“You’re going to stay to hell away from Shirley,” Keno said immediately.
Junior yawned and sat down. “Interesting. Very interesting.”
“I want an answer,” Keno shouted.
Junior held up his hand and started tagging off points on his fingers. “A. Your sister is old enough to take care of herself. B. She asked me to take her out in the first place. C. We seem to enjoy each other’s company. D. The big brother act is a little dated. It went over great in the gay nineties.”
Keno stood over him, glaring down at him. “What are you doing keeping her out all night, huh?”
“Well really, Mr. Morris,” Junior said lazily. Then he laughed. “Your sister is a very canny gal. She’s good at picking winners, Keno. This time she seems to have picked one. She seems to have inherited all the intelligence in the family.”
Keno picked him up out of the chair and Junior snapped his hands down over Keno’s wrists. They stood motionless and the sweat came out on their faces. Keno’s face was twisted with effort, but he couldn’t break Junior’s hold. Junior laughed again. Suddenly the fight drained out of Keno — right through the hole the champ had drilled in him. His shoulders drooped. Junior released his wrists.
Keno shuffled to the door and mumbled, “Better stay away from her, Franklin.” The door shut gently behind him.
Micky walked over to Junior and hit him open-handed across the face. He said, “I’ve known Shirley since she had skinned knees and bubble gum, kid. I’ll manage you and I’ll book your fights, but I don’t have to like you.”
“Your privilege,” Junior said calmly.
It was two weeks later that I ran into Shirley and she told me how one night they missed the last train, she and Junior, and then they had walked the rest of the night, had watched dawn come. Shirley and I had coffee together and there was a deep hurt in her level gray eyes as she said, “I can’t reach him, Lew. I can’t get to him. I’m an enemy, the same as everybody else. I think he likes being with me. But his guard is always up. Once somebody has been hurt badly enough, they never let that guard down for the rest of their lives. I... I love him, Lew.”
“Is that smart?”
“Can anybody be smart about a thing like that. I’m a year older than he is. Sometimes I feel a hundred years older, and sometimes I feel as if he’s much older than I. He’s odd, Lew. So odd, and so bitter.”
“What are you going to do?”
She shrugged. It was a curiously pathetic and helpless gesture. “Stick around, I guess. Maybe some day he’ll drop the guard.”
I told Micky about it. He cursed softly and said, “Why didn’t the damn fool kid tell me they just missed the train?”
“Have you noticed?” I asked him. “Junior never explains or apologizes. I guess it’s sort of a code with him. Is he still at you about Rastek?”
“Yeah. Every day. What do you think?”
“Maybe he could take him, Micky. Then, for Shirley’s sake, I’d like to take Junior on the big swing. Midwest and the Coast, back along the Gulf.”
“So I’ll see George about a match with Rastek.”
Junior took Rastek, in forty-four seconds of round one. It never should have happened. George was sore as a boil. It bounced Junior from small print to sports page headlines. Junior just happened to nail Rastek solidly with the first punch thrown. Rastek’s bicycle did him no good. Junior caught him and knocked him off it.
I took three boys with me on the big swing. Shirley saw us off at the station. Her eyes were shiny. Junior was very casual, almost elaborately casual.
That trip is in the records. It’s no chore to look it up. The headlines followed us and grew bigger as we went along, as the string grew. We hadn’t planned to fight him so much on the swing, but in some of those bouts he only worked a total of two hundred seconds. Twenty-one knockouts and three decisions. He pushed over some very good boys. Lambert, Smiley Brokaw, Stutson, Berntson, Cradey, Malloy, Crile, Bernstein.
Junior didn’t get what you’d call cocky. It was always that contempt that had been there right from the beginning. The old eyes in the rich-kid face under the brush cut looked out on the world with bleakness, and when the moment came they would blaze with an animal wildness.
There is a type of female attracted to young boxers. They make their approach with all the subtlety of a daily double player shouldering his way to the betting window. But Junior wasn’t having any. He brushed off the hangers-on.
A dozen times Mickey got me on the phone and yelled, “Can’t you stop that dopey kid from telling the press he’s ready for the champ? He’s not ready. He won’t be ready for another two years.”
“He’s eager, Mick.”
“If the Champ wasn’t a spoiler, I’d let him have his shot just to wise him up. But nobody has ever had the stomach to take two shots at the Champ. Put the lid on him, Lew.”
“I can’t. He wants the match.”
The champion is no dope, and neither are his managers. They caught a few of Junior’s bouts and they saw the shape of things to come. They decided that it would be poison to let the kid get too many bouts under his belt, to let get too much experience. The Champ was fairly certain he could put him away in his present stage of development. So he and his cohorts added their yammer to Junior’s. By the time we got back to New York it seemed like everybody in the entire world was all decided that Junior would fight the champion as soon as possible — everybody except Micky and me.
So Micky brought out the projector and the films. “You want to fight the Champ, huh?” Micky asked.
“That would appear to be the general idea,” Junior said loftily.
“Cut the lights, Lew,” Micky directed.
The Champ is something. He’s all chest and arms and squatty legs. No neck at all and a small head. The style borrows something from Henry Armstrong. Drive, drive, drive — every minute. Throw leather. But he’s even harder to hit. The squatty little legs are solid rubber, and in he comes, bounce-bounce-slam, bounce-bounce-slam, bounce-bounce-slam. To the uninformed he would appear to be a slugger, pure and simple, with no class and no deception. But if you watch closely you see the foot feints, the classic blocking, the quick pivot, the clever use of the ropes.
The last film was of the fight where Keno got it. The last whip-punch sent the mouthpiece spinning.
“Lights, Lew,” Micky said. I turned them on. Junior sat, a bit paler than usual, and he licked his lips. “Now how do you like it?” Micky asked.
“I can take him all right,” Junior said softly.
“And how would you go about doing that?” Micky asked.
“Run like hell for six rounds. The hell with the crowd. Spend six rounds going backward as fast as I can. Then start counter-punching him and hope some of the steam has gone out of his legs.”
Mick paced the room in silence for a long time, his cigar canted up at an angle. Then he stood by the windows looking out. Without turning, he said, “Kid, if you’d said anything else — anything — I’d refuse to make the match for you. But now I think you got about a fifty to one chance of taking him. So I’m cashing in on you. They’re so eager to get you quick that we’ll get a break on the percentage. You’re in shape. I’ll try to rush it.”
And he did rush it. He suckered them into taking Junior on last night. That was only three weeks and two days after we watched the movies.
Junior was already almost right. The danger was that I might draw him too fine. So the workouts had to stay light. He saw Shirley every night after she got out of work, but he was always in bed by ten. He was more silent than ever. There weren’t any laughs in him.
Four days ago I had another coffee with Shirley.
“He wants to win so badly,” she said.