John D. MacDonald

Big John Fights Again

It all started on a crisp autumn Thursday while a biting wind was scudding the brown leaves around the corners of the houses, and doing odd things to the skirts of the gals crossing Main Street. I had turned in my column of football predictions and I was standing by the hall window with Bus Henry watching the Walgreen corner where a nice updraft was flustering the females as they scuttled by, when the copy girl came out and said, “Cooley. Tear yourself away from your obscene amusements and answer the phone.” That’s the trouble with getting copy girls from college journalism courses; they’re too flip.

I picked up the phone and a deep voice said, “Mister Cooley? This is Big John Washington. You remember me?”

He wondered if I remembered him! Tyler City’s one claim to fame in fistic circles. A big solid Negro with dancer’s legs, a happy grin, a jaw like iron and sudden death in either hand. Did I remember him!

Before the war I had followed on down to watch him fight in Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Jersey City and points North, South, East and West. I saw him in there battering down a lot of good boys and I knew that all he was getting out of it was peanuts, because Dicky Wing was dragging down eighty-five percent of Big John’s share.

Big John was just edging into the big time when the draft got him, back in October of forty, six years ago. I hadn’t heard of him since, even though I had thought of him a few times.

“I certainly do remember you, John boy,” I said. “What can I do?”

“Mister Cooley, I always figured you were in my corner all the way and I remember some good advice you used to give me and I need some help. I need help bad. Could you come out and see me?”

“Sure. Where?”

“Idle Vista Apartments. Out beyond the armory in the flats. Bunch of red brick buildings. I’m in number nine. I wouldn’t ask you to come out except...”

“Hell, that’s okay. Say half an hour.”

I pulled my black coupe off the asphalt and went up the walk toward the long low red brick buildings. It was sort of a housing development. The wind was stiff and clothes stood out almost straight on the lines. A little brown kid in a blue snow suit riding a bright red three wheeler pedaled out to me and gave me a shy smile. I winked at him and walked along the front of the place until I found nine. I stuck my thumb on the bell.

A very familiar looking gal with a green cotton dress and wide beautiful eyes opened the door and smiled. “Mister Cooley?”

Big John loomed up behind her and said, “Come on in. Come on in,” before I could answer. The apartment was small, bright and cheerful. A blond cocker puppy threw himself against my leg, wriggling from the shoulders down in an ecstacy of puppy welcome.

“Down, Keep, down!” Big John said. “Mister Cooley, you maybe remember my wife, Jeanie. She used to sing at the KitKat before we got married.”

I said, “I sure do.” Her smile got bigger. “I remember her arrangement of ‘Lazy Day.’ You shouldn’t have let her stop singing.”

“She stopped singing and I stopped fighting. It’s better this way.”

We walked into the living room. I could see into the sparkling kitchen. Big John said to Jeanie. “Go fix us up some coffee, Honey, and bring it in.”

“Let’s all go into the kitchen,” I suggested. “I’m an old kitchen sitter from way back.”

Jeanie put the coffee on and Big John and I sat at the white porcelain table. When the smile went off his face, he looked much older than I had remembered.

“What’s new with you, John. How did the war go?”

“Old Uncle Sugar, he got me and he stuck me in the Engineers. And then my regiment went on over to Burma and we built that Ledo Road. More mud and dust than I ever see before. It was okay, I guess. Leastwise, I only got shot at once, when I was runnin’ a cat.”

“Do any fighting in the army?”

“Little bit. I roughed up a couple boys on the boat goin’ over. That’s all.”

“Johnny got to be a Master Sergeant,” Jeanie interrupted proudly.

“That don’t buy no groceries nowadays,” he said, firmly.

“What are you doing?”

He stuck out his big chest and the grin came back. “I got me three trucks. Got drivers for ’em. Got two big hauling contracts and I’m doing good. Saving money.” The smile faded. “Anyway, I was.”

Jeanie said, “We got a lot of trouble, Mr. Cooley.”

I didn’t ask any questions. I wanted them to tell me in their own way and their own time. I watched the cloud drift over their faces, watched them look at each other helplessly. “You tell him, honey,” Jeanie said.

