A crowd of men have gathered in front of the Mondamin, listening to Jeff Smith up on a barrel of nails. Hod sees Smokey standing a few feet back from the throng, nervous.
“Our boys asleep,” says Smith. “Defenseless. Then the furtive approach, the infernal device installed at water level, the fuse ignited—”
“What happened?” Hod whispers.
“Seattle papers come in,” says Smokey. “This is bad.”
“Then the dormant city shaken by a terrible explosion!” Jeff Smith has his hat over his heart now, a tear in his voice. “Our brave lads blown to smithereens. Dismembered. Horribly burned. Drowned in the unforgiving waters.”
“They gone blame this on me,” mutters Smokey, shaking his head.
“Bodies float to the surface.” Smith is using his soap-selling voice, dark eyes burning with indignation. “The malefactors feign innocence.”
Hod is confused. “What do you have to do with it?”
Smokey looks around at the red-faced men, steam rising from their mouths and noses, jaws clenched in anger. “Cause I’m the closest thing they got to a Spaniard in this camp.”
“But will Americans countenance this treachery?” Jeff Smith raising a fist in the air. “Will we quail and run? Will we falter before the swarthy Dago assassin?” The men shout No! to each tremulous query. Smith spreads his arms wide and smiles. “I knew it in my heart. Our country needs us, gentlemen. I have wired the Territory requesting commission. Any red-blooded American among you—” and here he points with his hat toward a tent that has been set up in the middle of the street at Broadway and Seventh, “—may strike a blow for liberty by signing on with the Skaguay Guards! God bless America!”
There is cheering and fist-waving and then the band from the Garden of Joy steps out to play The Stars and Stripes and most of the crowd, townsmen and busted stampeders alike, hurries to enlist, loudly describing the beating the wicked Spaniards are about to suffer. Jeff Smith hops down and crosses to Hod and Smokey.
“Most of them are hoping Uncle Sam will provide free passage back to the Outside,” he winks. “Let’s see how bold that reform outfit been nippin at my heels is when I’ve got my own army.”
“We gone to war?” Hod hasn’t looked at a newspaper since he’s been in the Yukon. It all seems very far away.
“We will, son, soon enough.” He claps Hod on the shoulder. “I’ll expect you to join the roll, of course. Sergeant McGinty.”
A long line has formed in front of the tent, getting longer every moment.
“I suppose I ought to.”
“That’s the spirit!” Jeff Smith’s eyes are glowing. He hasn’t changed from last night’s poker game, cigar ash on his pants, whiskey on his breath, the butt of his Navy Colt jutting out from the open front of his otterskin coat. “But first you two must bring me an eagle,” he says, and steps back inside the hotel.
“Eagles been gone for months,” says Hod.
Smokey is already on the move. “I know who find us some.”
They take the wagon out to Alaska Street. Voyageur lives in the last cabin at the end of the Line, the only one without cold-stiffened undergarments hung outside to advertise a woman within. Voyageur is a fisherman and meat hunter who sells his game to the grub tents at White Pass City.
“You lookin for a three-dollar whore you come too far!” he calls when Hod bangs on the door. He is a white-stubbled, sharp-smelling old man who dresses like a Tlingit and is scraping the flesh off a marmot hide as they step in to state their business.
“Birds mostly follow the salmon up into Canada when the spawning peters out,” he tells them. “But now that you got this run of fools going over the Pass year-round, why bother?”
He lets them borrow a square of weir netting and tells them the best place to look. “Anywhere there’s dead things, you find you some birds.”
They leave the wagon at Feero’s and travel the Brackett Road, able to skirt past the pack trains and the hapless stampeders trying to haul their own goods. The ice won’t break for months but still the greenhorns are in a rush, desperate to add their tents to the cluster at the edge of Lake Lindeman and start eating through their supplies.
“Skaguay got no use for you less you got cash money to spend, and it gone take some of that every day,” says Smokey as they pass a party that includes two women dragging a woodstove loaded on a sled over the corduroy road. “Stay here too long, they be nothin left of you.”
Hod talks them through the toll, explaining their mission, and they reach the base of the White Pass by noon. Even in the freezing cold it stinks.
“That’s some that aint gone yet,” says Smokey.
The Gulch is full of carcasses, mostly horses. Some are just bones, or frozen and dried to leather, while a few must have fallen or faltered and been pushed off the trail in the last few days. They lie twisted and broken on the rock, bones ripped through their hides, clusters of eagles picking at their exposed innards while ravens waddle anxiously a few feet away, waiting their turn.
The eagles barely flap out of the path as Hod and Smokey walk through the carnage.
“Let’s us turn our backs on this bunch here,” says Smokey. “Then when I say three, turn and toss it over em.”
