Some Faces in the Crowd (26 page)

I followed him down the steep wooden steps to the cellar. There was McCardle sprawled full length on the ground, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and sobbing like a baby. I put my hand on his arm and tried to reach him, but it wasn’t any good. He couldn’t stop crying. “I want Shapiro,” he was sobbing. “I want Shapiro, that poor little son-of-a-bitch Shapiro.”

McCardle had had enough. It was a terrible thing to see this big tough Irishman gnawing on his fingers and crying as if his heart would break, but there was nothing you could do about it. He had had enough. We had to send him back next morning with some other Section 8’s.

We finally got into Aachen, or what was left of Aachen, a couple of days later. But I was sorry to have to get there without McCardle and Shapiro. They were two of the best men I ever soldiered with.

T
HE GUY ON MY
left was a regular. Every Friday night since I could remember, he had sat in that same seat on the aisle. He was broad and beefy-faced, with a high-blood-pressure complexion and a big mouth. He was powerfully built, despite the pot belly and spreading rump of middle age. The first night he sat next to me he bought me a beer, told me to keep him in mind next time I bought a new car, and handed me his card. Name was Dempsey. “Edward J. (Champ) Dempsey,” it said on the card. “No, no relation to Jack,” he chuckled. “We went to different schools together.”

His voice, deep in his throat, always sounded as if he had a cold. The laughter with which he punctuated everything he said was open-mouthed and prolonged, loud and unmusical. He had a ridiculous pride in his ability to keep up a running patter of public speech throughout any fight.

Years before he had appointed himself a sort of one-man claque to urge the fighters on to bloodier efforts, and whenever the boys in the ring decided to take it a little easy, coasting a round or feeling each other out, his throaty witticisms would pierce the dark and smoky silence: “Turn out the lights, they want to be alone!” or “Hey, girls, can I have the next dance?” Or if one of the boxers happened to be Jewish, he was quick to show what a linguist he was by yelling, “Hit him in the
kishges,”
or display his knowledge of geography by shouting, “Send him back to Jerusalem!”

The fellow who always sat on my right was George Rogers, a big-money lawyer, but his seat was empty tonight. “Well, looks like our old friend George is playing hooky tonight, ha ha ha,” Dempsey said. Rogers was a white-haired old-timer who hardly ever said a word to either of us. Dempsey had been trying to sell him a car since early last summer.

Just before the first preliminary boys climbed through the ropes, the usher led to Rogers’ seat a fellow I had never seen before. He was short, thin, nervous, somewhere in his middle thirties, but already beginning to stoop from the waist like a much older man. His skin was pallid, he wore glasses, and he needed only the green eyeshade to become my stereotype of a bookkeeper.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said as he squeezed by. “I am sorry to disturb you.”

That wasn’t what they usually said when they shoved past you at the Arena. Dempsey looked at him the way a gang leader eyes a new kid who has just moved into the block.

“Where’s my old pal George tonight?” he wanted to know.

The man was shy and his answer came in a thin voice. “Mr. Rogers is out of town on business, sir. He was good enough to give me his ticket.”

“You in Rogers’ office?” Dempsey appraised him with salesman’s eyes.

The newcomer said yes, not too encouragingly, but it was enough for Dempsey to lean across me and display his professional smile. “Dempsey’s the name. What’s yours, fella?”

“Glover,” the fellow said, but he did not seem very happy about it.

“Glover!” Dempsey shuffled quickly through thousands of calling cards in his mind. “Used to know a Charley Glover back in K.C. fifteen years ago. Any relation to old Charley?”

“I’ve never had any relatives in the Middle West,” Glover answered.

“Well, I won’t hold it against you, ha ha ha,” Dempsey said. “Here, have a cigar.”

Dempsey leaned across me to hand it to him. He hadn’t offered me a cigar since the night I told him to stop trying to sell me a car, and let him know why.

Glover said he didn’t smoke cigars, and Dempsey lit his, igniting the match with a flick of his thumbnail. “So you work for Rogers, huh,” he went on. “Well, George is a very, very good friend of mine. What are you, a junior partner?”

“Oh, no,” Glover said, and something that was almost a smile lit his face for a moment, as if at the impossibility of such a suggestion. “I am a stenographer.”

Dempsey’s smile, or rather, his clever imitation of a smile, wiped from his face mechanically, like a lantern slide. When he abandoned it suddenly like that, his face looked even more bloated and aggressive than usual.

