They slowed to a walk, still tossing shadow punches as they angled toward the barns past a regulation boxing ring set up under a grove of cottonwoods with rough bleachers arranged for maybe forty, fifty spectators. It was full daylight now.
They had the old converted feed barn to themselves. A sprung hardwood floor, a ring, a trio of heavy bags hanging on chains from one of the ceiling beams, two speed bags screwed to the wall on metal frames. The place smelled like every gym: rosin, stale sweat, unwashed socks and jocks. Over this, faintly, the unfamiliar sweet-sour memory of fermented silage, under it an acrid iodine tang he realized was dried blood.
This was for real! This was professional! Damn, he was glad to be here! Ned handed him a pair of cracked, sweat-stiff gloves and started to pull on a pair of his own.
“We spar a little to cool down before we go eat.”
“Oh, uh... should you do this before you box with Jantzen?”
“I just wanna show you a couple things.” Ned gave him a rubber mouthpiece to protect his teeth. “Hey, how can you tell if a girl’s wearing falsies?” Dunc shook his head. “Falsies taste like rubber.”
In the ring Ned kept his feet solidly on the canvas, sliding them, slightly crouched. Dunc tried to ape his stance.
Ned said something that sounded like “Throw a few.” Dunc started sending out tentative jabs. Ned slipped his rubber to say, “I told you to throw ’em. Put some beef into ’em.”
He put his mouthpiece back in and Dunc started putting his arms and shoulders into the punches. None of them hit anything except air or Davenport’s gloves. Getting frustrated, he threw harder punches, a real flurry of punches, roundhouse swings off the floor, now heavy-armed. Ned wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You got strength but... Here, lemme show you something.”
Dunc was reeling backward, vision blurred, his nose flowering blood. Ned had eight fists, all hitting him at once, but without real force: quick light jabs. He tried to block them, but each time Ned’s glove was tagging him elsewhere. A final one in his gut with some muscle in it curled him over. His eyes were watering. A gentle open hand laid against his face pushed him off balance backward so he bounced off the ropes.
“An’ you meet an uppercut comin’ off the floor, an’ you’re kissin’ canvas.”
Dunc stood with his head hanging, his gloved hands on his knees, nose dripping blood on the canvas as he tried to get his breath back. His ears were ringing.
“You gotta teach me how to do that,” he panted. His vision was clearing. “I’d see ’em coming, but I couldn’t stop ’em.”
The fighter was pulling off his gloves. “C’mon, a little rubdown an’ then breakfast.”
Gimpy Ernest and Artis were standing on the front veranda watching them come toward the ranch house.
“Joe Louis once said that if you see an opening, it’s too late. You gotta already have hit the other guy. Otherwise—”
“I’ll be kissing canvas.”
They were both laughing as they went up the weathered steps to the veranda. Ned faked a punch at the dour crippled man’s belly, making him flinch, then opened his arms to Artis.
She avoided his bear hug. “You’re all sweaty, lover.”
The showers were in a converted equipment shed: concrete floor, a few tinny lockers, some benches to sit on. The hot sluicing water felt wonderful. Afterward they lay facedown, nude, on a pair of towel-covered tables to be worked on by a brace of masseurs. Dunc had never had a rubdown before. As strong fingers pungent with witch hazel massaged, rotated, delved, soothed, he forgot his nudity and almost fell asleep.
They each ate a pound of steak sizzling in butter, aided by six eggs each and abetted by a mountain of hash browns and about a half a loaf of toast. Dunc got as many glasses of milk as he wanted. He wanted a lot.
“You can ride into town with one of the guys to get your stuff from the rooming house.” The big fighter dug in his pocket, came out with a ten-dollar bill. “Here. You’re gettin’ twenty-five bucks a week an’ room and board. Just be back by three o’clock for Jantzen.”
A lot of money. He rode in with a man named Max. “The train station at two-thirty,” Max said, and drove off, a battered Nevada license plate swinging off the rattly pickup’s rear bumper by a lone screw.
Dunc walked six blocks to the rooming house and collected his yellow gym bag. The large-bodied landlady said with instant hostility that he didn’t have any refund coming just because he hadn’t slept in the room. He said he didn’t expect any.
At a smoke shop with a rack of paperbacks, he picked up a two-bit Signet edition of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. After being seduced by a chocolate malt at a soda fountain, he let the inevitable one-armed bandit hold him up for his change, and ended up on a train station platform bench, reading.
When Max honked the horn, he’d just got to the part where the teenage prostitute had come to Caulfield’s hotel room for a five-dollar “throw,” and Caulfield had chickened out. Even as Dunc would have done, probably even if Artis was making the offer.
When they got back, cars full of newsmen and hangers-on and avid-eyed women were pulling into the yard. Gimpy Ernest was there. Artis was not. Flashbulbs popped and were ejected onto the ground as fresh ones were snapped into place. Ned wore satin trunks and a light robe with his name embroidered on it. He stood in the outdoor ring, looking out at the well-filled bleachers, nodding to this person, cracking a joke to that.
He saw Dunc standing near the ring, gestured with a gloved hand. Unlike this morning, his fists now were taped to protect them. He kept banging them together.
“Hey, Dunc, c’mon up an’ be one of my cornermen.”
The fat Negro who’d been Ned’s masseur was wearing a T-shirt that had NITRO NED emblazoned on it. He was getting the spit bucket and water bottle arranged. He grinned, stuck out a huge black paw.
“Wesley Harding Jones. Wes.”
“Pierce Duncan. Dunc.”
“You ever tended a fighter before?”
“Nope.”
“No sweat. This ain’t but patty-cake anyway.”
Jantzen climbed through the ropes on the other side of the ring. He was even bigger than Ned, his body white but his face and neck burned dark by the sun like a farmer’s. It wasn’t a face, it was a mask: scar tissue massed over the eyes, the nose a broad splodge between the shapeless lumps of ear gristle on the sides of his head. He grinned vacantly across the ring at Ned.
But when the bell was struck, Jantzen seemed to go crazy, leaping from his corner, snorting, arms windmilling. He hit hard, but Ned picked blows out of the air like swatting flies, and every once in a while would work a lightning combination of his own, thunk thunk THUD, each blow driving Jantzen back. His famous right was never uncorked.
After the caravan of newspeople and hangers-on had driven back toward Vegas, Jantzen asked anxiously, “Ned, I done all right, huh?”
“You done great,” said Ned, putting an arm around the punchy fighter’s shoulders.
Later, when Gimpy Ernest had limped away taking his apparently permanent sour expression with him, Dunc saw Ned slipping the big punch-drunk brawler a fistful of folding money.
Chapter Thirteen
The church was empty and so was the confessional. Dunc went back out into the sunlight feeling relief Heel tried to go to confession and no one was there. He hadn’t done murder, maybe the only truly mortal sin, but he’d helped, jerking the scattergun from Hent’s hand, holding Hent down so the knife could go into his belly. Yet even now he was flooded with confusion about the part he had played. So how could he make confession?