“Old boy, you want to know where the coat is?” Harry asked mildly.
“Wherever it is you won’t wear it again, you mocking maniac.”
“Oh, yes, I will. The coat got dirtied up. Your boys, you know. The pavement outside Dorfman’s hasn’t been laundered recently. The coat’s at the cleaners. I’ll have it tomorrow. Made them promise not to touch my beautiful lining. Or is it your lining, or old Scotty’s lining? Have to wear the coat tomorrow to the fights, you know.”
“I’ll tell you something, Harry Lane,” Mike said going over to the bed and hating the white tired desperate face with the laughter in the eyes, “if you wear that coat again . . .”
“Got to wear it tomorrow night to the fights. Just told you,” he said, putting the tips of his fingers together with great repose.
“And I’m telling you this,” Mike said trembling. “If I see that coat on you, no matter where you are, I’ll tear it off your back,” and he felt all his physical strength and hard hatred and the toughness of his youth in the words as he leaned closer.
“I’m not at all drunk,” Harry said, and he got up, smiling, and stood in front of Mike. “The nerves in my legs went last night, that’s all. That coat is the mantle of Scotty Bowman. You pinned it on me. I’m trying to wear it with the distinction it deserves. I’m not crazy. I’m not degenerating fast. I’m not in collapse at all. So everybody’s laughing at me? All right, that’s fine. I don’t mind. But how about you and old Scotty, your friend? Ghosts can’t stand up under laughter. You and good old Scotty. When are you both leaving town?”
“You’re mad,” Mike said, but there was something in Harry’s eyes that held him back; it was an unyielding fierceness beneath the smile, a blind wild rejection of the threats no matter how grave they were; it touched something far beyond Mike and held him, just for the moment, helpless and wondering, for he saw that Harry would never give up the coat, couldn’t and wouldn’t, for if he handed the coat over now there was nothing left for him in the world, nothing left of himself. It made Mike feel frightened and frantic, and then he wanted to meet him head on fiercely. “Well, I told you,” he said. “You heard me, Annie Laurie. Now it’s up to me. I’m satisfied,” and he walked out.
In the hall he stopped to take a deep breath, then he opened the front door, and the boy and girl were still on the steps, only now the girl had her head down on the boy’s shoulder; her fair hair had fallen away from the back of her neck and the hall light just touched her neck. Again he had to brush past them. The heavy clouds were drifting and breaking up, some of them all silvered, then the moon came out. But still there was no breeze.
✧ XXIII ✧
At the Forum, after the semi-final when the lights came on, the officials for the Bruno fight got into the ring and the big crowd relaxed. Some who were sitting at the ringside left their chairs and stood around the press row. The Dutchman in a purple robe and his handlers were coming down the aisle, and getting a good hand. Then Ray Conlin led Bruno down the aisle and the roar rolled and then murmured on long after Bruno had sat down in his corner.
When those who had been loafing around the ring began to go back to their seats, Ray saw Harry Lane in the fifth row with Annie Laurie, who was leaning close, talking to him. Lane was in his shirt sleeves, the coat folded across his knees. Then someone called, “Hey, Conlin!” It was Mike Kon, on his way back to his seat and now at the Bruno corner. He had a crazy light in his eyes as if he had seen Harry with the coat and wanted to get at him.
“Later,” Ray called casually, for he was no longer impressed by Mr. Kon.
“Come here, you little lug. I’ve got a message for you,” Mike said angrily, so Ray ambled over to him and bent down.
“What gives, Mike? A message from who?”
“Mollie Morris. She tells me, you understand? Me, you little rat! Mention her name again as being behind you and she herself will have you deported. She insults me, phoning me. But I give you her message with pleasure.”
“You’re a nobody, Mike. And to hell with her,” Ray snarled. “Tell that to her. A message from me. An old newspaper broad,” and he spat.
Standing there in the ring with sixteen thousand of Bruno’s own people behind him, he felt entitled to have contempt for anyone who was against him and he looked over the ringside seats. Suddenly he grinned happily, for there in the second row behind the Dutchman’s corner, was Rosso, himself, sitting with little Augie Silone.
