one punch, and then tackle him before he had a chance to see and recover.
It didn’t work.
Buster the Bear’s head snapped with a roundhouse punch to the muzzle that would’ve killed any man, but by the time Henry Standing Bear tried to grab Buster by the middle, the black bear had already lifted him from the canvas and flung him aside, at which point he pounced on him with a verve yet unseen that night. It took four men, one of whom was me, to pull the chains to get the bear loose from the Bear, and by the time I got to Henry, he was the whitest I’d ever seen him. He said another little known fact about black bears was that they had forty-two teeth-he said he counted them as the muzzle pressed against his face.
I’d done a little Golden-Gloves work in my youth and had risen to the top of interplatoon competition in the Corps by virtue of size, youth, and skill-one of which I still had, one of which I didn’t, and one on which the jury was still out. I’d competed well enough at Camp Pendleton to continue boxing at Camp Lejeune and then at the Armed Forces Boxing Championships at Lackland Air Force Base, where “Jacksonville Jake,” a bundle of bailing wire from Florida with skin the color and toughness of tanned saddle leather, had bounced me like a Super Ball. Those three minutes had taught me a special and lasting respect for chief petty officers with middle names from the cities where they’d been born.
I was older now and looked back at those episodes as if they had been a part of some other man’s life. I’d engaged in earnest only a few times, sinking to that primordial depth of instinct to destroy and then call it a game. I’d seen and sworn to never look upon that kind of savagery in myself ever again.
In the history of bad ideas, however, this had to be the thesis statement. The first indication that you’re in the midst of a bad idea is that people stop making eye contact with you and you with them. When I saw him entering the standing-room-only bar, Henry Standing Bear didn’t make eye contact with me. Juana served him a canned iced tea and also avoided his eye.
They were lined up four deep at the bar, and Pat’s entrepreneurial skills had been tested when the bleachers borrowed from the Gillette American Legion baseball team had collapsed under the weight of the faithful. No one had been hurt; after all, God looked out for children, animals, and drunks. They’d brought in all the folding chairs from the community hall and had even torn the particleboard from the broken window so that more patrons could be seated on the porch.
I scanned the place for somebody who might blow my feeble cover but didn’t see anybody I knew except Bill Nolan and Henry, who had continued to ignore me until I volunteered to corner for him, seeing as how no one else seemed to be willing.
The bag gloves didn’t provide too much protection for Henry’s hands, but he could get them in where regular boxing gloves wouldn’t go, and the Bear advanced through his first match. In his second, he landed a return punch in Gary Hasbrouk ’s left side, which continued his theory that he could systematically left-hand his opponents to death. He then caught the man with an uppercut from out of Lame Deer that lifted him a solid eight inches from the plywood platform. In a model of sportsmanship yet unseen in the Powder-River-Pound-Down, the Cheyenne Nation stepped back to allow Hasbrouk to stretch his jaw and to try to remember what planet he was on, after which Henry sighed and reapproached his opponent.
Hasbrouk swung and missed the Bear by two feet and then squared off with one of the towel men. Henry stepped back again and looked at the referees. Mike Niall, Pat, and some thin man I didn’t know decided to call it a technical knockout as the crowd roared with disapproval.
Their behavior would have disgraced the Circus Maximus.
I ushered the Cheyenne Nation to the narrow hallway where I’d earlier talked with Cady on the pay phone and watched as the redoubtable Bear hid his swollen paw by keeping a shoulder between his hand and me. He’d made it to the final round as had Cliff Cly, who was standing in the ring and was exhorting the crowd.
In his first match, the rodeo cowboy cum ranch hand had knocked D. J. Sorenson out with one punch. In his second, a quick feint to the right kidney, and Ken Colbo let his guard down. Cly hammered him with a sweeping roundhouse that caught the wide-faced man in the side of the head. Colbo’s jaw grew slack for a blink, and then he crumpled forward on his knees. Cly unceremoniously pushed him back with a knee of his own, and the sound of the back of the man’s head hitting the plywood platform carried across the crowded and noisy room.
I led the Bear farther into the hallway and spun him back by grabbing his shoulder. “All right, if you’re bound and determined to do this, he drops his right when he pulls back from a jab-” He wasn’t paying attention and continued to keep his left hand where I couldn’t see it. “Let me have a look.”
He held the afflicted hand under his armpit. “No.”
In the entire evening so far, it was the first moment our eyes had met. “Henry, enough.”
He made a face. “What?”
I leaned in close. “Stop this before you get hurt.”
He turned his shoulder so that I couldn’t see and smiled at my glare. “We may be too late.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“What?” He continued to smile at my discomfort and his. “I am helping.”
“You’re not.”
“I am, whether you are aware of it or not.”
You could always depend on Henry to be the straw that stirred the collective drink. I shook my head. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to take you out back and beat the crap out of you myself. Let me see your hand.”
“No.”
For the second time in the conversation, our eyes met. “Let me see it.”
The smile faded, and his face became cigar-store-Indian immobile. We stood there like that, unmoving, and then I turned back toward the makeshift ring with the white bar towel in my hand.
I caught the eye of the three unofficial officials as I sidled against the crowd. Niall leaned over and spit in the nearest spittoon and then looked up at me with a questioning look on his face.
“His hand is broken.”
He shook his head. “What?”
I leaned in a little closer, watching as Cliff Cly approached, sipping a beer from his gloved hand. He gargled a little and then swallowed. I continued to speak to the rancher in a low voice. “The Indian’s hand is broken. He can’t fight.”
“You’re shittin’ me.” He gave a worried glance around the room. “That’s not good.”
Cly trailed his elbows on the top rope and looked down at us. “What’s the holdup?”
Niall looked at the soon-to-be champion by default and nodded toward me. “He says the Indian’s hand is busted, and he can’t fight.”
He swallowed the beer in his mouth, the sneer spreading across his lips. “That’s bullshit.”
I kept my eyes on the rancher. “His left is useless; there’s no way he’ll be able to continue.”
Niall shrugged. “Well then, he forfeits his five hundred dollars, and Cliff here becomes champion.”
I felt something nudging me in the side and turned to see the toe of Cliff Cly’s boot poking me in the ribs. “He’s a chickenshit-just like you.” He took another gulp of his beer and looked down at me.
I thought about what good a quality, grade-A ass whipping would do the man. “Another time.” I turned back to the ring judges.
“That’s what I told your daughter.” I ignored him and started to speak to Niall, but Cly interrupted again. “On the phone, she was coming on to me pretty hard, so I told her the next time she was in state I’d give her the high hard one.”
That’s when he spit the beer on me.
I stood there for a second, hoping that he hadn’t done what he did, but the persistent tickling of used beer and spittle dripped off my hair and onto my shirt.
I can’t be sure, but I guess it was about then that I looked back up at him and thought about Henry, the election, Mary Barsad, the investigation, my father’s homestead, but mostly about Cady, all of it ganging up on me- and something just broke.
My hand was on the ropes before I could think about what I was doing, and it was like my muscles were intent on a little trip and my mind was just along for the ride. Cly backed away as I ducked under the top rope, and he watched with a cocky interest as I wrapped the corner towel around my right hand.
As I wrapped my other hand, he kicked his head sideways, stretched the muscles in his neck, shuffled a few steps, and moved to my left. “C’mon, old man.”
