by John Sayles
“See you tonight,” says Hod, holding the Winchester in the crook of his arm.
The Swede lifts the shovel from his shoulder and wiggles it in the air. “I go now and dig you a hole.”
Hod wanders off in the other direction, which takes him down to the wharves. Both the Farallon and the Utopia are in, waiting to leave in the morning. He sits halfway down the Juneau Wharf with his legs hanging over the side and the Winchester across his lap, and is watching the gulls when Smokey finds him.
“Shouldn’t ought to be out in this cold. You gone stiffen up.”
“I can’t listen to them inside the Parlor any more.”
The negro sits by him, looks at the ragged, screaming infestation that lights and flies, lights and flies, ganging up on whichever of their number manages to get a scrap of food in its beak.
“Always got one eye on they own bidness, the other on their neighbors’.”
“They don’t ever rest.”
Smokey chuckles and shakes his head. “Naw. Don’t ever see no fat gull, neither. They just a appetite with wings.”
He leans over the railing and points down to the rocks below. It is a rough day in the little harbor, waves breaking hard and rolling up on the mudflats, making a loud sucking sound as they fall back.
“See them shells stuck onto the rocks?”
“The mussels.”
“That’s the way to do it. Got food all in that water, even smaller than a speck of gold dust, and ever time it wash in or wash out over the rocks, them shells get a taste. Don’t have to go nowhere, just keep they mouths open.” Smokey shakes his head admiringly.
They are always doing somebody, Jeff Smith and his crew. Doing the wide-eyed gold pilgrims coming in with their store-bought equipment and the scurvy-gummed sourdoughs coming out with the year’s cleanup in their pokes. Jeff and Niles Manigault with their Southern manners and way of talking, Doc with his portmanteau and his lead bricks coated in gold, Rev Bowers with his entreaties to Good Samaritans and Syd Dixon offering to cut the savvy newcomer into a sweet deal, Red Gibbs and Ed Burns and the smash-nosed mug from Seattle they call Yeah Mow lounging about to deal with the ones who come back in claiming they’ve been cheated. The drinks are always on the house for the Deputy Marshal and an unofficial pharmacy operates over the bar and there are always helpful directions for stampeders to “honest” merchants and hot deals that won’t last more than a day and to the exact location of the town’s famous Paradise Alley. There is spoiled flour topped off with the good stuff and sold out the back door, interests in sure-thing claims obtained from departing sourdoughs whose mothers have just died, the telegraph messages home that go nowhere. Received message comes the inevitable reply. We are all counting on you. Please send money. And always, while you are waiting for your bacon or your beans or your paperwork there is the casual poker game, a handful of fellas just passing the time and full of good advice for greenhorns, willing to deal you in if you don’t mind playing for Skaguay stakes, so much gold out there waiting to be picked off the ground that a certain inflation has crept into all aspects of manly endeavor. Niles is the master of the cards, friendly, flattering, solemnly warning the greenhorn to be on the lookout for buncos like the notorious Soapy Smith and his gang and ready to commiserate that his own luck at poker seems to be as poor as the greenhorn’s, confiding, during a break for bladder relief, the secrets of the Martingale system, where you double your bet with each play and are therefore, given the immutable laws of mathematics, assured of victory.
Hod understands that when he fights tonight, it will be as their man.
“Thank heavens you’ve found him, Smokey.” Niles is at the table in the back room of the Parlor when Hod comes in with Smokey to return the rifle. Jeff Smith sits across from him, with Arizona Charlie and Jake Rice and Dynamite Johnny O’Brien who captains the Utopia circled under a haze of cigar smoke. “I was afraid he might be in the clutches of that poke-hunting soubrette.”
Hod hangs the Winchester on the nails behind the bar. There is a tension in the room, a lack of joking, a stiffness of posture. The steamer captain, O’Brien, sits behind a pile of currency and gold dust.
“Shit and corruption,” says Jeff Smith, staring holes into his cards. “You’ll have to accept my note for it, but I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Cash only, as agreed upon,” winks the captain. “No markers, no trade, no excuses.”
