Ed Gorman: Blood Game

Rooney said, “You tell Sovich not to kill me.”

“I’ll tell him, Rooney.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“I ain’t got nothing against him. He shouldn’t have nothin’ against me.”

“I’ll talk to him, Rooney. You can bet I will.”

Rooney sighed. “Maybe I’ll retire after this one.”

Stoddard said, “That’s something to think about, Rooney. That sure is something to think about.”

He and Guild left soon after.

Rooney sat in the chair. There was a fly in the room. Every few minutes Rooney tried to slap it down. He had no luck.

He thought about the fighter he’d poisoned that time. The kid wasn’t supposed to die. All Rooney had wanted was to slow him down enough to beat him good. Then the kid up and died.

Rooney got up and paced. The sweat was now chill on his back, even with the heat. He was thinking of picket fences and small thatched cottages. He was thinking of a good woman with wide hips and a real way with children.

But he knew better, Rooney did. He knew it wasn’t going to happen for him. Ever.

He stared out the window at the first hundred or so fans who surrounded the large ring.

There was only one thing they’d come here to see today, and Rooney knew only too well what that was.

Twenty minutes later, inside the office where the gate receipts would be kept, John T. Stoddard handed Guild a Sharps and said, “I want you to shoot anybody who comes through that door during the fight.”

“Somehow I don’t think your permission is enough. To kill somebody, I mean.”

“Anybody who tries to get through there is doing so for only one reason. To take the gate money.”

The office was snug, with two oak rolltop desks on the east and west walls, a bookcase filled with leather-bound legal volumes, a map of Dakota Territory, and one wall lined with advertisements for various brands of pipes and smoking tobacco. Sunlight fell hot on the floor. In the comer Stephen Stoddard sat at a noisy typewriter filling up a white sheet of paper with black-lettered information. He wore a white straw boater. Inside his coat was a lump that had to be a gun.

“I’ll keep the Sharps, but I’ll be using it only as a last resort.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past Victor.”

“He probably wouldn’t put anything past you.”

Stoddard surprised Guild by taking his gibe seriously. “That supposed to mean something?”

Stephen Stoddard turned away from the typewriter. He was curious about his father’s reaction to Guild’s harmless remark.

“I said, is that supposed to mean something?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Then why’d you say it?”

“I was making a joke.”

“I don’t find it one damn bit funny.”

“You could always get somebody else for this job.”

“A little late, isn’t it, Mr. Guild? Two goddamn hours before the first preliminary fight starts?”

“Dad, I really don’t think he meant anything by that,” Stephen Stoddard said. He wore a white shirt with a high, starched collar, red arm garters, and a white straw boater. His trousers were dark blue and his shoes white.

“Did I ask you, Stephen?”

“No, I suppose not but-”

“Then you keep your goddamn nose out of my business, you hear me?”

“But Dad, all I said was-”

Stoddard moved across the room with easy grace. He poked a plump pink finger in Stephen’s face. “Out of my goddamn business, you understand me?”

Stephen managed to look more miserable than usual. He could not meet his father’s gaze.

“You understand me?”

Stephen scarcely whispered, “Yes, sir.”

“Now you come on with me and walk the grounds.”

For the first time, a look of anger showed clearly on Stephen’s face. “I’m going to stay here, Dad, with Guild.”

“The hell you are.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me that way.”

“That’s just the way I’m talking, Dad. Just the way.”

Stoddard glared at his son and began to sputter something but stopped himself.

His glare turned to Guild. “You’d better watch yourself, Guild. You’d better watch yourself pretty damn close.”

Stoddard turned and was gone.

Stephen Stoddard could not meet Guild’s eyes. He went back to the typewriter and began pounding away again.

Guild watched him. He knew it wasn’t his place to say anything, but he didn’t have any choice. “You don’t owe him, son.”

Stephen continued to type, his back to Guild. “It’s none of your affair, Mr. Guild.”

“I don’t like to see people suffering.”

“I’m not suffering.”

“Sure you are, son. Sure you are.”

Stephen turned around and faced Guild. “He’s my father.”

“I know he’s your father. He’s also a bastard, and he’s particularly a bastard to you, his own son.”

“He means well.”

“The hell he does. Your father has never meant well in his life.”

“You’re suggesting what?”

“That you leave. Get a job of your own. Show him you won’t take his abuse anymore.”

“It would kill him.”

“Because you left?”

“Yes.”

Guild rubbed at his face and sighed. “Son, he doesn’t care about you.”

“I’m the only family he’s got.”

Guild sat down in the office chair. He angled it away from Stephen. He put his Texas boots up on the rolltop desk and took out a cigarette and lighted it.

“You’re some kid.”

Stephen was already back to his typing. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

Guild inhaled deeply. He watched the blue smoke emerge from his mouth. He tried a couple of smoke rings. They almost worked, but not quite. “You want to stay here with me?”

“Why? You don’t want me to stay?”

“Fine with me. As long as you know what you’re getting into.”

“What am I getting into?” Stephen asked this with just a hint of mockery in his voice.

“There’s always some risk when you have this much money.”

“I’ve been around this much money before.”

“But we’re isolated here. Thieves could get in and out-”

Stephen shook his head. The white straw boater jiggled some. “I’m ready for any eventuality, Mr. Guild.” From inside his blue coat he took out a Colt.45. “After all, it’s the family money at stake.”

“I’m not sure it’s ‘family’ money, son. A big part of it is supposed to belong to Victor.”

“Oh, yes,” Stephen said, almost as an afterthought. “Victor.” It was going to be a very long afternoon, Guild thought.

“God did not mean for us to mingle the races, even in fisticuffs!” the man shouted to passersby. “The Bible expressly forbids mingling in any way!”

He stood at the bottom of the bleachers, an open Bible in one hand and the skull of an ape in the other. “It is from the ape that the colored man is descended. But it is from God that we white men spring. Please, stop this travesty!”

His pockmarked face, his sunken, exhausted gaze, his thin red lips that seemed always to be trembling, lent him the visage of a man not only mad but perhaps dangerous, too. Even the most swaggering of fans walked wide of him, unsettled by his presence in some way they could not define.

And so he stood in his ministerial frock coat, crying out as he had cried out on street comers and on trains and stagecoaches and in mainstream churches; cried out to be heard; cried out so that he could share at least some of the burden of his hatred.

“Help me end this travesty!” he called. “Help me end this tragedy!”

They kept on walking wide of him.