The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

James Grady The Championship of Nowhere

From Murder on the Ropes

Gene Mallette and the kid named Sandy were wildcatting a double shift on an oil derrick fifty-five afternoons before Independence Day. Drill and generator motors pounded May’s prairie air. Sandy laughed about something and smiled. Then a drill chain broke, whipped like a silver tie around his neck, and rocketed him to the top of the fifty-foot rig. His body swung there while pipes clattered and a driller screamed and all Gene could think about was Sandy’s teenage face smeared oil black except for his happy eyes and the glint of white teeth.

The chain unraveled with a spin and Sandy crashed to the derrick floor.

Gene and another guy rode to town in back of the flatbed truck with Sandy’s body laid at their boots. There’d been a spring snow two weeks before, so the truck didn’t kick up much dust from the dirt road. The earth smelled damp and good. He heard the foreman in the truck cab say maybe the drought was over. They saw a skinny deer grazing by the walls of a deserted sod house. They saw the blue misted Sweet Grass Hills rising from the yellow prairie between them and Canada. Those three volcanic crags would have been mountains anyplace else but here in Montana. The foreman drove to the Shelby undertaker parlor. As they lifted Sandy off the truck, Gene heard the mortician’s hand jingling silver dollars for those happy eyes.

“I’m done,” said Gene, and walked to the boarding house.

He put a shower and a tub soak on his tab. Sat at the dinner table with other boarders and ate stew he didn’t taste. Walked out to the sidewalk to sit on a bench, watch the people and cars around the Front Street speakeasies, and make himself think about nothing, nothing at all.

Least I got that, he thought.

Just before sunset a rancher named Jensen staggered out of a speakeasy called the Bucket of Blood, walked to a roan horse cinched to one of the new electric light poles, pulled out a silver pistol, and shot the horse smack between the eyes. The roan plopped to the ground so hard it snapped the cinch. Jensen pumped slugs into the beast, filling the town with the roar of the gun. He had gone through a full reload of the revolver and had its cylinder swung open for more bullets when the black Ford with a big white star painted on each of its front doors pulled up behind the dead horse. Texas John Otis unfolded his grizzly bear body to climb out of the car, sheriff’s badge on the left lapel of his black suit, a dead German sniper’s ten-inch broomstick handle Mauser in his right hand. Sheriff Otis ripped the shiny revolver away from Jensen and slammed the Mauser against the rancher’s skull.

“You dumb son of a bitch!” roared the Sheriff. “You shot your own damn horse!”

But by then Jensen lay draped unconscious across that bloody roan.

Gene turned away and saw her walking toward him.

He’d seen her before, back in ’06 when she was nine and he was fourteen. Her white father moved her and her kid brother off the Blackfeet Rez to educate in Shelby instead of being sentenced to an Indian boarding school. Gene’d seen her every day when he was a high school senior. She’d skipped a grade so she was a shy freshman who wore her black hair like a veil. Gene just knew she wouldn’t talk to him. Then he couldn’t talk to her while she was still in high school and he was a graduated adult doing a man’s job as a gandy dancer building railroads to bring homesteaders out West and ship the loot of the land back East. He’d seen her almost every week, often trying to corral her wild brother. Gene had seen her at the train depot the day he shipped out to the Marines for the Great War against the Kaiser. That day, damned if he wouldn’t before he died doing what had to be done, he’d gone up to her, said: “Goodbye.” She’d flinched — then lanced the gloom with her smile. When he came home from Europe with no visible scars, he’d seen her in the Shelby cemetery putting flowers on the influenza graves of the homesteader she’d married who’d been old enough to be her dad and the baby girl she’d let that dreamer father. After bloody California, as Gene’s parents and their ranch died, he had seen her move to town when the great winds of 1920 ate the homestead she’d tried to keep going while working the schoolmarm job her husband had been white enough to let her get and the town had been Chrisdan enough to let her keep for the full year of widow’s black. Gene had watched as she waitressed at the Palace Hotel where she lived in the back room, sometimes with her brother when he was in town trying to find dollars for ivory powder he pumped into his arm. And Gene’d seen her sad smile two months earlier when he’d asked her out. She’d whispered: “I got nothing that’s worth it for you.” He’d seen her not believe him when he swore she was wrong, seen her walk away so she wouldn’t see tears fall she couldn’t catch.

But that night, he saw her and knew she was walking toward him.

She blocked the red ball of the setting sun as she drew near. They were together inside a crimson lake. He could barely breathe and the water of this moment turned her walk into a slow swim toward him, her hair undulating out from her shoulders, her dress floating around her calves. He remembered forever that dress was the blue of morning sky. She wore no makeup on her skin, which was the color of milked coffee. The scent of purple lilacs came with her. Gene felt like Sandy spinning free of the chain that hung him high above the earth as he fell into her midnight eyes.

He knew he said “Hello Billie” and she said “Hello Gene.”

Maybe they tried to say more, but they couldn’t, not until she said: “I need your help. I need you to meet with some men. They sent me to get you. They want you to do something. It might save me, but it won’t be anything but trouble for you, no matter what they promise. But I had to come. I had to ask. I had to do that much. I’m sorry.”

All of a sudden it was night. Lights came on throughout the town. The glow from the street lamp on the corner yellowed her skin.

“Is it a long walk?” said Gene.

“I’ve got their car.”

The license plate on the Ford bore the county ID numbers from Butte, two hundred miles to the south, the only place rougher than Shelby in the whole state. Butte was a smokestack city of 60,000 people, tough Bohunk miners digging up the richest hill on earth for Irish robber barons who ran the place with Pinkertons, dynamite and satchels of cash they spent to fight off Wobbly labor organizers and Ku Klux Klan Catholic haters and reform meddlers from back East. On a good day, Shelby only had 1,200 people crowded into its prairie valley, busted-out honyockers who’d believed the Iowa newspapers’ lies about homesteading, ranchers like Jensen and cowboys who cut barbed-wire fences whenever they rode up to one, Basque sheepherders who couldn’t converse with two-legged creatures, Blackfeet and Gros Ventre and even Cheyenne stepped off their scrub reservations hunting for hope or honor or a last resort hell of a good time, railroad men, shopkeepers, and saloon tenders and border runners and streetwalkers and roughnecks like Gene had become who were trying to cash in on the Great North Country Oil Strike of 1921 that had filled every hotel hallway with dime-a-night cots.

Gene liked the no-nonsense way Billie drove, shifting when she had to, not afraid to let the engine whine and work it up a steep grade rather than panic-shift to high, stall, and maybe die. She drove them east, out of town past the railroad roundhouse and the mooing slaughterhouse pens, up and over the rim of the valley. Lamps of the town winked away in the Ford’s mirror. Somebody’d shotgunned a million white stars in the night overhead. The sky shimmered with green and pink sheets of northern lights, and the yellow cones of the car headlights showed only a narrow ribbon of oiled highway.

“This road goes all the way to Chicago,” said Gene.

“We can’t,” said Billie. “I can’t.”

She drove into the night.

“Why me?” he asked.

“Because of who you are. What you can do. California.”

“Because I’d come if you asked.”

“I don’t know what to say about that.”

“We never did.”

“No.” She steered the car toward a farmhouse. “We didn’t. Neither of us.”

She stopped the car in the dark yard beside a Cadillac Gene thought he recognized.

“I’ll take you back right now, if you want,” she said.

“Will you stay with me?”

He saw her head shake.

“Then let’s go,” said Gene as he got out of the car. “They’re waiting.”

Her brother opened the farmhouse door. He wore a frayed white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, loose pants, and a pencil pusher’s black shoes that were as dull as his droopy eyes. His right hand that pumped Gene’s was strong enough to deal cards at the Palace Hotel but not much more, a weak grasp that whispered he was a man who couldn’t cover his bets.,

“Zhene Mallette!” he slurred. “What d’you say, what d’you know, good ta see you!”

“How you doing, Harry?” said Gene, though he knew enough to know that answer and sent all the question’s sincerity to the man’s sister. Gene’s fingers brushed Harry back into the living room where the two men who mattered waited, and though he silently prayed otherwise, he sensed Billie step into the farmhouse behind him and shut the door.

The Cadillac in the yard belonged to the pudgy Shelby banker standing by the table supporting a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey and glasses. The brass nameplate on his desk in the bank read PETER TAYLOR — VICE PRESIDENT. He had a knotty head of not much hair and reminded Gene of a grinning toad who never said no to another fly.

“Good evening, Mr. Mallette,” said Taylor. “Thank you for coming.”

“Wasn’t for you,” said Gene.

“We know,” said the other man, the one Gene had never seen. Least, he’d never seen that particular black-haired city-suited man who hadn’t bothered to get up off the couch — or to either fill his hand with the .45 on his lap or hide the gun. Gene’d seen those eyes and that set of face once in the trenches, another time in a Tijuana cantina, a third time ringside at a smoker in Fresno, and the last and worst time in a set of chains headed through the work camp to the scaffold at San Quentin. Wasn’t that the man was tough, though Gene knew he could take a beating and then some, it was that he’d crawl up off any floor you knocked him down on to tear your heart in two and suck in the sound of ripping flesh.

