One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

Lee squeezed Tommy’s hand a moment.

  “No sign of Bones yet?” Tommy asked, and she said not.

  Down the bar Tony Broad was getting loud. Tommy heard his own name and when he turned he saw that Broad was directing the waitress’s attention his way.

  “That big fella, now that’s Tommy Cochrane,” Tony was saying. “A real live heavyweight fighter.”

  The waitress smiled uneasily, and Tommy just looked away. But Tony Broad wasn’t watching Tommy, he had his eyes on Lee Charles. Who the fuck was she to turn down a drink with him?

  “But you gotta see this fighter Mac Brady’s got,” Tony kept it up. “This Nicky Wilson. The kid’s a goddamned redwood and he’s going places. Ain’t that right, Billy?”

  Billy Callahan said that it was right. If Tony Broad said the square root of nine was four, Billy Callahan would say that was right, too.

  Herm Bell saw what was happening and he was watching the action happily. He was feeling low and shut out and he was in the mood to waltz with a couple of morons if he got half a chance.

  “Let it go,” he heard Tommy say.

  Now the waitress was asking about the wondrous Nicky Wilson, saying she’d seen him in the Parrot.

  “Oh, he’s something,” Tony Broad, who didn’t give two shits for Nicky Wilson, was saying. “Like yesterday down at the gym, he smashes this nigger. Puts him on the canvas and — boom! — kicks him right in the mug. Nigger’s bleeding all over the deck.”

  “Never saw a nigger bleed like that,” Callahan said. “Red blood too — just like you and me.”

  Lee tried to hold on to Tommy, but she had no chance. For a thirty-five-year-old finished-up boxer, he could still move. When he got to Tony Broad he took him by the thick throat and leaned him backward over the bar.

  “He kicked him?” Tommy asked.

  Callahan stepped away from the bar, his hands out in front. But Herm Bell braced him there, blocking him off from Tommy.

  “You put that hand inside the jacket and I’m gonna rip your head off,” Herm told him. “And throw it in your face.”

  Tony Broad was losing air, but indignant, demanding that Tommy unhand him.

  “He kicked him?” Tommy was still asking.

  Tony pushed with his forearms and managed to roll free of Tommy’s grip. He started to scramble away. Herm stayed tight with Callahan, daring him to go for the heater in his coat. It wasn’t likely though, not with a room full of spectators.

  Tony ran like a fat rabbit behind the bar and stood beside Lucky Ned, the bartender.

  “Phone the police,” Tony demanded. “This man has assaulted me.”

  But Lucky Ned was a man who made his decisions in his own time. He just looked at Tony Broad, then at Tommy, and stood where he was.

  T-Bone Pike chose that moment to stroll into the Parrot. He’d just come from winning three dollars in a four-hour snooker game and he was feeling damn good. Luck was on his shoulder and he’d convinced himself on the way over that the lady smiling on him today was smiling on Thomas Cochrane too.

  But then Tommy had him roughly by the arm and he was pushing him into the room behind the stage. T-Bone’s eyes were jumping.

  “What happened at the gym yesterday?” Tommy asked.

  “Nothin’ happen.”

  “Goddamn it,” Tommy snapped. “What happened?”

  “Nothin,” T-Bone said again. “Just sparrin’, is all.”

  Tommy caught himself then, took a breath. After a moment he reached out and ran his thumb gingerly over the cut on his friend’s chin.

  “Oh, Jesus. Did he kick you, Bones?”

  “Wasn’t nothin’, Thomas.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  T-Bone was ashamed and he looked down at the floor. “How your horse do, Thomas?”

  Tommy turned and walked back out into the bar. Things had quieted down. Callahan and Tony Broad were back at their end of the bar, but they weren’t so noisy now; they were nursing fresh bourbons and looking uneasy. Tommy took his place between Lee and the Doc, and he drank down his draught and said nothing. Herm ordered another round.

  Occasionally, as he drank, Tommy looked up into the mirror behind the bar. Once when he did, he caught Lee’s eyes, but he looked away quick, wouldn’t let her get involved there. It seemed to her that he was looking for something in the reflection.

