John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“This man go only in one direction, which is straight ahead.” Smokey seems distracted, barely looking at Hod as he speaks. “And you don’t want to be anywhere near when he gets there. Just keep movin them feet, movin, movin, couple three rounds, see if you can tire him out.”

Addie Lee is not in the room, nor any other woman. Smoke hangs low over the ring and Hod tries to breathe shallowly through his nose while Smokey greases his face. Smith and his crew settle in on a bench by the ropes and there is somebody new, laughing and backslapping with Jeff.

It is Whitey.

Whitey who stole his gear, one-eye-blue one-eye-green Whitey who, most likely, has always been part of the gang. Hod feels dizzy, as if he has already been pounded and is falling, falling—

Smokey is trying to talk to him.

“What?”

“I ask if you ever hunt.”

“Rabbits, mostly. On the farm.”

“You get mad at them rabbits?”

“That don’t do no good.”

“Same for a ox as it is for a rabbit. You stay cool and keep your wits about you.”

“How many you spose we have to go before this bunch’ll let us stop?”

Smokey looks away. “Just don’t you be the one they carry out from that ring.”

Niles Manigault steps close then, smiling, leaning over the ropes to take a final gander. “He ready?”

“Ready as he gone get,” says Smokey, and then the bell rings and Hod is trapped inside the tiny enclosure with Ox Knudsen.

The Swede bullrushes ahead with his right arm cocked and then sledgehammers it downward, holding his left glove open before him to grab with. Hod catches the first blow on the collarbone and nearly leaves his feet, staggering backward while Ox keeps coming, then dances sideways and snaps his lead left over Knudsen’s guard again and again. His hands don’t feel right, the wraps on them stiffening, and his eyes sting as sweat runs into them. A cheer goes up each time the Swede charges, followed by a moan of disappointment when Hod sidesteps to escape the blow.

“We come to see a prize fight,” calls a man somewhere behind him, “not a goddam waltz!”

Ox charges and Hod feints a move right, then skips left and catches the squarehead flush on the face as he goes by, Ox grabbing the ropes to steady himself and bleeding from the nose when he turns to resume his attack. The crowd, anonymous in their numbers, is almost all pulling against Soapy’s fighter.

“Get on him! Get on him, you dumb fuckin Swede!”

“Knock him cold!”

“Get him on the ropes and strangle the son of a bitch!”

Knudsen finally catches up with him near the end of the round, throwing his arm over Hod’s neck and hurling him against a corner post. Hod blocks the hammer blow that follows with both gloves, then tries to wrap the Ox’s arms, but the Swede butts him over the left eye and brings his knee up, aiming for the privates and getting thigh instead. He is too much stronger, working an arm free and jolting his elbow across Hod’s jaw and then the bell and another elbow and Hod jackknifing, rolling out backward through the ropes to get away, men shoving and tugging at him as he pushes through the ringside mob, using up half his minute’s rest before Smokey can pull him back into his own corner.

“There’s something wrong with the hand wraps.” His fingers seem bonded together inside the gloves, his fists like clubs.

“Rolled em in plaster of Paris,” says the negro. “Must of set by now.”

Hod looks up into his eyes. Smokey jams a chunk of ice against where his brow is split from the head butt.

“You gone need whatever help you can get.”

There is blood slicking the floorboards when the second round begins, blood and tobacco juice and no sawdust thrown over it and even with the fighter shoes they’ve given him Hod feels like he is skating every time he backs up near the corners. Ox Knudsen keeps lurching forward, relentless, chasing Hod around the ring with Hod chopping hard at his ears as Ox swings and misses and goes past with the momentum, Hod bicycling backward as fast as he can till Ox wrestles him into a half-clinch, clamping his left arm over Hod’s neck and rubbing his glove laces over the cut eyebrow and smashing Hod’s face with his free hand as Hod pounds at the exposed short ribs with left and right the way Smokey has shown him, then launches a blind uppercut that catches Ox under the chin and Hod drops to his knees to yank out of the hold, scrambling away on hands and knees while the crowd jeers but back up dancing on his toes before Joe Boyle can count three. His ears are ringing and vision blurred, Ox charging, Hod just able to throw himself sideways and give the Swede a backhand shove that sends him sprawling across to the far ropes. Hod wipes at his eyes, blood streaming into the left, and backpedals while he fends with outstretched arms against the next rush, running out of ring sooner than he expects and catching an overhand right on the jaw that sends him tumbling back through the ropes.

