by Jack Tunney
’Course, since we’d sailed into port in early afternoon, Cap’n Slidell figured we still had four or five hours of daylight left and he’d make sure he got every minute of those before he cut us loose. He was a fair man, but he liked getting his money’s worth.
Them mooks was trouble and I knew it. I could read trouble the way a con man on Halsted Street hustling three-card Monte in my old Bridgeport, Chicago, neighborhood could read a mark. I ignored them, though, figuring I’d let them make their play and see what was what.
It was easy to see them two was known along the docks ’cause sailors and fishermen got out of their way as they came over. The docks was busy then. I supposed a lot of ships must have come in or put in while the squall churned the ocean white and deadly. The smell of fish and the salt of the sea blew over me and dragged some of the teeth out of the hot sun burning down on me. Lines popped against masts as the wind clawed at the furled sails. Men’s voices – shouting orders or yelling at each other, or singing – rolled over the port.
Them two looked like they was about my age, and I’d turned twenty-seven back in December. They wore suits, but they didn’t look like no port authority I’d ever laid eyes on. Both of them was American, judging from their color and their clothing.
I’d almost got to Havana before I signed on with the Marines for the Korean War in 1950. I’d put in three hard years there, saw a lot of friends get killed or shot up, or freeze to death in the winter along the Chosin Reservoir after the Chinese joined up. I’d spent my twenty-third birthday fighting on bloody ground too frozen to dig proper graves in.
Major General Oliver P. Smith had led us through that battle, and we’d been outnumbered more than two to one by the Chinese. I’d landed with the Big Red One, the 1st Marine Division, and stayed through the thick of it. I’d never been one to walk away from a fight, which was why I usually ended up in trouble when I was a kid, and why I’d ended up with the Marines for that nasty bit of business.
Major General Smith wasn’t a man to quit on a fight neither. Even in the worst of it, when we was fighting for our lives with bayonets and rifle butts ’cause we was outta ammo, when we was chewing boot leather ’cause we was outta rations, we remembered what he said there at that battle when someone asked him if we was gonna retreat.
“Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”
We’d been surrounded and there wasn’t no way to get out of it. Just had to go through it.
I respected that. Getting through something, not running away from it, had been one of the first things Father Tim had taught us at St. Vincent’s Asylum for Boys. ’Course, most of us boys called the church Our Lady of the Glass Jaw. The nuns hated us for it, and they didn’t care for Father Tim much neither ‘cause he let us get away with it.
While I continued straightening the rope like I had nothing better to do, them two mooks stood there and tried to stare holes in my back. I ignored them, but I noticed that nearby local fishermen, cargo handlers, and sailors fought shy of us when they’d been coming around for gossip only minutes ago. I just concentrated on making sure that hawser was knotted right to the mooring cleat. The rope had clean lines and was wound tight. Wide Bertha was settled in snug as a bug against the dock.
Eventually, them two got bored. I would have too. I didn’t like standing around while other people was working. Always made me feel like I had to do something too.
“Hey.”
I stood and turned around, and them boys took a big step back. I was six feet tall, and both of them was taller than me. But I worked off-the-books as a longshoreman down at the Chicago River bridges from the time I was fourteen. The bridges was too low for cargo ships to get through and cargo got unloaded and disbursed at the bridges. Times was hard then, and I worked long days. I got broad shoulders and a build like an ape out of it.
Some of that was my old man’s fault, though. He’d been built the same way. My younger brother Patrick looks better in a suit than I do. As best I could remember, Pat favored Mom, in her looks and in her book smarts, but she wasn’t with us long enough for me to remember much of her.
I was shirtless because of the heat. I wore stained dungarees that I’d patched myself. I kept my hair short so it wouldn’t get infested with vermin that shared rack space on Wide Bertha with us, and I hadn’t shaved in about a week. So I probably looked like I was worth about two cents. Maybe less.
I looked at the two men. “Something I can do for you gents?”