The ravens all manage to squawk away before the net lands on two feasting eagles. The men sit on the trunk of a deadfall tree on the side of the slope, covering their noses with their mittens, and wait till the scavengers tire themselves out under the mesh. “Mr. Jeff gone want that big one,” says Smokey. “We let the other fly.” The bird he points at has blood speckling its white neck feathers and smells of dead horse.
Hod can hear a pack train climbing on the trail above them, can hear a man cursing a mule and a child crying, just crying.
“So how you end up here?” Smokey is the only negro he has seen in Skaguay, the only one he’s seen since the deckhands on the steamer to Dyea.
Smokey pokes a stick into the tangle of net and the larger eagle strikes at it. “Too many of them ring battles, twenty, thirty, forty rounds. Livin high on the hog in between—it wear you down. Then there was the bottle.” Smokey is quiet for a long moment, drawing patterns in the snow at his feet. Hod has never seen him take a drink. “What it come to, they was a little carnival I hooked on with, takin dives. Pay you a nickel and you hits the bullseye with a baseball, it throw open a trap door and I go in the tank.”
“I seen that once.”
“And it keeps me in the liquor and they lets me sleep in one of the wagons but that’s about all. Livin day to day. Only once we gets up to this north country, figure the people is starved for entertainment, the water in the tank won’t stay water, it’s always froze. So they just cut a hole in a curtain, I sticks my head through it. Hit the nigger on the noggin an you wins a prize.” He frowns and gives the eagles another poke. “Then Mr. Jeff see me and offer me a real job workin for him. That very day I took the vow and aint took a drop since.” He stands to stretch his legs. “Near about everybody stays in town owe Mr. Jeff something.”
When they carefully disentangle the smaller bird it doesn’t fly, just backs away from them stiff-legged, skreeking its raspy cry and holding its wings out, trembling, before flapping over to chase a trio of ravens out of a horse’s ravaged belly.
There is already bunting hung, red, white, and blue, from the façade of Jeff Smith’s Parlor when they get back.
“The noblest of the scavengers,” Jeff says, holding his head eagle-like and staring back down at the bird in the bundle of netting. “And a fitting symbol for our proud nation.”
“It looks awful, Jeff,” says Syd Dixon.
“Throw a couple buckets of water over him, hang him out in the sun, he’ll be good as new. If not, I’ll have him stuffed.”
They manage to slip a deerskin gold-poke over the eagle’s head, pulling the drawstrings to shut off any light, and the bird calms enough that they can cut the net away and put him in a cage that held a bandicoot Jeff Smith bought from Smokey’s carnival, displaying it in the corner of the Parlor till a sourdough shot it because he didn’t like the way it looked at him.
“Anybody who desecrates the national symbol in my saloon,” says Jeff Smith when they have hoisted the cage and its hooded occupant onto the bar counter, “shall be dealt with summarily.”
“What you gonna name him, Jeff?” asks Old Man Triplett.
“Liberty,” suggests the Sheeny Kid.
“Columbia,” counters Niles Manigault. “Proud beacon of freedom, torch-bearer to the peoples of the world—”
“I had a buddy in Seattle, used to rock side-to-side on his legs just like he’s doing,” says Red Gibbs. “We called him Wobbles.”
“I christen him Fitzhugh Lee,” says Jeff Smith, trying to reach in and snatch the gold-poke off the bird’s head. “General of the Confederacy and present American consul to the besieged island of Cuba.” He looks sharply to Hod. “If you don’t hustle down to that recruiting station, McGinty, you’re likely to lose your place.”
Despite the dropping temperature there are still dozens of men outside the tent waiting to be processed.
“I seen a drawing of that Havana once,” says a busted stampeder, shivering, gloveless, in a tattered mackinaw. “They got palm trees.”
“You think they’ll send us there?” asks the man in front of him, Gott-shalk, who sells sawdust he steals from Captain Billy’s mill to the saloons and peddles useless goldfield maps to the greenhorns coming off the steamers.
“Hell, maybe if it really gets cooking we’ll go all the way to Spain,” says the stampeder. “Tangle with them conquistadors.”
“Wherever we fight em,” says Gottshalk, “it got to be better than livin in Hell’s frozen asshole.”
When he gets inside the recruiting tent Hod finds Reverend Bowers sitting behind the table, taking names, with Ox Knudsen standing over his shoulder, picking his teeth with a splinter.
“We only take men with balls between their legs,” he says as Hod reaches in to sign the roster.
“You on this list?” asks Hod without looking up.
“Right at the top.”
“Since when do squareheads count as Americans?”
