“How was he supposed to know to?”
“Jick, anybody with a Lick Of Sense At All knows that fight was a big doings. That’s why your father and I and Stanley were there.”
“You were there?” I let out before I thought.
She gave me that look of hers labeled Of Course, You Ninny. “Your father or Stanley neither one told you about The Bet?”
My sixty years of close acquaintanceship with my mother still had given no guide as to whether silence or daylong interrogation was the wiser lubricant to get her to talking. This time I tried a dumb shake of my head.
“Well, I’m not surprised. It certainly wasn’t anything for the two of them to brag about.” She unfastened her gaze from me and seemed to be focusing off into a distance. “We saw the other man that morning just after dawn, you know.”
No, I didn’t. “Saw who?”
“The man Jack Dempsey was going to fight, of course. He came walking up over the brow of the hill ordinary as anything, right past our tent.” I must have looked as though I’d missed the conversational train by some miles, because she deigned to circle back and explain. “We camped that night, your father and Stanley and I, up on the bench there above Shelby. With everybody who’d come to see the fight, you couldn’t get a room in town for love nor money.” She paused ever so briefly, then gave a glint of smile: “Well, for love, maybe. Anyway, we’d simply brought a ridgepole tent—a lot of others did the same, it was a regular tent town there the night before the fight. Your father and I woke up at dawn, out of habit. Stanley was still fast asleep out under our Model T—there’d been a dance the night before and he’d gotten pretty well oiled—and so maybe there was some excuse for him. But your father saw the man as plain as I did. We both knew him right away, his picture and Dempsey’s had been in every newspaper for months. He went right past our open tent flap and said, ‘Good morning, quite a morning.’ We watched him for, oh, most of an hour after that, walking around here and there on top of the bench. Your father figured the man must be worried half to death, to be out wandering around that early on the morning of a fight. I pointed out to him how silly an idea that was. We were up that early every blessed morning of our lives, weren’t we?
“Your father and Stanley,” my mother stated conclusively as if citing the last two mysteries of the universe. “How they ever thought Jack Dempsey would knock the other man out, I will never understand.”
“Maybe because Dempsey knocked out almost everybody he fought?”
“All your father and Stanley had to do was use their eyes,” she went right on. “Jack Dempsey was like somebody trying to hit a bee with a sledgehammer.” To my startlement, she balled up her hands and swung a roundhouse right and then a matching orbit of left haymaker in the air between us. Even at age eighty-four, Beth McCaskill in fists was something to pay notice to.
“Just like that,” she emphasized. “Sometimes he missed by only a little, other times by a lot. But he kept missing. Jick, anyone with a brain bigger than a cherry pit could savvy that there were only two possible reasons. Either Jack Dempsey was missing the other man on purpose, or he just could not manage to hit him squarely. Either way, it came to the same.”
“But as I heard it, Gibbons was getting the cr—pudding beat out of him all through the whole fight.”
“Oh, he was. Especially in the third round. That’s when we started The Bet.”
Dempsey pounded at Gibbons’ body, trying to make him lower his jaw-guarding gloves. With a dozen rounds to go, Gibbons already was breathing heavily. Dempsey missed with a whistling uppercut. He resumed on the body, hitting Gibbons harder and harder until the bell.
“Your father of course set it all off,” my mother declared. “Can’t you just hear him—‘Jack Dempsey is eventually going to connect with one of those and knock that guy into the middle of next week, I’d bet anybody.’ ”
I could hear that, yes, and also the ominous ruffle of what was on its way to my father.
“Naturally,” my mother said imperially, “I told him I would bet him a month of my filling the woodbox against a month of his doing the supper dishes, that the other man wouldn’t be knocked out.” My mother’s turn to shake her head, but with incredulity. “Then Stanley had to get into it.”
