John D. MacDonald

Buzz-Saw Belter

Chapter One

Mayhem Maestro

I’ve told this story to a lot of people without telling them who the lead character is. Some of them think the story is about Stone Gowal. He has a part in it. A lot of prominent people have come off the hot, littered pavements of the East Side. A lot of little kids who are now sleeping out on the fire escapes to get out of the heat will be making headlines when they grow up.

Stone Gowal grew up on those streets. Seeing him from a distance he looks like any other hard boy. Short neck, big shoulders, heavy face bones. A lot of pounding has thickened his brows and his lips and widened his nose. Close up he’s something else. Close up his skin has a hard, grayish look, and under the shelves of his brows his eyes are a pale watery gray. Killer gray.

By tradition, outside the ring, he should be a big, happy, gentle animal. But all he has is the animal aspect. He is vain, ruthless, brutal.

Maybe this is rightfully a story about Len Kennedy. A lot of boys have drifted into the boxing game via the college route. Few of them have been any good. None of them have been champions. The writeups have given Len Kennedy some American Indian blood. He looks it. He is what the folks think about when they talk about turning fighting into a clean American sport.

Maybe the story really started ten years ago. Stone Gowal was twenty. That was when “Chalk” Leebna was still accumulating his big stable. Chalk saw Gowal in an amateur semi-final in Jersey City and liked the looks of him. The next day Stone Gowal was a professional and Max Gleason, to whom Chalk was paying a hundred a week, started to teach him how to move around a ring, how to hold his hands. Billy Lee Gleason was a goldenheaded ten, with skinned knees and a collection of movie star cutouts. Len Kennedy was fifteen that year. He was doing well in high school football.

Stone Gowal was a surly kid, unpredictable. During that first week at Dannegan’s Gym, Gowal, fretting under the constant instruction, pasted Max. Max, who ten years ago was forty something, still had enough left to give Gowal a worse beating than he has ever taken since. Max cut him to little bits, but the kid wouldn’t stop trying until both eyes had swelled completely shut.

Max has since told me that during all the years he worked with Gowal, he never once lost the feeling of being a sort of animal trainer. Gowal was like one of those big dangerous cats who, if they feel in the mood, will leap through the flaming hoop.

Chalk Leebna died a year later. He was crossed by a punk who, on another charge, is still doing twenty to life up the river.

Leebna lost a lot of dough and made the mistake of sending the punk over with the payoff. The punk pocketed the payoff and told the syndicate that Leebna had sent him to tell them that they’d better try to collect.

Chalk Leebna died on his hands and knees in an alley. At that point Max had saved some money. When the stable dissolved, Max then bought Stone Gowal.

It was about that time that my name started to appear on the sports page of the paper I’m still with.

I’ll never forget some of those early fights as Max Gleason started to bring Stone Gowal up the ladder. The crowd loved him in the same way they love to go to the midget auto races in hopes of seeing somebody smashed to a pulp.

His style was the same as it is now. But cruder. Stone would come out slow at the bell, his face impassive. He was never a pretty boxer, but he could roll to take the sting out of a punch, and he kept that jaw down so tight behind a humped left shoulder that he was hard to hit.

That left jab of his was like a piston. In the clinch he would appear to paw almost aimlessly at his opponent’s middle. But each lazy pat would boom like a big drum and soon the poor guy in the ring with him would be panting for air.

Max, during those early years, finally convinced Stone to wait until Max gave him the word. Max waited until that jab and the pawing right had taken the edge off the other man. When he finally gave Stone the word it was like unsnapping the leash from the collar of a mad dog.

Max never did manage to get Gowal to defend himself in the payoff round. Very few boys lasted beyond that round. The roar of the crowd always started in that round, building up into a scream as Stone moved in for the kill.

I’ll never forget the way Gowal’s thick lips would lift away from his teeth so that the white rubber guard showed. With his eyes slitted, grunting with each punch, he would work his man onto the ropes and even the slow motion camera couldn’t take the steam out of some of those punches. Imagine an unarmed man in the ring with a savage who carries a rock in each hand. It’ll give you the general idea.

