The barn was full of people in a sweat to smell hot blood. Soon Melody was lost from Chinatown and Big Mat in the milling crowd. When the fight started that crowd would go into a solid, quivering mass of hard faces, mouths slobbering in eagerness for a kill. When that happened Melody could go away to a corner and wait. He didn’t like anybody to know about it, but when the people got like that and an animal was dying he had to turn away or vomit. For him, though, there was something else in a dogfight. He came again and again to feel the lives of these people burning together in a single white flame. That flame acted on like him like whisky, and he burned with it.
The same folks came to the dogfights again and again. He knew a lot of people in the crowd. Somebody was slapping him on the shoulder every few minutes. At every slap he called out the same greeting and kept moving. Finally there was a tug on his arm and a familiar greasy smell. He turned and faced Sugar Mama.
“Ah, my friend!” she cried. “And where is the yellow one?”
“Who you talkin’ ’bout?” he asked.
“The grinning brother who tickles Sugar Mama and laughs always.”
“Oh—Chinatown. He’s around layin’ more bets.”
“You are betting then?”
“Sure.”
“You are betting much money?”
“Week’s pay,” he told her.
“Sí, sí, that is good. You will win and come to Sugar Mama’s house.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe—maybe.” She nudged him in the ribs. “Maybe you will see somebody. That one who was sick is not sick again. You like her?”
“Anna?” He said her name and felt as though he had confessed something that had been on his mind a long time.
“Anna is that one. Sí, I think she is crazy about you.” She nudged him again.
“Aw, stuff!” he said.
“No—no stuff. She does not say so, but she not can fool Sugar Mama.”
“Aw . . .”
“She is here,” said Sugar Mama. “I will get her. You wait—you wait.”
Sugar Mama was off. His eyes combed the crowd for her. He felt a little sad, because he knew what would happen when he met Anna. In his mind she had been something that her body could never equal.
But the handlers of the dogs, red stained, padded gloves protecting their hands, were ready to turn their fighters loose. The bull terrier was standing quietly, like an old warrior saving all his strength for the fight to come. Son, the police dog, was raging and twisting to cross the pit to his calm foe. He was raging and twisting, and old Bob Dank was feeding that rage by slapping a peppered and raw-meat-scented glove across the dog’s nose.
The fight was on, and from the first the men who knew dogs saw that Son did not have a chance. Son was a good fighting dog but he was up against a champion. A lot of folks in the crowd didn’t know that. They were yelling because Son was putting on the best show. They did not see that the bull terrier was playing a waiting game, waiting for Son to tire and leave the throat unguarded for just one vital moment. That moment was bound to come and in twenty minutes it came.
Son raged in and slashed at the bull terrier’s hind legs. By just the foam on his jaws he missed hamstringing his enemy. The terrier whirled and dived at his throat. Son was too tired to spring away. He crumpled under the weight, and his throat was hidden between grinding red jaws. The fight was over.
The crowd was silent, so that the sobbing breaths of the women became a roar. The fight was over, and a lot of men had lost money, but there was no thought of money at the kill. Nobody expected old Bob Dank to step in and save his dog. A dog once beaten like that would never fight again. But Bob Dank’s cry rang out:
“Haul him off! Haul him off!”
The dogs were doused with cold water and pulled apart. Bob Dank lifted a heavy stick in his hands.
“I want to kill this no-good sonofabitch myself,” he cried.
Every eye was on the club waving high in the air. Then a woman darted forward. It was Anna.
Bob Dank knocked her back with a blow between the breasts. Before she could fall Big Mat had jumped into the pit. One swing of his arm sent Bob Dank halfway across the barn, knocking people down like straw stubble. Everybody knew by Big Mat’s eyes that he had gone hog wild. Son, bleeding and shaking, got to his feet and charged. Mat’s booted foot swept upward, and the dog’s lifeless body spun into the surging crowd. Then hell broke loose.