And then he is on the ground with the Swede on top trying to throttle him, men shouting and yanking as they roll around, finally pulled away from each other and out of the tent by the legs and somehow Jeff Smith and the boys from the Parlor and Tex Rickard and Billy Mizner and half of Skaguay is there gathered around as Ox shouts threats and nearly lifts the three men holding him clear off their feet.
“Dissension in the ranks will not be tolerated!” Smith steps between them, raising his voice so all can hear. “Not while there is a desperate foe to be defeated, not while the defense of our great Northwest is in the care of the Skaguay Guards!” He turns a full circle, waving his hat, and even Ox Knudsen shuts up to listen to his pitch. “These two gentlemen,” he cries, “have agreed to settle their differences in the roped arena, this Friday night.”
There is a cheer from the crowd and the men holding Hod in a headlock thump him on the back in encouragement.
“Details of the event may be read in tomorrow’s News. Volunteers for the Skaguay Guard shall receive a one-dollar discount at the gate.”
And with that Hod is released and Ox pulled away by Rickard and Mizner and a couple other men and the recruiting tent closed till morning. The crowd disperses, returning to the beckoning saloons, and Hod hurries to catch up with Smith and the others.
“I’m not really a fighter,” he says, joining them on the boardwalk. “Just cause Choynski let me stand up for a while—”
“Nor are any of the hash-slingers in this outpost actually cooks, nor the shylocks who collect quitclaims lawyers, nor the Skaguay sparrows who parade at the Theater Royal dancers or singers,” says Jeff Smith, putting an arm around him. “You, my boy, are not a fighter any more than Doc, who has been known to prescribe laudanum for a hangnail, is a physician. In this benighted corner of the globe, however, you will have to do. Smokey has been training you, has he not?”
“How many rounds I got to go?”
Smith raises his eyebrows in something like shock. “Why, as many as you are able, my boy. In an affair such as this there can be no breath of scandal.”
“The audience will be almost totally local,” Niles Manigault explains before he follows the others into the Parlor. “And it is never wise to defecate where one resides.”
“Rickard wants it catch-as-catch-can, but Jeff is holding out for the Marquis of Queensbury,” says Frank Clancy in front of the Music Hall. “He says we’re not savages here.”
“I hear they want a twelve-foot ring,” says Billy Saportas from the Skaguay News. “Might as well hold the scrap in a piano crate.”
“Soapy says it’s twenty feet or no go,” says Goldberg in his cigar store. “Is this a fight or a bicycle race?”
“No gloves, that’s what I heard,” says Arizona Charlie, lounging in the Pantheon as Hod and Smokey roll barrels of beer across the floor. “Going back to the true spirit of the game.”
“Tell Jeff I’m proud of him,” says Tommy Kearns when they lug a new Wurlitzer Orchestrion into the Palace, Smokey trying to keep his back to the naked Muses on the wall. There is as much talk in town of the fight as there is of the developments in Cuba, and somehow the two are connected in people’s minds.
“Proud for what?”
“For putting his boy in the scrap right away. This old Granny McKinley, feeding diplomats to the Dagoes—”
“You mean Ox is like the Spanish?”
“I mean if there’s bound to be a fight, get on with it! How you feeling, son?”
“I’m fine.”
Kearns steps close to look Hod over. “And what do you think, Smokey? I lost a bundle when the Jew let him go past three.”
“That’s cause you sold him short,” says Smokey, carefully laying his side of the crate on the floor. “That Swede can’t box.”
“Neither can a grizzly bear, but I wouldn’t step into a ring with one. Show me your muscle, kid.”
Hod puts his end down and, for the third time that morning, flexes his right bicep to be felt and evaluated.
“It’s kind of knotty. You don’t like to see that knotty kind of muscle on a fighter. It should be big and smooth, like—like the muscle on an ox. Pure power.”
“You bet how you gonna bet, Mr. Tommy,” says Smokey. “But this boy know what he’s about.”
“He says he’s gonna kill you,” says Addie Lee as she sits with Hod on her bed behind the flag.
“You’ve seen him?”
“He sent for me to come to a room up at Dutch Lena’s. He thinks Soapy and them are out to do him in, so he had a bunch of his friends waiting downstairs.”
Hod feels himself flush, thinking of her in a hotel room with him.
“Look, the Farallon is leaving today. You could get out of here—”
“So could you,” he says.
“Wherever I am, I be doing the same thing. Right here is where it pays best.”
The men out in the bar beyond the flag are trading opinions of how the battle will go. “The thing with Swedes,” says one, “they don’t feel pain the way a normal white man does. Something about how thick their skulls are.”
“So he talks about me?” asks Hod.
Addie Lee shrugs. “We’ve had a couple chewing matches on the subject.”
