John D. MacDonald

Too Early to Tell

It goes back to Christmas Eve, 1948, to the night when Brownell, drowning some of his grief over the way the champ had spoiled Brownell’s boy, Keno Morris, wandered into a Third Avenue gin mill and found Junior Franklin. That’s when it started, Christmas Eve. And it ended last night. Or maybe it began last night. It is maybe a funny quirk that it should start on Christmas Eve and end in St. Nick’s Arena, and on a million TV screens.

It’s a good class. You have to give it that. Bob the Fitz fought in it. So did Tunney and Grek and Siki. So did Slapsey Max, and rough, willing Lesnevich. Keno Morris ran right up through the class until he hit the top man. And got spoiled. It happens that way. That last punch that leaves a bruise on the face, but also makes a deep hole in some hidden part of a man’s spirit — and the juices run out.

Brownell saw it happen to his boy, saw it happen to Keno. Everybody saw it. Keno could have gotten up again. That squat chunky body wanted to get up. But the champ, chest heaving, lounged in the neutral corner, the lips spread around the guard in a superior and confident smile. Micky Brownell still thinks that it was partly that grin that kept Keno’s pants pasted to the canvas until the ten count, and the boos. Those boos weren’t exactly fair, because right up until that thirty-fourth second of the ninth round Keno had carried the whole fight to the champ.

Micky says he pushed the door open and went into the steamy little gin mill shaking the big wet flakes off the collar of his top coat and swinging his hat to get the snow off that too. If you’ve ever met Micky, you know that he is not a one to be noticed at any time. He looks as if the hot summer of 1908 dried him up and no wind has ever gotten around to blowing him away. The hundred and sixty he pays for suits doesn’t seem to help.

He smells the trouble the minute he is in there. It is at the far end of the bar, a kid maybe eighteen. For several generations Micky has been sizing up man-meat on the hoof. He saw the sloping shoulders of the power-hitter plus the lean-flanked grace of the speed boy. Then he looked at the face. One of those rich kid faces, Micky says. Brush cut, lean-cheeked, sneery-mouthed.

Loaded, the kid was. Swaying drunk. Pig drunk. He is making himself popular by telling Danny’s regular patrons that they are a bunch of cattle because they’ve never read Sartre, have never heard of Bergson and his theories of aesthetics. Danny is wiping a glass and five of the lads, full of Christmas spirits, are moving in on the big-mouth kid.

Micky says the kid was so irritating that even though he’d only caught about fifty seconds of the spiel, he was almost willing to take a hand.

The kid finally gets the idea, shuts his mouth and turns his back to the bar. He slips one Sunday punch, blocks another, chops out with his own right and there are only four left. The fifth, suddenly in need of dental work, has slid under a table on his back. They move in on him, the four, and they mark him up, but he doesn’t go down. By then Micky is watching with what he calls extreme interest. The kid renders another citizen hors de combat and by then Danny is getting weary of waiting. So from behind the bar he lays the sap delicately behind the kid’s ear and he falls among the spittoons. The remaining three congratulate each other, each rest one foot on the kid and use him for a bar rail until Micky gets a cab and has Danny help him load the unconscious kid into it.

Mickey finds me on Christmas afternoon. I sit across from him in the booth and I note the glazed look in his eyes. He recounts the events of the proceeding evening and then he says, “Get this, Lew. The kid’s name is Harkness Willoughby Franklin, the Third. Three of them yet. Here is the pitch. When he is just small fry, his folks split up. The old man is killed in the war about seven years ago. Now the old lady is married again to somebody else and she has a flock of young kids. They live out in California and they seem to consider the kid a bad apple. They have him boxed up in this private school in Massachusetts. He wants to go out to California for the Christmas vacation. They say no and send him a check and tell him to have fun. He gets drunk right in the private school and gets tossed out the day before vacation starts. He is a bright kid and he is sore on the world.”

“Adopt him,” I said, a bit sourly.

“Wake up, Lew,” he tells me. “The kid is a natural. A hundred seventy-one pounds. Natural coordination. I’ve been talking to him. He wants to fight.”