  Finally, Tommy straightened and looked down the bar to Tony Broad.

  “You,” he said.

  “Stay away from me,” Tony told him.

  “You a friend of Mac Brady’s?” Tommy asked.

  There was enough bar between the two of them that Tony could find a measure of confidence.

  “What’s it to you?” he asked.

  “I want you to give him a message for me,” Tommy said. “Tell him the price is five grand. Tell him he’s got a fight.”

  TWENTY

  The house was a phantom, an aberration, as strange as a house could be. There was nothing she could recall with any semblance of accuracy — the rooms were smaller or bigger, the colours redder, bluer. A breakdown of memory. At the front door Lee hadn’t known whether to knock or not. Either action seemed a great exaggeration. In the end she walked right in, stepping bravely into her past, into the delicately furnished front room with the Persian carpets and teak carvings and the picture of the bob-haired teenage girl over the fireplace.

  A voice called down from upstairs, promising (threatening?) an imminent arrival. Lee sat down and then stood up again. A longhaired white cat with a pinched face sauntered into the room, eyed Lee with disdain and then scooted away when she tried to pet it.

  “Fuck you, too,” she said to the cat and then her mother came down the stairs and into the room.

  “Hello, Lee,” she said, and they kept their distance, mother and daughter. There would be no hugging or pecks on the cheek. Thirty-year-old habits were not broken, not that easily, not in this house.

  They had tea and some sort of hard English biscuits that only her mother would dare serve to humans. The petulant cat sat in her mother’s lap as the old girl sipped her tea and inquired casually about her daughter’s life the past couple of years.

  “I been kicking around a little bit,” Lee told her.

  “Kicking around?” her mother asked, her eyes registering her tired dismay at the demise of the language. “But I heard you were in California.”

  She’d heard. She’d heard because Lee had written three or four times her first year out there. Of course, her mother hadn’t replied — she’d obviously decided against sending mail to that land of ill-mannered decadence. She’d probably boiled Lee’s letters before reading them. This was assuming that she had read them. A smart bookie would give you five to one against.

  “Yeah, I was in California,” Lee said.

  “And now?”

  “And now I’m not.”

  “I can see that. How long have you been back?”

  “Couple days.” A small lie, maybe not a lie at all. How long had she been back?

  “And you have a place to stay?”

  “I’ve got an apartment downtown,” Lee said. A bigger lie. They came easier, that much she remembered. “I’m singing at a club, a place called the Blue Parrot. Do you know it?”

  They both knew goddamn well that her mother didn’t know it, and never would. It was a question that didn’t rate an answer, and didn’t get one.

  Lee took a drink of the bitter tea, set the hard cookie aside. The cat in the lap looked at her with eyes of lime green, a hideous animal, the kind of thing her mother liked.

  “Where’s Walter?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “No shit.”

  “Must you talk like that?” Lee thought the old lady would cover the cat’s ears. “He’s spending time at the cottage this summer.”

  “You two have separated then,” Lee said.

  The ice blue eyes flashed, warning Lee that certain questions wouldn’t be answered here today. No wonder Walter had taken a powde
r — he may have been a glad-hander and a drunk and an all-star shit at times, but at least he had a certain capacity for enjoying himself once in a while. He was probably in Coboconk right now, tossing back ale in the Paddy House and telling everyone who would listen how much money he made last year without lifting a single finger of either of his baby-soft hands.

  While here, back in the city, sat his second wife, who was at least as wealthy as he, with her hair dyed a new colour this year — purple approaching black — and her face powdered white, a death mask.

  Today she was facing her only child, Lee, whom she’d borne only to please her first husband. Lee’s father had been a tough son of a bitch, who’d made a fortune in silver in northern Ontario and who’d died in a barroom fight over a hockey game. As far as exits go, you can’t get much more Canadian than that. In any event, the old girl hadn’t had much use for barrooms or her daughter since.

  “It’s nice that you could drop by,” she was saying now. “I’ve wondered about you.”

