The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (9 page)

The first time O’Connor saw him slip the Colt along with his clothes into a locker before a workout he said, “Why you carrying
that
around?” Ketchel said, “Protection.” O’Connor wanted to ask from what, but didn’t.

Then came a fight against Curley Rue in a two-dog town called
Gregson Springs. No one knew much about Rue except that he talked tough and claimed he’d had plenty of fights here and there, none of them on the official record. That he could take a punch is beyond dispute. Ketchel floored him at least once in eight of the first ten rounds, but Rue got up each time, and Ketchel grew enraged at his failure to knock him out. At the start of the eleventh he pinned Rue against the ropes and pounded him steadily for an everlasting fifteen seconds, continuing to make a jellied smear of his face even after it was obvious to everyone looking on that Curley Rue was out on his feet. When he finally stepped back to let him fall, Rue fell over like a plank.

“Get up now, honyocker,” Ketchel said.

Curley Rue was carried unconscious from the ring. A week or so after the fight, a rumor reached Bogan’s gym that he had died of the beating.

O’Connor didn’t believe it. After several tries, he was finally able to get a phone call through to the promoter of the fight, who was also the local constable at Gregson Springs, and asked if it was true. The constable said he didn’t know. He said Rue had regained consciousness in the dressing room but wasn’t what anybody would call alert and he had trouble forming coherent phrases. At his own insistence he was helped to get dressed and transported to the depot and he got aboard the train for Lewiston. The next day, word started going around that he’d changed trains at Lewiston and shortly afterward died in the coach car. But nobody knew which train he’d been on or where he’d been headed or where he called home. None of the railroad agents knew of anybody having died on a train recently. Nobody even knew where the story got started.

“Ten to one the guy ain’t any deader than you or me,” the constable said. “I figure it’s one of them stories somebody makes up for
the sheer hell of it and next thing you know a whole bunch of people are swearing it’s true.” He promised to let O’Connor know if he should learn anything about the matter for certain.

Ketchel didn’t see why O’Connor was so rattled. “It’s either true or it’s not. But if it’s true it ain’t like I murdered him. It was a legal fight.”

“Of course it was, Stevie. That’s not the point.”

“What is?” Ketchel said. “Nobody held a gun to the guy’s head and made him get in the ring.”

“He might be dead, for Christ’s sake.”

“And if he is, what’s anybody supposed to do about it?”

O’Connor gestured in vague exasperation. “I don’t know!”

“Then what are we talking about?”

O’Connor turned to Pete the Goat, who was paring his nails with a pocketknife. “What do
you
think?”

The Goat pondered the question. He shifted the chaw in his cheek. “Well, I’ll tell you, one of the first fights I ever saw, bareknuckle I’m talking about, back when I was a kid, my uncle was working a corner and let me sit next to him. My uncle’s fighter was a fella called Moe, and in the fifth round he some way or other knocks an eye out the other guy’s head. Swear to God. There wasn’t much blood, a smear of it under the empty socket is all, and the eye’s hanging halfway down the guy’s cheek on some little stringy veins, I guess they were. You never saw nothing like it. Anyway, the ref stops the fight for a minute to try and figure out what to do. He asks the pug can he keep on fighting and the pug says yeah, but not with his eye hanging down like that because he can still see with it and it’s showing him his feet while the other eye’s showing him what’s in front of him and the whole thing’s terrible confusing and starting to make him dizzy, which I found easy to believe. His
cornermen all have a close study of it and they don’t see any way to put the eye back in his head, so the pug tells them to just go ahead and pull it off and hold on to it so he can give it a proper burial later on. So they do, and the pug says that’s better, at least he’s not seeing in two different directions at once anymore. The ref asks is he sure he wants to go on with the match and the pug says yeah. Now, you’d figure a fighter with two eyes has got a pretty big advantage over a guy with just one, but turns out my uncle’s fighter, this guy Moe, had a delicate stomach. When the ref tells them to resume fighting, they swap a few jabs and Moe lands one on that empty socket, then steps back with this kinda sick look, then bends over and starts puking. And while he’s doing that, the one-eyed guy steps up and hits him with an uppercut from down around his ankles and Moe goes about a foot in the air and comes down like a sack of bricks. You coulda gone out and had yourself some supper and a cigar and still got back in plenty of time before he woke up.”

He paused and spat a streak of tobacco. “Boxing’s a rough game. Kinda funny sometimes, kinda strange sometimes, kinda sad sometimes. But all the time rough. Like the man said, it ain’t for everybody. Anyhow, that’s what
I
think.” And went back to paring his nails.

Ketchel grinned like a mule chewing briars.

O’Connor glared from one to the other. “Jesus Harrison Christ, I ask a goddamn simple question….”