Then the house lights were dimmed, the big cone of light fell on the ring and the announcer shouted, “The next bout for the middleweight championship . . .” and Johnny Bruno did a little jig, his hands over his head while the crowd rose and screamed and even the sporting writers yelled encouragement. The Dutchman got a generous tribute too.
At the bell, Johnny moved out fast popping him with a light left on the nose.
He was faster and much prettier to watch than the Dutchman, he had the legs, and the Dutchman with his bull shoulders fighting from a crouch, his head bobbing, kept his long arms half hooked and held high ready to move in with the terrible short hooks. “Keep away from him, Johnny,” Ray yelled, “Away, away, away, away. That’s it, you’re my boy, away — away,” and he grinned as the Dutchman missed, and plodded on. Johnny, who kept popping him with the left, doing no damage, but piling up points, nailed him with a right high on the side of the head and the Dutchman looked startled. The crowd laughed exultantly. Standing flatfooted the Dutchman let go with a half-hearted right swing, just to keep Johnny dancing away. It glanced off Johnny’s nose. Blood gushed from the nose. Dancing back, Johnny shook his head and drops of blood sprayed over the canvas and on his own shoulders. When he grabbed and held on the blood streamed down over the Dutchman’s shoulder blades. “Hang on, Johnny, hang on,” Ray screamed. “Ten seconds, baby, ten seconds,” and they wrestled and the referee tried to break them, and Johnny backed away, the Dutchman very slowly followed him, and the bell sounded.
“It wasn’t much of a punch,” Ray said. “A very little bruise, Johnny. I’ll get it.” But Johnny kept spitting the blood bubbling from his nose into the pail and Ray cursed. He did not know where the blood came from that covered the towel, and Johnny’s eyes now were frightened; yet when the bell sounded there was no blood on the clean spot on the towel. “Ah, baby, baby, keep away.”
Standing up slowly, Johnny danced across the ring, but before he reached the Dutchman the blood drops fell on his gloves and his chest. Shaking his head he backed away, leaving a little trail of blood on the canvas. Grabbing him the referee backed him into the corner and yelled for the commission doctor, who came climbing into the corner, pushing his bag ahead of him and chewing cloves. He felt the nose, applied a medication but couldn’t stop the bleeding. “Get him to the dressing room. It may be a minor hemorrhage. He’s lost too much blood anyway.” Then the referee, shouting, raised the Dutchman’s hand and the crowd was silent, as Ray, pressing a towel to Johnny’s nose, led him to the dressing room, where Johnny lay on the table while the doctor worked on his nose. Blinking his eyes nervously and feeling a tightness around his heart like an old fear from his boyhood days, Ray sat by himself in the corner. There was a lot of pounding on the door. Eddie Adams came in with his hard cynical smile; then the sporting writers, all but Haggerty.
Then Ray saw little Augie Silone at the door, beckoning, and he followed him out to the corridor. Augie had on a pearl-gray hat and a pearl-gray lightweight suit and a plain yellow tie and his thin dark face with the big lips was twitching nervously.
“Rosso wants to know what happened to the kid’s nose,” he said quietly. “The kid’s no bleeder. Why didn’t you fix his nose?”
“The doc says a blood vessel popped. I did all I could, Augie. The doc couldn’t stop it himself till now.”
“Rosso says the kid’s no bleeder.”
“No, he’s no bleeder. It’s got me beat. I don’t know, Augie.” Augie smiled mournfully, his eyes hard and suspicious. “See, it don’t figure,
Ray. The Dutchman says, why did the kid walk into the swing? Johnny was to have the title tonight, Ray. So Rosso wonders.”
“Let him talk to the doc.”
“He told me to talk to you.” But three men were coming along the corridor, one of them Bruno’s brother, older, heavier, the same little patch of hair on the balding forehead, and wearing a red shirt and sharp navy-blue pants, and Augie said, “Be seeing you,” and he ambled on his way, and Ray went back to the dressing room and kept circling round the table where Johnny sat.
When they told him to hurry and get dressed, Johnny would drop him off in the convertible, he said they should go ahead without him, he would take his time; he had an appointment at the hotel. But the arena was dark and empty when he finally left.
