The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (5 page)

B
y the calendar it was early spring when he hopped off a Utah Northern just before it pulled into the freight yard, but the night was near freezing and felt even colder for the wind. The landscape was illuminated in an eerie ocher light from the gas lamps of the mines and smelteries. Huge plumes of black and gray and orange rising off a stark forest of smokestacks and lacing the air with harsh alien stinks. The “richest hill on earth,” Butte was called. It was born of gold and silver strikes but it was copper that made it rich. Meandering under the town was a river of copper fifty feet wide with lodes branching like tributaries, all of it now belonging to the Anaconda Copper Company, which in turn was part of the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which itself was a tentacle of Standard Oil. To most residents of Montana, however, Anaconda was simply the Company.

He’d heard talk about Butte everywhere he’d been. Had heard it had the highest smokestack on the planet, the deepest mine shaft, the longest ore train. Every mine had its own name, like the Bluebird, the Lexington, the Spectator, the Diamond, the Neversweat and its famous seven smokestacks. Wherever the Company bored a hole it tapped into a new vein, started another mine, put up another of the colossal elevator rigs called headframes to lower the workers into the ground and haul up the buckets of ore. Gallows frames, the miners called them. Stanislaus had heard enough about the mines to know he would sooner resort to armed robbery than set foot in one, but there was no shortage of men willing to go down the shafts and break the ore out of the rock, men with nothing to bargain with but their physical strength and a willingness to risk their lives. To risk cave-ins, fires, explosions, lung disease from the rock dust, pneumonia from working in the sweltering shafts and emerging sweat-soaked into an icy winter. They came from all over the country, these men, from all over the world, drawn to the ready work. Yankees and rednecks, John Bulls and Dutchmen, Dagos, Chinks, Finns, bohunks of every breed, and above all, Micks. The population of Butte and its environs in this year of 1904 was around fifty thousand, nearly a third of it Irish, most of them named Sullivan.

He’d come to Butte for no reason but to see it for himself. The roughest burg in the West, he’d heard, and the most exciting. He’d heard it said that many a Butte saloon had chosen to brick in their front windows rather than keep replacing the smashed glass, that every day at first light the cop wagon rattled down the streets behind its brace of draft horses and collected the drunks off the sidewalks and from the alleys, the occasional dead. Heard that it was a rare week in Butte that passed without murder. He’d heard the
town had the most whores to be found in any four square blocks in the country, the most saloons, the most gambling halls. It had dogfight pits and boxing arenas, vaudeville theaters, burlesque joints. Butte the Beaut, he’d often heard it called, sometimes in mockery and sometimes not.

He hid his bindle in the bushes and headed into town. The crowded streets were in strident carouse, ringing with the cries of doorway shills and a blaring tangle of musical styles issuing from every joint. Ragtime and coochie, waltzes and ballads, banjo plunking of a sort he’d never heard, ringing out a kind of music he would ever after think of as Western hillbilly. It was only a Tuesday, but in a town where the mines operated around the clock and seven days a week, every night was Saturday night.

His hands balled for warmth in his jacket pockets, his face stinging with chill for the rinse he’d given it at a frosty water trough at the edge of town. He relished the raucous high-timing, his eyes brighter than he knew. His first objective was to wash the taste of locomotive smoke from his mouth with a mug of beer. Then he would line the inside of his shirt with newspaper and search for a place to sleep out of the wind. Beyond that, his only plan was to find a job of some sort for a short while, put together a small stake, then get back on the rails.

He was passing a place called the Copper Queen, whose window sign boasted
THE PRETTIEST LADIES IN THE WEST
—10¢
A DANCE
, when the doors sprang open to an eruption of cheers and a fast-moving pair of men, one of them bent forward and being propelled by the other, who had him by the collar and the back of the pants in the customary manner of the bum’s rush and flung him into the street, spooking the animals of passing horsemen and wagons. He was a big man, the bouncer, with hair gleamingly po
maded and garters on his sleeves. “And
stay
out!” he said, and went back inside.

The ejected patron rose unsteadily to his feet and set his cap on his head, brushed vainly at his muddy clothes, muttered, “All right, okay, fine and dandy, I get it.”

