He had hired Guild as some sort of patsy.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I told her how you are about seeing women right before a fight.”
“It’s all right,” Victor Sovich said to Kane, his pudgy trainer. She stood in the doorway after Kane left. She looked crisp in her white dress, and beautiful. In her right hand was a suitcase.
Sovich smiled as she walked into the dressing room. “You did it, huh?”
“My mother is not happy.”
“She’ll survive.”
“She says you’ll get tired of me and throw me away. Or do something worse.”
“You know how mothers are.”
She came over and stood by the table he sat on. He had been rubbed down. He smelled harsh. The gloves had been put on his hands. “You seem so calm.”
“I am calm.”
“You don’t ever get afraid?”
“What’s to be afraid of?”
“Do you suppose you’ll ever marry me?”
“I thought we were talking about boxing?”
“Is my mother right, Victor? Are you that kind of man?”
He brought her to him and put his face into her soft breasts. “I’m not exactly forcing you to go with me at gunpoint.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“What did I tell you about the next time you asked me that? I said I wouldn’t tell you anymore.”
“Are you ashamed to tell me your feelings?”
He laughed. “No. But I am tired of repeating myself.”
If he wouldn’t repeat himself, she would repeat himself for him. “You told me you wanted me to go with you.”
“If I said it, I must have meant it.”
“You told me that I was beautiful and that you have never felt this way about any woman.”
“I’m pretty good with the words, aren’t I?”
“You said that if everything went all right that perhaps someday we would be married.”
“Oh, I did, did I?”
“Yes.”
“And how much did I have to drink?” He smiled and brought her tender body to his again.
“It was very hard saying good-bye to my children.”
“I’ll bet.”
“They cried so hard I could hear them three blocks away.”
“They’ll get over it. You know how kids are.”
“You don’t care about them, do you?”
Just then his trainer knocked again. He held up a bottle. “This’ll be your last drink before the fight.”
He was happy for the chance not to get into the mess about her children. He held out his thick arm. “I could use some water.”
He took the bottle and drank. The water tasted odd. He assumed it was from the well out here.
Finished, he handed the trainer back the bottle.
The trainer left.
Victor said, “Let’s not talk anymore. Let me just hold you.”
“You don’t care about my children, do you?” she said. There were tears in her voice.
Victor sighed. “This isn’t what I need right now. You understand?” He paused, then spread his arms for her. At first she would not come into the circle he made for her. She stood and stared like a frightened animal. Her tears made her seem much younger and quite vulnerable. Victor found this very erotic.
More softly he said, “Come here. Please.”
“Will you say you love me?”
“Yes. If that’s what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say it because you want to say it.”
Women were so simple, he told himself. All you had to do was shave and wear clean clothes and know when to tell them the right lies and they were yours.
So of course he told her that he loved her, and he told her that it was something that he wanted to say.
Her tears then were not of remorse but of gratitude. She thanked him in the same little-girl way she thanked him after they had made love.
But even as he held her, he was tiring of her. This would not be a long one. He liked them with some fight in them, and there was almost no fight left in her at all anymore.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The fight started at 3:43 that afternoon.
In all, 4,341 paying customers watched it. An additional one hundred policemen, army personnel from a nearby fort, and Mesquakie Indians from a reservation witnessed the bout.
In faces were pipes, cigarettes, cigars, and turdy lumps of chewing tobacco; in hands were soda pop, spafizzes, lemonade, and beer; on tongues were cheers for Sovich, curses for the colored man, and boos whenever the referee had the audacity to remind Sovich that there were, after all, rules to this contest.
It was ninety-four degrees when the fight started, and there was no wind. The latrines, filled with piss and feces, were rancid enough to spoil some people’s enjoyment of the boxing match. The people in the confection tents worried that they would not have enough soda pop and beer to last the fight, particularly if the colored man surprised everybody and managed to stay upright for any length of time.
Occasional female faces dotted the crowd. These women generally fit into two classes-the girlfriends (as opposed to brides) of men who wanted to feel their girls were good sports, and the odd woman who had developed a genuine taste for the blood game. The former tended to squeal and bury their faces in a manly shoulder when things got nasty in the ring. The latter showed a silence and fascination stonier even than the men’s.
The first round surprised everybody. Rooney did not do so badly. He did not do all that well, true, but he managed to avoid several uppercuts and to dance away from two hard right crosses Sovich tried to inflict on him. Once Rooney even managed to duck a bolo punch he saw only peripherally. Even the meanest of white men had to pay him begrudging respect for that one. If nothing else, Rooney’s first-round performance implied that this might be, for a time anyway, something resembling a real boxing match rather than a carnival sideshow.
The second round immediately put the fight back in the sideshow category. Sovich threw three left hooks, each one of which caught Rooney square on the jaw. The second time he dipped to one knee and shook his wide, ugly head to clear it of cobwebs. With this, he brought the white crowd alive. They started yelling “Nigger,” and when whites yelled “Nigger,” the fight was only starting.
The third round was more even. Rooney landed two fair punches on Sovich’s shoulders and one on Sovich’s head. These blows did not seem to hurt Sovich especially, but they did infuriate him. Sovich had been hoping that the colored boy would have been set down for good by now. He rallied, of course, pasting Rooney with several powerful body shots, one of which lifted Rooney half an inch off the canvas.
By this time the temperature had risen to ninety-seven degrees. In the fourth round, Sovich took complete command again. Two ringing shots to the head and three quick kidney punches once more brought Rooney to one knee. For the first time the referee began seriously evaluating Rooney’s demeanor and behavior. He paid special attention to Rooney’s eyes.
In the fifth round, Rooney shocked everyone, most especially himself, by slamming a roundhouse right to Sovich’s forehead and pushing him back into the ropes, where he followed up with some solid but not spectacular body blows.
Sovich got out of the round, but barely.
“What the hell’s going on in there, Victor?” John T. Stoddard asked in the corner while they waited for the next round to begin.
Sovich’s entire torso was heaving. “Must be the heat.”
“Do I need to remind you how much we’ve got riding on this?”
“You think he’s going to beat me?” Sovich managed a smile that did not quite convince either himself or Stoddard of his skills at the moment.
“Forget about giving them a show. Just put him to the canvas. You understand?”
The bell rang.
“You understand?” Stoddard shouted into Sovich’s ear.
“Yes,” Victor Sovich said, spitting a mouthful of saliva and blood next to Stoddard’s shoe. “Yes, you son of a bitch. I understand.”