by Glenn Taylor
He walked first to woods’ edge behind Jerry and Herchel’s place. There, he lay down four pieces of deer jerky, spaced ten paces apart and placed at the line where backyard became forest.
Then he headed across the Cut toward his own house. His shoe soles banged the bridge planks and he didn’t use the hand ropes.
It was quiet at the back of the hollow. None were home. Not his mother, father, sister, or brother. When he walked up the hill to the pen, the dogs stood from where they slumbered and began to pant. Four of them inside. Plott hounds, all. Offspring of Jack Dempsey, all sixty pounds, give or take. Jim-Jim, Tug, Pug, and Doo-Dad. Orb had named them himself. The pen was ten-by-ten, chain-link. A rusty corrugated roof. Herchel and Jerry had built it for the boy’s dogs when they were still pups.
Orb undid the latch and the dogs jumped all over him. As always, he went to the ground and let them lick his hands and face and sniff at his creases and the bottoms of his shoes. He lay prone and expressionless as they stepped on his skinny arms, their claws lining him in white. It comforted the boy to be held down, and he shut his eyes and nearly smiled. After a while, the dogs were sated. Orb stood and clicked his tongue twice. They sat down in a circle around him.
Then he made a strange sound that originated in his throat and came up slow, ending in “Tooooooooo east woods!” The dogs shot from their seated positions as if catapulted. They chugged across the Cut like Thor-oughbreds packed in a bunch.
At woods’ edge they lowered their snouts and traced a line. The treats were not in the same spot as the last time, but the dogs had come to expect this. They kept moving, and eventually, Doo-Dad, the only female among them, found the first of the four pieces. She called, and the others bounded over, each filing in to find his own jerky. They swallowed their jerky whole. Then Doo-Dad broke for home, and the others followed suit.
Orb stood at the open gate of the pen as they came back across the Cut. They strode like racing dogs, eyes on a jackrabbit. They jumped the creek with one glorious bound apiece, single-file and stretched. They didn’t put on the brakes till they’d nearly hit the back of the pen. Orb closed the gate, latched it solid, and walked away.
The dogs panted and slurped at their water trough.
Lizzie’s sister Effie crossed the footbridge and waved her hand over her head. “Orb!” she hollered.
He glanced in her direction, then away, then walked with greater speed toward his house. He leapt the porch stairs in two strides and slammed the front door behind him.
Effie was used to it. She crossed her arms and stared at the Ledford home, so still at the back of the hollow, not a trace of the boy’s movement inside. She wondered what he did in there alone.
The clouds covered up the sun. Effie’s shoulders cooled. She uncrossed her arms and turned around, traversing the bridge she’d just come across. Her own home was quiet that morning as well, her daughters having stayed in Charleston for summer school.
In October 1953, Effie’s husband Joe had died aboard a Skymaster troop carrier en route from Korea to Japan. There’d not been enough of his blood type to transfuse. Effie had kept right on raising their two daughters, just as she’d kept on teaching music at Douglass. But then came integration, and by 1957, her student numbers were halved. In 1961, they shut Douglass down and Effie was out of a job. She’d moved to Marrowbone Cut and assumed the post of choir director for the Land of Canaan Congregational.
Back on the porch of her A-frame, Effie sat down in a rocking chair. Next to it lay the pale canvas bag her sister had given her, full of red and blue and yellow yarn. Knitting needles stuck out like tiny goal posts. Effie sighed and left the bag where it lay. She was tired of making marble bags. She rocked, her eyes fixed on the wide billow of gray smoke from the factory. It never ceased, this smoke. It poured toward the heavens morning, noon, and night, the furnace below reflecting orange off everything inside. Effie had never cared for marbles.
It was one of the things that fascinated her about Orb. He played Ringer for hours each day. She looked from the factory to his house again, not much land separating the two. She imagined she heard him singing inside, but it was not so. Effie longed to refine the boy’s vocal technique. She’d never encountered such raw talent in a singer. Not in her pupils who’d been labeled “prodigies.” Not even in her father’s choir.