Stanislaus went inside. It was a spacious dance hall and saloon, blue-hazed with gaslight and smoke, boisterous with laughter and shouted conversations and a honkytonk piano. The dance floor was off to one side and dense with couples, the heralded ladies earning their dimes. If they weren’t the prettiest in the West, they were the prettiest he’d seen since San Francisco. He was down to his last four bits and couldn’t afford even to haggle with a whore, but after the cost of a beer he would still have enough money for a few dances and at least be able to feel a woman under his hands. He had never danced in his life but was certain he could do it better than most of the oafs lurching around on the floor. His mother regarded dancing as an essential social grace and had wanted to teach him and his brother the rudiments. But their first and only lesson had no sooner begun than Kaicel yelled from the porch for them to quit all their foolish stomping around in there or he’d bust up the piano for firewood.

One girl in particular attracted his attention. A strawberry blonde with a sassy way of tossing her hair as she swayed and jigged with a sprightly gusto and seemed to be dancing more with herself than with the oafish partner stomping clumsily at what looked like some altogether different endeavor. As Stanislaus shouldered through the crowd at the bar, he tried for another glimpse of her and in his distraction jostled a man and caused him to spill his drink.

The man glared and said, “Well, shit.” Stanislaus started to apol
ogize and the man punched him, propelling him into a clutch of drinkers at the bar who cursed and shoved him right back at the man, who hit him again, dropping him on the seat of his pants amid guffaws and a cluster of dirty pants legs and muddy boots. His jaw ached vaguely but he was not addled and his foremost thought was to get up before the man could kick him. Then various rough hands were helping him to his feet and there was laughter all around and someone said, “Lad can take a lick.” So commonplace were fights in Butte saloons that the scuffle drew scant notice from the rest of the room, and the piano man played on.

The bouncer had materialized, armed with a short club. He braced the puncher, whom he called O’Malley, and told him it was time to say good night.

“Fuck sake, Harris,” O’Malley said, “the bastard sloshed me whisky out of—”

Stanislaus hit him in the mouth and O’Malley’s hat took wing and he crashed against the bar and sat down hard. The startled Harris was too slow in attempting to apply his club to Stanislaus, who butted him in the face and loosed a gush of blood from his nose, then punched him four or five or six times so fast there would be debate among the witnesses about the exact number. Harris’s legs quit him and men moved aside to let him fall. His head struck the foot rail and his eyes rolled up white. But now O’Malley was risen and swinging, and Stanislaus hunched his shoulders and fended with his arms. A fist struck his crown and he saw stars but O’Malley yowled with the pain of a broken hand and Stanislaus lashed into him with another blur of punches. O’Malley again went down and Stanislaus began kicking him and he curled up tight with his arms around his head. “Enough! Enough, for
fuck’s sake!” O’Malley yelled. Stanislaus gave him one more to the ribs and stopped.

The surrounding crowd whooped and applauded the entertainment. The whole room aware now of a good fracas and avid to know what happened, and those who had seen the fight began describing it to those who had not. Somebody clapped Stanislaus on the back and somebody put a foaming mug in his hand and somebody asked his name. He said Steelyard Steve and several of them laughed, knowing a hobo handle when they heard one. He fingered a small lump under one eye and a cut on his upper lip, the only signs he showed of having been in a fight. In two days his face would show no sign of bruise, a remarkable recuperative power that would obtain for all of his brief life.

O’Malley was helped off the floor, his lips raw and distended, an ear like a purple fig, the broken hand already gone big as a bible. He put his good hand to his mouth and tongued out a tooth and regarded it with rue. They slapped at Harris’s cheeks and tugged at his ears and someone upended a mug of beer over his face and that brought him around.

Stanislaus spotted the strawberry blonde smiling at him from the edge of the crowd and asked the men nearest him if they knew her name. Gretchel, he was told. Its resonant similarity to “Kaicel,” which name he had renounced forever, made “Ketchel” come to mind.