Melody didn’t know just how he got out of the barn. Maybe he was carried by the crowd that was scattering like chickens before Big Mat’s fury. He stood outside in the gathering evening and pressed against the side of the barn to keep from being knocked down by the ducking figures. He stood there until everything was quiet. Then he peeped through the doorway. There was Big Mat, limp in the center of the floor, and Chinatown dancing around him.
“Boy, that was some fight! Boy, did you see me? I got two at once. . . .”
Big Mat was drooping and bewildered.
Chinatown cried, “This action done give me a thirst. I think I’m dried out again. Let’s us git some corn and celebrate. C’mon.”
He led Big Mat outside. Mat came easily. Before they had gone more than five steps a woman rushed up to them. Anna. Melody reached for her, but she threw herself on Big Mat and kissed him on the mouth. Chinatown pulled her away, and she ran across the field like a crazy thing. Big Mat stood shivering in the leaden evening.
The Moss boys walked the dirty string of river front. Melody sang a dirty ballad. Some of the verses he had heard; some he had made up. Chinatown harmonized with him on the familiar verses.
Big Mat followed a step or two behind them. He had followed them through the town, in and out of every “corn joint” they could find. One gulp after another had funneled through his throat, and still the look on his face was the same as when Anna had kissed him. His shuffle was even and sure.
“He a born drinker, as sure as God love Sunday,” sang Chinatown.
Maybe it was Sunday, thought Chinatown. The gals were still on their front porches, knees close together to hide what was beneath their cotton-print dresses. As they passed Chinatown sang the dirty songs louder and tried to see what the women were doing. Most of them stared at him from some unheard-of distance away. A few grinned and pulled at their short skirts.
“Should of brung your music box along,” he told Melody.
“Might of got busted in the fight,” said Melody.
“These here bohunks ain’t appreciatin’ us singin’,” said Chinatown. “Oughta have music along with it.”
“Maybe we ain’t singin’ so good.”
“What they know ’bout singin’?” he said. “Never hear ’em sing a note.”
Melody looked at him, surprised.
“Them foreigners sing good.”
“Hell, they don’t sing nothin’.”
“What they do then?”
“Yowl is all they do,” he said, “and a man can’t understand one word they yowlin’.”
Melody had heard some of these people from the Ukraine singing. He hadn’t understood one word. Yet he didn’t have to know the words to understand what they were wailing about. Words didn’t count when the music had a tongue. The field hands of the sloping red-hill country in Kentucky sang that same tongue.
“I like hearin’ them yowl,” he told Chinatown.
“Aw, shucks, Melody”—he laughed—“you kin even hear music in a snore.”
Melody laughed and turned to see if Big Mat was going to laugh.
“I kin hear music in a snore,” he repeated.
Mat’s eyes were on the shacks. He seemed only with them in body. Melody wondered if Mat’s mind was with his eyes, stripping the print cloth off the pale, freckled Slav girls on their porches.
“Boy, look at Mat,” he whispered to Chinatown.
Chinatown did not look around.
“Aw, he ain’t never laughed in his life.”
“Naw, look how he givin’ them gals the
eye.”
Chinatown saw and whistled softly.
“After all the time he been holdin’ hisself in, I feels sorry for the first gal he grabs.”
Mat stopped as a little girl, no more than ten years old, came out of an outhouse behind one of the shacks. Her pants were still down in back, and she was carefully holding her dress high. Melody and Chinatown stopped to watch Big Mat.
Out of the back yard next door came a gang of little towhead boys. They saw the girl and turned into hunting dogs circling something they had flushed out of the brush. Too late the little girl saw them. She darted for her doorstep, but they had her. Without a sound she went down on her back, fighting silently. Twisting and turning, a furious little figure was dragged away to the tall weeds up the riverbank. The weeds tossed violently and then trembled for a little time.
“Can’t see why she don’t yell some,” said Chinatown.
