Blood Game

by Ed Gorman

  She knew what Guild would think of what she had done. The words he would use.

  She stood up, sighing.

  She gathered her two carpetbags quickly and left the room, turning back only once to look for the last time on the peculiar half-light trapped in the comers of the place.

  She wondered if death would be this soft and eerily beautiful. She hoped so, she hoped so.

  “Hurry now, miss. Hurry now,” the desk clerk said, looking her over again, still undecided if she was black or white.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Portland

  June 7, 1892

  Dear Stephen,

  When the detective came to my door, I was very frightened. I knew that at last my past had found me, the past I wonder about when I can’t sleep at night.

  If you have children of your own someday, you will know the particular hell I am describing, the hell of deserting your own flesh and blood. How many times over these past years have I wondered what you would look like as a young man. How many times have I heard the tears you surely cried when I left.

  I know that no apology can undo what I did. I must accept my blame without any attempt at justifying myself. The worst thing I ever did was to desert my own son.

  There is no point in castigating your father. I’m sure you know by now how difficult he can be, and how he delights in belittling and bullying people. I can only say that I stood it as long as I could and then left. I should have taken you. I was afraid, however, that he would never rest if I took you, and he would someday find me, too.

  The detective tells me that you work for your father and that you’ve grown into a healthy and handsome young man. When he saw me, he said that you still favor me. I suppose it sounds vain, but I’m glad you do. It’s as if we still have a special bond between us, and the looks we share prove that bond.

  Reading this over again, I see that your father was probably right—I was, and remain, a silly woman, spoiled by my own father and sheltered from the world in convent school. Even today I feel more like a girl than a woman, and when I look at the children I’ve had with my husband, Ralph, I feel a peculiar alienation—the same alienation I felt from your father and now my husband, Ralph. I know you won’t believe this, but the only person I’ve ever felt close to—except to my father, who never had any time for me—was you. I think about you constantly. I hear a sentimental song and I think of the songs I used to hum to you when I rocked you in your cradle. I see a painting or a book—remembering how taken you were with paintings and books—and I want to buy it for you and send it to you.

  I think it would spoil things if we met, Stephen. Tempting as it is, I think you would hate me the more for inflicting myself on you at this late date. And Ralph, to be truthful, would not understand. Long ago he tired of my tears and moods where you are concerned. He warned me that he would ask me to leave if I “moped” about you any longer.

  At my age, darling, I can’t afford to be on the street, and Ralph, handsome and rich as he is, would not think twice about putting me there. He is known to keep company with other women, and I assume at least a few of them would be more than happy to become his next wife.

  But there I go, doing what I said I didn’t want to—inflict my troubles on you.

  I pray to sweet Jesus that you can someday find it in your heart to forgive me. I pray to sweet Jesus that someday I can forgive myself.

  Love,

  Your mother

  Guild was outside the business office, smoking a cigarette, when the boy he’d sent as a runner came back with the fat, beersmelling sheriffs deputies. Guild explained to them what had happened, carefully leaving out that John T. Stoddard himself had set up the robbery.

  “His son got it, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “This doesn’t look like Stoddard’s day.”

  “Oh,” Guild said, “what else?”

  “The nigger.”

  “The fighter?”

  “Yeah.” The deputy wore a khaki uniform. Great dark circles of sweat ringed the areas beneath his arms. “He’s winning.”

  “What?”

  “He’s knocked Sovich down four times now.”

  Something was wrong in the ring. Guild didn’t know what, but Rooney had no chance against Sovich. None. “We’d better go tell Stoddard.”

  “Wasn’t like Reynolds to carry a gun,” the deputy said. “We all knew him. He was a robber, and a good one. But never carried any gun.”

  “He did this time.”

  “You have to kill him?”

  Guild stared at the man. “Yes, I did, Deputy. I had to kill him.”

  The deputy shrugged. “Just asking.” He nodded over to a wagon. Two sleek black horses stood in traces. “We can use that to take the bodies back to town.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll go make arrangements. Why don’t you go tell Stoddard.” Guild nodded and went back inside the building. Dusk shadows filled the hallway now. Reynolds lay sprawled beneath a blood-soaked blanket. Guild stepped over him and went inside the office where Stoddard sat in a chair next to his son’s body. Stoddard dumbly held a letter in his hand. Guild knew the letter was the one Stephen had been carrying but had been afraid to open. Stoddard stared down at Stephen.

  “I don’t know what to do, Guild.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Guild said harshly. “You live with it, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t know he was going to die. I didn’t want him to be here when Reynolds came in.”

  “Well, he was.”

  John T. Stoddard looked up. All the arrogance was gone from his face. He appeared to be a large, ponderous animal that had been wounded very badly. His eyes were red from crying. “You still don’t like me, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t you believe I’m sorry about this?”

  “You’re sorry for yourself, not for Stephen.”

  “I loved him.”

  “No, you didn’t.” He nodded to the letter. “Any more than she did.”