“Please,” said the banker, “have a chair. Call me Peter.”

“Never figured on calling you at all.”

“Life adds up like we don’t expect. Please, sit down. There, beside the woman.”

“Where should I sit?” said her brother, but his words went into the night as didn’t matter.

Gene eased himself into the folding chair closest to the couch and acted as if his legs weren’t coiled springs. Banker Taylor settled into an easy chair and filled glasses with whiskey. Harry Larson strutted to the folding chair close to Gene, grandly lowered himself but misjudged his balance and almost crashed to the floor. By the time he got himself stable, his sister stood behind him, a hand on his shoulder. The man on the couch didn’t move.

“Nice night for a drive.” Gene sent his words to the banker, kept the man on the couch in his gaze. “But that whiskey is illegal. Seems like a man in your position would be more careful.”

“Laws like Prohibition are for people who fear man’s nature.” Taylor held a whiskey toward Gene. When Gene didn’t take it, Taylor sat the glass on a milk crate near Gene’s legs. “Wise of you not to drink, given the opportunity in front of you. As for what’s legal, a man like you who’s served time in a prison work camp can’t be sanctimonious.”

“Your friend on the couch there would know more about prison than me.”

“Never been,” said the man on the couch. “Witnesses never make it to the trials.”

Banker Taylor extended a glass of whiskey to the black-haired man. “Gene, you’ll find that Norman here — pardon my manners, this is Norman Doyle — Mr. Doyle is a lucky man.”

Doyle took the whiskey glass with his left hand; the butt of the .45 faced his right.

“You don’t need a glass, do you, Harry? You took care of yourself as soon as your sis left for town. Your vice is still legal, though the politicians are going to fix that, too. And you, Wilemena — or should I call you Widow Harris? You know, Gene, she’s been without a man for a long time. A broke-in mare without a saddle for the itch. I don’t think we’ll give her a glass. She’s a woman, plus whiskey and Injuns don’t mix, even if they are breeds.”

“Get to it,” snapped Gene.

“How you doing in the market?”

“What?”

“The stock market,” said the banker. “Everybody plays the market these days. Going up, up, up. Going to make everybody a millionaire. How you doing in the stock market?”

“You know I’m not that kind of guy.”

“You mean you can’t be. ’Cause you don’t have the money. So how you going to get rich? This is America. Everybody wants to get rich. Can’t get a good car or the woman you want if you don’t have silver dollars to jingle. Are you going to get what you want, what you need, by roughnecking other people’s oil out of this God-forsaken ground?”

“I get by.”

“And that’s all you’re getting. By. Passed by. Till one day the wind just up and blows you away like you were never here. Forgotten. But tonight, you’re a lucky man. If you got the guts to be who you are and do what you can do better than any man in this state.”

“Tell me.”

The banker said: “You’re a boxer.”

Harry Larson blurted out: “Everybody knows, Gene! We all heard. You’re the best!”

Billie squeezed her brother’s shoulder and he shut up.

“I gave that up,” said Gene. “I’m not ever going back in the ring.”

Doyle said: “Yet.”

“California rules don’t matter up here,” said the banker. “What that judge said—”

“It isn’t about that.”

“Maybe you don’t have the guts for it anymore,” said Doyle.

“It’s not guts,” said Gene. “It’s the stomach.”

“Killing a man should be no big deal for a war boy like you,” said the man with the gun.

“I didn’t kill him. We fought. I hit him. He went down. He didn’t get up. He died.”

“Oh.” Doyle smiled. “So you didn’t do it. What happened? Did some angel come down to the canvas and snatch his soul?”

“I don’t know. Angels don’t tell me their secrets. The only reason the night court judge called it reckless misadventure was to keep the locals from lynching me. Banning me from boxing in the state and sticking me in the work camp for ninety days got me out of town. When I got out, nobody cared anymore. Except me. I went home. So what’s my boxing to you?”

“It’s what it is to our whole damn town,” said the banker. “We got us a heavyweight championship of the world going to be fought here. Jack Dempsey against Tommy Gibbons.”

“That’s just a joke going around,” said Gene.

“Yes, it started that way. A joke. A telegram from a civic leader that was a publicity stunt to get Shelby a little free fame. As if anything is free.”

“Who cares about fame.”

“Be a modern man, Gene. Modesty is over. Useless. So is reality. Image is everything. What’s true for a man is true for a town. This is a dirt road nowhere, but so what? If it can become famous, a celebrity, then riches and the happy-ever-after good life will surely follow.”

“That’s a load of crap.”

“Maybe, but it’s the way things work nowadays. The joke telegram was going to get us a few newspaper stories back East, a publicity stunt. But Dempsey’s manager Jack Kearns called the bluff, agreed to his boy fighting for the championship in Shelby. Nobody out here wants to be a back-down kind of guy. So now this ‘joke’ thing has grown a life of its own, a bigger one every day. Dempsey’s been guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars. Now accountants are estimating a total cash gate of a million to a million point four.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Gene nodded his head to take in Billie. “With us?”

“We’re going to heist the fight.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe the million-dollar-gate hype,” said the banker. “But figure it’s half that, and figure our plan will get us half of that half. A quarter of a million dollars split up among we five won’t make us famous, but these days, that much cash will still buy us some sweet years.”

“You’re nuts!”

“No, I’m the inside man. If these locals knew the strings I’ve been pulling the last few years, they’d lynch me. I’ve been a public naysayer on this fight, but a whisper here, a question phrased just so, and suddenly people get an idea they think is their own. That’s how I put this in place, that’s how we’ll take it.”

“To make it work,” said the toad, “we all need to be insiders. I inspired the idea that to perfect our glorious Dempsey-Gibbons fight, we need a preliminary bout: the heavyweight championship of Shelby. That’ll put us all on the inside. That’s how we’ll rip it off.”

“You want me to be your man in that prelim fight. Your boxer.”

“Don’t care if you win,” said the pudgy banker in the lantern-lit farmhouse. “Don’t care if you lose. All we care about is that you fight, that you make it go the distance, and that you climb out of the ring alive with enough left in you to do the job.”

“Getting out of the ring alive seems like a good idea,” said Gene.

“We’re good idea men,” said the banker. “The question is whether you got the guts and the smarts to be one, too. You can say no, walk out of here right now. If you’re dumb enough to tell anybody what’s what, we’ll call you crazy and a liar. They’ll believe us, not you.”

“This hard world is hell on liars.” The black-haired man reclined on the couch, made a show of keeping his eyes on Gene and the .45 automatic on his lap.

“How is it on crazies?” said Gene.

“Depends.” Norman Doyle didn’t smile.

“What if they have to carry me out of the ring?”

Doyle said: “Don’t bother to wake up.”

The hophead beside Gene looked at nobody.

“So what’s it going to be?” said the banker. “Yes or no?”

“Never happen.” Gene shook his head: “Forget about whether the heist would work, the crime thing isn’t what I do.”

“Then you can say goodnight and leave,” said the toad. “Your Billie girl will drive you back to that charming boarding house. Say goodbye to her, then, too. She’ll be leaving town.

“You see,” continued the toad, “there’ve been expenses. Bringing Doyle up from Butte. Guaranteeing debts Harry incurred ’round the state. He was the one who knew of your fondness for his sister. She’s a hell of a woman. A fine worker. But schoolmarming and waitressing won’t settle Harry’s debts. Bankruptcy foreclosure from the people Harry owes is permanent. So if our scheme ‘never happens,’ then Doyle will drive her to Butte so she can work buying her brother’s lifeblood a few dollars at a time in an establishment whose proprietor I happen to—”

Gene was on his feet, the folding chair spinning behind him before he knew it, but not before Doyle’d filled his hand with the .45.

“You did this whole thing!” he told the banker.

“Let’s say I brought elements together for a successful business venture,” said Taylor. “Now you choose. What do you want that business to be?”

The black hole of the .45 watched Gene’s heart. The banker watched his eyes. Harry Larson slumped with his face in his hands.

His sister stood behind him. Gene saw her soft cheek he’d never touched now scarred by a wet line.

Must have been deep into the twenty-first century before he said: “Who do I have to fight?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Doyle.

“No,” said Gene, “I guess it doesn’t. How long do I have to get ready?”

“Seven weeks and change. You fight on the Fourth of July.”

“That’s not enough time.”

“Make it be,” said Taylor. “Inspired local sponsors ‘found’ Doyle to manage you. The mayor’s sending an offer. Accept it. Also, cultivate your mustache: in your pictures, that’s what we want people to see and remember, for your sake. Tomorrow, Billie will fetch you out to the old Woon ranch. The four of you will live there while you train.”

“One of you might be able to run aw ay for a while,” said Doyle. “I’d catch you, but you’d have a while. But the three of you... easy pickings.”

