Stallion Gate (29 page)

“Looks like a privy.” Groves eyed an eight-foot wooden crate that stood on end at the tower base.

“That’s what the men call it.” Oppy pointed to the cable running into the top of the “privy.” “It protects the firing switch. We wanted to keep dust out.”

“You mean rain,” Groves said. “The weathermen have let us down. I brought VIPs from Washington, that reporter from the
Times
. I hope they can see something.”

“They will.”

“My other concern is tower security.”

“At this hour people are staying away from the tower,” Oppy said.

“Obviously, you’re a scientist, not a security officer. This is exactly the opportunity a trained saboteur would
be waiting for. I want a light on the tower and some men down here with submachine guns. Security and secrecy are our first priorities from here on.” Groves turned to his aides. “Can you think of anything else?”

“Mescaleros, sir,” Joe said. “The local Apaches.”

“I remember, we saw some when we came in December. I thought you were going to take care of that, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. If I could be detailed a couple of men of my choosing, sir? Mescaleros like to come down from the hills around dusk. I should get started now.”

“Then get moving. I’ll assign someone else to the Director.”

Oppy caught up with Joe at the jeep. He spoke in a low voice, his back to the officers. “What are you up to?”

Joe started the engine. “I almost got the chance once to tell Harvey that if he wanted to walk away from you, he shouldn’t talk, he should just go.”

“This is it, this is what we all worked for.”

“
You
worked for. This is your bomb, not mine.”

He swung away from Oppy and aimed for the North blacktop. He’d only gone twenty feet when he hit the brakes and stopped. “Oppy!”

Oppy was heading back to Groves, and turned at the sound of his name. Suddenly he seemed pathetically out of place against the tower, the desert, the men in uniform.

“Good luck!” Joe shouted, and stepped on the accelerator again. He’d pick up Shapiro and Gruber at the guard station. Ray should already be in Antonio. He could see the first lightning over the Oscuras, but he was finally in the clear.

Joe couldn’t get away from the right-hand jab. He circled to his right, the way he’d shown Shapiro, and walked into a hook. Heard a hoarse grunt and recognized his own lungs, lungs ten years older than the kid’s, ten years of cigarette fumes encased in ten years of beer fat, the sort of fat that showed only when a 195-pound kid hooked to the ribs. He liked the way the kid kept his eyes and shoulders level, jab high and cocked. The eyes intense and watery, pale in the headlights and black water in the dark. Joe feinted the jab.

The next thing he knew, he was sitting on his ass. He didn’t know whether he’d been hit with a right or a left. All he remembered was seeing a fist coming and being too slow to get out of the way. Being down brought a new perspective, closer to his leaden feet and the pounding sac of his heart. The wet macadam had a diamond glitter. Ray had appropriated the mess tent from the Base Camp, and the cars were parked under it in a ring of light. Canvas drummed in the rain. Joe rolled away from a rabbit punch and up to his feet.
Who’s here? Everybody’s here. Texans, New Mexicans, soldiers. No scientists, but it wasn’t their fight.

“Time!” Hilario shouted.

Ray sat Joe on the bumper of a jeep and pressed a towel against his ear. The ear stung, so it was cut. Their fists were taped, but they wore no gloves. There were going to be a lot of cuts.

“Ought to be a real ring, ought to be a referee. This is like a fucking dogfight,” Ray muttered.

“Dogfights are very popular here.”

Hilario’s perch was a patrol car, suitable to his official stature. Though there were some familiar faces from Santa Fe, the crowd was mainly cattlemen from Ama-rillo and El Paso. Creased faces, hats of doe felt and big thumbs on rolls of cash. Faces more comfortable in a country-fair tent than any arena. Sporting men who expected some blood for their money, made from wartime contracts. Hilario was the perfect timekeeper for them because he stopped a round only when he thought it was the right moment to bet again. He had no sense of fairness, but he had an instinct for drama. Across from Hilario, Pollack watched from inside his white Cadillac. The MPs hung back, as Joe had told them to.

“Time,” Hilario shouted.

