“But do you want to?” he whispered.
Her breath came quicker, shallower, like she was running. Her long legs stirred against his. He pulled back, her face held away from his, her lips parted but unable to reach him, and he held her away until he heard her whisper Yes! she whispered Yes! she told him Yes! and as her bare leg slid up his thighs he moved into their kiss.
In the morning Gene found the edge. That knife line border where strength and hunger meet. That fury place when you sink into your eyes and your spine steels. You no longer walk, no longer run: you are a tight wind with legs like thunderclouds and lightning bolt arms. The smile on your skull is death and your mouth’s coffee-metal-salty taste for blood doesn’t care whose. He devoured ten miles of road with the scent of her on him, her hips bouncing up and down on the black horse. He shadowboxed in the barn with her watching everywhere and not there at all. Bare-fisted, slew the heavy bag with his favorite three-punch staccato rhythm and whirled without losing cadence to make the speed bag sing, then spun to snatch a horsefly out of the air with his right jab. He was totally in the moment of that hay-stinking, dusty, oven horse barn even as he was absolutely in eternity’s every four-cornered canvas ring. Pain simply didn’t matter. He was a boxer.
“Clean up,” said Doyle. “We’re all going to town, show the yokels we’re for real.”
Doyle drove and made Gene sit up front with him. Harry was a wire in the back seat beside Billie. She wore that blue dress.
Shelby’d been full before the fight announcement. Now Gene felt like he was in a beehive swelling with hot air from the beating of a million wings. The town had six dance halls for workers who’d flooded in to hammer up the eight-sided, 40,000-seat wooden arena rising like a toothpick skeleton on the edge of town. On the prairie across the tracks from the fight site stood an encampment of Indian tepees. Cars jammed Main Street. People stared and pointed. Men took it upon themselves to clear a slot for them in front of the movie house, holding up traffic, beckoning Doyle into the parking spot. When they got out of the car, hands appeared from everywhere to shake Gene’s, to touch him on the back, the shoulders. The crowd stared at the Larsons, who followed in the wake of the fighter and his trainer, knew these merely local half-breeds were now somehow sacred, too. Fans smiled a dark hunger. An oilman’s blond daughter whose eyes Gene had never marked now pulled at the gladiator with her sapphire gaze.
Harry jumped out front: “Let us through! Let Gene through!” They entered a barbershop. A white-shrouded half-clipped customer leapt out of his chair, and Doyle nudged Gene to obey the barber’s plea to take that throne.
“On the house for you two boys,” said the barber. “On the house.”
“What two boys?” said Gene.
The back room curtain opened and out came a husky giant whose muscles bulged his shirt sleeves. Eric Harmon said: “Me and you.”
The good part of Gene, the old part, the real part, wanted to say: You were here first, Eric. Take the chair. But the boxer he was now smiled and leaned back for the barber’s clip.
“I won’t be long,” said Gene. “Then you can have your turn.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Eric.
Only the snip snip of scissors sounded in the barbershop as Eric leaned against the wall. Doyle sat, nodded for Billie and Harry to sit, too. Two other customers pretended to read magazines. On the street outside the window, none of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd moved; all of them faced every which way they could to keep that glass in the corner of their eyes.
“Is that okay?” whispered the barber after he spun Gene around to look in the mirror,
“Looks damn fine,” said Gene. “I look damn good, don’t I?”
Thought: Please Billie, know I don’t mean it!
“Never thought of you as a pretty boy,” said Eric.
“I never thought of you at all.” Gene got out of the chair, tossed the barber a quarter. Told the scissors man: “You do such fine work, think I’ll hang around and watch.”
Eric shook his head and took the chair. The white sheet whipped around him. Gene noticed the barber’s shaking hands.
“Careful there, Pete. Don’t nick our boy and make him red out too soon.”
“Doesn’t matter if he uses the razor,” said Eric. “I don’t bleed easy.”
“We’ll see.” Gene looked across the room. “Mind if I put on your radio?”
The barber didn’t break his concentration as he cut the younger man’s hair, and Gene walked over, tuned the radio to some hot New York jazz. Gene turned the volume up.
Gene said: “I got to wash up. But not as much as some.”
Then he walked through the curtain to the sink and the bathroom. The sound of radio jazz blanketed the room outside the curtain. Nobody could hear anything from the washroom. Gene turned on the water and didn’t look around as he heard the curtain swing open, get pulled shut.
“Think we gave them enough show, Eric?” Gene took a towel off the rack, turned around, drying his hands. The younger fighter stood watching him. At least two inches. At least twenty pounds.
“This isn’t a show for me,” said Eric. “We never met, not really, but I know who you are, seen you around. Always kind of admired you. So you should know this isn’t personal.”
“At least you’re that smart.”
“This is about winning. About who’s a champion. And that’ll be me. I’ll fight you fair, but I’ll beat you.”