I did a lot of talking, both to Junior Franklin and to Micky. It didn’t do any good. He was one sour kid, believe me. Sour on the world and on himself. You know what he wanted? A million bucks. He had this picture in the back of his mind. They didn’t want him in California. So he’s going to drive up to their house in a convertible the size of a locomotive. The back end is going to be full of presents for the half-brothers and sisters. And he’s going to spit in the step-father’s eye.

Dempsey wanted a million too. He wanted it because he came off the tracks, out of the road camps, sick of stew cooked in a tomato can. But this Junior Franklin didn’t want it any less badly than Dempsey wanted it.

I guess the old lady and the step-father got conscience qualms. A month later they show up at the Clarry. Mickey has gotten the kid a room next to mine. The kid and I have spent a long tough day at Wattermeyer’s Gym. I say this for the kid, there was never any trouble about making him work out. You tell him to work on the heavy bag and you can go away and come back an hour later and hear that chunk, chunk, chunk.

The kid and I are talking over the day in his room, talking about the match Micky has made for him over in Jersey that’s coming up in three days, when there is a knock on the door. The kid opens it.

As soon as they come busting in, the woman, hugging him, squealing, “Harky, Oh Harky, darling,” the plump guy standing over to one side fiddling with his hat, I try to eel by and leave them alone. But Junior grabs my shoulder and says, “Stay here, Lew.”

I went over into the corner by the windows. It is tough to believe that the lady is old enough to have a kid as big as Junior. She is quite a dish and she carries herself as though she is pretty well convinced it is true. She had a spoiled twist to her mouth that doesn’t go away when she starts to cry and plead, as she does immediately.

To everything the kid says no, and the situation gets pretty grim. The kid and the step-father are soon yelling at each other and the lady’s tears are turned off like a faucet.

“If that’s your decision...” she says coldly.

“It is,” Junior says.

“Tom will send you your usual check every month, of course.”

Though this Tom was standing right there, Junior says, “Tell him not to strain himself.”

They leave in a hurry and I could see how they felt and somehow I hoped the kid couldn’t see it. They put up a fuss, but in their eyes you could see that they were damn glad to have the kid off their hands. But I could see that probably Junior sensed it too. He sat on the bed, his face right on the verge of getting all screwed up like a little kid with a skinned knee.

“Damn both of them,” he said in a husky whisper. It put a chill on the back of my neck because he didn’t say it like a guy cussing. He sort of chanted it.

“Let’s go eat!” I said, trying to sound cheery.

“I’ll knock on your door in ten minutes,” he said. I left him sitting there. The kid was really loused up inside. He was growing up too fast, I guess. It was nearer twenty minutes before he knocked. I could tell as soon as I looked at him that something had changed. In twenty minutes something had changed inside of him. He still had the rich-kid face, but all warmth had drained out of his eyes, leaving them older and colder than granite. I could smell the shape of it. This big yen about being a boxer had been a wild kid stunt. Underneath he wanted to be taken back into the fold. But then they showed him how it was. Now it was for real. Not a game any longer.

It showed up in Jersey. Micky couldn’t go. Junior stood up at the whistle and I dropped off the apron of the ring and pulled the stool down. Junior shuffled his feet in the rosin, yanked on the top ropes and turned at the bell. The other kid was willing enough. Both of them were green. The other kid clipped Junior twice. Junior shook them off and stalked the other kid. He got him right over my head in the corner. First there were two green kids, and then all of a sudden there was just one scared kid. A few thousand years of civilization was peeled off Junior. Usually during a real mix-up, the crowd roars all the way through it. They started roaring as Junior caught the other kid with a left, right and left. But then, as the kid sagged and Junior hooked him back upright into the corner, not letting him fall, the roar dwindled off. The ref came trotting over, but not before Junior sledged the semi-conscious kid three more times.

As the ref pulled Junior back he hit the falling kid one more time.

There was a big sigh in the place as several hundred people exhaled slowly. Junior shook his head as though he didn’t quite know where he was. Then he smiled down at me. It took them a long worried time to get the wobbly kid over onto his stool.

He was still as limp as a rag as they hustled him up the aisle.

On the way back on the train with our kit on the seat beside him, he didn’t seem to want to talk. He had that look on his face. Beat down, jaded. A joe coming out of combat has that look. An emotional hangover. Too much women will give the same result.