Melody knew she could not have yelled out. It was a game they played. Or, better, it was a thing they did that was no game but had rules like a game.
Big Mat’s eyes were fishskinned. He started to walk on. Now Melody could see that he was drunk—drunker than any man had ever been before. Melody thought he was drunk like this long before the corn went into him. The corn just let the drunk show in his eyes.
Boys were playing ball in the dirt road. The path was blocked but only for a short time. Legging it down the road was one of the little hunters they had watched a short distance back.
“Hey, guys! Hey, guys!” he was shouting.
The ball game went on.
“Hey, guys, they linin’ up on ol’ Betty back in the weeds!”
In a confusion of thudding feet the road before them cleared. Balls and bats were dropped. A string of shavers legged it back to line up on ol’ Betty.
Chinatown watched them go and laughed long and deep.
“She jest a few years older and have a coupla more pounds round her belly, and I’d run to git in that line myself.”
“Aw, C’mon,” said Melody. He started on.
Big Mat was standing as though he would never move again.
“C’mon, Mat.”
“Look like Mat ready to git in that line right now.” Chinatown laughed.
“C’mon, Mat,” Melody called again. “We go on down the line to the Mex shacks.”
“Better ’n that, ol’ Betty got some big sisters down from Pittsburgh,” said Chinatown. “Onliest calling card you needs is green money.”
“Naw, we make Mex Town,” Melody insisted.
Big Mat turned toward them and suddenly he was sick. Corn whisky was bad coming up. They knew how that felt. Chinatown jumped out of the way, because Big Mat didn’t bend over like a sick man does. Big Mat stood straight up, and the liquid gushed out between his teeth like a river at flood.
“Git low to the ground, Mat! Git low!” cried Chinatown.
Big Mat stood upright until the last of the stuff had run down his chin and into the front of his open shirt.
“The word never be in me,” he muttered in his wet lips.
They were ready to hold his head or do something for him. He was off before they could approach.
“Where you goin’ to, Mat?” called Melody.
Big Mat strode on, and they had to trot to keep him in hearing of their voices.
“Wait up, Mat!” Chinatown was calling.
“Wait up, Mat!” Melody heard himself.
They passed the pump at the edge of town.
“There some water to soak your head, Mat,” cried Chinatown.
But Big Mat did not wait for anything. He strode through the leaden evening, shadow-black until the lighted bunkhouse windows held him in outline. They followed him over a hill and did not call any more.
Walking right through the crap game by the door, Big Mat made for his bunk.
“Hey, look where you goin'!” cried one of the gamblers.
“Look out, Black Irish!” called the man who was holding the dice.
“It’s Big Mat,” cried somebody. “He’s jest broke up the dogfights. Now he’s feelin’ good. Now he’s raisin’ hell.”
“Old Bob Dank got two broken ribs and a dead dog,” yelled the gambler. “He left town.”
“Sonofabitch! He better watch where he steppin’ or he find out this ain’t no dogfight,” snarled one man, sucking a crushed finger.
They trailed off into silence. Every eye was on Big Mat. With steady strength he ripped off his filthy clothes. Then he was naked before his bunk. A man napped on top of the thin wool blanket. It was Smothers. Perhaps he had fallen asleep, waiting his nightly talk with Big Mat. Without a word Mat put his arms under the mattress and lowered it to the floor. Smothers was not even jarred. Naked, shiny with sweating, looking like a furred animal come in out of the wet, Mat fell face downward on the steel springs of the bunk. The springs jerked him up and down for a little while. There was no other movement.
“Wot the hell?” breathed the gambler.
One of the men turned to Chinatown and Melody.
“What happened to him?”
“Corn juice happened to him.” Chinatown laughed.
The gambler stared at Big Mat and then pointed below the bunk.
“Looka there!”
“Gawd, wot a whopper!” said a man.
The men began to laugh. The room rocked with heavy laughter.
