Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“Goddamn it, Irv, that ain’t funny!” Spinelli brushed the clinging snow from his shoulders. “It ain’t funny at all.” His lips were trembling. “Goddamn it. Tubby. It’s melting down my back...”

“Put your cock away, Spinelli,” Larkin said.

“A guy can’t even take a piss without some lard-ass dumping snow on him.”

Tubby Gruber was laughing at Spinelli’s shivering discomfort, but Shorty Kohler looked at him with disgust. “That’s your trouble, you ginney bastard. You take shit from everybody.”

Kohler had a forehead ridged with cartilage and a nose broken twice and reset both times by a rubber at Still-man’s Gym in New York. He had been an amateur boxer before he was drafted and that, plus an explosive temper, had earned him an uneasy respect throughout the battalion.

“You know why you take your lumps from guys?” Kohler told Spinelli, “it’s ’cause you don’t have any belief. Like no character. You gotta stand up for yourself, know what I mean? Like that fucking Corporal Schmitzer. Goddamn baboon prick. Kicks you in the ass and you don’t do nothing about it.”

“So what’s to do about it?” Spinelli said. His feelings were raw and his voice was breaking. “He’s got the stripes, he’s bigger than me, and lots older and everything.”

“It don’t make no difference,” Kohler said. “Lemme tell you something. Fights are won two ways. The first is before anybody throws a punch. Lemme show you. A guy comes up to me in a bar, a big guy, he’s got fifty pounds on me. So he wants to look good to his girl or his pals. So I move away from him, give him space at the bar, keep my eyes on my drink, he’s already won the fucking fight. Acting that way, I give him balls. So the minute his elbow touches mine, what do I do...”

Larkin said, “You figure he’s a queer so you ask him if he wants to go down on you, right. Shorty?”

Kohler looked pained. “Shit, corporal, this is for Spinelli’s own good. What I do, Carmine, is I swing the edge of my palm against the guy’s arm, hard. And I stare right into his eyes. Then I say something to him. No bullshit lines like you hear in movies. Just something quiet, like maybe... ‘You looking for trouble, pal?’ ”

“That’s great,” Larkin said. “I heard John Wayne say that in a movie. But he said it to a girl.”

Gruber was laughing because it was safe to now, but Spinelli’s expression remained intent and serious.

“Okay, Shorty, that’s one way,” he said. “But you said two ways. What’s the other one?”

Kohler rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Well, you just win it, that’s all. What the fuck you think? You come out of your corner fast, and you try to rock him with your best shots and no matter how hard he belts you, don’t let him know it. If your eye’s bleeding, fuck protecting it, keep wading in. Don’t ever let the son of a bitch know he hurt you. Then he starts to worry and forgets what they tell him in his corner. And pretty soon, nothing’s working for him.”

Kohler raised his hands, shrugged and let them drop to his side. “That’s all there is, Carmine. Just them two things.”

Corporal Larkin regarded him with what seemed to be frank admiration; the smile beneath his smudge of beard suggested only an innocent sincerity.

“So tell me something. Shorty,” he said. “Where was all them big fights of yours? At the Garden or was it maybe St. Nick’s Arena?”

Kohler looked away from Larkin, his eyes moving across the white valley. “You know the fuck it wasn’t no St. Nick’s or the Garden. I fought at smokers and steak rackets and if you won you got maybe ten bucks and if you lost you got some beers and a steak on a poppy-seed bun. So it wasn’t any fucking main event, but we didn’t fight niggers.”

“You got a real soft streak in you. Shorty,” Larkin said. “I’m kind of surprised.”

“What the hell you talking about?” Kohler’s tone was uneasy; he could guess something was coming but knew no way to defense against it.

Larkin was black Irish, with black hair and dark eyes and a cough that bit into his lungs like the teeth of a saw, a condition which wasn’t helped by sleeping on frozen ground for months and smoking several packs of cigarettes every day. Still, though he was wasted and thin, everyone except Docker treated him with a cautious, wary respect, because Larkin knew how to use words so they stung and hurt, sometimes worse than blows.

“Shit, Kohler, you’re a real patsy,” Larkin said, but when he laughed there was just the flash of white teeth against his black beard. “A real lover, aren’t you?”

Kohler looked at the low skies. “You gonna tell me what you’re talking about? Is this Twenty Questions or something?”

“I mean, Shorty, you were so kind to all them spades. Kid Chocolate and Beau Jack and Sugar Ray. Imagine all those black assholes twitching and puckering with relief. Think of Jersey Joe Wolcott and Hank Armstrong and don’t forget that clown Joe Louis, all of them on their knees thanking the good Lord because Shorty Kohler wasn’t going to whip their asses for a stein of beer and a bowl of beans at some fucking mick steak racket.”

“Look, I didn’t say I could beat any of them guys.” Kohler looked for support to Gruber and Spinelli. “Did I, for Christ’s sake? Louis and Wolcott, shit, they’re heavyweights. Sugar Ray and Armstrong, they’re welters like me, but they’re the best there ever was.”

Corporal Larkin stuffed the Rex Stout into the outer pocket of his soiled, coffee-stained GI overcoat. The coat was singed black at knee level, charred streaks that circled the back and front of the coat like an extra hemline. The black singes, acquired from standing too close to glowing field stoves, were among the unissued insignia of combat field soldiers, along with bleeding gums and trench foot and hands blistered from cradling scalding canteen cups.

Larkin unhooked his canteen and took a sip of Trankic’s black whiskey. It felt good, warming the coldness in his lungs that made him cough so much, but looking at Shorty Kohler didn’t make him feel good, because Kohler was staring at him now like some dumb beaten dog. “Forget it, Shorty,” Larkin said. “I saw you fight once. You were all right.”

“Yeah? You’re a big bullshit artist.”

“You want to put next month’s pay where your mouth is?”

Kohler looked uncertain. “No shit. You saw me fight?”

“Twenty-ninth Street between Lex and Third, Jimmy Ryan’s bar, a steak racket in the basement. You fought an Italian kid, his name was Bonelli or Bottelli, something like that. Your cut man was drunk and the referee was that old priest from St. Stanislaus, he’d been a lightweight contender, and a chaplain in World War One. So, big mouth, I see you fight or I didn’t see you fight?”

Kohler had begun to smile; his eyes were small and bright under the ridge of cartilage. “Shit, yes, you saw me fight. Hey, Carmine! Hey, Tubby! You hear Larkin? He saw me fight Don Bonavinci.”

“Bonavinci, right,” Larkin said.

“But, wait a minute. How come you never mentioned it before? Something like that, it figures you’d mention.”

“Some things you remember, some things you forget.” The look in Larkin’s eyes made Kohler decide to change the subject. “It happened to me once with a girl,” he said. “I forgot her name and I knew her all my life, seen her for years sitting out on the steps and playing in the street. But then I took her out, and I’m calling her ‘hey’ and ‘you’ and ‘babe’... It was funny because I never thought of her one way or another when she was just a kid on the block. But I’m out with her, she’s a different person and I don’t know her name anymore.” Kohler shrugged and feinted a flurry of rapid punches at the trunk of a tree...