The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

  The next weekend, and all of them after that, there would be just as many drunks and angry wives. Nothing ever changed in Gallup.

  Watching these men get beaten somehow made me feel better about what went on at home. And I discovered that Mom wasn’t the only sad woman. Gallup was full of them.

  CHAPTER 13

  OUR LIFE IN THE DUPLEX came to an end one morning in January when a worker from the health department banged on our door. The city would be there in two weeks to tear down the building, he said. Before he left, he spray-painted “CONDEMNED PROPERTY” over a pee stain on our front wall. When we packed up the Rambler and green trailer and took off, the drunks on Second Street probably celebrated, the conscious ones anyway.

  We moved about a mile away to 306 South Cliff Drive. Our new orange stucco house sat on a steep hill across from a huge gully the size of a miniature canyon. On the main floor, we had three bedrooms and a back porch enclosed by a cinder-block wall, and on the floor below, a basement and garage. Although not as nice as our house in Albuquerque, it was still a big step-up. No more trash in the front yard—and no more drunks. Sam and I shared a room in the basement away from the rest of the family upstairs. We could sneak out through the garage without anyone knowing.

  Dad started spending more and more time away from the house, even after he got off work. No one complained. As long as he wasn’t there, we didn’t have to listen to him fight with Mom. He pretty much ignored Sam and me until the day he burst into our room to tell us about the upcoming boxing match between Benny “Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith.

  Dad loved listening to fights on the radio. The Rambler had the best radio we owned, so he’d sit in the car and ask us to join him. Sam was never interested, but I was happy to make Dad think I loved boxing as much as he did. He was always nice to me when he thought we agreed.

  Dad studied all the great boxers from the past: Joe “the Brown Bomber” Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, who barely kept his family alive on nine dollars a week before becoming heavyweight champion. But his all-time favorite was Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler” from Colorado. The son of a miner, Dempsey fought as many as ten men a day for five dollars apiece before he went pro. He chewed on pine tar to toughen his jaw.

  The “poor boy becomes a great fighter” stories were a big hit with Dad. He’d talk about these guys like they were members of the family, recounting moments of glory that were supposed to serve as life lessons. Boxing was the ultimate man’s sport, he said, because it was the best way for a man to prove himself.

  All I knew was that I was a puny kid with thick glasses, who didn’t like getting hit. But Dad seemed to think that eventually I would become a true Crow man and love to pound the shit out of people.

  It was chilly the evening of March 24, 1962, when he and I hustled to the Rambler. Dad opened the garage door but left the car inside, under the dim light of a single bulb. He brought sandwiches for us to snack on and glasses of iced tea to wash them down.

  He leaned over and tapped my leg. “This is a special night. We’re going to listen to history together.”

  The ring announcer at Madison Square Garden came on: “Ladies and gentlemen, main event. Fifteen rounds for the Welterweight Championship of the World.”

  “This is going to be a great fight. Griffith needs to kill Paret, that Cuban son of a bitch,” Dad said, rubbing his hands together like he was warming up to kill the guy himself. “Paret called him a faggot, and Griffith has to defend his honor.”

  Was he serious? According to the boxing magazines Dad read, fighters taunted each other all the time, and this didn’t seem any worse than lots of other insults he had spoken about.

  “Paret won’t die, will he? It’s just a boxing match, right?”

  His jaw tightened. “You don’t call a man a faggot unless you want the ever-living crap stomped out of you. Surely even you understand that. Boxing is war with your fists, and all great fighters follow a warrior’s creed. If you’re disrespected, you have a duty to kill the bastard who did it. Otherwise you’re not much of a man.”

  Dad shadowboxed over the steering wheel. “Paret needs killing. It’s plain and simple.”

  The bell rang for the first round, and the fight began. Dad jabbed his fists harder at the air. All the usual explosive signs were there: bugged-out eyes, pulsing Y vein, and twitching lips. But that night, he also puffed himself up, growing larger than I’d ever seen him.

