The Harder They Fall (22 page)

Toro’s training in the San Diego gym attracted capacity crowds to every session, even though he looked even more listless than he had at Ojai. Danny was so disgusted he devoted most of his time to the local bars and horse rooms, leaving Doc to continue Toro’s education in the manly art. Doc did what he could. He had enough liking for Toro to want to teach him how to take care of himself in case he ever got in there with someone with the handcuffs off.
But Toro lacked either the primitive drive of a rough-
and-tumble
killer or the systematised consecration of the athlete. He was lethargic and moody and dreaded the sweaty monotony of road work and the daily grind at the gym. He obeyed Doc’s instructions with reluctant obedience. But except for learning to hold his left out in the more or less established way, and to move around with slow, graceless orthodoxy, there wasn’t much improvement in his boxing ability. George obligingly permitted himself to be knocked over occasionally to keep alive the myth of Toro’s punching powers, but our Man Mountain still hadn’t learnt to hit hard enough to bother a healthy featherweight.

I had the fight reporter of the only morning paper up to the room a couple of times and sized him up as a nice guy on the lazy side with about as much integrity as I had, who would just as soon shove my stuff in with his name on it as grind it out himself. So I sat up there at the Hotel Grant, making with the adjectives.

There wasn’t a day when I didn’t have a qualm or two for what I was doing. At the same time I had to admit that on the bottom level I was getting a real kick out of putting this big oaf across as the world’s most dangerous heavyweight. The morning of the fight, for instance, when I read the copy in the first column of the sports section under Ace Mercer’s byline, it handed me a laugh, I suppose a laugh of superiority.

Jones was a tall, rangy boy with more stuff than I would have expected from a second-rater out there in the sticks. He came out of his corner as if he really meant to make a fight out of it, with stiff jabs that made Toro look clumsy and flat-footed. Toro threw a wild right that almost knocked himself down as Jones ducked. The crowd laughed. Ten seconds before the end of the round, Jones feinted to the body, sucking Toro into dropping his hands, and crossed him with a straight right to the jaw. Toro’s knees buckled, and if Doc and Danny hadn’t jumped through the ropes at the bell, he might have gone down.

The crowd was on its feet, cheering Jones as the coloured fighter danced confidently back to his corner. That was part of Toro’s appeal of course. They came not only to see the brute flatten his opposition but also with the deeply rooted hope that just once, the little guy, the underdog, the dimly realised symbol of themselves would triumph over the Giant as David the eternal short-ender felled Goliath.

Toro staggered back to his corner in a daze. Doc had to use smelling salts to sharpen his dimming senses.

‘What goes with this Jones?’ I asked Vince.

‘If the jig tries anything,’ Vince said, ‘he ends up in the bay.’

‘Maybe he just wants to make it look good for a round or two and doesn’t know how little Toro can take.’

‘If that jigaboo tries to cross us, we got protection,’ Vince said. ‘I got my guy workin’ his corner.’

That was the first time I realised what a really thorough fellow Vince Vanneman was. It wouldn’t win any merit badges for any of us, but if it hadn’t been for his foresight things would have turned out even worse than they did.

Jones came out for the second round as if the understanding we thought we had was actually made between two other guys. He wouldn’t stand still for Toro to connect with his ponderous rights. As he kept moving around Toro he was scoring with sharp punches that had the crowd on its feet, begging for a knockout, defying the slow-moving giant with bloodthirsty abuse, ‘Knock the big bum out! Send him back to Argentina! Attaboy, cut him down to your size!’

Fortunately, Jones was a punishing but not a finishing puncher or he would have written an untimely 30 to our
whole campaign. But when the second round ended, Toro wandered back to his corner with blood dripping from his mouth and his eyes staring uselessly. Doc worked over him with his educated fingers, massaging the back of his neck, while a handler squeezed a spongeful of cold water over his head, and checked with vaseline the trickle of blood that ran from the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s the business all right,’ Vince said.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘This is some tank artist, this Jones.’

