Blood Game (16 page)

Dr. Fitzgerald was in the ring, bending over the unmoving form of Victor Sovich.

Rooney crouched on his haunches in the comer, keeping his massive, ugly head down, obviously trying not to pay any attention to the taunts and jeers directed at him by various white fans nearby. “He better not die, nigger. You hear that?” said one man as Guild pushed past to the ring.

The first drops of rain began to fall now, too, the sun disappearing altogether, the plump black rain clouds bringing not only darkness but chill, too. Rooney started rubbing himself. Seeing this, his trainer brought him a robe and threw it over his shoulders.

John T. Stoddard climbed up through the ropes. He was dazed in such a way that his face looked dead, his mouth open, spittle a silver cord down the side of his jaw, his eyes shocked into a flat, unseeing blue.

“What happened here?” the trainer said to the referee as Stoddard wandered around looking lost.

“Rooney just came on strong.

“Bullshit.

“You asked me a question. I'm just telling you what happened.”

“And I say bullshit. There's no way Rooney could have done this to Sovich.”

“It's what happened. I'm telling you—it's what happened. The only thing I can think of is that Victor complained about the water.”

“What water?

“You gave him a bottle to drink from right before the fight. Maybe you still have the bottle.”

“Back in the dressing room.

“Maybe we better have a look at it.”

Stoddard came over now. The dazed look was still in his eyes. He stared dumbly down at Victor.

“He's dead,” the referee said.

Stoddard said nothing

“Dead, Mr. Stoddard. Dead.”

The rain came harder now, cold and almost painful to the skin. The fans in the bleachers began to scatter. Where before there had been thousands, now there were only scores. Those who remained seemed not to notice the rain. They stood in their places, watching the ring.

Guild stared down at Sovich. He had not liked the man, did not like him still, yet there was an angry dignity to the man's Slavic face in the repose of death. His eyelids were cut badly and his nose had been broken and two of his front teeth were nothing more than stumps. His legs were covered with blood.

“Let's get his body back to the dressing room,” Guild said to the trainer.

Guild got Sovich by the feet, the trainer by the shoulders. They eased him over onto a stretcher.

The referee said, “I've never had a man die on me before.”

The sky opened up fully. The silver rain came in waves, in walls, in chill, shifting patterns that quickly drenched the parched ground beneath the bleachers and obscured everything in steam.

Somewhere in the middle of the downpour, they could hear an isolated fan shout toward the ring, “Is he dead?”

And the referee shouting back, “Yes, he's dead.”

There was no sense in hurrying. Guild was already soaked. They carried Victor Sovich back on a stretcher covered by a sheet. The sheet got soaked immediately and clung tightly to Sovich, lending him the aspect of sculpture.

Guild tried not to think about the water bottle Victor had drunk from, but of course he had already begun to suspect what had happened. He thought of a woman whose brother had been given poison. Her brother had been a boxer, as had his killer.

They moved slowly back through the bleachers and along the rope fence and to the business office.

Guild said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Stoddard trailed along. He seemed barely able to pick up his feet. He said nothing.

They put Sovich on the rubdown couch. Dr. Fitzgerald checked him again. He shook his head.

The room smelled of liniment and trapped heat.

Guild got a cigarette going. He was watching John T. Stoddard sink into memories of his son when Sovich's trainer appeared holding a glass bottle half filled with water. “Here's what we're looking for.”

Guild took the bottle and sniffed it. “Can't smell anything.” He held it up to the light. “Looks clear.”

“There are a number of poisons we can't detect right away,” Dr. Fitzgerald said. “Not being able to see them or smell them doesn't mean anything.” He looked at Stoddard heaped in the comer and said, “Mr. Stoddard, I'm going to pour you a glass of whiskey. I want you to drink it. Then I want you to get out of your wet clothes and lie down on that cot in the other room. Whether you know it or not, you're in a state of shock.” He nodded for the trainer to help Mr. Stoddard into the other room.

