Ed Gorman: Blood Game

“My problem has been,” John T. Stoddard said, “finding the right colored man to fight Victor.”

“Victor Sovich?”

“Victor Sovich.”

“And you’ve come up with a colored man?”

“Indeed I have, Mr. Guild. Or better yet, you call me John and I’ll call you Leo.”

John T. Stoddard smiled as if he’d just ceded the Louisiana Territory to Guild.

“If you’ve got the colored man, and the public wants to see a black man and a white man fight, I guess I don’t understand what you need me for.” Guild tried to call him “John,” but it didn’t work. He couldn’t get the word to leave his mouth.

“The problem,” John T. Stoddard said, “is Victor.”

“Victor?”

“He’s mad at me.”

The way he said it, as if they were playmates in a spat, almost made Guild smile.

“Why is he mad at you?”

“That part doesn’t matter, Leo. What matters is that we convince him to get back here in time for the fight Saturday afternoon.”

“Where is he?”

“Across town.”

“Doing what?”

“If I know Victor, he’s soaking up the suds and spending all the time he can with Mexican women. He loves Mexican women, just before they go to fat. You understand?”

Guild nodded. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Get him for me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Take him this envelope. When he sees it, he’ll come along.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”

“Because he wouldn’t even give me the chance to hand him the envelope. He’d just start swinging.”

Stephen Stoddard said, “He’s a genuine madman, Mr. Guild, Victor is. A genuine madman. I once saw him knock a Brahma bull out with one punch.”

“Great,” Guild said, “and I’m supposed to go get him.”

“The sheriff said that’s the sort of thing you do,” John T. Stoddard said.

“If you mean Sheriff Cardinelli,” Guild said, “he only says things like that after about three or four schooners. He always gets sentimental and likes to talk about how tough all his former deputies are. I suppose it reflects on how well he trained us thirty years ago.”

“You worked for him here?”

“No. Up in the territory. Near the border.”

“Oh.”

Guild sighed. “I’m not your man.”

“What?” John T. Stoddard looked shocked.

“I’m fifty-five years old. I’ve got a crimped right knee from a riding accident, and I’m used to dealing with criminals, who most of the time are willing to have you bring them in because they’re tired of running and hiding. Victor doesn’t sound as if he’ll be happy to see me at all.”

“You’re afraid of him, then?” John T. Stoddard said.

“Of course.”

“I can’t believe you’re admitting this.”

“Why wouldn’t I admit it?”

“Well, because.”

“Because as a bounty hunter I’m supposed to be big and strong and brave?”

“I guess something like that.”

Guild stood up, fanned at his sweaty face with his Stetson. He was playing something of a game and he was about to see if all his theatrics were about to pay off. He had immediately sized up John T. Stoddard as a cheapskate, a man who would expect a man to accept whatever pittance he felt like paying. Obviously, there weren’t many men in this town willing to deliver the envelope to Victor, whatever the fee. Guild figured he should get a good dollar.

“You’re leaving?” John T. Stoddard said.

“I’m leaving.”

“I’d think pride alone would make you take this job.”

“Well, you’d be wrong.”

Now John T. Stoddard stood. “How much do you think I was going to offer you?”

Guild considered a moment. He wanted to name a price that would establish a high ceiling. “Fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars!” John T. Stoddard moved with the large, melodramatic motions of an opera star in his dying moments on stage. ‘‘Who would pay you fifty dollars just to deliver an envelope?’’

“I wouldn’t take fifty dollars, anyway. I’d want seventy-five.”

“Seventy-five!”

Guild fanned himself some more with his hat and waited for what he sensed was the right moment and then turned to go.

“Do you realize how many young boys you’re letting down?” This one was so good Guild had to stop halfway to the door and turn around. “Beg pardon?”

“Young boys. In this town. Do you know how many of them have their hopes up to see Victor Sovich?” He paused and threw a wild hand toward the heavens. “Do you read magazines, Leo?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever read articles on how disappointment can stunt a young boy’s mental development?”

“I see,” Guild said. “If they don’t see Victor on Saturday, they might be mentally stunted.”

“You can scoff if you like, Leo. But that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here.”

“Sixty-five dollars,” Leo Guild said.

John T. Stoddard glared at Guild as if he were one of those socialists now stirring up labor trouble around the country. “You would put your own pocketbook above the well-being of eight-year-old boys?”

Guild shook his head. “Yeah, I guess that’s the kind of low-down son of a bitch I really am.”

Stephen Stoddard, whom Guild already liked anyway, had the good grace to laugh. At least until his father glared at him.

He had sixty-five dollars’ worth of John T. Stoddard’s greenbacks in his wallet, he was smoking one of John T. Stoddard’s stogies, and he was sitting across the aisle in the streetcar from a very nice looking fortyish woman in a big picture hat. Her occasional glances at the six-foot Guild in his white boiled shirt, black suitcoat, black serge trousers, and black Texas boots said that he was probably a rapscallion, but an interesting one. Only when her soft brown gaze fell to the.44 strapped around his waist did her lips purse in that social disapproval city folks display for people not their kind.

In addition to watching the woman, Guild just enjoyed the ride. He liked the way the streetcar ran down the center of the sprawling town with its three- and four-story buildings and all its buggies and rigs and wagons. He enjoyed watching all the men in straw boaters and high-buttoned suits and the women in flowered hats and twirling red and blue and yellow parasols, and he liked seeing all the big shiny store windows filled variously with high-button shoes and fresh bakeiy goods and pharmaceuticals and barbers in dark suit coats and handlebar mustaches stropping their razors and patting shaving cream on sagging faces. There was a music to the city that he sometimes longed for, the announcing clang of streetcars, the hoarse whistle of the factory changing shifts, the traffic policeman’s street corner instructions to keep moving, keep moving, the sweet passing laughter of women he could at least dream about.

The woman he’d been playing eye games with got off about three blocks before he did, and as usual he felt a vast and personal disappointment, as if she’d been the woman he’d been meant to marry only she hadn’t understood this and had gone shopping for rutabagas instead, and with not so much as a glance back at him. Not a glance.

The city changed abruptly. Where the stone and brick and wooden business buildings had given way to wide streets lined with forbidding iron gates and what passed for mansions in a midwestern town this size, so then did the mansions give way. Now the streets narrowed and the houses grew smaller and uglier in appearance, immigrant houses already sixty years old, older than the town’s incorporation itself. Wild, filthy children ran the streets, and a cornucopia of garbage-the red of tomato rinds, the yellow of gutted squash, the tainted brown of sun-rotting fly-infested beef-filled curbstones and gutters alike.