I believe it is not too strong to say that my family loved Stanley Meixell, almost as you are meant to love the person beside you at the altar when the bands of gold fasten your lives together. My father was but a redtopped sprig of a homestead boy the day he saw Stanley arrive, a ranger atop a tall horse, sent to create the Two Medicine National Forest. That day set the course of my father’s life. Just as soon as he was big enough he was at the English Creek ranger station in the job of flunky that Stanley contrived for him, and as soon as he entered manhood he emulated Stanley by joining the U.S. Forest Service. By then my mother had come into the picture, and brisk as she was about the shortcomings of the world and particularly its male half, Beth McCaskill adopted that bachelor ranger Stanley Meixell, fussing over him when he shared our supper table as though he were her third small son beside Alec and me. Stanley eventually drank himself into blue ruin, a crash of career and friendship that was to haunt my parents until he righted himself, in their eyes and his own, a full ten years after. But at that earlier point he still had the bottle more or less under control and so the fondness was as thick as the exasperation in my mother’s voice as she told me of Stanley’s Shelby role.
“ ‘Aw, Beth, you’re letting this sharpster husband take advantage of you,’ ” she quoted Stanley’s Missouri drawl with deadly precision. “So of course I bet him too, that I would cook whatever he wanted for Sunday dinners for a month, against his bringing me a batch of fish every week for a month.” She scanned me as if there must somewhere be an explanation of male gullibility. “They were so sure of that Jack Dempsey.”
They sure must have been sure. I recalled that Stanley Meixell actively despised fishing, and dishwater was not my father’s natural element.
The seventh round ended with Gibbons bleeding from nose and mouth and over an eye. In the eighth, Dempsey staggered him with a punch that found the jaw. The fighters traded jabs and hooks, clinched, sparred again. Dempsey swung again for the jaw but missed, swung with his other hand and missed again, then methodically hit Gibbons over the heart. They clinched until the bell.
“The other man was not a pretty sight, I do have to say,” my mother acknowledged. “With the fight only half over, your father was grinning like a kitten in cream. Which must have been what inspired me to up our bet, don’t you think?” I nodded instantly. “A month of my taking out the stove ashes,” she proclaimed as if the upping was occurring again, “against a month of his washing the parts of the cream separator.”
I flinched for my father. Washing the many discs and fittings of a cream separator was one of the snottiest jobs ever.
“Stanley of course couldn’t stand prosperity either,” my mother continued, “so I bet him a gallon of chockecherries every week—I pointed out that he could pick them while he was doing all that fishing—against my keeping him in pie and cake for a month.”
Gibbons looked like a drowning man clinging to a rock as he clinched with Dempsey in the twelfth round, taking repeated punishment in the body. In the thirteenth, Dempsey almost wrestled him off his feet in a clinch, then threw a hook which Gibbons blocked with an elbow. At close quarters, Gibbons hit Dempsey twice, then a swing from Dempsey grazed his chin. Dempsey aimed for the jaw again, and missed. Gibbons struck him with one hand and then the other. They backed off and sparred until the bell.
Did she have it in mind from the start, hidden and explosive there in the ante? Or did it arrive to her as pure inspiration, Madame Einstein suddenly divining the square root of the universe? There between rounds thirteen and fourteen, my mother coolly bet those two rubes of hers the task of plucking her fifty spring chickens for canning, against a pair of handstitched deerhide dress-up gloves she would make for each of t
hem if she lost.
And there my father and Stanley dangled in the noose of their own logic. Dempsey was whaling the ribcage off Gibbons with those body blows. Surely Gibbons’ mitts had to drop, inevitably one of Dempsey’s smashing tries had to find an open jaw. Not to mention the mutual vision of two forest rangers arriving at community dances with their workday hands princely in soft yellow deerskin, handstitched. But the plucking of fifty chickens . . .
By then the heat in the Shelby arena was tropical. People had draped handkerchiefs under their hats down the back of their sun-hit heads and necks so that the scene resembled Arabia, remembered my mother. Probably not all the sweat on my father and Stanley Meixell was solar, for now my mother was making philosophical remarks to Shelby at large about the surprising number of pikers in the ranks of the U.S. Forest Service.
Stanley and my father turned to each other.
One gritted out, “In for an inch, in for a mile, I guess, huh?” The other nodded painfully.
