by John Sayles
The manager is not impressed. “Folks won’t be happy paying to see a slaughter.”
“You underestimate our boy,” says Smith, pulling his wideawake off and holding it over his heart. “As well as the drawing power of your Mr. Choynski.”
“An exhibition,” says Choynski.
“I expect our citizenry will expect a bit more fireworks than that.”
“A lively exhibition. What’s your name?”
Niles Manigault begins to speak but Hod beats him to the punch. “Hosea Brackenridge. Always called me Hod, though.”
The fighter smiles. “That’s too good to have made up.” He holds out his hand to shake. Several of the knuckles are misshapen. “If you’re anywhere near as tough as this beef, Mr. Brackenridge, we will reward the people of Skaguay with a memorable evening.”
“Cocky Jew bastard,” drawls Niles Manigault as they step out onto Broad-way again. A mulecart is tipped on its side and men are trying to right it, boots sliding in the mud as they push.
“We’ve already sold the tickets.” Jeff Smith steps around the accident, unconcerned. “Add the liquor on top and the wagers, there’s a tidy sum to be gathered. My only true concern is what to call our boy Hosea here.”
“I concur,” says Manigault. “One Jew name in the ring is quite enough.”
“It’s not Jew,” Hod protests. “It’s from the Bible.”
“Which is nothing but Jews till you reach the end of the Book,” says Smith. He stops on the far boardwalk to look Hod over again. “Young McGinty.”
Niles laughs.
“That a real person?” Hod knows he’s signed on for a beating, and hopes that’s all it is.
“I ran an establishment called the Orleans Club in Creede during their bonanza,” Smith tells him. “I acquired a statue, a prehistoric man who had been artfully carved out of stone, and kept him in the back room. For the price of one nickel the curious were allowed to take a brief look. We named it McGinty.”
“Christened thusly,” explains the dude, “because anyone that petrified has got to be Irish.”
The fight is in the dance hall at the front of the Nugget. The room smells of cigars and spilled beer and the wet woolen clothes of the three hundred men already packed in around the tiny roped square where two windmilling prospectors settle a grudge to cheers and catcalls. Smokey walks Hod around the already drunken throng in the hall, then back through the packed, whiskey-reeking bar into a tiny room screened off by a dirty American flag hung over a narrow doorway. A skinny girl, still in her teens, lies on a cot staring at the ceiling. She sits up to look at them blankly. She wears a sleeveless green chemise and has her red hair pinned up with an emerald-colored brooch.
“Sorry, Miss,” says Hod.
She looks at the negro. “Boxin over?”
“Just about to start, the real one.” Smokey points to Hod. “He got to change.”
She nods and stands, glancing at Hod as she steps out of the crib. “He aint no fighter.”
“Nemmine her,” says Smokey, tossing a pair of stained trunks onto the cot. He holds up a pair of high-topped leather shoes. “These aint gonna fit you, is they?”
“Don’t appear so.”
“Put them of yours back on when you ready, then.” Smokey watches as Hod strips down, turning away when he peels his long underwear off. There are postcards of naked women stuck all over the walls, naked women holding tennis rackets, astride bicycles, lounging on divans, naked women staring right at you.
“These are big, too,” says Hod, holding the waist of the trunks out with his thumbs.
“You put this in there, protect your privates.” Smokey hands him a molded triangle with padding stuffed in it. “Then pull them drawstrings tight. You sure you been in the ring?”
Hod wedges the protector into the trunks, then wriggles his hips to get it to sit right. “There wasn’t any ropes. The other miners just crowded around in sort of a circle.”
Smokey shakes his head. “Makin you toe the line with Chrysanthemum Joe.”
“He somebody?”
The colored man snorts. “He put that left hand of his on your chin, you find out quick who he is. Beat Kid McCoy twice.”
“What you think I ought to do?” Hod is more worried about the crowd, raw-faced and shouting around the ring, of being humiliated, than of the soft-spoken man from the Pack Train Restaurant.