“It’s like this, Mister Cooley. I still got this contract with Dicky Wing which says he’s my manager when I’m fighting. Mr. Wing, he wants me to start fighting again. I was twenty-five when they drafted me and I’m thirty-one now. I was quick so they didn’t mark me up much but even twenty-five is pretty old for a fighter. My legs were about to give out, and you know what that means. Now I know my legs are bad. I’m about thirty pounds heavier and I can’t move around. I go in there and the kids are going to punch my head off for me. I can’t do no good any more, and anyway, if I do fight, I don’t get hardly anything out of it. Wing takes eighty-five percent of my share of the gate and he nicks me for a bunch of phoney expenses besides.”

“He can make more with this trucking and we can be happy besides,” Jeanie said, as she put the coffee in front of me.

“Yeah, we got this place here and Jimmy is three years old now. Damn it, Mr. Cooley, I fight again and she has to go back to singing so we can keep living here, and I have to sell the trucks and they punch me around until I’m talking to myself.”

“But why fight, John, if you don’t want to?”

He gave me a very wry grin. “I tell Dicky Wing that I don’t fight for him. Then maybe some loads in the trucks get smashed. Maybe somebody talks to the people I got contracts with and they don’t want contracts with me any more. Maybe they find some way to get me out of here. Suppose I get stubborn. Maybe somebody catches Jeanie on a dark street and tosses a little acid in her face. Just a little bit.”

“That’s nonsense, John. People don’t do that.”

“Maybe they don’t do that to white folks, Mister Cooley. You’re about the only white man in this town never treated me like I was some kind of big animal that fights for a living. I swear to you, Mister Cooley, they’ll ruin everything if I don’t fight.”

“Why are they so anxious?”

“Folks remember Big John Washington,” Jeanie said. “He always gave a good show. They remember that he was practically in the big time. That’s where they’ll start him again after a few setups. Wing won’t give a damn if Johnny gets killed. He’ll get one or two big gates that’ll make fifty thousand for him. Then John’ll be through.”

“Why can’t you string along with him for a year and then pick up your trucking business again?”

“You ever talk to a doc about how fighters get punchy? One more year on top of the fifty bouts I had and I walk on my heels, talking to myself. I can’t take it. When it was over, I’d be too slow to get into a rough business like this here trucking.”

“Are you sure the contract with Wing is still good?”

“Lawyer says so.”

They both looked at me helplessly as I drank the coffee. They were two very damn nice people and the world had suddenly backed them into a corner. Somehow I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t see any way out. They had come to me in trouble and it was up to me to do something. Anything. Big John sat with shoulders like a brewery horse, a neck like the trunk of an oak tree, and the eyes of a frightened child. Jeanie stood by him, her hand on his massive shoulder — her eyes mirroring the look in his. They could feel their world slipping and I happened to be the straw they clutched at. It made me feel inadequate and insufficient.

“You kids got to give old Steve Cooley time to think this out,” I said. “Suppose I run along and see what I can do. I ought to be able to think of something.”

I patted the head of the kid on the bike as I walked back to my car. As I started to drive away, I looked back. Big John and Jeanie were still standing in the doorway. All the way back to the center of town, I cursed softly and yanked the coupe around corners.

The thing that was needed was time. Wing was pushing Big John. If Big John could leave the trucking alone for a few months...

At four o’clock in the afternoon I walked into the Harder Truck Terminal and opened the door of Harder’s office. Red was on the phone, yelling at some poor driver that had broken down eleven miles from nowhere, I stood and waited until he finished and slammed the phone back onto the cradle. The office seemed too small for Red. His grey-sandy hair fell over his forehead, and his white freckled skin was trying to burst out of his clothes. He had the energy and drive to turn a small wildcat outfit into big business and dozens of trucks.

He wiped his forehead and said, “Damn it, Steve, how do all the feeble minded drivers get onto my payroll? What can I do for you?”

I sat on the edge of his desk. “Red,” I said, “we’ve always gotten along, haven’t we?”

“Is this a touch?” he demanded.

“Yeah. But not for money. For a favor for a friend of mine.”

“What kind of favor?” he asked, growling at me.

“I got a friend, as I said, who’s got troubles. It’ll take him three or four months to clean up. He owns a small trucking business. He has two good contracts. I want you to take over his business, for a fee, of course, until he can come back and handle it himself.”