J. Carl had finally come around on Marrowbone. In a week, he’d be coming out for the celebration.
Willy Ledford stepped from the doors of the factory. Effie could tell it was him by his gait, the way he raised and lowered his cigarette hand. Not yet sixteen, and the boy had ceased to hide his foul habit. Willy was a boxer, and the only time he didn’t smoke was the week before a fight.
He crossed the yard and stepped heavy up the stairs of his house. Slammed the door behind him, just as his younger brother had. They’d learned early on that it had been hung crooked, and that you had to swing hard to get it closed. Once, Ledford had hung a screen door for the temperate months, but as pups, Tug and Jim-Jim had busted right through the screen. Ledford staple-gunned it back to the frame, but the dogs came through again and again, and little Orb soon followed suit. Everyone had laughed about the dog door and Orb’s fancy for it, but eventually Tug and Jim-Jim got so tall that they split the door’s cross piece, splintering it beyond repair. There’d been no screen door since.
Ledford stepped from the factory smoking his own cigarette. He checked his wristwatch. Dimple and Wimpy would be along soon with two horse-drawn trailers. Twice a week, every available man formed a line out the factory doors. Hand over hand, they passed cinched burlap marble bags, twenty-five count each, and loaded up the box trailers until the tires nearly flattened. Then, Dimple and Wimpy would mount up and pull the heavy loads to the front gate where they met the distributor truck.
Ledford’s one-furnace operation was no Marble City, but Marrowbone marbles were shipped to stores across West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio too.
He looked up at the house, the boys’ bedroom window. A thread-bare shade hung inside, thin as paper. Ledford watched the silhouette of his oldest boy, curling too much weight on a long bar. Willy’s torso rocked as he heaved the thing to his chest. Behind him, Ledford could see the outline of Orb’s head where he sat on the bed, watching his older brother build muscle.
The goats ran past. A blur of black and gray. They bleated, loud and trumpet-pitched.
Ledford stubbed his cigarette on the bottom of his boot and went back inside. In the corner was the tarp, a mountain of newspapers underneath. The tarp’s peak was shoulder high. He lifted its edge and grabbed a paper from the stack. Glanced at its date. Two weeks old. An article caught his eye. “Buddhist Crackdown by Viet Nam Charged,” it read. He eyed the first few lines. Buddhist monks were being forced to sign petitions against their cause of religious freedom. Ledford shook his head and began folding the paper, his hands quartering it tight and precise, by memory. On his way back to the furnace, he dipped the folded paper in a bucket of dirty water. It dripped a serpentine trail along the sawdust floor behind him.
One-handed, Mack Wells gripped a punty rod at the lip of the furnace window. On the end was a small bulb of molten glass. In his other hand, he held a red delicious apple from which he took man-sized bites.
“Liable to drop that rod,” Ledford said.
Mack chewed his apple. “Not with these forearms,” he said. “Been putting up the weights, sparrin some with Willy.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Ledford took the rod from Mack and choked up on it. He cupped the wet newspaper in his right hand and set the molten bulb into it, already rolling his left wrist. The paper sizzled and smoked and charred, and the bulb turned. “Kennedy is fucking up in Vietnam,” he said.
Mack put his boot on the edge of a wheelbarrow full of broken blue glass. The sorters had done their job—he couldn’t spot a single shard of green. “Kennedy’ll be just up the road in Charleston next week,” Mack said. “Why don’t you grace the centennial, tell him what a fuckup he is.”
“I know he did.” Mack took a last bite of his apple, spit two seeds on the floor, and threw the core across the room at the head of a new employee. He missed. The young man was from the neighborhood, one of Effie’s former students at Douglass. Hayes was his last name. Folks called him Stretch. “Anyway,” Mack said, “I thought you were back to quittin the papers,” he said.
“Well.” Ledford had no answer for his friend. It seemed every time he tried to shut out the world, it gave him cause to open his eyes again.
The hot bulb rolled, and layer by layer the newspaper disappeared.
IT WAS A small, four-square building with a stair-step roofline. Painted above the door were the words Boxing Gym. Herchel and Jerry had built the place, with Paul Maynard’s help, back in ’59. That was the year Paul had boarded up Maynard’s Boxing Gym, where he’d once trained his son Sam to prominence. But Sam was long since dead, and the Maynards no longer had the money to run a gym. Their open shafts whistled empty on the hillside. All the coal had been dug. Everybody had left, save Paul. His nephew Shorty stayed closest to home, moving his family just up the road. Shorty was Paul’s deputy, an arrangement rife with trouble.