I
N TRUTH
, K
ETCHEL
was not sure how he felt about the rumor that Curley Rue had died in consequence of the beating he’d given him, and because he was not one to be unsure about himself the uncertainty made him angry and troubled his sleep for the next
two nights. Then late the following afternoon came the news that James Jeffries had retired, the only heavyweight champ up to that time to retire undefeated. And Ketchel recalled a recurrent dream he used to have about Jeffries, a dream he’d never told to anyone except Kate.

The particulars were always the same. It was a fight to the finish for the heavyweight title and they slugged it out all day and all night, beating each other bloody into the 212th round while spectators came and went and the faces at ringside changed continually. But at the bell to begin round 213, Jeffries could no longer muster the strength to raise his arms, and Ketchel set himself and threw a tremendous overhand at big Jeff’s unprotected jaw. But on every occasion of the dream, in the instant before the punch struck he woke up.

Kate had not been uninformed about boxing and knew the might of Jim Jeffries and that at his fighting weight he outscaled Ketchel by sixty pounds, and she was aware of Ketchel’s veneration of him. She was delighted by the dream. She said she believed the only reason he always woke up before the punch landed was that he respected Jeffries so much he wanted to spare him the humiliation of a knockout, even in a dream.

“You think so?” Ketchel said. “Boy, wouldn’t that be something? To knock out the Boilermaker! I mean, that man is a goddamn killing machine.”

“Well, so are you, Mr. Michigan Assassin.”

“Yeah, but…Jeffries! He’s the biggest of them all.”

Kate smiled and kissed him. “Oh baby, he’s no bigger than you, he’s just taller and weighs more.”

Since Kate’s death, he had not had the Jeffries dream nor occasion to recall her response to it. But when he got the word of Jef
fries’ retirement, he remembered. He lay in bed that night and remembered the dream and remembered telling Kate about it and remembered her wonderful kiss and bold green eyes and confident insistence that he was no less powerful nor even smaller than Jeffries, the physical difference between them be damned.

The recollection was akin to recovering from a brief but unsettling episode of amnesia, a return to full awareness of who he was, and he suddenly felt like both laughing and crying. And did both. Then slept soundly.

H
E HAD SIX
more fights in the rest of that spring and summer and won them all by knockout, fighting as fiercely as ever. And in two of those fights he had his opponent on the ropes and beaten to helplessness, at which point he both times ceased his attack and let the man fall for the count.

H
e met Molly Yates one morning when he took breakfast in the Silver Hill Café for the first time. Along with the family house, she had inherited the business after her parents were killed in a train derailment returning from a trip to Denver. She was tall and auburn-haired and twenty-five years old. She knew who he was before he introduced himself, having seen his picture in the local newspaper and heard her customers talk about him.

He went to the Silver Hill for breakfast every morning thereafter, and they would converse for an hour or two every time. He learned she’d had a high school sweetheart she planned to marry, but two months after graduation and going to work in the mines he was killed in an explosion, and for almost a year she thought her heartbreak might kill her too.

He’d known her for three weeks when she invited him to supper at her home on the following evening. He arrived freshly barbered and in a new suit. After they dined they repaired to the parlor and she played the Victrola and they danced. He thought she might slap him for his sudden kiss and was instead surprised by the fervor and finesse of her own kiss in return. She unpinned her hair and let it spill onto her shoulders in a dark abundance. And then they were naked in her candlelit bed.

She afterward told him she had known several men, as she phrased it, since the death of her betrothed, though never again a miner. She had discovered the particular enjoyment of physical intimacy without emotional investment. She said she hoped he did not think her wanton.

He said he thought she was just what the doctor ordered.

“Well, in that case,” she said, rolling atop him, “I believe it’s time for your medicine.”

I
N
N
OVEMBER HE
became an uncle when a daughter named Julia Josephina Kaicel, who’d been nicknamed Julie Bug, was born to John and Rebeka. Although the farm continued to provide a living for his mother and his brother’s family, Ketchel had in recent months been sending cash in his letters to her, and he now enclosed even more than usual, directing her to use the money to pay the legal costs of a divorce from Kaicel, who at this point had been missing without word for almost a year. He had spoken with an attorney in town and been advised that his mother very likely had grounds on the basis of desertion.

H
E COULD FEEL
himself sharpening under the Goat’s rigorous regimen. His footwork quickened, his defenses improved. He was
using his jab to better effect than ever. Still, his most potent asset, ever and always and excepting perhaps a nearly maniacal determination, was the flurry, a two-fisted salvo of punches one behind the other and linked tightly as a chain. A flurry at once punished an opponent and kept him on the defensive, unable to counterpunch in the midst of the attack. Few fighters owned both the hand speed and the reservoir of energy necessary for throwing more than a few effective flurries in the course of a long fight, but Ketchel’s hands were fast as vipers and he was a phenomenon of unflagging stamina. The locals liked to joke that while some fighters were pretty good at the old one-two, Ketchel was the master of the old one-two-three-four-five-six.