“I have enough running to do for the fight,” said Gene.

“Good,” said Taylor. He raised his whiskey glass: “And good luck... champ.”

She drove him back to town. They didn’t talk. The envelope with the offer from the mayor was in his mailbox. Gene scrawled OK, signed his name, and gave the clubfooted desk clerk two bits to deliver it. Gene settled his tab through the morning and stretched out on his last honest bed. Trains clattered through town on the tracks fifty yards from where he lay, but he let them go without him to clean forests and seaside towns.

Billie picked him up after breakfast. The highway snaked through erosion-farmed prairie spreading sixty miles west to the jagged blue sawtooth range of the Rocky Mountains. That highway beneath heaven’s blue bowl sky led to Mexico. She turned left off that oiled route, put the Rockies at their backs as they followed a graveled snake trail. The farmland became hilly with the breaks for the river named Marias after some woman in Meriwether Lewis’s life. Gene thought Lewis was damn lucky to be able to do that for her.

The peeling Woon house and barn stood against the horizon at the end of the road.

“There’s two bedrooms upstairs, one down, and a room in the barn,” said Doyle as he came off the front porch to where Gene and Billie parked. “I got the downstairs where I can hear the screen doors creak. You’re upstairs, palooka, the woman, too. Hophead is in the barn.”

Doyle led them into the barn, where the oven air was thick with the scent of hay and manure. Flies buzzed. A black horse whinnied from a stall. A heavy punching bag hung down into the open other end from one beam, while another dangled a speed bag. Dumbbells waited on a table next to boxing gloves, rolls of tape, and five pairs of canvas shoes.

“Taylor guessed about your size,” said Doyle. “We’ll get other stuff if you need it.”

“I’ve got my own shoes and gloves for the fight.” Gene picked up a pair of sneakers. “These’ll work in the meantime.”

From ten feet away, Doyle said: “So what now?”

“You got a knife?”

Doyle’s right hand snapped like a whip to drop a switchblade out of his sleeve. Light flashed between him and Gene, and with a thunk the knife stuck into a stall wall. “Help yourself.”

So I gotta watch out for that, too. Gene pulled the knife from the barn wood and cut his pants into shorts. Tossed the knife to the dirt in front of Doyle’s shined shoes. Gene took off his shirts, changed his work boots for the new sneakers, said: “Time to train.” Working the oil rigs had kept him strong with endurance. That was crucial, but he’d need explosive power, too. He spent an hour working with dumbbells while telling Harry how to construct a flat bench for chest presses. He put a ten-pound weight in each hand to shadowbox. When his arms were on fire, he put on training gloves and moved first to the heavy bag, then to the speed bag. Gene’s arms were so heavy that even if he’d had his old timing, the twenty-minute display of tap tap miss he gave the watching Doyle, Billie, and Harry would still have been pitiful.

“Seems you’re working it backward,” said Doyle. “Skill stuff should come first.”

“Find out what skill you got when you’re at your worst.” Sweat covered Gene’s bare chest. “Then you know how much further you’ve got to make yourself go.”

“ ’Pears to me you’ll be lucky to make it out of this barn.”

“I might not be the only one.”

“ ’Least you talk like a fighter.” Doyle spit. “Woman: I’m hungry. Go make lunch.”

“Make your own lunch,” said Gene. “I need a spotter for road work and I don’t fancy your company or figure Harry can handle the heat.”

“Your job ain’t to figure, palooka.”

“Fine. You explain to Taylor how you chose to screw up me getting ready.”

“I explain nothing to nobody.” Doyle’d taken off his suit jacket so his white shirt showed dampness around the leather straps of the .45’s shoulder holster.

But you won’t push things too far, thought Gene. Not yet.

Doyle said: “I’m going to the house.”

As he walked away, Gene told Billie what he needed.

She bridled the black horse. Didn’t even look for a saddle. Swung herself up on its back, her dress swirling, hiking up past her knees. Her feet were bare, as were her legs that gripped the naked flanks of the black horse. Harry draped glass jars of water on each side of the quivering animal’s neck. Billie tapped her heels against the animal, and he carried her out of the barn, her round hips split evenly along the beast’s spine and rocking with the rhythm of each step. When she got into the sunlight, she turned back, gave Gene a nod.

Gene ran.

Out of the barn, through the yard, along the gravel road. Dust filled his panting mouth. Rocks stabbed the soles of his feet. He followed a wagon trail along the crests of the river breaks. A quarter mile and the house vanished behind rises and dips in the land. He dropped the strong set of his shoulders. Heard the clump clump of the horse behind him, the rattle of the glass water jars. A half-mile and he vomited, staggered, and would have fallen but somehow she was down on the ground beside him, holding him up as he wheezed and gasped and the world spun in bright explosions of light.

She poured water over him, made him wash his mouth and drink. “Can you do it?”

“Have to, don’t we?”

Billie touched his sweaty chest. His slamming heart made her hand twitch. “Thank you.”

“Have to run ten miles a day by end of next week.”

She got back on the horse. He stumbled along for another three minutes before he turned around and made his mind see him running back to the house. He wouldn’t let Doyle see him have to be carried back. Billie made Gene eat four scrambled eggs for lunch. Hosed him off behind the house. Laid him down on the bed upstairs while she unpacked his suitcase with his clothes, the canvas bag with his still supple ring shoes, blue satin trunks, and those blood-smeared black gloves. Before dinner she held his ankles while he did sit-ups until his midriff cramped at ninety-seven and he thrashed out of her control on the barn’s dirt floor. He sparred with the heavy bag and the speed bag and lost both times. She watched for the five minutes he hung swaying from a pipe by both arms to stretch out and give himself a whisker longer reach. She couldn’t tell that he’d tried to finish with a set of pull-ups and failed. Hosed him down again. Dinner was whatever and he ate it all, including the nighttime-only bone-building milk that could cut his wind. Upstairs, in only his underpants, he lay helpless while she sponged his face in the pickle brine he’d made Doyle get from town. Some trickled in his eye, but she was fast and put her hand over his mouth so his scream stayed muffled in the bedroom walls. She eased both of his hands into other bowls of brine: working the rigs had toughened their flesh, but every trick mattered. The brine stung in the dozens of cuts on his hands. He was too tired for pain.

“Would he do it?” said Gene. “Your brother. Make you... let them force you into...”

“Harry would hate that but he already hates himself. He’d shoot up and believe it was a trick of fate he couldn’t help and can’t help, something that’ll go away if we just get through it.”

“What about you?”

She turned away. “My mom died. My baby died. My brother’s all I’ve got left to lose.”

“There’s you.”

“You’re the only one who cares about that.” She shook her head. “Besides, they wouldn’t just kill Harry, they know he wouldn’t care. So they’d kill me, too, to prove the point to the world. At least if the two of us are still alive... we’ve got that.”

She turned back to him. “You know that... whatever you want from me, you can have.”

“I don’t want anybody to hurt you. I don’t want you to ever have to cry.”

Billie left the bedroom. He lay there with his hands in the bowls of brine. If the house catches fire, here’s where I’ll die. The bedroom door opened and she came in carrying a roll of blankets and a pillow. She made a bed for herself on the floor, took his hands out of the bowls, pulled a blanket over him, but then he was gone into a sleep beyond rest.

The next day was worse. And the day after that. Bone-thumping soreness. Muscles of rubber, lungs of fire. Half the time he couldn’t think straight as he lifted weights, tried not to trip and kept failing as he jumped rope. He’d hang from the pipe first thing every morning, drop down to bend and twist every way he could before Billie bridled the horse, filled the water bottles, and followed his stumbling run across the prairie. Heavy bag, speed bag, more rope, shadowboxing, then another run before dinner. Brine sponges and soaking. And always Doyle watching, hanging around, eating across from him and Billie, and when he wasn’t on the needle, brother Harry, who kept trying to joke, who talked of what a fight it would be, of how all Gene’s road work was building them streets of gold, a highway to heaven.

On the fifth night at the farm, Taylor sneaked out to see them.

“They found your opponent,” said the pudgy banker. “Eric Harmon. He’s got twenty pounds of muscle and two inches on you, and he’s only two years out of high school. Won the Golden Gloves down in Great Falls, and he’s got glory in his eyes.”

“He can have it,” said Gene.

“That’s right. As long as you don’t let him finish you off getting it.”

Taylor left them a radio and left them alone.

Training the next day was hell. And the next. Nights while he soaked his hands, Billie read Sinclair Lewis to him as music played on the radio downstairs where Doyle smoked and watched the door. Gene could readjust fine, but her voice was magic. He’d ask her questions. Knew she answered him with the truth, perhaps saying it for the first time in her life without qualification. About how her father bought her mother. About how Billie always knew she never belonged, not white, not Indian, not a man with power, not a woman with respect. How freedom only came when she lost herself in a book or at a movie or in a song on the radio. Or sometimes on a horse, galloping over empty prairie. How the only time she ever felt real was when she was teaching and some kid’s face lit up as he got it, whether “it” was the Pythagorean theorem or the glories of Rome. How she took pity on the fatherly man who begged to marry her, gambled that he’d at least keep her safe. How he gave her baby Laura, who fiercely stirred her soul. How daughter and husband died coughing while Billie watched.

