One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  Cars began to switchback slowly up the ridge and park themselves, noses toward the distant arena. Their drivers would watch a tiny fight for free. North of the railroad tracks, tendrils of smoke rose from a modest circle of pitched tepees. The eleven autos in Camp Nok Out sputtered around a space staked out for three thousand, kids and wives at the wheels, practicing their driving.

  An auto lurched ahhhooogahing onto Main from the east, a bathtub lashed to its roof. The tipsy plane buzzed Main, and more horses bolted. A temporary marshal with a tin badge dashed around on horseback, pointing directions at drivers who ignored him. He turned his finger to the sky and shot at the plane.

  The dust thickened and climbed.

  Jerry emerged from his refreshment parlor to stand in the daylight by his street sign. He called out in a mild, embarrassed voice: Ice cream! Sundries! Five ringside tickets to the big fight! He’d sell a fifty-dollar ticket for ten. A passerby grinned at him and said a fellow was selling them over by the arena for five. He put the tickets back in his vest pocket and dipped his handkerchief, for a nickel, into a bucket of cold clean water that a kid was taking around. He held it to his forehead. Over his nose. He heard the wheeze on the edge of his breath. Such dust! Not such dust since the bad, bad summer of 1919, when it seemed to crawl its way into everything. Such gagging, vehement dust.

  A horse-drawn cart sleep-crawled down the street, dispensing oil to settle the dust. The smell of oil and the smell of dust—the smells of his time of highest trying. The smell already of piss.

  The milling. As the town filled—not forty thousand by a long way, but four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, and still the No. 2 from the Twin Cities to come—as it filled, as the streets grew dense and slow with people and vehicles and horses and moving vendors, it was as if a huge slow spoon stirred it all, set them all milling. For the few hours before the arena gates opened, at noon, everyone moved aimlessly, tirelessly, circularly, stirring up the oil-sprinkled dust, peering into booths, into the doors of the Black Cat and the Log Cabin and the Green Lite. The cafés were crammed. People hung over eaters’ shoulders, waiting for a seat. The lines to the outhouses were long.

  Shortly after eleven o’clock, the sun now high and white, the shape of the stirred crowd began to change, elongating on one edge toward the arena a half-mile away. Slowly, almost as if in a dream, the walkers walked and the drivers drove, slowly, steadily, in a long row toward the huge bowl.

  Two women in knickerbockers leaned their heads together under a single wide sun umbrella, reading something in a newspaper.

  The Calgary Scots Band warmed up behind the livery, and the epic wail of bagpipes began to float out into the shouts, the popping exhausts, the wisps of piano music, the drone of the stunting planes, the whinnying of horses, the futile splash of the watering wagon, the cowboy yodels, the clank of photographers lugging their big tripods, the barks of concessionaires hawking model oil derricks, Help Build Shelby buttons, flavored ice shavings, Japanese parasols, binoculars, near beer, miniature boxing gloves, green Go Gibbons hatbands, and fresh oil paintings of Indians and sunsets.

  Dempsey’s train has arrived from Great Falls. There is a great bustle, boys running everywhere, jostling. The train goes past the depot, continues for a full mile, the boys gasping behind it on the tracks, running all the way in that white sun.

  A clot of fervent disembarking men hustle a tall dark shadow into a Ford that speeds toward the arena.

  A ragged man with a black hat and a long yellow-white beard sits on the tracks with a sign: LORD GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?

  Shaggy little parades make their way ringward. A group of Blackfeet in full war regalia emerges from the pitched tepees and walks slowly in the intensifying heat, the leader carrying an American flag.

  A man in an army uniform, drunk, snips all his unsold tickets in half, bowing briefly between snips as if he is cutting one town ribbon after another.

  All day there was popping. Firecrackers. Buckaroos firing six-guns. Automobile exhausts. Frail pops that skittered across the back of the big breathing animal.

  The arena, that day, belonged to the animal. The people climbed long stairways to its rim, then they climbed down its blank face toward the ring. They looked, when they had finally all arrived, like leaves at the bottom of a teacup, sand in a large shell. They shadowed their eyes like sailors and scanned the empty slopes.