Stone Gowal’s specialty was waiting until his man was headed for the floor and then he’d hook up on him with a blow that would straighten him for the payoff punch.

If Stone Gowal had happened to be under the wing of a syndicate, he would have become champion long before he did. But the fight racket had a million angles. With only one fighter under his wing, Max couldn’t arrange the proper favors, or get the proper booking. And when boys were brought up via the tank route for a shot at the topside, they avoided Gowal on the way up. But on the way down Gowal got to them, doing a much more serious job on them than the champ had done.

Even so, by the fourth year they were getting four-figure purses and Gowal was fighting a lot. You could tell when they started to make money. Stone started wearing neckties because then he could afford the tailored shirts to fit around his bull neck.

Billy Lee was sent away to a decent school. Max wanted to turn her into a lady. That was silly, because there was no time, even in the bubble-gum stage, that Billy Lee wasn’t very much of a sweet little lady.

Maybe in the movies they would have it that Stone Gowal, the refinement of brute fury, had a soft spot in his heart for the kid of the guy who managed him and trained him. But to Stone she was “the brat” until the skinny, little-girl frame began to fill out into the contours of woman and then Stone began to have a wet look around his mouth — but that comes later in the story.

There is an easy way and a hard way to come up in the fight game. The syndicate way is the easy way, because then you have the dough to buy your own publicity, and buy your victories. The other way is the way Max Gleason and Stone Gowal traveled. They got their publicity just by being around, by knocking the ears off everybody who came their way, by making trips through the brush and knocking off the promising beginners before the syndicate could step in and put those promising beginners out of the reach of the Gleason-Gowal combination.

You do that long enough and the sports writers begin to put little digs in the columns, and after a while it snowballs up to the point where the syndicate has to give the unconnected boy a shot at the tame champion.

It takes a long time.

Stone Gowal’s private life gave Max a lot of trouble during that period. When Gowal’s divorce came up, the plaintiff appeared in court with the jaw Gowal had broken the week before. Her teeth were wired together. The alimony kept Stone poor. It was two years before she married, taking away the financial burden.

The college kid Stone slugged in a Birmingham night spot never regained the sight in his right eye. Only the fact that both parties had been proven very drunk kept the settlement as low as it was. Even so, Gowal got a lot of bad publicity.

Stone Gowal carried his belligerence around with him. He strutted when he walked, and the tiniest slur, real or imagined, could tighten those huge fists that looked like paving bricks.

But nothing can contradict a long string of knockouts. Not forever.

Toward the end of the seventh year of Gleason’s handling of Gowal, the syndicate had to throw a bone to the dogs by giving Gowal a shot at the “ranking contender for the heavyweight crown.”

The night before the fight a few sharpies moved in on Gowal at his hotel. That’s a story that didn’t get in the paper. They slugged him, stripped him, moved him out onto the fire escape and doused him with cold water. The temperature was about ten above. At the end of an hour they brought him in and put him to bed and left.

They got what they wanted.

The next night Gowal went into the ring with a temperature of a hundred and two. Max knew he was weak and feverish and he unsnapped the leash in the first round. You may remember reading about that fight. Maybe you even saw it. Barney Jeeno wasn’t too bad a boy. He came out feeling with a cautious left which Stone slammed out of the way to plant a solid right hook under Barney’s heart. Barney’s mouth sagged open and he got on his bicycle.

Stone stalked him like a big cat. He moved Barney into a corner and rolled with the stiff left and right that Barney laid alongside his jaw. Stone looked like a man spitting on his hands before chopping down a tree. His shoulders rolling in heavy rhythm, Stone went to work on Jeeno’s middle. From my ringside seat it sounded like somebody slapping a tile wall with a wet mop.

Finally, when Barney’s arms sagged, when only the force of Stone’s blows were keeping him upright in the corner, Stone moved back a little and shifted to the head. Barney’s mouthpiece flew out in a fine mist of blood and his eyes rolled up so that there were just slits of white visible.