Smith looks to Charlie Meadows. “Front me a hundred.”
“The bet stands at two,” the captain reminds him, steady-eyed. The men have peeled down to their shirtsleeves, Jeff’s Navy Colt lying on the bar counter with the other gentlemen’s hardware.
Arizona Charlie hesitates, thinking up an excuse, and Smith scowls and pokes Jake Rice. “You front me,” he says to Rice, and then points to Smokey, who is tossing sardines from a tin into Fitzhugh Lee’s cage and watching the bird snap them up on the fly. “I’ll sell you my dinge. You’ve got plenty to keep him busy at your place.”
The men are silent for a moment, only the sound of the eagle’s claws clicking on the floor of its cage. Jake squirms in his seat.
“For two hundred?”
“He’s worth twice that. The best and only nigger in the Territory.”
“But what am I going to do with him?”
“That’s your business.” Jeff Smith has the look on his face that they all try to avoid.
Jake reluctantly lays two hundreds on the table, then turns to Smokey. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll make it double on the fight tonight and buy you back.”
“Is that right?” says Jeff Smith and then Dynamite Johnny turns up a pair of kings and Smith throws his hand on the floor, disgusted, and stomps over to the woodstove to give it a violent kick. He points at Smokey. “I want you out of here,” he says, and then points at Fitzhugh Lee. “And I want that bird stuffed.”
It has been decided that gloves will be worn but throws allowed, that the bell will be in the hands of one side but the time-piece held by the other, that Joe Boyle, down from Dawson and considered neutral in the affair, will referee. Half-clinches will be allowed and it will be up to the fighters to separate themselves. Smokey puts a towel over Hod’s face while he wraps his hands in the back room at Jake Rice’s place. “I want you to close your eyes,” he says, “and imagine how you gone to beat the man.” The wraps feel heavy on his hands, which are already sweating. “But keep your body relax.”
Men are hollering and stomping on the other side of the door. When Hod closes his eyes he can imagine only blackness. It is cold in the little room, Hod’s bare legs starting to ache with it, and when he opens his eyes again the negro is sitting beside him, head in his hands.
“Mr. Jeff and them been makin their bets,” he says.
“Let’s get this damn show on the road!” yells somebody from outside, kicking on the door.
“And aint none of em on you.”
The ring has been set up in the middle of the dance-hall floor, men already drinking for hours after the parade, with the Smith faction on one side of the room and his rivals on the other. Hod notices that they are all heeled, Jeff with his Navy Colt in the special gun pocket lined with buckskin and the Sheeny Kid with his Bulldog a lump under the jacket and Red Gibbs standing by the back with a bungstopper in hand, ready to throw the door open or make sure it stays closed. Introductions are shouted. Ox doesn’t look any smaller stripped down than he does with all his layers of clothes on. He is bigger than Choynski, a true heavyweight, a full inch taller than Hod as they glare at each other throughout the referee’s instructions. There are wisecracks being made and some laughter, but mostly it is the men on one side snarling about what their champion is going to do to the other.
Hod doesn’t feel like anybody’s champion standing in his corner, leaning his head close to hear Smokey over the shouting and stomping of the men. He is the veteran of only one real fight, carried by a professional and then given his sleep medicine in the agreed-upon r
ound. His hand-wraps feel too tight and his stomach is up under his throat and his knees are buzzing.
“This man go only in one direction, which is straight ahead.” Smokey seems distracted, barely looking at Hod as he speaks. “And you don’t want to be anywhere near when he gets there. Just keep movin them feet, movin, movin, couple three rounds, see if you can tire him out.”
Addie Lee is not in the room, nor any other woman. Smoke hangs low over the ring and Hod tries to breathe shallowly through his nose while Smokey greases his face. Smith and his crew settle in on a bench by the ropes and there is somebody new, laughing and backslapping with Jeff.
It is Whitey.
Whitey who stole his gear, one-eye-blue one-eye-green Whitey who, most likely, has always been part of the gang. Hod feels dizzy, as if he has already been pounded and is falling, falling—
Smokey is trying to talk to him.