  “Kill him, Griffith!” he yelled. “Kill the asshole. Kill him!” Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his body jerked from side to side, making the car sway.

  Griffith was winning, but at the end of the sixth round, Paret fought back hard, knocking him down.

  “Son of a bitch, man!” Dad yelled. “Get up and defend your goddamn pride. Get him NOW.” His voice bounced around inside the car.

  They had to give Griffith smelling salts, and if the bell hadn’t sounded, Paret might have knocked him out. But by the end of the next round, Griffith was back on top again, showing no signs of the knockdown. Dad let out a breath. “Okay, okay. Much better.” He kept turning up the volume and adjusting the station to get better reception. The crowd cheered both men’s names in the background.

  The bell came for the twelfth round. A minute into it, the radio announcer said, “This is probably the tamest round of the fight.” But then he shouted, “Griffith has trapped Paret in the corner against the ropes! He can’t defend himself. His head is snapping back again and again, but Griffith won’t let him fall.”

  Dad pummeled the air with his fits. “Kill the bastard. Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  “Paret has slumped to the mat, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said. “He’s been knocked unconscious, taking several unanswered blows to the head. I don’t know how any human being could survive such a beating.”

  They switched to the ring announcer at Madison Square Garden. “The time: two minutes and nine seconds of the twelfth round. The winner by a knockout and, once again, Welterweight Champion of the World, Emile Griffith.” The crowd roared.

  Dad broke into a broad smile and relaxed his fists. His eyes returned to normal, and the Y vein receded into his forehead. He turned to me with a big grin and rubbed my head vigorously, as if we had both experienced a glorious outcome.

  “Sometimes a man has to kill to make things right,” he said, staring out the windshield. “You understand that Paret needed killing, don’t you? They carried him off in a stretcher. That’s a good sign. I hope the son of a bitch dies. I’ve beaten men to death, but we weren’t in a boxing ring and I didn’t get paid for it. No other way to even the score. I’ve gotten rid of a few richly deserving sons of bitches. No one misses them. I did the world a favor.”

  He switched off the radio and looked at me. “I’m crazy. Me and you both are. You gotta do what you gotta do. You understand?”

  I nodded. All I wanted was to get out of the car and away from him. If he saw the disgust on my face, he’d want to hit me. My head swam with fear. How could I be his son?

  I felt sorry for Paret. The referee kept pulling the fighters apart during the match—why didn’t he do it after Paret was trapped on the ropes? He couldn’t defend himself. The referee had to have known that Griffith wouldn’t quit even though Paret couldn’t raise his arms to stop the punches. I hated Dad and the referee.

  We had just listened to a murder—and Dad loved it. I’d heard him say again and again that Cleo deserved to die, and Dad almost made that happen. How many people had he actually killed?

  Was he right—was I crazy like him?

  No. He and I were different. I wanted to be nothing like him. I was different from Mom too. Lonnie, Sam, and Sally weren’t like them either.

  But I couldn’t deny that some of Dad’s love for breaking all the rules had rubbed off on me, along with some of Mom’s sadness.

  NORMAN MAILER, THE GREAT sports writer who covered the fight live, said he had never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times. When I re
ad that in the newspaper and in the boxing magazines, it made me feel worse. The picture of Paret’s body slumped over the ropes was sickening. His eyes were swollen shut before the end of the twelfth round. He fell into a coma that would claim his life ten days later.

  For weeks after that, all I could think of was how Benny Paret never regained consciousness because he was brain dead, probably while still standing, unable to fall to the mat. The more sickened I was by what I saw, the happier Dad was that justice had been served Thurston Crow–style.

  CHAPTER 14

  ONE AFTERNOON LATER THAT SPRING, Sam and I walked along Green Avenue, not far from our house, looking for trouble. Our pranks had become more reckless and brazen. We threw rocks at signs in the middle of the day. We swung our baseball bats into mailboxes without checking to see if anyone was watching. Any pretense of normalcy had vanished.

