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...