  “She didn’t want to see him.” He stared down at Stephen again and began sobbing. His great shoulders moved to the rhythms of his grief. He let the white letter fall to Stephen’s chest. Red blood soaked it immediately. “He couldn’t have asked for two worse parents.”

  Guild didn’t say anything. He was tired of it all. He wanted to see that the kid was loaded on the wagon along with Reynolds, and then he wanted out of here.

  The deputy appeared in the doorway. He glanced down at Stoddard and shook his head. He seemed disgusted with a man who would cry for any reason. He said, “You tell him about the nigger?”

  “No, I didn’t. Not yet.”

  “You better. Things are getting worse in there. Things are getting a lot worse.”

  Chapter Thirty

  She watched him die. At first Teresa thought he was just having a bad time of it. She attributed this to the heat and all the food and liquor he’d had last night. The colored man was hurting Victor because of Victor’s own excesses. For a few rounds she thought this might even be a good thing for Victor. Perhaps it would teach him some humility. Perhaps he would begin taking better care of himself and better care of her. Perhaps, though she knew this was very unlikely, perhaps he would even agree to take the children with them now.

  Sitting in the front row, her head pained by all the hoarse shouting going on around her, she thought again of her mother’s contempt and disgust. She had never seen such an expression on her mother’s face nor heard such ugliness in her mother’s voice.

  The shouting got worse.

  Teresa looked up just in time to see Victor get knocked down for the first time. It was then she knew he was going to die and that she could do nothing about it. It was more than just fear. It was some sense she had. As he was falling to the canvas, he turned his face so that he seemed to look right at her. She saw how vague his eyes had become, the way pain had wrinkled his mouth. Nothing broke his fall. Canvas and his head smashed together.<
br />
  He got up. The crowd around her took this as a sign that the fight would turn back Victor’s way. They shouted and clapped and stamped their feet. But she knew better, knew exactly what was going to happen to him.

  You get used to being bad. You get used to seeing your once stone-fisted punches become as nothing against the face of your opponent. You get used to the feeling of strangling on your own blood from cuts inside your mouth, and you get used to the blindness that sets in after you’ve been hit so many times. When you get paid by the round, all you can hope is that you somehow manage to stay upright long enough to make good money for your day’s work.

  Today was different.

  Today was the sort of day Rooney dreamed about when he’d had several schooners of beer and was sitting at a fishing hole. His punches were crisp and deadly once more. His opponent was driven to the canvas several times. Rooney, loose now with self-confidence and a real sense of how to take his man out, was once again a man others needed to fear.

  He had lost count of how many times Sovich had pitched to the canvas by now. And it didn’t matter. All that did matter was that Rooney was moving in slowly, cutting off the ring and making escape for Victor Sovich impossible.

  He kept punching, punching.

  She did not want to watch him die.

  She sensed that even the crowd, that great roaring white beast that seemed to have its masculinity at stake here, knew he was going to die.

  Its chanting fell to ragged silence.

  Its boastfulness became soft curses.

  Its anger became fear.

  She took it as a sign from God. He did not want her to desert her children, and this was His way of letting her know.

  She stood up just as Victor was knocked down for the fourth time. She was crying, quiet silver tears, as much for herself as for Victor, and she slipped from the arena without a single look back at the ring.

  No, she did not want to see because seeing was a curse. If she saw him in his last moments, she would never be able to forget. In the night when it was hot and she could not sleep, she would see his dying face. Or in the winter when the hard winds came and woke her, then too she would see his dying face and her heart would turn bitter over things that might have been but, alas, were not.

  She did not look back once. She went home to her children and her mother.

  When he put his head down, the nigger hit him on top of the head. When he moved his body away, the nigger hit him in the kidney. When he fell to the canvas, the nigger hit him in the face on the way down. There was no escaping the nigger now.

  Victor knew it was the water that had done this to him. But as the rounds pressed on, as the pain carried him into a kind of purgatory where all normal human reactions were suspended, he thought less about the water. Now there was just the blindness setting in, the sensation of pissing his pants, the right hand from nowhere inflicting more pain.

  For a time he’d hoped that he could still turn the fight around. By now he knew better. As he bobbed and ducked and tried to retaliate, odd images began forming. He saw his father, Slavic-rough and Slavic-mean, tossing a baseball to a six-year-old Victor. He saw his sister Peg singing “Ave Maria” at Victor’s first communion. He saw the first girl he’d ever slept with smiling at him knowingly in the shadows afterward.

  More blows, abruptly. The referee, clamping his hands on Victor’s face and forcing his eyes open, shouted right into Victor’s face, “How are you feeling? Can you go on?”

  Could he go on?

  A nigger beating Victor Sovich?

  Instinctively, Victor pushed the man aside and staggered in the direction of Rooney, swinging wildly as he did so.

  The crowd roared for the first time in long minutes.

  Rooney hit him very hard on the forehead again. Victor felt himself start to sink to his knees. A coldness came, then a darkness. He had experienced neither before.

  His sister again, and the “Ave Maria.”

  His father slapped him for spilling too much beer in the bucket Victor always ran down and got him. (He’d never been able to please the old man. Never.)

