The Fight (10 page)

A little later, they all went to a Casino and played Black Jack. The thought that he would run with Ali was beginning to offer its agreeable tension, a sensation equal to the way he felt when he was going to win at Black Jack. Gambling had its own libido. Just as one was ill-advised to make love when libido was dim, so was that a way to lose money in gambling. Whenever he felt empty, he dropped his stake; when full of himself, he often won. Every gambler was familiar with the principle — it was visceral, after all — few failed to disobey it in one fashion or another. But never had he felt its application so powerfully as in Africa. It was almost as if one could make a living in Kinshasa provided one gambled only when one’s blood was up.

Naturally, he drank a little. He had friends at this Casino. The manager was a young American not yet twenty-one and in love with the taste of his life in Africa; the croupiers and dealers were English girls, sharp as birds in their accents — the keen vibrating intelligence of the London
working class was in their quick voices. He was getting
mal d’Afrique
, the sweet infection that forbids you to get out of Africa (in your mind, at least) once you have visited it. What intoxication to gamble and know in advance whether one would win or lose. Even orange juice and vodka gave its good thump. He was loving everything about the evening but the sluggishness of his digestion. Pocketing his money, he went back to the hotel to put on a T-shirt and exercise pants.

The long drive to Nsele, forty-five minutes and more, confirmed him in the first flaw of his life. He was a monster of bad timing. Why had he not paced himself so that the glow he was feeling at the Casino would be with him when he ran? Now his n’golo was fading with the drinks. By the time they hit the road, he would have to work off the beginnings of a hangover. And his stomach, that invariably reliable organ, had this night simply not digested his food. My God. A thick fish chowder and a pepper steak were floating down the Congo of his inner universe like pads of hyacinth in the clotted Zaïre. My God, add ice cream, rum and tonic, vodka and orange juice. Still, he did not feel sick, just turgid — a normal state for his fifty-one years, his heavy meals, and this hour.

It was close to three in the morning as he reached Nsele, and he would have preferred to go to sleep. He was even ready to consider turning around without seeing Ali. By now, however, that was hardly a serious alternative.

But the villa was dark. Maybe Ali would not run tonight. A couple of soldiers, polite but somewhat confused by the sight of visitors at this hour — Bob Drew, a cameraman
from the AP, was also waiting — asked them not to knock on the door. So they all sat in the dark for a quarter of an hour, and then a few lights went on in the villa, and Howard Bingham, a young Black from
Sports Illustrated
who had virtually become Ali’s private photographer, came by and brought them in. Ali was still sleepy. He had gone to bed at nine and just awakened, the longest stretch of sleep he would take over twenty-four hours. Later, after running, he might nap again, but sleep never seemed as pervasive a concern to him as to other fighters.

“You did come,” he said with surprise, and then seemed to pay no further attention. He was doing some stretching exercises to wake up and had the surliness of any infantryman awakened in the middle of the night. They would make four for the run. Bingham was coming along and Pat Patterson, Ali’s personal bodyguard, a Chicago cop, no darker than Ali, with the solemn even stolid expression of a man who has gone through a number of doors in his life without the absolute certainty that he would walk out again. By day, he always carried a pistol; by night — what a pity not to remember if he strapped a holster over his running gear.

Ali looked sour. The expression on his face was not difficult to read. Who wanted to run? He gave an order to one of the two vans that would accompany them, telling it to be certain to stay well behind, so that its fumes would not bother them. The other had Bob Drew inside to take photographs, and it was allowed to stay even.

Norman may have hoped the fighter would want to walk for a while, but Ali right away took off at a slow jogger’s
gait, and the others fell in. They trotted across the grass of the villas set parallel to the river and, when they came to the end of the block, took a turn toward the highway two miles off and kept trotting at the same slow pace past smaller villas, a species of motel row where some of the press was housed. It was like running in the middle of the night across suburban lawns on some undistinguished back street of Beverly Hills, an occasional light still on in a room here and there, one’s eyes straining to pick up the driveways one would have to cross, the curbings, and the places where little wire fences protected the plantings. Ali served as a guide, pointing to holes in the ground, sudden dips, and slippery spots where hoses had watered the grass too long. And they went on at the same slow steady pace. It was, in fact, surprisingly slow, certainly no faster than his own rate when jogging by himself, and Norman felt, everything considered, in fairly good condition. His stomach was already a full soul of heated lead, and it was not going to get better, but to his surprise, it was not getting worse — it seemed to have settled in as one of the firm discontents he would have on this run.

