The Glory Punch

John D. MacDonald The Glory Punch

Klees followed Harvey “The Doctor” Westa down between the rows of booths and Harv picked one in the back corner where he could see who was coming in.

Harv watched Klees wedge himself in on the other side of the booth. “You saw him?” Harv asked.

Klees smiled wanly. “Yeah. Every time I see him he looks stronger. How he can come in on the weight with those shoulders...”

“Just a strong boy, Joe. And you always worry. Cheese blintz for you too?”

“On me it shows, but I’ll take it. Maybe you ought to have more than one, Harv. You’re giving him three pounds.”

They ate in silence for a few moments, two men who had learned to know each other over seven years. Klees was small and pot-bellied and asthmatic, with the face of a worried owl.

The Doctor always looked the same. Blue-white skin, heavy planes in his face, abrupt angles. He had always looked as though he’d cut easily, but his skin was amazingly tough. The ring years hadn’t coarsened or brutalized his face. They had just thickened a few of the lines. His voice was a soft rasp — had been ever since Curtis had hooked him in the throat in Cleveland.

“How can you do it?” Klees asked.

“Do what, Joe?”

“I mean one of these strong boys is going to take you, Harv. Sooner or later one of them is going to get to you. How long can you go on brains?”

Joe had expressed the thought that had been a tiny irritant in the back of Harv Westa’s mind for the last two months of training.

“Not that strong boy, Joe. Not Buddy Mace.” The words were soft and sure, but Harv thought that maybe it would be Buddy Mace. Maybe this would be it.

Joe shrugged. “It better not be. Not this time, anyway.”

Harv knew what he meant. Things had gone a little sour. The club had died of snow-blindness and that had taken a cut of the roll and it had also taken two of the annuities cashed in to meet the obligations. Then the court had been too generous with Mag. An additional two hundred a month for her and the kids. Joe had booked an exhibition tour, but there would be no tour if Mace caught him with that sledge-hammer right. And Mace had to be out of the running. The columns had given Buddy Mace a big play and the questions had gotten so insistent that the fight had to be booked. He needed the cash from the tour. Needed it badly.

“How were the kids?” Joe asked, his voice growing rough as it always did when he spoke of Harv’s kids. Joe would never forgive Mag.

Harv grinned. “The little guy was showing me the right hook he’s been working on. He starts it way back in left field and I showed him bow to shorten it up. He told me his mom won’t let him practice. After the fight I can have them for two whole days.”

“How’s my girl?”

“Cute like a bug. She kept saying, ‘Where’s Joey? Where’s Joey?’ I promised her the four of us would do the zoo day after tomorrow.”

“You turn ’em back to Mag?”

“In the lobby. She shook hands with me and gave me the frozen puss. Nice to see you, Hahvee. I trust the children were well behaved.”

“Jesus, Harv. A woman like that. It had to be a woman like that.”

“Mag’s okay. Lots of people don’t get along.”

“Who could get along with her?”

“Break it off, Joe.” The soft rasp had turned cool.

“Still a torch-boy. I give up.”

At that point Stew Baltimore, the sportswriter, came up to the booth. “Any room here for the working pres?”

“Sit down, inkpot,” Joe said sourly. But there was good humor behind the words. Baltimore had always been fair, always reasonable. And he knew the game. Once upon a time he had been a promising amateur until he found out the bones in his hands were too brittle. Joe moved over and Stew sat beside him, facing Harv.

Harv saw the speculative look in Stew’s eyes. “Measuring me for Mace’s right?” Harv asked.

“It’s fifteen rounds, Harv,” Stew said. “And I saw Louie bounce four of his best lefts off that kid’s chin and the kid came back to take him. The fight goes the full fifteen.”

“It could and then again it might not.”

“What are you going to hit him with? The stool? Those arms of his are big and solid and he’s smart enough to punch for your arms, Harv. By the tenth you’ll feel like you’re fighting with two socks full of wet putty.”

“And then what?”

“And then maybe the Doctor gets too tired to slip and roll and feint and tie him up and maybe he nails you.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Joe asked. “You trying to — spoil Harv’s morale? Don’t you know the odds?”

Stew grinned. “Sure. Doc’s the favorite. Seven to five. But those odds come from a myth, Joe. A big public myth. Harv has been in there for years, chopping down the promising boys the way a Canuck chops down the pine trees. They never see him with his hair mussed and they never see anybody land solidly on him and so they think he goes on forever like Boulder Dam.”

“And why not?” Joe asked.