Outside on the corner a newsboy was yelling, “Morning Sun,” and Mike Kon was standing by himself, his hands in his pockets. He kept looking all around, waiting and looking as if he couldn’t believe he had lost the one he was waiting for in the crowd. He was agitated, uncertain and very grim and full of trouble for someone. Ray was afraid to speak to him. He bought a paper and, under Haggerty’s name, was the bare news that Bruno had lost in the second round to the Dutchman by a technical knockout. In the last three lines, it said, “Bruno had suffered a nosebleed two days ago and although it had been slight, the question was why hadn’t his handlers asked for a postponement?”
“No,” Ray whispered. “No,” and he felt weak. Rosso will find out I was worrying about being deported, and Harry Lane, he thought. Suddenly he yelled “Taxi” at a passing cab, and jumped in. “The Mount Royal,” he said, scared and lonely.
At the hotel he hurried through the rotunda, into the elevator, and on the sixth floor, the paper still like a club in his hands, he half ran along the corridor and rapped on the door; he could hear voices in the room; Eddie Adams was in there. Augie Silone opened the door.
“I want to see Rosso,” Ray said. He liked the sound of his own voice, all the defiance he had ever possessed was now in the set of his shoulders and in his little black eyes, his thrust-forward head.
“You do, eh? I wouldn’t if I was you,” Augie said sourly, and he closed the door and Ray tried to stop his heart from pounding. The door opened again. Augie said, “Rosso is busy. Don’t get in his way.”
“Augie, I’ve got to see Rosso,” he pleaded. “It says in the paper —”
“Rosso can read too.”
“But that creep Haggerty . . .”
“You weren’t on the ball, Ray.”
“I was on the ball. All the time I’m on the ball. I’m the guy who knows the facts.”
“Rosso has got the facts. Maybe now he is good to you, you should like it that he don’t want to see you to ask why you so sudden go dumb and careless. Be a bunny, start hopping.”
“Augie, I’m broke.”
“We’re all broke. Be a bunny, I said,” and he closed the door.
Ray wanted to get away from that closed door; he hurried, but going down in the elevator he realized that the farther he got away from Rosso, the more alone he was, and he hadn’t paid for his room. He couldn’t go to Eddie Adams and ask for a share of the Bruno purse, and now everybody would cheer if he was deported. Back in New York, if Rosso was against him, he might be found some night in the gutter.
Hurrying, he took a cab down to St. Antoine and the Sun and climbed the stairs to the sporting department and asked for Haggerty. Haggerty came from an inner office, in his rolled-up shirt sleeves, and with his white hair tousled. “What’s on your mind, Ray?” he asked, sitting down. “I want someone to get this right,” Ray blurted out. “You got to get behind me, Haggerty.” Squatting on the corner of the desk, his little dark face full of his terrible anxiety, he said, “Haggerty, if I ever had anything to say I always said it to you because you got a big following. I looked at Johnny’s nose. I’m not careless and never was and worked with him in all his bouts. The whole thing now they pin on me. So I’m out with Rosso. I go to New York and hang around and nobody’ll touch me. I’ll have no job here, no money. It’ll be easy for Harry Lane to get me deported, and with Rosso against me everywhere. Everybody listens to you, and maybe at Dorfman’s tonight, Rosso goes there, and you say it was a little thing, you exaggerated, and I’m the best. I should be back with Bruno. Put in a word for me. Tell it in your column because somebody’s got to put in a word for me.”
“Damn it, Ray, it’s none of my business,” Haggerty said uncomfortably, avoiding Ray’s eyes, bothered by his own compassion. “Well, look here, if I see anybody in Dorfman’s I’ll say I think you always were a good handler for the boy. I’ll say it because it’s true. I’ve got to get back to my column. Take it easy, Ray.”
“Thanks, Haggerty,” he said, and he had to go.
The street was dark and quiet, and as he looked up at the lights on the mountain, he thought, “Rosso and Eddie’ll go to Dorfman’s. I can see Rosso in Dorfman’s — and if Haggerty’s there — I’ve got to go to Dorfman’s.”