  The house is strangely quiet without the children. Vivian and Amelia wear their good dresses and are talking carefully when he comes in to change his soaking shirt. They have been invited to Rachel Zimmerman’s to hear an opera on the wireless and, after that, for those who are interested, the prizefight. On the airwaves.

  Most of the wives will be there.

  Amelia has been arguing politely in favor of the fight in the flesh. She herself has no particular love for the sport—she expects the bout to be brutal and short and undoubtedly bloody—but the thought came to her in the middle of the night that this was a historical event, and she cannot, today, seem to believe otherwise. She feels that when she is in Milan, when she is back in New York, she will feel terrible that she has missed a historical event that occurred directly under her nose.

  She hadn’t known she felt like that. She had wanted to visit her brother and his family before embarking for Europe, and she had, of course, wanted to see a frontier town in a state of excitement, yes. But she truly hadn’t cared about witnessing the actual bout—not until the middle of the night, when a voice came to her and said, Do it.

  She asks Jerry to tell Vivian that respectable women will be there. He says he doesn’t know what’s respectable and what’s not. Some of them are wearing knickerbockers and pith helmets and buckaroo outfits. The city ones are. But what does that mean? You tell him.

  He says this to Vivian, hoping for a wry remark, an opinion, anything. For weeks, she has seemed simply to be waiting. Good-naturedly, mildly, unreachably. Waiting for the spectacle to be over, Jerry thinks.

  She has been very even, very patient, like a midwife in a chair. Rarely has she raised her voice or even talked about it much—the strangers, the noise, the wild stories in the papers. Rarely has she even raised her voice to the children, who have been agitated and quarrelsome, though she snapped at Francis when he made a fuss about being sent to the farm. Otherwise, she has been oddly serene in a way that Jerry feels as anger.

  She is biding her time, he thinks. The prizefight will be over in a matter of hours. The town will empty. Amelia will go away. The children will come in from the farm. School will start. And then she will turn to him, and she will say, We have to stop this. We are adults. We have children. We have to be done with stunts.

  Now, though, she just smiles and shrugs, and again it is unnerving. It is as if she has a voice in her head that is dispensing consolations to her, urging her to have patience—with this town, with this visitor, with her own husband.

  He shows them the tickets, fans them out like a deck of cards. They make Amelia adamant that she must attend. He doesn’t care. It is all the same to him.

  Vivian begs off, mildly, with a smile. Jerry goes into the bedroom to put on a clean shirt. Vivian watches him from the other room; watches him put on a clean shirt for a debacle. A slim man who has for a year and more hoped as few people have hoped, gotten up at five o’clock in the winter dark to sniff out the main chance, to stake his claim to something big in his life, to do everything he can do to tap into extraordinary luck. And it hasn’t worked.

  He looks to her, at that moment, like the loneliest man on earth.

  For these many months Jerry has reminded her of Francis, when he was one year old and thought he could fly. He thought he could fly because he always got caught when he pitched himself headlong off one end of the sofa toward the adult in the middle. She will always remember her child’s face the day she sat on the step shelling some peas, and he pitched himself forward off the top step, past her shoulder before she could stop him. All she caught was a small face tha
t flashed pure eagerness, and then that face scraping the graveled ground. The absolute shock in his eyes before he began to scream and the way the eyes continued to look bruised for so many days while the big scrapes on his nose and forehead scabbed and healed. There had been something of that flying eagerness in Jerry this past year or so, ever since the oil.

  Now, though, he is quiet in the next room, putting on a shirt, five tickets in his pocket that he’d bought with those eager eyes for $250 and would sell for five dollars apiece if he could. He was putting on a shirt to take his chattering sister to the big fiasco.

  She sees the back of his white shirt and she goes into the bedroom and takes her big-brimmed hat from its nail on the wall. She puts on her walking shoes. He squints at her—even inside, the day seems too bright for him—and she sees him as she saw him one day in the rain not so long ago, in his ice cream parlor, waiting for a single customer with a look of complete depletion and surprise.

