The Harder They Fall

  ‘Shove his pride,’ Vince said. ‘You think he’s the only tanker in Las Vegas?’

  ‘But the fight’s the night after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We got all this publicity working for us. There’s seventy-five hundred already in the house. We’re out of pocket if this sensitive fellow doesn’t keep his word like a gentleman.’

  Miniff wiped his forehead nervously. ‘The aggravations I gotta put up with from these stumblebums.’

  ‘Maybe you could slip the guy a mickey,’ Vince suggested.

  ‘Whatta you think I am, a crook?’ Miniff demanded. ‘Eighteen years in the business, I never got mixed up in no rough stuff. No mickeys and no beatin’ up guys. I got principles.’

  ‘You’re breakin’ my heart,’ Vince said. ‘You’re breakin’ my heart. Oney I’m gonna break your little neck if this creep-a yours gives us any trouble.’

  Miniff’s hairy little hand shoved his hat back farther on his head and wiped his face in a convulsive gesture.

  ‘I tell ya the guy won’t budge.’ He turned to me as the more reasonable listener. ‘I’m talkin’ to a wall. His brain is jammed like somebody dropped a rock in the machinery.’

  ‘Tell you what you do,’ I said. ‘Bring the fellow here after his workout this afternoon. Maybe we can get somewhere with him.’

  In a couple of hours Miniff was back with his problem child. He looked like a full-blooded Indian, all right, a tall, powerfully built man, with the long, impressive head of a Navajo warrior. In another time, you couldn’t help thinking, he might have been a great tribal chieftain, but now he was just another scuffed-up pug, the nobility of his face hammered into a caricature of the eternal palooka, the high-bridged, Roman schnoz pushed into his face, ears on him that would look like cauliflowers even to a cauliflower and sunken eyes overhung with scar tissue. Only he had a way of fixing you with those eyes, sort of proud-like and melancholy, that made you want to look away.

  ‘What seems to be the matter, Chief?’ I said.

  ‘Molina don’t knock me out,’ he said.

  ‘Why, you good-for-nothing bum,’ Vince said. ‘What record are you protecting, for Christ’s sweet sake? I suppose you never took a dive before. Why, you been in the tank so long you’re starting to grow fins.’

  The Indian seemed numb to abuse. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘It’s just business,’ I said. ‘There’s no disgrace to it, Chief.’

  The Indian just sat there looking out at us from the depth of his battered dignity. Miniff screamed, Vince threatened and I reasoned, but he just shook his head. Miniff was right, it was just as if a rock had fallen into the mental machinery and the brain had jammed. He sat there immune to abuse, bribery and the danger of physical violence. Maybe it was only a dim protest against a life of profitless punishment that made him slam his mind against us and refuse to submit to further humiliation at the hands of these white-faced jackals riding high on the towering shoulders of an oversized, overrated bum.

  The morning of the fight the Indian was still holding out and all of us were jittery – all, that is, except Toro, who was really beginning to think that boxing came as naturally to him as Luis Acosta had once told him it did. I ponch and he go boom – that’s the way it seemed to Toro as one opponent after another flopped down beneath his ludicrous onslaught.

  As soon as Nick got in, we ran over to his suite to dump our troubles in his lap. The manicurist was just putting the finishing touches on his nails as we entered. Ruby met us at the door on her way downstairs to the beauty parlour, although she looked more as if she had just stepped out of one. The Killer was on the phone making a date for Nick with Joe Gideon, who ran the casino downstairs. Apparently the syndicate had an interest in the joint.

  ‘So you two geniuses can’t handle one dopey fighter,’ Nick said. ‘What would you do if I wasn’t around? You know, that’s why eventually we have to have all the money.’ He looked at his trim, polished fingernails. ‘Tell Miniff to send his boy to me.’

  We went over to the arena, where Toro and the Chief were weighing in. Vince whispered the word to Miniff, who passed it on to the Indian under his hand. At first, Miniff told us, Thunderbird didn’t want any part of it. But Miniff impressed him with what a big man this Latka was and hinted that he might be interested in buying Thunderbird’s contract and taking him East to fight in the Garden. Hope is the blind mother of stupidity, and the big jerk went for it.

