Blood Game (6 page)

“I just want to relax and have a quick drink here before I have to go back upstairs. And I can't relax if I think you're not going to do it right tomorrow.”

“Oh, I'm going to do it right.”

“You're going to shoot him?”

Reynolds hesitated only a moment. “I'm going to shoot him.”

“Good, then. It's settled.”

“You really are a cold son of a bitch, you know that?” Reynolds said. But his words were not without a certain harsh admiration.

Victor Sovich said, “You want to come with me?”

The woman looked at him. “Where you have in mind?”

“The next town, wherever that is.”

“My children?”

“Your mother's across town.”

“I leave my children?”

“It's no life for them, believe me.”

“But my children. I love them.”

“We'd come back through here every three or four months. The Midwest is good for me. I'd have to come back through here anyway.”

They were in bed. The sheets smelled of their sweat and their lovemaking and the wine they'd had just before. He sat propped up against the wall and took in the smells. He enjoyed them. In the window the light was dying. It had turned yellow and pink. Now it was purple dusk. Through the smashed window he could see the quarter-moon. He smiled to himself. She was going to go with him. Oh, she would protest and tell him what a good mother she was. They always did. They needed that dignity. There was no other way they could face what they were about to do. He knew they wouldn't last long. These women never did. There would come a night or afternoon, some idle moment when he was shaving or bathing or reading a magazine, when he would suddenly have had enough of her, and then he would want to see her no longer. Then he would not be able to endure her touch or look at her body, clothed or unclothed, ever again.

“You like Maria.”

“She's cute.”

“Couldn't we at least take Maria?”

“I'd like to. It just wouldn't be good for her.”

“Bobby, then. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for a boy to travel.”

“It wouldn't be good for him, either.”

Now was her time to sulk. She rolled over in the bed, away from him. He put his hand on her warm back, feeling the graceful curve of it, how it so fetchingly gave way to her plump, tender buttocks and the magnificent sweep of her long legs.

“Don't,” she said.

Now it was his turn to roll away.

He lay on his side, staring at the wall. He could see the dirty handprints the kids had left on it. He could smell where the cat shit in the corner. Maybe he didn't want to take her with him tomorrow after all.

He kept staring at the quarter-moon and wondering about tomorrow. The nigger. He hated niggers and he wasn't even sure why. Something happened to him when he fought colored men. Something even he was slightly afraid of. He never liked to feel out of control, but with niggers in the ring that was usually the way he felt, out of control.

He remembered the first time he'd killed one. How the crowd had become silent so abruptly, how the referee kept saying, “Goddammit, boy. Goddammit, you wake now, you hear?” But the nigger had been dead already. The way all niggers should be.

After the fight a reporter came back to his dressing room. The reporter kept asking him how he felt. He knew Stoddard would get angry if he said the wrong thing. There had been more than one hundred ring deaths in the past two years, and church groups were really protesting prizefights. He did not say anything stupid. His livelihood depended on his not saying anything stupid. He said instead the expected things. That he was sorry. That he hoped the boy's family would understand. That he would say a prayer for the boy, in fact.

By the second time he had killed a colored boy, it was something most desirable for him to do. And not only for Stoddard's sake, but for his own. He enjoyed killing.

She was crying now.

He said, “You're a good mother. It's not like you're deserting them.”

“They're my children.”

“We'll see them often. I promise.”

“What would the priest think?”

He scowled. “The hell with the priest.” He remembered watching his sister die from smallpox. How the priest hovered. How the priest swooned. How the priest talked about an afterlife as if he really believed in it. As if we weren't like cats and dogs and rats, animals that died and rotted. He had had no time for priests ever since.

She only cried all the more. “I suppose you would like me to give up my faith, too?”

He stayed on his side, looking at the quarter-moon.

It was always like this with them. They cried and then they got indignant and then they got angry. But they always came along.

Always.

Stephen Stoddard liked to walk the streets at dusk, just as the first fireflies appeared in parks and the electric lights appeared on the streets.

He passed from the downtown, with its barbershops and millinery stores and banks and jewelers and ice parlors, to an address he'd found in the newspaper.

Most cities these days had Evening Home Clubs, where young men could gather to discuss the issues of the day without consorting with the type of people you met in pumprooms and taverns.

He was most interested in discussing the gold standard, finding it the one topic that always provoked immediate and prolonged conversation.

Given the letter he carried in his suit coat, however, he wondered how able he would be to focus on a debate.

Now, as he walked, Stephen Stoddard shook his head. Incredibly the ex-Pinkerton he'd secredy hired a year ago had finally found Stephen's mother. She lived in Portland, Oregon, half a continent away, and in the ten years since he'd last seen her, she'd gone on to start a whole new family. According to the photograph the ex-Pinkerton had enclosed with the letter, his mother was now plump, gray-haired, and surrounded by children bobbing around her like apples in a barrel.

His mother. He remembered soft, slender fingers and sweet songs hummed in the darkness. He remembered bread baking in the oven and the wet, clean scent of her long auburn hair just after she'd washed it. He remembered the sunlight on the new bicycle she'd bought him and moonlight on the silver ice of the skating rink.

He remembered her tears, too, how he'd been unable to stop them and felt the lesser for being so unable. The harshness of those tears. The increasing frequency of those tears.

Then she'd been gone, and gone forever.

Why, he'd never been able to understand exacdy, nor had his father been able or willing to explain.

Now he held in his possession a letter that promised to tell him. The letter had come the day before yesterday. He had still not opened it. He did not know if he was frightened or simply savoring this first word from his mother in all these years.

Whatever, each time his soft, slender fingers touched the envelope, they jumped away, as if stung or shocked.

