Doyle led them into the barn where the oven air was thick with the scent of hay and manure. Flies buzzed. A black horse whinnied from a stall. A heavy punching bag hung down into the open other end from one beam, while another dangled a speed bag. Dumbbells waited on a table next to boxing gloves, rolls of tape, and five pairs of canvas shoes.
“Taylor guessed about your size,” said Doyle. “We’ll get other stuff if you need it.”
“I’ve got my own shoes and gloves for the fight.” Gene picked up a pair of sneakers. “These’ll work in the meantime.” From ten feet away, Doyle said: “So what now?”
“You got a knife?”
Doyle’s right hand snapped like a whip to drop a switchblade out of his sleeve. Light flashed between him and Gene and with a thunk the knife stuck into a stall wall. “Help yourself.”
So I gotta watch out for that, too. Gene pulled the knife from the barn wood and cut his pants into shorts. Tossed the knife to the dirt in front of Doyle’s shined shoes. Gene took off his shirts, changed his work boots for the new sneakers, said: “Time to train.” Working the oil rigs had kept him strong with endurance. That was crucial, but he’d need explosive power, too. He spent an hour working with dumbbells while telling Harry how to construct a flat bench for chest presses. He put a ten-pound weight in each hand to shadowbox. When his arms were on fire, he put on training gloves and moved first to the heavy bag, then to the speed bag. Gene’s arms were so heavy that even if he’d had his old timing, the twenty-minute display of tap tap miss he gave the watching Doyle, Billie and Harry would still have been pitiful.
“Seems you’re working it backward,” said Doyle. “Skill stuff should come first.”
“Find out what skill you got when you’re at your worst.” Sweat covered Gene’s bare chest. “Then you know how much further you’ve got to make yourself go.”
“’Pears to me you’ll be lucky to make it out of this barn.”
“1 might not be the only one."
“’Least you talk like a fighter.” Doyle spit. “Woman: I’m hungry. Go make lunch.”
“Make your own lunch,” said Gene. “I need a spotter for road work and I don’t fancy your company or figure Harry can handle the heat.”
“Your job ain’t to figure, palooka.”
“Fine. You explain to Taylor how you chose to screw up me getting ready.”
“I explain nothing to nobody.” Doyle’d taken off his suit jacket so his white shirt showed dampness around the leather straps of the .45’s shoulder holster.
But you won’t push things too far, thought Gene. Not yet.
Doyle said: “I’m going to the house.”
As he walked away, Gene told Billie what he needed.
She bridled the black horse. Didn’t even look for a saddle. Swung herself up on its back, her dress swirling, hiking up past her knees. Her feet were bare, as were her legs that gripped the naked flanks of the black horse. Harry draped glass jars of water on each side of the quivering animal’s neck. Billie tapped her heels against the animal, and he carried her out of the barn, her round hips split evenly along the beast’s spine and rocking with the rhythm of each step. When she got into the sunlight, she turned back, gave Gene a nod.
Gene ran.
Out of the barn, through the yard, along the gravel road. Dust filled his panting mouth. Rocks stabbed the soles of his feet. He followed a wagon trail along the crests of the river breaks. A quarter mile and the house vanished behind rises and dips in the land. He dropped the strong set of his shoulders. Heard the clump clump of the horse behind him, the rattle of the glass water jars. A half mile and he vomited, staggered and would have fallen but somehow she was down on the ground beside him, holding him up as he wheezed and gasped and the world spun in bright explosions of light.
She poured water over him, made him wash his mouth and drink. “Can you do it?”
“Have to, don’t we?”
Billie touched his sweaty chest. His slamming heart made her hand twitch. “Thank you.”
“Have to run ten miles a day by end of next week.”
She got back on the horse. He stumbled along for another three minutes before he turned around and made his mind see him running back to the house. He wouldn’t let Doyle see him have to be carried back. Billie made Gene eat four scrambled eggs for lunch. Hosed him off behind the house. Laid him down on the bed upstairs while she unpacked his suitcase with his clothes, the canvas bag with his still supple ring shoes, blue satin trunks and those blood-smeared black gloves. Before dinner she held his ankles while he did sit-ups until his mid-drift cramped at ninety-seven and he thrashed out of her control on the barn’s dirt floor. He sparred with the heavy bag and the speed bag and lost both times. She watched for the five minutes he hung swaying from a pipe by both arms to stretch out and give himself a whisker longer reach. She couldn’t tell that he’d tried to finish with a set of pull-ups and failed. Hosed him down again. Dinner was whatever and he ate it all, including the nighttime-only bone-building milk that could cut his wind. Upstairs, in only his underpants, he lay helpless while she sponged his face in the pickle brine he’d made Doyle get from town. Some trickled in his eye, but she was feist and put her hand over his mouth so his scream stayed muffled in the bedroom walls. She eased both of his hands into other bowls of brine: working the rigs had toughened their flesh, but every trick mattered. The brine stung in the dozens of cuts on his hands. He was too tired for pain.
“Would he do it?” said Gene. “Your brother. Make you...let them force you into...”
“Harry would hate that but he already hates himself. He’d shoot up and believe it was a trick of fate he couldn’t help and can’t help, something that’ll go away if we just get through it.”
“What about you?”