Red exploded out of the chair and shook a freckled fist in my face. “Are you nuts?” he shouted, “I can’t even take care of maintenance on my own wagons! Take care of a competitor! I got troubles enough and I got three big answers for you. No! No! And no!”

I let him rave and mumble for a few more minutes while I took a cigarette off his desk and lit it. When he had run down, I said quietly, “You know, Red, the newspaper business is damn slow these days. Not much local news. I’ve been thinking of an idea to hand the city editor. A review of old crimes that happened in Tyler City. Just to refresh peoples’ minds a little. Pictures and all.”

His fists uncurled and he seemed to sag. It was cruel, but I had to do it. He sat heavily behind the desk and all the fight had gone out of him. “Gawd, Steve! You wouldn’t do that. She’s happy now. People have forgotten, almost. You wouldn’t do that to a pal’s wife?”

“Is your definition of a pal a guy who refuses to do a friend a little favor?”

“It’s blackmail, Steve.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll get paid for your trouble, but the fee has to be reasonable.”

I gave him a chance to think it over. We sat in the small office. Finally he grinned up at me and said, “I’m sorry, Steve. Send the guy in. Who is he?”

“Big John Washington.”

He rose halfway out of the chair and said, incredulously, “Take care of business for a...”

I stopped him with my hand out. “What difference does it make, Red? Turn me down and I’ll stick Sally’s picture all over the magazine section of the Sunday edition. That’s a promise.”

He held his head in his hands for a few moments. He said, “Send him in with his records, Steve.”

I couldn’t get Big John on the phone, but I got hold of Jeanie and told her the story. She listened and said, “I’ll tell him to take the papers over there, Mr. Cooley. But... this don’t mean he’s going to fight, does it?”

“I don’t know yet, Jeanie. Give me a chance to figure on it for awhile. You asked me to help you. Let me do it in my own way.”

She agreed and said she was sorry that she had questioned me.

I found Dicky Wing standing like a customer at his own bar in the basement of the Craylor Hotel. He has the concession on the bar and grill. He is a smallish man with a thin narrow head and faded blond hair. He has weak eyes, a little blond mustache to march his hair and a very deceiving air of vagueness and helplessness.

Dicky is about as vague as a French postcard and as helpless as the Russian infantry. He owns three horse rooms, a wire service, the football pool, the hotel bar and grill, a greyhound track, half a dozen stumblebum fighters, seven or eight crummy tenements, a cut-throat taxi company, a ten year old Duesenberg, several blondes and half the crooked politicians in town. He knows everybody, speaks to everybody and grabs every check in sight.

“Hello, Steve,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

“Scotch and water, Dicky. Thanks. How goes it with you?”

“Pretty good, I guess. Yes... maybe I could say pretty good. Yes indeed.”

“Heard a rumor, Dicky. Heard you were going to hoist Big John Washington back into the big time. Can you give me a line on it for the sports page?”

“My goodness, Steve. Things certainly do get around in this town. They certainly do. You can... ah, quote me. Yes, quote me. I believe that Big John will make a... a startling comeback. Yes... uh... startling.”

“Pretty old, isn’t he?”

“Big John! Why, Steve, he’s a young man. A young man. Lots of good fights left in him. Lots of good fights.”

“Go on, Dicky. Some kid’ll tear his head off. He’s been out of the game for six years.”

“They won’t hurt Big John, Steve No sir. Not Big John; he’s got a head like a rock. Yes sir. Like a rock.”

“What have you got lined up for him?”

“Nothing very definite. Not definite at all. Maybe two fights with some unknown boys that are on their way up. Good boys, you know. Just to get Big John back into the swing. Then I have spoken to my good friend in New York, Boots Hunger-fort, and he is willing to have his boy Sailor Henderson meet Big John in Philly during Christman week.”

“Henderson’ll kiss him! That boy’s good. Really good. Big John never was and never would have been in his class!”

“Look... uh... Steve. You know, as a favor to me, you ought to keep your personal views... ah... toned down a little in the paper. Big John will train out at my place on the lake. If I... ah... keep the big sportswriters out entirely, it would be worth... say fifty a week to you to drive up once or twice a week and give him a good writeup. You... uh... know what I mean.”