The shorter one was the mouthpiece of the pair. He gave me the hairy eyeball like that was supposed to make me curl up in a dead faint right there on the dock. I figured he didn’t know I’d been fighting wind and water for the last three days during a storm that had seemed determined to kill ever’ man of us.
Even if he’d looked like something I didn’t want to tangle with, I was just plumb worn out and didn’t have it in me to be afraid of nothing. Yes sir, I was tuckered and there wasn’t nothing I was gonna let get between me and the evening I had planned.
So the short guy yanked his thumb at Wide Bertha and sneered. “Yeah, mac, you can do something for us. You can move your boat.”
I looked at him for about a minute, then shook my head. “That ain’t no boat. She’s a ship.”
“Don’t matter.” The look on his face got harder and I guessed I was supposed to be impressed.
I wasn’t. I grew up around nuns at St. Vincent’s who could glare paint off a wall and raise welts the size and color of strawberries with a ruler.
The taller man spoke up then. “Maybe you should go check it out with your boss. Let him know Mr. Falcone says he should move this scow.”
Okay, I knew then that the tall guy knew more about sailing, but he didn’t know me. Scow was a hurtful term, and any sailor worth his salt was proud of his ship. I was proud of Wide Bertha. She’d just braved everything the Atlantic and the Caribbean could throw at her to make sure I got to sleep in a bed tonight.
“You don’t talk bad about a man’s ship. Especially not to his face.” I spoke in a low, soft voice, not trying to rile anybody yet. But them two took another step back and that was fine with me.
Around us, several sailors, fishermen, and folks walking through the market area at the docks had stopped to watch. I didn’t know what all the interest was and didn’t particularly care for all the stares. It wasn’t good to draw attention while you was in a port. Sailors ain’t always real welcome in most places. Locals wanted to shake a ship’s crew loose of every nickel they got, then kick them right back into the sea.
The tall man tried throwing his weight around again. “This here’s private parking, swabbie. Mr. Falcone does his business here.”
I put my fists on my hands and took a deep breath. I run short on patience on good days, and there hadn’t been any good days for over a week. “This is a public portage. First come, first serve. Cap’n Slidell already checked with the harbor master.”
“The harbor master’s wrong.”
“Then you take that up with the harbor master. Not me.”
“Maybe we should take it up with your captain.”
“It’s a free country, bud.” I laughed at the thought of them two mooks bracing Cap’n Slidell.
The cap’n was sixty years old, was meaner than a gutshot alligator, and had a wooden leg he picked up after losing the real one in World War II. I’d already seen him take that leg off in a bar fight in Singapore and whale the tar out of three German sailors that thought they was gonna buffalo an old man. That evening the cap’n cleaned house with that leg and them beat-up Germans carried each other outta that bar. Me and the rest of the crew just watched because the cap’n would have cleaned our clocks if we’d tried to interfere.
“Hey, Mick.”
I looked up and Sandbag Pete was hanging over Wide Bertha’s rail. Sandbag was a skinny redhead with a head that looked too big on him and arms and legs that looked like pipe cleaners. He was older than me
, gray bearded, but he could climb a ship’s rigging faster than any monkey I’d ever heard tell of. He wore dungarees too, and a sleeveless shirt, but his skin had already pinked up something fierce from the sun.
Sandbag nodded at the two mooks. “You having trouble down there?”
I waved him off. “No trouble.”
“Mick?” The big one squinted at me.
“Mickey Flynn.” I didn’t see any harm in them knowing my name.
“You Irish?”
“Irish as green beer and St. Paddy’s Day.” A lot of people still didn’t care for us Irish. I’d grown up with that dislike all my life in the old neighborhood where we fought with the Italians and the Poles.
Maybe that was another reason I didn’t care for them two men. I’d figured them for Italian, especially with the mob moving into Havana and buddying up with Fulgenico Batista the way they was. I guess probably I liked the Italians about as much as the Italians liked the Irish. Hearing the name Falcone had just sealed the deal.