Stoddard came suddenly and violently back to life. He jerked his arm away from the trainer's hand. “Mr. Guild here doesn't approve of me,” he announced in a formal, almost theatrical way. He sounded as if he were right on the edge of tumbling into insanity. “He didn't think I was good enough for him, and he didn't think I was good enough for my son. He has a pretty goddamn high opinion of himself.”

“Why don't you go in and lie down, Stoddard?” Guild said.

“Are you happy I'm ruined, Leo? Are you going to get drunk and tell all the men in the bar that John T. Stoddard is ruined?”

“Come on now,” Dr. Fitzgerald said. “You go with the trainer and lie down and get a nap for yourself.”

“He thinks it's funny,” Stoddard said. “He thinks it's funny that I'm wiped out.”

The tears were coming again. They were hard, bitter tears, and he might never recover from them. But they were better than his silence.

The trainer eased him out of the room and into the next. He got the door closed, but Guild could hear Stoddard's sobs.

Dr. Fitzgerald handed Guild a folded piece of paper. The faded bloodstains told Guild what it was. “Have you read this, Mr. Guild?”

“Yes.

“The poor kid.

“Yes.”

Dr. Fitzgerald nodded to the door. “Is he really ruined?

“I suppose.

“You don't like him, huh?

“No.

“He's in a bad way.

“He deserves to be in a bad way.

“You're kind of a hard son of a bitch.”

“You wouldn't say that if you knew how he'd treated the kid.”

“Sometimes we treat people we love pretty badly.

“I guess so.”

Dr. Fitzgerald looked at the door again. “No matter how much you hate him, Mr. Guild, right now he hates himself a whole lot worse.”

The doctor's remarks cooled Guild's anger. Stoddard was probably not the villain Guild had turned him into. He was probably just as helpless and pathetic as Guild himself, living with his remorse over his son just as Guild lived with his remorse over the little girl.

The door from the hallway slammed open. A young man with freckles and a soaked gray suit stood there. “Didn't you hear it?” he said to Guild.

“Hear what?

“The gunshot.

“Not above the rain.”

“Somebody shot the nigger.”

“Rooney?

“Yeah. Rooney.

“Jesus,” Guild said. “Jesus.”

Guild recognized the man right away, the tall, frenzied man in the ministerial frock coat and the insane dark eyes. He sat in a comer. Reverend Feely. The fat deputy stood next to him. The deputy said, “In this town you're in trouble even if you shoot a colored.”

“He killed a white man. Coloreds have gone far enough. Don't you agree?”

“Whether I agree or not don't matter none. They still put you behind bars in this town when you shoot somebody.”

“Even a colored?”

“Even a colored.”

“I tell you they've gone far enough, and we've got to put a stop to it.”

“This is the gun you shot him with?”

“You think I'm ashamed of shooting him?”

“No. I s'pose not.”

“And I ain't going to be ashamed when I go before a judge, neither.”

Guild knocked on the door that led to the interior room being used for dressing. When the door opened, he stepped back so Dr. Fitzgerald could step inside first.

Rooney lay on the training cot. In his black face his white eyes bulged. Silver sweat stood in cold beads on his face. His big hands favored the massive hole in his chest.

His trainer said, “We got the guy, Rooney. Deputy's got him outside.”

Rooney seemed not to hear. He just stared up at the ceiling with those bulging eyes. Guild wondered what he was thinking about.

Dr. Fitzgerald went over and started examining him. Once Rooney moaned, as if enduring intolerable pain. He started crying soon after. “I'm gonna die, ain't I, Doctor?”

“You're going to be fine.”

“You're lying and you know it. I'm gonna die. I beat Sovich and a white man shoots me. It ain't fair.”

“You lie there now and let me have a closer look at that wound.”

“It ain't fair.”

Guild watched Rooney's eyes. They were quick now with panic and fear.

As Dr. Fitzgerald bent over him, Rooney said, “They got a priest around here?”

“Lie still now. I don't think they have a priest.”