The bell sounded and Stone swaggered away. They dragged Barney to his corner and held him on the stool, slapping his face, dousing him with water, holding the smelling salts to his nose. Barney stirred a little. When the bell sounded, they pushed Barney up and took away the stool. Barney never took a step. He just swayed beyond the balance point and went over on his face. Barney was never able to bring himself to climb into a ring again. Stone Gowal spent the next six days in the hospital fighting pneumonia with the same brute courage that he fought everything else.

It was obvious to all of us that Stone Gowal had earned a shot at the title. But even so they stalled another six months. The angered yells of the sports scribes rose to a shrill scream and died away when the date was set.

Chapter Two

Blood Feud

Max should have known that the syndicate would move in another direction. Max should have known that Stone Gowal didn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty.

I had coffee with Max Gleason on the afternoon of the day he heard what they were going to do to him. He had a beaten look.

He made me promise that I’d keep it off the record.

It was beautifully simple. Max stirred his cooling coffee and told me how he had turned down a cash offer for Stone’s contract. The next day he had received in the mail a photostat of a statement that was going to be sent to the Commission.

It was a notarized statement, signed by Stone Gowal, and it stated that during his entire relationship with Max Gleason, he had never been permitted to receive his full legal percentage of the purses. It further stated that he had received falsified expense accounts, and that it was only with great difficulty that he had prevented Gleason from “fixing” his fights, and from giving him “mysterious medicine” before some of his tougher bouts. Appended to the statement was a second one signed by a hanger-on who had sometimes been used in Gowal’s comer. It substantiated the statement by Gowal.

“Did you talk to Stone?” I asked.

“Yes. He did it for thirty-five thousand, cash. I’ve never handled a champion and this was my chance. If I don’t accept their price, the frame goes on and I get tossed out of the business. Gowal will get suspended temporarily, but they’ll get him reinstated under their management.”

“Can’t you fight?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Fight who? And for what? I’ve made a little. I’ve still got my health. They’ll give me twenty-five thousand. A gift.” His lip curled.

At that moment Billy Lee came in and slid into the booth beside Max. She was on vacation. “Hello; Mike,” she said to me. She put her fingers on her father’s arm. “I thought I’d find you here. Did you tell Mike?”

It was good to look at her. When I was a little kid I had a picture on my bedroom wall that I had cut out of a magazine. It showed one of those Viking ships with a blonde woman standing on the bows. Billy Lee sort of reminded me of that girl. Not as beefy, of course. But just as straight and clean and — shining.

Max said that he had told me. Her eyes flashed as she looked at me. “Did you ever hear of a more stinking trick, Mike? That Gowal is a prize louse. We’ve always known he was a stinker, but we didn’t know he was that bad.”

“When do you sign him over?” I asked.

Max glanced at his watch. “In about an hour.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going out to the West and take another look at a boy I saw a month ago.”

“Heavy?”

“Right.”

“Bring him along to lick Gowal?”

Max doubled his fist. “I’d like to. But by the time I bring him along, Gowal will be out of the fight game.”

“Maybe I could help in that department,” Billy Lee said in a faraway voice.

I didn’t see what she could mean. Neither did Max.

Under new management, Stone Gowal did just as good. The things that Max had taught him had become such a part of his fighting pattern that he couldn’t lose them now that Max wasn’t handling him any more.

The syndicate lips, curled around cigar butts, wore wide, wet smiles. Sixty thousand is cheap for a champion.

Even so, Gowal nearly lost the big one. He stepped out when the champion was too fresh. He got arm weary before he started to land solidly, and some of the sting was gone. The champion began to cut him up. But in the closing moments of the tenth round Stone snapped back and floored the champion. The champion tried to keep out of trouble in the eleventh, but his legs were gone. Stone got him into a corner and slowly battered him to the floor. He had to do it a second time, and a third time. The third time the champion stayed down, though at the ten count he was trying to get his knees under him.