“He ever hit you?”
“Threatened to once or twice. But he’s afraid of Soapy and them, like everybody else.”
“And you work for Soapy.”
“Half of everything goes to the house, wherever you are,” she says. “Who owns the house, that aint always so clear.”
He buries his fingers in her hair and kisses her on the mouth and she kisses back.
“This don’t matter, you know.” She is crying, sort of, tears falling but her face composed and serious. “You’re just sucker bait for the gamblers. And I’m just sucker bait for you.”
He gently pushes her down on the bed then, and for the first time doesn’t care about the men out at the bar.
Niles Manigault sits nursing a bourbon when Hod steps out.
“There is a theory,” says the Southerner, “only recently given much credence, that proper training for a fight precludes intimate relations.”
Hod looks at him blankly.
“Each visit to the daughters of joy, each frolic with the fairies of the demimonde,” he elaborates, “further saps the warrior’s vitality. Even married men are advised to forfeit their conjugal benefits until the foe is vanquished. Of course, if one lacks hope, there is the phenomenon of the condemned man’s last meal—”
Hod leaves him contemplating at the bar.
The Skaguay Guards march on the day of the fight. After two hours of drilling conducted by a defrocked Mountie named Hopgood who Jeff Smith has hired, they form up and strut in a pair of ragged columns down Broadway, to the cheers and jeers of those who haven’t joined. Knudsen has been put at the head of the second company, a long-handled shovel over his shoulder, while Hod leads the first, carrying Jeff Smith’s Winchester. All the percentage girls come out and wave handkerchiefs and the Garden of Joy band is playing as they march behind the volunteers and the sun is showing itself brighter than it has in weeks and for a tiny moment, stepping along smartly to the beat of El Capitán, Hod starts to feel that this is something big, something real, something important in the world and that he is a part of it.
Jeff Smith stands waiting on a wagon at Second, a flag draped like a Roman’s toga over his shoulders, with Fitzhugh Lee glaring from the cage at his feet.
“Friends,” he declaims when the band has sputtered to a halt and the columns have deployed around the wagon and the civilians crowded in among them close enough to hear. “Patriots. Americans.” He pulls the banner off his body and holds it out to them in both arms. “I speak to you today concerning the march of the flag, and of the Almighty’s designs for our future.”
It is freezing cold despite the sun, the breath of the Guards huffing out like musket volleys as they stand at attention in their ranks, the unenlisted allowed to dance in place and bury their hands in their coats. Hod hopes that Smith has not prepared a stem-winder.
“For it is to Him that we must look for guidance in the approaching millennium,” he continues. “It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil, a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history, perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing workingfolk of all the earth. A people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes. The propagandists,” cries Jeff Smith, “not the misers, of liberty!”
Hod sees the reform contingent, who call themselves the 101 Committee, watching from the boardwalk, arms crossed in disapproval.
“And it is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon his chosen people, a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today.”
The eagle in the cage at Smith’s feet begins to croak rhythmically, swaying back and forth like an agitated parrot. Hod feels the Winchester heavy and cold on his shoulder. He is ready. Sick of this fool’s-gold Yukon and ready to go off to Cuba or the far islands of the Pacific, to wear a real uniform and fight and maybe die for the flag that droops from Jeff Smith’s outstretched arms.
“Shall we free the oppressed Cuban from the saffron banner of Spain?”
“Yes!” cry the Skaguay Guards.
“Shall we add our blood to that of Christian heroes who blazed their way across a savage continent?”
“Yes!” cry the sourdoughs and the stampeders, the merchants and the sure-thing men, the citizens of America’s farthest outpost. Hod sees Smokey, standing alone back in the doorway next to the oaken Sioux at Goldberg’s Cigar Store, watching them all with a vacant look on his face.
“Shall we continue,” asks Jeff Smith, holding the flag over his head now, “our march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall our free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of freedom wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Will we not do what our fathers have done before—to pitch the tents of liberty ever further from our shores and continue the glorious march of the flag?”
Uproarious cheers and men throwing their hats in the air and percentage girls waving little flags on sticks that have been passed out and a crackle of patriotic gunfire that prompts Fitzhugh Lee to lift his tailfeathers and unleash a stream of fish-smelling offal onto the cage floor. Then by some common but unspoken agreement all adjourn for drinks of celebration, all but the dozen who linger to watch Hod and Ox Knudsen staring at each other, ten yards separating them.
“See you tonight,” says Hod, holding the Winchester in the crook of his arm.
The Swede lifts the shovel from his shoulder and wiggles it in the air. “I go now and dig you a hole.”