Inside the gym, Willy sat down on a dugout bench against the wall. He was heaving, elbows on his knees. Under the bare lights, he dripped sweat and watched it pat against the floor in dark circles. Behind him, the barnwood paneling shone blood red. Jerry had washed down the walls a week prior, dry-locked them, and rolled two coats of the red stuff. Orient Bay, according to the can.
Mack Wells drank water from an Army-issue canteen and breathed hard through his nose. He tugged off his headgear and tossed it into a corner bin. “You’re faster with that straight right,” he told Willy.
“Thanks. You still whupped my ass.” Willy had been regional runner-up at 112 pounds the year before. He liked to train alone, and he liked to spar with Mack.
“Might have more wind if you quit smoking them squares,” Mack said.
“I know it.” Willy stood and stretched. His muscles tightened, outlined in shadow as if cut from stone. “I’ll be seein you,” he said. He walked out shirtless, a wet towel on his head.
Gym rules were posted by the door: You spit on the floor, you go home was one of them. Others were observed and learned over time: no posters, no murals, no music. No talking during the three-minute work sessions. Windex wall mirrors nightly—anyone who’d shadowboxed before them. Get gloved up to hit the heavy bag or get out. Amateurs only, Junior Division only. No pros. No dues.
Paul Maynard walked in at five till five. He stuck his head inside the cramped back office. “Coach,” he said, nodding.
“Coach,” Mack said, likewise. He had his feet on the desk and a notepad in his lap. On it, he’d sketched a crisscrossing marble highway design. He regarded it. Paul hung his hat on a hook. In the corner, an industrial fan with a skin of brown dust ran hard.
Two boys came in the door. There were never more than four on a Tuesday. Never more than eight, no matter what the night. They were all from the area. Country tough and white. Most in Wayne wouldn’t allow their boys to box at Marrowbone. Some called it Nigger Gym. Most could scarcely believe that Paul Maynard was a part of it. They vowed not to reelect him sheriff.
At five-thirty Don Staples walked in and took his spot in the rotten leather barber’s chair. Mack hit the bell with his ball-peen hammer. Work sessions commenced. There was the slap of the rope against poured concrete. The snapping, exhaled hiss of the shadowboxer before the mirror. Heat gathered and sat quick. Wet. It was something, the way sweat could stink. Even a boy’s.
Stretch Hayes walked in a little after six. He’d come in once before, thinking he could spar from the get-go. Thinking that because he was city tough, because he had the interrupted eyebrows of a street fighter, he’d somehow bypass the two-month rule. He found out different, quick. And here he was again, fresh off his first shift as furnace tender. He hovered in the gym.
Staples one-eyed him over the book in his hands. It took guts to be the sole black fighter in the gym. Only Harold had held that designation before.
Paul watched the footwork of a skinny boy from Echo Creek, kicked at his sneakers to keep his square small. He didn’t acknowledge Stretch’s presence.
Staples liked Stretch. He showed enough respect, whatever Paul may have thought, and he didn’t seem the type to cause trouble. It was known that his daddy had once killed a man, but to Staples, this was neither here nor there.
The bell sounded again. There was a little chatter. The boys passed a water jug and spit in a bucket. Mack called Stretch over. “Furnace work suiting you?” he asked.
“Yes.” Stretch, like a young Ledford, had been drawn to the fire. He liked to stare at it and close his eyes to see what happened on the backs of his eyelids.
“You like it out here?” Mack asked.
“Yes. Can I spar?”
“No.” Mack knew of the boy’s family. None before him had graduated high school. The men died young or lived behind bars. Stretch’s daddy was up at Moundsville. His brother, Huttonsville. Mack couldn’t yet decipher if their trouble ran through Stretch.
Paul put in a dip two-handed. One hand to squeeze-shape the stuff, the other to pull out his bottom lip. He disliked messiness.
Staples stepped down from the barber’s chair and over to him. “Don’t do that shit in front of the kids,” he said.