Stew lost his air of banter. He looked steadily at Harv. He said, “Don’t grandstand tomorrow night, Harv. If he nails you, stay down. You’re thirty-three. You take that right hand of his too much and he could kill you. But if you want to know what I really think will happen, I put a C bill on you yesterday.”

“Doesn’t care what he does with his money, Joe,” Harv said.

“He’s smart, Harv. He knows that left. You’ll stab the kid silly.”

“Sure, sure,” Harv said softly. “I’ll nibble him down.”

And he thought of the kids and he saw that wild swing that came from left field and he saw himself taking the kids back to Mag in the hotel lobby where they stood and talked like polite strangers. And he saw the two empty envelopes in the safety deposit box, envelopes that had contained the annuity policies.

He was suddenly very tired. He yawned. “They tell the kids that champions sleep ten hours a night. I feel like I could do that. Be good, Stew. Let’s roll it, Joe.”

They went down between the booths. Buddy Mace, at the big booth crammed with people, said loudly, “There goes the champ.” He said it wryly enough so that it got a laugh from his crowd.

Joe clutched at Harv’s arm, but Harv turned and walked back to the big booth. The crowd there was silent, expectant. Harv smiled sadly down at the square, ruddy face of Buddy Mace. Mace tried to stare him down.

“Look, kid,” Harv said in his gentle rasping voice, “take good care of yourself between now and tomorrow night. Get lots of sleep. I don’t want it to look too easy. You know what I mean.”

Mace flushed and tried to struggle up, saying, “Why you broken-down—”

Harv turned and walked away. He heard Mace’s friends quieting him, telling him to pay no attention.

On the street Joe picked his teeth, said, “He’ll come out sore, maybe.”

“So let him shoot it all while I’ve got legs.”

“And if he can keep shooting for fifteen rounds?”

“Then, Joe boy, we have a bad evening. A very rugged evening.”

Harv Westa rubbed his feet in the rosin box, supporting himself with a taped hand on the top rope, and listened to the low grumbling roar of the crowd. It was a good crowd, a tough crowd. Harv had become an expert in crowds. He knew by the pre-fight sound that this crowd would be yelling for blood. It was like a vast, restless, hungry animal. There would be women who screamed from ringside with something feral and ugly about their faces. And there would be men who, with shifting shoulders, with teeth clamped tight on their cigars, followed every move in the ring, their eyes steady and glowing.

But he knew that once the fight started, he would fight in a vacuum in which there were no crowd noises, in which nothing existed except a pretty and deadly game of move and countermove, feint, thrust, roll, slip, waiting for the tiny openings, open but a fraction of a second, little alleys down which a hard fist could travel.

Gus had broken out the new gloves. The tape had been inspected. While various notables bounded into the ring and waved clasped hands at the crowd, Gus tightened the laces and Harv molded the padding across the back of his hand, breaking it enough to give the hard knuckles free play, but not so much as to invite a broken hand.

He stood up and turned around once, hands high, acknowledging his introduction, Lanny Morr, the referee, gave them the standard instructions. As yet, Harv had kept from looking directly at Buddy Mace. But, in the center of the ring, he stared at Buddy’s taut brown diaphragm, at the moist hair, at the steady breathing. Indeed, a very strong young man. A rugged young man. The pictures had shown that. Strong and fast, with a punch in either hand, providing he could get his feet set. Off balance, the pictures had shown punches that pawed rather than struck.

He went back to the corner while Gus grabbed the robe, poked the white rubber guard between his teeth. Harv adjusted the guard with the tip of his glove, yanked twice on the top ropes, turned and came out at the bell, moving up onto his toes as he touched gloves with the durable young man who was his business objective of the evening. For it was a business, just like the accountant with his ledgers, or the plumber with his wrenches. A cold, hard practical business, well-rewarded.

Mace, in spite of his slim legs and narrow feet, moved slowly and solidly, flatfooted and set. Harv felt disappointment as Mace didn’t rush him. Mace’s handlers had cooled him off and warned him against losing his head, no doubt.

They both had the wary, expressionless look of the professional, both moving with the coiled consciousness of being able to inflict sudden hurt.

Harv circled to the right, left out almost daintily, left shoulder hunched, his chin tucked behind the shoulder, right hand cocked and ready.

The pattern of the fight was yet to be set. It was like a dance which had to be improvised. One would become the aggressor. Mace could not counterpunch effectively, as counterpunching demands the ability to hit hard from an off-balance position. And yet he was too cautious to rush in.