A beefy, silver-bearded man in a cream suit pushed up beside him, introduced himself as Richardson, manager of the place, and asked his name and the name of the mine he worked for. He said he was Steve Ketchel and was no miner and didn’t care to be, but he could do with a job.

Richardson’s aspect suggested he had witnessed more foolishness
in his time than any man should have to. He watched glumly as glassy-eyed Harris was assisted to his feet and someone handed him a bar rag to put to his bloody nose.

“It happens this place is in need of a bouncer, Mr. Ketchel,” Richardson said, “and you appear to have the proper aptitude. Pays twenty a week.”

“When do I start?”

“Now would be good.”

They shook on it. Ketchel asked if he could have a couple of dollars in advance to see him through to his first payday. Richardson gave him two silver dollars and then returned to his backroom office. He made the loan so readily that Ketchel wanted to kick himself for not having asked for more.

A
N HOUR LATER
the Gretchel girl pushed through the throng to where he stood at the bar with several mugs of beer in front of him, all of them bought by admiring miners. He was half-buzzed and still a little charged with the adrenaline of the fight, and she had to lean close and speak loud for him to hear her through the enveloping din. He’d been giving her the eye all night, she said, and she couldn’t help wondering if he was just too shy to ask for a dance.

“All you need’s a pair of nickels, honey.” Her scent was a heady mix of perfume and woman musk.

“I don’t know how,” he said. “I never learned.”

“Well now, darling, I’ll teach you. But like the man said, first things first.” She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers. He gave her one of the silver dollars.

It proved less a matter of teaching than uncovering a natural talent. She showed him the basic step-step-close of the waltz and in
minutes he was whirling her as smoothly as any swell to the strains of “The Band Played On” and “Daisy Bell.” Then came the box step and swaying to “After the Ball” and “Sidewalks of New York.” Then the jaunty two-step and some other basic moves and they were bouncing happily to “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” and “Hello, My Baby.” After ten dances he gave her the other dollar and they used up that one too, and she accepted a mug of beer in payment for still another turn.

When he said he was interested in something more than a dance she said she sometimes let a fellow have something more than a dance but it sure cost more than a mug of beer. He asked if she would accept his marker. She said, “Hey, honey, it’s not the sort of thing gets sold on the cuff. You welsh on me, I can’t exactly take it back, can I?”

He said if he couldn’t clear his debt in cash he’d repay her in kind. She laughed and said he might not have any jack but he sure wasn’t short on cheek.

When her work shift was done they went to the Buffalo Hotel where she lived, hugging close as they made their way against the biting cold of the wind. The hotel was a block outside of the notorious red-light district he’d heard so much about, including Venus Alley, the heart of the quarter. She told him she’d starve before she’d work in a whorehouse, and shoot herself before sinking as low as an alley crib. She might once in a while be a whore, she said, but she was always her own whore.

Her room was surprisingly ample, impeccably neat, warmed by a radiator. He wrote “I.O.U. $2, Steve Ketchel” on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She placed it next to a Victor Talking Machine on a table beside the bed, the phonograph equipped with a rigid tone arm and a stationary horn. She said it was her prize pos
session “of all my worldly goods.” He sat in the only chair and watched her select a record, position it on the turntable, crank the machine, and set the needle in the groove.

He recognized the tune as the “hoochie-coochie song,” though its correct title was “The Streets of Cairo.” He’d never before seen the dance performed outside of a carnival tent or at such close range or by a prettier woman. Or seen the dancer shed
all
of her clothes.

They left the lamp on while they had their sport, and after a short break went at it again in a reprise of gasping and breathless profanities and heaving fits of giggling. She was eight years older than he and hadn’t enjoyed herself this much with a man in some time. When she asked if he had a place to live and he said not exactly, she said he could stay with her and they would see how it worked out. He said all right, but only if she permitted him to pay half the cost of the room for however long he was there. She agreed, then went to the dresser and tore up his marker. “No charge for a roommate,” she said.

He believed he’d come to the right place.

The next day he recovered his bindle from the bushes. He unrolled it on her bed to reveal his extra shirt and socks, a tin of matches, a piece of soap. “All
my
worldly goods,” he said. And laughed when she said there was no reason to sound so proud about it.