Near the hotel he heard fire reels; then he saw one fire truck parked across the road; a crowd had gathered. The police had blocked off the road. Firemen were dragging a hose across the road. A cop tried to turn him back but he ducked around him and without even looking back at the fire he hurried up the Dorfman steps, his heart beating heavily, for he was afraid he might encounter Alfred in the hall before he even got into the lounge. No one was in the hall. When he looked in the lounge he saw Harry Lane and Annie Laurie sitting at the bar. No one else was there. Lane was always in the way. It’s those damned firemen blocking off the street, he thought. Everybody would be down the street at the fire, and in a panic he hurried out.
A thin stream of smoke was coming from an upstairs window. It was the Wishing Well, the night club, that was burning, and now there was a very big crowd. He cursed softly. Nobody’ll get here, he thought. But the boys might be down there, and he started to run, all his natural hopefulness returned.
Searchlights were playing on the face of the night club and big-booted firemen dragged hoses across the road, shouting. A policeman pushed Ray back toward the sidewalk and, blocked off, he could see no one he knew. When he got out of the crowd he saw a taxi that had come around by way of Sherbrooke Street in front of Dorfman’s, and he started to run that way again, then up the steps and into the hall to the lounge and there was Haggerty talking to Harry Lane and Annie Laurie.
Haggerty still had that tolerant, half-contemptuous ease with Harry. Annie Laurie had just turned. “It’s not next door to the Wishing Well. It is the Wishing Well,” she insisted.
“Get out. It’s that restaurant next door,” Harry said.
“No, it’s the old Wishing Well.”
“But they just had the place redecorated.”
“So what?”
“Maybe they didn’t pay the decorator, and he’s burning the joint down.”
“Imagine the Wishing Well burning,” Annie Laurie said, sighing. “I remember the first night I ever went there. I was nineteen. My beautiful youth. It’s all going up in smoke,” and she was so much at ease with Harry that Ray hated her. Then his eye fell on the coat which Harry had tossed on a bar stool when he went to the window. The coat was there within ten feet of Ray, lying on the stool while the others laughed and watched the fire.
Very nervous, yet motionless as if in a trance, he stared at the coat. All his troubles had begun with that coat and the sight of it frightened him. In the beginning he had tried to be bright and witty with Mike Kon about a yellow lining; if it hadn’t been for the coat he wouldn’t have felt that he had to reestablish himself with Mike and he wouldn’t have gone to the washroom and he wouldn’t have got the punch on the jaw from Harry and he wouldn’t have felt compelled to get even with him. Because of that coat, here he was now with Rosso against him and terrified that Harry could get the police to deport him. “Why was I such a meddler?” he thought. “That coat meant nothing to me. Why am I here at all having this guy on my back?” an
d he went toward Harry.
“Mr. Lane,” he said huskily. “I’ve got something to say. Please listen to me.”
“You. What’s this?” Harry asked, turning to Haggerty and then to Annie Laurie, both of whom looked as astonished as he did.
“Mr. Lane,” Ray went on desperately, “if you’d look at it this way. What should there be between you and me? Nothing, nothing at all. So why did I ever bother you? A guy gets drawn in. I made trouble. I get way out of my depth. About that beating — I apologize. For you I’ve been a big troublemaker.”
“Well, well, well,” Haggerty said, and he started to laugh and the laughter frightened Ray.
“What’s the matter with an apology?” he said fiercely. “A sincere apology is a good thing. A big man can take an apology, Mr. Lane. I want to make things right with you.” Then he grew frightened again by Harry’s silence and the mournful wondering expression on his face, as though some belief or hope he held was being mocked. He seemed to be off by himself like a man hearing ironic laughter, then he smiled, more at himself and his thoughts than at Ray, and he turned to Annie Laurie.
“You know,” he said, keeping his face straight. “This is a very great moment.”
“What do you mean, Harry?”
“A great historic moment,” he said solemnly. “For a long time I’ve waited for some troubled soul to come wanting to make things right with me, someone to say I’ve been wronged. Well,” and he bowed, “at last he’s come. Here he is,” and he burst out laughing.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan Page 26