Gene answered her questions, too. About how after the blood of Belleau Wood he’d rotated to England, where a sergeant gave him a choice of boxing or the front. The ring seemed saner. Learning to slip and bob and weave, combinations and counters and timing.

“And I found out that while I could do a lot, I was only truly good, really good, born in the blood special good for one thing: boxing.”

“Then knowing and having that makes you lucky.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” he said.

She said nothing. Blew out the bed lantern and lay down on her floor.

The next morning he ran clear and cool in his head, heard the horse trot to keep up behind him. He went three hills farther than he’d ever gone before and ran back without stopping. Took only one jar of water from Billie. He used heavier weights, did more sit-ups, made the jump rope sing and swirl. Slipped on training gloves. The heavy bag hung in the sunlit barn. Gene glided to it on feet that didn’t stick to the earth. He felt the rhythm of a breeze. Feinted once, twice—

Hit the heavy bag with a right jab that shook dust off the barn beam, a great slamming thwack that made the horse jump in his stall.

Gene turned and grinned at Billie. Saw her want to smile back, and that was something, almost enough. The heavy bag cried in pain for half an hour of his punches. He worked the speed bag like a machine gun. Doyle came out of the house, the leer gone from his face. Harry pranced around the barnyard like a chicken chirping: What’d I tell you! What’d I tell you!

And Gene breathed as a boxer.

That night Billie blew out the lantern on the bedside table, but instead of lying down on her floor, she stood there looking at him on the bed as moonlight streamed through the open window. The breeze stirred her hair and her long white nightshirt.

“You lied to me,” she said.

“That’s one thing I’d never do.”

“You said you were only truly good at one thing, at boxing. But you’re the best in the world there ever could be at this. At risking everything to save me. No one could do that better and there’s sure no one who would ever want to.”

The bed floated in front of the light of her eyes in that shadowed room.

“Do you think we’re going to get out of this alive?” she whispered.

“Or die trying.”

But she didn’t laugh. Said: “Either way, just once, for one thing, I want to choose.”

“That’s what I want for you, too.”

She lifted the nightshirt off over her head like a white cloud floating away to let her bare skin glisten with the lunar silver glow. The bed squeaked as she knelt on it, as she lay beside him. He’d never been so afraid of doing the wrong thing. She took his right hand and pressed it on her breast, filled it with her round, warm, stiffening flesh, and he felt her heart slamming as hard as his as she said: “Everything I can, I give to you.”

“But do you want to?” he whispered.

Her breath came quicker, shallower, like she was running. Her long legs stirred against his. He pulled back, her face held away from his, her lips parted but unable to reach him, and he held her away until he heard her whisper Yes! she whispered Yes! she told him Yes! and as her bare leg slid up his thighs he moved into their kiss.

In the morning Gene found the edge. That knife line border where strength and hunger meet. That fury place when you sink into your eyes and your spine steels. You no longer walk, no longer run: you are a tight wind with legs like thunderclouds and lightning bolt arms. The smile on your skull is death and your mouth’s coffee-metal-salty taste for blood doesn’t care whose. He devoured ten miles of road with the scent of her on him, her hips bouncing up and down on the black horse. He shadowboxed in the barn with her watching everywhere and not there at all. Bare-fisted, slew the heavy bag with his favorite three-punch staccato rhythm and whirled without losing cadence to make the speed bag sing, then spun to snatch a horsefly out of the air with his right jab. He was totally in the moment of that hay-stinking, dusty, oven horse barn even as he was absolutely in eternity’s every four-cornered canvas ring. Pain simply didn’t matter. He was a boxer.

“Clean up,” said Doyle. “We’re all going to town, show the yokels we’re for real.”

Doyle drove and made Gene sit up front with him. Harry was a wire in the back seat beside Billie. She wore that blue dress.

Shelby’d been full before the fight announcement. Now Gene felt like he was in a beehive swelling with hot air from the beating of a million wings. The town had six dance halls for workers who’d flooded in to hammer up the eight-sided, 40,000-seat wooden arena rising like a toothpick skeleton on the edge of town. On the prairie across the tracks from the fight site stood an encampment of Indian tepees. Cars jammed Main Street. People stared and pointed. Men took it upon themselves to clear a slot for them in front of the movie house, holding up traffic, beckoning Doyle into the parking spot. When they got out of the car, hands appeared from everywhere to shake Gene’s, to touch him on the back, the shoulders. The crowd stared at the Larsons, who followed in the wake of the fighter and his trainer, knew these merely local half-breeds were now somehow sacred, too. Fans smiled a dark hunger. An oilman’s blond daughter whose eyes Gene had never marked now pulled at the gladiator with her sapphire gaze.

Harry jumped out front: “Let us through! Let Gene through!” They entered a barbershop. A white-shrouded half-clipped customer leapt out of his chair, and Doyle nudged Gene to obey the barber’s plea to take that throne.

“On the house for you two boys,” said the barber. “On the house.”

“What two boys?” said Gene.

The back room curtain opened and out came a husky giant whose muscles bulged his shirt sleeves. Eric Harmon said: “Me and you.”

The good part of Gene, the old part, the real part, wanted to say: You were here first, Eric. Take the chair. But the boxer he was now smiled and leaned back for the barber’s clip.

“I won’t be long,” said Gene. “Then you can have your turn.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Eric.

Only the snip snip of scissors sounded in the barbershop as Eric leaned against the wall. Doyle sat, nodded for Billie and Harry to sit, too. Two other customers pretended to read magazines. On the street outside the window, none of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd moved; all of them faced every which way they could to keep that glass in the corner of their eyes.

“Is that okay?” whispered the barber after he spun Gene around to look in the mirror.

“Looks damn fine,” said Gene. “I look damn good, don’t I?”

Thought: Please Billie, know I don’t mean it!

“Never thought of you as a pretty boy,” said Eric.

“I never thought of you at all.” Gene got out of the chair, tossed the barber a quarter. Told the scissors man: “You do such fine work, think I’ll hang around and watch.”

Eric shook his head and took the chair. The white sheet whipped around him. Gene noticed the barber’s shaking hands.

“Careful there, Pete. Don’t nick our boy and make him red out too soon.”

“Doesn’t matter if he uses the razor,” said Eric. “I don’t bleed easy.”

“We’ll see.” Gene looked across the room. “Mind if I put on your radio?”

The barber didn’t break his concentration as he cut the younger man’s hair, and Gene walked over, tuned the radio to some hot New York jazz. Gene turned the volume up.

Gene said: “I got to wash up. But not as much as some.”

Then he walked through the curtain to the sink and the bathroom. The sound of radio jazz blanketed the room outside the curtain. Nobody could hear anything from the washroom. Gene turned on the water and didn’t look around as he heard the curtain swing open, get pulled shut.

“Think we gave them enough show, Eric?” Gene took a towel off the rack, turned around, drying his hands. The younger fighter stood watching him. At least two inches. At least twenty pounds.

“This isn’t a show for me,” said Eric. “We never met, not really, but I know who you are, seen you around. Always kind of admired you. So you should know this isn’t personal.”

“At least you’re that smart.”

“This is about winning. About who’s a champion. And that’ll be me. I’ll fight you fair, but I’ll beat you.”

“Eric, don’t kill yourself over—”

“California was a long time ago. Not long for people out there in the street, but for guys like us who have to climb into the ring, damn near the weight of forever ago. I got no feelings for what you did, except sorry for you and the guy who fell.”

“I knocked him down.”

“You’ll have to do more than that to me. This is my only chance to prove I’m somebody.”

“No it’s not.”

“Sure it is. Just look at you.”

Then the younger man stuck out his hand. When they shook, he didn’t try to crush Gene’s fingers, and Gene suddenly loved him for that.

“Give me a good fight,” said Eric. “I want to know I won something hard.”

Gene didn’t know what to say. Let him leave with silence. Gene gave him time to get clear of the barbershop, swept open the curtain, and there stood Sheriff John Otis.

“ ’Pears I didn’t have to hustle down here after all.” Texas John’s eyes pulled back from Gene to take in Billie, trembling Harry. Doyle. “Don’t see no trouble to put down.”

“Could have been,” said the barber. “Why—”

“My law ain’t about ‘could be.’ ’S about what I see with these two good eyes.” Those two good eyes rode Doyle. “Though just ’cause I size up a son of a bitch doesn’t mean I’ll give him what he deserves. But when he makes his wrong play, I drop the curtain.”

“Just like you were in a movie, huh?” said Doyle. “Not out here in the real world.”

The sheriff laughed, and his suit coat coincidentally opened with his swinging arms. Gene saw the Colt Peacemaker holstered on Texas John’s hip like it had been in his Ranger days. Saw the wooden stock for the Mauser slung under Otis’s right arm, knew that thousand-yard sniper automatic hung near the sheriff’s heart.

