A Moment in the Sun (15 page)

“Tell Jeff I’m proud of him,” says Tommy Kearns when they lug a new Wurlitzer Orchestrion into the Palace, Smokey trying to keep his back to the naked Muses on the wall. There is as much talk in town of the fight as there is of the developments in Cuba, and somehow the two are connected in people’s minds.

“Proud for what?”

“For putting his boy in the scrap right away. This old Granny McKinley, feeding diplomats to the Dagoes—”

“You mean Ox is like the Spanish?”

“I mean if there’s bound to be a fight, get on with it! How you feeling, son?”

“I’m fine.”

Kearns steps close to look Hod over. “And what do you think, Smokey? I lost a bundle when the Jew let him go past three.”

“That’s cause you sold him short,” says Smokey, carefully laying his side of the crate on the floor. “That Swede can’t box.”

“Neither can a grizzly bear, but I wouldn’t step into a ring with one. Show me your muscle, kid.”

Hod puts his end down and, for the third time that morning, flexes his right bicep to be felt and evaluated.

“It’s kind of knotty. You don’t like to see that knotty kind of muscle on a fighter. It should be big and smooth, like—like the muscle on an ox. Pure power.”

“You bet how you gonna bet, Mr. Tommy,” says Smokey. “But this boy know what he’s a
bout
.”

“He says he’s gonna kill you,” says Addie Lee as she sits with Hod on her bed behind the flag.

“You’ve seen him?”

“He sent for me to come to a room up at Dutch Lena’s. He thinks Soapy and them are out to do him in, so he had a bunch of his friends waiting downstairs.”

Hod feels himself flush, thinking of her in a hotel room with him.

“Look, the
Farallon
is leaving today. You could get out of here—”

“So could you,” he says.

“Wherever I am, I be doing the same thing. Right here is where it pays best.”

The men out in the bar beyond the flag are trading opinions of how the battle will go. “The thing with Swedes,” says one, “they don’t feel pain the way a normal white man does. Something about how thick their skulls are.”

“So he talks about me?” asks Hod.

Addie Lee shrugs. “We’ve had a couple chewing matches on the subject.”

“He ever hit you?”

“Threatened to once or twice. But he’s afraid of Soapy and them, like everybody else.”

“And you work for Soapy.”

“Half of everything goes to the house, wherever you are,” she says. “Who owns the house, that aint always so clear.”

He buries his fingers in her hair and kisses her on the mouth and she kisses back.

“This don’t matter, you know.” She is crying, sort of, tears falling but her face composed and serious. “You’re just sucker bait for the gamblers. And I’m just sucker bait for you.”

He gently pushes her down on the bed then, and for the first time doesn’t care about the men out at the bar.

Niles Manigault sits nursing a bourbon when Hod steps out.

“There is a theory,” says the Southerner, “only recently given much credence, that proper training for a fight precludes intimate relations.”

Hod looks at him blankly.

“Each visit to the daughters of joy, each frolic with the fairies of the
demimonde
,” he elaborates, “further saps the warrior’s vitality. Even married men are advised to forfeit their conjugal benefits until the foe is vanquished. Of course, if one lacks hope, there is the phenomenon of the condemned man’s last meal—”

Hod leaves him contemplating at the bar.

The Skaguay Guards march on the day of the fight. After two hours of drilling conducted by a defrocked Mountie named Hopgood who Jeff Smith has hired, they form up and strut in a pair of ragged columns down Broadway, to the cheers and jeers of those who haven’t joined. Knudsen has been put at the head of the second company, a long-handled shovel over his shoulder, while Hod leads the first, carrying Jeff Smith’s Winchester. All the percentage girls come out and wave handkerchiefs and the Garden of Joy band is playing as they march behind the volunteers and the sun is showing itself brighter than it has in weeks and for a tiny moment, stepping along smartly to the beat of
El Capitán
, Hod starts to feel that this is something big, something real, something important in the world and that he is a part of it.

Jeff Smith stands waiting on a wagon at Second, a flag draped like a Roman’s toga over his shoulders, with Fitzhugh Lee glaring from the cage at his feet.

