Having made his point about the oil, Jerry moved on to the subject of the big fight of 1923.
“It will,” he said, “be an interesting sight to see film footage of that particular day. But before we do, I’d like to remind this audience that I was secretary of the Shelby Commercial Club at the time of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight and that the club was never formally disbanded, so I suppose I am secretary yet. I never got a chance to stand up and read the minutes of the last meeting, which was held about a month after the fight.
“You will remember that things weren’t going along too well for Shelby at that time. A couple banks were busted. Mayor James Johnson had lost about seventy thousand dollars, his entire fortune at the time. Of course, he didn’t know then that he’d bring in a couple of wells the next year and save his skin once again.
“An unpaid-for arena stood out there on the edge of town where the Arena Motel is now, and that arena was, for those of you who never saw it, the Eighth Wonder of the World. It covered six acres. Of course, it would come down in a few years to salvage the lumber, and that would be that.”
He gestured at the clippings and photos taped to the wall. One of the browned photos showed the arena from the sky, huge and outlandish on the edge of a town that was only widely scattered little boxes connected by winding dirt roads, a dozen-tracked rail corridor on its far edge. “Go look at the thing,” he urged. Then he shook his head, a flicker of a smile on his face.
“Okay, so we’re busted. Whole town is. Kearns and Dempsey hightail it outa here with damn near three hundred thousand bucks—1923 bucks—and we’re sitting here busted. All thousand of us.”
The people in the larger audience looked serious and sympathetic. But here was an interesting thing. The older people, the old-timers on the folding chairs at the front table, had perked up. There was a look on their faces as if something had finally shown itself and made this evening worth something. Especially the men. They smiled. They whispered to each other. Norgaard shook his head exactly as Jerry did; made the identical small smile.
T.T. Wilkins called out that he still had thirty fight tickets for sale. Cheap. And then Jerry read the telegram that the Commercial Club sent as its last act of business, a few months after the fight. It was addressed to Tex Rickard, the famous promoter, and it said: “Shelby is prepared to offer $100,000 for rematch of Dempsey and Gibbons, July 1924. Anxiously awaiting reply.”
The audience laughed and shook their heads.
“We never got an answer!” Jerry said, elaborately at a loss. “We figured the telegraph poles must have blown down. There were some big storms that summer.”
The mention of the telegram made the old people laugh louder than they had all evening. Their white heads had tipped toward each other. It was as if they were watching a program everyone else in the audience didn’t see; cackling over something that was plain as day, but only to them.
Now it was time for the speech by the young man who used to be Amelia’s student, the one who wrote to her. The one named Michael Cage. The one she couldn’t remember. According to someone, he made a lot of money with television. He played a part in a sitcom. It was not a big part—he was the neighbor who always came and rang the doorbell—but it was steady and clearly something that would start him up the ladder.
Michael Cage had already done a number of different things in his life. He’d been a waiter in Fiji, a manager of a clothing store, a partner in a failed music company, and, for these past two years, in Hollywood in a sitcom. He also wanted to be a scriptwriter. He wanted to write a movie script about the Dempsey-Gibbons fight. It was a natural. You had boxing, the twenties, high stakes, a famous champion, the West, pioneers, David and Goliath, the whole shebang. So that was his plan, Cage’s. He wanted to spend a week in Shelby, really get to know some of these old folks, get a toehold, secure some rights to some lives.
Amelia Malone was still trying to place him. He had come up to her before the banquet and given her a big kiss on the cheek, a loud smooch! She couldn’t believe it. He said she was “instrumental” in the fact that he was where he was, and he hoped he could spend an afternoon with her while he was home because he understood that she had a wealth of material about the twenties and the fight and so on. Reminded her that his parents were the ones, down the street, who had helped retrieve all that stuff from her smoldering garage. Wondered if she knew what a treasure trove she had.
