Sugar Pop Moon (5 page)

“His legs, Hector. Get his femurs,” the little one is yelling.

Hector lunges at me, swinging the blade at my legs. I grab his wrist with both hands and try to shake the knife loose.

Margaret rushes out of the room and the little guy charges me. He throws his arms around my waist and pushes me toward the window. I trip on the lamp and the three of us fall to the floor; my back lands on the mattress and the two of them tumble on top of me. The little one is on his knees. He's leaning down on my shins, pinning my ankles to the floor. I try to free my legs as I shake Hector's fists, which are now holding the cleaver between my legs. If I let go he'll slam me right in the nuts.

I wrestle my right foot free and kick at the little guy. I connect squarely with his face and he falls away. He's holding his nose with both hands and blood is dripping out from underneath his palms.

“My nose, my fucking nose,” he chokes out as he clutches his face. “Fucking albino.”

He points at my knees. “Get his legs!” he screams as blood runs from his nose to his chin.

Hector looks at him in shock. I take Hector's hands—and the cleaver in them—and bang them as hard as I can against the plaster wall. The silver blade falls out of his grip and bounces on the mattress before clanging on the floor. He squeezes his right hand between his knees as the little guy lunges for the cleaver. Hector is wide open—I could whack the back of his head with my elbow but I don't. Instead, I grab my overcoat and hat, stumble out of the room and head for the exit. The tender is gone and so are the flappers, no doubt paid by the cleaver boys to disappear.

I race out of the joint, my heart slamming its way up my chest and practically out of my mouth. I run down the hall and burst out the front door onto Tenth Street. The icy air scorches my skin and whips my eyes but it's a welcome pain. It's the sting of safety.

I run back to Market Street, my footsteps echoing into the night, and right then I swear to myself I'll never be dumb enough to get lured into a trap like that again. But I've got all of their faces burned into memory. The tender, the flappers, Margaret, Hector, and the little guy. I owe each one of them, just like I owe Gazzara. And I'll be back, because I like to pay my debts.

The Auburn's headlights shine onto Route 25 as we hightail it out of Philly. Santi has been asking me the same questions since I got back to the hotel and found him pacing the lobby.

“Isn't the femur your leg bone?” He's trying to picture what went down at the cellar club, which is about thirty miles behind us.

“I don't know,” I say, still trying to make sense of what just happened.

Santi's shaking his head. “They were going to chop off your legs? For messing with a bartender?”

The kid has no idea how far I pushed things.

“That's the short version,” I tell him.

I turn on the radio and Rudy Vallee's singing “I'm Just A Vagabond Lover.” I know every note because Old Man Santiago has the record at the Hy-Hat and I play it every time I'm there. Whenever I listen to Rudy Vallee I pretend I'm white—normal white—and as rich as J. P. Morgan. I picture myself on a yacht sipping daiquiris with Pearl. She's stuck on me and nobody is out for my femurs.

“What's your move now?” Santi asks. “We've got to map out a sensible plan of strategy.”

I can't imagine how to fix this mess before Jimmy gets back. I'm in even deeper now, because Gazzara is obviously more than a small-town hood and I've spun him off his nut. I turn up Rudy Vallee and run through my options.

The one move I haven't considered is coming back to Philly with more muscle, but I'd have a tough time finding anybody crazy enough to join me. None of the boys at the Pour House will want to cross Jimmy. And I won't ask any of the tougher kids at the Hy-Hat; the whole point of the club is to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

I hate to admit it, but the one person who could help me out of this mess is my father. He hasn't been too happy with me since I started working at the Pour House, and he certainly won't like hearing the name Jimmy McCullough—but if I present the situation the right way he just might stand by me. The champ knows what it's like to be behind the eight ball. He never took any guff from anybody, not even when the mob came down on him to take a dive. He did more than refuse: he knocked the guy out and walked away smelling as clean as freshly laundered towels.

I don't have many other choices. Calling my mother isn't an option; she left after I was born and hasn't shown up since. I've never laid eyes on her, but from what my father tells me, she never had to fight to survive. She was born into money. Big money. And she's white.

Dorothy Albright trailed her father down the aisle of the Third Regiment Armory, joining the crowd of businessmen surrounding the boxing ring at the front of the arena. Dorothy had pinned her hair up on the crown of her head and refrained from dabbing rouge onto her cheeks, but she was still a rose in a butcher shop.

She had been to the armory a year earlier to see one of her father's prizefighters take his lumps from Marvin Hart, the heavyweight champion at the time. The place hadn't changed—it reeked of sweat, tobacco, liniment, and greed. Beer stands were set up alongside the cheap bench seats in the back, and vendors worked the ringside aisles, hawking Cracker Jack and pretzels. Clusters of older men in sweat-stained work shirts gathered by the rear fire exit. They puffed on cigarettes as they talked in clipped sentences about the odds of the fight—and what they'd do with their winnings.

It had taken three hours to get to Camden from Hartford, and there were hundreds of more acceptable ways Dorothy could have spent her day, let alone her evening. There was no Bible passage that addressed it directly, but she knew two brutes fighting for public entertainment went against the Lord's word, somehow.

To say that she saw the world differently than her father did was an understatement. He'd been talking up this fight ever since the
Newark Evening-Star
had agreed to back the statewide tournament four months ago. He could barely contain himself when speaking of how his latest investment, Barry Higgins, would soon have the championship belt of New Jersey wrapped around his flat Irish midsection.