“Eric, don’t kill yourself over —”
“California was a long time ago. Not long for people out there in the street, but for guys like us who have to climb into the ring, damn near the weight of forever ago. I got no feelings for what you did, except sorry for you and the guy who fell.”
“I knocked him down.”
“You’ll have to do more than that to me. This is my only chance to prove I’m somebody.”
“No it’s not.”
“Sure it is. Just look at you.”
Then the younger man stuck out his hand. When they shook, he didn’t try to crush Gene’s fingers, and Gene suddenly loved him for that.
“Give me a good fight,” said Eric. “I want to know I won something hard.”
Gene didn’t know what to say. Let him leave with silence. Gene gave him time to get clear of the barbershop, swept open the curtain, and there stood Sheriff John Otis.
“‘Pears I didn’t have to hustle down here after all.” Texas John’s eyes pulled back from Gene to take in Billie, trembling Harry Doyle. “Don’t see no trouble to put down.”
“Could have been,” said the barber. “Why —”
“My law ain’t about ‘could be.’ ‘S about what I see with these two good eyes.” Those two good eyes rode Doyle. “Though just ‘cause I size up a son of a bitch doesn’t mean I’ll give him what he deserves. But when he makes his wrong play, I drop the curtain.”
“Just like you were in a movie, huh?” said Doyle. “Not out here in the real world.”
The sheriff laughed, and his suit coat coincidentally opened with his swinging arms. Gene saw the Colt Peacemaker holstered on Texas John’s hip like it had been in his Ranger days. Saw the wooden stock for the Mauser slung under Otis’s right arm, knew that thousand-yard sniper automatic hung near the sheriff’s heart.
“This ain’t the real world. This is Shelby.”
“Imagine that,” said Doyle.
“Don’t have to,” answered Texas John. “I’m here. And we got phones and everything. And when I called around about a curly-haired fancy-dancy with a Butte license plate who claims to be a boxing manager, the boys down there wondered how you ended up in an honest game.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“Luck is a fragile thing,” said Doyle. “Be sure to watch it close. You can bet I will.”
The sheriff told Gene: “You in with some fine people, Hometown.”
His black cowboy boots shook the barbershop as he tromped out to Main Street.
“We’re back to
the ranch,” said Doyle.
Great by me, thought Gene. Every day his training ran him like a growing steel tiger. Every night he lay beside Billie. He needed less sleep and more of her. She gave him all she could reach. She’d ask questions, care about his answers.
“What was the hardest thing to learn about boxing?” asked Billie.
“Making yourself pull down into the fighter’s crouch where you could hit and where you could get hurt. Getting past the terror. Your mouth all dry, your stomach heaving in and out, and you look across the ring and see that steely stare coming back at you and you hope he doesn’t see your stomach fluttering and then you see his and it’s jumping like mad, too, and oh Christ, any second they’ll ring that bell.”
He told her how easy it was to forget to keep your guard up. How his favorite combination was a lightning left-left-right, and when you throw the left jab, how you had to remember to bring it back at eye level, quick and straight. How after the second left, your dance had to move your left foot four inches to the left so your shoulders squared up and gave your right jab the snap that created power. How the uppercut was easy, go pigeon-toed and corkscrew your punch. How the hook took him months to learn, how he practiced a million times with each fist until he could keep his elbow up and whip it out tight and close, just eighteen inches of loop — two feet and it’s an arm punch, a pillow, a joke, a nothing and left you only with how lucky you were in dodging the others guy’s coming-in cannonball.
“But besides being good at it, what do you like about boxing?”
Took him all the next day to find the answer. That night they lay like spoons in the darkness, his face brushed by the perfume of her hair, her bare spine pressed against the mass of his chest, the two of them alone on the white sheet of their starlit bed.
“In the ring,” he whispered, “what’s happening is real. True. Even the feints, the fakes, and the cheats. You use every single bit of yourself and find more you didn’t know was there. No chain is gonna whip out of the sky and hang you dead and dropped before you know it. You’re not gonna need to shoot your own damn horse. You know exactly who you are. Where you are. It’s a fight. You’re a boxer. “
She said nothing.
Then told him: “This here with you is the closest I’ve got to that.”
Told him: “You say the one special thing you can do is boxing. The one special thing I can do is make you love me.”
Billie curled into a ball, away from him and into him at the same time, her head pulling away on the sheet from his kisses even as her round hips pushed back against his loins, pressed against him, rubbing, and Gene gave himself to her.
Nine nights before the fight Doyle threw open their door, stood backlit in the entrance as Billie jerked the sheet over her nakedness and Gene sneaked one bare foot down to the floor.
“Wake up and dress, palooka. I need a driver.”
“That’s not my job.”
“The hophead’s too shaky, so it’s either you or the woman. If it’s her, the coming back to you will take a good while longer. That’s okay with me.”