The bartender was down at the far end of the bar. I said to Dicky, “I get the picture. You make him look real good with your two bums and his past rep. Then I write him up as a killer. Then, you match him with Henderson and get a wad of dough down on Henderson. No thanks.”

He smiled at me softly. “Don’t say no so quick. If you don’t somebody else will. You know how it is. I like you, Steve. I’d like to see you making the extra dough.”

It gave me something to think about. I went back to my apartment and shut myself in the kitchen with a bottle of rye, hoping for inspiration to come. I am a solitary drinker only when I have a problem. It doesn’t help much, but I like to think that it does. Dicky was right. And Big John was right. It was the old merry-go-round. They’d build him up and match him with Henderson. Then they’d build him up again and match him with some other good boy. At the end of a year or so, Big John would be through — physically and mentally. It was a dirty business, but from Dicky’s point of view, it was good business. Big John could make him a lot of money — quickly. It would be much easier with Big John than it would be with some new boy. The crowd loves the idea of a comeback.

I sat and drank rye and beat on my head with my fist. When there was an inch of rye left in the bottom of the bottle, I had one stinking little inspiration. I fumbled my way into the bedroom and fell across the bed into dreamland, giving the old subconscious a chance to work out on the problem.

In the morning I called Dicky and told him that I’d take on the job he had mentioned to me. He was delighted.

Then I went to work. Being on a local sheet as long as I have, you make a lot of friends and a lot of enemies. Good and bad of both kinds. I went to work on them. I begged and pleaded and threatened and swore. I ignored them when they said they’d have me thrown out of their offices. I signed my name until my hand was sore — signing away my life, signing away my future. Whenever I stopped to think of what I was doing, it scared me to death. A dozen times I wanted to quit, and each time I remembered the two of them standing in the doorway of the little apartment. I remembered that I hadn’t been born with two strikes against me, and the third pitch, a hard-breaking curve halfway to the plate. I remembered a lot of things, and I kept signing my name.

When I had enough I went to see Rocky LaPorte. He is Dicky Wing’s only competition in Tyler City, but they get along pretty well. Sometimes I handle the police beat, and on one of those times I was able to do Rocky a very large and juicy favor. He is inclined to remember it.

He is a stocky man with a white-toothed grin a yard wide. He is the lavender shirt and dollar cigar type, but at heart a nice guy — so they keep telling me. He owns a construction company that knocks off all city contracts, a brewery that uses emphatic sales methods, several meat markets, two gas stations, a roller skating rink, a third rate football team, several redheads and the rest of the crooked politicians that Dicky doesn’t own.

I found him late at night in a poker game in a suite at the Craylor. The other monkeys in the game seem disturbed to see me, but Rocky gives me the big hello and we lock ourselves in the bathroom while the game goes on without him.

I outlined the deal and what I wanted him to do. When I was through he flicked cigar ashes into the tub and said, “Stevey boy, I got to protect you from yourself. You’ve gone nuts. This newspaper work is killing you. Suppose you come to work for me, hey? I’ll make you an offer. I can use a little fat guy like you with big ideas. But not the kind of ideas you just give me.”

I reminded him of all I had done for him and told him of the chances I might get in the future. At last he sighed and agreed to help me.

“That’s great, Rocky,” I said, “I certainly appreciate it. Now I like to do things in business like way, and even though I trust you further than I would my own grey haired mother, I want you should let me pick you up tomorrow and go and see my legal eagle, at which time some money will change hands. Then you can sit tight and I’ll tell you when to move in.”

It all went as planned, with Tom Hennessey, my lawyer, looking at me strangely during the little conference. The paper was drawn up and Rocky and I signed it, with Hennessey and his girl for witnesses. It was as tight as a drum...

We sat in the kitchen again and Big John had a sad droopy look on his face like a lonesome bloodhound. “I’ll do anything you say, Mister Cooley, but it sure looks like I’m going to be fighting a long, long time.”

“John, you got to trust me. I’ll tell you more later. Look, your business is being taken care of, isn’t it?”