“This ain’t the real world. This is Shelby.”

“Imagine that,” said Doyle.

“Don’t have to,” answered Texas John. “I’m here. And we got phones and everything. And when I called around about a curly-haired fancy-dancy with a Butte license plate who claims to be a boxing manager, the boys down there wondered how you ended up in an honest game.”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Luck is a fragile thing,” said Doyle. “Be sure to watch it close. You can bet I will.”

The sheriff told Gene: “You in with some fine people, Hometown.”

His black cowboy boots shook the barbershop as he tromped out to Main Street.

“We’re back to the ranch,” said Doyle.

Great by me, thought Gene. Every day his training ran him like a growing steel tiger. Every night he lay beside Billie. He needed less sleep and more of her. She gave him all she could reach. She’d ask questions, care about his answers.

“What was the hardest thing to learn about boxing?” asked Billie.

“Making yourself pull down into the fighter’s crouch where you could hit and where you could get hurt. Getting past the terror. Your mouth all dry, your stomach heaving in and out, and you look across the ring and see that steely stare coming back at you and you hope he doesn’t see your stomach fluttering and then you see his and it’s jumping like mad, too, and oh Christ, any second they’ll ring that bell.”

He told her how easy it was to forget to keep your guard up. How his favorite combination was a lightning left-left-right, and when you throw the left jab, how you had to remember to bring it back at eye level, quick and straight. How after the second left, your dance had to move your left foot four inches to the left so your shoulders squared up and gave your right jab the snap that created power. How the uppercut was easy, go pigeon-toed and corkscrew your punch. How the hook took him months to learn, how he practiced a million times with each fist until he could keep his elbow up and whip it out tight and close, just eighteen inches of loop — two feet and it’s an arm punch, a pillow, a joke, a nothing and left you only with how lucky you were in dodging the others guy’s coming-in cannonball.

“But besides being good at it, what do you like about boxing?”

Took him all the next day to find the answer. That night they lay like spoons in the darkness, his face brushed by the perfume of her hair, her bare spine pressed against the mass of his chest, the two of them alone on the white sheet of their starlit bed.

“In the ring,” he whispered, “what’s happening is real. True. Even the feints, the fakes, and the cheats. You use every single bit of yourself and find more you didn’t know was there. No chain is gonna whip out of the sky and hang you dead and dropped before you know it. You’re not gonna need to shoot your own damn horse. You know exactly who you are. Where you are. It’s a fight. You’re a boxer.”

She said nothing.

Then told him: “This here with you is the closest I’ve got to that.”

Told him: “You say the one special thing you can do is boxing. The one special thing I can do is make you love me.”

Billie curled into a ball, away from him and into him at the same time, her head pulling away on the sheet from his kisses even as her round hips pushed back against his loins, pressed against him, rubbing, and Gene gave himself to her.

Nine nights before the fight Doyle threw open their door, stood backlit in the entrance as Billie jerked the sheet over her nakedness and Gene sneaked one bare foot down to the floor.

“Wake up and dress, palooka. I need a driver.”

“That’s not my job.”

“The hophead’s too shaky, so it’s either you or the woman. If it’s her, the coming back to you will take a good while longer. That’s okay with me.”

Gene made the time as midnight when he drove Doyle away from the farmhouse.

“They say a woman weakens a boxer,” said Doyle. “Steals his legs. His wind.”

“Only way to find out is to get me a sparring partner. Why don’t you volunteer?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, punchy?”

“I’m just doing the job I said I’d do.”

“No. Tonight you’re driving. Like I say you’ll do.”

Doyle made him take a back road into Shelby. Music came from the joints on Front Street. Doyle had him park on an alley slope up from the drop-lit rear door of Taylor’s bank. “Shut off the lights and engine, but keep your hand on the starter.”

“We meeting the man?”

“Might say that if you weren’t supposed to keep shut up.” Doyle bent over to hide the strike of a kitchen match that let him check his watch: ten minutes to one. Doyle puffed out the blue flame. Sulphur smoke soured the darkness. He eased out the passenger door, flapped his suit coat so it was loose.

“When I come running, you start the engine. Keep the lights out.” Doyle crept to a shed where the shadows hid him from the alley below, stood there like a rock.

Gene knew time in three-minute increments. In the middle of the sixth round, way down the slope, between two Main Street buildings, Gene spotted the hulking figure of a man walking toward the alley. The man stepped out of the passageway: Sheriff Otis.

From that distance, the car with Gene was an innocent shape, one of the new vehicles crowding into town for the oil rigs or the railroad spur they were building for the chartered trains from back East. Even if the ex-Texas Ranger spotted the car, its engine was off, its doors were closed. Shadows cloaked Doyle. Sheriff Otis walked along the flat stone wall of a building and into the cone of light dropping down over the bank’s rear door. Otis wrapped his gun hand around the bank’s doorknob to be sure it was locked tight.

Gene barely heard Doyle’s whisper: “Draw!”

Saw the shadowed man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out toward Otis.

Saw the flash of the pistol and heard its roar as a blast of crimson graffitied the bank’s cement wall below the doorknob and Otis flipped into the air and crashed to the alley.

Doyle leapt into the car and they sped to the back road south.

“Got the son of a bitch just like I wanted!” yelled Doyle.

“Sucker shot!”

“Depends on which side of the trigger you’re on. Besides, I could have put the pill through his black heart, but instead he’ll get to gimp around and play the local hero.”

“What makes you so kind?”

“A dead lawman brings heat from everywhere. A cripple is a joke.”

“Hope he doesn’t bleed out.”

They hit a bump.

Doyle said: “Those are the risks you take.”

Three nights later, six days to the fight, Taylor drove out, told Doyle: “Perfect job. The town fathers gave a local guy the badge. Otis is parked in his house on the east end, sitting on the porch with his gun on his lap, his leg cemented up, watching the trains go by, and cursing like a son of a bitch. Somehow everybody’s talking about two guys with Texas accents who blew into town and now can’t be found anywhere. Almost like they never existed, but they must have been the ones. Amman’s past come back to haunt him. Happens all the time.”

“Will he walk again?” asked Gene.

“Who cares?” said Doyle. “The law dog’s not gonna be there to figure what he can’t see, he’s not gonna be able to run after no robbers.”

“You will have to run,” said the toad to Gene. “In all the confusion, our locals won’t piece it together but, quick enough, they’ll take it to the real lawman. He’ll figure your part, especially since he already’s got a lead on Doyle. But Doyle’s good shot bought you half a day at least.

“After the heist, this is the first place they’ll look. Doyle’ll plant a burned map of Mexico in the trash ashes. But you go east to that farm where we met. Cut up the cash. Hide my share in the lockbox under the living room floor. Harry, leave the money you owe. Doyle will peel off extra bills for expenses. There’ll be scissors, hair dye. A razor for your mustache, Gene. If you’re banged up from the fight, there’ll be a sling for your arm and doctor’s papers about a farm accident. Only lie when you have to. A close trim, a henna, and Billie’ll look respectable. The shed has a change-up car. Alberta plates. Harry knows the bootlegger trail into Canada. The four of you’ll hit that whistle-stop depot at Aden before the evening papers. Doyle’ll have train tickets to Vancouver for Mr. and Mrs. Louis Dumas. Doyle figures he’ll like New York: Anybody can be anybody there. Harry, you can help Doyle drive to the big time or he’ll let you out on the way, your choice.”

“What about you?” said Gene.

“I stay here to keep messing with the minds of our friends and neighbors. A year from now, I regretfully leave this paradise for a better job. Six months later, I vanish a free man.”

“What’s to stop us from keeping all the money?” said Gene. “You won’t go to the cops.”

“You’re too smart to risk running from my insurance men plus hiding from the law.” Taylor smiled. “Besides, you and the Larsons are fundamentally honest people. A banker learns how to judge that real quick.”

That moonlit night as she floated on his chest, Billie whispered: “Would Doyle double-cross our banker?”

“No. Not as long as it’s all working. They’re both too clever for that.”

“What about us?” whispered Billie.

“Yeah.” A breath made his chest rise and fall. “Any way you look at it, what about us.”

On the first day of July the thermometer said it was 92 degrees in the shade. Doyle was gone; Harry was stoned. After his morning run and workout. Billie stretched Gene out on their bed, rubbed him down, lay beside him like every morning. They napped. Something woke Gene before the ticking alarm clock. The window glowed like molten white gold. He shielded his eyes and shuffled to the edge of the fluttering curtains.

Out there. By the barn. Doyle closing the trunk of his Ford and carrying a shovel back into the barn where maybe it hadn’t been hanging that morning.

That night, Gene told Billie: “Tomorrow I need you to go to town. With Doyle. If Harry comes, even better, but you’ve got to get Doyle away from here and keep him away for at least half a day. Say it’s for supplies or whatever, but you’ve got to get me free of him.” She nodded in the darkness, and he hated them both for the creeping fear.

