long as a city block. The sides dipping toward a small sacred square in the middle. Eight sides. Eight spokes.
That is where he lies now, a tiny figure bathed by the white moon. In the very center, wheeling in atonement for all eternity.
And Tommy Gibbons in the little green-roofed house. His eyes are closed too. He, too, lies splayed. His wife—his young first wife—presses cool compresses to the yelping bones of his face. A Blackfeet war costume, his honorary membership, is draped over the foot of the bed.
He listens to the faint squish of the compresses and his son’s breathing in the next room.
The moon flings its white light down upon it all. The town. The huge molten arena on its edge. The railroad tracks like fallen ladders across the grass.
IV
22
222 Defoe St.
St. Paul, Minn.
Sept. 27, 1927
Dear Jerry,
Enclosed please find most recent tax statement on the Yates place. I would like you to sell that property for me if you find a buyer at five dollars an acre. I do not think it at all likely the oil play will go in the direction of that farm and, in fact, I am now of a mind that the field has been greatly overrated and I can do better things with my money. I believe life insurance—not fire or marine insurance—is the way to go for me. The early signs have all been promising—I have drawn up three policies during the past week alone—and I find that life insurance, particularly the writing of monthly income policies, is something that engages my talents to the fullest. I have been so successful at this early stage that I am writing a small book about monthly income insurance. I began it a month ago and am nearly finished. It seems to flow directly from my head onto the page, and I find I have to make only the slightest corrections the second time through.
The writing of this book, forcing as it does the contemplation of the entire philosophy of life insurance, has helped me view Family and Posterity in a new and richer way. As I mentioned a few months ago, the best decision of my life was to return to my neglected marriage and children. I say “neglected” with a full measure of remorse and regret. However time heals all wounds and we are, I can report, a family again with mutual goals and mutual respect, clean habits and a go-getting attitude.
My insights along these lines of marriage and family make me very concerned about Daisy Lou, that she is making a big mistake regarding Mr. T.T. Wilkins and will live to rue the day. I cannot, for the life of me, make sense of her objections to him. They seem frivolous at best, and then there is the matter of a divorce
d woman in a small town simply striking out on her own with no rhyme or reason. And the legal procedures with her name. Can’t you talk some sense into her?
Ruth and I have had but one significant argument in the seven months since we were reunited, and that involved my decision to attend the Dempsey-Tunney rematch in Chicago. She views boxing as a barbarism, as what decent woman doesn’t when all is said and done. However, I felt compelled to attend because I had a sixth sense of the outcome (I am using the bout in my insurance book as an example of science and strategy prevailing over the impulsive and prideful instincts) but, more importantly, because a number of business prospects would be on the special trains from St. Paul and it seemed a good opportunity, in the leisurely and intimate atmosphere of a train car, to explain to them the advantage of life insurance policies. (I proved my theory by selling the three monthly income policies.)
Well, you should have been there, old boy! More than one hundred thousand of us paying a couple million for the privilege. Made Shelby’s “extravaganza” seem a schoolyard fight, you have to admit. I had one of the best seats, just a few rows from ringside, and I can tell you the newsboys did not capture the immaturity of our man Dempsey at the moment of truth. He had Tunney! The man would never have made it back onto his feet in ten. But Dempsey’s problem is—and I go into this in some detail in my book—that he will not go by the rules or by strategy. He is a creature of instinct and emotion, a barroom fighter still, when you get right down to it. He just hovered around like a big panther that has had a whiff of blood, until the referee pushed him into the neutral corner and started counting. By then, of course, Tunney had the extra seconds and up he got. And of course he is a man who uses his head and plots his moves and thinks of the long picture, so he knew exactly what to do for the rest of it. Retreat, retreat. Make Dempsey a maddened bull, wear him out, and bingo, that’s the end of a champion.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 25
