Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

"I almost got the chance once to tell Harvey that if he wanted to walk away from you, he shouldn't talk, he should just go."

"This is it, this is what we all worked for."

"You worked for. This is your bomb, not mine." Joe swung away from Oppy and the tower and aimed for the North road. He only went twenty feet when he hit the brakes and stopped. "Oppy!"

Oppy was heading back to Groves. He turned at the sound of his name. Suddenly he seemed pathetically out of place against the tower, the desert, the men in uniform.

"Good luck!" Joe shouted and stepped on the accelerator again. He'd pick up Shapiro and Gruber at the guard station. Ray should already be in Antonio. Joe could see the first lightning over the Oscura, but he was finally in the clear.

28

Joe couldn't get away from the right-hand jab. He circled to his right, the way he'd shown Shapiro, and walked into a hook. Heard a hoarse grunt and recognized his own lungs, lungs ten years older than the kid's, ten years of cigarette fumes encased in ten years of beer fat, the sort of fat that showed only when a 195 Ib kid hooked to the ribs. He liked the way the kid kept his eyes and shoulders level, jab high and cocked. The eyes intense and watery, pale in the headlights and black water in the dark. Feinted the jab.

The next thing he knew, Joe was sitting on his ass. He didn't know whether he'd been hit with a right or a left. All he remembered was seeing a fist coming and being too slow to get out of the way. Being down brought a new perspective, closer to his leaden feet and the pounding sac of his heart. The wet tarmac had a diamond glitter. Ray had appropriated the mess tent from the Base Camp and the cars were parked under it in a ring of light. Canvas drummed in the rain. Joe rolled away from a rabbit punch and up to his feet. Who's here? Everybody's here. Texans, New Mexicans, soldiers. No scientists, but it wasn't their fight.

"Time!" Hilario shouted.

Ray sat Joe on the bumper of a jeep and pressed a towel against Joe's ear. The ear stung, so it was cut. Fists were taped, but no gloves. There was going to be a lot of cutting.

"Ought to be a real ring, ought to be a referee. This is like a fucking dogfight."

"Dogfights are very popular here."

Hilario's perch was a patrol car, befitting his official status. He looked like a white lizard on a black stone. Though there were some familiar faces from Santa Fe, the crowd was mainly cattlemen from Amarillo and El Paso. Creased faces, hats of doe felt and big thumbs on rolls of cash. Faces more comfortable in a country fair tent than any arena. Sporting men who expected some blood for their money, made from wartime contracts. Hilario was the perfect timekeeper for them because he only stopped a round when he thought the time was right to bet again. He had no shred of fairness, but he had an instinct for drama. Across from Hilario, Pollack watched from inside his white Cadillac. The MPs hung back, as Joe had told them to.

"Time," Hilario advised.

The kid came out popping the right jab again. He had a bullet head of close-cut dirty hair, more dirty curls on wide shoulders and down the back of a thick neck. Small nose and round brow designed for a fighter. Narrow chin with a sandy stubble. Thin lips with a broad smile. Nineteen years old, maybe twenty. He had a stomach of snake-white muscle and, in the middle of it, a pink root of glossy scar tissue that spread up from his belt. Either an accident or an operation by a butcher. Joe slipped the jab, hooked, crossed, threw another looping hook without hitting the boy once. The boy jabbed in return and found the fault line in Joe's eyebrow. It was a seam full of promise and the kid found it twice more before Joe covered up. He attacked the ribs, trying to get Joe's guard down so he could pound the brow again.

There were different philosophical levels to a fight. Joe felt it was important to understand where an opponent's strength came from. Some boxers just had arm strength, some had to come forward off their legs. The kid had speed and balance, but Joe suspected madness, more even than the typical washed-out, brainless Texan madness. It would take time to locate the source, but a fight between big men should have the pace of a long and penetrating conversation. The kid backed Joe against the grille of a truck. When Joe clinched, clamping the kid's fists under his arms, the kid snapped his blunt head forward and butted Joe in the temple. Joe dropped to a knee, but there was no rush of red on the ground, so the brow was okay. He rose, backpedlled, jabbed until Hilario called time.

As Joe sat down, Ray swabbed his forehead with petroleum jelly.

"He's trying to cut you."

"Tell me something I don't know." Joe ran his tongue round his mouth and counted teeth.

"Captain Augustine's here, sitting over in the bar."

Shouts and hands indicated the changing odds. Three fingers. Hilario wrote a chit for a sombre Navajo in a velvet shirt. Shapiro had moved closer, and looked like he was sucking a cyanide pill or had bet on the wrong fighter. Across the court, the kid didn't want to sit and rest. He bounced on his toes and stared at Joe.

The kid had madness and speed. Joe sidestepped and the kid was there. When he stepped back, the kid was ahead of him. The scar on the stomach had turned a dull red as if alive all by itself and it occurred to Joe that it might be the mainspring, the potent source of that insanity. It looked like the sort of a tear a steer horn would make. No matter how good the kid got, and he was better than good, he'd never have a career fighting with a split stomach, he couldn't even get drafted. How would an over-the-hill professional, a fake Indian chief, look to a kid like that? No wonder his lips twisted in an effort as he wound up for the hook, chest cords popping and driving off the back leg, bringing his weight through without lunging or losing his balance, merely delivering as much hate as his fist could carry to the old damage above Joe's left eye. Fighting was a subtle matter, sooner or later a case of one man dominating first the centre of the ring and then, corner by corner, the rest of it. Even under a tent in the rain, there was a centrifugal pattern to the steps, the feints, the mental concentration. Hate was a good thing to bring to a fight. Then Joe's brow popped under nothing harder than a touch. One moment he could see and the next moment his eye was a well of blood. The kid was all over Joe, ignoring Hilario, who was shouting for time so he could get one more round of bets down, until Joe made the kid step back with a jab. "What time is it?"

Ray pinched Joe's brow closed, taped it, daubed it with jelly, then wiped Joe's face.

"Eight twenty, eight thirty. You don't need a clock, you need a zipper."

"The last money. Bet it, spread it around."

"With you bleeding to death, we can get pretty good odds."

"Bet it."

Joe stood alone. Headlights merged in the centre of the courtyard and insects spun over the white haze as if it were a pool. Across it, the kid stood and squinted back. Had that jab been the first tap of knowledge? There was a lot of sound from such a small crowd. He'd always had the sense that towards the end of a fight the paying public wanted to climb into the ring to deliver the last decisive blows. He remembered how once on the mesa a horse broke its legs and he and some other kids had had to stone the animal to death. It took a long time to kill a horse with stones.

The kid went right at the cut. In the middle of the court, Joe backpedalled and jabbed. Against the cars, he covered up, locking his fists against his cheeks, his elbows over the solar plexus, accepting the punishment on the ribs until he could escape. The kid winged combinations and then single shots. An effusion, an undiminishing supply of rage, a hook to the kidney, to the ear, then the cross to the cut. Like a busy sculptor working on a statue he passionately hated. Joe staggered, ducked, clinched, backpedalled until Hilario called time again.