After they had gone perhaps half a mile, Ali said, “You’re in pretty good shape, Norm.”

“Not good enough to talk,” he answered through closed teeth.

Jogging was an act of balance. You had to get to the point where your legs and your lungs worked together in some equal state of exertion. They could each be close to overexertion, but if one was not more fatigued than the other, they offered some searing and hardworking equivalent
of the tireless, to wit, you would feel no more abominable after a mile than after the first half mile. The trick was to reach this disagreeable state without having to favor the legs or the lungs. Then, if no hills were there to squander one’s small reserve, and one did not lose stride or have to stop, if one did not stumble and one did not speak, that steady progressive churning could continue, thoroughgoing, raw to one’s middle-aged insides, but virtuous — one felt like the motors of an old freighter.

After a few weeks of steady running, one could take the engines of the old freighter through longer and longer storms, one could manage hills, one could even talk (and how well one could ski later in the year with the legs built up!) but now his body has been docked for two months and he was performing a new kind of balancing act. It was not only his legs and his lungs but the gauges on the bile in his stomach he had to watch, and the pressure on his heart. If he had always run before breakfast, and so was unaccustomed to jogging with food in his stomach, he was having an education in that phenomenon now. It was a third factor, hot, bilious, and working like a bellows in reverse, for it kept pushing up a pressure on his lungs, yet, to his surprise, not nauseating, just heavy pressure, so that he knew he could not keep up with a faster pace more than a little before his stomach would be engorging his heart and both pounding in his ears.

Still, they had covered what must be three-quarters of a mile by now and were long past the villas and formal arrangement of Nsele’s buildings, and just padded along on a back road with the surprisingly disagreeable exhaust of the lead van choking their nostrils. What a surprising impediment
to add to the run — it had to be worse than cigar smoke at ringside, and to this pollution of air came an intermittent freaking of a photographic flash pack from Bob Drew’s camera.

Still, he had acquired his balance. What with food, drink, and lack of condition, it was one of the most unpleasant runs he had ever made, certainly the most caustic in its preview of hell, but he had found his balance. He kept on running with the others, the gait most happily not stepped up, and came to recognize after a while that Ali was not a bad guy to run with. He kept making encouraging comments, “Hey, you’re doin’ fine, Norm,” and, a little later, “Say, you’re in good condition,” to which the physical specimen could only grunt for reply — mainly it was the continuing sense of a perfect pace to Ali’s legs that helped the run, as if his own legs were somehow being tuned to pick their own best rate, yes, something easy and uncompetitive came off Ali’s good stride.

“How old are you, Norm?”

He answered in two bursts, “Fifty — one.”

“Say, when I’m fifty-one, I won’t be strong enough to run to the corner,” said Ali. “I’m feeling tired already.”

They jogged. Wherever possible, Ali ran on the turf. Pat Patterson, used to pounding concrete, ran on the paving of the road, and Bingham alternated. Norman stayed on the turf. It was generally easier on the feet and harder on the lungs to jog over grass, and his lungs so close to the pressure of his stomach were more in need than his legs, but he could not keep the feel of Ali’s easy rhythm if he left the turf.

On they went. Now they were passing through a small
forest, and by his measure, they had come a little more than a mile. He was beginning to think it was remotely possible that he could cover the entire distance — was it scheduled for three miles? — but even as he was contemplating the heroics of this horror they entered on a long slow grade uphill, and something in the added burden told him that he was not going to make it without a breakdown in the engines. His heart had now made him prisoner — it sat in an iron collar around his neck, and as they chugged up the long slow grade, the collar tightened every fifty feet. He was breathing now as noisily as he had ever breathed, and recognized that he was near to the end of his run.