‘My guy’s talkin’ to him,’ Vince said. ‘My guy’s a real tough fella. He’ll tell that nigger what’ll be if he don’t splash this round.’

The representative of our interests Vince had placed in Jones’s corner seemed to be doing plenty of talking. He was leaning through the ropes with his sweaty, larcenous face close to Jones’s ear, pouring it to him. But when Jones came out for the third round he was still trying. He knocked Toro off balance with a smart left jab to the mouth and followed up with a straight right that sent Toro stumbling back against the ropes. Any moment I expected to see Toro start caving in, in sections, and my lousy five per cent not worth one of Danny’s torn-up bookie tabs. It made me realise for the first time how hungry I was for that dough, just as hungry as Nick, or Vince or Luis Acosta out there on the high seas on his way home to the small-time. Just like Acosta I found myself up on my feet begging Toro to stay with him.

Jones was getting wild now, with the disobedient urge to knock Toro out. His left hand shot over Toro’s shoulder and Toro brought up a looping right from the floor that
caught Jones on the chin. It didn’t hurt Jones so much as it caught him off balance, and Toro, trying clumsily to follow up his advantage, shoved Jones with both hands, and the coloured fighter half-slipped, half-fell to the canvas. As long as he was down and the referee (with whom Vince had done a little business) began to count, Jones decided to rest on one knee until the count of six, for he was beginning to be arm-weary from throwing so many punches at his wideopen target.

But when he arose at six, a towel came fluttering up out of his corner. Vince’s guy was working overtime to earn his fifty clams. Jones tried to kick the towel out of the ring and go on fighting, but the referee grabbed him and led him back to his corner. Then he came back and raised the hand of our bewildered superman. A terrible roar of protest rose from the crowd. In a second the air was full of flying cushions, programmes and bottles. Some of the fans in their wrath started breaking up their seats and hurling the pieces into the ring. With police running interference we hustled Toro back to the dressing room. With a quick fifty to the sergeant, we got away in his police car.

‘What happen?’ Toro asked me in innocent confusion.

‘Don’t worry, you won the fight fair,’ I told him. ‘It’s just that the people aren’t satisfied until they see you kill somebody. So they didn’t want the fight stopped so soon.’

Toro smiled through his bloody lips. ‘One ponch and he goes boom,’ he said. ‘Just like first time.’

For once in my life I had no desire to fraternise with reporters. So instead of going back to the hotel or catching a train, we went straight to a garage and hired a car. We
drove up the coast until we thought we were safely out of range of the little stink bomb we had exploded and stopped at a small auto-court, or motel, as they like to call them in Cal. The guy Vince had working for us in the other corner was with us too. His name was Benny. He was one of those ex-lightweights who blow up into heavyweights as soon as they come off the training and get on the beer. As soon as Doc put Toro to bed after a warm bath and a light massage, so he’d rest easier, Benny gave us the lowdown on the little comedy (in the Greek sense) that had been going on in his corner. It was a hot night and he was on his third beer when he opened his sweat-stained shirt, revealing a fat, hairy chest on which were tattooed the words, ‘Pac. Coast lt-wt champ, 1923’, and the exaggerated nude figure of a woman called Edna embracing an Adonis-like creature in boxing trunks, boxing gloves and a sailor hat captioned Battling Benny Mannix. The Battler managed to raise the group’s morale somewhat by inhaling and exhaling his fatty diaphragm in such a way that the tattooed figures undulated together with impressive realism.

‘This jig comes back after the first round cocky as hell, see,’ Benny began in an injured tone. ‘“Christ, I didn’ know that big fella was such a bum,” he says. “An’ I thought I was layin’ down to save myself punishment.”

‘“Don’t get no fancy ideas,” I tells him, “or you’ll get a helluva lot more punishment ’n you figured on.”

‘But when the jig goes out for round two, he’s still full of wrong ideas, see? “This guy’s got nothin’,” he says, “I c’n stiffen this guy. The hell with them five Cs,” he says to Mathews. “We c’n make more flattening this joker.”