Hod wanders off in the other direction, which takes him down to the wharves. Both the Farallon and the Utopia are in, waiting to leave in the morning. He sits halfway down the Juneau Wharf with his legs hanging over the side and the Winchester across his lap, and is watching the gulls when Smokey finds him.
“Shouldn’t ought to be out in this cold. You gone stiffen up.”
“I can’t listen to them inside the Parlor any more.”
The negro sits by him, looks at the ragged, screaming infestation that lights and flies, lights and flies, ganging up on whichever of their number manages to get a scrap of food in its beak.
“Always got one eye on they own bidness, the other on their neighbors’.”
“They don’t ever rest.”
Smokey chuckles and shakes his head. “Naw. Don’t ever see no fat gull, neither. They just a appetite with wings.”
He leans over the railing and points down to the rocks below. It is a rough day in the little harbor, waves breaking hard and rolling up on the mudflats, making a loud sucking sound as they fall back.
“See them shells stuck onto the rocks?”
“The mussels.”
“That’s the way to do it. Got food all in that water, even smaller than a speck of gold dust, and ever time it wash in or wash out over the rocks, them shells get a taste. Don’t have to go nowhere, just keep they mouths open.” Smokey shakes his head admiringly.
They are always doing somebody, Jeff Smith and his crew. Doing the wide-eyed gold pilgrims coming in with their store-bought equipment and the scurvy-gummed sourdoughs coming out with the year’s cleanup in their pokes. Jeff and Niles Manigault with their Southern manners and way of talking, Doc with his portmanteau and his lead bricks coated in gold, Rev Bowers with his entreaties to Good Samaritans and Syd Dixon offering to cut the savvy newcomer into a sweet deal, Red Gibbs and Ed Burns and the smash-nosed mug from Seattle they call Yeah Mow lounging about to deal with the ones who come back in claiming they’ve been cheated. The drinks are always on the house for the Deputy Marshal and an unofficial pharmacy operates over the bar and there are always helpful directions for stampeders to “honest” merchants and hot deals that won’t last more than a day and to the exact location of the town’s famous Paradise Alley. There is spoiled flour topped off with the good stuff and sold out the back door, interests in sure-thing claims obtained from departing sourdoughs whose mothers have just died, the telegraph messages home that go nowhere. Received message comes the inevitable reply. We are all counting on you. Please send money. And always, while you are waiting for your bacon or your beans or your paperwork there is the casual poker game, a handful of fellas just passing the time and full of good advice for greenhorns, willing to deal you in if you don’t mind playing for Skaguay stakes, so much gold out there waiting to be picked off the ground that a certain inflation has crept into all aspects of manly endeavor. Niles is the master of the cards, friendly, flattering, solemnly warning the greenhorn to be on the lookout for buncos like the notorious Soapy Smith and his gang and ready to commiserate that his own luck at poker seems to be as poor as the greenhorn’s, confiding, during a break for bladder relief, the secrets of the Martingale system, where you double your bet with each play and are therefore, given the immutable laws of mathematics, assured of victory.
Hod understands that when he fights tonight, it will be as their man.
“Thank heavens you’ve found him, Smokey.” Niles is at the table in the back room of the Parlor when Hod comes in with Smokey to return the rifle. Jeff Smith sits across from him, with Arizona Charlie and Jake Rice and Dynamite Johnny O’Brien who captains the Utopia circled under a haze of cigar smoke. “I was afraid he might be in the clutches of that poke-hunting soubrette.”
Hod hangs the Winchester on the nails behind the bar. There is a tension in the room, a lack of joking, a stiffness of posture. The steamer captain, O’Brien, sits behind a pile of currency and gold dust.
“Shit and corruption,” says Jeff Smith, staring holes into his cards. “You’ll have to accept my note for it, but I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Cash only, as agreed upon,” winks the captain. “No markers, no trade, no excuses.”
Smith looks to Charlie Meadows. “Front me a hundred.”
“The bet stands at two,” the captain reminds him, steady-eyed. The men have peeled down to their shirtsleeves, Jeff’s Navy Colt lying on the bar counter with the other gentlemen’s hardware.
Arizona Charlie hesitates, thinking up an excuse, and Smith scowls and pokes Jake Rice. “You front me,” he says to Rice, and then points to Smokey, who is tossing sardines from a tin into Fitzhugh Lee’s cage and watching the bird snap them up on the fly. “I’ll sell you my dinge. You’ve got plenty to keep him busy at your place.”
The men are silent for a moment, only the sound of the eagle’s claws clicking on the floor of its cage. Jake squirms in his seat.
“For two hundred?”
“He’s worth twice that. The best and only nigger in the Territory.”
“But what am I going to do with him?”
