John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

She is catching her breath near the entrance door during a waltz, Rafferty sentimentally warbling After the Ball , when Hod steps in.

“Young McGinty.” She likes to tease him with the name, though she knows it isn’t his real one.

“I was wondering — later—”

Addie Lee nods. “I got one lined up already, but if you want to wait—”

He doesn’t want to wait, but she has expenses to keep up and he is a barter client.

“I’ll be here.”

“All you men,” she says, giving him something like a smile. “Give a girl a big head.” And then the band swings into American Beauty and she is two-stepped away by a man with a hundred-dollar bill pasted to his sweaty forehead.

The dancing goes on and on, Hod watching the other girls work their marks, easing away from three different fistfights, his reputation in the camp as a fighter now a liability, Rafferty’s tenor lifting higher after every drink he takes. They are still dancing, fresh prospectors replacing the ones who are too drunk or tapped out, when Addie Lee crosses back toward the bar with Ox Knudsen staggering after her like a drunken bear. The fiddler apparently knows only five songs and no one seems to care as he repeats them again and again till he is spelled by a professor who bangs out Coonville Cakewalk on the ivories, the girls rolling their eyes at each other and giggling as the men, reeking of booze and tobacco and wet wool, gallantly offer their arms to escort them in a wavering parade around the floor.

There is no mystery where she is going with the Swede and what they’ll be up to. Hod can’t help himself and follows.

Jeff Smith and Niles and big Arizona Charlie and skinny Billy Mizner and Tex Rickard down from Circle City are at a table playing poker and eyeing the marks. Rickard has been setting up fights for the Ox, who works as a blacksmith when he isn’t bulldogging startled prospectors in the ring.

“Our young Apollo,” notices Niles Manigault, always paying more mind to the room than to his cards. “Mooning over his soiled dove.”

Hod finds an empty stool and turns his back to them.

“Make him an eggnog,” calls Charlie Meadows. It has become a source of great amusement to them all that he doesn’t drink.

“No liquor, no tobacco,” says Niles, drawing a pair. “If it wasn’t for his fascination with the scarlet sisterhood he’d be a model for our youth.”

“Leave the boy alone,” says Jeff Smith. “He’s in training.”

Rickard laughs. “What, with old Smokey?”

“One needs to acquire the fundamentals of the science.”

“One needs to render his opponent immediately unconscious,” says Billy Mizner, “like our Swede in there. See your twenty and call.”

Every day when there is a break from hauling Jeff Smith’s goods around they put on what Smokey calls the pillow gloves and go at it, the negro coaching him on footwork and head movement. None of it seems natural.

“That’s why it’s a science,” Smokey tells him, breathing hard after a session in the warehouse on Captain Moore’s wharf. “If it come natural, any one of these overgrowed plowboys be the champeen of the world.”

He means Knudsen, of course, who has been fighting twice a week at the beer hall, taking all comers for bragging rights and side bets. He is a brawler with cannonballs for fists, known for throwing opponents bodily out of the ring and pounding them to jelly once he has them down.

Smokey steps back and takes up the attack stance. “When they was still throwin baseballs at my head,” he says, aiming hooks at Hod’s ribs, “I’d take them balls off beforehand and go at em with a mallet, soften em up some. Thas what you do with your body hits, soften a man up.”

Hod brings up his guard and goes up on his toes the way Smokey showed him. “I use a mallet?”

“You fight that squarehead it best be a railroad tie. What we do now is I temp to knock you block off, and you gots to keep out the way of it.”

Smokey comes after him then, wild and hard, and it is all Hod can do to dance and parry away from the negro inside the tiny square he has closed in with packing crates.

“You stop movin, boy, you damn well better be throwin them fists.”

There is a trio of busted sourdoughs next to Hod at the bar, veterans of two winters in the interior, doling out their little pouches of dust for whiskey and harmonizing to whoever is within earshot.

“You got four, five, maybe a half-dozen fires going,” says one, thick-bearded and bitter, “got to burn off that frost layer before you can dig. And every day it’s a longer walk to find wood. There isn’t but a couple hours of light so half your digging is by fire or lantern and them wolves get to howling—”

“Indins say it’s dead men’s souls crying out,” says another. “But that’s only to make us cheechakos flighty. What it is is just wolves, which is the Satan of the animal kingdom. Waiting to gang up and pull you down while you still got some meat on your bones.”

“The nights,” says the third, a man Hod has seen down by the wharf trying to sell his claim and his cabin and what gear he’s brought back to the greenhorns coming off the steamers, “the nights last forever. Out there in a log coffin with an oil lamp and a partner who’s like to go off his nut and murder you if you fall to sleep before he does. You done heard all his life’s business three times over and he’s heard yours and you’re sick of it. Enough to make a man pick up the Bible.”

Each of them is missing at least one finger and the one next to Hod still has black scurvy gums and a burn scar that covers half his face.

“The good ground’s all been picked over,” he grumbles, “or jumped by gun thugs. So you pan and you dig and you freeze your damn toes off for that little speck of yellow, more grit in your teeth of a day than you put in your poke, and God help you if you run out of lard or coffee or beans or if your cabin burns while you’re out digging or a bear gets into your stores or you take fever or snap an ankle in the rocks. Out there in them open snowfields, a man don’t count for nothin. It’s too big.”

There is a commotion then and Flapjack Fredericks makes his entrance, a runty, beet-nosed character in a top hat and an oversized Prince Albert coat and a constant cigar in his face, trailed by two girls dressed in identical red outfits, the older not more than fourteen.

“I brought my matched set,” he winks, “in case one wears out.”

The girls wear no makeup, pink-cheeked and curly haired, eyes vacant as sheep, and stand chewing their lips in the corner where Flapjack plants them while he gladhands around the room.

“Look what the wind blew in,” mutters the man with the burned face.

Fredericks claps him on the back. “This round is on me, boys. Compli-ments of Flapjack Fredericks, Gold King of the Yukon.”

“Sluice-robbin son of a bitch that got lucky, is what,” says another of the busted sourdoughs. “Probly fell over drunk right on top of it.”

“And it could happen to you, boys,” he winks. “Just don’t never give up the hunt. I was down to boiling tree moss for soup when I chopped into a big, fat vein of the yellow stuff — peed my trousers it was so rich — and now I got a palace on Nob Hill and a boat to sail me round the harbor and I spread caviar on my flapjacks every morning.”

“Fish eggs,” grunts the third prospector, accepting his free drink from Suds.

“At five dollars an ounce,” twinkles the Gold King of the Yukon. “Go through the stuff like it’s toilet paper.”

“Figured out what that’s for, have you?”

“I got the world by the dingus,” Flapjack calls to anyone within earshot, “and I don’t care who knows it.”