She remembered the parents, knew them by sight, of course, knew their names, but she didn’t believe this kid could have had any musical talent or she would remember him too. He might have been forced by his mother to take lessons for a year or so. He might have been a fattish sort of kid who couldn’t sit still. Or the one who kept a rolled-up comic book in his shirt pocket. Or the one whose sister had a voice with slim potential.
She had been instrumental in his life, he vowed again, saying the words as if they meant anything at all.
So now he was a slicked-down, slim, vaguely handsome kind of fellow. But handsome in that negative sort of way in which there was simply nothing present to make him non-handsome. He smiled a lot. He wore a California suit, almond-colored, and white shoes. No one in Shelby wore white shoes anyplace but the golf course. He reminded Amelia of a game show.
He told the crowd, for starters, that he was mighty proud to be a native of this fine little town, a town filled with history and drama and adventures that do not fade with the passage of time. He said he had nothing but admiration for the brave people now sitting at the front table—he gestured magnanimously and made a white grin in the middle of his tan—who gave up everything to carve out lives on these wide and windblown prairies. People like his childhood music teacher, Amelia Malone, he said with another flourish of his arm.
He said he could only hope that he carried, as his own personal legacy, some of their grit and determination and, yes, their vision too. Their sense of life’s inherent possibilities.
Since he quit the ministry and went into dry goods back in the forties, George McClintock had not been averse to a few drinks on social occasions. At the banquet, he was more voluble than usual because he was a little drunk and a lot worried about Suzanne.
He asked Jerry in a normal speaking voice whether he thought it was possible this young fellow would wrap it up before everyone at the old-timers’ table was dead.
“You were the people!” Michael Cage shouted. “You were the people”—he stabbed the air before them—“who invited the world heavyweight boxing champion of the world—the incomparable Jack Dempsey—to defend his title in Shelby, Montana, population one thousand.
“Picture it,” he said, spreading his hand wide. “A little prairie town in 1923 builds an arena that could accommodate the whole town—times forty. And that town raises, not one hundred thousand dollars, and not two hundred thousand dollars, but, yes, close to three hundred thousand dollars to bring the world’s champion to Shelby.
“And the fight is fought. And it is a good fight.”
There was something biblical in his intonation that was deeply familiar to George McClintock. He thought for a minute about his young preaching self and couldn’t quite believe that he and that young person still shared a name, much less a body or a mind.
“Tommy Gibbons, the valiant challenger, stays on his feet the entire fifteen rounds. Fighting Tommy from Saint Paul. He gives the champion a run for his money and gives the audience probably the best fight anybody in the country has ever witnessed.
“It was classic drama, my friends! David and Goliath. The little guy against the big guys and their slick managers and their money. The pioneer West against the urban East.”
His other hand was spreading the air now. McClintock expelled his breath loudly. “Picture the big steamers pounding their way across the prairie, bringing all those big-shot reporters—those Damon Runyons and Heywood Brouns—and their typewriters and cameras and sidekicks too,” Cage pleaded. “Picture Dempsey’s training camp by the historic Missouri River,
a camp of rowdiness and color, a camp of men in the wild and roaring twenties. Flappers roaring out to visit in their flivvers. Gangster bodyguards. And then, up north in Shelby, Gibbons and his sweet wife and children in a little green cottage near his workout arena. Gibbons the good guy from Saint Paul. A David, armed with nothing but his grit and his integrity and his fists.
“A townful of people who have put their last dollar on this contest between the underdog and the champion. And as each deadline approaches for an installment of one hundred thousand dollars, the tension, the drama, the stakes rise. As each deadline approaches, we slide closer to the edges of our seats!”
He seemed to have forgotten that he was talking to people who knew all about it. He seemed to be trying to convince someone far away, someone somewhere else.
And he was not done yet. “You were the witnesses!” This with an open-palmed hand to the old-timers’ table. “You have the stories and the evidence of the big fight. You do. And you.” His finger reached Norgaard, who jerked his head up.
“You, sir,” Cage said jauntily. “You, sir, were actually at the fight, I believe.” He smiled encouragingly.