The gallery began to stomp. The sound ceased suddenly as Harv moved back, then in quickly, weight behind a left jab which rocked Mace’s head back. As Mace, off balance, stepped back, Harv went in with another high jab to the eyes, to screen the right. The right hit solidly, but too high on the face. Mace shook the punch off, moved into another left, threw his own left and right, missing with both.

Harv felt the tension leave him. This was work he understood. He made Mace pay the fee of hard left jabs to force him into a corner. Then Harv moved lightly inside the right, clinched to spin out of the box.

In the clinch he felt the enormous power of Mace, the strength in those big arms and shoulders. He tried to tie Mace up, but the boy pulled his left loose, chopped Harv twice over the kidneys. It was like being stabbed with a hot silver knife. It took some of his wind. They broke clean and Harv went in with two hard left jabs, a right which Mace blocked with a forearm as hard as a stone.

At five seconds to go, Harv fed him two lefts to the mouth, the second one more of a hook than a jab, following it with a solid right under the heart at the bell.

Back in the corner he was breathing easily. Gus said, lips to his ear, “Watch the clinches, Doc. When he gets loose, signal for the break.”

Harv nodded. In a ledger in his mind there was a ruled balance sheet. In one column he recorded the rounds won, as the first had been; in the other, the rounds lost and tied. For the last three years there had been another balance — the available energy to get through the fight, if it went the limit. That energy had to be conserved. There could be no careless wastage of it. Available energy divided by fifteen. If, by some mistake, it were divided by fourteen, then there would be nothing left for the last round, and the fight would be lost.

The second round followed the pattern of the first. He opened a tiny cut under Mace’s eye and, since it was under the eye, it was not worth working on. Once Mace’s right hit him high on the head, over the ear, and the power of it frightened him. It dulled him for a fraction of a second and he knew that if the right had hit lower, closer to the nerve centers, that dullness might have lasted long enough to enable Mace to get another right through. And two would be enough.

He scored with two crisp rights to the jaw and a full score of left jabs in the second round, floated into clinches both times that Mace cornered him, signaled with arms wide for the break when Mace tore free.

On the stool he measured his strength and was satisfied.

The crowd had settled to an almost taut silence, recognizing what was going on. They saw how closely Westa was avoiding the sledge blows and they knew that this fight could not go on in this way for the full fifteen rounds.

In the third he was slow in the clinch and the big pawing right hand of Mace boomed off his left side, and when Morr broke them, Harv danced away, carrying pain like a torch held against his flesh.

Pain made him less wary; a desperate block softened a whistling right hook, but his left forearm was momentarily numbed by the impact.

In the last few seconds before the bell he stabbed twice with the scalpel left, feinted with the right, caught Mac flush in the mouth with a good left hook that brought a high roar from the crowd.

Back in the corner Harv knew that he was no longer breathing right. Mace’s sledge-work on his sides had taken its toll. Gus held the waistband of the shorts out to make breathing easier. Joe knelt on the ring apron and said, lips touching Harv’s ear, “Three for you, kid. But it looks like it’s costing. Try to ride the next two even and rest when you can.”

Harv knew the strategy. Don’t draw on the bank for two rounds, then work a little harder in the sixth.

In the fourth round it worked. The gallery started to stomp again, heavy feet in cadence.

Mace kept boring in: heavy, stolid, wickedly strong. It was a constant effort not to be trapped. He pulled all the old tricks, like dropping his arms and walking away as though discouraged with trying to make Mace fight. Once, nearly trapped, he spun out along the ropes, burning his skin, whirling, hitting Mace solidly under the ear as the younger, stronger man turned.

In the fifth it didn’t work so well. His breathing was labored and his left arm was weary. Normally it would have lasted nicely, but Mace’s piston-stroke blows had pulped the muscles.

He caught a punishing right on his elbow and tried to move inside the left hook to the middle. But it caught him in the side and he felt his lips pull away from his teeth in an anguished grin.

Mace seemed to be getting stronger and faster but Harv knew that it was only because he was tiring under the constant battering against his arms, the fire-hot pawing at his middle. Once he tied Mace up properly and took a long ride in the clinch while Morr cursed and struggled to part them. When they broke the crowd was booing.

After the sixth, his ears still ringing from a right that, in looping around his neck, had nearly knocked him down, Harv turned to Joe Klees as Joe came up onto the apron. He said, “I got to try the other way, Joe.”

“He’s going to kill you.”

“Keep it going this way and he’s going to kill me anyway. Maybe he can be touched. He’s waiting for hit-and-run and he’s holding it, waiting for me to slow down some more.”