Smokey strikes a pose—arms slightly bent and extended out before him, loose fists held palms toward the ground, left hand and foot slightly forward of the right, right elbow tucked in close to the ribs. “You stand like this,” he says, “then you try catch his hits with your gloves or duck your head away from them. With Joe they gonna come in bunches, so stay on your toes, keep movin. This here,” he taps the spot between the ribs just below his breastbone, “this is your mark. You let him hit you sharp on that mark, your knees gonna buckle right under you. So you keep this elbow down here ready to block him, throw it across your mark when he try at it.”
“That leaves my head open on the right.”
Smokey smiles, showing a few missing teeth. “Don’t it though? That’s what beautiful about the game. Whatever a man do, it open him up to something comin back.”
“So if I think he’s gonna—”
“Last thing you want to do out there is any thinkin, son. It’s all time and distance, time and distance, and then you just got to have a feel for it.”
“You were a fighter?”
Smokey begins to wrap Hod’s left hand in a tight, complicated cross-pattern with a roll of cloth bandage. “Bare-knuckle days. My last bout I went twenny-eight rounds with Peter Jackson when he come over from Australia. Near kilt each other.”
Hod looks down at his heavy shoes. “These gonna be all right?”
Smokey nods. “Got a nice tread on em. Wood floor, slicked up with blood—”
Hod feels a little dizzy. He tries to focus on one of the postcards. A naked woman with dimpled knees and a feathered hat poses, chin up and eyes to the heavens, before a backdrop of a distant, smoking volcano.
“Should I try to hit him back?”
“Try to hit him first and then get away. Hit him, hold him, wrestle him around. Just don’t get him mad at you.”
There is a roar from the dance floor as one or both of the prospectors hit the floor.
“I think I better piss first.”
Smokey sighs, starts out. “I get you a cuspidor.” He pauses with the flag half lifted to look back. “Whenever you think you can’t stand no more, you take your dive. And once you in that tank, stay under for a while. Can’t nobody hit you with nothing down there.”
Three hundred men turn to look, whiskey-ornery, as Smokey brings Hod back into the dance hall. Jeff Smith stands with Niles Manigault and several of the others from the Parlor at the side of the little improvised ring, cargo rope stretched between four cattle stanchions nailed to the floor. The one they call the Sheeny Kid barks out from the center.
“Gentlemen, if I may direct your attention—now entering the squared circle—from the mists of County Cork—European Catchweight Champion and challenger for the Heavyweight crown—the Gaelic Goliath—Young McGiiiiiiiiinty!”
Smokey holds the ropes apart and Hod ducks in to more jeers than applause. He stands trying to look above the men’s howling faces and sees the red-haired girl from the little room leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed. He wishes she wasn’t there.
“Hey Soapy!” cries a man from within the mass of spectators. “Where’d you dig this stiff up?”
Laughter then, overtaken by excited chatter and then cheers as Choynski steps in from the street wrapped in a bearskin, his manager shoving a path clear to the ring. “And his opponent—” cries the Kid, turning to gesture theatrically toward the arriving fighter, “—for the first time in the north country—a battler of great renown—the California Terror—the Hebrew Hercules—Chysanthemum Joe Co-wiiiiiinski!”
Wild applause and foot stom
ping as Smokey pulls Hod over to meet Choynksi and his manager in the center of the ring, each man’s second watching the other as the little gloves are pulled on and laced, Hod expecting something heavier with padding in them. These are more to protect your own knuckles than the other man’s face.
Choynski half-turns to raise an arm and acknowledge the cheers, while Hod hangdogs down at the tobacco-stained floor.
“This evening we will be witnessing an open-rounded exhibition of the scientific art of self-defense, fought under the Queensbury rules,” the Kid continues to some booing by the more vicious element in the crowd. “Rounds of three minutes with a one-minute respite in between, a downed fighter taking a ten-count from the referee—” indicating the character the men in the Parlor called Reverend Bowers, “—shall constitute a knockout and end the bout.”
“Just call it now, Reverend, and save the dub a beating!” calls a man by the woodstove at the back. More laughter.
“Gentlemen—a show of appreciation for our two warriors!”
More applause then. “Two,” says a man behind Hod’s corner.