He and Molly kept company whenever he wasn’t at the gym or working at the Copper Queen and she wasn’t taking care of business at the café. He repeatedly asked her to come see him fight but she steadfastly refused, saying she did not care to witness violence and had no desire to see him get hurt.

“It’s usually the other fella gets hurt,” he said, trying for a laugh but not unaware that he was bragging, wanting to impress her.

He fought six times in December, including three fights in a single week, and won them all by knockouts. Then asked Joe O’Connor when he thought he would be ready for Tommy Ryan, who had been the middleweight champion for the past seven years but who was now thirty-five years old and had not defended his title in a year.

“I can take that old man,” Ketchel said.

O’Connor said a lot of other middleweights felt the same way and all of them wanted a shot at Ryan. Ryan, however, didn’t seem inclined to accept anybody’s challenge, and the odds were that he would retire without ever fighting again.

“Don’t worry, Stevie,” O’Connor said, “the breaks’ll be coming our way real soon. For now, we just stay sharp and ready.”

Right, Ketchel said. But he’d earned a rest and meant to have it. He persuaded Molly to take a short vacation to San Francisco with him right after Christmas.

I
N CONTRAST TO
Montana’s glacial winter, San Francisco’s December seemed almost mild, never mind the chill Pacific breeze. They took breakfast every morning in the glassed-in gallery of the hotel café. On their second day in town the newspaper front pages were full of the Idaho bombing murder of Frank Steunenberg, who had been hard on miners’ unions during his governorship of that state a few years earlier. The Industrial Workers of the World, commonly called the Wobblies or the “I-Won’t-Works” and widely regarded as a union of red agitators bent on the destruction of the American Way, was suspected in Steunenburg’s killing. Ketchel said he bet every miner in Butte was talking about this news. He began to read the report to her but she asked him to please don’t. The whole thing sounded too awful and she did not want to know about it.

They had a wonderful few days. He showed her around this city he loved so dearly, taking her to the wharves, to the park, out to the beach where he’d spent his first night on the coast and been soaked by the tide. They ambled through a Chinatown so much larger than Butte’s she joked that she felt as though she’d been shanghaied.

New Year’s Eve was their last night in town. Molly wore a stunning blue dress he’d bought for her in the city’s best dress shop. They dined at an elegant restaurant with blazing chandeliers and waiters in tuxedos. The champagne came to the table on a wheeled tray, in glass buckets of shaved ice. The dessert came in a dish of flames. They afterward went dancing in a posh club and joined in
the raucous midnight cheering. They were both slightly tipsy as they started back to the hotel.

They were on a deserted street of closed shops and only two blocks from the hotel, skyrockets still bursting in sprays of bright color, firecrackers banging loud as gunshots, when a pair of men stepped from the darkness of an alley and blocked the way. In the weak light of a distant corner lamppost Ketchel saw the small pistol one of them held and the long-bladed knife in the hand of the other.

“Your money or your blood,” said the one with the gun.

“Oh my God,” Molly said softly.

“Anything you say, gents,” Ketchel said. “Easy does it. Here’s my wallet.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out the Colt, cocking it in the same motion, and shot the gunman in the throat, the muzzle-blast bright yellow. The man’s hat fell away and his gun clattered on the pavement as he staggered back and collapsed in the alley.

Ketchel pointed the Colt at the other man and he dropped the knife and raised his hands. “Oh Christ, mister, not me.”

“Get,” Ketchel said.

The man turned and ran down the sidewalk and around the corner and was gone. The crack and pop of fireworks continued in the surrounding streets.

He was exultant, marveling at his own coolness, at his steadiness of hand. At having pulled the gun without hesitation or doubt of purpose. He knelt beside the robber in the alley darkness and heard the man’s small gargling gasps. He could not make out his features.

“You hear me?” Ketchel said. The man said nothing. Was likely unconscious, likely dying.

“Can’t say you didn’t have it coming, Mac,” Ketchel said. He stood up and tucked away the revolver. He looked at the little pis
tol lying at the foot of the alley and chose to leave it there. Let the cops know the bastard had not been unarmed.

Only now did he remember Molly. He turned and saw she was gone.

Back at the hotel he found the room door locked from inside, and she did not respond to his rapping and request to open up. He crooned through the door that everything was all right, he understood why she’d run away, she didn’t have to be ashamed of being afraid of them.

To which she answered in a small voice that she was scared of
him.
He was a frightening man and it scared her even more that she hadn’t seen the truth about him until this evening.

“Scared of
me?
What…what’re you talking about?”

“That gun…I had no
idea
…And you just…oh, God.”

“Hey now, darling, it was a damn good thing I had it. Come on, sweetheart, open up.”