I turned to amble back to the boardwalk because I had things to do and I knew the cap’n wasn’t one for tolerating goldbrickers. The cap’n had taken me on because I was a war veteran, but he kept me on because I was a hard worker.
“Nobody said you could leave.” One of them dropped his hand on my shoulder and pulled to turn me around.
I went with the pull, came around, and stepped inside the tall guy’s reach. I gripped his left wrist in my right hand, then closed my left hand around his throat. I squeezed hard enough to make his bloodshot eyes bulge and I saw the surprise and fear dawn on his sallow face.
I put my face into his, almost nose to nose. “I don’t know who you think you are, mister, but you’d better keep your meat hooks off me or you’re gonna draw back a nub.”
That was when Shorty reached under his jacket and pulled out a pistol.
FIGHT CARD: THE CUTMAN
JACK TUNNEY
AVAILABLE NOW IN ALL E-READER FORMATS
BONUS PREVIEW
FIGHT CARD: SPLIT DECISION
JACK TUNNEY
ROUND 1
KANSAS CITY, KS.
1954
I knew I had him when he started to fight dirty. Most fighters start out on the up and up, only turning to the cheap shots when things aren’t going their way. Round three though, the son of a gun tries to lace me.
He pivoted around so his back was to the referee, then comes at me high with a left jab. He makes like he’s aiming for my right eye, then he lets his glove drift wide. The idea is to get the laces on the inside wrist of your glove to rub alongside your opponent’s face like a cheese grater. As soon as he threw the punch, we both knew the stunt.
So, fine. He wants to play it that way, okay.
It felt good to be winning. I’d dropped my last three, putting me below .500. Not a good record for a kid supposedly on the rise. A rise to the middle. To the punch drunk league with all the stumble bums out there taking licks for nothing more than cab fare home.
My form was on, I wasn’t out of breath yet. Hard work had paid off and no way this joker was going to take this match out from under me with some cheap shots.
I laid three in his gut and had him on the retreat again when the bell rang signaling the end of the third. All I wanted to do was keep on punching until he was face down on the canvas, but that would have to wait another ninety seconds.
In my corner my manager, Sal, put down the stool and tipped a bottle of water into my mouth. I spit it out into the bucket.
“Did you see that? He tried to lace me,” I said.
“What’s that?” Sal turned his good ear to me.
“He tried to lace me,” I repeated.
“Aw, he’s scared, that’s all.” Sal had been there and back and seen it all along the way. A salty old veteran of every fight hall from here to Buffalo, Sal had punched himself silly years ago, then kept it up for another ten years after that. His nose had been broke so many times he’d lost count. Matching cauliflower ears hung like lamps from each side of his head and he moved with a hitching limp that finally brought his days in the ring to an end. Why he picked up a go-nowhere prospect like me, I’ll never know. I was his only middleweight, and I felt the tag was plenty appropriate. My talent was in the middle. The highest I could ever get in the fight game was somewhere between the title fight and the gutter. He knew it and I knew it, like the palooka across the ring and I both knew he threw those laces at me.
Still, Sal treated me like a contender. He may have been punched dumb, but he was no fool. Treat your boys right and they’ll treat you right. Guess he always reminded me of Father Tim in that way. That was enough for me to hitch my wagon to Sal for keeps.
***
The bell rang for the fourth and I came out blazing. I backed him into a corner straight away, banging body shots into him until he bent at the middle like a little wilting flower. Sucker.
I brought out my uppercut to lift his chin, but that wasn’t where the damage came from. The damage came in my follow up right cross to the now wide open chin. As many times as I’d practiced the move in sparring, it came as second nature to me.
His chin rose like it was praying to the Virgin Mary, and from there it was easy. His head snapped to the side, his jaw knocking out of place and staying there. I knew he was headed for the floor, but I couldn’t resist one last shot.