“What fight’s that?” Norgaard said slyly. He looked around disingenuously. “We’ve had a lot of fights in Shelby. My son Tom was in a half a dozen bloody ones before he was seven years of age.”
The crowd laughed, even Jerry.
Cage smiled generously, pretended to be vanquished by wit.
“I salute you,” he said, arm aloft. “Our pioneers.”
It took some minutes to set up the film. George Shore, who was running the projector, thought he had it all set to go, but the film flew out like confetti when he tripped the switch, piled itself on the floor, and the fluorescent lights flickered on again while the starting and stopping and rewinding was done.
The people at the fifty-year table sat a little lower in their seats than they had when the evening began. Amelia’s wiglet and hat were very slightly askew. She had taken off her gloves and was pensively examining the spread fingers of her gnarled hand. A few just rested, in the way that old people do who are no longer revived or entertained by small talk. Jerry pulled a small leather notebook from his vest pocket and flipped back through the pages, searching for a particular notation to prompt his memory.
The room went dark again and the projector light arrowed through it. A little hum ran through the multipurpose room.
Hundreds of people appear on the screen, milling around a big puffing steam engine. Men in hats, straw boaters, move around rapidly. Tom Mix cowboys on horseback. Model T’s. Difficult to make everything out because the film is so very black and white. The white hurts your eyes. The black swallows things up.
Dempsey. He is very dark. White shorts and an old dark cardigan. Shiny slicked-back hair. Twenty-eight years old, and his face sags slightly at the edges. A removed look, lowering, unmoving but powerful, like a smoke-darkened idol. He breathes out animal air, slowly. He blinks like a lizard.
And now Gibbons, the challenger, wearing a big figured robe. He looks swaddled in it, like a kid in borrowed clothes. He is alert and wiry as a terrier. There is an industrious ridge between his squinty eyes. Thin lips. He bounces against the ropes, testing them.
Jerry remembers, as he watches, that Gibbons had an older brother, Mike. The Phantom. A middleweight. That Mike was supposed to be the real boxer, the genius, but he lost an eye, flamed out, something. Tunney said one time that he patterned his style on Mike Gibbons. And he used that style to beat Dempsey in ’26 and, for good, in ’27. So you could say one of the Gibbons boys finally did do Dempsey in, by proxy. It wouldn’t be Tom who did it, though.
The camera moves to a group of Indian men in long braids and full headdresses. A one-word caption: “Injuns.”
Gibbons has the stupid robe off, a white towel across his shoulders. He is immigrant-white. They pose for the newspaper photographers. Handshake, long freeze. Fists grimly to the chins, long freeze. A breeze blows the towel off Gibbons’s shoulders, and he grabs at it angrily. The speed of the film makes everything frantic.
Men mill around the fighters, straw-hatted, frail, and light.
The fight is about to start. Dempsey shoots a cool hunter’s look at Gibbons, whose eyes dart up through the shoulders of his handlers.
“It was so hot,” Amelia confides to McClintock. “I believe I was terribly dehydrated. I believe the heat made some of those people rabid.”
It was an unedited, round-by-round film. After the sixth round, after Tommy began to retreat and defend, most of the watchers went into their own thoughts. The evening had begun to seem long.
Smoke wafted up through the arrowing white light. The white heads in the front. The clicking film, so silent. The jittery images. The moments when the silence and the grainy stark images, the naked men clutching each other, took on the look of pornography. Those times when Gibbons clung to Dempsey like a rebuffed, abject lover, as if he had a grief or a desperation that made him do this horrible public clinging and the champion must pluck him off, growl at him, run him into a corner. You wanted to look down at your feet during those paralyzed moments when the muscled, slick-skinned, hand-muffled men held each other like that.
Skiff Norgaard was fast asleep. George McClintock had settled down farther in his seat and had a look of distracted misery on his face because he was thinking of Suzanne in the hospital and the way she would look—so pinched and distant—when his nephew drove him down to see her in the morning.