A few days later Keno Morris came to the Clarry with his kid sister. We took a table down in the grill for five. Micky, Junior, me, Keno and Shirley Morris. Junior was the only one Shirley didn’t know, of course. Shirley is crisp. That type. Took a business school course after high school and at that time she’d been working for a year in an insurance office in Manhattan, taking the train back every night to East Orange where Keno still bunks in with his folks. Maybe there are a hundred and fifty thousand Shirley’s in New York. Quick and trim. Dark suits. White collars and cuffs. But too many of them have the thin little lips that go with thin little lives. At fifty-five they’ll still be drying nylons in hall bathrooms. The ones like Shirley are marking time. There the lips are warm, the eyes level but with a hint of laughter, no matter how brittle the conversation is. Girls made, in heart and body, to have kids and a man.

They were both cool about the introductions, Junior and Shirley, and from then on they ignored each other. But you could feel how it was with them, even then. It made for a funny kind of strain, made all of us talk too loud, laugh too loud.

Then Micky said, “How about it, Keno? You’ve had enough lay-off.”

Keno grinned his slow grin. “That’s why I brought Shirley along. Moral support. I want to quit, Mick. Hell, I know how much I owe you. You brought me right up to where I could knock on the door. But they wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t quite have it. I never will have it. I could go on with it, but it won’t ever be like it was. It won’t ever be fun again. I could get another shot in a year maybe. But I’ll be thirty in a month. The legs are about to go.”

There was a long silence. Mick sipped his coffee and put the cup back down. Keno and Shirley were watching him anxiously.

“How you fixed, Keno?” Mick asked quietly,

“Close to forty, with no taxes to come out of it. I’ve got my eye on a good drive-in, Mick.”

“Luck, Keno. I was going to sound you out about quitting. You get in a jam, I can maybe book you a couple of deals to help out.”

Shirley leaned over and impulsively kissed Micky’s dry cheek. The old goat blushed like a sub-deb. He said quickly, “Junior here is going to help build up the Brownell bankroll. Someday he’s going to be as good as you were, Keno.”

“Better,” Junior said lazily. It was like a slap in the face. In the stunned silence he stood up, yawned and said, “Goodnight all. Nice to meet you and your sister, Morris.”

“Where,” said Shirley as soon as Junior was out of sight, “did you get that!”

Micky briefed her. “What’s he got?” Keno asked.

“Everything,” Micky said, and added softly, “I hope.”

“But he’s wrong inside,” Shirley said. “He’s wrong, Mick. I feel so sorry for him. He needs somebody, dreadfully.”

Keno, still sore, said, “He needs a thump in the chops, Sis.”

But Shirley didn’t hear him. Her eyes were far away. And probably her heart too.

By June the string was up to nine. One boy managed to last until the sixth round before the fight was stopped. The name, Junior Franklin, began to get into the fine print in the sports columns. He was a killer, but unlike most killers, he was unpopular with the fans. The fight crowd could sense the contempt in him from the moment he came down the aisle. He didn’t acknowledge either cheers or boos. He had a habit of staring distantly down into the ringside faces.

But no matter how he fenced and sparred and danced in the beginning of a bout, everybody knew that sooner or later the lid would blow off, and people held their breaths waiting for that moment. One old guy died of a heart attack during that fantastic third round of his fight with Sailor Duval, the round where Junior and the Sailor stood flatfooted in the center of the ring and traded right, left, right, left, right, left for endless eternal seconds until at last the Sailor faltered, moved slowly backward and dropped on his face at the ropes.

Junior changed physically. Hours of ducking, bobbing, weaving strengthened the neck muscles. He went from a fifteen and a half collar to a seventeen. His square wrists thickened. His face was saved by the fact that he was devilishly hard to cut, and his nose had a wide strong bridge to begin with. Stripped down he was a beauty, with deceptive shoulder spread, lean legs, flat hard belly and symetric chest.

He was still willing to work, but I could sense the impatience building up in him. He wanted to be on top so badly that he hurt. And he started to needle Micky for bigger and more important matches. Micky kept saying, “When I think you’re ready for ’em, Junior, I’ll match you. You’re coming along nice.”