Syndicate publicity went to work on the new champion. They had pictures of him patting dogs and refereeing settlement-house bouts, and smiling at the camera. But over that wide-lipped smile, those gray eyes were as cold as the eternal tomb.

As champion he fought often, which made him popular with the folks. He did very little training. But the quality of the competition was pretty sketchy. Stone had a little gray tire around his middle and a spray of pimples on his gray back. But in the ring he stalked and killed.

Max dropped out of sight. I knew that Billy Lee had probably finished school. I wondered about the two of them. And one day they came back to town, and Max brought his new heavy with him. I met the kid and liked him at once. He had a nice grin and a good way of handling his big body. Max got him booked into the garden and I saw the bout.

Len Kennedy, his name was. For the first two rounds the excitement grew in me. He moved his hundred and ninety-something pounds with all the blazing speed of a lightweight. The opposition was Tubbs Warner, the wheelhorse who is always in there trying.

Len Kennedy was built just right. Lots of shoulders, a flat belly and dancer’s legs. And Max had brought him a long way. He could do an acceptable foot-feint, good enough to fool old Tubs. He could land his punches just where he wanted to, either coming in or going away. On defense he was something for the records. Once he let Tubs corner him and open up. Tubs swung three hard lefts, alternating with three hard rights. Two blows were caught on the arm, one on the shoulder, one in the glove, and two were clean misses.

Len slid out fast and nailed Tubs lightly behind the ear before he could turn himself around.

I noticed then that Len Kennedy had virtually no marks on him except for a straight nose which had a tiny slant toward left field.

But in the third round, I settled back in my seat in disgust. He had everything in the wide world but a punch. The punches looked good, looked as if they had the old zing, but Tubs shook them off the way a honey-bear shakes off bees. When Gowal had licked Tubs he had dropped him on his face with his arms spread wide and a beatific smile on his lips.

Len got the decision, of course, but it wasn’t a popular bout. For a fighter to have that indefinable something called “color” he has to start with a punch and a killer instinct. Those two things seem to go together.

I ran into Max a week later and he said, “What do you think, Mike?”

“You want the truth?”

“Would I ask if I didn’t?”

“Max, you got a nice clean boy. A wonderful boy. He ought to teach boxing in some nice clean Ivy League college. He could maybe smash a fly on the wall flat — if he hit it square.”

Max just grinned and said, “Come along. Want to show you something.”

Len was working out at Dannegan’s. But it wasn’t the usual workout. I saw that at once. Len grinned at me. The sweat was running down his face. Max had him turn his back to us and pull the sweat shirt up around his neck. It was a smoothly muscled back.

“Move your arm, kid, your right. A slow motion punch.”

Max pointed to a little oval pad of muscle just below the right shoulder blade. “Mike, you watch that muscle right there.”

I did. It was smooth at first and then as Len’s arm got out further it bunched up.

“I don’t know the right names of the muscles, Mike. All I know is that on every slugger I ever see, that little fella is oversize. It gives the snap to the punch.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Sure you do. On Len here, the muscle is small. Okay, we find the workout to make it big.”

Len pulled down his shirt and began to work again on the heavy bag. His lips were moving. He was arm weary.

“How many?” Max asked.

“Over half,” Len grunted.

As we walked away Max said, “He can throw fifty a minute. Three thousand an hour. I got him on a four-hour workout. Six thousand with each arm.”

“Won’t he get muscle-bound?” I asked.

“Not with the rest of the workout.”

“What’s that?”

Max grinned. “I make him swim two hours a day. You ever see a muscle-bound swimmer?”

That is why the record book looks so odd when it gives the statistics on Len Kennedy. All those decisions in a row and then the beginning of the string of knockouts.

I saw the third one in the string. Everything was exactly the same as in the Tubs Warner bout. The punches looked just the same. Tubs had shaken them off. The kid that Len fought tried to shake them off, too. He shook off a few and then he wilted at the knees. When he got back up he was an angular, dancing scarecrow, blundering in windmill fashion around the ring. When Len got close enough he chilled him with a short, right, overhand chop. He had his back to me. I saw the little pad of muscle stiffen. Only it wasn’t so little.