“That’s your business.” Jeff Smith has the look on his face that they all try to avoid.
Jake reluctantly lays two hundreds on the table, then turns to Smokey. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll make it double on the fight tonight and buy you back.”
“Is that right?” says Jeff Smith and then Dynamite Johnny turns up a pair of kings and Smith throws his hand on the floor, disgusted, and stomps over to the woodstove to give it a violent kick. He points at Smokey. “I want you out of here,” he says, and then points at Fitzhugh Lee. “And I want that bird stuffed.”
It has been decided that gloves will be worn but throws allowed, that the bell will be in the hands of one side but the time-piece held by the other, that Joe Boyle, down from Dawson and considered neutral in the affair, will referee. Half-clinches will be allowed and it will be up to the fighters to separate themselves. Smokey puts a towel over Hod’s face while he wraps his hands in the back room at Jake Rice’s place. “I want you to close your eyes,” he says, “and imagine how you gone to beat the man.” The wraps feel heavy on his hands, which are already sweating. “But keep your body relax.”
Men are hollering and stomping on the other side of the door. When Hod closes his eyes he can imagine only blackness. It is cold in the little room, Hod’s bare legs starting to ache with it, and when he opens his eyes again the negro is sitting beside him, head in his hands.
“Mr. Jeff and them been makin their bets,” he says.
“Let’s get this damn show on the road!” yells somebody from outside, kicking on the door.
“And aint none of em on you.”
The ring has been set up in the middle of the dance-hall floor, men already drinking for hours after the parade, with the Smith faction on one side of the room and his rivals on the other. Hod notices that they are all heeled, Jeff with his Navy Colt in the special gun pocket lined with buckskin and the Sheeny Kid with his Bulldog a lump under the jacket and Red Gibbs standing by the back with a bungstopper in hand, ready to throw the door open or make sure it stays closed. Introductions are shouted. Ox doesn’t look any smaller stripped down than he does with all his layers of clothes on. He is bigger than Choynski, a true heavyweight, a full inch taller than Hod as they glare at each other throughout the referee’s instructions. There are wisecracks being made and some laughter, but mostly it is the men on one side snarling about what their champion is going to do to the other.
Hod doesn’t feel like anybody’s champion standing in his corner, leaning his head close to hear Smokey over the shouting and stomping of the men. He is the veteran of only one real fight, carried by a professional and then given his sleep medicine in the agreed-upon round. His hand-wraps feel too tight and his stomach is up under his throat and his knees are buzzing.
“This man go only in one direction, which is straight ahead.” Smokey seems distracted, barely looking at Hod as he speaks. “And you don’t want to be anywhere near when he gets there. Just keep movin them feet, movin, movin, couple three rounds, see if you can tire him out.”
Addie Lee is not in the room, nor any other woman. Smoke hangs low over the ring and Hod tries to breathe shallowly through his nose while Smokey greases his face. Smith and his crew settle in on a bench by the ropes and there is somebody new, laughing and backslapping with Jeff.
It is Whitey.
Whitey who stole his gear, one-eye-blue one-eye-green Whitey who, most likely, has always been part of the gang. Hod feels dizzy, as if he has already been pounded and is falling, falling—
Smokey is trying to talk to him.
“What?”
“I ask if you ever hunt.”
“Rabbits, mostly. On the farm.”
“You get mad at them rabbits?”
“That don’t do no good.”
“Same for a ox as it is for a rabbit. You stay cool and keep your wits about you.”
“How many you spose we have to go before this bunch’ll let us stop?”
Smokey looks away. “Just don’t you be the one they carry out from that ring.”
Niles Manigault steps close then, smiling, leaning over the ropes to take a final gander. “He ready?”
“Ready as he gone get,” says Smokey, and then the bell rings and Hod is trapped inside the tiny enclosure with Ox Knudsen.
The Swede bullrushes ahead with his right arm cocked and then sledgehammers it downward, holding his left glove open before him to grab with. Hod catches the first blow on the collarbone and nearly leaves his feet, staggering backward while Ox keeps coming, then dances sideways and snaps his lead left over Knudsen’s guard again and again. His hands don’t feel right, the wraps on them stiffening, and his eyes sting as sweat runs into them. A cheer goes up each time the Swede charges, followed by a moan of disappointment when Hod sidesteps to escape the blow.
“We come to see a prize fight,” calls a man somewhere behind him, “not a goddam waltz!”
Ox charges and Hod feints a move right, then skips left and catches the squarehead flush on the face as he goes by, Ox grabbing the ropes to steady himself and bleeding from the nose when he turns to resume his attack. The crowd, anonymous in their numbers, is almost all pulling against Soapy’s fighter.