When Gibbons survived the fourteenth round, the crowd threw seat cushions into the ring in exultation. The boxers shook hands as the final round began.
Dempsey crowded Gibbons, Gibbons held onto Dempsey. Dempsey hit Gibbons in the body with each hand, then missed with a punch at the jaw. Gibbons reeled out of range, accepted two blows, and held onto Dempsey. Dempsey pulled back and fired a fist at Gibbons’ jaw. It sailed over Gibbons’ neck as the final bell rang.
The referee, who was also the only fight judge, raised Dempsey’s hand to signal that he was winner and still champion.
Gibbons had the victory of the solitary, of the journeyer alone beyond what we had been—he was not destroyed.
Thus the stew of dishwater and fishline and chokecherries and chicken feathers that my father and Stanley Meixell existed in for the rest of the summer of 1923.
• • •
“The melodious thunk of Thelonious Monk, the razzmatazz of the snazziest jazz, is the tuuune my heart beattts for youuu . . .”
From Riley’s merry uproar in the shower that evening, you’d have thought he had just gone fifteen rounds in the ring himself cleaning Jack Dempsey’s clock. Mariah too looked almost ready to purr, and for my part I was glad enough to have been the inspiration, by proxy of Beth McCaskill, for their “other man” tale. Yet something uneasy kept tickling at me after supper there in the Bago as Mariah and I waited for Sinatra to finish his shower so that the three of us could head uptown and see what was what in Shelby after they turned the night on. Was I imagining, or did it seem that day by day where she and Riley were concerned, corners came off a little more? That the way they were managing to merge in their work was maybe causing them to creep beyond that? That the two of them had begun showing such civil tendencies toward each other that if you didn’t know there had been a bloodthirsty divorce between them you would think they were companionably, uhm, merged?
Yet again, Mariah on the other side of the table nook from me did not appear particularly smitten with anybody except possibly the inventor of the camera. She was intent at marking up contact sheets of her day’s Shelby photos with a grease pencil, and simultaneously eating a microwarmed apple turnover for dessert. With the same hand. Employing the utensil while holding the grease pencil tucked at a writing angle between her index and second fingers looked like there was every risk of forking her contact sheets or crayoning her pastry, but that was Mariah for you.
Conversational me, I waxed: “So, did you get the picture you wanted today?”
“I never do quite get that one,” she responded between some slashes of cropping marks and a bite of turnover. “But maybe today’s is a little closer to it.” That chosen picture when it appeared with Riley’s story extended all the way across the newspaper page: the wide, wide tan northern horizon as Gibbons would have seen it on his fight day dawn, absolute rim of the world blade-straight across human eyespan, but on that line of earth the bits of promontory that are the Sweetgrass Hills—a cone of dune, space, a blunter humped swell, space, another dune. As if saying no brink, even the planet’s, stays so severe if taken one strip at a time.
By now Riley was trying the monkey-thunky stanza about the seventeenth different way and still didn’t sound to me within hailing distance of any tune. Meanwhile Mariah had polished off both dessert and contact sheets and gone to putting on earrings for the evening, dangly hoops festooned with tiny pewter roses. Doing so, she remarked: “I always have wondered why he never goes on to the rest of a song.”
“Yeah, well, this rig doesn’t hold enough hot water for him to think his way past the first verse, is my guess.” Her raised arms as she fastened the earrings brought up a point I would rather not have noticed. Two points, actually, making themselves known where the tips of her breasts tested the fabric of her green blouse. Mariah had showered before supper and pretty plainly her bra went missing in the aftermath. Be damned, though, if I was going to tell a thirty-five-year-old daughter how to dress herself.
The laundered Riley at last appeared, declaring Mariah and I had kept him waiting long enough. Any social suspicion I had was not borne out by him either, for although he gave Mariah a commendatory glance he passed up the chance to say anything flirty and just ushered us out into the night by yapping out a ring announcer’s announcement of round sixteen.
We went north of the railroad tracks to a bar called the Whoop-Up, on Riley’s insistent theory that the places across the tracks are always more interesting.
More interesting than what, I should have asked him the instant we set foot inside the sorry-looking enterprise.