Stone Gowal had been on top of the heap for two years. I was in a Village club one night and the master of ceremonies had one of the spots switched to a table on the other side of the floor. Stone gave the folks his party smile. A little table for two, he had.

Seeing the gal at the table with him almost made me bite a piece out of the rim of my glass. When the show was over and the house lights went back on, I made certain.

Yes, it was Billy Lee Gleason. Her shoulders were bare and smooth and they were the shade of ice tea with milk.

Ignoring the glare of the gal I was with, I excused myself and went on over to their table. Stone’s shoulders were so wide they were grotesque.

“Hi ya, Mike,” Gowal said in his husky fighter’s voice.

I nodded to him, spun a chair around from a nearby table with a “reserved” sign, sat down and said, “Imagine seeing you here, Billy Lee.”

To tell the truth, she didn’t look too out of place. With a touch of aqua eye shadow, a bit too much goo on the ripe lips and an extreme hair-do, she looked like any other club chick.

“How have you been, Mike?” she asked, using the tone of voice that said she didn’t care how I’d been. Even thick-head Gowal got the chill and beamed with delight.

“Max know who you’re out with?” I asked.

“What’s that to you?” Stone rasped, his eyes narrowing. A big gray fist on the table top slowly tightened.

Billy Lee slipped her arm through his, ran her finger tips back and forth, up and down his hand. She leaned closer to him and said, “Don’t get steamed, honey-bun. He’s a newsboy. Remember?”

“I don’t care who the hell he is,” Stone Gowal said without taking his eyes off me. “Crack wise and I break his mouth.”

Billy Lee looked at me and lifted her chin. “I don’t remember asking you to sit down here, Mike.”

“Nice to have seen you folks,” I said. I went back to my gal. But my heart wasn’t in the evening. I kept remembering Billy Lee at ten. Without reaching too far for the comparison, seeing her with Gowal was like seeing an Easter lily floating down an open sewer. I wondered how Max was taking it. And at the same time I thought I could see why Billy Lee was chumming up to Gowal. There was something in every woman that responds to brutality, just as there is a streak of brutality in even the mildest of men. I thought of the two of them together and nearly gagged on a perfectly good Scotch and water.

The next day I looked up Max. He had a bleak look. I didn’t have to open my mouth. He saw the look on my face and turned his back. “A lot of people been telling me,” he said. “She was twenty-one last Tuesday. What can I do?”

Len Kennedy was within earshot, working on the heavy bag. With his next punch he nearly busted the seams and let out the sand.

It was just another sordid story. The big city has a lot of stories like that. In my game you’re supposed to get used to it. Somehow, I’ve never been able to grow a thick enough shell. Something always knifes through and gets hold of me deep down inside.

Max Gleason should have had to wait another three or four years before getting Len up into the big time. But a month later Len was booked to fight Gowal. The whole distance for the title. I was on vacation when the deal was made and when I got back I started to dig out the angles. It was something that shouldn’t have happened — but it did. The syndicate doesn’t play that way. But they did.

I picked up a rumor here and a word there and a hint the other place. All of them steered me right to Billy Lee. We sat across from each other in a drug store and she drank a coke while I tried to get the facts from her.

Finally I understood. I stared at her and said, “You fool! You wonderful damn fool!”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“But how did you know it was going to work? How did you know that if you broke a bunch of dates with Stone Gowal and went out with Len that Stone would force his managers to make a bout with Len?”

She shrugged. “I told Gowal that I thought Len could lick him. And that this little girl was going to go out with the best man, bar none. It was as simple as that.”

“You could have gotten in a terrible mess, Billy Lee.”

Her level eyes were on mine. “Mike, ever since Stone crossed dad, I’ve been planning this. It had to work. And I was able to handle Stone.” Her eyes looked haunted. “But just harely. Now I keep my door looked nights and a gun under my pillow. I had him running around in mad little circles. It isn’t love with him. It’s just wanting to destroy. And now his pride is hurt. It’s up to Len, now. Len has to win.”