“Get on him! Get on him, you dumb fuckin Swede!”
“Knock him cold!”
“Get him on the ropes and strangle the son of a bitch!”
Knudsen finally catches up with him near the end of the round, throwing his arm over Hod’s neck and hurling him against a corner post. Hod blocks the hammer blow that follows with both gloves, then tries to wrap the Ox’s arms, but the Swede butts him over the left eye and brings his knee up, aiming for the privates and getting thigh instead. He is too much stronger, working an arm free and jolting his elbow across Hod’s jaw and then the bell and another elbow and Hod jackknifing, rolling out backward through the ropes to get away, men shoving and tugging at him as he pushes through the ringside mob, using up half his minute’s rest before Smokey can pull him back into his own corner.
“There’s something wrong with the hand wraps.” His fingers seem bonded together inside the gloves, his fists like clubs.
“Rolled em in plaster of Paris,” says the negro. “Must of set by now.”
Hod looks up into his eyes. Smokey jams a chunk of ice against where his brow is split from the head butt.
“You gone need whatever help you can get.”
There is blood slicking the floorboards when the second round begins, blood and tobacco juice and no sawdust thrown over it and even with the fighter shoes they’ve given him Hod feels like he is skating every time he backs up near the corners. Ox Knudsen keeps lurching forward, relentless, chasing Hod around the ring with Hod chopping hard at his ears as Ox swings and misses and goes past with the momentum, Hod bicycling backward as fast as he can till Ox wrestles him into a half-clinch, clamping his left arm over Hod’s neck and rubbing his glove laces over the cut eyebrow and smashing Hod’s face with his free hand as Hod pounds at the exposed short ribs with left and right the way Smokey has shown him, then launches a blind uppercut that catches Ox under the chin and Hod drops to his knees to yank out of the hold, scrambling away on hands and knees while the crowd jeers but back up dancing on his toes before Joe Boyle can count three. His ears are ringing and vision blurred, Ox charging, Hod just able to throw himself sideways and give the Swede a backhand shove that sends him sprawling across to the far ropes. Hod wipes at his eyes, blood streaming into the left, and backpedals while he fends with outstretched arms against the next rush, running out of ring sooner than he expects and catching an overhand right on the jaw that sends him tumbling back through the ropes.
His head is clear enough and his legs are still with him but there are men all around him screaming into his ears and the Ox waiting just inside the ropes for when Hod ducks to step back through, his right cocked, lips moving in a stream of curses, and Boyle behind him counting to ten and Hod gets up onto his knees with somebody trying to shove him back in and he hates them, hates Jeff Smith and Whitey and the whole sure-thing crew and the men screaming all around him and the one shoving behind, hates them all, rising and turning to smash the shoving man flush on the mouth and then clubbed from behind by Ox in the ring, spinning to land an overhand left on the Swede’s nose, feeling it crack, backing him up enough to get through the ropes but immediately grabbed in a bear-hug dance till the Ox pins him up against the corner post and goes at him, elbows and fists, Hod turtling in and crouching and catching the blows as best he can till the bell rings and Ox not stopping till Smokey steps in and blocks the Swede with the wooden stool long enough for Boyle to peel Hod away and get him back to the corner. Men are stomping and screaming, red-faced, nigger this and nigger that, some of them throwing things, bottles and beer steins and a malacca cane, and there is blood smearing Hod’s face and arms and chest, blood dripping from his gloves, blood staining the ropes and floor, blood staining Smokey’s shirt as he presses a sponge soaked in ammonia water into Hod’s face.
“You ain’t gone outrun him, we seen that,” he shouts into Hod’s ear over the cries of the gamblers and the townsmen and the stampeders, the high rollers and lowlifes who surround them. “Got to make yourself a openin and put him away.”
Hod tries to say that the man is too big to knock out but his lips have begun to swell and it doesn’t come out right. The negro looks across to Jeff Smith and his crowd, all grins behind a cloud of smoke, then turns back to him.
“You got enough kick in them hands, boy.” Smokey’s face is a way he has never seen it, like he’s set to kill somebody, his fingers digging into Hod’s shoulders as he hollers and stares him in the eye. “You just put it on him and don’t get off till he’s out. And I don’t mean down, I mean out.”