The next day, the second day of July, two days before the fight, he watched as Billie drove away from the farm toward Shelby. With Doyle. Doyle alone.

Gene ran to the barn, found Harry slumped on a stool. Harry sat in that manure oven, his shirt sleeves buttoned tight on his wrists, flies crawling untroubled on that face where the eyes clung to open above a slack-jawed smile. Gene said: “What kind of man are you?”

“Wasted,” answered Harry.

“Can you still lie and do it good enough to save your sister?”

Harry stared at ghosts standing witness. Licked his lips, told Gene: “I’m the kind of guy who says whatever and then believes it’s true. Believing a lie helps sell it. So you’re telling me that for once in my stupid life, what I gotta do is just be myself? Even I can’t screw that up.”

Can’t do it like Billie, thought Gene as he saddled the black horse while lecturing her brother: “If Doyle beats me back, tell him I took the horse to ride out my crazies. Sell him that. If I get back first, we got to get this horse in his stall like he never left it.”

As he galloped away, Gene didn’t look back at the man slumped in the barn door.

Way he figured it with Billie’s talk about the Pythagorean theorem, from the barn on the ranch south of Shelby to the farmhouse east of that town was just under fourteen miles. But that was one way, and across fenced rolling prairie and farmland where somebody might see him.

Somebody, but not Doyle. He’d be busy. In town. With Billie.

Gene boot-heeled the horse’s flanks. Not for nothing. Not all this for nothing.

Misted indigo humps of the three Sweet Grass Hills rode a horizon of blue sky. Fields of wheat Gene and the horse charged through were losing green to gold, baking to an early harvest in the ninety-five-degree heat. The horse reeked of wet sweat. Would Doyle’s nose pick up that scent rubbed on a man? When he got back. With Billie. A circling hawk watched Gene cut the first of many barbed-wire fences. I’m just like an old-timer now, he thought as he rode through the savaged fence. What was it like for them? Fields of horse-belly-high buffalo grass instead of sodbuster-ruined scrub and wheat planted for starving Boston urchins. What was it like for Billie’s people who rode this endless open with a hundred million buffalo? Gene heeled his horse.

He spotted the farmhouse. Nobody else had seen him, though he’d seen a wagon ferrying a Hutterite family in their religion’s strange black pants, homemade checkered shirts, and plain faces. They’d ignored a frantic horseman who galloped past them, cutting fences before they were even out of sight. They’d tell no one outside their colony what they’d seen: nothing outside their community of God mattered.

Gene sat in the saddle on the heaving horse. Watched the farmhouse for ten minutes. Saw nothing move. He made the horse trot forward.

“Hello?” he called. No answer. He reined in the horse by a garage window. Gene peered inside: dusty sunlight showed him a coupe with Alberta license plates. And only two seats.

Took him one loop around the farmhouse to spot what he hadn’t found at Woon’s ranch. Behind a shed was a freshly shoveled solo hole in the earth, six feet long and four feet deep, its dirt pile waiting beside that gaping maw.

Call me a lucky man, thought Gene. Not many people get to see this.

Doyle, you lazy bastard. Four feet isn’t deep enough for even one in this coyote country.

From the saddle, he nudged open the shed door and saw three sacks of quicklime.

Gene pulled the door shut, then jerked the reins and kicked the frothing horse home.

In a gully a mile from the Woon barn, the horse staggering beneath him, Gene glanced over the ridge toward the highway: two cars turned off that main road toward the ranch.

“Go!” he kicked his boot heels. The exhausted black beast stumbled through the rocky gully circling Woon’s ranch. If Gene rode low and kept the horse’s head down, maybe no one driving up in a car would spot him. He risked a scouting peek over the sage-brushed ridge.

Saw Doyle’s Ford and the toad Taylor’s Cadillac closing in on the ranch.

From the barn ran Harry, stumbling into the path of the cars so they had to stop, had to not get to the ranch as he waved his arms and ranted like a man poisoned with monsters.

“Hya!” Gene charged the horse through the gully, around the back of the ranch, up out of its shelter, and into the barn as car engines whined closer. Gene rode the white-foamed black horse into the open stall, flipped off the saddle and almost ripped the teeth out of the wheezing horse’s mouth as he stripped off the bridle, let it fall to the stall floor as car engines stopped. Gene raced toward the mass of sunlight filling the barn door—

Out, charging toward the two cars emptying of Doyle and Taylor and caught-a-ride Harry. And Billie. Gene yelled: “Where the hell have you been!”

“In town!” called Billie. Her face told him the truth: “Just in town.”

Gene whirled to Taylor: “Why the hell are you here?”

“The town dispatched me to brief you on their plans.” The toad smiled. “And I’ll tell you ours. All that sweat: you’ve been working out. Good. But rest now. Hot out here. Let’s go inside.”

Gene snapped: “The barn?”

“I’m no animal,” said Taylor, and led everyone into the house.

Sitting in the Woon living room, Gene told Taylor: “Sounds like we ain’t going to have a fight. The radio says the chartered trains from back East have all canceled. No money, no fight, nothing for us to steal. Dempsey’s boss Jack Kearns says—”

The toad lunged across the room to scream at the sitting boxer: “The fight is happening! Don’t you say that! The fight is happening and we’re... we’re...”

“You’re wound tight,” said Gene. “Just as tight as one of the real boosters.”

“Worry about you!” Taylor’s hands shook. “You got to fight fifteen rounds and still be workable! Don’t worry about Kearns! The fight’s going to happen! They’re meeting in a bank right now getting seed money! People will show up with cash they owe for tickets! And the chartered trains! They’re going to run full speed from St. Paul and Chicago and fifty dollars ringside! They’re bringing all that money so we can take it! Nobody’s going to keep it from us!” Gene shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

Saw Doyle staring at the trembling toad.

“Yes,” said Taylor. “Yes I am. And this is how it works.

“Under that wooden arena are four rough dressing rooms, one for each fighter. And a collection room for all money coming through the gate. By the sixth round of the Main Event, accountants figure ninety percent of the gate cash will be in. To get it to the bank, they’ll send a posse in the seventh round. Kearns will make Dempsey take it that long so people get their money’s worth. Everybody knows Dempsey can put Gibbons away, so they will all be glued to the ring for the first rounds, for the quick knockout. Guards will be on the gates leading down into the dressing rooms and collection area. But inside there’ll only be fighters, their trainers, a couple counting room clerks — and all that cash.

“You’ve got to take Eric the full fifteen rounds so you’ll have an excuse to still be inside when the Dempsey fight starts. Change fast. Pillowcase masks and gloves go inside with you. Soon as the crowd roars with the bell starting Round One, you three run to the counting room, muscle inside, tie up the clerks, grab the cash, walk out with everything stuffed in your gear bags. Billie picks you up out front during the fifth round while the posse is still at the bank. You’re gone before anybody knows anything is wrong.”

“No killing,” said Gene.

“I’m not a necktie fool,” said Doyle. “We got handcuffs and tape suips for the clerks. Shouldn’t be more than two of them. I’ll be gun man, you truss them up, Harry scoops up cash.”

“You know the rest of the plan,” said Taylor.

“Yes,” said Gene, “I do.”

“So,” said the banker to Gene as he stood to leave: “How you gonna do in the fight?”

“Swell.”

“Glory,” said Doyle. “Ain’t it great.”

That night Gene and Billie made love for the last time before the fight.

“We have to beat everybody,” Gene whispered to her. “Even Harry, and we have to clue him in as much as we dare. We have to do the holdup. Not let anybody die. Get to the car. Then take over Doyle, wrap him up. Drive out east to Texas John’s, dump the whole true thing on him, and comince him ours was the only way. If we turn in the cash plus the guy who shot him and stole it, we got a chance. Maybe Doyle will rat on Taylor, too, buy himself a deal. The men Harry owes won’t go after you two: you’re not worth it to be roped in as accessories. I’ll do time if I have to. No matter what, you’ll be free.”

“You mean from all this.”

“From all that you want free of.”

“It’s a terrible plan.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

Heaven moved aside and let the noon sun boil down on a bull’s-eye boxing ring that Fourth of July, 1923, a black-roped canvas square centered in the heart of an octagonal sloping wooden arena on a sallow dust prairie. Gene wore those bloodied black gloves, blue satin shorts, and his second skin shoes. For a long count he existed alone in the hollow, dry breeze, floating in slow motion, bouncing on the balls of his feet, jabbing air that was as thick as invisible molasses. He lived in the belly of a blazing whiteness. He heard his rasping breaths, his cannon heartbeat. Then gravity’s roar rocketed him back to a box of glory in Shelby, Montana, to Doyle and Harry wearing corner-men’s white shirts and bow ties and sweating at their post, and Gene knew everything had gone terribly wrong.

“Nobody’s here!” he yelled to Doyle. “Look out at the stands! Like three rows of people! Maybe three hundred at most! Empty bleacher seats stretching all the way up to the sky!”