Floor that must have been mopped annually whether it needed it or not. Orangish walls. Pool table, its green felt standing out like a desperate sample patch of lawn. Total crowd of three, one of them the bartender pensively hunched over a chess board at the near end of the bar. Nobody was smoking at the moment, but the barroom had enough accumulated tobacco smell to snort directly.
Perhaps symptomatically, bar stools were few and we ended up perched right next to the extant two customers, beer drinkers both, the beef-faced variety who still look like big kids even though they’re thirty-some. Riley and me they gave minimum nods, Mariah and her blouse they gave maximum eyeballing. With distinct reluctance the bartender left his chess cogitation long enough to produce my scotch ditch and Mariah’s Lord ditch, Riley meantime whistling tunelessly as he did his habitual shopping of the bottles behind the bar. “Lewis and Clark blackberry brandy,” he eventually specified. “Always a good year.”
The bartender went back to staring at his chess board. The two beer consumers resumed muttering to each other about how life was treating them. The three of us sipped. The most activity was generated by the clock above the cash register, one of those just barely churning ones that flops a new advertising placard at you about every half minute. Before long I was forcing myself not to count the number of times the ad for DEAD STOCK REMOVAL, with a cartoon drawing of a cow with a halo, 24-HOUR SERVICE, flopped into view.
“I’m trying to remember,” Riley murmured to Mariah after a spell of this whoopee in the Whoop-Up. “Did we live this nerve-tingling kind of life before we were divorced?”
“Every night was an extravaganza,” she assured him with almost a straight face.
Any fitting response to that seemed to elude Riley, and he focused off toward the bartender who was staying as motionless as his chess pieces. Riley of course grew curious. The two at the end of the bar near us did not look like chess types. Ever interrogative, Riley put forth to the bartender: “Where’s your other player?”
“Sun City, Arizona. Take turns calling each other every fifteen minutes with a move.”
That floored even Riley, at least briefly. But sure enough, on the dot when a quarter past came the bartender reached to the phone, punched a bunch of digits, rattled off what sounded like pawn to queen four, and hung up.
Activity picked up too at my ear nearest the beer pair. “Tell you, Ron, I don’t know what you got going
with Barbara Jo, but don’t let her get you in front of no minister. This marriage stuff is really crappy. You take, Jeannie’s mom is always on my back about why don’t we come over more. But we go over there and the stuff she cooks, she never salts anything or anything, and I don’t eat that crap without no salt on it. Last time she called up and asked Jeannie why we weren’t coming over, I told Jeannie to tell her I had to lay down and rest. Then there’s Jeannie’s dad, he just got dried out down at Great Falls. Cranky old sonofabitch, I think they ought to let him have a few beers so he wouldn’t be so much of a craphead, is what I think. And you know what else, Jeannie’s brother and sister-in-law had a Fourth of July picnic and didn’t even invite us. That’s the kind of people they are. Jeannie and I been talking a lot lately. I told her, I about had it with her crappy family. Soon as the first of the year and I get enough money ahead to buy my big bike, I’m heading out to the coast and go to school somewhere.”
“Yeah?” Ron responded. “What in?”
“Social work.”
Our sipping went on as if we had glassfuls of molasses, so I admit it was an event out of the contagiously drowsy ordinary when Mariah took herself off to the ladies’ room. She didn’t realize it but she had company all the way, the double sets of bozo eyeballs from beside me. “Divorced, did I hear them say?” the nearer of the two, the Ron one, checked with the other in a muffled tone.
“Yeah, I heard the word,” confirmed the other bar stool resident. “A free woman. Always the best price.”
“She looks sweet enough to melt in your mouth, don’t she,” said the first.
“I’d sure like to give that a try,” pined the other.
“Like to, hell. I’m gonna. You just watch.”
I had turned and was sending them a glower which should have melted their vocal cords shut, but it is difficult to penetrate that much haze of beer and intrinsic lard. Nor was goddamn Riley any help. “Don’t look at me,” he murmured. “She was only ever my wife. You’re stuck with her as a daughter permanently.”