  I had delivered the day’s papers, but it wasn’t time to go in yet. Dinner wasn’t ready, and even if it was, we didn’t want to be there when Dad got home. On most nights, he started yelling at Mom the instant he walked through the door.

  A few blocks from our house, we passed a large backhoe parked on someone’s driveway, and in the carport next to it, I spotted an enormous truck tire partially hidden behind warped plywood.

  “Hey, Sam, I bet we could have some fun with that.”

  “You can’t push that big thing out of there.”

  “Watch me.”

  It didn’t look like anyone was home, but just in case, we ducked behind the truck and waited a few minutes. Nothing.

  The tire reached the top of my shoulders. The bolts were bigger than my fist. It had to be nearly two feet thick. I shoved aside the plywood, and the tire fell over. It took all our strength to set it upright. Sam steadied it while I rolled it onto the street. I was surprised at how easily it moved.

  “What are we going to do with this?” Sam asked.

  “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  We rolled it a few blocks to the top of Elephant Hill, so named because of the White Elephant Storage facility at the bottom. Sam glanced down the steep concrete slope and clapped his hands. He’d figured out my plan.

  I studied the cars and trucks flowing through the intersection at rush hour. Sam kept trying to push the tire, but I told him we needed to wait until we knew there would be lots of traffic in the intersection when the tire reached the bottom. The timing had to be perfect.

  After watching for several minutes, I gave the tire a gentle nudge. It rolled slowly and wobbled. The thick yellow rim wiggled from side to side.

  “It’s going to fall over!” Sam shouted, jogging down the hill alongside it.

  “Don’t touch it,” I shouted back. “It’ll straighten out.”

  Within seconds, the tire righted and took off as if shot out of a cannon, a black streak screaming down the hill. It sounded like a high-pitched engine. The noise echoed all around us.

  When the tire flew into the intersection, it drilled into a northbound Volkswagen Beetle, just behind the driver’s door, smashing the car into a V shape. The windshield shattered, and the frame crumpled into a heap of useless metal on the sidewalk.

  Then the tire ricocheted backward and slammed into a double-wheeled pickup truck loaded with hay. The wheel well crunched, bending the bed almost off the cab. Bales of hay popped out. The truck screeched to a halt against the sidewalk, but the tire kept moving. A couple of drunks danced out of the way as it wobbled like a giant hula hoop and finally came to a stop.

  Both drivers got out and stared at each other, circling their vehicles. The fat, middle-aged Navajo man driving the truck wore cowboy boots, a long jacket, and a big Stetson. He glanced up at the sky as if Coronado himself had delivered the blow.

  I was more worried about the thin, young Volkswagen driver with the ponytail. He wore tennis shoes and looked like he could run fast, exactly the kind of victim we tried to avoid. The drivers and spectators gathered on the sidewalk, their eyes scanning for the source of destruction.

  Sam laughed and jumped up and down. The blond bandits had struck again. But I knew big trouble when I saw it. We hadn’t become Gallup’s most successful juvenile delinquents by sticking around and laughing at our victims—but the enormity of what we had done was intoxicating. I started laughing too.

  Once again, I felt powerful and invisible.

  Along with destroying a monstrous tire and two vehicles, we attracted a sizable crowd. My sides ached by the time I noticed that the man in the Volkswagen was staring up the hill at us. I swear his eyes were glowing red.

  I froze.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  The man lowered his head, yelled something warlike, and started sprinting up Elephant Hill. I pushed Sam ahead of me. “Run to the Baptist church and hide in the stairwell,” I said. “Wait fifteen minutes and then go home. And keep your mouth shut.”

  I tore down Green Avenue, away from Elephant Hill, hoping the angry man with the ponytail would follow me and not Sam. If he was caught, he’d lead the guy to our house and spill his guts, including how much Dad hated men with long hair. Sam would think that what we had done was funny. He might even ask the guy in for dinner and show him our cherry bombs.

  Three blocks into my escape, I panicked. Before me was the beginning of the S-shaped slopes that flattened into an open area. If I kept running, the guy would catch me.