“He won’t survive the first,” says another.
“Four ounces.”
“Piker.”
“All right, eight then.”
“You’re on. He falls like timber in the first.”
There is more betting, none venturing that Hod will last beyond three rounds, and then a sourdough raps a blacksmith’s hammer against a hunk of metal pipe hung on a rope and Hod is pushed into battle.
There is no run to this deal. Choynski steps up and whap! whap! hits Hod twice in the face before he can cover it with his forearms and elbows and thump! delivers a short-armed hook to his ribs that hurts a lot worse. Choynski steps back and begins to casually pick openings, shooting his right fist into Hod—head, body, head, head—Hod turtling in and backstepping to the rope, which stretches too much to hold his weight. He stumbles sideways, loses his balance and tumbles forward to grab the fighter around the neck and hang on. Choynski catches Hod and pulls him in, pressing foreheads. There is already booing, and somebody’s shoe whizzes over the rope to thump Hod in the back.
“You better throw some leather, son,” Choynski mutters in his ear before pushing him away, “or these people are gonna string us up.”
Hod goes after him, left, right, left, right, putting everything he has into each swing, hitting shoulder, arm, hip, and once, painfully, the top of the man’s skull.
“You’re looping,” Choynski tells him as he ducks in and steps past. “Hit in a straight line and corkscrew your wrist—” Whap! whap! he demonstrates, snapping Hod’s head back with two effortless lefts. “Put some shoulder in it.”
Hod brings his elbows in and tries to punch straight, Choynski catching the hits on his glove or flicking his head safely to the side at the last moment. By the time the pipe is rapped and he falls back onto the barstool Smokey sets out, Hod’s arms feel like he’s been jacking bedrock for a full shift.
Smokey takes a mouthful of water, then sprays it onto Hod’s face. “Keep your mouf close,” he says. “You like to bite your tongue off.”
“I’m just about blown.”
“That’s cause you holdin your wind every time he hit you or you tries to hit him. Just breathe through it. Don’t want no air trapped in your lungs for them body punches.”
There are men screaming at him over the ropes, telling him he’s a faker and a dub, telling him to lay down, telling him to stay on his feet one more round, telling him he couldn’t punch a dent in a pat of butter.
The pipe is banged again and the stool pulled from under him. He wades in, his arms held further out in front of him. Choynski leaves off from his outfighting, ducking under and in to pound Hod in the ribs. Hod tries to keep breathing, to block the blows with his elbows. He can feel that the other man isn’t putting everything into it, punches landing with no weight behind them. The men around them are booing again and Choynski hits him with a sudden uppercut beneath the chin that staggers him back to the ropes where hands catch him and shove him forward into a shot square in what Smokey called the mark and sure enough Hod’s legs go to water and he dives forward to hug Choynski’s neck.
“Easy, son,” says the battler, bending his knees to support Hod’s weight. “You got to last six.”
“Six rounds?” The idea seems unbearable.
“Your Mr. Smith has some bets down. It’s six or we don’t get paid. You ready?”
“I think so.”
Choynski pushes him free then and snaps two punches, pulled a little so they only sting, to the right side of his face. Hod staggers back, only half acting, and cheers erupt. He steps back in, throwing straight punches with no kick in them, and Choynski smiles and feints and throws some of the same back at him. It is an exhibition, an exhibition of a scientific art he knows nothing about but is willing to pretend at as long as they stay in the center of the ring away from the blood-thirsty sons of bitches surrounding it. Choynski pops him on the nose with his left, a big blue spark before his eyes, but it triggers Hod’s cocked right hooking back over to catch the battler on the side of the jaw.
“Attaboy,” grins Choynski, dancing sideways. “Let em fly.”
Hod thrashes at him left and right and then the round ends and there are cheers and complaints and paper money and gold dust passing hands as he flops down on the stool straining for wind.
“He says I got to last six rounds to get paid.”
“They don’t tell me noner that,” says Smokey, spreading some kind of grease on Hod’s eyebrows and cheekbones with his thumbs. “Can you see out that eye?”
Hod’s left eye is swollen, closing to a slit. “Sort of.”