  “Say hello to the ladies for me,” he says politely.

  “I’m going with you,” she says. “I hear you have some tickets to that hullabaloo on the edge of town. I hear you could let me have a ticket for a good price.” He looks at her quizzically. “I hear this is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” she says.

  “That last part’s right,” he replies with a small smile. “We couldn’t take two of them.”

  Amelia must stop at a number of concession stands along the way to the arena. She wants to find just the right item to engrave this visit on her mind forever, to remind her, in Milan, in New York, wherever her life and career may take her, that she has been here on this day, in this place, at this spectacle. This opera, she calls it.

  She holds her parasol close to her white face and it gives her a shrouded look, as if she speaks from a cowl. They stop at a little stand that sells green Gibbons ribbons. And one that sells large metal pins that call Shelby the Fastest Growing City in the Country. And one that sells green sunshades and small fight pennants. And one that sells latticed wooden oil derricks, about a foot high, with Shelby, Montana, site of the Dempsey-Gibbons championship prizefight painted in small imperfect black letters around the bottom. This is what she must have. The derrick.

  She makes Jerry carry it because she doesn’t think it looks right for a lady to carry an oil derrick. As they walk with the slow crowd through the roiling dust, he lets it hang at his side, as if he doesn’t know his hand is there.

  Inside the arena, the dust was gone, and everything—the endless rows of pine boards, the people who filled the bottom of the huge saucer, the reporters and their typewriters at ringside, the boys selling soda pop and seat cushions—all of it was unbearably clear and bright. Bathed in white light. Too clear, too peeled.

  The sap smell of the new boards mentholated the air. The place was wildly bright because most of it was empty. The empty reaches, like sand or snow, seemed to grab the sun and throw it down on the people, the fans, who sat like tea leaves at the bottom of the huge octagon.

  The men wore straw boaters. The women, scattered here and there, wore the bell-shaped cloches of the day. Green sunshades went on. Sunglasses.

  A reporter touched his typewriter keys for the first time and yelped.

  Another one made a loud remark about wide open spaces.

  The Calgary Scots Band, high notes wailing above a prehistoric drone, made its entrance and began to march slowly along the top tier of seats, miniature figures in kilts. The Ladies from Hell, Jerry called them. They played “The Campbells Are Coming.”

  A portly man brought a box of sandwiches to the reporters. He wore a gray linen suit pin-striped with red, a white hat with a plaid band, and a green eyeshade.

  A boy of about ten, all alone, marched in with the stub of a fifty-five-dollar ringside ticket and took his seat behind the reporters. He watched their fingers and scanned the crowd.

  A man jumped into the ring and shouted through a large megaphone that smoking articles must be extinguished. A lick of flame, a gust of wind—yes, the wind did reach inside the bowl, a clean breeze—and the whole place would go up. And what a way to die. Incinerated at a misbegotten spectacle. It would be as ignominious as choking on an overeager bite of food.

  Two stripped men climbed into the ring and a small bell rang and they hit at each other until one knocked the other cold in the second round.

  A fife-and-drum corps played “You’re in the Army Now.”

  The Blackfeet, the men in headdresses, walked in and took their seats in a block near the ring. Some of the women carried children. For a moment or two, Amelia saw them as they must have appeared to the first Europeans—huge dazzling birds stalking their own planet.

  Amelia announced that she had been thinking about the booth with the Gibbons ribbons. That she must have one and she was afraid they would be sold out. She would simply go get one. There was time. She and Jerry argued a little—he said it sounded rowdy out there—but she must have one, and she would simply whisk out, get it, and be back before they knew she was gone. She had a very strong feeling the ribbons were going to sell out, and she had learned, to her sorrow, not to ignore such feelings.

  A gun was fired somewhere outside the white bowl and the sound of it drifted over the top and settled on them. And then the whining plane wavered again over their heads, its shadow racing across the bleachers.

  A man in a flannel shirt and spats yelled through the megaphone, and two more muscled, stripped men climbed into the ring. The bell sounded, small in the air, and they leaped at each other.