And Junior started staying out late. He was off the liquor, and he made up the rest by sleeping until noon. Anyway, there wasn’t much Micky or I could do about it. Junior wouldn’t answer any questions as to where he had been or what he had been doing. He seemed to grow more distant from us, more apart, as the months went by.

Then Keno came to town with fire in his eyes. He got to the point at once. “The society kid is running around with Shirley,” Keno said huskily, “and I want it stopped.”

“How did they get together?” Micky asked curiously.

Keno flushed and kicked at the rug. “Shirley phoned him.”

“Then aren’t you sort of working at this from the wrong end?” Micky asked mildly.

“She won’t listen to me, or to the folks. I told her that guy’s poison. She’s been taking late trains, getting home one, two o’clock in the morning and then getting up at six thirty to get to town in time for work. It isn’t good for her. She locks the door to her room and Mom says she hears her crying in there. The other night she didn’t come home at all. It either stops, or I’m going to shoot a couple holes in your prize boy, Mick.”

“Oh, fine!” Micky said wearily. He sent me in to wake up Junior. In ten minutes Junior joined us, his hair still wet from the shower, a robe belted around him.

He raised one eyebrow in a slightly nasty way as he saw Keno.

“You’re going to stay to hell away from Shirley,” Keno said immediately.

Junior yawned and sat down. “Interesting. Very interesting.”

“I want an answer,” Keno shouted.

Junior held up his hand and started tagging off points on his fingers. “A. Your sister is old enough to take care of herself. B. She asked me to take her out in the first place. C. We seem to enjoy each other’s company. D. The big brother act is a little dated. It went over great in the gay nineties.”

Keno stood over him, glaring down at him. “What are you doing keeping her out all night, huh?”

“Well really, Mr. Morris,” Junior said lazily. Then he laughed. “Your sister is a very canny gal. She’s good at picking winners, Keno. This time she seems to have picked one. She seems to have inherited all the intelligence in the family.”

Keno picked him up out of the chair and Junior snapped his hands down over Keno’s wrists. They stood motionless and the sweat came out on their faces. Keno’s face was twisted with effort, but he couldn’t break Junior’s hold. Junior laughed again. Suddenly the fight drained out of Keno — right through the hole the champ had drilled in him. His shoulders drooped. Junior released his wrists.

Keno shuffled to the door and mumbled, “Better stay away from her, Franklin.” The door shut gently behind him.

Micky walked over to Junior and hit him open-handed across the face. He said, “I’ve known Shirley since she had skinned knees and bubble gum, kid. I’ll manage you and I’ll book your fights, but I don’t have to like you.”

“Your privilege,” Junior said calmly.

It was two weeks later that I ran into Shirley and she told me how one night they missed the last train, she and Junior, and then they had walked the rest of the night, had watched dawn come. Shirley and I had coffee together and there was a deep hurt in her level gray eyes as she said, “I can’t reach him, Lew. I can’t get to him. I’m an enemy, the same as everybody else. I think he likes being with me. But his guard is always up. Once somebody has been hurt badly enough, they never let that guard down for the rest of their lives. I... I love him, Lew.”

“Is that smart?”

“Can anybody be smart about a thing like that. I’m a year older than he is. Sometimes I feel a hundred years older, and sometimes I feel as if he’s much older than I. He’s odd, Lew. So odd, and so bitter.”

“What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. It was a curiously pathetic and helpless gesture. “Stick around, I guess. Maybe some day he’ll drop the guard.”

I told Micky about it. He cursed softly and said, “Why didn’t the damn fool kid tell me they just missed the train?”

“Have you noticed?” I asked him. “Junior never explains or apologizes. I guess it’s sort of a code with him. Is he still at you about Rastek?”

“Yeah. Every day. What do you think?”

“Maybe he could take him, Micky. Then, for Shirley’s sake, I’d like to take Junior on the big swing. Midwest and the Coast, back along the Gulf.”

“So I’ll see George about a match with Rastek.”

Junior took Rastek, in forty-four seconds of round one. It never should have happened. George was sore as a boil. It bounced Junior from small print to sports page headlines. Junior just happened to nail Rastek solidly with the first punch thrown. Rastek’s bicycle did him no good. Junior caught him and knocked him off it.