“Friends,” he declaims when the band has sputtered to a halt and the columns have deployed around the wagon and the civilians crowded in among them close enough to hear. “Patriots. Americans.” He pulls the banner off his body and holds it out to them in both arms. “I speak to you today concerning the march of the flag, and of the Almighty’s designs for our future.”

It is freezing cold despite the sun, the breath of the Guards huffing out like musket volleys as they stand at attention in their ranks, the unenlisted allowed to dance in place and bury their hands in their coats. Hod hopes that Smith has not prepared a stem-winder.

“For it is to Him that we must look for guidance in the approaching millennium,” he continues. “It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil, a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history, perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing workingfolk of all the earth. A people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes. The propagandists,” cries Jeff Smith, “not the misers, of liberty!”

Hod sees the reform contingent, who call themselves the 101 Committee, watching from the boardwalk, arms crossed in disapproval.

“And it is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon his chosen people, a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today.”

The eagle in the cage at Smith’s feet begins to croak rhythmically, swaying back and forth like an agitated parrot. Hod feels the Winchester heavy and cold on his shoulder. He is ready. Sick of this fool’s-gold Yukon and ready to go off to Cuba or the far islands of the Pacific, to wear a real uniform and fight and maybe die for the flag that droops from Jeff Smith’s outstretched arms.

“Shall we free the oppressed Cuban from the saffron banner of Spain?”

“Yes!” cry the Skaguay Guards.

“Shall we add our blood to that of Christian heroes who blazed their way across a savage continent?”

“Yes!” cry the sourdoughs and the stampeders, the merchants and the sure-thing men, the citizens of America’s farthest outpost. Hod sees Smokey, standing alone back in the doorway next to the oaken Sioux at Goldberg’s Cigar Store, watching them all with a vacant look on his face.

“Shall we continue,” asks Jeff Smith, holding the flag over his head now, “our march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall our free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of freedom wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Will we not do what our fathers have done before—to pitch the tents of liberty ever further from our shores and continue the glorious march of the flag?”

Uproarious cheers and men throwing their hats in the air and percentage girls waving little flags on sticks that have been passed out and a crackle of patriotic gunfire that prompts Fitzhugh Lee to lift his tailfeathers and unleash a stream of fish-smelling offal onto the cage floor. Then by some common but unspoken agreement all adjourn for drinks of celebration, all but the dozen who linger to watch Hod and Ox Knudsen staring at each other, ten yards separating them.

“See you tonight,” says Hod, holding the Winchester in the crook of his arm.

The Swede lifts the shovel from his shoulder and wiggles it in the air. “I go now and dig you a hole.”

Hod wanders off in the other direction, which takes him down to the wharves. Both the
Farallon
and the
Utopia
are in, waiting to leave in the morning. He sits halfway down the Juneau Wharf with his legs hanging over the side and the Winchester across his lap, and is watching the gulls when Smokey finds him.

“Shouldn’t ought to be out in this cold. You gone stiffen up.”

“I can’t listen to them inside the Parlor any more.”

The negro sits by him, looks at the ragged, screaming infestation that lights and flies, lights and flies, ganging up on whichever of their number manages to get a scrap of food in its beak.

“Always got one eye on they own bidness, the other on their neighbors’.”

“They don’t ever rest.”

Smokey chuckles and shakes his head. “Naw. Don’t ever see no fat gull, neither. They just a appetite with wings.”

He leans over the railing and points down to the rocks below. It is a rough day in the little harbor, waves breaking hard and rolling up on the mudflats, making a loud sucking sound as they fall back.

“See them shells stuck onto the rocks?”

“The mussels.”

“That’s the way to do it. Got food all in that water, even smaller than a speck of gold dust, and ever time it wash in or wash out over the rocks, them shells get a taste. Don’t have to go nowhere, just keep they mouths open.” Smokey shakes his head admiringly.