“Sure is, but that man didn’t act like he wanted to do it too bad.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s a friend of mine. You just remember what I told you to do. Tomorrow you’re going up to Wing’s camp to start training. When it gets too cold he’ll bring you down to the gym in town. All you got to do is remember not to use that right. You can’t punch with it any more. You can paw with it a little, but no punch.”

“I get that okay.”

“And if I don’t get a chance to talk to you or relay a message to you through Jeanie before this first tank job fight that Dicky has lined up, remember that you got to look very bad in there. Very bad. The two or three guys he lines up will dive for you as soon as you land a good punch. You drag it out. Move around as slow as you can.”

Big John grinned whitely. “I’ll sure be slow in there, Mister Cooley.”

I convinced them both that it was going to work out okay, even though my fingers ached from keeping them crossed. I knew that if it didn’t work out, the three of us were hitting the skids together. Big John seemed to cheer up. As I was leaving he instinctively put his hand on my arm, and then yanked it off as though I was red hot. There wasn’t anything I could say to him. You can’t tear out five generations of fear with a few words. I liked the big homely lug and he knew it. So there wasn’t much need for words.

I got up to the lake three times before the first fight. Dicky had Benny Baum and Kid Williams working on Big John. They melted twenty pounds off him, bringing him down to two fifteen, but they didn’t take any more off for fear of weakening him.

I hung around and I could see that they were discouraged. Big John moved slowly around the ring with the leather face guard hiding his expression. Baum could hit him at will. Big John would paw with the right. The second time I was up there, he knocked Baum through the ropes with a left hook to the gut. That made Baum and Williams very happy.

I filled the local sheet with all kinds of guff about Big John. I built up the incident of his knocking Baum through the ropes with one punch. I hauled a pal of mine, Doc Wescott, up with me and had him look Big John over. He let me print his opinion that Big John had the reaction time, the reflexes and the speed of a kid of eighteen. That went over well, and Tyler City began to wake up and take notice.

Wing’s idea of keeping out other sportswriters worked pretty well. They were all sore, expecially a couple that came up from New York. They made cracks about secret training, but it only increased the interest in Big John. Wing walked around looking like a little kid who had found a nickel in his pocket that he didn’t know he had.

I got down to the first fight in Youngstown, Ohio. Wing had Big John matched with a Polish boy they called Mick Doyle. Big John almost overdid it. I was at ringside and I could see that Doyle was worried that he wouldn’t get a good chance to fold up and collect his diving money. Big John, chocolate and impassive, plodded around the ring, pawing at Doyle. Doyle peppered him at will but pulled his punches while the crowd jeered and sneered. It was terrible.

Finally in the seventh, Big John pawed Doyle with a slow right. Doyle wavered and dropped his arms. John pawed him again and Doyle fell heavily onto his face, turning his head just in time to keep from flattening his nose. It was a classic and beautiful dive.

The papers tried to give Big John a ride, but after all he had knocked out his man, and who could prove it was fixed? I did a long piece about deceptive punches, about slow punches having terrific battering power and so on.

I missed the second bout in Scranton, because I didn’t want Wing to think I was being too eager. Every Saturday I went to the bar at the Craylor and the bartender would slip me a plain envelope with five beautiful tens in it. That part I liked.

The second bout was the same as the first, only the diving champ was named Young Weeks instead of Doyle. He finally located his chance to dive in the sixth. The crowd booed and the ref lifted Big John’s hand in disgust. But it was another knockout and it gave me a chance to blow off steam in my column and in the story of the fight. Wing was as happy as a turtle in a goldfish bowl. I fed them some more about those deceptive punches.

There were still three weeks to go before the Henderson fight. Big John was training in town and staying in a room over the gym. As I had figured, they wouldn’t let him come home. All I could do was wait. I had horrible visions of Cooley with a tin cup on the corner, Cooley in a line of guys in grey behind bars, Cooley with the soles off his shoes, bumming dimes for coffee. It was too damn late to turn back and I couldn’t keep myself from thinking how awful it was going to be if things didn’t work out.

A week before the fight I got the phone call from Rocky. He said, “It’s all set, Stevey, and I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

I was in no mood to discuss it. I thanked him and hung up.