Michael Cage was jotting numbers now, doing sums and divisions and making columns with the names of different people at the top.
Amelia had her gloves back on and was patting a finger lightly on her bad eye.
Jerry was trying to remember the exact legal description of the piece of land Skiff Norgaard rooked him out of in 1922.
The shadows in the film have grown long and have risen from the floor. The ring is crowded with people and shadows.
Round fifteen. The audience perks up. Gibbons is game. Still game. It is as if he gains something if he can simply diminish the other’s win. That’s all he can hope for, all he’s really ever been able to hope for—that Dempsey won’t win easily. And now it’s almost over.
The old-timers rouse themselves and watch intently. Something flat, a seat cushion perhaps, sails onto the arena and is plucked away. Towels flap furiously around the fighters’ heads and then they are back out there.
Gibbons throws his arms around Dempsey’s waist, clinging, and pushes him out of the picture, beyond the camera’s eye. The referee follows and disappears.
The crowd at the banquet watches the unpeopled screen—watches one shadow push the other shadow into the ropes. The rope shadows bend with the weight of the phantoms against them, and the crowd leans forward because it seems, now, that something important is happening.
And then the real Dempsey is backing into the ring and Gibbons is pushing him and the referee hops panting beside them,
The next moment, it’s over. The bell rings silently and the big arm is hoisted into the air, like something dark and dead.
Fans jump into the arena, lots of them. The fighters disappear. One young fellow walks across the foreground. He is lanky and local. As he passes in front of the camera, he grabs the hat off his head and slices the air with it, disgusted, impatient, tired of the whole fool business.
Several of the men at the old-timers’ table believe that man to be themselves. They are so sure, they don’t even feel like mentioning it.
The fourth graders took the stage again and sang “America the Beautiful” and “My Home’s in Montana.”
The emcee asked if any other old-timers had words to say, and Amelia did.
She was by far the most dressed up and made up of all the women. She had the flimsiest shoes, pumps with open toes, and the kind of gloves that went halfway up the forearm. Her crocheted summer shawl and that hat with a half veil.
She walked up to the podium, limping. She had twisted
her ankle as she stepped out of the car, and now it had started to swell and hurt.
She spent some time adjusting the microphone. “Can you hear me?” she trilled. “You at the back of the room?” Jerry gave someone a don’t-ask-me look.
Amelia thanked everyone for staging such a heartwarming event and thanked Mr. Cage—that’s how she referred to him—for his kind and eloquent words. She said the fourth graders had performed admirably, probably because their parents had been so well taught by herself and had handed down a certain musical sense to their offspring. She gave a quick, fleeting little smile when she said this.
The fourth graders’ songs, she said, combined with the fight film to make her remember a ballad that a blind soldier sang before the boxing contest, as she put it. It was a very beautiful ballad that is not heard much anymore.
“It was so very hot that day,” she said, her voice rising. “I wore a light muslin frock that was tailored for me in New York City—I had only recently arrived from the city, some of you may remember…”
She scanned the old-timers’ table and got only one or two verifications—most didn’t actually remember how or when she had come to town. One or two consulted their watches.
“And I remember fanning myself, fanning, fanning with a beautiful Japanese fan I had purchased on Union Square in Manhattan for a song, but to no avail! I made a young man in the seat ahead of me put out a cigarette, I recall that as well. And a good thing too. That arena was a tinderbox. Those hot, hot boards, new hot boards with sap oozing out of them—I got a big spot of sap on my skirt—and those young men just smoking and throwing cigarettes around like we wouldn’t have all gone up in about two seconds if a fire had broken out.”
She paused and tipped her head down a little, as if she had notes in her hand, though she didn’t.
“It seemed,” she said, “as if the real boxing contest, the one everyone was waiting for, would never happen. They brought out other young men to fight, and one of them became so very bloody I had to avert my eyes. Yes, it’s true!” She threw an accusing glance at the audience.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 17