The Harder They Fall

by Budd Schulberg

  ‘Yeah?’ He was crumbling his toast carefully into his soft-boiled eggs. ‘Did you get yours all right, kid? You should be in for around seventeen Gs.’

  ‘But, Nick. What about Toro? All Toro’s got is forty-nine bucks. A broken jaw and forty-nine lousy bucks.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you, Eddie?’

  ‘What’s it got to do with me, I …’ What did it have to do with me? Where were the words to bridge the unbridgeable? To reconcile the unreconcilable?

  ‘You just can’t do that to a guy, Nick. You just can’t let him get beat to death and then leave him with a hole in his pocket.’

  ‘Listen, Eddie, the slob got paid off. You can see it on the books.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I just saw the books. I know Leo and his books.’

  ‘Then it’s just tough titty, isn’t it?’ Nick said.

  ‘Jesus, Nick, after all, the poor son-of-a-bitch is human. He’s …’

  ‘It’s just tough,’ Nick said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Nick. For the sake of Jesus Christ, you can’t do this.’

  ‘Go back to bed, Eddie,’ Nick said, reaching calmly for his coffee. And the terrible thing about it was the way he said it. I knew he still liked me. I knew, God forgive me, he thought I had class. He was always going to count me in. ‘Go back to bed and sleep it off. You’re spoiling my breakfast.’

  I went back to the hospital to see Toro. ‘You mustn’t stay very long,’ the nurse said, outside his room.

  ‘How is he getting along?’

  ‘He’s under sedation. Still suffering from shock. His left side is partially paralysed, but the doctor is confident it’s only temporary.’

  Toro was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. His face was a mass of blue and purple blotches. He turned his head slowly when he heard me enter.

  ‘¿Mi dinero? My money … my money?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say.

  His eyes searched me frantically. ‘¿Mi dinero … dinero?’

  I don’t know why I should have been the one to tell him. But I figured I was the only one who would take the trouble to break it to him easy.

  ‘Toro, I … I don’t know how to tell you this, but … it’s gone. Toro, it’s all gone. Se fué.’

  ‘¿Se fué?’ Toro muttered through his wired teeth. ‘No. No es possible. ¿Se fué?’

  ‘Lo siento,’ I said. ‘Toro, lo siento.’ That’s what the Spanish say for ‘I’m sorry’, but it means literally, ‘I feel it’, and that was the way I meant it.

  A wrenching groan came up out of Toro’s throat. He stared at me unbelievingly for what seemed at least a full minute. Then he turned slowly away from me and stared into the wall. Suddenly his great shoulders began to heave and he was shaken by dry, guttural sobs. It was a terrible thing to see a man of such size crying so desperately.

  Finally I said, ‘Toro, I’m terribly sorry. I wish there was something I could do.’ Then I thought of my own seventeen thousand. ‘Say, I’ve got an idea! I can let you have five thousand dollars.’ I was going to say ‘ten’, but some little bookkeeper in my brain cut it in half for me. ‘At least that would get you home.’

  ‘But it … is all my money … all … all … I make it all …’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ I agreed, ‘but what can you do? They’ve got you coming and going. Be smart and take the five, Toro.’

  He turned from the wall and glared at me.

  ‘Vaya,’ Toro whispered hoarsely. ‘Go. All of you… Go away from me.’

  All of you. What did Toro mean, all of you? He must have me mixed up with the others. I was Toro’s friend, the only one who cared, the only one who sympathised. And yet, he had said all. He had said all of you.

  ‘But, Toro, I’m your friend, I want to help you, I …’

  ‘Go,’ Toro whispered. ‘Go … go… go …’

  As I walked slowly down the corridor, Vince appeared. He was wearing a big wrap-around camel’s hair overcoat.

  ‘Hello, lover,’ he said.

  ‘Vince,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it. Don’t tell me you’re coming to look in on Toro again.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘He’s my boy now. I gotta see how quick I can spring him. We got big plans together.’

  ‘You mean, you and Toro?’

  ‘Yeah. I just bought his contract back from Nick this morning. Just because he loused himself up in town doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of scratch to be picked up in the sticks.’

  ‘But he’s through, Vince. He’s all washed up.’

  ‘For the Garden, sure. But I figure we can still pick up a nice piece of change going back over the same territory, in reverse. This time the home-town fans’ll put their bucks down to see the local boy beat hell outa the Giant. We got a name that’s still a draw and we don’t even have to bother to rig anything. I already got him booked with Dynamite Jones for the Bull Ring at Tiajuana. We’ll let the people guess maybe last time it was a tankeroo and this time Jones is going in without the handcuffs. I bet we do twenty thousand.’

  ‘Vince, you’re crazy! What makes you think Toro wants to go on fighting, after last night?’

  ‘You’re not thinking so good today, lover. He’s got to fight. He’s broke.’