She said nothing more nor undid the lock. He asked her to let him in so they could discuss it in private. “I can explain,” he said, although he did not see what there was to explain.

He was smacking the door with his palm, beginning to lose his patience and entertaining thoughts of shouldering his way in, when a boisterous quartet of drunks came up the stairway. They grinned at the sight of him leaning on the door, and as they passed by him one said, “Good luck, chum. I been in that doghouse a time or two meself.”

Ketchel was the only one who didn’t laugh. He watched them go reeling down the hall and had an impulse to run after them and knock them all on their asses. Then pictured himself as they saw him and felt like a dope.

The hell with this, he thought, and repaired to the hotel bar downstairs.

He woke to a gentle shaking of his shoulder by the early-shift bartender. He was seated with his painful head on his arms at a table next to a window glaring with morning light. He went up to the room and found she had packed her clothes and gone. She left a note saying she was taking an earlier train back to Butte and asked that he please not seek her out.

H
E DID SEEK
her out, of course. First at the café, where she disappeared into the back room when she saw him come in, and later at her house, where she stood behind her locked front door and said that if he did not leave her alone she would ask the police to intervene. The mention of police did the trick. It obliged him to consider the chilly prospect of discussing with them the cause of her estrangement and the incident of New Year’s Eve. There was nothing for it but to let her be.

He never returned to her house, did not again set foot in the Silver Hill Café. As far as he would ever know, she told no one in Butte, maybe told nobody anywhere, what happened to bring their brief association to an end.

A little over three months later, all the news was of the apocalyptic quake and fire that razed San Francisco. When he saw in a newspaper photograph the smoldering remains of the very hotel where he and Molly had stayed during their visit, he could not help but feel that he was looking at the wreckage of more than a building.

H
IS MOTHER WROTE
that the petition for divorce had been submitted. All she could do now was wait for it to make its slow
way through the legal system and meanwhile hope to heaven that Kaicel did not show up before it was granted.

Ketchel didn’t say so, but he was sure they had all seen the last of Thomas Kaicel. In a recent dream he’d seen himself fighting with him in a boxcar of a rumbling freight, throttling him, pitching his lifeless body into the passing night. Wherever Kaicel might be, Ketchel knew in his bones the man was dead. And had a strong sense that he had died badly.

H
E APPLIED HIMSELF
with renewed zeal to achieving greater proficiency at his trade, and by autumn had won another seven matches, all of them against opponents larger than himself. He had now won thirty-five fights and every one by knockout. His only losses remained the two decisions to Reece Thompson. He was twenty years old and a solid 150 pounds, and there was no worthy opponent in the region left for him to fight, not even among the heavyweights.

But in those days before radio he remained unknown to the world beyond Montana. O’Connor and the Goat agreed that he was ready to climb the ladder. It was time to move to California, the center of big-time boxing. They agreed to make the move at the end of the year.

Among the enduring topics of national interest at this time was the shooting murder of the famous architect Stanford White in New York City a few months before. The crime had occurred at the roof theater of the Madison Square Garden. The killer was Harry Kendall Thaw, a rich young man of dubious sanity whose motive was reported to be outrage over White’s “ruination” of a woman now Thaw’s wife, never mind that the alleged ruination had occurred five years earlier and that she had become Thaw’s wife only a year ago.

The woman in the scandalous triangle was Evelyn Nesbit. She was twenty-one years old on the occasion of the killing. She had been a showgirl, a model for photographers, for painters and illustrators. Even before the infamous crime, her face if not her name had been renowned as the subject of Charles Dana Gibson’s immensely popular illustration,
The Eternal Question,
in which her exquisite profile was framed within a question mark shaped by the lush fall of her hair.

Ketchel thought Evelyn Nesbit was as beautiful in the newspaper photographs as in Gibson’s drawing. He saw in her face an abused innocence that inflamed his imagination. As she was for countless other American males from blushing boys to palsied old men, she was the object of his most passionate sexual fantasies, and he readily understood why a man would kill for her. Sitting at supper in Montana, beholding a picture of her taken in New York and printed in a Denver newspaper, he was thickly heartsick with desire.

S
HORTLY BEFORE
K
ETCHEL
made his move to California with O’Connor and the Goat, middleweight champion Tommy Ryan announced his retirement. There was immediate and wide debate about who should be recognized as the division’s new champ. In point of fact, the matter had been in dispute since the year before, when Hugo Kelly of Chicago claimed the championship on the basis that Ryan refused to fight him. It was not much of an argument, in that Ryan had refused to fight anybody since 1904. Still, a number of sportswriters supported Kelly’s claim to the title. Others, however, insisted on Jack (Twin) Sullivan as the middleweight champ, and some argued for Joe Thomas, a hard hitter in San Francisco who had only recently turned pro and in his third fight kayoed the welterweight champ.