  I went back to the dressing room and sat with Toro while he put his clothes on after the weigh-in. He had hit the scales at 279, four pounds more than the last fight. Toro was putting on the grey, double-breasted plaid I had picked out for him in LA. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled at the well-groomed, well-tailored figure he presented.

  ‘You look mighty sharp there, boy,’ I said.

  ‘You take picture?’ Toro said. ‘I send picture to Mama and Papa to show them I am dress up like a de Santos.’

  ‘Sure, we’ll send all you want,’ I said.

  ‘Señora Latka, she is also here?’ Toro asked me as we left the dressing room.

  ‘Yes, she’s here with Nick,’ I said.

  ‘I go see her now,’ Toro said.

  ‘Take it easy. You’ll see her when you see Nick.’

  ‘We go for walk. We talk.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ I said. ‘I suppose Nick’s noticed it too. What do you find to talk about?’

  ‘We talk … nice,’ Toro said.

  ‘In Spanish,’ I said. ‘Tell me in Spanish.’

  ‘The Señora is very kind and sympathetic,’ Toro explained. ‘She is more like the ladies of Argentina. I like to go to church with her. And after church I tell her something about the life of my village. About my family. About the Día del Vino, the first full moon of the harvest time, when the fountain in the village runs wine for all to drink and even the village beggars stagger like lords.’

  Maybe that was all it was, I thought. Ruby, in her instinctual way of reaching out to men, was more like the women of Toro’s village. Perhaps Ruby was only supplying the personal touch which the rest of us were too lazy, too selfish or too busy to supply. But the fear – completely unjustified by anything I had seen and lurking only in the evil back alleys of my mind – that her touch might become too personal prompted me to say, ‘Go a little slow with her, Toro. I’ve seen Nick when he’s mad. I wouldn’t want him mad at me.’

  ‘But there is nothing wrong in what we do,’ Toro said in Spanish. ‘She is a good woman. She goes to church. We do no one any harm.’

  We walked back to the hotel together. ‘This man I fight tonight – big fellow?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, he’s big,’ I said, ‘but you ought to beat him, all right. Just keep throwing punches.’

  I wondered how Nick was making out with that Indian. The Indian wasn’t much, easy to hit and as muscle-bound as Toro, but he was more of a fighting man, with better coordination, and I hated to think what he might do to Toro if he held out on his refusal to go in under wraps.

  Ruby was still down in the beauty parlour, so Toro went up to his room to put away those three chops that would have to sustain him until fight time. I thought it would be interesting to see how Nick was jockeying the Indian, but when I put my head in the door Nick told me this was strictly between him and the boy and to go take a powder for myself. At the bar I met Miniff, who hadn’t been allowed in either. ‘Jeez, I’m worried,’ he said with a sigh of venality. ‘You gotta admit it, my bums has always been reliable. When I say they go, that’s when they go. If this jerk crosses me, it’s terrible for my reputation.’

  About half an hour later, the Indian came down. Miniff beckoned him to the privacy of the men’s room off the bar.

  ‘Well, what happened? Give,’ Miniff begged.

  ‘He told me I shouldn’t say nothing to nobody,’ the Indian said.

  ‘But you’re not gonna ootz us out of that extra dough? You and Nick got together?’

  ‘He’s a pretty smart fella,’ was a
ll the Indian would say.

  Half an hour from fight time I was still as much in the dark as the cash customers. When Benny Mannix came in from the Indian’s dressing room to go through the motions of watching Doc bandage Toro’s hands, I asked him if he knew what was going on.

  Benny shook his head with irritable bewilderment. ‘It beats the hell outa me. Know what the guy does? He takes me aside ’n tells me to go out ’n get him a little piece a chicken wire. Chicken wire, the guy wants! So a couple minutes later when I run down the wire, he says, “That’s good. Now go get a pair of pliers and meet me in the can.” I think the guy’s crossing over to the silly side a the street, so I try to con him out of it. “Okay,” he says, “okay, after the fight I’ll just tell Nick you din wanna cooperate.” “You mean this is Nick’s idea?” I says. “Who else aroun’ here has any ideas?” this Thunderbird comes right back. So I shut my mouth before I catch any more flies and I meet him in the can with the pliers like he asks.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Benny,’ I said. ‘Let me smell your breath.’