“Champ,” he said, “I’m going — to stop — pretty soon,” a speech in three throttled bursts. “I’m just — holding you — back,” and realized it was true — except how could Ali put up with too slow a gait when the fight was just four nights away? “Anyway — have good run,” he said, like the man in the water waving in martyred serenity at the companions to whom he has just offered his spot in the lifeboat. “I’ll see you — back there.”

And he returned alone. Later, when he measured it by the indicator on his car, he found that he had run with them for a mile and a half, not too unrespectable. And enjoyed his walk. Actually, he was a little surprised at how slow the pace had been. It seemed unfitting that he had been able to keep up as long as he had. If Ali were going to run for fifteen rounds, there should, he thought, be something more kin to a restlessness in his legs tonight. Of course, Ali was not wearing sneakers but heavy working shoes. Still. The leisureliness of the pace made him uneasy.

There is no need to follow Norman back on his walk, except that we are about to discover a secret to the motivation of writers who achieve a bit of prominence in their own time. As the road continued through the forest, dark as Africa is ever supposed to be, he was enjoying for the first time a sense of what it meant to be out alone in the African night, and occasionally, when the forest thinned, knew what it might also mean to be alone under an African sky. The clarity of the stars! The size of the bowl of heaven! Truth, thoughts after running are dependably banal. Yet what a teeming of cricket life and locusts in the brush about him, that nervous endless vibration seeming to shake the earth. It was one of the final questions: Were insects a part of the cosmos or the termites of the cosmos?

Just then, he heard a lion roar. It was no small sound, more like thunder, and it opened an unfolding wave of wrath across the sky and through the fields. Did the sound originate a mile away, or less? He had come out of the forest, but the lights of Nsele were also close to a mile away, and there was all of this deserted road between. He could never reach those lights before the lion would run him down. Then his next thought was that the lion, if it chose, could certainly race up on him silently, might even be on his way now.

Once, sailing in Provincetown harbor on nothing larger than a Sailfish, he had passed a whale. Or rather the whale passed him. A frolicsome whale which cavorted in its passage and was later to charm half the terrified boats in its path. He had recognized at the moment that there was nothing he could ever do if the whale chose to swallow him
with his boat. Yet he felt singularly cool. What a perfect way to go. His place in American literature would be forever secure. They would seat him at Melville’s feet. Melville and Mailer, ah, the consanguinity of the M’s and the L’s — how critics would love Mailer’s now discovered preoccupations (see Croft on the mountain in
The Naked and the Dead
) with Ahab’s Moby Dick.

Something of this tonic sangfroid was with him now. To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo — who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?

They laughed back at Ali’s villa when he told them about the roar. He had forgotten Nsele had a zoo and lions might as well be in it.

Ali looked tired. He had run another mile and a half, he would estimate, three miles in all, and had sprinted uphill for the last part, throwing punches, running backward, then all-out forward again, and was very tired now. “That running,” he said, “takes more out of me than anything I ever felt in the ring. It’s even worse than the fifteenth round, and that’s as bad as you can get.”

Like an overheated animal, Ali was lying on the steps of his villa, cooling his body against the stone, and Bingham, Patterson and Ali did not talk too much for a while. It was only 4
A.M.
but the horizon was beginning to lighten — the dawn seemed to come in for hours across the African sky. Predictably, Ali was the one to pick up conversation again. His voice was surprisingly hoarse: he sounded as if a cold were coming on. That was all Ali needed — a chest cold for
the fight! Pat Patterson, hovering over him like a truculent nurse, brought a bottle of orange juice and scolded him for lying on the stone, but Ali did not move. He was feeling sad from the rigors of the workout and talked of Jurgin Blin and Blue Lewis and Rudi Lubbers. “Nobody ever heard of them,” he said, “until they fought me. But they trained to fight me and fought their best fights. They were good fighters against me,” he said almost with wonder. (Wonder was as close as he ever came to doubt.) “Look at Bugner — his greatest fight was against me. Of course, I didn’t train for any of them the way they trained for me. I couldn’t. If I trained for every fight the way I did for this, I’d be dead. I’m glad I left myself a little bit for this one.” He shook his head in a blank sort of self-pity as if some joy that once resided in his juices had been expended forever. “I’m going to get one million three hundred thousand for this fight, but I would give one million of that up gladly if I could just buy my present condition without the work.”