“I got to tell somebody what I did.” He writhed then with his pain. He was delivering death just as a birthing woman delivered life. Rooney looked over at Guild. “I poisoned this man, this nigger. He was a boxer. I shouldn't ought to done that. I just wanted to get ahead, was all. That was all.”

His entire body jerked. His bulging eyes bulged even more. His body jerked again. His eyes closed, white eyes replaced by dark lids.

“He was lucky to make it this long,” Dr. Fitzgerald said.

An hour and twenty-two minutes later, Guild stepped off the streetcar. His clothes were dry. He needed a shave. He was shaking and he wasn't sure why.

He stood on the street comer, letting well-dressed pedestrians swirl by him on their way to the opera house and the vaudeville parlor. He stared for a long time at the hotel. He wondered which floor she was on. He wondered if she'd left.

Dropping his hand instinctively to his .44, he crossed the street, waiting for a hansom cab to pass by, sleek and black in the streetlight. He liked the fresh smell of the city following the rain. It felt as though it had been purged of something foul.

In the lobby he went up to the desk. He asked the clerk if Clarise had checked out.

“No, she hasn't, sir.”

“You're sure?”

“She was going to. Said she changed her mind.”

“Thank you.” He started away from the desk. “Oh. I need her room number.”

“Four-oh-six,” the clerk said without looking it up. His blue eyes said that he'd been smitten, and smitten most seriously by Clarise.

On the carpeted stairs Guild passed more people in evening dress going out. In his rumpled clothes, he seemed to elicit both amusement and disgust.

On the fourth floor he went down a long hall. At 406 he leaned forward to see if he could hear anything. Nothing.

He knocked.

Still he heard nothing. He glanced around the hallway and at the same time took his .44 from its holster. He tried the doorknob. Open.

He peered into the darkness of the room. Through a gauzy white curtain, plumped out from the window on a breeze, he saw a ghostly streetlight. The furnishings, bed, bureau, reading chair, and lamp were silhouetted against the glowing curtain.

He went inside.

The place smelled of Clarise's perfume. Despite himself, he allowed himself a moment's pleasure by closing his eyes and recalling last night by the river, the wonderful floating death of his orgasm and the fast roar of the water and the sweet, soft scent of her perfume.

She took one step from the shadows behind the door and quite skillfully got him square across the back of the head.

He was unconscious before he hit the floor.

“You figured it out, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“I don't want you to hate me, Leo.”

“You killed two men tonight.”

“Sovich has killed enough colored people. I don't worry about him. And you know what Rooney did. I wanted him to be blamed. I figured white folks would make his last minutes a lot more miserable than I could.”

“A minister killed him. A crazy white man. But you knew a white man would kill him, didn't you?”

“That's what I was hoping. White folks don't like black folks who kill whites.”

“You should have seen him, Clarise. There at the last.”

“Did he suffer?”

“He suffered a lot. He was really scared, Clarise. The way you're going to be. The way I'm going to be.”

“He killed my brother.”

“I know.”

“I tried to forgive him, Leo. I couldn't.” She sighed and walked over to the window. In the street below, the clatter of hooves was sharp. “Back at the arena, I didn't think I could go through with it. I looked at him for the first time. Really looked at him. I saw that he was just human like the rest of us. You ever convince yourself somebody's not human and then all of a sudden you see they're a scared animal just like you?”

“All the time.”

She turned back to Guild. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed. Her brown, gentle hands were folded in her lap. “I prayed God to forgive me, Leo, but somehow I couldn't warn Rooney. I wanted to. I wanted to get up and shout out that—”

She started crying.

Guild rolled himself a cigarette and watched her. He took two long drags, and then he got up and went over and sat next to her, taking her gently into the crook of his arm, putting her warm, wet cheek on his shoulder. Her whole body trembled.

“I wish I could feel good, Leo,” she said. “I wish I could feel some satisfaction.” She cried harder again. “I deserve what happens to me, Leo. I shouldn't have done it. I surely shouldn't have.”

Guild walked over to the dresser. He took her bag and started throwing her things into it. He was neither gentle nor orderly.