There would be an appropriate time, an appropriate place, to open the letter.

Soon now, he told himself as he moved along the sidewalk in and out of the shadows cast by the streetlight.

Soon now.

Guild had to be careful with the stuff. Put too much on and he smelled too sweet. A little was all he needed.

As he stood fresh from his bath in new black trousers, Leo Guild looked at the way the flesh of his chest had started to sag some beneath the wiry salt-and-pepper hair.

As if the stuff would magically make him younger, he splashed on a generous amount of the bay rum he'd bought at the barber-shop a few days earlier. He next combed his hair and then pulled on a newly laundered white boiled shirt.

Putting on a false grin so he could get a look at his teeth, Guild at the same time began patting his stomach. Even if his chest was starting to go, his stomach was pretty damn flat for a man his age. Pretty damn flat.

He went over and sat on the bed and pulled on clean white socks and then his black Texas boots.

He wanted a steak and some bourbon. Most especially he wanted the company of Clarise Watson.

He started thinking of the litde girl. It was usually like this. Anytime he was about to have himself some fun, the little girl came to mind. A priest had explained to him that this was one way of continuing to punish himself. The litde girl was always there to remind him of that day. Of his mistake. Of his guilt.

He went over and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked around the hotel room. He thought of all the men who had stayed in this room before him. Of their pleasures and of their shame, of their loneliness for families far away. It was as if this room was haunted by all of them, a jumble of ghostly voices and griefs, but no voice, no grief was any clearer than that of the little girl's. He had never given a name to her, even though during the course of the trial—Guild ultimately acquitted—he heard it daily. But a name made her real in a way he could not deal with. She would always be just “the little girl.” It was easier that way, somehow.

He opened the door on the third knock. He carried his .44 along with him. When he saw who it was, he leveled the gun to point directly at the man's stomach.

Victor Sovich was once again dressed like an opera star, complete with cape. This time he'd even added a top hat and cane. He said, “What's that smell?”

Guild flushed. He felt like an eight-year-old discovered doing something terrible. Sovich was referring to the bay rum. Guild said, “Some goddamn man before me must have spilled a bottle of bay rum.”

Sovich sniffed. Then he smirked. “That must be it, Guild. Some man before you must have spilled a bottle of bay rum.” He seemed to take as much pleasure from mocking Guild as he had yesterday from beating him.

“What do you want, anyway?” Guild said.

“I wonder if you'd like to talk some business.”

“What kind of business?”

Sovich said, “Why don't we go downstairs and have a drink?”

“You can tell me right here.”

“Is it all right if I come in?”

“No.”

“You're still mad about yesterday?”

Guild didn't say anything.

“It wasn't anything personal, Guild. It's just that you're working for Stoddard. You know how it is.”

“Why are you working for Stoddard?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You keep saying he cheats you yet you keep right on coming back. There's only one way to explain that.”

“And what would that be?” The smirk was back.

“He's got something on you. Something he could use against you with the law.”

Now the smirk grew icy. “I'm going to assume Stoddard didn't tell you anything, that you had this notion yourself.”

Guild just wanted Sovich out of his sight. “What kind of business do you want to talk about?”

“He's going to short-count me again. He'll take eighty percent and give me twenty percent. If I'm lucky.”

“That's between you and Stoddard.”

“He'll probably have you guard the gate money and the betting money.”

“So?”

“So you could take it all and give it to me.”

Guild hefted the .44 again. “Now why the hell would I do that?”

Just then an old man in a flannel robe came down from the bathroom. He smelled of hot water and sweat. It was much too hot for a flannel robe. He kept walking, but he gave them both a big blueeyed stare.

After the old man passed down the hall, Sovich said, “You'd do it because I'd pay you to do it. Fifteen percent of what you take from Stoddard you keep.”

“Maybe the fight won't be as successful as you two think. Some of these fights people just don't show up for.”

“Oh, they'll show up for this one.” He smirked again. This expression was slightly different from the others. It was colder. “White folks always show up when a nigger's going to get killed.”

“You ever think it could go the other way?”

“I never think that at all. Because it's not going to.”

“I won't do it.”

“You could make yourself a lot of money.”

“I could make you a lot of money, you mean. And that I'm against on principle.”

“You're going to be old pretty soon, Guild. Principle won't get you jack shit then. You'll need money.”

Guild waved the .44 at Sovich. “Go on. Get out of here.”

“Fifteen percent, Guild. You could make yourself a lot of money.”

Guild slammed the door, but not before Sovich had a chance to smile again.

Guild went and sat on the edge of the bed until it was time to leave. He thought of the little girl. He wondered what she'd be doing now if she'd lived. Getting ready for the fall and high school, he thought. That was how he measured her years. Where she'd be in school.

Ninth grade now.

But of course that wasn't going to happen.

He had seen to that.

“Well,” said Clarise Watson, “I was bom in Illinois and I moved to Connecticut when I was twelve, where a white man was very much taken with me. He saw to it that I was educated and that I learned how to dress properly and that I had proper dental work. He was grooming me to work in his house, which meant, among other things, being his mistress. His wife was this very cold white-haired woman who was difficult for everybody to get along with, including her husband. I'm told that he'd had other mistresses before. She knew about them and would tease him with them. She would get one of the mistresses' undergarments and leave it under his pillow. Or a gift he had given his mistress would be on his desk in the morning. She was the one with all the money, and all the power, and she never wanted to let him forget it. Finally she would make him so nervous and anxious that he couldn't have sex with his mistress. He'd keep trying, but his wife leaving all these little hints would undo him. She took more pleasure in handling it this way than in just throwing the girls out. She liked humiliating him.