  Amelia left, the stub of her ticket in her hand, walking very straight and graceful, parasol aloft, away from Vivian and Jerry, up the aisle to the very top of the arena where the stairways from the outside came in.

  The movie men began to climb onto parapets that jutted from the bleachers halfway up the side of the bowl. They hunched over their big cameras like crows, waiting.

  Amelia climbed the stairs beneath them, slowly. She seemed to glitter in the heat.

  The boxers pounded each other, lips drawn back. They clinched and staggered. A round ended. Another began. Blood began to flow down one man’s face and drop onto the arena floor. By the eighth round, when the referee called it a fight, the cut man’s eye was a slit plum on the surface of his face.

  The man at the gate told her to be careful. She said she was coming right back. He suggested she stay inside. She shook her head and walked through, her parasol clearing a small space around her, her ticket inside her glove.

  The gate was built into a wire fence that ran all around the arena. Men pushed against it; hung on it as if they were caged. They cleared a path for her—she had her city stride, her decisive city step—but they filled in behind her. They yelled. “We’ll come in for ten bucks! We’ll come in for five!” And a few of them screamed, “We’re coming in now!” though nothing happened for a few more minutes.

  It was chaotic outside the arena. Stifling dust. The yells of the men. Children and dogs darting between the taller forms. The heat of a broiling afternoon in July. Firecrackers and running boys. The wire fence glittering its teeth at the bilious crowd.

  She scurried to the little booth, her linen handkerchief over her nose, sweat trickling out of her hair and down her face and neck. She plunked down her quarter for the ribbon—there were many ribbons left, and the vendor had no words for her, hardly a look. He was also selling opera glasses.

  Back at the fence, in the span of a few minutes, the mood had become acrid. One of the gatekeepers shouted that Kearns had ten-dollar tickets, and he pointed somewhere down the long fence to his right. The marshals on horseback, riding up and down the fence between it and the men, were now holding packets of tickets aloft, offering them for ten dollars.

  Amelia collapsed her parasol and tried to make a path for herself between the sweaty shouting men. Excuse me, she said. She retrieved her ticket and clutched it, hand high. Excuse me, and she zigzagged toward the gate she had exited because she knew the keeper would remember h
er. People were now partway up the fence, hanging on to it. The noise had grown so that she could scarcely hear her own imploring politeness.

  She smelled horse. One of the marshals loomed near her on a tall speckled animal. A soda pop bottle flew through the air, just past the horse’s ear. The horse snorted and ran sideways, knocking into the milling men, and it seemed that that was the moment when something broke loose. Someone might have shouted “Let’s go,” or perhaps it was just a yelp of pain from someone stepped on by the shying horse, knocked over maybe, but it was then that a cracking sound could be heard and the mournful whine of bending wire. A section of the fence dropped to the ground.

  Amelia felt at first as if she had been lifted off her feet, lifted by the elbows and rushed forward. Then her feet hit the ground and they were moving frantically, trying to keep the rest of her upright. Shoving bodies and screams and panting. Someone stepped hard on her foot. She grabbed at the cloth of a shirt in front of her. A strangled voice screamed in her ear. She dropped her parasol and the ribbon. Her arms flew wide for balance and she grabbed at an arm. She couldn’t get her breath. She heard her own yipping shrieks through the pounding feet.

  Something that stung like a hot cinder flew into her eye. Her hands flew to her face. Blind, she felt the rushing bodies push her forward for a few moments, then she fell among their knees and feet, then she was crouched into herself, hands across her face, the flailing legs passing her, passing on. The shouts too.

  She blinked inside her dark hands. She gulped air and coughed. Someone put a hand under her elbow and lifted her to her feet. He pointed at a bent blue hat in the dirt, and she nodded. He picked it up and poked at it and handed it to her. She coughed. She blinked hard. Her left eye watered and stung.

  She slowly dusted off the hat. The feather was bent at a right angle. She snapped it off and dropped the feather in the dirt. She surveyed the front of her dress and smacked the dust out of it the best she could. There was a rip in her stocking. Her foot throbbed. The Gibbons ribbon was not in her hand. She decided not to look for it.