Toad Taylor bobbed outside the ring beneath their corner, a ridiculous straw skimmer knocked off-center above his crimson face as he shook both hands in the air and hissed at them: “They’re coming! The charter trains! Don’t believe them when they say they didn’t go! We stopped the rumors about no fight! We did! So they have to go! They have to be here! Plus the crowds outside! Thousands of them! You’re just the throwaway! The time filler! The real people will be here! They’ll bring the big money! They have to! They must! This is the heavyweight championship of the world!”

But not for Gene.

Or for Eric Harmon, younger, taller, heavier muscled, and abruptly materialized in the opposite corner. The sheen on Eric looked like the boy had oiled himself, but Gene knew it was sweat: Eric would not cheat. Eric’s eyes were bullets. As their gloves fell away from the referee’s handshake, Gene felt Eric drop benevolence he’d cradled for a lifetime.

Then rang that bell.

A whirling fury charged across the ring to Gene, gloves hooking and jabbing and feinting fast, so fast, trees falling on his raised arms as Gene backpedaled, saw flashes of sky and flesh flung his way. Eric connected with a right hook Gene blocked with his shoulder. Gene spun—

Hit the canvas and bounded up before the referee could count two. The bell rang.

“He’s killing you out there!” screamed Doyle in the corner as he sponged Gene’s face.

“He’s trying.”

“The fight’s gotta last!” Doyle glared into Gene’s face. “Decide how you want to die.”

Ding!

Gene took the ring and meant it. Eric rained blows at him. Gene slipped a punch and fired his jab back along the younger man’s arm in a blow that shook Eric’s face. But Gene pulled the last two punches of his combination. Eric didn’t care. Round Two, Three, Four, Five. Eric matched each ticking second of the clock with a punch, a move, a charge.

Round Six Eric bloodied Gene’s mouth. Not much. A trickle of salty wet inside his cheek. The bell rang. Gene went to his corner. If Doyle or Harry said anything, he heard them not. He swallowed. When the bell rang, a new beast pranced out to meet Eric.

All fights have a rhythm, a jazz that is the two combatants and the fight itself, a music that shimmers beyond the sum of its parts into a set with its own time and place and fury. Often individual elements of a fight so dominate that the jazz is muted or lost to naked eyes and souls. But even then, the jazz is there. The true boxer senses that jazz in his bones, a feeling he can’t create alone but one that he can slip into, and through it, become it. And command.

Round Seven came the jazz, and the jazz was Gene. Eric’s punches hit him and hurt, damaged and didn’t matter. Gene’s jabs slammed into the bigger man on time, in rhythm. Gene’s mind cut a deal with the jazz to play long enough to keep the set alive as Gene’s gloves smacked the meat of a young man. Here the ribs. There a hook to the face. Left-left-square up right bam! Over and over again. Round Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eric fought with everything he had and more, but in this music that was his sound, his damning sound: Eric was a fighter fighting. Gene was a boxer. Force against finesse. Strength against science. Work against art. Eric had a heart full of prayers but the angels’ chorus was jazz.

Round Eleven. Blood ran from Eric’s ears and nose. He threw off the referee. Come on! his gloves beckoned Gene. Come on! Round Twelve. Thirteen. Gene danced him into a clinch.

“You can have it!” whispered Gene. “I’ll take a dive in the fifteenth! Don’t make me do this!”

Eric pushed off him and wildly swung-missed. Spit out his mouthpiece. Through broken teeth yelled: “Hell wi’ you! I’m real!”

The low punch Eric threw might have hit home in Round One, but now Gene slid back and let it fan. Without thought, Gene’s right counter slammed his opponent’s jaw. Eric hit the canvas so hard Gene bounced. Stay down! Gene willed. Eric staggered up on the seven count.

Round Fourteen. Eric stood in the center of the ring like a heavy bag absorbing punch after punch from Gene, who for a fury blind minute couldn’t stop. Then he backed away, only bobbed back in close when it looked like the referee would call it.

Fifteen. Final round. Strings down from the sky plucked Eric off his corner stool and puppeted him toward Gene. Blood and sweat trickled down both of Eric’s arms to drip on the canvas. His guard didn’t rise above his belt. Gene tapped his face twice. Eric staggered back—

A roar from the soles of his shoes tore through the state. Eric charged, his arms swinging slow wild haymakers like a baby, his eyes drowned by gore streaming from his splattered forehead as he yelled: “W’re are ’ou? ’Hre ’ou? Fight me! Fight me!”

No one should lose like that. Gene snapped up a perfect guard, danced in. As softly as he dared, Gene hooked a right into the staggering man’s cheek and felled him to the canvas.

The referee stood there, not bothering to count ten. The last bell rang.

Gene knew the referee raised his hand. Knew Harry gave him water, wiped him down. Knew the mayor bounded into the ring and hung a gold-painted brass medal around his neck. Men carried Eric out of the ring. Gene saw his chest move and knew that boy’s hands still clung to life inside bloodied boxing gloves. And as Gene staggered between the ropes Doyle held and saw an arena overflowing with empty seats, he knew that now began his real fight.

Momentum pulled him to the arena corridor. As they walked past the stands, Gene saw a man pass a Mason jar to the only other two people sitting in the row. Gene knew the Mason jar didn’t hold the concession stand’s lemonade. Going down the corridor’s ramp, Gene and his crew met a squad of trainers and corner-men coming up with night-haired Jack Dempsey.

Dempsey hit Gene with eyes that were black ice and saw everything about him, the sheen of sweat, the glint of brass around his neck, the blood splattered on Gene’s chest. I’m taller than him, thought Gene as they drew close. That flicker of arrogance whispered to Dempsey. His gaze jabbed Gene’s soul and Gene knew: never had a day that good, never will.

The paltry paid crowd roared when they saw the true champion emerge into the sunlight.

The lone guard on the door to the walled-in area for the dressing and other rooms told Gene’s crew: “Not a single chartered train came! And everybody else is still hanging outside!”

“Nothing changes!” hissed Doyle as they hurried to the pine-planked sweat chamber the promoters grandly called a dressing room.

Inside, door closed. Harry threw a bucket of water over Gene, wiped him with a towel. Kept muttering: “Great fighter, you’re a great fighter, great fight. Not me, you. ’S’ thing to be.” From a duffel bag, Doyle pulled pillowcases cut for masks and money hauling, his .45 shoulder rig, a suit jacket. He tossed revolvers to Harry and Gene.

“Don’t worry, Champ. They ain’t loaded.”

Gene said: “If the trains didn’t come—”

“We take what’s there!” said Doyle. “You better pray there’s enough!”

Gene had only his shirt left to button when a thunderous creak! rolled through the wooden arena. The room around them bent and screamed. From outside came a great roar. Three would-be holdup men ran into the dungeon of rooms built under the area. The dim hall was empty. They ran to the corridor door. No guard. They hurried up the ramp into a blast of sunlight. Dempsey and Gibbons danced in the ring for Round One, but the great rolling-herd roar of a thousand voices caught even their attention.

In they came from every entryway. Men in suits and straw hats, work boots and denim. Women in long skirts and yellow scarves. Umbrellas and pocket flasks. Clothes ripped by the barbed wire and turnstiles they’d torn down to storm inside for free. Damn the big money they’d never have: no one would keep them from their championship.

“Look!” Harry pointed to a corridor a hundred feet away. A toad of a man, his straw hat askew, hopped back and forth in front of a stampeding phalanx, his hands outstretched to hold them back, screaming so loud that even Gene and his crew heard him: “Go back! You didn’t pay! You’ve got to pay! Everybody’s got to pay!”

Laughter drowned him out as he spun into the ranks of wild-faced men and cackling women. Gene lost sight of Taylor as the crowd swirled. The banker popped out, pressed against a railing as elbows and shoulders slammed his back. The toad’s face was a purple moon with craters for eyes and the scream of his mouth. Taylor’s hands clutched his chest like he’d been punched, clawed at his throat fighting a strangler. A well-wisher poured amber liquid from a pocket flask into the uptight banker’s maw. Taylor choked, gurgled. He flopped over the rail as the crowd surged into the arena. Revelers plucked the banker from the rail and dragged him along until he sprawled into a hatless toad heap on a bench, reeking of bootleg whiskey like he was dead drunk, but Gene knew the toad was just dead, that he’d bake in the sun until the cleaning crew and newspaper eulogies told about an innocent casualty of championship fever.

“Gone.” Harry trembled as he stared at the chaos. “ ’Sall gone to crazy!”

“Come on!” yelled Doyle as the crowd of twelve thousand gate crashers scrambled in and the bell rang the end of Dempsey-Gibbons Round One. “We’ve got a job to do!”

“No good,” muttered Harry as Doyle marched them back down inside the bowels of the arena, past the unguarded corridor door. “Nothing’s no good ’less you’re a fighter.”

“Shut up!” snapped Doyle as they hurried back to Gene’s dressing room.