I got word to Jeanie to tip off Big John somehow that I wanted to see him at his apartment at eleven o’clock. It would depend on John to get out of his room and get to his home. If he wasn’t able to make it, I’d have to depend on Jeanie to give him his instructions, and that wouldn’t be so good.

I was in Jeanie’s kitchen drinking coffee at eleven o’clock when Big John arrived. He came stomping out into the kitchen, worried and looking almost haggard from the weight he had lost.

“I’m sure glad to see you, Mister Cooley. They give me hell about the way I handled those two fights. They sure did. Boy!”

“Are you scared of Sailor Henderson?” I asked him.

“Mister Cooley,” he said, with dignity, as he sat in the other chair, “I’m not scared of no man in this wide world in the ring. But I know this boy Henderson, he can lick me. He’s a better man in the ring. That’s all.”

I didn’t give him any part of the story except what he had to do in the Henderson fight. I didn’t want to give him any more of it, because I didn’t want to worry him too much. Feeling like a damn fool, I got up in the middle of the kitchen and showed him just about how he had to do it. He caught the idea and went through the motions.

“Now do you think you can lick Henderson?” I asked him.

“If he does what you say he’s going to do, I can clip him so he won’t get up right quick, but how do you know he’s going to act that way?”

“I’m going to go see him and make sure he does.”

“I don’t follow that, Mister Cooley.”

“Never mind about it. You just do like I tell you.”

“But how is this going to make me stop fighting? I should think if it works I’ll be fighting more than ever.”

“Let him worry about that, honey,” Jeanie said. Big John shrugged and went silent on me. After a time he promised to do it just like I told him to do it. He began to cheer up, even finding the light-heartedness to chuckle at Henderson’s probable surprise.

I drove him back down and dropped him off a block or so from the gym. He hurried off down the street and I U-turned out of there.

The big arena at Philadelphia was packed. Everybody was loaded with dough and Christmas spirits. I was in the third row from ringside, bathed in cold sweat. I realized that I had gone sentimental and staked everything on a great big clown that would probably get slammed out of the ring before he could put my plan in motion.

I had talked with Henderson in his room in the Trevor in the middle of the afternoon. He had scared me. The man moved like a big cat, and his fists looked like boulders. His eyes were the color of fractured steel. He had listened to me and thanked me. He had been sitting on the bed, thinking hard, when I left.

I didn’t notice the preliminaries. They were just bobbing, weaving figures that my eyes were looking at, while my mind was busy in other places. I glanced down at the palms of my hands and saw the curved grooves that my fingernails had cut into them.

Finally the stools were hauled around to what had been the neutral corners, the referee sprinkled some fresh rosin and some kind of master mechanic checked and tightened the ropes. Big John came striding down the aisle, his gay yellow robe trailing out behind him, the big muscles of his thighs bunching as he walked.

Henderson made him wait about ten minutes. John slumped in the stool while Baum and Williams puttered around him, patting his shoulders and whispering to him. Suddenly the crowd roared and I knew Henderson was coming down to his corner.

He vaulted the ropes and stood up and down on his toes, high strung, nervous and tough as old leather. The crowd quieted down for the announcement, and yelled again as each man was introduced. The seconds checked the bindings and the gloves were put on. Baum took Big John’s robe off, and he stood in the middle of the ring with a towel around his shoulders as the referee gave the standard instructions to the two of them. Henderson didn’t look at Big John.

They turned and went back to their corners. Baum grabbed the towel and the stool. At the bell, both men whirled and touched gloves in the middle of the ring.

Henderson danced lightly, stooping into a low crouch and then bobbing up, looking for an opening. Big John shuffled around. The hot white lights burned down on them. The crowd was so quiet that I could hear Big John’s shoes scraping the canvas.

Henderson opened up with three fast, hard, left jabs, slamming Big John’s head back. The crowd murmured and Big John circled away. Henderson found him again with some more left jabs. Big John covered, and pawed out of the cover with that blundering right. Henderson moved out of range and grinned. There were some loud boos from the crowd.

As soon as Big John came out of cover, Henderson stepped in with two quick jabs. When Big John’s guard lifted, Henderson slammed a right to John’s middle that boomed like a drum. People at ringside gasped along with Big John. That wasn’t according to the book. I think it was at that moment, I stopped breathing.