I shook my head. “Yeah, he certainly has to win this one — or else!”

Chapter Three

Champs Don’t Quit

Nothing can ever duplicate the atmosphere of a championship bout. I had taken two trips up into the mountains to the training camp. Len looked good. Very good.

He had come into the ring first. Gowal had made him wait while the crowd grew impatient. At last Gowal had come down the aisle. He went over the top rope in his usual flashy style, taped hands raised and clasped, that false grin of his shining out at the crowd.

I was in the press row and from time to time I turned to look back across the sea of faces. The faces at the Roman Amphitheatre must have looked like those faces. Eager, sweaty, nervous, blood-hungry. Sharp faces, with the bestial quality not far below the surface. The crowd made a low humming like some vast dynamo slowly building up its power.

The staring eyes of the television cameras peered down through the smoke at the brilliantly lighted ring. To the public this was just another championship fight. They didn’t know what was back of it, how the lives of four people were inextricably tied up in the outcome of the fight.

They came out for the instructions, not looking at each other. The referee finished, slapped them on the shoulders and they went back to their comers. The handlers stripped off the robes that had been slung over their shoulders. They poked the mouth-guards in with the awkward gloves, chewed down on them, rubbed their feet in the rosin and stretched their arms on the top ropes.

Stone Gowal looked like what he was. A fighting machine. A big, fast, dangerous man without an ounce of pity. He had climbed to the top with his fists and they were all he had. Len Kennedy looked rangy and taut and clean. His skin was a clear pink as compared with the haired and grayish texture of Stone’s body.

They came out at the bell, and circled cautiously. Len came in with two jolting left jabs, caught Gowal’s jab in his right glove, moved quickly to the left, and reversed, ripping a good left hook to Gowal’s middle, but taking a right high on the head in return.

Gowal was moving as he usually did. Always inching forward, looking flat-footed, but capable of moving quickly in any direction. Gowal thought he saw an opening and threw the right. Len stepped inside with another left hook to the pit of Gowal’s stomach.

At the bell I watched Max go up on the apron of the ring, talk into Len’s ear. Len nodded, looking perfectly cool. I looked for Billy Lee. Though it was against her custom to attend the bouts, I knew that she’d be in on this one. She had an aisle seat in the fourth row almost directly behind Len Kennedy. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips compressed.

Gowal, at the bell, tried to fool Len. He came out slow, and, as soon as he was within range he led with a right that, if it had landed, might have ended the fight right there. When you’re as good as those boys, leading with the right is not dangerous.

All Len caught was the breeze, but he had come so close to catching the whole works that it made his face pale. He moved in behind his fine left jab and gave it to Gowal three times over the left eye. Gowal nailed him with a very hard left jab, half hook and half jab. Len’s knees sagged and Gowal came in fast. But Len had tricked him. He rocked Gowal with a left, a right and a left to the head and Gowal, surprisingly, hung on. I moved up to the edge of my seat. Before the ref could break them, Gowal had rubbed his laces up across Len’s nose. The referee warned him and Gowal put on an expression of injured innocence. On him that look was as out of place as a pink ribbon on a grease gun.

Len’s next left jab opened up a streak of red over that bad eye. Gowal shook his head impatiently and countered with two left jabs of his own and a right cross that Len took on his shoulder. Len came in and planted two more on that bad eye, was dropped by a short right. He calmly took the nine count, came up and moved away fast as Gowal rushed him. When Gowal made his second rush, Len bounced off the ropes, tagged that bad eye with a screaming right hook.

After the bell Gowal’s seconds worked frantically over that eye. It was cut deep.

