“Flatterer!”
“I mean it. You can’t sharpen those reflexes.”
“And if I said I’d risk it because I’m broke?”
Jud lighted his pipe with little popping sounds of his lips He shook out the match and tossed it over his shoulder. “I’d say there’s another reason. A two-legged reason — a gray-eyed reason. And, don’t forget, son, a married reason.”
“I know that. I’m not forgetting it. Indirectly, though, it helps her.”
“To get Terrance out of a hole? The whole town knows he’s in over his head. The whole city knows he’s on the skids for good this time. A temporary break? What good does it do him?”
“I’m already tangled up in all this, Jud. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a penance for being a damn’ fool five years ago.”
“She was your girl. Plain as the nose on my face, and I own the plainest nose ever seen in New York. Why did you let her go, anyway?”
“Nothing to offer. That’s what I thought.”
“If this wasn’t my own office, I’d spit on the floor. It would express my opinion. So now you let the kid hospitalize you because you want to punish yourself. If I know you, son, the past five years have been punishment enough.”
Lew smiled. “Well, almost enough. Anyway, I’m broke. We can plant a tree in the middle of the ring and I can dodge around it. Let me make a gesture.”
“Do you want her?” Jud asked slowly.
Lew felt a mixture of irritation and anger. “That’s a hell of a personal question, Jud.”
Jud inspected his pipe, tamped the burning tobacco down with a calloused thumb. “Personal, yes. It will take a minute to explain. You got a minute?”
“Of course.”
“Remember, Lew, how dirty it was five years ago? The tie-ins and the booking and the continual rape of the financial innocents?”
“I remember.”
“Now it’s worse. I had a shred of decency left, so I got to hell out of New York. They weren’t kidding when they said the whole deal needs a Congressional investigation. It’s tighter. You can’t wedge your way in. They lay it on the line. If they don’t own a piece of your boy, directly or indirectly, and a fairly generous piece, he can’t get booked into the big time anywhere in the country. And they’ve got the dough to buy in, and they’ve got the muscles, just in case somebody needs their mind changed.”
“How does that affect me?”
“I keep my nose to the ground. A very sensitive mechanism, my boy — it picks up all the earth tremors. A damp little specimen named Clyde Sheniver is in town. He’s a front for important money. The important money wants a piece of Sammy Hode. He brought two sets of muscles with him — a pair of kids with the wrongsize pupils in their eyes, and the usual touch of acne. Jack needed an advance, so he made a deal with this Clyde Sheniver: Sixty thousand bucks for four-fifths of Jack’s contract with Sammy Hode provided Sammy knocks out one Lew Barry in the River Stadium on August 1st. Jack took half in advance. Thirty thousand. He has to give it back if it doesn’t go through. In plain and simple language, he can’t give it back. So, I am an old man and maybe I’m getting tired of the human race. But if you want the lady, just say no. I understand that the current fashion is to make it look like suicide. They got a new gimmick where they run an extension off the tail pipe of a car. You lost her on a rebound and you can get her back the same way.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they just muscle him into selling out at a low figure?”
“Because the big money has tried to get you back in there to help build up the reputation of their punks from time to time and it was always no dice. If Jack can work this, it puts Sammy Hode close to the top in one jump. It’s well worth their sixty thousand. And, as I said, this is a real good kid. The best in too many years, I think. See what a sucker you are, to Jack’s way of thinking? He’s sold the deal before you agreed. He knows he can talk you into anything.”
Lew sat down quietly, arms on his knees, chin on his chest. Jud kept quiet. After a time Lew heard him knock the ashes out of his pipe: he looked up then.
“It all means this, Jud: It means I’ve got to go through with it.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“He’s staked too much on it. He’s staked his life on it. I can’t let a man down when he makes a bet that big.”
“And you’ll throw the bout?”
“Don’t forget. I just watched the kid out there. All I want to do is stay alive. I’ll settle for a knockout. I won’t exactly hold my chin out, but I have a feeling he’ll find it.”
Jud sighed heavily. He slid off the desk, walked around and opened the drawer. He took out a key, walked across the room and handed it to Lew.
“What’s this?”
“A place I’ve got. It’s on Lake Gloria fifteen miles out of town, south on Route 80. My name is on the mailbox. All the equipment is there. I’ll train the kid right here. You know how to pace yourself. I’ll send a good man out tomorrow to cook and clean up, and you can phone me here by the time you’re ready for sparring partners.”
“You sound as though you knew I’d go through with it before I walked in here.”
“I had a visit from a lady the other day. We talked about you. We made a few guesses. She’ll drive you out there. You see, I guess we both know you too well. Now get the hell out of here and I’ll be in Hode’s corner on August 1st, with my hand over my eyes. I sure hate the sight of bloodshed.”
Lew walked out steadily, stood flat-footed in front of Jack Terrance arid told him he would go through with it. Jack climbed on a chair to announce it. As his harsh excited voice filled the smoky room, Lew saw Sammy Hode over near one of the heavy bags. The boy’s face was expressionless. His mouth tightened a bit. He turned, tapped the bag with his left, hit it viciously with a right. The stitches burst and the sand began to pour onto the wooden floor. The boy turned and their eyes met, held, across thirty feet of the smoky room. Lew was the first to drop his glance.
During the first few quiet days at Brock’s camp on Lake Gloria, Lew Barry thought often of the strange trip from the city when Ivy had brought him out in the convertible. She had brought Chris along and he had spent his time “killing” all the other cars with a plastic ray gun.
When he had gone back, alone, to the house after agreeing to the bout, leaving Jack to call up the papers, she had taken one long look at him, and turned quickly away, saying, “I knew you would. I hated to think of it, but somehow I knew you would.”
“To arrive at any decision, you weigh all the factors as judiciously as possible. That’s what it said in the correspondence course on executive training that I took a couple of years ago. About last night, I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault or mine. It just happened. It can be forgotten.”
“I want you to think over what you said. I keep thinking that maybe you said it too fast. If he gets back on his feet, I want you to leave him. Then take some time — a half-year, or a year. Then we’ll be together.”
“Don’t build up a dream, Lew. We had one chance.”
“And I muffed it.”
“It was partly my fault, too. I could have put my pride in my pocket for once. But it isn’t pride this time. It’s something else. Can’t you see it? It’s a way of buying my freedom. And I don’t want it bought that way.”
“But now I’ve told him I’ll do it. I can’t back out.”
“That’s too bad.”
“You sound so damn’ cold.”
“Think of it the other way, Lew. Suppose I agreed to that. They kill old men in the ring. In the ring you’re an old man. So I pin that in my memory-book. I killed him because that was my price.”
“Not your price, but mine. You and Jud, you both seem to think I’m some kind of a zombie. Jack pulls the string and along I come. Don’t either of you ever think of the reason for that? You both know the reason. I was nineteen and he was twenty-four and just an acquaintance, a guy who hung around, good for some laughs. And then there was that night when that crazy man came into the dressing-room with a cannon. I was the one who froze. Not Jack! He made the dive, slamming me out of the way, diving at that crazy guy and taking that big slug right in the shoulder, and his momentum piled the crazy guy up against the wall. His arm still doesn’t work perfectly. You know that. And the slug would have got me dead center. Everybody who saw it knew that.”