The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  The Championship of Nowhere

  from Murder on the Ropes

  Gene mallette and the kid named Sandy were wildcatting a double shift on an oil derrick fifty-five afternoons before Independence Day. Drill and generator motors pounded May’s prairie air. Sandy laughed about something and smiled. Then a drill chain broke, whipped like a silver tie around his neck, and rocketed him to the top of the fifty-foot rig. His body swung there while pipes clattered and a driller screamed and all Gene could think about was Sandy’s teenage face smeared oil black except for his happy eyes and the glint of white teeth.

  The chain unraveled with a spin and Sandy crashed to the derrick floor.

  Gene and another guy rode to town in back of the flatbed truck with Sandy’s body laid at their boots. There’d been a spring snow two weeks before, so the truck didn’t kick up much dust from the dirt road. The earth smelled damp and good. He heard the foreman in the truck cab say maybe the drought was over. They saw a skinny deer grazing by the walls of a deserted sod house. They saw the blue misted Sweet Grass Hills rising from the yellow prairie between them and Canada. Those three volcanic crags would have been mountains anyplace else but here in Montana. The foreman drove to the Shelby undertaker parlor. As they lifted Sandy off the truck, Gene heard the mortician’s hand jingling silver dollars for those happy eyes.

  “I’m done,” said Gene, and walked to the boarding house.

  He put a shower and a tub soak on his tab. Sat at the dinner table with other boarders and ate stew he didn’t taste. Walked out to the sidewalk to sit on a bench, watch the people and cars around the Front Street speakeasies, and make himself think about nothing, nothing at all.

  Least I got that, he thought.

  Just before sunset a rancher named Jensen staggered out of a speakeasy called the Bucket of Blood, walked to a roan horse cinched to one of the new electric light poles, pulled out a silver pistol, and shot the horse smack between the eyes. The roan plopped to the ground so hard it snapped the cinch. Jensen pumped slugs into the beast, filling the town with the roar of the gun. He had gone through a full reload of the revolver and had its cylinder swung open for more bullets when the black Ford with a big white star painted on each of its front doors pulled up behind the dead horse. Texas John Otis unfolded his grizzly bear body to climb out of the car, sheriff s badge on the left lapel of his black suit, a dead German sniper’s ten-inch broomstick handle Mauser in his right hand. Sheriff Otis ripped the shiny revolver away from Jensen and slammed the Mauser against the rancher’s skull.

  “You dumb son of a bitch!” roared the Sheriff. “You shot your own damn horse!”

  But by then Jensen lay draped unconscious across that bloody roan.

  Gene turned away and saw her walking toward him.

  He’d seen her before, back in ‘06 when she was nine and he was fourteen. Her white father moved her and her kid brother off the Blackfeet Rez to educate in Shelby instead of being sentenced to an Indian boarding school. Gene’d seen her every day when he was a high school senior. She’d skipped a grade so she was a shy freshman who wore her black hair like a veil. Gene just knew she wouldn’t talk to him. Then he couldn’t talk to her while she was still in high school and he was a graduated adult doing a man’s job as a gandy dancer building railroads to bring homesteaders out West and ship the loot of the land back East. He’d seen her almost every week, often trying to corral her wild brother. Gene had seen her at the train depot the day he shipped out to the Marines for the Great War against the Kaiser. That day, damned if he wouldn’t before he died doing what had to be done, he’d gone up to her, said: “Goodbye.” She’d flinched — then lanced the gloom with her smile. When he came home from Europe with no visible scars, he’d seen her in the Shelby cemetery putting flowers on the influenza graves of the homesteader she’d married who’d been old enough to be her dad and the baby girl she’d let that dreamer father. After bloody California, as Gene’s parents and their ranch died, he had seen her move to town when the great winds of 1920 ate the homestead she’d tried to keep going while working the schoolmarm job her husband had been white enough to let her get and the town had been Christian enough to let her keep for the full year of widow’s black. Gene had watched as she waitressed at the Palace Hotel where she lived in the back room, sometimes with her brother when he was in town trying to find dollars for ivory powder he pumped into his arm. And Gene’d seen her sad smile two months earlier when he’d asked her out. She’d whispered: “I got nothing that’s worth it for you.” He’d seen her not believe him when he swore she was wrong, seen her walk away so she wouldn’t see tears fall she couldn’t catch.

  But that night, he saw her and knew she was walking toward him.

  She blocked the red ball of the setting sun as she drew near. They were together inside a crimson lake. He could barely breathe and the water of this moment turned her walk into a slow swim toward him, her hair undulating out from her shoulders, her dress floating around her calves. He remembered forever that dress was the blue of morning sky. She wore no makeup on her skin, which was the color of milked coffee. The scent of purple lilacs came with her. Gene felt like Sandy spinning free of the chain that hung him high above the earth as he fell into her midnight eyes.

  He knew he said “Hello Billie” and she said “Hello Gene.”

  Maybe they tried to say more, but they couldn’t, not until she said: “I need your help. I need you to meet with some men. They sent me to get you. They want you to do something. It might save me, but it won’t be anything but trouble for you, no matter what they promise. But I had to come. I had to ask. I had to do that much. I’m sorry.”