“What?”
“I ask if you ever hunt.”
“Rabbits, mostly. On the farm.”
“You get mad at them rabbits?”
“That don’t do no good.”
“Same for a ox as it is for a rabbit. You stay cool and keep your wits about you.”
“How many you spose we have to go before this bunch’ll let us stop?”
Smokey looks away. “Just don’t you be the one they carry out from that ring.”
Niles Manigault steps close then, smiling, leaning over the ropes to take a final gander. “He ready?”
“Ready as he gone get,” says Smokey, and then the bell rings and Hod is trapped inside the tiny enclosure with Ox Knudsen.
The Swede bullrushes ahead with his right arm cocked and then sledgehammers it downward, holding his left glove open before him to grab with. Hod catches the first blow on the collarbone and nearly leaves his feet, staggering backward while Ox keeps coming, then dances sideways and snaps his lead left over Knudsen’s guard again and again. His hands don’t feel right, the wraps on them stiffening, and his eyes sting as sweat runs into them. A cheer goes up each time the Swede charges, followed by a moan of disappointment when Hod sidesteps to escape the blow.
“We come to see a prize fight,” calls a man somewhere behind him, “not a goddam waltz!”
Ox charges and Hod feints a move right, then skips left and catches the squarehead flush on the face as he goes by, Ox grabbing the ropes to steady himself and bleeding from the nose when he turns to resume his attack. The crowd, anonymous in their numbers, is almost all pulling against Soapy’s fighter.
“Get on him! Get on him, you dumb fuckin Swede!”
“Knock him cold!”
“Get him on the ropes and strangle the son of a bitch!”
Knudsen finally catches up with him near the end of the round, throwing his arm over Hod’s neck and hurling him against a corner post. Hod blocks the hammer blow that follows with both gloves, then tries to wrap the Ox’s arms, but the Swede butts him over the left eye and brings his knee up, aiming for the privates and getting thigh instead. He is too much stronger, working an arm free and jolting his elbow across Hod’s jaw and then the bell and another elbow and Hod jackknifing, rolling out backward through the ropes to get away, men shoving and tugging at him as he pushes through the ringside mob, using up half his minute’s rest before Smokey can pull him back into his own corner.
“There’s something wrong with the hand wraps.” His fingers seem bonded together inside the gloves, his fists like clubs.
“Rolled em in plaster of Paris,” says the negro. “Must of set by now.”
Hod looks up into his eyes. Smokey jams a chunk of ice against where his brow is split from the head butt.
“You gone need whatever help you can get.”
There is blood slicking the floorboards when the second round begins, blood and tobacco juice and no sawdust thrown over it and even with the fighter shoes they’ve given him Hod feels like he is skating every time he backs up near the corners. Ox Knudsen keeps lurching forward, relentless, chasing Hod around the ring with Hod chopping hard at his ears as Ox swings and misses and goes past with the momentum, Hod bicycling backward as fast as he can till Ox wrestles him into a half-clinch, clamping his left arm over Hod’s neck and rubbing his glove laces over the cut eyebrow and smashing Hod’s face with his free hand as Hod pounds at the exposed short ribs with left and right the way Smokey has shown him, then launches a blind uppercut that catches Ox under the chin and Hod drops to his knees to yank out of the hold, scrambling away on hands and knees while the crowd jeers but back up dancing on his toes before Joe Boyle can count three. His ears are ringing and vision blurred, Ox charging, Hod just able to throw himself sideways and give the Swede a backhand shove that sends him sprawling across to the far ropes. Hod wipes at his eyes, blood streaming into the left, and backpedals while he fends with outstretched arms against the next rush, running out of ring sooner than he expects and catching an overhand right on the jaw that sends him tumbling back through the ropes.