The kid came out popping the right jab again. He had a bullethead of close-cut dirty hair, more dirty curls on wide shoulders and down the back of a thick neck. Small nose and round brow designed for a fighter. Narrow chin with a sandy stubble. Thin lips with a broad smile. Nineteen years old, maybe twenty. He had a
stomach of snake-white muscle and, in the middle of it, a pink root of glossy scar tissue that spread up from his belt. Either an accident or an operation by a butcher. Joe slipped the jab, hooked, crossed and threw another looping hook without hitting the boy once. The kid jabbed in return and found the fault line in Joe’s eyebrow. It was a seam full of promise, and he found it twice more before Joe covered up. He attacked the ribs, trying to get Joe’s guard down so he could pound the brow again.

There were different philosophical levels to a fight. Joe felt it was important to understand where an opponent’s strength came from. Some boxers just had arm strength; some had to come forward off their legs. The kid had speed and balance, but Joe suspected madness, more even than the typical washed-out, brainless Texas madness. It would take time to locate the source, but a fight between big men should have the pace of a long and penetrating conversation.

The kid backed Joe against the grille of a truck. When Joe clinched, clamping the kid’s fists under his arms, the kid snapped his blunt head forward and butted Joe in the temple. Joe dropped to a knee, but there was no rush of red onto the ground, so the brow was okay. He rose, backpedaled and jabbed until Hilario called time.

As Joe sat down, Ray swabbed his forehead with petroleum jelly. “He’s trying to cut you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Joe ran his tongue around his mouth and counted teeth.

“Captain Augustino’s here, sitting over in the bar.”

Shouts and hands indicated the changing odds. Three fingers. Hilario wrote a chit for a somber Navajo in a velvet shirt. Shapiro had moved closer, and looked as if he was sucking a cyanide pill or had bet on the wrong fighter. Across the court, the kid didn’t want to rest. He bounced on his toes and stared at Joe until Hilario called the two men forward.

The kid had madness and speed. Joe sidestepped, but the kid was there. When he stepped back, the kid was ahead of him. The scar on the stomach had turned a dull red as if alive all by itself, and it occurred to Joe that it might be the mainspring, the potent source of that insanity. It looked like the sort of tear a cow horn would make. No matter how good the kid got, he’d never have a career fighting with a split stomach; he couldn’t even get drafted. How would an over-the-hill professional, a fake Indian chief, look to a kid like that? No wonder his lips twisted in effort as he wound up for the hook, chest cords popping and driving off the back leg, bringing his weight through without lunging or losing his balance, merely delivering as much hate as his fist could carry to the old damage above Joe’s left eye.

Fighting was a subtle matter, sooner or later a case of one man dominating first the center of the ring and then, corner by corner, the rest of it. Even under a tent in the rain, there was a centrifugal pattern to the steps, the feints, the mental concentration. Hate was a good thing to bring to a fight.

Joe’s brow popped under nothing harder than a touch. One moment he could see, and the next moment his
eye was a well of blood. The kid was all over Joe, and ignoring Hilario, who was shouting for time so he could get one more round of bets down, until Joe made the kid step back with a jab.

“What time is it?”

Ray pinched Joe’s brow closed, taped it, daubed it with jelly and wiped his face.

“Eighty-twenty, eight-thirty. You don’t need a clock, you need a zipper.”

“The last money. Bet it, spread it around.”

“With you bleeding to death, we can get pretty good odds.”

“Bet it.”

He stood alone. Headlights merged in the center of the courtyard and insects spun over the white haze as if it were a pool. Across it, the kid stood and squinted back. Had that jab been the first tap of knowledge? There was a lot of sound from such a small crowd. He’d always had the sense that toward the end of a fight the paying public wanted to climb into the ring to deliver the last decisive blows. He remembered how once on the mesa a horse broke its legs, and he and some other kids had had to stone the animal to death. It took a long time to kill a horse with stones.

The kid went right at the cut. In the middle of the court, Joe backpedaled and jabbed. Against the cars, he covered up, locking his fists against his cheeks, his elbows over the solar plexus, accepting the punishment on the ribs until he could escape. The kid winged first combinations and then single shots. An effusion, an
undiminishing supply of rage, a hook to the kidney, to the ear, then the cross to the cut, like a busy sculptor working on a statue he passionately hated. Joe staggered, ducked, clinched and backpedaled until Hilario called time again.

On the hood of the patrol car, Hilario’s pockets were misshapen from the money he’d stuffed into them. He watched Joe carefully, looked at the kid.