  All of a sudden it was night. Lights came on throughout the town. The glow from the street lamp on the corner yellowed her skin.

  “Is it a long walk?” said Gene.

  “I’ve got their car.”

  The license plate on the Ford bore the county ID numbers from Butte, two hundred miles to the south, the only place rougher than Shelby in the whole state. Butte was a smokestack city of 60,000 people, tough Bohunk miners digging up the richest hill on earth for Irish robber barons who ran the place with Pinkertons, dynamite and satchels of cash they spent to fight off Wobbly labor organizers and Ku Klux Klan Catholic haters and reform meddlers from back East. On a good day, Shelby only had 1,200 people crowded into its prairie valley, busted-out honyockers who’d believed the Iowa newspapers’ lies about homesteading, ranchers like Jensen and cowboys who cut barbed-wire fences whenever they rode up to one, Basque sheepherders who couldn’t converse with two-legged creatures, Blackfeet and Gros Ventre and even Cheyenne stepped off their scrub reservations hunting for hope or honor or a last resort hell of a good time, railroad men, shopkeepers, and saloon tenders and border runners and streetwalkers and roughnecks like Gene had become who were trying to cash in on the Great North Country Oil Strike of 1921 that had filled every hotel hallway with dime-a-night cots.

  Gene liked the no-nonsense way Billie drove, shifting when she had to, not afraid to let the engine whine and work it up a steep grade rather than panic-shift to high, stall, and maybe die. She drove them east, out of town past the railroad roundhouse and the mooing slaughterhouse pens, up and over the rim of the valley. Lamps of the town winked away in the Ford’s mirror. Somebody’d shotgunned a million white stars in the night overhead. The sky shimmered with green and pink sheets of northern lights, and the yellow cones of the car headlights showed only a narrow ribbon of oiled highway.

  “This road goes all the way to Chicago,” said Gene.

  “We can’t,” said Billie. “I can’t.”

  She drove into the night

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because of who you are. What you can do. California.”

  “Because I’d come if you asked.”

  “I don’t know what to say about that.”

  “We never did.”

  “No.” She steered the car toward a farmhouse. “We didn’t. Neither of
us.”

  She stopped the car in the dark yard beside a Cadillac Gene thought he recognized.

  “I’ll take you back right now, if you want,” she said.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  He saw her head shake.

  “Then let’s go,” said Gene as he got out of the car. “They’re waiting.”

  Her brother opened the farmhouse door. He wore a frayed white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, loose pants, and a pencil pusher’s black shoes that were as dull as his droopy eyes. His right hand that pumped Gene’s was strong enough to deal cards at the Palace Hotel but not much more, a weak grasp that whispered he was a man who couldn’t cover his bets.

  “Zhene Mallette!” he slurred. “What d’you say, what d’you know, good ta see you!”

  “How you doing, Harry?” said Gene, though he knew enough to know that answer and sent all the question’s sincerity to the man’s sister. Gene’s fingers brushed Harry back into the living room where the two men who mattered waited, and though he silently prayed otherwise, he sensed Billie step into the farmhouse behind him and shut the door.

  The Cadillac in the yard belonged to the pudgy Shelby banker standing by the table supporting a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey and glasses. The brass nameplate on his desk in the bank read PETER TAYLOR —VICE PRESIDENT. He had a knotty head of not much hair and reminded Gene of a grinning toad who never said no to another fly.

  “Good evening, Mr. Mallette,” said Taylor. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Wasn’t for you,” said Gene.

  “We know,” said the other man, the one Gene had never seen. Least, he’d never seen that particular black-haired city-suited man who hadn’t bothered to get up off the couch — or to either fill his hand with the .45 on his lap or hide the gun. Gene’d seen those eyes and that set of face once in the trenches, another time in a Tijuana cantina, a third time ringside at a smoker in Fresno, and the last and worst time in a set of chains headed through the work camp to the scaffold at San Quentin. Wasn’t that the man was tough, though Gene knew he could take a beating and then some, it was that he’d crawl up off any floor you knocked him down on to tear your heart in two and suck in the sound of ripping flesh.

  “Please,” said the banker, “have a chair. Call me Peter.”

  “Never figured on calling you at all.”

  “Life adds up like we don’t expect. Please, sit down. There, beside the woman.”

  “Where should I sit?” said her brother, but his words went into the night as didn’t matter.

  Gene eased himself into the folding chair closest to the couch and acted as if his legs weren’t coiled springs. Banker Taylor settled into an easy chair and filled glasses with whiskey. Harry Larson strutted to the folding chair close to Gene, grandly lowered himself but misjudged his balance and almost crashed to the floor. By the time he got himself stable, his sister stood behind him, a hand on his shoulder. The man on the couch didn’t move.

  “Nice night for a drive.” Gene sent his words to the banker, kept the man on the couch in his gaze. “But that whiskey is illegal. Seems like a man in your position would be more careful.”