  I thought of Speedy Sencio. I thought of all the broken and burnt-out fighters the Vince Vannemans of the world were forever patching up and shoving back into the ring. But I was too disgusted to think of anything to say.

  ‘You know, I’d like to cut you in, kid,’ Vince was saying. ‘After all, me and you ’re good pals. But, well, to level with you, Eddie, you been on the flit too much this last trip. I haven’t got the dough to throw around like Nick. I just don’t think you’re worth it any more. But if I change my mind, I’ll let you know.’ He reached out and pinched my cheek. ‘No hard feelings, though, huh, lover?’

  He sauntered down the hall toward Toro’s room. I stood there helplessly. I wasn’t good enough for Vince.

  There was only one more little thing I could do for Toro, I thought. Pepe and Fernando could take him home with them. Pepe would provide for him. I ducked into a phone booth in the hospital drug store and called the Waldorf Towers. The hotel operator transferred me to Information. The De Santos party checked out at noon, I was told. Their forwarding address was the Hotel National in Havana.

  I wandered back to my room. Something led me to the closet. I opened my trunk. The bottom drawer was full of old stuff, articles, press clippings, letters – I couldn’t even remember why I had kept them – and down in the middle of all this mess, there it was, And Still Champion by Edwin Dexter Lewis, three names, to give it class.

  The pages were yellowing. But that didn’t matter. I could get them retyped. As I looked at the title page I had a dream’s-eye view of the Theatre Guild poster in front of the theatre. I started to read the first act. I tried to make myself believe in it. But what was the use? How long could I go on kidding myself? The dialogue was forced. The characters were props. The bones of the plot stuck out all over. And this was the blank cheque to fame I had been holding out for myself all these years. The Pulitzer Prize number! All I had written was the first act of a bad play. Just twenty-three pages of a play that was going back into the bottom drawer of my trunk, where it belonged.

  I pushed the trunk back into the closet again. It felt frighteningly insecure to be without my play. What was I now? Just what Beth said I was, just another guy working for Nick.

  It was early in the morning when I found my way to Shirley’s. Lucille was cleaning the bar room and Shirley was playing solitaire.

  ‘Eddie,’ she said. ‘You look like hell. You look like the kid’s last fight. What in God’s name is the matter with you?’

  ‘The worst of them all,’ I said. ‘The biggest heel of them all. The only one who knew right from wrong and kept his goddam mouth shut. The only one who knew the score, knew what was going on and still kept his hands in his pocket. The worst, the worst, Shirley, the w
orst of all.’

  Shirley came over and looked up into my face.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Forget it. It’s time for bed.’

  When I awakened, the room was dark, the shades were drawn and I didn’t know whether it was day or night. All I knew was that there was a woman in bed with me, and for a moment I thought it was Beth. I fumbled for a match to light a cigarette, and when I lit it I realised with a shock that I was in the room into which Sailor Beaumont and other beaten fighters had crawled in search of solace and relief from pain.

  Shirley? What was I doing with Shirley? Shirley never went to bed with me. Shirley only took to bed her badly beaten fighters. Just a succession of substitutes for the Sailor. Everybody knew that.

  I know the goddam trouble with me, I thought. Enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft berth, indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch. No wonder Beth wouldn’t have me. A heel, she called me, a heel, the biggest heel of all.

  ‘I know the goddam trouble with me,’ I suddenly said aloud.

  ‘Eddie, honey, what’s the matter with you? Stop fighting yourself. Whatever it is, don’t worry about it,’ Shirley said quietly.

  Her bare arm went around my neck and her generous breasts pressed against me soothingly.

  ‘Go to sleep now. You’ll feel better when you get up.’

  But even as I floated off into warm, cowardly sleep, I realised why it was that she had taken me into her bed at last.

  About the Author

  BUDD SCHULBERG grew up in Hollywood, his father being one of the founders of the Hollywood film industry. His novels include the legendary What Makes Sammy Run?, On The Waterfront, The Disenchanted, The Harder They Fall and Everything That Moves. He died in 2009.

  By Budd Schulberg

  The Harder They Fall

  The Disenchanted

  On the Waterfront

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  Allison & Busby Limited

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  First published in Great Britain in 1947.

  This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2013.

  Copyright © 1947 by BUDD SCHULBERG

  The following are reprinted by permission of the owners of copyright: King Jazz, Inc. (pp. 129, 133), as recorded by Coot Grant and Sox Wilson. Lyrics from ‘I Cried For You’ (p. 176), copyright 1923 by Miller Music Corporation. Used by special permission of the copyright proprietor. Lyrics from ‘Fine and Mellow’ (p. 176), copyrighted by Edward B. Marks Music Corporation, RCA Building, Radio City, New York. Used by permission.

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1317–2