Ed Gorman: Blood Game

“You going to see the fight tomorrow, Mr. Reynolds?” the bartender asked.

“Isn’t everybody?” Reynolds tried to make a joke of it. “Dam near, from what I hear. You have tickets?”

“I bought one today, matter of fact.”

“You’re lucky. I have to work.”

“It’ll be some fight.”

“The colored guy’s going to get killed. You’ve heard about Sovich, haven’t you?”

“He’s killed several colored boys, from what I gather.”

“You gather right.”

Reynolds eyed him. “You like prizefighting?”

“Sure. Don’t you, Mr. Reynolds?” The bartender had sort of a high voice for somebody who was so chunky and had such massive hands.

“I don’t know. I always think I’m going to like it, and then the blood starts flowing-” He shook his head. “I just don’t know if I do or not.”

“Well, tomorrow’s going to be special.”

It sure is, Reynolds thought. I’m going to have to shoot somebody. And with the way things have been going, I ’m going to kill him by accident.

“Special? You mean Sovich?”

The bartender nodded, wiped out the inside of a schooner with his white towel. “Sure, Mr. Reynolds. It isn’t likely a town this size is going to see him again.”

Six customers came in through the front door. They were laughing and slapping each other on the back. One, very drunk, was singing. He sounded Swedish. He was off-key.

The bartender moved down the bar to serve them.

This was what Reynolds had wanted, anyway. Solitude. He liked to stand at a bar and think through his problems and plan his robberies.

Tonight he’d gone to an alley with the Navy Colt his old man had owned. He needed to practice firing. His ineptitude with firearms was obvious. People assumed because you were a good thief you were also good with a gun. In fact, most of the robbers Reynolds knew were peaceful men. They would rather give themselves up than be shot or shoot at somebody.

He agreed with Stoddard that the robbery would look more believable if somebody was shot. Victor Sovich was less likely to be suspicious.

But he wondered how it would feel, shooting a man like that. Just shooting him.

He had a few more drinks-thankfully, the bartender got to talking with the group that had just come in and left Reynolds alone-and then of course he started thinking about Helen again.

Things had been very, very good with Helen. They’d made a lot of plans, including a family and a cabin by a lake they could share with her cousin in Wisconsin. They were even talking about what parish they were going to belong to (Helen was partial to St. Michael’s; he to All Saints), and then it just had all gone to hell. He wished he were better at crying. Being a small man, though, he’d carefully taught himself not to cry. He needed every vestige of manliness he could summon. But sometimes crying would feel good, and he knew it. To just goddamn sit down and bawl like a baby. He’d seen his old man do it in the last failing months of the old man’s life, when the black lung had gotten especially bad and when he coughed up blood more and more. He could never have imagined the old man crying. But there he was in bed, with his wife holding him as if he were her child and not her husband, and he was bawling away without shame. The old man didn’t have her faith in the afterlife. He thought we were just like road dogs, nothing but ribs and a skull left of you, and then not even that after a time.

“Why don’t you have a drink on me, Mr. Reynolds?”

“Sure. What’s the occasion?”

“The fight tomorrow. Those men down there rode all the way over from Chicago to see it. They say it’s going to be one hell of a fight, and the colored guy’s going to be lucky he doesn’t get killed.”

The bartender poured him a drink.

“You be sure and go now, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Oh, I’ll be sure. Don’t worry about that.”

He wished there was some way he could explain to this Guild that he was really sorry he had to shoot him.

“Well, you not only be there but you enjoy yourself, you hear now, Mr. Reynolds?”

Sometimes Reynolds suspected that the bartender fixed himself good, hard drinks when nobody was watching. You could see this in the way he walked after a certain hour.

“I’ll try to enjoy myself,” Reynolds said. “I’ll do my damnedest.”

“That’s the spirit, Mr. Reynolds. That’s the spirit.”

Reynolds had two more drinks and then walked back to his sleeping room. He propped the window up with a book and stripped down to his shorts and lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. The smoke was gray in the leaf-shadowed light from the street. He thought of Helen and going with her dressed up to mass every Sunday. Jesus, but how sweet that would have been. Then he thought of this Guild he had to shoot tomorrow. He was going to get him in the calf and make it fast. In the calf there wouldn’t be any way he could go wrong. If he tried to shoot him in the arm, maybe he’d hit the chest. Then things could go very wrong.

He lay there finishing his cigarette and then they started, the tears. He had to keep them down because the man on the other side of the wall would hear them and tell everybody in the boardinghouse.

He lay on the bed in the leaf-shadowed light all curled up like a little kid. His thin body jerked and started with his silent tears. He tasted them in his throat and his mouth and his nose.

He kept thinking of Helen and how he still loved her and how he would always love her. All she’d asked was that he’d give up being a thief, and at first it had seemed easy, but after a few weeks he’d realized that that was all he knew and that working a time clock job was just never going to work.

He wondered now who he was crying for, himself or Helen. Probably both of them.

He had another cigarette. Gradually his tears stopped. He reached over to the nightstand and picked up the Navy Colt.

He pointed it at the wall and made a small popping sound with his mouth, imitating the sound a gun makes.

He wished it were tomorrow afternoon. He wished it were over with.

They started arriving early on Saturday morning. They came by train, stagecoach, buckboard, horse. They came in ones and twos and threes and whole families. They came from farms and factories and neighboring towns. The local newspaper would make note that one man had been four days traveling and had come better than two hundred miles. Many of them hit restaurants and hotels and the local YMCA, but the majority of them sought out taverns and pumprooms. This was the sort of occasion you started getting drunk for early in the day.

Out on the edge of town, where the bleachers had been set up and a large canvas ring was in the process of being erected, there were already more than three hundred fans who had come early for the best possible seats. It was not yet eight A.M., and two men had already been arrested for drunk and disorderly and another for indecent exposure, the result of taking a pee behind a tree without noticing the fact that a family was having a picnic nearby. The temperature was nearing ninety, the humidity oppressive. Many of the police wore the tan khaki of the auxiliary policeman. These cops looked especially young, trying to swagger around with their hands on their nightsticks but not quite knowing how to do it without looking somewhat ridiculous. The pickets had arrived, too, ten ladies in crisp summer pastels bearing signs that read BOXING IS IMMORAL and WE ARE NOT ANIMALS. A reporter from Quincy spent an hour with them, making note of their various complaints and trying to hide his own delight over the fact that today he was finally going to see Victor Sovich fight.