Big John lowered his guard a little, and Henderson hooked the heavy right to John’s jaw. I went up onto the edge of the seat. Keeping his hands fairly high, John started to fall forward. Henderson hovered, looking for another spot to slug in the right hand and make it look better. Big John fell forward until it seemed he couldn’t possibly recover. At the last moment, as I had showed him in the kitchen, the big left leg came out, bracing him, and the right arm shot out like a mortar shell. It had all of Big John’s shoulders and back in it. It hit a Henderson standing almost wide open.

Henderson flew clear off the floor, into the ropes. He rebounded off the ropes and rolled limply back almost to the center of the ring. He was on his face and motionless. At the count of ten, he hadn’t begun to stir.

Baum and Williams climbed up onto the edge of the ring, white and shaken. Big John hauled Henderson over to his corner. I remembered to start breathing again.

I found Rocky and two of his boys in the club car. I was surprised to see him. He was a hired man in the picture. It was no skin off his nose either way. We went out between cars and he handed me the stuff. I looked it over and stashed it away. Then he said, “Stick out your hand, Stevey.”

I did so. He licked a fat thumb and counted off some bills into my hand. “One hunnert, two, three, four and five. How’s ’at look?”

“Wonderful, Rocky. What’s it for?”

“Commission. I rode along with you and got some good odds.”

“But I didn’t broker it for you.”

“If I’d lost, maybe I’d have the boys work you over some dark night. You know how it is.” I shoved the money into my pocket. Later I even bought him a couple of drinks out of it.

The next morning Jeanie gave me a nice smile when she opened the door for me. Big John was drinking coffee in the kitchen. One eye was a little puffed from the fight, and that was all. He didn’t seem very cheery. I waved him down when he started to stand up. I sat opposite him.

“How does it look now, John?” I asked him.

“I can’t truly say. I found out last night that Dicky Wing, he lost my contract to Mr. Rocky LaPorte. He bet it on the fight, betting against me. Looks like I’m going to have to start fighting for Rocky now. He’s worse than Wing I hear.”

“Maybe,” I said, and grinned at him.

He scratched his head and said, “How come that Henderson fella, he acted like you said he would?”

“Easy. I went up and told him that you were coached to take a dive in the first round, that your manager was betting against you. He had his boys check and I guess they found out where the Wing money was riding. He never figured for you to hit him. He was trying to make the knockout look so good so it wouldn’t queer his record. He’s a straight boy, as straight as they come.”

Jeanie asked, “What will Rocky want Johnny to do?”

“Nothing,” I said, “I bought John’s contract from Rocky last night.”

They both gave me a very vacant stare and Big John said, “What was that you said? Have you got that kind of money, Mister Cooley?”

“It cost me a buck.”

His mouth dropped open. I handed him a copy of my agreement with Rocky. He went through it twice, his lips moving as he read. He looked up and said, “This here thing is dated before the fight. It says that if Rocky ever gets hold of my contract, he agrees to sell it to you for one dollar.”

“That’s right. I made him live up to it. Here’s the original of the contract.” I threw it on the table.

“But this Rocky, he had to put up a lot of money to get hold of that.”

“He put up my money, John. I mean, money that I borrowed on notes from every chump in town without telling them what I was going to use it for.”

He got very still and I heard Jeanie gasp. “But... but, if I knew that... Mister Cooley, suppose I lost that fight?” John said.

“You didn’t, did you? Henderson was sucked in by the fact that you apparently didn’t have any right hand, and your manager was setting you up for a dive.”

I picked the contract off the table and stuck it into my inside pocket. I slapped the pocket. Jeanie had fallen against him and had her face buried in his neck. Her shoulders were shaking with silent sobs. “Now I’m the manager, John, and when I need the dough, I’m going to have you get in there and take some beatings. But in the meantime you better get back into the trucking business.”

They both went with me to the door. Big John said, “Mister Cooley, you got yourself a fighter. Any time.”

Jeanie was mopping her eyes. I stood on the porch and stuck my hand out to Big John. He took a furtive look up and down the street and took my hand timidly. In a moment I left. All the way back into town I cursed and yanked the little coupe around all the corners. I was wondering what sucker trap I’d fall into next.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Big John Fights Again