Harry plucked at Doyle with a trembling hand: “No good, you’re no good, this is all gone no good and we know what you’re going to do!”

Shut up, Harry! willed Gene.

Harry chose to fight for the first time in his life. He jumped on Doyle: “Get him now, Gene! Don’t wait!”

Doyle threw Harry into Gene. Gene shoved Harry back toward Doyle as that man’s right hand whirled. A heartbeat before the crowd outside roared the start of Round Two, Gene heard snick and saw light flash in the dim wooden cavern. Crimson misted the air between Harry and Doyle. Harry spun to show Gene his new wet red collar. The inertia of the switchblade slash turned Harry all the way around to face Doyle again. Doyle pushed the dying man aside. Harry fell between wooden beams to lie underneath the arena until the demolition crew found him two weeks later, long after insects and animals finished with his flesh. The law chalked up his bones to a worker who’d gone missing after cops ran two Wobbly labor organizers off the construction site, one of those tragic industrial accidents that happens all the time.

Doyle stabbed at the boxer but Gene still had the jazz. He batted the knife out of Doyle’s hand with a left slap and slammed his right fist straight into the killer’s jaw. Fifteen rounds earlier, that punch might have put Doyle out for good: now it dropped him out but breathing.

Finish him— No! Gene dragged the moaning man to his dressing room, threw him inside, and slammed the door: no lock. He wedged the knife in the doorjamb and snapped off the blade.

Doyle won’t be out for long. The wedged door won’t hold him long. Think! Won’t let us get away, we’re witnesses, ’n’ he doesn’t need no other reason than rage.

But fist he’ll go to the money. Try to feed his money hunger first, then revenge.

Gene ran to the counting room. Get there first! Tell them Doyle’d gone crazy! Killed Harry! Was going to hold them up. With a clerk, maybe two. maybe guns with bullets, they could ambush Doyle and the clerks would be witnesses to Gene’s story, to his being a hero, to him and Billie being innocent, safe, fr—

The counting room door stood ajar.

The crowd roared as Gibbons split open an old cut over Dempsey’s eve in Round Four.

A short guy in a good suit stood in the counting room. Four chairs behind the long table were empty. Notebooks and tills were strewn everywhere. But no silver dollars. No stacks of greenbacks. The short guy stared at the big man in the doorway whose hand dangled a revolver.

“If you’ve come for money, you’re too late,” said the short guy. “Someone beat you to what little of it they had. Got them to give it up to him. Then once the bust-in riot started, the clerks knew it was over and they all left to see the big fight.”

“You’re Dempsey’s manager. Jack Kearns.”

“Guilty. And with that gun in your hand, you’re a man looking for trouble.”

“Doesn’t have any bullets.”

“A man with a gun and no bullets is a man who’s in trouble.” Kearns squinted. “I saw you fight, Mallette. You held back. Got size, speed, strength, technique. But give it up. You got no future as a real champ. Inside you there’s no killer.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Not likely. What did they promise you for winning?”

“Wasn’t about the money.”

“For you, probably not. But how much to be the champ of this town?”

“A thousand.”

“They cheaped you. You’ll never get it anyway. This crazy day cheated them, too. They’ll all go bust.” Kearns held a fold of bills toward Gene. “Every winner deserves a purse. Five hundred, and keep this between you and me. Call yourself lucky to get it and get gone before your half-assed manager comes looking for his cut.”

Gene didn’t know what to do. Put the money in his pocket. Kearns took the revolver from Gene. Broke open the cylinder and clucked at the empty slots for bullets. “You’re too honest for your own good.”

He took a flat .25 automatic from his back pocket and disappeared it in Gene’s hand. “An honest guy needs iron that works. This one’s ready to go, though it won’t damage anybody who’s not kissing close.”

Kearns walked toward the door. The crowd outside roared when Gibbons connected with a combo that stung the champion and then danced around the ring to escape a furious Dempsey.

“Mr. Kearns!” said Gene. “Who got all the money from the fight?”

“Gee kid, beats me.”

Then he was gone. Outside, the crowd roared. Gene fled the counting room. Saw the door to his dressing room shake. Out of the door crack fell a knife blade.

Gene ran. Made it out of the roaring arena. A naked yellow eye baked the oiled air. He muscled his way through a dirt street jammed with crazed strangers. Two Martin boys set off a string of Chinese firecrackers. A man and two women sat on an overturned sausage peddler’s cart, stuffing themselves with meat tubes they plucked from the ground. A tuxedoed redhead bounced off Gene and staggered away, his eyes whirling in his head. A cowboy shot his Peacemaker into the air and no one flinched.

Where are you, Billie? Got to be here! She’s got to be here!

Firecrackers. A horse screamed and a fat woman laughed. The cowboy fired his pistol.

Car horn, was that a—

“Gene! Over here!”

Billie waved from the Ford’s running board. Gene shoved his way to their getaway car that was pinned against the curb by a deserted truck. Parked vehicles jammed every road.

She grabbed Gene to be sure he was alive and real. “Where’s Doyle? Where’s...?”

“All gone wrong. No heist. Doyle killed Harry. He—”

Glass exploded in the car window.

Doyle: near the arena. He stood on a wobbly overturned pushcart, his gun hand shaking as he lined up for another shot over the sea of heads who didn’t give a damn.

Gene grabbed her hand, held on to his life, and plunged into the mad, milling crowd.

“One chance!” he yelled as he dragged her behind him. Every bone in his body wept. His legs shook. Lemonade he grabbed from a kid didn’t cool the fire in his throat. “We got one chance! Get to Texas John! Not crooks! We’re targets ’n’ only he can save us!”

“His house is two miles across town!” But she ran with him.

By the time they’d fought their way to Main Street, Billie was more carrying Gene than running with him. They looked back and saw only the sea of people in their wake.

“Still there,” gasped Gene. “He’s still there somewhere. Won’t stop. We can’t stop.”

The crowd became a solid wall of flesh at the east end of Main Street, an audience to the volunteers battling a ball of fire that had once been a tailor shop.

“Railroad tracks!” gasped Billie. “Nobody’s there! We can go quicker along them!”

“But not straight to John’s! That’s maybe three football fields north of his house—”

“Only hope,” she told him as they staggered to the steel rails. Hundreds of parked freight cars squatted on the tracks, diverted there for the passenger charters that hadn’t come. A metal clang! shuddered the wall of boxcars beside them as the locomotive a thousand yards away got a clear track signal. Steel wheels creaked a slow revolution.

Gene pressed Kearns’s close-in gun into Billie’s hands. Shoved Kearns’s money into her dress pocket. “Get on train! Can’t make it farther. Can’t run no more.”

“Yes, you can!” Billie grabbed his shirt. “Look! You can see Texas John’s house from here! Just up that hill!”

“Can’t get up that hill ’fore Doyle catches us. You know he’s out there, hell-hound smelling us. He won’t stop until he gets his blood. Till he gets me. But you: hop on this freight, open boxcar comin’ up. Hide. Taking care of me will slow him down. He’ll see me, stop for me. Enough so you can go. Get free.”

“You can get away!” cried Billie.

“No. I can only do what makes me special. You said it. I save you. Only special you can do is make me love you. Let me be special and love you and get you on the train. You be special and do it. Don’t let us both die as nothing.”

“Too late,” she said, looking past him, wrapping her grip around the pistol.

Doyle stood a hundred yards down the tracks.

Billie raised her gun—

Gene covered her hand with his: “That won’t work until he’s close enough to kiss.”

The barrel of her automatic swung down along Gene’s ribs. Billie hid the gun behind her.

“You have to let him get real close,” said Gene. “He’ll like that. Do that. For you. Not for me. He’ll never let me get close to him again. But I won’t just stand here and take it.”

He stepped away from her grabbing hand. Took two steps forward as Doyle strolled toward him. Doyle stopped when he was about the same distance away as a sucker shot to a bank door. But instead of night, he had a broad daylight aim, though the sky had suddenly gone gray with rain clouds as Dempsey threw everything he had at Gibbons, yet had to settle for a clinch finish at the final bell, a decision victory instead of a knockout.

The freight train groaned and inched forward.

Gene Mallette brought both hands up in fists and dropped into the stance of a boxer.

Heard Doyle laugh and saw that man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out.

A crimson rose blew out Doyle’s left ear and sprayed red on a passing boxcar. Doyle fell to the chipped rock track bed as the crack! of a German sniper’s Mauser from a front porch on a hill a thousand yards away whispered to Gene above the rumble of the train.

No second shot came from the man who used to have a badge and who knew what his eyes saw. Gene stared at the house on the hill: whatever had happened up there was over. He and Billie went to the dead man. A million angels dropped tears on them as she helped Gene throw Doyle and the guns through open doors of crawling boxcars. Gene almost fell under the steel wheels, but she grabbed him and held on. The train rumbled toward the mountains and the ocean beyond. Gene ripped the medal off his neck and threw it onto the last boxcar out of nowhere.