They are always doing somebody, Jeff Smith and his crew. Doing the wide-eyed gold pilgrims coming in with their store-bought equipment and the scurvy-gummed sourdoughs coming out with the year’s cleanup in their pokes. Jeff and Niles Manigault with their Southern manners and way of talking, Doc with his portmanteau and his lead bricks coated in gold, Rev Bowers with his entreaties to Good Samaritans and Syd Dixon offering to cut the savvy newcomer into a sweet deal, Red Gibbs and Ed Burns and the smash-nosed mug from Seattle they call Yeah Mow lounging about to deal with the ones who come back in claiming they’ve been cheated. The drinks are always on the house for the Deputy Marshal and an unofficial pharmacy operates over the bar and there are always helpful directions for stampeders to “honest” merchants and hot deals that won’t last more than a day and to the exact location of the town’s famous Paradise Alley. There is spoiled flour topped off with the good stuff and sold out the back door, interests in sure-thing claims obtained from departing sourdoughs whose mothers have just died, the telegraph messages home that go nowhere.
Received message
comes the inevitable reply.
We are all counting on you. Please send money
. And always, while you are waiting for your bacon or your beans or your paperwork there is the casual poker game, a handful of fellas just passing the time and full of good advice for greenhorns, willing to deal you in if you don’t mind playing for Skaguay stakes, so much gold out there waiting to be picked off the ground that a certain inflation has crept into all aspects of manly endeavor. Niles is the master of the cards, friendly, flattering, solemnly warning the greenhorn to be on the lookout for buncos like the notorious Soapy Smith and his gang and ready to commiserate that his own luck at poker seems to be as poor as the greenhorn’s, confiding, during a break for bladder relief, the secrets of the Martingale system, where you double your bet with each play and are therefore, given the immutable laws of mathematics, assured of victory.

Hod understands that when he fights tonight, it will be as their man.

“Thank heavens you’ve found him, Smokey.” Niles is at the table in the back room of the Parlor when Hod comes in with Smokey to return the rifle. Jeff Smith sits across from him, with Arizona Charlie and Jake Rice and Dynamite Johnny O’Brien who captains the
Utopia
circled under a haze of cigar smoke. “I was afraid he might be in the clutches of that poke-hunting soubrette.”

Hod hangs the Winchester on the nails behind the bar. There is a tension in the room, a lack of joking, a stiffness of posture. The steamer captain, O’Brien, sits behind a pile of currency and gold dust.

“Shit and corruption,” says Jeff Smith, staring holes into his cards. “You’ll have to accept my note for it, but I’m going to call your bluff.”

“Cash only, as agreed upon,” winks the captain. “No markers, no trade, no excuses.”

Smith looks to Charlie Meadows. “Front me a hundred.”

“The bet stands at two,” the captain reminds him, steady-eyed. The men have peeled down to their shirtsleeves, Jeff’s Navy Colt lying on the bar counter with the other gentlemen’s hardware.

Arizona Charlie hesitates, thinking up an excuse, and Smith scowls and pokes Jake Rice. “You front me,” he says to Rice, and then points to Smokey, who is tossing sardines from a tin into Fitzhugh Lee’s cage and watching the bird snap them up on the fly. “I’ll sell you my dinge. You’ve got plenty to keep him busy at your place.”

The men are silent for a moment, only the sound of the eagle’s claws clicking on the floor of its cage. Jake squirms in his seat.

“For two hundred?”

“He’s worth twice that. The best and only nigger in the Territory.”

“But what am I going to do with him?”

“That’s your business.” Jeff Smith has the look on his face that they all try to avoid.

Jake reluctantly lays two hundreds on the table, then turns to Smokey. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll make it double on the fight tonight and buy you back.”

“Is that right?” says Jeff Smith and then Dynamite Johnny turns up a pair of kings and Smith throws his hand on the floor, disgusted, and stomps over to the woodstove to give it a violent kick. He points at Smokey. “I want you out of here,” he says, and then points at Fitzhugh Lee. “And I want that bird stuffed.”

It has been decided that gloves will be worn but throws allowed, that the bell will be in the hands of one side but the time-piece held by the other, that Joe Boyle, down from Dawson and considered neutral in the affair, will referee. Half-clinches will be allowed and it will be up to the fighters to separate themselves. Smokey puts a towel over Hod’s face while he wraps his hands in the back room at Jake Rice’s place. “I want you to close your eyes,” he says, “and imagine how you gone to beat the man.” The wraps feel heavy on his hands, which are already sweating. “But keep your body relax.”