  Not enough to answer my letters, Lee thought. Well, let’s cut to it, then, it seemed unlikely that things would be warming up, not in this life. Probably not the next.

  “I have a favour to ask,” Lee said.

  “Oh?”

  “I need to borrow some money,” Lee said. She was quick to clarify. “I’m asking for a loan, not a handout. I’ll pay you back, at whatever rate of interest you decide.”

  “How much money?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  And her mother actually laughed at her. Laughed and looked at the goddamn cat, as if asking if the animal had heard. Still smiling as she took a bite from one of the granite biscuits.

  “Oh, Lee.”

  “This is important,” Lee said, holding her temper. “You know I wouldn’t ask otherwise. Do you realize how hard it is for me to do this?”

  “It didn’t appear difficult.”

  “I’m in trouble and I need the money,” Lee said flatly. “You know you can more than afford it, I’ll pay you back with interest, it’ll be no different than if the money was sitting in the bank.”

  The cat jumped down and left the room, casting its vote on the matter. Lee’s mother asked after the nature of her trouble.

  “Isn’t it enough that I’m your daughter and I’ve come to you?”

  Her mother considered this for a long time. “No,” she said.

  Ah, yes. Home sweet home. Lee set the vile tea aside and got to her feet. Her mother seem relieved that the visit was over and followed her to the door.

  “Why do you need the money?”

  Lee stepped outside into brilliant sunlight. There were roses blooming in the yard, red and yellow, huge beautiful blossoms. Lee hated to see them in this place, it was a cruel contradiction, an insult to nature.

  “There’s a chance that the money could save Tommy Cochrane’s life.”

  “Well,” her mother said smiling. “That man is a hoodlum and I would not spend five cents to save his life.”

  Lee stood looking at the flowers a moment.

  “You know,” she said, “I can’t for the life of me figure why Walter would want to spend the summer at the cottage.”

  Her mother closed the door.

  Mac Brady had his fight, but he was on short notice and he had some ground to cover if he was going to pull it off. Luckily he already had the card — so he had the Gardens booked, he had the licence, the vendors, everything in line on that end. Now it was a matter of changing opponents and making it look good. Not that anybody on the money end was going to complain — after all, Tommy Cochrane was a better draw than the Polack.

  As for Wosinski, the Pole went down with a herniated disc the day after Mac got the okay from Tommy. It was an unfortunate injury and it paid Wosinski almost as much as the fight would have, with the bonus that he wouldn’t have to get his brains rattled to collect.

  Mac took care of the medical report on the Pole and went to the commission to request a change in the licence. There were a few clever remarks, and some head shaking, but everything went smoothly enough. What was going on was obvious, but it wasn’t necessarily bad for boxing. Wilson butchering Wosinski might have been.

  It was testimony to Mac’s influence — and the number of people who owed him favours on one level or another — that he managed to accomplish all this in one day. And when he’d pushed whatever buttons needed pushing, he went looking for Tommy Cochrane. He found him shooting snooker at Sully’s with T-Bone Pike. Mac showed a contract and an offer of four thousand.

  “You didn’t get my message?” Tommy asked.

  “Four is the best I can do, Tommy.”

  “Then you haven’t got a fight. Now you’re really in a spot, Mac — I heard today that Wosinski’s down with a bad back. Imagine that.”

  Tommy grinned at Mac and then leaned over the felt. He dropped a cherry in the corner but hooked himself on the pink. The only shot he had was a bank on the blue and he tried it and made it. Then he looked at Mac.

  “Maybe I’ll go shoot pool for a living,” he said.

  “If I can call some debts,” Mac said doubtfully, “I can go to forty-five hundred.”

  “Five grand, Mac. Don’t you hear good?”

  “How the hell can I pay you five thousand dollars? It’s bad business.”

  “Then walk away from it, Mac. Just leave it alone and walk away.”

  “Okay, smart guy, that’s what I’m going to do,” Mac said and he strode out of the pool hall.

  Tommy tried a combination and missed. He looked up at T-Bone.

  “What do you figure, Bones?”

  “I say fifteen minutes, Thomas.”

  “Less,” Tommy said and he checked the clock at the front. “Bet you a nickel.”