  The chewy breasts of Teresa. What an odd thing to want now with the coldness and the darkness setting in—sex.

  The referee’s hands on his shoulders, pushing him to the corner. “You’re bleeding from your penis,” the referee shouted into his face. “There’s blood all over your legs.”

  He wanted, despite all the pain and confusion, to get Rooney. And wanted Teresa, the musk of her sex, the soft brown sadness of her eyes.

  Blindness was total now, and the coldness.

  God, the coldness.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The crowd was without voice. Where only minutes before it had urged its raging best on Victor Sovich, now it was nothing more than a whimpering beast, softly cursing its disbelief.

  Dr. Fitzgerald was in the ring, bending over the unmoving form of Victor Sovich.

  Rooney crouched on his haunches in the comer, keeping his massive, ugly head down, obviously trying not to pay any attention to the taunts and jeers directed at him by various white fans nearby. “He better not die, nigger. You hear that?” said one man as Guild pushed past to the ring.

  The first drops of rain began to fall now, too, the sun disappearing altogether, the plump black rain clouds bringing not only darkness but chill, too. Rooney started rubbing himself. Seeing this, his trainer brought him a robe and threw it over his shoulders.

  John T. Stoddard climbed up through the ropes. He was dazed in such a way that his face looked dead, his mouth open, spittle a silver cord down the side of his jaw, his eyes shocked into a flat, unseeing blue.

  “What happened here?” the trainer said to the referee as Stoddard wandered around looking lost.

  “Rooney just came on strong.

  “Bullshit.

  “You asked me a question. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “And I say bullshit. There’s no way Rooney could have done this to Sovich.”

  “It’s what happened. I’m telling you—it’s what happened. The only thing I can think of is that Victor complained about the water.”

  “What water?

  “You gave him a bottle to drink from right before the fight. Maybe you still have the bottle.”

  “Back in the dressing room.

  “Maybe we better have a look at it.”

  Stoddard came over now. The dazed look was still in his eyes. He stared dumbly down at Victor.

  “He’s dead,” the referee said.

  Stoddard said nothing

  “Dead, Mr. Stoddard. Dead.”

  The rain came harder now, cold and almost painful to the skin. The fans in the bleachers began to scatter. Where before there had been thousands, now there were only scores. Those who remained seemed not to notice the rain. They stood in their places, watching the ring.

  Guild stared down at Sovich. He had not liked the man, did not like him still, yet there was an angry dignity to the man’s Slavic face in the repose of death. His eyelids were cut badly and his nose had been broken and two of his front teeth were nothing more than stumps. His legs were covered with blood.

  “Let’s get his body back to the dressing room,” Guild said to the trainer.

  Guild got Sovich by the feet, the trainer by the shoulders. They eased him over onto a stretcher.

  The referee said, “I’ve never had a man die on me before.”

  The sky opened up fully. The silver rain came in waves, in walls, in chill, shifting patterns that quickly drenched the parched ground beneath the bleachers and obscured everything in steam.

  Somewhere in the middle of the downpour, they could hear an isolated fan shout toward the ring, “Is he dead?”

  And the referee shouting back, “Yes, he’s dead.”

  There was no sense in hurrying. Guild was already soaked. They carried Victor Sovich back on a stretcher covered by a sheet. The sheet got soaked immediately and clung tightly to Sovich, le
nding him the aspect of sculpture.

  Guild tried not to think about the water bottle Victor had drunk from, but of course he had already begun to suspect what had happened. He thought of a woman whose brother had been given poison. Her brother had been a boxer, as had his killer.

  They moved slowly back through the bleachers and along the rope fence and to the business office.

  Guild said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Stoddard trailed along. He seemed barely able to pick up his feet. He said nothing.

  They put Sovich on the rubdown couch. Dr. Fitzgerald checked him again. He shook his head.

  The room smelled of liniment and trapped heat.

  Guild got a cigarette going. He was watching John T. Stoddard sink into memories of his son when Sovich’s trainer appeared holding a glass bottle half filled with water. “Here’s what we’re looking for.”

  Guild took the bottle and sniffed it. “Can’t smell anything.” He held it up to the light. “Looks clear.”

  “There are a number of poisons we can’t detect right away,” Dr. Fitzgerald said. “Not being able to see them or smell them doesn’t mean anything.” He looked at Stoddard heaped in the comer and said, “Mr. Stoddard, I’m going to pour you a glass of whiskey. I want you to drink it. Then I want you to get out of your wet clothes and lie down on that cot in the other room. Whether you know it or not, you’re in a state of shock.” He nodded for the trainer to help Mr. Stoddard into the other room.

  Stoddard came suddenly and violently back to life. He jerked his arm away from the trainer’s hand. “Mr. Guild here doesn’t approve of me,” he announced in a formal, almost theatrical way. He sounded as if he were right on the edge of tumbling into insanity. “He didn’t think I was good enough for him, and he didn’t think I was good enough for my son. He has a pretty goddamn high opinion of himself.”