She turned away. “My mom died. My baby died. My brother’s all I’ve got left to lose.”
“There’s you.”
“You’re the only one who cares about that.” She shook her head. “Besides, they wouldn’t just kill Harry, they know he wouldn’t care. So they’d kill me, too, to prove the point to the world. At least if the two of us cure still alive...we’ve got that.”
She turned back to him. “You know that...whatever you want from me, you can have.”
“I don’t want anybody to hurt you. I don’t want you to ever have to cry.”
Billie left the bedroom. He lay there with his hands in the bowls of brine. If the house catches fire, here’s where I’ll die. The bedroom door opened and she came in carrying a roll of blankets and a pillow. She made a bed for herself on the floor, took his hands out of the bowls, pulled a blanket over him, but then he was gone into a sleep beyond rest.
The next day was worse. And the day after that. Bonethumping soreness. Muscles of rubber, lungs of fire. Half the time he couldn’t think straight as he lifted weights, tried not to trip and kept failing as he jumped rope. He’d hang from the pipe first thing every morning, drop down to bend and twist every way he could before Billie bridled the horse, filled the water bottles and followed his stumbling run across the prairie. Heavy bag, speed bag, more rope, shadowboxing, then another run before dinner. Brine sponges and soaking. And always Doyle watching, hanging around, eating across from him and Billie, and when he wasn’t on the needle, brother Harry, who kept trying to joke, who talked of what a fight it would be, of how all Gene’s road work was building them streets of gold, a highway to heaven.
On the fifth night at the farm, Taylor snuck out to see them.
“They found your opponent,” said the pudgy banker. “Eric Harmon. He’s got twenty pounds of muscle and two inches on you, and he’s only two years out of high school. Won the Golden Gloves
down in Great Falls, and he’s got glory in his eyes.”
“He can have it,” said Gene.
“That’s right. As long as you don’t let him finish you off getting it.”
Taylor left them a radio and left them alone.
Training the next
day was Hell. And the next. Nights while he soaked his hands, Billie read Sinclair Lewis to him as music played on the radio downstairs where Doyle smoked and watched the door. Gene could read just fine, but her voice was magic. He’d ask her questions. Knew she answered him with the truth, perhaps saying it for the first time in her life without qualification. About how her father bought her mother. About how Billie always knew she never belonged, not white, not Indian, not a man with power, not a woman with respect. How freedom only came when she lost herself in a book or at a movie or in a song on the radio. Or sometimes on a horse, galloping over empty prairie. How the only time she ever felt real was when she was teaching and some kid’s face lit up as he got it, whether “it” was the Pythagorean theorem or the glories of Rome. How she took pity on the fatherly man who begged to marry her, gambled that he’d at least keep her safe. How he gave her baby Laura, who fiercely stirred her soul. How daughter and husband died coughing while Billie watched.
Gene answered her questions, too. About how after the blood of Belleau Wood he’d rotated to England where a sergeant gave him a choice of boxing or the Front. The ring seemed saner. Learning to slip and bob and weave, combinations and counters and timing.
“And I found out that while I could do a lot, I was only truly good, really good, born in the blood special good for one thing: boxing.”
“Then knowing and having that makes you lucky.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” he said.
She said nothing. Blew out the bed lantern and lay down on her floor.
The next morning he ran clear and cool in his head, heard the horse trot to keep up behind him. He went three hills farther than he’d ever gone before and ran back without stopping. Took only one jar of water from Billie. He used heavier weights, did more sit-ups, made the jump rope sing and swirl. Slipped on training gloves. The heavy bag hung in the sunlit barn. Gene glided to it on feet that didn’t stick to the earth. He felt the rhythm of a breeze. Feinted once, twice—
Hit the heavy bag with a right jab that shook dust off the barn beam, a great slamming thwack that made the horse jump in his stall.
Gene turned and grinned at Billie. Saw her want to smile back, and that was something, almost enough. The heavy bag cried in pain for half an hour of his punches. He worked the speed bag like a machine gun. Doyle came out of the house, the leer gone from his face. Harry pranced around the barnyard like a chicken chirping: What’d I tell you! What’d I tell you!
And Gene breathed as a boxer.
That night Billie blew out the lantern on the bedside table, but instead of lying down on her floor, she stood there looking at him on the bed as moonlight streamed through the open window. The breeze stirred her hair and her long white nightshirt.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“That’s one thing I’d never do.”
“You said you were only truly good at one thing, at boxing. But you’re the best in the world there ever could be at this. At risking everything to save me. No one could do that better and there’s sure no one who would ever want to.”
The bed floated in front of the light of her eyes in that shadowed room.
“Do you think we’re going to get out of this alive?” she whispered.
“Or die trying.”
But she didn’t laugh. Said: “Either way, just once, for one thing, I want to choose.”
“That’s what I want for you, too.”
She lifted the nightshirt off over her head like a white cloud floating away to let her bare skin glisten with the lunar silver glow. The bed squeaked as she knelt on it, as she lay beside him. He’d never been so afraid of doing the wrong thing. She took his right hand and pressed it on her breast, filled it with her round warm stiffening flesh, and he felt her heart slamming as hard as his as she said: “Everything I can, I give to you.”
“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 backseat 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. “1 want to know I won something hard.”
Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw Page 15