A Moment in the Sun (7 page)

“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 stomping 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 stains 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.”

“You’re an insult to the cranium, Doc,” says Rev Bowers. “Suds, lay one out for our scrapper here.”

“Don’t think I could handle any liquor now,” says Hod. “Feels like I ought to keep what wits I got left as clear as I can.”

More laughter then and Red Gibbs thumping him some more which makes Hod want to deck him and then Niles is on his feet with a toast.

“To Young McGinty,” he says. “As game a warrior as ever stopped a punch.”

They drink several more rounds then, laughing, Niles imitating the various suckers they have skinned that night, while Hod props his elbows on the bar and holds his head in his hands. He feels like he might vomit. It’s late, only Jeff Smith’s party still in the Nugget, the wood stove and the whiskey warming them.

“And the sheeny and his fat Paddy manager,” says Rev Bowers, cheeks glowing, “think they’ve made a killing, tickets paid back to Frisco, when the steamers are so afraid of Jeff it won’t cost him a penny.”

“We have an arrangement,” Jeff Smith corrects him. “An understanding between business parties. Fear has nothing to do with it.”

They are halfway to the door, leaving Hod alone on the stool, when he remembers and calls out.

“Mr. Smith?”

They all turn as if they’ve forgotten he is there.

“A hundred dollars?”

He sees Niles winking to Rev Bowers.

“In trade,” says Jeff Smith.

“Trade?”

Smith moves his eyes to Addie Lee, leaning in the doorway of her little crib, watching with no expression. “You’ll keep track, won’t you Sparrow?”

She shrugs and slips behind the hanging flag.

A SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT

White folks’ hair is easy. Dorsey never stops wondering at the way it just grows out straight from their heads, offering itself up to be trimmed. And the shaving, for the ones like Judge Manigault who don’t keep a beard or moustache, you just pull the skin taut and slide with the blade. It never curls back into the pores to make a bump or get infected like his own. If only they would keep their mouths from moving while you try to work.

“Humiliation.” The Judge sits in Dorsey’s chair, lathered up next to Mr. Turpin who owns the pharmacy, who is getting his trim from Hoke. Old Colonel Waddell waits near the door, his face hidden behind the
Messenger.
“We have attempted to hold on to our heritage, to our custom of living,” says the Judge, “and we have failed. So now we must be humbled.”

“I don’t know, Judge,” says Mr. Turpin as Hoke clips out the hair in his ears. Hoke is a good boy, stay on his feet the whole day if needs be, only sometimes he forget and commence to hum while the gentlemen are still talking. “You scratch under the surface just a bit, you’ll find somebody making a profit on it. That’s what politics is all a
bout
.”

“Russell got sufficiently fat before he was governor. But this appointing of half our aldermen—unprecedented. Another chance to force us to eat crow. I believe the yankees are behind him.”

“But our own Supreme Court—”

“Failed in their duty to protect the citizens who maintain it.” The Judge is one of those who keeps his own shaving mug here at the shop, has a favorite razor. He won’t let Hoke shave him, good as the boy is. Dorsey, of course, is famous at the Orton, and hasn’t drawn blood since he was a novice.

“
Lex ita scripta est
,” mutters the Colonel, lowering his newspaper a bit. “That was their verdict.”