Gene made the time as midnight when he drove Doyle away from the farmhouse.
“They say a woman weakens a boxer,” said Doyle. “Steals his legs. His wind.”
“Only way to find out is to get me a sparring partner. Why don’t you volunteer?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, punchy?”
“I’m just doing the job I said I’d do.”
“No. Tonight you’re driving. Like I say you’ll do.”
Doyle made him take a back road into Shelby. Music came from the joints on Front Street. Doyle had him park on an alley slope up from the drop-lit rear door of Taylor’s bank. “Shut off the lights and engine, but keep your hand on the starter.”
“We meeting the man?”
“Might say that if you weren’t supposed to keep shut up.” Doyle bent over to hide the strike of a kitchen match that let him check his watch: ten minutes to one. Doyle puffed out the blue flame. Sulphur smoke soured the darkness. He eased out the passenger door, flapped his suit coat so it was loose.
“When I come running, you start the engine. Keep the lights out.” Doyle crept to a shed where the shadows hid him from the alley below, stood there like a rock.
Gene knew time in three-minute increments. In the middle of the sixth round, way down the slope, between two Main Street buildings, Gene spotted the hulking figure of a man walking toward the alley. The man stepped out of the passageway: Sheriff Otis.
From that distance, the car with Gene was an innocent shape, one of the new vehicles crowding into town for the oil rigs or the railroad spur they were building for the chartered trains from back East. Even if the ex-Texas Ranger spotted the car, its engine was off, its doors were closed. Shadows cloaked Doyle. Sheriff Otis walked along the flat stone wall of a building and into the cone of light dropping down over the bank’s rear door. Otis wrapped his gun hand around the bank’s doorknob to be sure it was locked tight.
Gene barely heard Doyle’s whisper: “Draw!”
Saw the shadowed man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out toward Otis.
Saw the flash of the pistol and heard its roar as a blast of crimson graffitied the bank’s cement wall below the doorknob and Otis flipped into the air and crashed to the alley.
Doyle leapt into the car and they sped to the back road south.
“Got the son of a bitch just like I wanted!” yelled Doyle.
“Sucker shot! “
“Depends on which side of the trigger you’re on. Besides, I could have put the pill through his black heart, but instead he’ll get to gimp around and play the local hero.”
“What makes you so kind?”
“A dead lawman brings heat from everywhere. A cripple is a joke.”
“Hope he doesn’t bleed out.”
They hit a bump.
Doyle said: “Those are the risks you take.”
Three nights later, six days to the fight, Taylor drove out, told Doyle: “Perfect job. The town fathers gave a local guy the badge. Otis is parked in his house on the east end, sitting on the porch with his gun on his lap, his leg cemented up, watching the trains go by, and cursing like a son of a bitch. Somehow everybody’s talking about two guys with Texas accents who blew into town and now can’t be found anywhere. Almost like they never existed, but they must have been the ones. A man’s past come back to haunt him. Happens all the time.”
“Will he walk again?” asked Gene.
“Who cares?” said Doyle. “The law dog’s not gonna be there to figure what he can’t see, he’s not gonna be able to run after no robbers.”
“You will have to run,” said the toad to Gene. “In all the confusion, our locals won’t piece it together but, quick enough, they’ll take it to the real lawman. He’ll figure your part, especially since he already’s got a lead on Doyle. But Doyle’s good shot bought you half a day at least.
“After the heist, this is the first place they’ll look. Doyle’ll plant a burned map of Mexico in the trash ashes. But you go east to that farm where we met. Cut up the cash. Hide my share in the lockbox under the living room floor. Harry, leave the money you owe. Doyle will peel off extra bills for expenses. There’ll be scissors, hair dye. A razor for your mustache, Gene. If you’re banged up from the fight, there’ll be a sling for your arm and doctor’s papers about a farm accident. Only lie when you have to. A close trim, a henna, and Billie’ll look respectable. The shed has a change-up car. Alberta plates. Harry knows the bootlegger trail into Canada. The four of you’ll hit that whistle-stop depot at Aden before the evening papers. Doyle’ll have train tickets to Vancouver for Mr. and Mrs. Louis Dumas. Doyle figures he’ll like New York: Anybody can be anybody there. Harry, you can help Doyle drive to the big time or he’ll let you out on the way, your choice.”
“What about you?” said Gene.
“I stay here to keep messing with the minds of our friends and neighbors.
A year from now, I regretfully leave this paradise for a better job. Six months later, I vanish a free man.”
“What’s to stop us from keeping all the money?” said Gene. “You won’t go to the cops.”
“You’re too smart to risk running from my insurance men plus hiding from the law.” Taylor smiled. “Besides, you and the Larsons are fundamentally honest people. A banker learns how to judge that real quick.”
That moonlit night as she floated on his chest, Billie whispered: “Would Doyle double-cross our banker?”
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 24