Back in grade school, Dorothy had admired her father, particularly when he spoke of respecting all people, regardless of their skin color. According to him, he'd always fought for the downtrodden. He even told her a story of how, when he was a young boy, he'd taken a few beatings at the hands of neighborhood teenagers for befriending the Negro, Tom Jeffries, who worked at his father's general store. But now, Dorothy realized that her father's tolerance wasn't enough to make him an upstanding citizen. He simply wasn't the straight arrow he presented himself to be. That's why she railed against him, hoping a run of bad luck would convince him that his gambling businesses weren't only illegal but built on temptation and moral weakness. His enterprise was the devil on Earth.

But Dorothy did have a reason for being at the armory, and she didn't dare mention it to her father. This would surely test his tolerance: she'd developed a fondness for a doughy knot of muscle named Ernie Leo, who was not only a Negro, but also Higgins's opponent. She'd been praying for weeks that Ernie would buck the odds and walk away with the prize money—and force the Higgins syndicate, particularly its prime operator, to rue the day it ensnared itself in professional prizefighting.

The overhead lights snapped off as Dorothy and her father found their seats. The only bulbs that now shone were the black torpedo lamps trained on the ring. Inside the ropes, Ernie shadowboxed in his corner. His skin was as dark as his leather boots, his legs muscular and sturdy. His feet looked heavy, as if they'd grown roots below the canvas. Above his beefy shoulders, sweat shone on his round face. Beads trickled down his pulpy ears, his short, fleshy neck, his puffy bottom lip, and the cleft in his chin.

Dorothy had met Ernie during one of her father's scouting expeditions at that dreadful gym in Hoboken, the place he'd take her when trying to prove that boxing was the result of discipline and endurance. The athletes did work hard, but that didn't prove anything. Most were lummoxes—their brains were as dense as their physiques—and every one of them was a pawn in her father's operation. Ernie was no exception, but he was sweet and decent. And she knew he was smitten because she'd caught him stealing glances at her in between rounds on the brown leather dummy bag. She'd imagined feeling him inside of her, smothering her with muscle, sweat, and pleasure. It was her greatest sin, her weakness of the flesh, and she'd struggled for all of her twenty years to keep it under control. Father Jennings, the pastor at Saint Anthony's of Padua, had told her months ago that he smelled this weakness on her, and she couldn't deny it. It oozed out of her every pore. Still, when Ernie hit that dummy bag, walloping it with his gloved fists and peering around the side of it, she felt a tingle stirring beneath her corseted waist as her sin grew deep within her loins and clamored to be set free.

On the day Ernie signed to fight Higgins, she'd sat with the fighter on a bench outside the trainer's room, intoxicated by the spicy smell of his liniment. Had her father seen them, he'd surely have lit into Ernie. He didn't abuse Negroes the way his cronies did, but that didn't mean he had any use for Ernie other than as a stepping-stone for Higgins. And he certainly didn't want Dorothy gumming up the works. She knew him well enough to know he'd have probably yelled about miscegenation, as if he didn't create his own laws whenever he needed them. He'd have been so busy barking at her, she might have missed hearing Ernie say that he considered himself more than a rented dunderhead.

“I'm not going to lose for nobody, not if I can help it,” Ernie said. “I won't sell my pride. And I'm not gonna give up the prize money, neither.”

It made sense that the twenty dollars meant more to Ernie than the title did; he couldn't be making more than ten cents an hour sweeping streets in Hoboken.

Now he stood in the ring, lumbering in a small circle, punching the fetid air in front of him.

“Higgins will be out soon,” Dorothy's father said, his blue eyes contrasting a mane of white hair that was combed back off his forehead, each strand plastered into place. His face was so clean-shaven it looked as if it were made of clay.

“Wait'll you see him, honey. He's a born winner.”

Her father owned 40 percent of Higgins. He'd bought his way into the fighter's syndicate with a thousand dollars—more than twice what Aunt Ellen made teaching third grade all year in Baltimore.

“Let's hope this leads to the big paydays,” her father said. He squeezed her hand and she fought the urge to yank it back.

He couldn't possibly be nervous, could he? Dorothy knew little of what her father was up to, but the round-robin must have been weighted in Higgins's favor. The only reason Ernie was given a chance to take on a white fighter was that he had the finesse of a wild boar.

The last time Dorothy had seen Ernie he was standing on the scale at the weigh-in. She'd looked him in the eye and wished him luck. He'd nodded back while inflating his muscles and lifting both arms over his head as his trainer, Willie Brooks, wrapped a cloth tape measure around his chest. Now she prayed that all his hard work would give him a fighting chance.

Her father leaned toward her ear. “Once our boy plows through Leo, he'll take on Tommy Burns,” he said, smiling.

He and his cronies had been coveting the world heavyweight title ever since Burns had taken it from Marvin Hart in February. Burns, they felt, was beatable. Even Dorothy had to admit that her father's timing was impeccable. He'd bought into Higgins on a Monday, and by Friday, Burns was champ.

Ernie windmilled his arms in looping circles from his shoulders. A group of five men sitting ringside—two rows in front of Dorothy—hurled insults at him. They all wore grubby pants and yellowed white shirts; they couldn't have been more than a year older than Dorothy.