“You’re the Doctor,” Joe said, and he looked about to cry.

Harv went out, slower than before. He knew where and how to take his shot. Those high left jabs made Mace lift his own left a shade too high. Two fast left jabs and then the right under the heart would bring both arms down long enough...

And it had to be quick. Mace was coming in faster, with a shade more confidence.

Harv feinted, lanced the jab at Mace’s eyes, bouncing it twice with the old jolt. Then, with a full pivot he planted the right under Mace’s heart, solidly. The opening was there for a fraction of a second. He hooked Mace flush in the jaw, felt the man slacken, followed it up with a straight right to the jaw and another left. The sawdust had run out of Mace. He pawed, off balance and Harv, plodding in, down on the floor now, heels and toes, slammed left, right, left — measured the husky kid and bounced the right off the button.

He danced back to the neutral corner, suddenly conscious of the high-pitched scream from thousands of throats. Morr picked up the count at four. Mace lay like an abandoned doll. But at five he quivered. Harv, with sudden fear, leaned heavily on the ropes, sucking the air deep into his lungs. At seven Mace pushed himself up, got his knees under him. At nine he was on one knee, shaking his head. At ten he came up like a dazed bear, standing stupidly with his hands at his sides.

He got his hands up as Harv came in. Harv brushed his gloves aside, drove a straight right down the middle. It didn’t hit properly, but it knocked Mace down. Mace was on his knee at seven, still shaking his head, a shade stronger.

As Harv came in again, Mace stumbled to one side, pawing at Harv. This time it had to be perfect. Mace moved back against the ropes. Harv Westa measured him, summoned up the last bit of steam, made him sag toward the floor with the left under the ear, then brought a right up through the middle. The mouthguard flew out in a fine bloody spray and Mace dropped heavily onto his face.

At eight he hadn’t stirred. The bell rang at the count of nine.

Harv sat, limp and spent, on the stool. Gus said, his voice breaking. “He’ll never come out. He’ll never come out.”

Harv watched Mace, watched the drunken way he lolled on the stool, watched him stiffen as the salts were held under his nose, watched the beginnings of coordination as they slapped his face and doused him with water.

As the bell rang, they pushed him to his feet. He was still shaking his big head. Harv came over fast, put his last hopes into a right hook to the jaw that landed with the impact of a bullet hitting wet concrete.

He went over to the neutral corner and he knew that Mace would, incredibly, impossibly, get back up onto his feet.

At ten, Mace was up and moving doggedly forward. Harv tried desperately to avoid the clinch, but the stronger man fell against him, hugged him tight, found from some inner store of instinct the ability to whale his heavy right hand against Harv’s aching side.

Morr separated them and Harv clipped Mace with a left hook to the mouth before Mace fell into the clinch again.

After the clinch, when he tried to go in again, the big whistling right appeared out of nowhere and Harv stumbled back, dulled with the impact, fighting for control. And then Mace was grinning at him, moving doggedly forward, and Harv knew that the fight was over. Maybe the fans didn’t know it yet. But he knew it and Mace knew it.

He tapped Mace with two feeble jabs, collected a right thump under the heart at the bell.

“Take Stew’s advice,” Joe yelled into his ear.

Stew’s advice. Once he clips you, stay down.

The bell rang for the ninth. Mace came over fast, almost to Harv’s corner, suddenly eager, strong in his recovery, in his knowledge that this was the time. Harv forced weary muscles to obey commands born of years in the ring. Roll with that one, get inside the right, hang on, move around him, reverse, back up, step in and jab, then weather the storm. Rock and roll, slip and turn, threaten with a right-that you know is dead, but maybe Mace doesn’t know it. Hang on in the clinch. Sag against him and stay loose for those pawing blows that tear you apart.

Move away from the left, and inside the right. Duck your head into that one move to the right, always to the right to take the sting out of that enormous right hand of his. Cotton in your mouth, a running pain in your side, and you can’t stay up on your toes because the tendons in your legs have turned to red-hot wires. But you stay up on your toes and you grin and you cuff him with your dead arms and it is like being in a phone booth with a man trying to hit you with an axe. Sooner or later he’ll manage to do it.

And the one-minute rest had to do what ten hours couldn’t do, and somehow he got onto his feet and into the center of the ring.

Mace had grown to be larger than life size and Harv felt as though they were fighting under water, fighting in the dreamy bottom of some steaming aquarium. He saw the glove coming up, saw it grow, tried to move away, not fast enough, and then his lip hurt because it was between the mouthguard and the canvas of the ring floor and the light hurt his eyes.

