Rev Bowers is over him, waving his arm and counting very deliberately. Hod manages to get to one knee but the muscles in his legs are gone, and when the Reverend gets to a slow seven he looks to Jeff Smith who looks to the sourdough with the hammer and bong! the round is ended, bettors stomping and shouting with glee or anger, Smokey coming out to lift Hod under the arms and flop him on the stool. The negro mashes a sponge into his face and Hod tries not to gag as the ammonia shoots up his nose to a spot behind his eyes and burns into the cuts on his face. He pushes the sponge away and the sound of the screaming men comes back in a rush and he is furious, furious at himself and ready to fight again. If only he could feel his legs.
“You doin fine, young man,” says Smokey. “You got more heart than head, but you doin fine. Where we at?”
“Nugget.”
“And where that?”
“Skaguay.”
Smokey takes Hod by the gloves and pulls out on his arms. “You hit the boards this round, just stay down. Peoples got what they paid for.”
He is able to stand when the sixth starts, his head clearing, his first two straight lefts landing and then a one-two, bringing his right hard over the top and following with a—
Someone is waving a towel in his face. The breeze is nice. He is sitting on a floor that has tobacco stains on it and blood, blood mixed with sweat on his arms and chest. The fighter from the Pack Train, Choynski, is flapping the towel, smiling and not wearing boxing gloves any more. He leans down and says something, just a noise in Hod’s ear but it’s not clear, nothing is clear—
He’s back in the little room with the French postcards on the wall and there is music and men’s voices from outside and the girl in green, the redheaded girl with the scrawny arms, winces in sympathy as she dabs at his cuts with a cloth soaked in something that stings like hell.
“They call me Sparrow,” she says. “But my Christian name is Addie Lee.”
His shoes and his socks are off, and somebody has pulled the protection out of his trunks and tossed it, stained with blood, onto a chair in one corner. He’s never been this undressed this close to a woman, the whores in Butte having only pulled his pants halfway down, and now he has to haul his knees up so this Addie Lee won’t see him stiff. When he crosses his arms to cover his nipples up it hurts terrible, his ribs on both sides purple with bruises.
“He laid you out pretty good. Hit the back of your head on the floor.”
That, too, hurts terrible, an ache that makes it hard to swallow when she tips his chin and gives him some water. “I go six?”
Addie Lee nods. “Don’t know if them ginks tonight were sorer at you or at Mr. Smith. They waitin for you out there.”
“Mr. Smith?”
She nods again. “The whole crew of em. Celebratin the haul they made.”
It takes a while for him to manage to sit up. Dressing himself is a torture, each move reminding another part of his body how hard it’s been pounded. When he shuffles out into the bar there is Smokey carefully sweeping the floor and Jeff Smith with a drink in his fist laughing and shaking his throbbing hand and Niles Manigault calling him Young McGinty and Rev Bowers and the Sheeny Kid and Old Man Triplett and Suds behind the bar and a fella named Red thumping him on the back which makes the ache in his skull jostle around and a little weaselly one they call Doc.
“Saw a boy die in the ring one night,” says Doc. “Hit the floor just like you did. An insult to the cranium.”
“You’re an insult to the cranium, Doc,” says Rev Bowers. “Suds, lay one out for our scrapper here.”
“Don’t think I could handle any liquor now,” says Hod. “Feels like I ought to keep what wits I got left as clear as I can.”
More laughter then and Red Gibbs thumping him some more which makes Hod want to deck him and then Niles is on his feet with a toast.
“To Young McGinty,” he says. “As game a warrior as ever stopped a punch.”
They drink several more rounds then, laughing, Niles imitating the various suckers they have skinned that night, while Hod props his elbows on the bar and holds his head in his hands. He feels like he might vomit. It’s late, only Jeff Smith’s party still in the Nugget, the wood stove and the whiskey warming them.
“And the sheeny and his fat Paddy manager,” says Rev Bowers, cheeks glowing, “think they’ve made a killing, tickets paid back to Frisco, when the steamers are so afraid of Jeff it won’t cost him a penny.”
“We have an arrangement,” Jeff Smith corrects him. “An understanding between business parties. Fear has nothing to do with it.”
They are halfway to the door, leaving Hod alone on the stool, when he remembers and calls out.
“Mr. Smith?”
They all turn as if they’ve forgotten he is there.
“A hundred dollars?”
He sees Niles winking to Rev Bowers.
“In trade,” says Jeff Smith.
“Trade?”
Smith moves his eyes to Addie Lee, leaning in the doorway of her little crib, watching with no expression. “You’ll keep track, won’t you Sparrow?”
She shrugs and slips behind the hanging flag.
A SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT
White folks’ hair is easy. Dorsey never stops wondering at the way it just grows out straight from their heads, offering itself up to be trimmed. And the shaving, for the ones like Judge Manigault who don’t keep a beard or moustache, you just pull the skin taut and slide with the blade. It never curls back into the pores to make a bump or get infected like his own. If only they would keep their mouths from moving while you try to work.
“Humiliation.” The Judge sits in Dorsey’s chair, lathered up next to Mr. Turpin who owns the pharmacy, who is getting his trim from Hoke. Old Colonel Waddell waits near the door, his face hidden behind the Messenger. “We have attempted to hold on to our heritage, to our custom of living,” says the Judge, “and we have failed. So now we must be humbled.”
“I don’t know, Judge,” says Mr. Turpin as Hoke clips out the hair in his ears. Hoke is a good boy, stay on his feet the whole day if needs be, only sometimes he forget and commence to hum while the gentlemen are still talking. “You scratch under the surface just a bit, you’ll find somebody making a profit on it. That’s what politics is all about.”
“Russell got sufficiently fat before he was governor. But this appointing of half our aldermen — unprecedented. Another chance to force us to eat crow. I believe the yankees are behind him.”
“But our own Supreme Court—”
“Failed in their duty to protect the citizens who maintain it.” The Judge is one of those who keeps his own shaving mug here at the shop, has a favorite razor. He won’t let Hoke shave him, good as the boy is. Dorsey, of course, is famous at the Orton, and hasn’t drawn blood since he was a novice.
“Lex ita scripta est,” mutters the Colonel, lowering his newspaper a bit. “That was their verdict.”
“The law as it is written,” the Judge scowls, “is not meant to serve scoundrels.”
Dorsey cuts the guests at the Orton Hotel — merchants from around the state, politicians, even Governor Russell once when he was still running a dairy across the river — but many of the finest white gentlemen who live in the city come to be trimmed here as well. The Judge is a daily customer, as is Mr. Turpin. Colonel Waddell wears a full gray mane of hair and beard, like he did before the Emancipation, when he was known as a real fire-breather. Looks just like the Jeff Davis statue they put up in Raleigh, and only wants a bit of neatening up once a week. He waxes the tips of his moustache at home.