  ‘I should drop dead this second if it ain’t like I’m telling you,’ Benny says, offended that I should doubt his veracity. ‘So when we get into the crapper together he says, “Now cut off a little piece.”

  ‘“How small?” I says.

  ‘“Small enough to fit ’n my mouth,” he says.

  ‘“What the hell?” I says.

  ‘“Now have you got a rubber on you?” he says.

  ‘“A rubber?” I says. “Sure, but …”

  ‘“Okay, now slip the wire into the rubber,” he says. “There, that’s it. Now keep it in yer pocket, an’ when you put the mouthpiece in my mouth make sure you got this underneath it so it’ll lie flat against my gums.”’

  ‘Holy Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘I seen ’em do a lot a tricks but this is a new one on me,’ Benny said.

  So that’s the way it was when the fight began. The first time Toro held his left in the Indian’s face, the chicken wire did its work and the blood began to trickle out of one corner of his mouth. But it wasn’t bothering him yet. He fought back. He could punch a little with his left hand and he let it go a couple of times, forcing Toro back. The customers stood up and yelled. It looked as if the Indian could take him. Again you could feel the mass frenzy to see the giant punished and humiliated. Men who were good to their mothers and loved their children shouted encouragement for the Indian with passionate hatred for the hulking, inept figure who retreated before him. But every time Toro pushed his left glove into the Indian’s face, blood came forth to meet it. By the end of the round he looked as if he had stopped an oncoming truck with his face.

  Miniff and Benny did what they could for the cuts between rounds. The Indian came out of his corner with a looping right hand that made Toro grunt, but in the clinch that followed, Toro pawed at his opponent’s face and the Indian’s mouth became a bloody mess. Toro’s gloves were sticky with it too and each time he brushed the Indian’s face they left an ugly red blot. The Indian kept boring in, but the blood pouring out of his mouth was beginning to bother him. Before the round was half over his mouth and Toro’s gloves were so soggy they made a sickeningly squashy sound when they came together.

  ‘Stop the fight, stop the fight,’ some of the ringsiders were beginning to yell. Women hid their faces behind their programmes. The Indian sprang out of his corner with show-off courage, but his face was a bloody mask. He missed a wild swing which sprayed the white shirt of the referee and some of the ringsiders beneath him. Toro backed away and turned to the referee with a question in his eyes. He had no stomach for this. The more tender-hearted among the fans, and those who had wagered on an early knockout were on their feet now, chanting, ‘Stop it, stop it!’ The Indian, seeing the referee move toward him, shook his head and charged in recklessly. But the referee caught his arm and led him, apparently under protest, back to his corner. It was all over. The Giant of the Andes had scored his sixth consecutive victory by a TKO.

  Toro crossed himself as he did before and after every fight. Then he went across the ring to see if the Indian was all right. The Indian, his mouth still bleeding profusely, rose to embrace Toro. The crowd loved it, all their blood-thirst suddenly run to sentimentality. Toro got a fair hand when he left the ring. But everybody stood up and cheered or applauded the Indian as he climbed down through the ropes with his mouth wadded with blood-soaked cotton. The Indian smiled through his pain and mitted the crowd happily. The boys from the reservation, up in the bleachers, screamed his name exultantly and he responded with a wave that was full of pride.

  Nick looked over at me and winked. ‘Good fight,’ he said. It had looked convincing, all right. I wondered what touch of sadism in Nick made him dream up a gimmick like that. Maybe it was just a hard, sound business idea. There was no bloodlust in Nick, just moneylust.

  ‘That was too bloody,’ Ruby said. ‘I hate to see a fight like that.’

  ‘Aah, that was nothing,’ Nick said, pleased with Ruby’s reaction. ‘Ruby misses all the knockouts,’ he said. ‘She’s always hiding her eyes under her hand.’

  ‘I hate to see those boys get hurt,’ she said. ‘At least I’m glad it wasn’t Toro.’

  I walked back to our dressing room. Toro was lying on the table getting a rub-down. Danny was slumped in a chair, staring at the floor. He had been drunk ever since we got to Las Vegas.

  Vince fell into a burlesque pantomime of Danny’s condition. In this act of condescension, performed for my benefit, there was more than a hint of comradeship between us. You and I are the guys who keep this show going, the grimace seemed to say. And I suddenly realised with a sickening shock that my old hostility to Vince, boldly unconcealed on the train going west, had been pushed further back in my mind and discreetly suspended as our common interest in the success of our venture inevitably drew us closer together.

