“See you tonight,” says Hod, holding the Winchester in the crook of his arm.
The Swede lifts the shovel from his shoulder and wiggles it in the air. “I go now and dig you a hole.”
Hod wanders off in the other direction, which takes him down to the wharves. Both the Farallon and the Utopia are in, waiting to leave in the morning. He sits halfway down the Juneau Wharf with his legs hanging over the side and the Winchester across his lap, and is watching the gulls when Smokey finds him.
“Shouldn’t ought to be out in this cold. You gone stiffen up.”
“I can’t listen to them inside the Parlor any more.”
The negro sits by him, looks at the ragged, screaming infestation that lights and flies, lights and flies, ganging up on whichever of their number manages to get a scrap of food in its beak.
“Always got one eye on they own bidness, the other on their neighbors’.”
“They don’t ever rest.”
Smokey chuckles and shakes his head. “Naw. Don’t ever see no fat gull, neither. They just a appetite with wings.”
He leans over the railing and points down to the rocks below. It is a rough day in the little harbor, waves breaking hard and rolling up on the mudflats, making a loud sucking sound as they fall back.
“See them shells stuck onto the rocks?”
“The mussels.”
“That’s the way to do it. Got food all in that water, even smaller than a speck of gold dust, and ever time it wash in or wash out over the rocks, them shells get a taste. Don’t have to go nowhere, just keep they mouths open.” Smokey shakes his head admiringly.
They are always doing somebody, Jeff Smith and his crew. Doing the wide-eyed gold pilgrims coming in with their store-bought equipment and the scurvy-gummed sourdoughs coming out with the year’s cleanup in their pokes. Jeff and Niles Manigault with their Southern manners and way of talking, Doc with his portmanteau and his lead bricks coated in gold, Rev Bowers with his entreaties to Good Samaritans and Syd Dixon offering to cut the savvy newcomer into a sweet deal, Red Gibbs and Ed Burns and the smash-nosed mug from Seattle they call Yeah Mow lounging about to deal with the ones who come back in claiming they’ve been cheated. The drinks are always on the house for the Deputy Marshal and an unofficial pharmacy operates over the bar and there are always helpful directions for stampeders to “honest” merchants and hot deals that won’t last more than a day and to the exact location of the town’s famous Paradise Alley. There is spoiled flour topped off with the good stuff and sold out the back door, interests in sure-thing claims obtained from departing sourdoughs whose mothers have just died, the telegraph messages home that go nowhere. Received message comes the inevitable reply. We are all counting on you. Please send money. And always, while you are waiting for your bacon or your beans or your paperwork there is the casual poker game, a handful of fellas just passing the time and full of good advice for greenhorns, willing to deal you in if you don’t mind playing for Skaguay stakes, so much gold out there waiting to be picked off the ground that a certain inflation has crept into all aspects of manly endeavor. Niles is the master of the cards, friendly, flattering, solemnly warning the greenhorn to be on the lookout for buncos like the notorious Soapy Smith and his gang and ready to commiserate that his own luck at poker seems to be as poor as the greenhorn’s, confiding, during a break for bladder relief, the secrets of the Martingale system, where you double your bet with each play and are therefore, given the immutable laws of mathematics, assured of victory.
Hod understands that when he fights tonight, it will be as their man.
“Thank heavens you’ve found him, Smokey.” Niles is at the table in the back room of the Parlor when Hod comes in with Smokey to return the rifle. Jeff Smith sits across from him, with Arizona Charlie and Jake Rice and Dynamite Johnny O’Brien who captains the Utopia circled under a haze of cigar smoke. “I was afraid he might be in the clutches of that poke-hunting soubrette.”
Hod hangs the Winchester on the nails behind the bar. There is a tension in the room, a lack of joking, a stiffness of posture. The steamer captain, O’Brien, sits behind a pile of currency and gold dust.
“Shit and corruption,” says Jeff Smith, staring holes into his cards. “You’ll have to accept my note for it, but I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Cash only, as agreed upon,” winks the captain. “No markers, no trade, no excuses.”
Smith looks to Charlie Meadows. “Front me a hundred.”
“The bet stands at two,” the captain reminds him, steady-eyed. The men have peeled down to their shirtsleeves, Jeff’s Navy Colt lying on the bar counter with the other gentlemen’s hardware.
Arizona Charlie hesitates, thinking up an excuse, and Smith scowls and pokes Jake Rice. “You front me,” he says to Rice, and then points to Smokey, who is tossing sardines from a tin into Fitzhugh Lee’s cage and watching the bird snap them up on the fly. “I’ll sell you my dinge. You’ve got plenty to keep him busy at your place.”
The men are silent for a moment, only the sound of the eagle’s claws clicking on the floor of its cage. Jake squirms in his seat.
“For two hundred?”
“He’s worth twice that. The best and only nigger in the Territory.”
“But what am I going to do with him?”
“That’s your business.” Jeff Smith has the look on his face that they all try to avoid.
Jake reluctantly lays two hundreds on the table, then turns to Smokey. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll make it double on the fight tonight and buy you back.”
“Is that right?” says Jeff Smith and then Dynamite Johnny turns up a pair of kings and Smith throws his hand on the floor, disgusted, and stomps over to the woodstove to give it a violent kick. He points at Smokey. “I want you out of here,” he says, and then points at Fitzhugh Lee. “And I want that bird stuffed.”
It has been decided that gloves will be worn but throws allowed, that the bell will be in the hands of one side but the time-piece held by the other, that Joe Boyle, down from Dawson and considered neutral in the affair, will referee. Half-clinches will be allowed and it will be up to the fighters to separate themselves. Smokey puts a towel over Hod’s face while he wraps his hands in the back room at Jake Rice’s place. “I want you to close your eyes,” he says, “and imagine how you gone to beat the man.” The wraps feel heavy on his hands, which are already sweating. “But keep your body relax.”
Men are hollering and stomping on the other side of the door. When Hod closes his eyes he can imagine only blackness. It is cold in the little room, Hod’s bare legs starting to ache with it, and when he opens his eyes again the negro is sitting beside him, head in his hands.
“Mr. Jeff and them been makin their bets,” he says.
“Let’s get this damn show on the road!” yells somebody from outside, kicking on the door.
“And aint none of em on you.”
The ring has been set up in the middle of the dance-hall floor, men already drinking for hours after the parade, with the Smith faction on one side of the room and his rivals on the other. Hod notices that they are all heeled, Jeff with his Navy Colt in the special gun pocket lined with buckskin and the Sheeny Kid with his Bulldog a lump under the jacket and Red Gibbs standing by the back with a bungstopper in hand, ready to throw the door open or make sure it stays closed. Introductions are shouted. Ox doesn’t look any smaller stripped down than he does with all his layers of clothes on. He is bigger than Choynski, a true heavyweight, a full inch taller than Hod as they glare at each other throughout the referee’s instructions. There are wisecracks being made and some laughter, but mostly it is the men on one side snarling about what their champion is going to do to the other.