  “Laws like Prohibition are for people who fear man’s nature.” Taylor held a whiskey toward Gene. When Gene didn’t take it, Taylor sat the glass on a milk crate near Gene’s legs. “Wise of you not to drink, given the opportunity in front of you. As for what’s legal, a man like you who’s served time in a prison work camp can’t be sanctimonious.”

  “Your friend on the couch there would know more about prison than me.”

  “Never been,” said the man on the couch. “Witnesses never make it to the trials.”

  Banker Taylor extended a glass of whiskey to the black-haired man. “Gene, you’ll find that Norman here — pardon my manners, this is Norman Doyle — Mr. Doyle is a lucky man.”

  Doyle took the whiskey glass with his left hand; the butt of the .45 faced his right.

  “You don’t need a glass, do you, Harry? You took care of yourself as soon as your sis left for town. Your vice is still legal, though the politicians are going to fix that, too. And you, Wilemena — or should I call you Widow Harris? You know, Gene, she’s been without a man for a long time. A broke-in mare without a saddle for the itch. I don’t think we’ll give her a glass. She’s a woman, plus whiskey and Injuns don’t mix, even if they are breeds.”

  “Get to it,” snapped Gene.

  “How you doing in the market?”

  “What?”

  “The stock market,” said the banker. “Everybody plays the market these days. Going up, up, up. Going to make everybody a millionaire. How you doing in the stock market?”

  “You know I’m not that kind of guy.”

  “You mean you can’t be. ‘Cause you don’t have the money. So how you going to get rich? This is America. Everybody wants to get rich. Can’t get a good car or the woman you want if you don’t have silver dollars to jingle. Are you going to get what you want, what you need, by roughnecking other people’s oil out of this God-forsaken ground?”

  “I get by.”

  “And that’s all you’re getting. By. Passed by. Till one day the wind just up and blows you away like you were never here. Forgotten. But tonight, you’re a lucky man. If you got the guts to be who you are and do what you can do better than any man in this state.”

  “Tell me.”

  The banker said: “You’re a boxer.”

  Harry Larson blurted out: “Everybody knows, Gene! We all heard. You’re the best!”

  Billie squeezed her brother’s shoulder and he shut up.

  “I gave that up,” said Gene. “I’m not ever going back in the ring.”

  Doyle said: “Yet.”

  “California rules don’t matter up here,” said the banker. “What that judge said —”

  “It isn’t about that.”

  “Maybe you don’t have the guts for it anymore,” said Doyle.

  “It’s not guts,” said Gene. “It’s the stomach.”

  “Killing a man should be no big deal for a war boy like you,” said the man with the gun.

  “I didn’t kill him. We fought. I hit him. He went down. He didn’t get up. He died.”

  “Oh.” Doyle smiled. “So you didn’t do it. What happened? Did some angel come down to the canvas and snatch his soul?”

  “I don’t know. Angels don’t tell me their secrets. The only reason the night court judge called it reckless misadventure was to keep the locals from lynching me. Banning me from boxing in the state and sticking me in the work camp for ninety days got me out of town. When I got out, nobody cared anymore. Except me. I went home. So what’s my boxing to you?”

  “It’s what it is to our whole damn town,” said the banker. “We got us a heavyweight championship of the world going to be fought here. Jack Dempsey against Tommy Gibbons.”

  “That’s just a joke going around,” said Gene.

  “Yes, it started that way. A joke. A telegram from a civic leader that was a publicity stunt to get Shelby a little free fame. As if anything is free.”

  “Who cares about fame.”

  “Be a modern man, Gene. Modesty is over. Useless. So is reality. Image is everything. What’s true for a man is true for a town. This is a dirt road nowhere, but so what? If it can become famous, a celebrity, then riches and the happy-ever-after good life will surely follow.”

  “That’s a load of crap.”

  “Maybe, but it’s the way things work nowadays. The joke telegram was going to get us a few newspaper stories back East, a publicity stunt. But Dempsey’s manager Jack Kearns called the bluff, agreed to his boy fighting for the championship in Shelby. Nobody out here wants to be a back-down kind of guy. So now this ‘joke’ thing has grown a life of its own, a bigger one every day. Dempsey’s been guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars. Now accountants are estimating a total cash gate of a million to a million point four. “

  “What does that have to do with me?” Gene nodd
ed his head to take in Billie. “With us?”

  “We’re going to heist the fight.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t believe the million-dollar-gate hype,” said the banker. “But figure it’s half that, and figure our plan will get us half of that half. A quarter of a million dollars split up among we five won’t make us famous, but these days, that much cash will still buy us some sweet years.”

  “You’re nuts!”

  “No, I’m the inside man. If these locals knew the strings I’ve been pulling the last few years, they’d lynch me. I’ve been a public naysayer on this fight, but a whisper here, a question phrased just so, and suddenly people get an idea they think is their own. That’s how I put this in place, that’s how we’ll take it.”

  “To make it work,” said the toad, “we all need to be insiders. I inspired the idea that to perfect our glorious Dempsey-Gibbons fight, we need a preliminary bout: the heavyweight championship of Shelby That’ll put us all on the inside. That’s how we’ll rip it off.”