Ray rubbed Joe’s back and massaged his arms. “Drop the fucker.”

The kid came out with another rush of punches, each punch a complaint from a small, withered soul. Joe answered with a fluid jab twice as fast as any other he’d thrown, but soft, just enough to tell the boy
I understand
. Understanding was contagious. The kid circled instead of wading in. Good as he was, he had never fought more than three rounds before. This was the fourth. He still hit hard, but he leaned on the jab and wound up for the hook. Joe slipped the hook and countered to the heart, a probe, a gesture of rising interest in the boy’s condition. Also an announcement:
We are at a new level
. The kid jabbed for time, for an opportunity to rethink the changing context. His jabs were short. Joe snapped a jab off the kid’s nose and for a moment the little eyes were glass.

The kid answered with a jab-and-cross, tearing the tape from Joe’s cut. Joe’s eye filled with blood, which sprayed as he ducked. The kid came in to finish the cut. When they punch, left-handers tend to slide to the right. A matter of physics, one of Newton’s laws. The more
tired, the more they slide out of control. Moving low for a big man, Joe slipped a hook and rose, driving arm and fist of the bluntest curiosity into the boy’s unguarded stomach and red cicatrix. The kid arched, half of him still following the parabola of his swing while the other half tried to bend away from Joe, who hit the coralroot scar again and continued to move in, staying low, pursuing the softening, collapsing midsection. In the air the kid had no place to go. Joe hooked from the ground up, his own body rising.

Inevitability came in grunts and the sound, when Joe hit him, of a stake being driven into sodden earth. When he stopped, the boy went from weightless to gravity-bound and sprawled in the headlights like a figure under water.

The suddenness of the end brought a quiet to the tent. Joe pressed the back of his hand to the blood pulsing from his cut. Ray and the MPs started collecting money. Hilario was collecting too.

He had left his clothes in the cafe kitchen. He washed, taped and dressed himself by the sink while Ray cleared the table of No. 10 cans of peaches, lard and beans, and counted the money by denominations. The enamel top of the long kitchen was covered by stacks of bills.

“Chief, you should’ve seen Shapiro and Gruber. They went through those cowboys like Gestapos, took everything but their watches. Done.” Ray took a step back from the table like a man getting a better view of a big Rembrandt. “My God, I’ve never seen this much money
before. Sixty-six thousand dollars for you. That’s as good as a title fight. You should open a bank.”

“I had something else in mind.” Joe tucked his tie into his shirt and gingerly touched the tape on his brow.

“Well, here’s to Chief Joe Peña.” Ray found two glasses in the sink and filled them with Black Label. “The greatest heavyweight in the Army. Your night, Chief.”

Pollack slipped through the kitchen door. His hair was freshly straightened and looked combed with a razor. He wore a canary jacket and a diamond ring on each hand. Dressed like a man about to travel at his ease, he made a slow, respectful circuit of the table, then laid down three folded papers.

“Deed. Receipt. Liquor license.” Pollack touched a stack of green bills briefly, to establish the fact of them. “Congratulations; you own a nightclub. I wish I could stay to show you the ropes.”

“You’re leaving tonight?”

“I said I was going to be on the dock when Eddie Junior came in. That’s a three-day drive. Kansas City, Pittsburgh, New York. If he can come back from Italy, I can be there on the dock.” Pollack counted out $50,000 and stuffed the bills in a money belt while Joe checked the papers. They were already signed. “I never thought I’d say good-bye to the Casa Mañana or New Mexico, Joe. Something else happening here tonight? Lots of Army trucks sort of hidden off the road.”

“It’s a bombing range, you know.” Joe tucked the papers in his shirt.

“Thought I recognized some soldiers from the Hill.” Pollack draped the money belt over his arm. He’d never put the belt on in front of anyone else; he had too much dignity for that. Just as he wouldn’t go cross-country in a train because he didn’t want to be mistaken for a porter. “You’re going to be okay, Joe. From now on, everyone’s going to be okay.”

“We got out alive.” Joe shook hands gently because his fist hurt so much. “Thanks for everything.”

At the door, Pollack hesitated. “That was the last fight for Big Chief Joe Peña?”

“The very last.”

“Good. I thought this time he cut it a little fine.”