Out on his feet, his hands dropped and I laid one straight shot to his face, pulled it a little left and ran my laces across his eyebrow. The skin split open like a pair of lips gasping for airand the blood ran into his eyes before he hit the mat.
The ref pushed me back and started to count, but I didn’t stick around to listen. I went back to my corner where Sal waited for me with a big grin. I heard the bell. Fight over. My record came even at ten and ten.
Over Sal’s shoulder was Lola, my girl. She was at every fight even though I always tell her not to come. A lot of guys like to bring their gals to the fights, but I think it is no place for a lady. Most of them end up bored, filing their nails and waiting for the bloodshed to be over so they can get home. Still they come, content with their role as arm candy for the big shots as long as it keeps them in mink.
Of course the crowd here at the Excelsior is more a squirrel-masquerading-as-mink than a real fur and diamonds crowd.
And Lola is my diamond. She smiles at me, I smile back. My face wasn’t even bruised up that night. No cold steak over a black eye for me. A night out with my winnings, treating Lola the way she deserves. A double in her highball and desert after the meal.
Two more fights to go that night and she knows the drill. I’ll meet her out front. She can’t make it to the locker rooms and there’s no reason for her to hang around inside to see a bunch of sluggers she doesn’t know.
After my three seconds of glory standing center ring with my fist in the air, Sal takes me down to the locker rooms.
“Real good, kid. Real good,” he says. “You read him like a book.”
Easy for Sal to say. He can’t read no more than I can do Chinese algebra. That part of his head was punched away a long time ago.
We go through our usual post-bout rubdown and there’s not much to talk about since the fight went so well. We don’t talk about what to work on for next time. In fact, there’s no next time scheduled.
“What do we got lined up, Sal? I gotta eat, y’know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Jimmy.” Sal kept on rubbing, squeezing a little hard like his mind was somewhere else.
“Hey, lay off there, Sal. I won. No need for punishment.”
“Sorry, kid.” He took his hands off me, rubbed them together to get rid of the liniment oil. “I been meaning to talk to you . . .” He trailed off. Not unusual for Sal. He sometimes dropped thoughts like the act of letting them out of his mouth made the whole idea he was trying to communicate slip away.
“Just let me know when we got the next one set, okay, Sal? Maybe after tonight I can get something a little further
up the card, y’know?”
“Yeah, yeah. Maybe, Jimmy.”
I hopped off the table and started dressing. “It’s just, well, you know how it is, Sal. How I feel about Lola. You know I been wanting to ask her to marry me. I can’t do it without two nickels to rub together.”
“Yeah, Jimmy. It’s tough times all around.”
Just like Sal to make me feel guilty about wanting the best for Lola. Sal had it rough. Not a dime left from his fight days, and when I go on a three-fight losing streak it makes it hard to secure any kind of purse. And him taking a percentage of what I think isn’t enough to live on? Man, I’m a heel for not thinking about him first.
“I’m sorry, Sal. I know I ain’t been exactly making it easy for you.” Neither had any of his other pugs, but I didn’t want to remind him. Rubbing salt in the wound, y’know?
“Well, you see, Jimmy . . .”
This time he was cut off by a knock at the door. Odd. Not many people made it down the long hall to the locker rooms. Fewer had the politeness to knock.
I looked up, my pants on but unbuttoned and my chest still bare. Through the door came a small man in a fancy suit. Two much bigger men were with him but they stayed outside, bookending the door and looking like they were waiting for something to happen.
“Sal!” the man said. Sal looked down at the concrete floor and sheepishly extended a hand to the well-dressed man.
“Mr. Cardone, good to see you again.”
Cardone shook Sal’s hand but looked past him to me standing by my locker, half dressed.
“This is the guy, huh? Jimmy, right?” He pointed at me and despite the smile on his face it felt like an accusation. “A hell of a bout out there. You really showed that joker what for.”