“There’s nothing funny,” the cook said. “You all laugh but there’s nothing funny. You two young lads; where are you bound for?”
“Where are you going yourself?” Tom asked him.
“I want to go to Cadillac,” the cook said. “Have you ever been there? My sister lives there.”
“He’s a sister himself,” the man in the slagged trousers said.
“Can’t you stop that sort of thing?” the cook asked. “Can’t we speak decently?”
“Cadillac is where Steve Ketchel came from and where Ad Wolgast is from,” the shy man said.
“Steve Ketchel,” one of the blondes said in a high voice as though the name had pulled a trigger in her. “His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father. There aren’t any more men like Steve Ketchel.”
“Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?” asked the cook.
“Oh, shut up,” said the blonde. “What do you know about Steve? Stanley. He was no Stanley. Steve Ketchel was the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel. There never was a man like that. He moved just like a tiger and he was the finest, free-est spender that ever lived.”
“Did you know him?” one of the men asked.
“Did I know him? Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world and I loved him like you love God. He was the greatest, finest, whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived, Steve Ketchel, and his own father shot him down like a dog.”
“Were you out on the coast with him?”
“No. I knew him before that. He was the only man I ever loved.”
Every one was very respectful to the peroxide blonde, who said all this in a high stagey way, but Alice was beginning to shake again. I felt it sitting by her.
“You should have married him,” the cook said.
“I wouldn’t hurt his career,” the peroxide blonde said. “I wouldn’t be a drawback to him. A wife wasn’t what he needed. Oh, my God, what a man he was.”
“That was a fine way to look at it,” the cook said. “Didn’t Jack Johnson knock him out though?”
“It was a trick,” Peroxide said. “That big dinge took him by surprise. He’d just knocked Jack Johnson down, the big black bastard. That nigger beat him by a fluke”
The ticket window went up and the three Indians went over to it.
“Steve knocked him down,” Peroxide said. “He turned to smile at me.”
“I thought you said you weren’t on the coast,” some one said.
“I went out just for that fight. Steve turned to smile at me and that black son of a bitch from hell jumped up and hit him by surprise. Steve could lick a hundred like that black bastard.”
“He was a great fighter,” the lumberjack said.
“I hope to God he was,” Peroxide said. “I hope to God they don’t have fighters like that now. He was like a god, he was. So white and clean and beautiful and smooth and fast and like a tiger or like lightning.”
“I saw him in the moving pictures of the fight,” Tom said. We were all very moved. Alice was shaking all over and I looked and saw she was crying. The Indians had gone outside on the platform.
“He was more than any husband could ever be,” Peroxide said. “We were married in the eyes of God and I belong to him right now and always will and all of me is his. I don’t care about my body. They can take my body. My soul belongs to Steve Ketchel. By God, he was a man.”
Everybody felt terribly. It was sad and embarrassing. Then Alice, who was still shaking, spoke. “You’re a dirty liar,” she said in that low voice. “You never laid Steve Ketchel in your life and you know it.”
“How can you say that?” Peroxide said proudly.
“I say it because it’s true,” Alice said. “I’m the only one here that ever knew Steve Ketchel and I come from Mancelona and I knew him there and it’s true and you know it’s true and God can strike me dead if it isn’t true.”
“He can strike me too,” Peroxide said.
“This is true, true, true, and you know it. Not just made up and I know exactly what he said to me.”
“What did he say?” Peroxide asked, complacently.
Alice was crying so she could hardly speak from shaking so. “He said ‘You’re a lovely piece, Alice.’ That’s exactly what he said.”
“It’s a lie,” Peroxide said.
“It’s true,” Alice said. “That’s truly what he said.”
“It’s a lie,” Peroxide said proudly.
“No, it’s true, true, true, to Jesus and Mary true.”
“Steve couldn’t have said that. It wasn’t the way he talked,” Peroxide said happily.
“It’s true,” said Alice in her nice voice. “And it doesn’t make any difference to me whether you believe it or not.” She wasn’t crying any more and she was calm.
“It would be impossible for Steve to have said that,” Peroxide declared.
“He said it,” Alice said and smiled. “And I remember when he said it and I
“You can’t insult me,” said Peroxide. “You big mountain of pus. I have my memories.”
“No,” Alice said in that sweet lovely voice, “you haven’t got any real memories except having your tubes out and when you started C. and M. Everything else you just read in the papers. I’m clean and you know it and men like me, even though I’m big, and you know it, and I never lie and you know it.”
“Leave me with my memories,” Peroxide said. “With my true, wonderful memories.”
Alice looked at her and then at us and her face lost that hurt look and she smiled and she had about the prettiest face I ever saw. She had a pretty face and a nice smooth skin and a lovely voice and she was nice all right and really friendly. But my God she was big. She was as big as three women. Tom saw me looking at her and he said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Good-bye,” said Alice. She certainly had a nice voice.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Which way are you boys going?” asked the cook.
“The other way from you,” Tom told him.
God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen
IN THOSE DAYS THE DISTANCES WERE ALL very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true. On this afternoon it was snowing and inside an automobile dealer’s show window, lighted against the early dark, there was a racing motor car finished entirely in silver with Dans Argent lettered on the hood. This I believed to mean the silver dance or the silver dancer, and, slightly puzzled which it meant but happy in the sight of the car and pleased by my knowledge of a foreign language, I went along the street in the snow. I was walking from the Woolf Brothers’ saloon where, on Christmas and Thanksgiving Day, a free turkey dinner was served, toward the city hospital which was on a high hill that overlooked the smoke, the buildings and the streets of the town. In the reception room of the hospital were the two ambulance surgeons Doc Fischer and Doctor Wilcox, sitting, the one before a desk, the other in a chair against the wall.
Doc Fischer was thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth, amused eyes and gambler’s hands. Doctor Wilcox was short, dark and carried an indexed book.
Doctor Wilcox was sensitive about this book but could not get along without it. It was bound in limp leather and fitted his coat pocket and he had bought it at the advice of one of his professors who had said, “Wilcox, you