I took three boys with me on the big swing. Shirley saw us off at the station. Her eyes were shiny. Junior was very casual, almost elaborately casual.

That trip is in the records. It’s no chore to look it up. The headlines followed us and grew bigger as we went along, as the string grew. We hadn’t planned to fight him so much on the swing, but in some of those bouts he only worked a total of two hundred seconds. Twenty-one knockouts and three decisions. He pushed over some very good boys. Lambert, Smiley Brokaw, Stutson, Berntson, Cradey, Malloy, Crile, Bernstein.

Junior didn’t get what you’d call cocky. It was always that contempt that had been there right from the beginning. The old eyes in the rich-kid face under the brush cut looked out on the world with bleakness, and when the moment came they would blaze with an animal wildness.

There is a type of female attracted to young boxers. They make their approach with all the subtlety of a daily double player shouldering his way to the betting window. But Junior wasn’t having any. He brushed off the hangers-on.

A dozen times Mickey got me on the phone and yelled, “Can’t you stop that dopey kid from telling the press he’s ready for the champ? He’s not ready. He won’t be ready for another two years.”

“He’s eager, Mick.”

“If the Champ wasn’t a spoiler, I’d let him have his shot just to wise him up. But nobody has ever had the stomach to take two shots at the Champ. Put the lid on him, Lew.”

“I can’t. He wants the match.”

The champion is no dope, and neither are his managers. They caught a few of Junior’s bouts and they saw the shape of things to come. They decided that it would be poison to let the kid get too many bouts under his belt, to let get too much experience. The Champ was fairly certain he could put him away in his present stage of development. So he and his cohorts added their yammer to Junior’s. By the time we got back to New York it seemed like everybody in the entire world was all decided that Junior would fight the champion as soon as possible — everybody except Micky and me.

So Micky brought out the projector and the films. “You want to fight the Champ, huh?” Micky asked.

“That would appear to be the general idea,” Junior said loftily.

“Cut the lights, Lew,” Micky directed.

The Champ is something. He’s all chest and arms and squatty legs. No neck at all and a small head. The style borrows something from Henry Armstrong. Drive, drive, drive — every minute. Throw leather. But he’s even harder to hit. The squatty little legs are solid rubber, and in he comes, bounce-bounce-slam, bounce-bounce-slam, bounce-bounce-slam. To the uninformed he would appear to be a slugger, pure and simple, with no class and no deception. But if you watch closely you see the foot feints, the classic blocking, the quick pivot, the clever use of the ropes.

The last film was of the fight where Keno got it. The last whip-punch sent the mouthpiece spinning.

“Lights, Lew,” Micky said. I turned them on. Junior sat, a bit paler than usual, and he licked his lips. “Now how do you like it?” Micky asked.

“I can take him all right,” Junior said softly.

“And how would you go about doing that?” Micky asked.

“Run like hell for six rounds. The hell with the crowd. Spend six rounds going backward as fast as I can. Then start counter-punching him and hope some of the steam has gone out of his legs.”

Mick paced the room in silence for a long time, his cigar canted up at an angle. Then he stood by the windows looking out. Without turning, he said, “Kid, if you’d said anything else — anything — I’d refuse to make the match for you. But now I think you got about a fifty to one chance of taking him. So I’m cashing in on you. They’re so eager to get you quick that we’ll get a break on the percentage. You’re in shape. I’ll try to rush it.”

And he did rush it. He suckered them into taking Junior on last night. That was only three weeks and two days after we watched the movies.

Junior was already almost right. The danger was that I might draw him too fine. So the workouts had to stay light. He saw Shirley every night after she got out of work, but he was always in bed by ten. He was more silent than ever. There weren’t any laughs in him.

Four days ago I had another coffee with Shirley.

“He wants to win so badly,” she said.

“So does the Champ, Shirley.”

She made a face. “He keeps telling me I’ve hitched my wagon to the right star. I hate him when he says that.”

“Don’t have any fights with him before the go, Shirley.”

She drew herself up. “Don’t talk nonsense, Lew. I’m Keno’s sister. I know about fighters.”

“Sorry, honey.”

