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.