  ‘What you doing tonight, son?’ Vince said. ‘How about me ’n you going out and getting into trouble?’

  I was Vince’s friend. It was a terrible thought. All my insults had bounced off him harmlessly. Their pointed vulgarity had only succeeded in making our relationship more intimate than it would have been if I had merely ignored him. Vince, suffering the unbearable loneliness of the gregarious heel, had taken me for a friend.

  ‘Tell me where you’re going to be so I’ll be sure not to go there,’ I said.

  ‘Catch me at the Krazy Kat around twelve,’ Vince said, just as if I had begged to accompany him. ‘That’s where these divorce dames hang out. Let’s have ourselves a little poon hunt.’

  That’s the way nearly everyone talked along the streets I worked. That’s the way I was beginning to sound myself. But somehow I heard Vince’s words one by one in all their forlorn and godforsaken vulgarity, coming out of that fat white neck rising over the open yellow sports shirt. They were not familiarly meaningless phrases, but separate counts indicting me for my degradation. Instead of meeting the charge head-on, I sidestepped and walked over to the rubbing table and looked down at Toro. Doc was massaging a red splotch along his ribs where the Indian had let those right hands go.

  ‘Nice fight, Toro,’ I said.

  ‘Too much blood,’ Toro said. ‘No like bleed heem too much.’

  ‘He’s worried about the other guy,’ Doc said. His damp, homely face creased into a cheerless smile.

  ‘How about the Indian?’ I asked Doc. ‘Think he’s okay?’

  ‘I guess he’ll live,’ Doc said. ‘But I’ll bet he’ll be eating his dinner through a straw for the next couple of days. Those blood vessels in his gums are probably cut all to hell.’

  I went across the hall to have a look for myself. If the club doctor was going to send him to the hospital I ought to know it. The headlines even popped into my mind – a box on the sports page – MOLINA TKO VICTIM RUSHED TO HOSPITAL. For a second I was horrified to realise this was a daydream, or rather a nightdream of vicious wishfulness.

  Over in the other dressin
g room, the house doc was still working over the Indian. A small crowd of handlers and well-wishers were grouped around the table, their tense, silent faces turned toward the Indian’s terrible mouth.

  Miniff was standing at the sink, with his shirt off, washing his hands and face. For once he was without his hat and his small bald head looked naked and pathetic with nervous blue veins trellising across it. He was so short that he had to stand on tiptoes to look into the mirror.

  ‘How’s your boy?’ I said.

  ‘He ain’t mine no more,’ Miniff said. ‘Soon as I pick up my cheque and pay him off, I kiss him off for good. I want no part of him.’

  ‘This is the first time I ever saw you throw away a dollar,’ I said.

  Miniff picked up the short, straggle-ended cigar butt he had placed carefully on the edge of the sink, and shook his head. ‘I never want to go through nothing like this again. That bum like to drove me crazy. I don’ want no part of him. That screwball almost gets me in wrong with a big man like Latka and then he lets ’em chop his puss up like a hamburger when he coulda stretched out on the canvas in round one, nice and comfortable, like he was home in bed. I’ll never figure that one.’

  ‘He had to save his pride,’ I said.

  ‘Pride!’ Miniff seemed to chew the word and spit it out again. ‘Would you let your mouth get cut to ribbons when allatime you could let yerself down easy without even scraping an elbow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Pride, nuts,’ Miniff said.

  The doc had decided to send the Indian to the hospital for a couple of days. Nothing serious, just superficial haemorrhages, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

  I rushed out to make sure there were a couple of photographers on hand to catch the Indian being loaded into the ambulance. That was the kind of publicity that falls into your lap. You can’t buy it and you can’t dream it up. A small crowd of busybodies pressed around him. A couple called out, ‘Attaboy, Chief!’ The Indian waved feebly. He must have been pretty sick from swallowing all that blood. In his own stupid, and unnecessarily brutal, martyrdom, he had won his victory. To us it had been just another little skirmish in the long campaign, but the Indian had given his blood in a cause neither Nick nor Miniff nor Vince could ever understand.