  T-Bone bent at the waist and proceeded to run the table, beating Tommy by forty points. As Tommy was racking again, Mac Brady came through the front door. Tommy looked at the clock. Eleven minutes. T-Bone placed a nickel on the rail.

  “Well, I made some calls,” Mac said.

  “What’s the matter — you don’t like the phone in here?” Tommy asked. “Bust ’em up, Bones.”

  T-Bone miscued on the break. Mac watched, then drew the contract from his pocket.

  “Well, call me a goddamn fool, but five thousand it is,” he said. “I’ll be the laughing stock of the town if this gets out.”

  “Oh, it’ll get out, I can guarantee you that,” Tommy said. “It’ll get out because you’ll let it out first chance you get, Mac. It sells tickets, and you know it. I’ll probably read in the newspaper tomorrow that I’m getting ten grand.”

  Mac shook his head and spread the contract on the green felt.

  “You think you know me, Tommy, but you don’t. I’m just doing a job here, just like everybody else. Now let’s get your chicken scratch on this contract, and I’ll leave you to your game.”

  “You get my signature when I get my five thousand, Mac,” Tommy said. He blasted the cue ball into the pack, scattering reds all over the contract. “Now you know that. Why don’t we quit playing games?”

  “You think I’m walking around with five grand in my pocket? I don’t carry that kind of cash.”

  “Then get it,” Tommy said. “And while we’re talking money, you better know you’re picking up my training expenses. Looks like I’m stuck using Bert’s gym. I’ll train in the afternoons and I don’t want that jackass Wilson anywhere near me. I mean it, Mac — he better be out of there when I show.”

  “Who the hell are you — Doc Kearns all of a sudden?”

  “You know who I am, Mac — I’m the one in the middle. Now you get the cash together and bring it over to the Jasper and I’ll sign your paper. Otherwise, it’s no deal and you got no fight. Now what do you say to that?”

  Mac tugged at the contract, sliding it out from under the snooker balls like a magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath china.

  “You’ll get your money, Tommy. I’ll send it over tomorrow or the n
ext day. But you’d better hold up your end, you’d better give me a show. I’m not paying for some two-minute performance.”

  “You couldn’t care less if it’s two minutes or two hours,” Tommy told him. “All you want is the ranking, Mac. But don’t you worry about me, I’ll give you a show. In fact, I’ll go you one better. I’m gonna whup your boy, Mac. I’m gonna beat him until he begs you to throw the towel.”

  “Maybe you will,” Mac said, tucking the contract away. “But I doubt it.”

  He left the pool hall again. Tommy watched after him, then went back to his game. T-Bone was looking on narrowly.

  “You sure ‘bout this, Thomas?”

  “Sure enough.”

  T-Bone put his hand on the arrowhead around his neck. “What about the doctor, Thomas? You know what he tole you.”

  “Forget about that, Bones. I mean it, I don’t want you to mention it again.” He dumped the eight in the corner. “Besides, doctors are wrong all the time. I feel good.”

  “That an easy person to fool.”

  “Who?”

  “Yourself.”

  Tommy lined up a cherry, then straightened from the table. “This is the farm we’re talking about, Bones. Remember that. This is the farm.”

  “It a lot more than that,” T-Bone Pike said. “And don’t be tellin’ this nigger any different.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Monday Herm was back at the track, looking to get even with the nags for what they did to him (or to Tommy Cochrane, at least) on Saturday. He got there early and he wandered down to the stables to pass the morning with the boys there, maybe pick up a horse or two. The talk today wasn’t about thoroughbreds though — the news was out that Tommy Cochrane was going to fight Nicky Wilson, and expert opinions on the outcome were forming as thick as the flies on the manure pile out back.

  Herm didn’t want to talk about the fight — what he knew he couldn’t say anyway — so he sat in a tack room with a cup of coffee and stayed pretty quiet. What he heard, though, told him there wasn’t much support for Tommy Cochrane.

  “Cochrane’s had his day,” a groom was saying. “He’s over the hill, and the kid’s a banger.”