His head is clear enough and his legs are still with him but there are men all around him screaming into his ears and the Ox waiting just inside the ropes for when Hod ducks to step back through, his right cocked, lips moving in a stream of curses, and Boyle behind him counting to ten and Hod gets up onto his knees with somebody trying to shove him back in and he hates them, hates Jeff Smith and Whitey and the whole sure-thing crew and the men screaming all around him and the one shoving behind, hates them all, rising and turning to smash the shoving man flush on the mouth and then clubbed from behind by Ox in the ring, spinning to land an overhand left on the Swede’s nose, feeling it crack, backing him up enough to get through the ropes but immediately grabbed in a bear-hug dance till the Ox pins him up against the corner post and goes at him, elbows and fists, Hod turtling in and crouching and catching the blows as best he can till the bell rings and Ox not stopping till Smokey steps in and blocks the Swede with the wooden stool long enough for Boyle to peel Hod away and get him back to the corner. Men are stomping and screaming, red-faced, nigger this and nigger that, some of them throwing things, bottles and beer steins and a malacca cane, and there is blood smearing Hod’s face and arms and chest, blood dripping from his gloves, blood staining the ropes and floor, blood staining Smokey’s shirt as he presses a sponge soaked in ammonia water into Hod’s face.

“You ain’t gone out run him, we seen that,” he shouts into Hod’s ear over the cries of the gamblers and the townsmen and the stampeders, the high rollers and lowlifes who surround them. “Got to make yourself a openin and put him away.”

Hod tries to say that the man is too big to knock out but his lips have begun to swell and it doesn’t come out right. The negro looks across to Jeff Smith and his crowd, all grins behind a cloud of smoke, then turns back to him.

“You got enough kick in them hands, boy.” Smokey’s face is a way he has never seen it, like he’s set to kill somebody, his fingers digging into Hod’s shoulders as he hollers and stares him in the eye. “You just put it on him and don’t get off till he’s out. And I don’t mean down, I mean out .”

Smokey blows a mouthful of cold water in his face then and the bell rings and Hod stands from the stool and there is a great whooping cry from the men of Skaguay. It is clear how it will end, what they have all come to see, and it will be the Ox or it will be him. Ox keeps his left foot forward as he gallops across the floor, putting legs and hip and back into his punch, only this time when Hod sidesteps he slams him one-two in the kidney and crosses over hard with his left trying to punch through the man’s face to the back of his skull and Ox is spitting blood, thick gouts of it out onto the wet floor and bending his knees, intent on the kill as he lurches forward, Hod ducking his head back away from the roundhouse skinning his nose and the force of it twisting Ox, feet slipping in the blood slick and falling, reaching back with his left to catch himself leaving the opening for Hod’s uppercut thrown from the hip and Ox knocked back on his ass with a stunned expression on his square white face in the instant before Hod steps in to clamp his left hand behind the Swede’s head and piston the club of his right over and over into it, punching down with all of his weight, cracking Boyle away with the sharp of his elbow when the referee tries to step in then going down on one knee to continue pounding the Swede’s face, his head against the hard floor now, pounding left and right till men fill the ring in a cursing wave that sweeps him up and away, pummeled and kicked, Smokey unable to fight through to him with the stool in hand, Hod lifted clear off his feet and carried, trying to cover his face, his privates, forehead cracking against the doorframe and then out into the back alley and yanked to his feet, running panicked behind Niles Manigault out onto an alley full of woodsmoke and a sky that has gone insane.