There was some good reason for getting up, but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The ring was a stone being spun on the end of a string and the spinning made him heavier against the floor. The floor had to be pushed down, pushed away.

And then he stood on legs whose knees threatened to bend both ways. He tottered like a marionette without strings and the right hand came looming toward him again, blotting the world into darkness.

Somehow he was on the stool and Lanny was back again. He remembered Lanny Morr from way back when Lanny was bending over him asking him something. With painful clarity he forced the words out, saying, “I’m fine, Lanny. Fine.”

The mouthpiece was shoved back and Gus yelled into his ear, “Thirteen coming up. Stay down, kid. Stay down!”

The blows were pain no longer. They were muffled by the vast distance. Harv was way back inside himself, marveling at the tangled pictures his eyes were relaying to his brain.

He couldn’t remember who it was who kept hitting him. A strong kid. A very strong kid and it was funny the way the strong kid seemed to be sobbing each time he threw a punch. Funny to sob like that. About what?

Then his cheek was against the canvas and he saw out there the three chairs in a row. Mag in the middle one, the boy on one side and the girl on the other. All solemn-faced and accusing. The boy knew how to throw the right now, he guessed.

Throw a right for the kid. Show him the right way. So they came to look at the old man fighting fifteen kids? Sure, they send out a new fresh one for each round. Fifteen twins. No, twins meant two.

He was on his feet again. Show the kid the way it was done. Too tired to get a right up to the height of the jaw. Have to be in the middle. He squinted through puffed eyes at the figure who moved in on him. Brace the feet, half turn and drive. See, kid? That way you get the shoulder and back in it. Right in the middle. Right against that hard brown diaphragm with the moist dark curling hair. Boom. See, kid? Pivot and slam it home. Watch your old man. You waste your strength if you bring it all the way around.

If that fellow’d stop hitting me around the head, I could show you better. Now with the left, same system, kid. Back and shoulders in it. Pick up a rhythm. Same way you’d do it on the heavy bag. Chin on your chest and keep watching that spot you want to hit. Left, right, left, right. See how solid? And as you force him back, you can take a step each time and that helps with the pivot.

One, two, three, four, five. Now he doesn’t back up any more, boy. He’s nailed against the ropes. Six, seven, eight. And now he isn’t hitting me any more, boy. He isn’t knocking your old man silly any more. Now when he bends over in the middle, he brings his jaw down. See, boy, he bends over because his stomach hurts. And then we move it up just a little and we bounce them off his jaw. One, two, three. And that’s all, kid. He can’t take as many there as he can in the middle.

They held him on each side to get him down out of the ring. Gus was screaming in his ear, “You crazy guy! You crazy, crazy, wonderful guy!” The aisles were jammed and they were all trying to hit him on the back.

Then, as always, it was just the three of them in the dressing room and he was on the table with Gus gently working on the leg muscles.

“Okay?” Joe lees asked.

“An automobile accident would have been healthier, but I’m okay.”

“A fight like that!” Joe said. “For the books. You shoot your wad and you can’t nail him. Then he shoots his and you don’t stay down either. Two guys with no arms left. Then you walk him around backwards while you tear his middle apart. I never see you do it that way before.”

“He gave me the dreamies. I thought I saw the kids out there with Mag. I was showing the boy something.”

Joe took his cigar out of his mouth, spat out a fleck of tobacco. “You should know better than that! Mag’d never bring the kids here.”

“Now I know that. But I wasn’t thinking so good with his right hand jammed into the middle of my head, Joe.”

Harv sat up, trying to gather the strength to walk to the shower. After the shower there’d be some of the newspaper guys around who would want to talk.

He sighed. No, the kids hadn’t been out there, and they never would be. And there never would be any reconciliation with Mag, because that was just the way it was. And it would never be any different. Except for the fighting. That would be different. This had nearly been it. But with a few breaks he’d last out for one or two more bouts. Mace was tougher than average. Don’t let Joe book Mace again too soon. Mace would probably be the one. In the meantime, pile up a little more cash. Nearly the end of the road.

Maybe after he was licked and all through, Mag’d let him see the kids oftener.

He plodded into the shower. There was a mirror there. He thought of going to the zoo with the kids and Joe. He grinned and the grin hurt his mouth. Hell, this face was going to scare the monkeys. He turned on the cold water and stood, face uplifted, eyes shut, torn mouth open, letting the water begin the task of bringing his body back from the half-life to which it descended, a little further each time.