‘Well, I tries to tell him if he keeps up the wise talk he’s sucking around for a hole in the head, but the jig don’t scare so easy. He’s got this giant-killin’ on his mind. So when I’m massagin’ him I try to squeeze his muscles so they’ll go dead on him and when I wipe off his face I accidentally rub some alcohol in his eyes, so when we send him out for Three he’s brushing his eyes and he ain’t quite the weisenheimer he was when he came in from Two. But even then he’s beatin’ your guy real bad when he goes down from that slip. So I figures, what the hell, this jig is just wrong enough to get up off the floor and belt the big jerk out. So I sees my chance and throws in the towel.’

Danny sucked out the last of a pint bottle of rye. ‘I don’ like it,’ he said. ‘Twen’y years in the racket I never have a run-in with the Commish. All that’s gotta happen now is I lose my licence.’

‘Aah, shet up your bellyachin’,’ Vince said. ‘Always cryin’ about your goddam licence. Shove the commissions, both of ’em. Leave Jimmy and Nick take care of ’em.’

‘But damn it, if you’re gonna set these fights up, why don’t you do it right?’ Danny demanded. ‘The woods are full of bums ready to fall down for a price. But you, the great fixer, gotta pick a guy who likes to win.’

‘Aah, go shove yourself, spithead,’ Vince said in rebuttal. ‘What am I, a mind reader for Chrisake? How the hell should I know what goes on in that dinge’s double-crossin’ brain?’

‘If I lose my licence, I’m dead,’ Danny said. ‘You, you can always go back to pimping.’

‘Why you son-of-a-bitch!’ Profanity spewed from Vince’s
fleshy mouth as he lunged heavily toward Danny, starting a wild punch that Danny blocked neatly. Danny made no effort to retaliate as Benny, George, Doc and I grabbed parts of Vince’s aroused anatomy and pulled him away.

‘Never do that,’ Danny said quietly, his face strangely white, his thin lips drawn to an angry line.

‘Yeah, well, no jerk is gonna call me them names like that,’ Vince blubbered.

‘Whatta you wanna do, wake Molina?’ Doc said. ‘Let the guy sleep. He needs his sleep.’

‘Aah, shove him too,’ Vince said. He settled back on the couch with a crumpled copy of
Crime
he had picked up on the train down to San Diego.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette in peace. Across the highway the surf pounded on the beach with relentless monotony. The sky was clear and moonlit. Looking up into it, the tension of the smoke-filled motel room seemed as foolish and far away as an argument you had with your brother when you were eight. In a few minutes George Blount came out and joined me. ‘Man, oh, man!’ he said and chuckled softly.

‘One of these days Danny’s going to clip him,’ I said.

‘Mister McCuff’s like me,’ George said. ‘Don’ want to fight nobody ’cept for money.’

‘Why do you think it is, George?’ I said. ‘Why is it most you guys don’t go in for these grudge matches?’

‘I don’ know,’ George laughed. ‘Maybe you go roun’ punchin’ fellows and catchin’ punches so long you just get it all outa your system. Maybe every man’s got just so many punches in him and when you get rid of ’em all in the ring
you just don’t want to hit nobody no more.’

I walked down the road a quarter of a mile or so with him, not saying much of anything but conscious as always of his deep serenity.

‘Boy, we really stank up the joint tonight,’ I said.

‘That fella oughta go home,’ George said. ‘That fella oughta go home before something bad happen.’

That was easy to say, when all you were getting out of it were three squares and a little pocket money. But Toro Molina had already turned them away in two cities. He was an oil well just beginning to come in and you don’t turn off a profitable flow just because your hands are getting a little dirty, not where I come from.

As soon as we read the papers next morning we knew we had troubles. The State Boxing Commission had tied up the purses of both fighters, pending an investigation. The fight we had lined up for Oakland was postponed. Toro couldn’t read the papers well enough to learn what had happened, so at least he was happy. Only he wanted to know where the money was that he had earned. Vince slipped him fifty dollars. He had never had a large American bill of his own and he seemed content with it. ‘Feefty bocks, hokay,’ he kept saying.

You could have chipped the air up for ice cubes when Nick came in.