“They’ve seen worse.” It was the same conversation they’d had last practice.
Staples waved him off and walked over to Mack and Stretch. “You’re looking to spar?” he asked the young man.
Stretch nodded. The guidance counselor at school had suggested it before he graduated. She’d said it was better than a fistfight.
Mack understood Staples’ intention. “Kids finish up about seven-thirty,” he told Stretch, pointing to the clock on the wall. It was the kind that came standard in schools, old and round and hanging on a nail above the light switch. Electrical conduit snaked the place, tacked down in loops and painted over red like the walls. “What’s wrong?” Mack said, eyeballing Stretch. “You can’t stay that long? You got someplace to be?”
Stretch kept his mouth shut and his chin high. A sparse goatee was coming in slow. He shook his head no, though he was supposed to catch a ride back to Huntington at seven. He had people to see.
“Good,” Mack said.
Paul had never let anybody spar until after two months’ worth of three-days. The mirror was your sparring partner, the medicine ball your opponent. He stepped to the office and motioned for Staples to follow.
Before Paul could shut him down, Staples said, “I’m just going to put on the mitts. Let him take a few swings.”
Paul sighed, then nodded his okay.
The gym bell sounded again and again. Stretch watched the clock. He didn’t work out like the others. Instead he sat on the dugout bench and eyeballed the conduit on the wall. Corrugated casing over all that electric charge. Like a snakeskin, he thought. Like the rubbers he bought at the druggist’s.
Stretch wanted to beat the shit out of somebody.
At seven-thirty Paul used his tongue to pry out the dip in his lip. It dropped in the yellow spit bucket. He walked over to Stretch. “Better wrap your hands,” he said.
Mack came over to show him how. The other boys had left.
Harold came in the door and said hello.
Stretch didn’t say it back. The two weren’t on speaking terms. Stretch’s older brother had never liked Harold, had once called him an Uncle Tom. But now that brother lived inside a prison cell, and it seemed to Stretch that maybe he’d been wrong about Harold. He’d been wrong about Marrowbone, too. And in those days, Stretch was going to take a job where he could get one.
Harold went to work on the double-end bag, then the speed. Like Willy, he did things alone inside the gym.
When he wasn’t t
hrowing punches, Harold watched Stretch Hayes. Wondered if he was as tough as he looked. The day before, inside the factory, he’d overheard Stretch and Willy talking about him over the roar of the fans. “Harold thinks the CIP means somethin. It don’t mean a damn thing to nobody I know from the neighborhood,” Stretch had said. “And why he got to talk like a white boy?” Later, as he fell asleep, Harold had whispered words aloud in bed. “Don’t mean a damn thing,” he said again and again, accenting different syllables, trying to wash out the white.
The floor ring had a soft enough cover. It was twenty by twenty, and the corner posts were padded sufficient. Tattered and tethered, the rope covers sagged, wrapped here and there by duct tape, like everything else in the place. Stretch stepped through and squared off in front of Staples, who smacked his punch mitts together flat-faced and hard. Their gunshot sound flinched Stretch’s eyes.
Staples felt his age inside the ring. He didn’t have the wind he once possessed.
For the first minute and a half, he let the young man throw his one-two, one-two, one-two-three’s. Then he started counterpunching with the mitts. Soft at first, then zippy enough to raise red welts across the young man’s brow. He wanted to see if the Sixteenth Street tough would lose his temper. He wanted to tell him what Paul Maynard told his fighters, sage advice for boxing or CIP sit-ins alike: “Lose your temper, lose the fight.”
Stretch strained and winded himself and threw haymaker hooks that missed their mark. He went two three-minute rounds without losing his temper. Then he puked in the spit bucket Mack had put in his corner. After the first heave, Stretch dropped to his knees and let loose two more spigot-gushers—chicken salad and RC Cola. Nobody said a word.
Mack threw him a bloodstained towel. He’d wait until Stretch left to laugh at the boy. He’d wait to express his newfound respect.
Paul stood at the ropes and watched Stretch heave a last time. “It ain’t basketball,” he said.
When Stretch did walk out that night, gray-faced as he’d ever been, they all nodded to him in a manner that belied their optimism. In their book, he’d passed some sort of test.