His head is clear enough and his legs are still with him but there are men all around him screaming into his ears and the Ox waiting just inside the ropes for when Hod ducks to step back through, his right cocked, lips moving in a stream of curses, and Boyle behind him counting to ten and Hod gets up onto his knees with somebody trying to shove him back in and he hates them, hates Jeff Smith and Whitey and the whole sure-thing crew and the men screaming all around him and the one shoving behind, hates them all, rising and turning to smash the shoving man flush on the mouth and then clubbed from behind by Ox in the ring, spinning to land an overhand left on the Swede’s nose, feeling it crack, backing him up enough to get through the ropes but immediately grabbed in a bear-hug dance till the Ox pins him up against the corner post and goes at him, elbows and fists, Hod turtling in and crouching and catching the blows as best he can till the bell rings and Ox not stopping till Smokey steps in and blocks the Swede with the wooden stool long enough for Boyle to peel Hod away and get him back to the corner. Men are stomping and screaming, red-faced, nigger this and nigger that, some of them throwing things, bottles and beer steins and a malacca cane, and there is blood smearing Hod’s face and arms and chest, blood dripping from his gloves, blood staining the ropes and floor, blood staining Smokey’s shirt as he presses a sponge soaked in ammonia water into Hod’s face.
“You ain’t gone outrun him, we seen that,” he shouts into Hod’s ear over the cries of the gamblers and the townsmen and the stampeders, the high rollers and lowlifes who surround them. “Got to make yourself a openin and put him away.”
Hod tries to say that the man is too big to knock out but his lips have begun to swell and it doesn’t come out right. The negro looks across to Jeff Smith and his crowd, all grins behind a cloud of smoke, then turns back to him.
“You got enough kick in them hands, boy.” Smokey’s face is a way he has never seen it, like he’s set to kill somebody, his fingers digging into Hod’s shoulders as he hollers and stares him in the eye. “You just put it on him and don’t get off till he’s out. And I don’t mean down, I mean out.”
Smokey blows a mouthful of cold water in his face then and the bell rings and Hod stands from the stool and there is a great whooping cry from the men of Skaguay. It is clear how it will end, what they have all come to see, and it will be the Ox or it will be him. Ox keeps his left foot forward as he gallops across the floor, putting legs and hip and back into his punch, only this time when Hod sidesteps he slams him one-two in the kidney and crosses over hard with his left trying to punch through the man’s face to the back of his skull and Ox is spitting blood, thick gouts of it out onto the wet floor and bending his knees, intent on the kill as he lurches forward, Hod ducking his head back away from the roundhouse skinning his nose and the force of it twisting Ox, feet slipping in the blood slick and falling, reaching back with his left to catch himself leaving the opening for Hod’s uppercut thrown from the hip and Ox knocked back on his ass with a stunned expression on his square white face
in the instant before Hod steps in to clamp his left hand behind the Swede’s head and piston the club of his right over and over into it, punching down with all of his weight, cracking Boyle away with the sharp of his elbow when the referee tries to step in then going down on one knee to continue pounding the Swede’s face, his head against the hard floor now, pounding left and right till men fill the ring in a cursing wave that sweeps him up and away, pummeled and kicked, Smokey unable to fight through to him with the stool in hand, Hod lifted clear off his feet and carried, trying to cover his face, his privates, forehead cracking against the doorframe and then out into the back alley and yanked to his feet, running panicked behind Niles Manigault out onto an alley full of woodsmoke and a sky that has gone insane.
“Get to O’Brien’s ship!” shouts Niles as he turns to help Red Gibbs slow down the lynch-minded throng. “And keep out of sight!”
Hod runs then, sweat steaming in the freezing air, men chasing him across Runnalls and down Broadway and off onto Holly Street, Hod cutting through the open door of Jeff Smith’s Parlor and past the squawking eagle and through the card room into the backyard where he throws the latch that opens the secret passage through the board fence he has seen them use so many times to frustrate a skinned stampeder. He comes out into Paradise Alley and steps into the first red-lit crib he sees, startling the Belgian girl inside.
“But what is this?!”
Hod is swallowing blood and fighting for breath, realizing, as the hammering of his heart begins to slow, that he is nearly naked.
“I’m freezing.” One of his gloves has been torn off in the melee and he manages to work the other off with his teeth, but his hands are nearly useless in the hardened wrappings. He manages to lower the shade. “I got to get under the covers.”