Maybe you caught it on TV last night. Or maybe you were there. You saw the end of the story. The way Junior came out and got on the bicycle. You heard how they booed him. The referee kept motioning for Junior to come on in and fight. You saw the number of times the Champ stopped and motioned to Junior to come on in and trade punches. Junior stayed out of the corners and kept moving fast, along the ropes. The Champ couldn’t corner him.

A lot of people switched to another band on their sets. So they missed the seventh. Junior came out and he was still on his bicycle. Not one solid blow had been struck in the fight. And then after twenty seconds of running, Junior reversed. He took the Champ’s right around the back of his neck and dropped home the prettiest straight right I have ever seen. It didn’t travel over eight inches. The Champ’s pants bounced off the floor and for once he lost his head and came up too fast. He still had fog in his brain. Junior dropped him on his face with a left and right.

Right then a lot of people learned something about champions. He got his hands under his chest at the count of four. At seven he got a knee under. At nine he came up, pulling that dazed squatty body off the floor through sheer will power. Instinct carried him through the rest of the round, brought him up after the two knockdowns that followed. And each time he came up he seemed a little stronger.

The crowd noise was one continuous high-pitched scream like nothing I ever heard before. It didn’t let up between rounds. And that incredible man came bounding out for the eighth. Maybe Junior thought it was an act.

Junior tried to stand toe to toe with him. He missed twice for every blow he landed. The Champ didn’t miss at all. Junior went down twice. He went down the third time and he was counted out as, with a smeared mask for a face, he was trying to use the ropes to pull himself back up onto legs that wouldn’t hold him.

I had him on the stool when the Champ came over. Junior was just able to keep himself erect on the stool.

The Champ said, panting, “How goes it, kid?”

“It’ll be warm in California for the Christmas vacation,” Junior mumbled.

“What goes with him?” the Champ yelled over the crowd noise.

Junior saw him then. His eyes cleared. “You wouldn’t stay down,” he said accusingly.

“In my business, I can’t afford to. Nice fight, kid.”

We got him back to the dressing room. I cut the tape off his hands while Micky swabbed his face clean with a special tenderness.

The loser’s dressing room is always a funeral. Some of the press boys come around for a little color. “How hard did he hit you, son?”

Micky chased them out. His cigar was out but he was still chomping on it. His voice shook a little as he said, “Nice, kid. A nice battle. Beat some of the kinks out of him, Lew.”

“I’m through,” Junior said dully. “I’m all done.”

“I expected that, kid,” Micky said. “Maybe the next good boy I get will let me bring him along the right way.” Micky walked out.

Junior was almost asleep when Shirley came in. She went to his side and took his hand. He opened his eyes and gave her a startled look. I moved away from the table.

“You’ve got your cues wrong, honey,” he said. His voice was harsh. “I didn’t win. I lost.”

“I watched it, dear.”

He pulled his hand away. “There’s no angle here, honey. I’m through fighting.”

“Angle, angle,” she said. “Can’t you think of anything else? What do you think I am? What do you think most people are? Most people are just like you and just like me. Lonely a lot of the time. Afraid sometimes. Don’t you know that you’ve got... you’ve got to have somebody to love? If you don’t... you’re alone. Always.” Her voice grew uncertain. “Somebody who cares what happens to you.”

She went down onto her knees then on the tile floor and as she is not a tall girl, her forehead came just high enough to rest against the padded edge of the rubbing table. Her shoulders shook, but she did not make a sound.

Junior came up onto one elbow. He reached his hand out and touched her hair. In his eyes was a great wonder.

I shut the door quietly behind me. I could hear the sounds of celebration from the Champ’s room, echoing in the concrete corridor.

The crowd had gone, leaving a litter of gum wrappers, cigarette butts, the smell of smoke and sweat and perfume.

Micky was out by the car. He was leaning against it and he had relit the cigar. It glowed against the night.

We stood for a time in silence, as old friends can.

“He might come along O.K.,” I said.

“Uh?” he said, around the cigar.

“Shirley’s in there. Give him a few months. He’ll fight again.”

Micky thought that over. He took the cigar out of his mouth and spat a flake of tobacco from his lip. “I’d like that,” he said. “I always told you he’s a good boy.”

We got in the car and went back to the hotel.

But that was only last night, and it’s still too early to tell.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Too Early to Tell