Smokey presses a chunk of ice to it, looks over to where Jeff Smith and his crew sit on a board-and-barrel bleacher. “If it six, you need to rest some in the middle of the rounds. Just get in tight and lean on the man. He be happy to lean back.”
The pipe gongs and they are on again and the boxing lesson continues, sparring back and forth, Choynski hitting Hod with a flurry of half-strength punches whenever the fanatics beyond the ropes get too restless. Hod’s arms are leaden and a couple times he has to backstep, dropping them to his sides to shake them out, Choynski closing but not too fast, before they can go at it again. Hod’s nose begins to bleed, dripping down over his chin and smearing into the sweat on his chest, and he has to breathe through his mouth. But he stays up through the third and the fourth, only in danger in the fifth when he catches the eye of the girl in the green, still watching through the cloud of cigar and woodsmoke that fills the room, and Choynski tags him with another uppercut that knocks him back on his keister.
Rev Bowers is over him, waving his arm and counting very deliberately. Hod manages to get to one knee but the muscles in his legs are gone, and when the Reverend gets to a slow seven he looks to Jeff Smith who looks to the sourdough with the hammer and bong! the round is ended, bettors stomping and shouting with glee or anger, Smokey coming out to lift Hod under the arms and flop him on the stool. The negro mashes a sponge into his face and Hod tries not to gag as the ammonia shoots up his nose to a spot behind his eyes and burns into the cuts on his face. He pushes the sponge away and the sound of the screaming men comes back in a rush and he is furious, furious at himself and ready to fight again. If only he could feel his legs.
“You doin fine, young man,” says Smokey. “You got more heart than head, but you doin fine. Where we at?”
“Nugget.”
“And where that?”
“Skaguay.”
Smokey takes Hod by the gloves and pulls out on his arms. “You hit the boards this round, just stay down. Peoples got what they paid for.”
He is able to stand when the sixth starts, his head clearing, his first two straight lefts landing and then a one-two, bringing his right hard over the top and following with a—
Someone is waving a towel in his face. The breeze is nice. He is sitting on a floor that has tobacco sta
ins on it and blood, blood mixed with sweat on his arms and chest. The fighter from the Pack Train, Choynski, is flapping the towel, smiling and not wearing boxing gloves any more. He leans down and says something, just a noise in Hod’s ear but it’s not clear, nothing is clear—
He’s back in the little room with the French postcards on the wall and there is music and men’s voices from outside and the girl in green, the redheaded girl with the scrawny arms, winces in sympathy as she dabs at his cuts with a cloth soaked in something that stings like hell.
“They call me Sparrow,” she says. “But my Christian name is Addie Lee.”
His shoes and his socks are off, and somebody has pulled the protection out of his trunks and tossed it, stained with blood, onto a chair in one corner. He’s never been this undressed this close to a woman, the whores in Butte having only pulled his pants halfway down, and now he has to haul his knees up so this Addie Lee won’t see him stiff. When he crosses his arms to cover his nipples up it hurts terrible, his ribs on both sides purple with bruises.
“He laid you out pretty good. Hit the back of your head on the floor.”
That, too, hurts terrible, an ache that makes it hard to swallow when she tips his chin and gives him some water. “I go six?”
Addie Lee nods. “Don’t know if them ginks tonight were sorer at you or at Mr. Smith. They waitin for you out there.”
“Mr. Smith?”
She nods again. “The whole crew of em. Celebratin the haul they made.”
It takes a while for him to manage to sit up. Dressing himself is a torture, each move reminding another part of his body how hard it’s been pounded. When he shuffles out into the bar there is Smokey carefully sweeping the floor and Jeff Smith with a drink in his fist laughing and shaking his throbbing hand and Niles Manigault calling him Young McGinty and Rev Bowers and the Sheeny Kid and Old Man Triplett and Suds behind the bar and a fella named Red thumping him on the back which makes the ache in his skull jostle around and a little weaselly one they call Doc.
“Saw a boy die in the ring one night,” says Doc. “Hit the floor just like you did. An insult to the cranium.”
