Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

Johnny took out his wallet and put down five ten dollar bills. ‘Enough?’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ Rudolph put the bills carelessly in his pocket. He laughed again.

‘What’s so funny?’ Gretchen asked

‘I never thought I’d live to see the day,’ Rudolph said “when I didn’t know exactly how much money I had in my pocket.’

‘You have taken on the wholesome and mind-freeing habits of die rich,’ Johnny said gravely. ‘Congratulations. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office, Rudy. And I hope you brother wins.’

‘I hope he gets his head knocked off,’ Gretchen said.

A preliminary bout was under way as an usher led them to their seats three rows from ringside. Gretchen noted that there were few women present and mat none of them was wearing a black-wool dress. She had never been to a prizefight before and she tuned out the television set whenever one was being shown. The idea of men beating each other senselessly for pay

seemed brutish to her and the faces of the men around her were just the sort of faces that one would expect at such an entertainment. She was sure she had never seen so many ugly people collected in one place.

The men in the ring did not appear to be doing much harm to each other and she watched with passive disgust as they clinched, wrestled, and ducked away from blows. The crowd, in its fog of tobacco smoke, was apathetic and only once in a while, when there was the thud of a heavy punch, a sort of sharp, grunting, animal noise filled the arena.

Rudolph, she knew, went to prizefights from time to time and she had heard him discussing particular boxers like Ray Robinson enthusiastically with Willie. She looked surreptitiously over at her brother. He seemed interested by the spectacle in the ring. Now that she was actually seeing a fight, with the smell of sweat in her nostrils and the red blotches on pale skin where blows had landed, Rudolph’s whole character, the subtle, deprecating air of educated superiority, the well-mannered lack of aggressiveness, seemed suddenly suspect to her. He was linked with the brutes in the ring, with the brutes in the rows around her.

In me next fight, one man was cut over the eye and the wound spurted blood all over him and his opponent. The roar of the crowd when they saw the blood sickened her and she wondered if she could sit there and wait for a brother to climb through the ropes to face similar butchery.

By the time the main bout came on, she was pale and sick and it was through a haze of tears and smoke that she saw a large man in a red bathrobe climb agilely through the ropes and recognised Thomas.

When Thomas’s handlers took off his robe and threw it over his shoulders to put the gloves on over the bandaged hands, the first tiling Rudolph noticed, with a touch of jealousy, was that Thomas had almost no hair on his body. Rudolph was getting quite hairy, with thick, tight black curls on his chest and sprouting on his shoulders. His legs, too, were covered with dark hair, and it did not fit the image he had of himself. When he went swimming in the summer, his hairiness embarrassed him and he felt that people were snickering at him. For that reason he rarely sunbathed and put on a shirt as soon as he got out of the water.

Thomas, except for the ferocious, muscular, over-trained body, looked surprisingly the same. His face was unmarked and

the expression was still boyish and ingratiating. Thomas kept smiling during his formalities before the beginning of the bout, but Rudolph could see him flicking the corner of his mouth nervously with his tongue. A muscle in his leg twitched under his shiny silk purple trunks while the referee was giving the final instructions to the two men in the centre of the ring. Except for the moment when he had been introduced (In this corner, Tommy Jordache, weight one fifty-nine and a half), and had raised his gloved hand and looked quickly up at the crowd, Thomas had kept his eyes down. If he had seen Rudolph and Gretchen, he made no sign.

His opponent was a rangy Negro, considerably taller than Tommy, and with much longer arms, shuffling dangerously in his corner in a little dance, nodding as he listened to the advice being whispered into his ear by his handler.

Gretchen watched with a rigid, painful grimace on her face, squinting through the smoke at her brother’s powerful, destructive, bare figure. She did not like the hairless male body -Willie was covered with a comfortable reddish fuzz - and the ridged professional muscles made her shudder in primitive distaste. Siblings, out of the same womb. The thought dismayed her. Behind Thomas’s boyish smile she recognised the sly malevolence, the desire to hurt, the pleasure in dealing pain, that had alienated her when they lived in the same house. The thought that it was her own flesh and blood exposed there under the bright lights in this dreadful ceremony was almost unbearable to her. Of course, she thought, I should have known; this is where he had to end. Fighting for his life.

The men were evenly matched, equally fast, the Negro less aggressive, but better able to defend himself with his long arms. Thomas kept burrowing in, taking two punches to get in one, slugging away at the Negro’s body, making the Negro give ground and occasionally punishing him terribly when he got bim in a corner against the ropes.

‘Kill the nigger,’ a voice from the back of the arena cried out each time Thomas threw a volley of punches. Gretchen winced, ashamed to be there, ashamed for every man and woman in the place. Oh, Arnold Simms, limping in the maroon bathrobe, saying, ‘You got pretty feet, Miss Jordache,’ dreaming of Cornwall, oh, Arnold Simms, forgive me for tonight.

It lasted eight of the ten rounds. Thomas was bleeding from the nose and from a cut above the eye, but never retreating, always shuffling in, with a kind of hideous, heedless, mechanical energy, slowly wearing his man down. In the eighth round the Negro could hardly lift his hands and Thomas sent him to the canvas with a long, looping right hand that caught the Negro on the forehead. The Negro got up at the count of eight, staggering, barely able to get his guard up and Thomas, his face a bloody smear, but smiling, leapt after him mercilessly and hit him what seemed to Gretchen at least fifty times in the space of seconds. The Negro collapsed on to his face as the crowd yelled ear-splittingly around her. The Negro tried to get up, almost reached one knee. In a neutral corner, Thomas crouched alertly, bloody, tireless. He seemed to want his man to get up, to continue the fight, and Gretchen was sure there was a swift look of disappointment that flitted across his battered face as the Negro sank helplessly to the canvas and was counted out.

She wanted to vomit, but she merely retched drily, holding her handkerchief to her face, surprised at the smell of the perfume on it, among the rank odours of the arena. She sat huddled over in her seat, looking down, unable to watch any more, afraid she was going to faint and by that act announce to all the world her fatal connection to the victorious animal in the ring.

Rudolph had sat through the whole bout without uttering a sound, his lips twisted a little in disapproval at the clumsy bloodthirstiness, without style or grace, of the fight.

The fighters left the ring, the Negro, swathed in towels and robe, was helped through the ropes by his handlers, Thomas grinning, waving triumphantly, as people clapped him on the back. He left the ring on the far side, so there was no chance of seeing his brother and sister as he made his way to the locker room.

The crowd began to drift out, but Gretchen and Rudolph sat side by side, without saying a word to each other, fearful of communicating after what they had seen. Finally Gretchen said, thickly, her eyes still lowered, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ ‘We have to go back,’ Rudolph said. “What do you mean?’ Gretchen looked up in surprise at her brother. ‘We came,’ Rudolph said. ‘We watched. We have to see him.’ ‘He’s got nothing to do with us.’ As she said this, she knew she was lying.