The bell for the third brought Gowal out of his comer like a raging lion. Take three to get in one. That was his formula for the kill. He snowed Len under with a hail of gloves. Len ducked and weaved and rolled and shot back whenever he got a chance, but he couldn’t withstand that mad fury that Gowal had turned on. He went down, off balance, with a right that hit him over the ear. He came up on one knee, shaking his head to clear it, waiting for the nine count. The crowd was screaming. Gowal stood in a neutral corner, his arms outstretched on the ropes, his chest heaving. He kept his eyes on Len. The moment Len came up, Gowal was all over him again.

Len, with his chin on his chest, suddenly stopped rolling and weaving and walked right into Gowal’s rhythm. Suddenly it was a tank-town amateur bout. Two huskies that didn’t know anything except to stand and trade leather.

Blood covered the left half of Gowal’s face. Len’s mouth slowly disintegrated into a bloody smear. Left, right, left, right. With each blow Gowal made a gasping sound that seemed to tear his throat.

And miraculously Len was no longer pinned in the corner. He was coming out, inch by inch. Gowal was giving ground! Len’s punches were landing cleaner. The bell clanged, and clanged again, but they kept punching until the referee managed to get them apart. They went back to their corners like men walking in their sleep.

Len gulped air through his torn mouth. Max had his lips close to Len’s ear. Gowal slumped in his corner, his good eye nearly shut.

They came out at the bell, marched stolidly to the middle of the ring and started again where they had left off.

At last Gowal wavered, stumbled and went down heavily. Len had to be pushed away by the referee. At five Gowal was on his knees, blinking through the blinding haze of lights. He was up at nine. Len went in, took three in the mouth and knocked Gowal down again. This time Stone Gowal came up with a little more trouble. His face was no longer human.

Len couldn’t hit him. He measured him, the right poised, the left outstretched, barely touching Gowal’s chest. The referee knew he should stop it. I could see it by his face. But he was looking toward one of the big guns in the syndicate who sat ringside, and he was licking his lips in indecision.

The great fighting heart of Stone Gowal hadn’t quit.

Len, his left still against Gowal’s chest, turned his head and yelled something at the referee.

Maybe it was some dim instinct, the last vestige of conciousness. The last bolt of fury. The last spasm of deadly anger.

Len turned his face back to Gowal in time to meet a right that nearly tore his head off. As he fell, he fell against Gowal and they both went down. The bug-eyed referee started the count, looking from Gowal to Len and back to Gowal. Stone Gowal crawled over to the ropes and hauled himself to his feet.

Len Kennedy didn’t stir.

And so the story comes out wrong. The bum licks the hero. Maybe too many times life makes it come out that way.

By the time I managed to get to Len’s room, Billy Lee was already there.

Len was still dazed. But after Billy Lee put her hands on those sweaty shoulders and kissed that broken mouth, he came out of it a little. The press gang was over talking to the winner — and still the champion of the world.

There is only a little bit more of it. Len wanted to fight again. But it took him three weeks to completely wake up mentally, and Max talked him out of it. Max tore up the contract. Max has two new boys. A middle and a lightweight.

I saw Max in the flea-bag hotel he favors just the other night. He talked about his boys. He had that “going to have a champ” look on his face. Then he showed me the picture of Billy Lee’s baby. Like all babies, it had the Winston Churchill look, but I said it was beautiful like you always do. In the picture, Len was holding it. He works on a construction job in the South.

But the main reason I came to see Max was to tell him about Gowal. Maybe I should have been able to tell Max that I had run into Stone Gowal selling neckties in some “cocktail-lounge” saloon.

But all I could give Max was Gowal’s message that he was thinking of retiring as champ and was thinking of going into the managing end and wondered if Max was too sore to make it a partnership deal. Ordinarily, you’d expect that Max Gleason would have spurned the offer.

But Max said, “Hey, with his name I could really get the bookings for my boys!”

So all you can say is that in the fight game the stories don’t always have the right and happy ending. It’s sometimes even hard to tell when the stories are over. But all I want is the ringside seat I had for this one.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Buzz-Saw Belter

Chapter One Mayhem Maestro

Chapter Two Blood Feud

Chapter Three Champs Don’t Quit