“A stenographer! Ha ha ha. Are you kidding?”

“Mr. Rogers has employed nothing but male stenographers for over thirty years.”

Dempsey looked disgusted and turned away.

The boys in the curtain raiser were entering the ring.

There was scattered applause for Sailor Gibbons, a rugged, battle-scarred veteran who had never graduated from the preliminary ranks. He bounded through the ropes with showy vigor and winked at a friend in the working press as he shuffled his feet in the rosin box. He was an old-timer getting ready to go to work, easy to hit but hard to stop, what the tub thumpers like to call a “crowd pleaser.”

The boy who followed him through the ropes had the kind of figure and color that made everyone want to laugh. His 140 pounds were stretched over a six-foot frame and his skin was purple-black. His face was long and thin and solemn, and the ring-wise could detect nervousness in the way his muscles twitched in his legs as his handlers drew on his gloves. Over his shoulders was a bright orange bathrobe that identified him as a Golden Gloves Champion.

The moment Dempsey saw him, he began. “Ho ho! Look what we got with us tonight. A boogie! Boy, how I like to see them boogies get it!”

The announcer was introducing them. “… and at one hundred thirty-nine and a half, just up from the amateur ranks, the Pride of Central Avenue, Young Joe Gans.”

Dempsey cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come on, Sailor, send him back to Central Avenue—in sections.” Then, like a professional comedian, he looked around for his laugh. He got it.

The stadium lights dimmed out and the ring lights came on, molding the ring and the fighters together in one intense glow. You could feel the nervous excitement in the hushed crowd, five thousand men and women crouching there in the darkness waiting for the blood.

In the white glare the fighters, the pale stocky one and the dark slender one, moved toward each other with animal caution and touched gloves in that empty gesture of sportsmanship. Gibbons was an in-fighter, strong-legged, thick-shouldered, crouching, weaving, willing to take one on the jaw to get inside and club and push and rough his man against the ropes. Young Gans was the duelist, jabbing with a long spidery left and dancing away.

“Come on, Sailor!” Dempsey bellowed. “Let’s get home early. Down below. They can’t take ’em there.”

As if responding to Dempsey’s instructions, Gibbons brought a wild right up from the floor in the general direction of the colored boy’s stomach. But Gans swayed away from it with the graceful precision of a bullfighter.

Next to me a small voice spoke out in a conversational tone. “Nice work, Gans,” Glover said.

Dempsey turned and frowned. “You pulling for the boogie? What you pulling for the boogie for? Betting his corner?”

“I like his style of fighting,” Glover said.

“Fighting!” Dempsey said. “You call that fighting? The boogie is a hit-and-run driver, that’s what he is. Ha ha ha.” He liked it so well he cupped his hands to his mouth again and gave it to his public. “Hey, ref, how about giving that shine a ticket for hit-and-run driving?”

Some of Dempsey’s fans in front of him turned around to show him they were laughing. Gibbons lunged at Gans again, and the Negro flicked his left in the white man’s face half a dozen times and skittered sideways out of danger.

“Attaboy, Gans,” Glover said. “Give him a boxing lesson.”

He didn’t say it loud enough for the fighters to hear; it was really intended as a little encouragement for himself, but Dempsey heard it and glared at Glover again. He opened his mouth to put Glover in his place but turned back and yelled at the fighters instead.

“Don’t hit him in the head, Sailor. You’ll break your hands. In the breadbasket. That’s where they don’t like it.”

The Negro feinted with his left, pulling the slow-thinking Gibbons out of position, and scored with a short, fast right to the heart. Gibbons sagged, but his face spread in a big grin, and his legs pistoned rapidly up and down to show how light on his feet he was. He was hurt.

“He doesn’t like them there, either,” Glover said. “Nobody likes them there.”

Dempsey was talking half to Glover and half to the fighters in the ring now. “But he took it. That’s the way to take ’em, Sailor. Give the boogie some of that and watch him fold.”

“I’m watching,” Glover said. “All I can see is Gans’s left in Gibbons’ face.” Suddenly he raised his voice, edged with excitement. “That’s the way, Gans, jab him. Jab his head off.” He was growing bolder as Gans piled up points.

Dempsey leaned forward, his fists tightly clenched, his shoulders moving in unison with Gibbons’ as the Sailor tried to reach Gans with vicious haymakers; the colored fighter skillfully ducked and blocked and rolled until Gibbons was charging in with the crazed fury of a punished bull.