The laughter woke Smothers. He looked around, rubbing his crazy eyes.
“Listen when I say what’s in me to say,” mumbled Smothers, and he went back to sleep.
PART FOUR
ANNA had said:
“He will be a big man with muscles like a bear on the mountain. That is so he can kill Sugar Mama if she try to hold me when I go with him.”
Big Mat was like that and more. He had handled a barn full of men at the dogfights. He had said things to Anna with his body. Anna could understand. She had seen him in action, traveling back double a thousand years and more to the time when men said things in the talk of the wild beast. So she had talked back in his language. And what she said was all in a hard, quick kiss and a crazy flight across the open fields. Maybe she knew that Big Mat would come for her. He came. And Sugar Mama would have been a dead one if she had tried to stop their going.
Anna had said:
“He will have a pine tree on his belly, hard like rock all the night. . . .”
One kiss in an open field. Mat had not forgotten. Two nights in a row he had stayed with her at Sugar Mama’s shack. When he took her out of the place and rented a shack they were together every night. For a full week he laid off from work, and Chinatown and Melody did not see him. The shades at the new shack were drawn all the time. It was funny to Chinatown, and he made a joke of it, but Melody did not sleep well. He was full of misery that couldn’t be joked away. There was no joke stronger than the thought of Big Mat lying a full week next to her love-scented body.
Anna had said:
“He will get me high-heel shoes with bright stones in the heels. . . .”
So Big Mat came and got all the money he had been saving. Anna went into the stores and came out with rhinestone shoes and dresses like the hostesses wear in the dance halls. The rhinestones did not glitter after one trip down the slushy road. The dresses were heavy around the bottoms where they dragged in the mud. Still, Anna wore her new clothes every day and paraded through the Mexican part of town like an overseer’s wife.
It had rained the day Big Mat came back to the mills. The rain had puddled the ground, and already a thin layer of soot floated on the water. He was going to work the night shift. Melody was just going off after twelve daylight hours. They met in the mill yard and stood a few minutes in the hot wind from the hearth. Mat had been drinking. There was the look about him of a man traveling on whisky instead of muscle. His hair was matted, and matted in it were white threads of cotton—threads from a torn mattress.
With his eyes Melody had searched Big Mat. He did not look like the strong brother
from the red hills. He felt a rush of feeling for Mat heat up his face. He wanted to put a hand on him and say something good for him to hear. Nothing could get past a fence between them. There was nothing to do but be casual, half strangerlike.
“How they goin’, Mat?”
“Hallo, Melody.”
“What’s doin’, Mat?”
“Ain’t feelin’ so good.”
And Melody had to pick up the talk before it dragged further.
“Fellas all miss you roun’ the bunkhouse, Mat.”
“Yeah?”
Melody tried to smile and laugh a little.
“Don’t know what to do for a strong guy round the place now.”
“Yeah.”
They couldn’t find anything else to say right away. The silence grew painful.
“How China gittin’ on?” blurted Big Mat.
“He doin’ all right, I reckon.”
“That’s good.”
“Oh, he been a little sick. Too much corn last night.”
“That’s bad.”
“Yeah.”
They shifted their weight around to break the muddy cinders in a small circle.
One of the pit men passed and called out:
“Better shake it up, Black Irish. The pit boss full of hell tonight. Had his gal out, and somebody got him drunk and borrowed her for a little while. He’ll be mean.”
“Well, so long,” said Melody.
Big Mat waited for a long second.
“Say, Melody,” he muttered, “you don’t think—that I ain’t—doin'——That is—that I ain’t actin'——”
Melody waited for him to break the thing between them. But Mat’s voice trailed off, and they were back where they started.
“Well, so long, Mat.”
“So long. . . .”
Melody was all mixed up. He stopped by the railroad lunch car to think things out. He ordered a cup of coffee to sharpen up his thinking.
Blood on the Forge Page 10