  Frantically looking for a hiding place, I saw a house with a yard carved into a hill. The dirt bank rose higher than the roof of a carport. I leapt over the bank and landed flat on a concrete block in the carport, knocking the wind out of me and scraping my hands, elbows, and chin. A truck was parked there, and I scooted underneath it.

  My panting pounded in my ears in the tight space under the muffler. I couldn’t see the sidewalk, so I twirled my body around, ripping my jeans on the driveway, and then rolled to the side of the truck and stared out. I forced myself to inhale and exhale slowly to quiet my breathing. Within minutes, I heard footsteps and saw a pair of tennis shoes run past the carport. I quickly rolled back under the truck, held my breath, and closed my eyes.

  He kept going.

  As the sun sank behind the distant mountains, a blanket of darkness crept across the carport. Maybe Sam and I would get away with it after all—maybe he was scared enough to keep quiet. My hands and elbows stung as I lay on the concrete. My jaw had stiffened, and my T-shirt felt sticky with sweat.

  When the streetlights came on, I slid out from under the truck. Silence. Worried the angry man might still be looking for me, I crawled out to the street and limped through the alleys to get home. Sam was waiting for me in our basement bedroom.

  “What happened?” His eyes flicked to my various scrapes. “Did the guy catch you?”

  “Nah, I jumped into a carport to hide.” I glanced at my torn jeans. “I got busted up pretty good.”

  “Mom and Dad are real mad at you for being late.”

  “Did you tell?”

  “No, but Mom said you’ll get a good whipping for being so late.”

  “Has anyone talked to them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I better get up there before Dad comes down with the belt.”

  MOM AND DAD SAT ACROSS from each other at the kitchen table. Mom was whining that no one ever listened to her and that the kids never helped around the house.

  When I entered the room, she looked over at me with teary eyes. “Where were you? It’s been dark for hours.”

  Neither one of them mentioned my torn clothes and scraped chin. Dad stared at me in full anger mode, which meant that Mom had won him over to her side. It didn’t matter to her where we were or what we were doing, but when she decided to get upset with one of us, she pushed Dad to deliver a beating—though he didn’t need much urging. It was the one time he didn’t get mad at her.

  Eyes bulging, he stood and pulled off his belt. “You upset your mother, and I won’t tolerate that.”

  I might have laughe
d if he hadn’t been about to beat me—Dad didn’t care what Mom thought about anything.

  He wrapped the leather part of his belt around his hand so the buckle would hit me first, his most recent form of punishment. As if the two of them were following a script, Mom’s tears disappeared and she beamed. Suddenly she had become important to him. It was the only power she had.

  I focused on the living room floor to get ready. Then I raised my head, trying not to make eye contact. But I couldn’t help but look into his eyes. The anger in them made we wonder if that was the way he looked at all the sons of bitches who had it coming. He’d hit me tonight until his rage subsided, but it would have nothing to do with me being late.

  As he approached with the belt and the buckle, I pictured myself resisting torture at the hands of the Japanese after getting caught trying to escape. I did everything to pretend not to be me, but it never worked. I was stuck with being David Crow no matter how much I wished to be someone else.

  Dad was in his trancelike state, talking to himself, lips twitching and eyes darting around unfocused. “My father beat me with a wet rope. He damn near killed me,” he mumbled, as if a vicious beating was a rite of passage between Crow men.

  The first blow was always the worst. It hurt the most, especially if my skin was still raw from the last beating—or if I was all scraped up from narrowly escaping an angry man with a ponytail. A few strikes in the same spot, and blood would flow down my pant legs.

  I winced, fearing the hit of the buckle after the belt whizzed through the air, feeling like a coward. Dad said I should take my beating like a man, the way he always had. But how, exactly, was I supposed to do that? Feel proud that I endured it? Fight back? Was this how Cherokee men made their sons tough? He had no idea what I’d just done. He would have thought it was funny, unless he had to pay for it.