Smokey blows a mouthful of cold water in his face then and the bell rings and Hod stands from the stool and there is a great whooping cry from the men of Skaguay. It is clear how it will end, what they have all come to see, and it will be the Ox or it will be him. Ox keeps his left foot forward as he gallops across the floor, putting legs and hip and back into his punch, only this time when Hod sidesteps he slams him one-two in the kidney and crosses over hard with his left trying to punch through the man’s face to the back of his skull and Ox is spitting blood, thick gouts of it out onto the wet floor and bending his knees, intent on the kill as he lurches forward, Hod ducking his head back away from the roundhouse skinning his nose and the force of it twisting Ox, feet slipping in the blood slick and falling, reaching back with his left to catch himself leaving the opening for Hod’s uppercut thrown from the hip and Ox knocked back on his ass with a stunned expression on his square white face in the instant before Hod steps in to clamp his left hand behind the Swede’s head and piston the club of his right over and over into it, punching down with all of his weight, cracking Boyle away with the sharp of his elbow when the referee tries to step in then going down on one knee to continue pounding the Swede’s face, his head against the hard floor now, pounding left and right till men fill the ring in a cursing wave that sweeps him up and away, pummeled and kicked, Smokey unable to fight through to him with the stool in hand, Hod lifted clear off his feet and carried, trying to cover his face, his privates, forehead cracking against the doorframe and then out into the back alley and yanked to his feet, running panicked behind Niles Manigault out onto an alley full of woodsmoke and a sky that has gone insane.
“Get to O’Brien’s ship!” shouts Niles as he turns to help Red Gibbs slow down the lynch-minded throng. “And keep out of sight!”
Hod runs then, sweat steaming in the freezing air, men chasing him across Runnalls and down Broadway and off onto Holly Street, Hod cutting through the open door of Jeff Smith’s Parlor and past the squawking eagle and through the card room into the backyard where he throws the latch that opens the secret passage through the board fence he has seen them use so many times to frustrate a skinned stampeder. He comes out into Paradise Alley and steps into the first red-lit crib he sees, startling the Belgian girl inside.
“But what is this?!”
Hod is swallowing blood and fighting for breath, realizing, as the hammering of his heart begins to slow, that he is nearly naked.
“I’m freezing.” One of his gloves has been torn off in the melee and he manages to work the other off with his teeth, but his hands are nearly useless in the hardened wrappings. He manages to lower the shade. “I got to get under the covers.”
“I will get Bernard—”
“Unless he wears my size,” says Hod, climbing into the narrow bed, “forget about your maque. Just relax, make me some coffee. Soapy will pay in the morning.”
The woman is wearing a wrapper with a Chinese design on it and mukluks. She pours him coffee from a pot already cooking on the little woodstove in the center of the room.
“You have been in a fight?”
“Something like that.” The coffee tastes like metal.
“The other man, he beats you.”
“Listen, would you mind coming in here with me?”
The woman has blondined hair and huge breasts. She keeps the wrapper on and plants herself on top of him and it is strange, lying with a woman who isn’t Addie Lee, but after twenty minutes he stops shaking. He sends her to the Parlor then, and sits wrapped in blankets on the bed, fire poker in hand in case her Bernard is one of Smith’s many enemies and betrays him to the mob.
It is Smokey who finally comes to the door, Smokey with a fresh gash across his nose, wearing a fur hat with side flaps to hide his face and carrying a bundle of clothes and a pair of sheep shears to cut the handwraps away.
“Thought you didn’t work for Jeff anymore.”
Smokey shrugs. “Guess I been bought back.”
“How’s the Swede?”
Smokey works the blade of the shears under the stiffened cloth and begins to cut.
“Sheriff Taylor got a warrant out for you.”
Hod starts to shiver again. “It was a fight. With a referee—”
“Don’t nobody remember boxing aint legal till somebody get killed.”
Outside the auroras are still shimmering green above and the wagon sitting in Paradise Alley has PEOPLES’ FUNERAL PARLOR painted on the side.
“You gone have to climb in there,” says Smokey, indicating a casket loaded on the back. “They still mens out hopin to tie a rope round your neck.”
When he pulls the lid off he discovers that the box holds the remains of Fritz Stammerjohn who used to work on the Brackett Road with him, murdered yesterday at the Grotto and now frozen quite stiff.
Smokey, nervous, takes the reins in hand. A pack of Skaguay dogs, terriers and shepherds and collies and retrievers deemed too weak or too flighty to pull a sled, have discovered them and take turns propping themselves up against the wagon on their front paws to sniff. “You and him both headin for Seattle,” says Smokey. “Gone have to double up till we gets to the boat.”
Hod lays the Belgian whore’s blanket over Fritz Stammerjohn and climbs in, lying head to feet, Smokey propping the lid over them with a tiny crack for air. It is a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, angry voices calling out here and there, but the wagon never stops till they are on the Alaska wharf alongside the Utopia. Captain O’Brien is out on deck, watching the Northern Lights.
“You start to wonder if there’s a God in Heaven,” he sighs as Hod helps Smokey lug the casket aboard, “and then He sends you a night like this.”