“Come on, eightball, why don’t you fight?” Dempsey jeered.

“Good boy, Gans,” Glover answered. “He hasn’t hit you once this round.”

When the bell rang, Gans dropped his hands automatically but Gibbons’ right was cocked and while the sound of the bell was still
galong-galonging
through the arena, he let it go. You could see Gans stiffen and then sag as his body absorbed the pain for which it hadn’t been prepared. The blow made Dempsey laugh with excitement and relief. He always gave a short, nervous laugh when the fighter he was rooting against got hurt, but tonight he had someone special to laugh at. “That’s the baby! What’d I tell you? He don’t like ’em downstairs. Those boogies never do. One more like that and he’ll quit cold.”

“One more like that and Gibbons ought to be disqualified,” Glover said.

“Aah, you nigger-lovers give me a pain,” Dempsey said. “Always griping about those bastards getting gypped. That punch started before the bell.”

“Well, he’ll have to wait three minutes before he can hit him again,” Glover said. “The only time Gibbons can hurt him is when Gans isn’t looking.”

“Oh, is that so? What the hell do you know about it? I been sitting in this same seat for eight years. I’ll bet you ain’t even seen a fight before.”

“Do you have to see a skunk to recognize its smell?”

Dempsey tensed himself to rise. “Listen, you little shrimp, if you’re trying to call me a skunk …”

Glover looked frightened. Dempsey had at least fifty pounds on him, and Glover didn’t look as if he had had too much experience with his dukes. But the bell saved him, in reverse timing. The ten-second warning buzzer for round two made fans around us say, “Sit down. Down in front! We wanna watch the fight in the ring.”

The two fighters leaned toward each other from their stools, feet set for the spring at the bell. Dempsey and Glover anticipated the bell too, sliding forward to the edges of their seats, their legs tensing under them as if they also expected to leap up as the round started. Dempsey made his hands into fists again and they trembled with eagerness to begin punching. In the shadows just beyond range of the ring lights, Glover’s face was white and drawn. His right hand was doubled against his mouth in a nervous gesture of apprehension.

“All right, Sailor, this is the round,” Dempsey shouted. “In the belly. In the belly.”

“Come on, Gans,” Glover countered, “box his ears off again.”

At the bell, Gibbons ran across the ring and tried to nail the Negro in his corner before he was set. Glover opened his mouth in fright, like a mother seeing her child run down in the street. “Look—look out!”

Without changing the solemn expression with which he had come into the ring, Young Gans stepped aside in what looked almost like a gesture of politeness—”please, after you”—and Gibbons plunged foolishly through the ropes.

“Where is he, Gibbons?” Glover said. “You can’t even find him, much less hit him.”

“Why don’t you stand up and fight, you yellow bastard?” There was desperation in Dempsey’s tone for the first time.

Glover’s voice became shrill with combativeness. “That’s the way to fight him, Gans. Keep that left in his face.”

“Keep rushing him, Sailor. He can’t hurt you. He couldn’t break an egg.”

“What are you blinking for, Sailor? What are you stopping for? I thought he couldn’t hurt you.”

“He’s not hurt. A little nosebleed like that don’t bother him. Keep after him, Sailor. Make the boogie fight!”

Young Gans was making a monkey out of Gibbons, but I was watching the fight between Glover and Dempsey now. They were talking at each other but looking straight ahead, straining forward for every movement and moment of the bout in the ring. I didn’t have to watch the fight. There in the thin, hysterical voice of Glover and the bullfrog fury of Dempsey, it was more vivid than even Jimmy Powers or Bill Stern would have made it.

“How do you like that one? And that one? And that one?” Glover flicked the jabs in Dempsey’s face.

Dempsey shook them off and laughed. “Powderpuff punches. All powderpuff punches. Hey! That’s it! That’s it! Break the boogie in two!”

Glover clinched a moment to ride out the pain and danced away again. “Who says you can’t take ’em in the belly?”

Their voices rose as the tiring fighters fought harder, became more vulnerable now, more dangerous. But suddenly their shouting was lost in the giant roar that filled the place. The crowd was on its feet, screaming through its thousand wild mouths, screaming at the sight of a man, a black man, writhing convulsively on the canvas, bringing up his legs and clutching himself, twisting his long, serious face into a grotesque mask of agony.