Things as They Are (10 page)

Kurt showed the mitts, self-consciously displaying them on his knees where they lay immense, red, chapped, ugly.
Norman prodded the knuckles with his index finger. “Look at them knuckles, Beman!” he urged. “Like fucking ball-bearings. These are lethal weapons we’re looking at. Stand back! Stand back!” he shouted theatrically, recoiling in mock alarm. “You don’t want those exploding in your face!”

Apparently Kurt had it all, neck and hands. To hear Hiller talk we were in the presence of greatness. And greatness believed it. Norman shifted position on the bench and slipped his arm around Meinecke’s shoulders. “Ducks were made for water,” he said. “And you were made for the ring, Meinecke. You are a natural raw talent just waiting to be developed.”

“But how? How do I get developed?”

“You got to have like a manager, a trainer. Somebody to get the best out of you.”

“But who?” said Meinecke. “Who’s a trainer around here?”

I knew. Before answering, Norman leaned a little closer.

The Meinecke training camp’s headquarters was established at Deke’s. Deke’s daddy had disappeared about the time Deke turned fourteen, three years before, and the mattress which Deke’s Mom had drunkenly set on fire while smoking in bed, and which his father had hauled smouldering through the house to heave into the backyard, was still there, a map of interesting stains dominated by the charred, blackened crater whose flames Mr. Deke had extinguished with the garden hose that fateful day. Shortly after this incident Mr. Deke had taken off for parts unknown and Mrs. Deke, down in the dumps and remorseful over the turn her life had taken, fell prey to Jehovah’s Witnesses and converted. Despite all these momentous changes, nobody got around to hauling the offending mattress off to the nuisance grounds and three years later it still lay where it had fallen. Which was convenient for Dooey, Hop Jump, Murph, and the rest of us because it provided a spot to loll about on while watching Hiller put Kurt through his
paces. There amid the yellow grass, the run-over tricycle with the sow thistle growing up through the spokes of a twisted wheel, the greasy patch of lawn which Mr. Deke had killed by draining the oil from his car onto it every change, there amid all the other symptoms of neglect – scattered gaskets, a picket pulled from the sagging fence by Deke’s brothers and sisters, a lid from a paint can, shards of vinyl from a broken record, a torn plastic diaper, a discarded hot plate whose two rusted elements seemed to regard the scene with blood-shot, whirling eyes – the training of Kurt Meinecke went on in a blistering July heat wave.

Meinecke jumping rope in the hottest stretch of the afternoon, Hiller roaring abuse and ridicule at him. “Knees higher! Get them knees up! No pain, no gain! I still see titty bouncing there! Bouncing boobies, Meinecke! Shame! No fighter of mine goes into the ring looking like he needs a brassiere! Knees up!”

Road work was even more brutal. Hiller conned Kurt into allowing himself to be tied to the bumper of Murph’s reservation beater Chev with twenty feet of rope. The car was then driven at exactly six miles an hour down two miles of deserted country road with Kurt flailing along behind in the dust. If Meinecke didn’t keep up he’d be dragged. When I protested, Norman said that it was the only way to get Meinecke to put out, he was such a lazy fuck. Anyway, boxing was survival of the fittest.

“But what if he trips and falls?” I asked.

“He’s got no business tripping,” said Norman.

The really bizarre thing was that Meinecke seemed grateful for the opportunity of being leashed to a bumper and towed up and down country lanes. “Like Norman says,” he explained to me when I told him he was crazy, “ ‘no pain, no gain’ and another thing – which Norman also says – ‘you don’t know what you can do until you have to do it.’ Couple of times there on the road I wanted to quit awful bad, but when you know you can’t … well, you don’t. And then you’re the better for it.”

“Yeah, and after that fucking lunatic ends up dragging you a couple hundred yards behind a car, then you’ll say you’re the better for the skin graft too.”

Norman was a genius of the stick-and-carrot school of psychology. For Meinecke, the carrot was the rapturous commentary which Hiller provided to accompany Kurt’s daily thumping of the heavy bag dangling from Mrs. Deke’s clothesline pole. There was no doubt about it, Meinecke could punch. Even with Murph clinging to the bag, bracing it, Meinecke could rock them both with one of his awesome right hands. A little praise from Norman and Meinecke looked like a cat full of sweet cream. “That’s a boy, Kurtie! Look at that! That boy’s what you call a banger. Your classic body puncher, your get down and get dirty George Chuvalo kind of fighter. Jab! Jab! Stick it in his face! Set it up! Go downstairs now! Hit him with the low blow! Crack his walnuts! All’s fair in love and war, Kurtie, my man! You beauty, you!”

A typical July afternoon.

Each of Hiller’s boys had a role to play in the making of a champion, nobody was left out. The pattern was the same as in
The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen
, where each contributed according to his talents. Dooey was our equipment manager, shoplifting vaseline, adhesive tape, gauze, iodine, Q-tips, copies of
Ring
magazine – all the props – from the local drugstore. Murph and his beat-up ’57 Chev towed Meinecke through his road work. Deke’s yard was our training camp. I was delegated corner man and masseur. To Hop Jump fell the honour of being appointed Meinecke’s sparring partner, a seemingly perverse choice since the Hopper was notorious for his cowardice. This he cheerfully acknowledged with the frequent declaration, “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” The truth was that he was neither, but everyone instinctively understood poetic licence and what he was getting at. Hiller was implacable; no amount of whining and pleading on Hop Jump’s part got his sentence
commuted. For the rest of us seated on the pulpy mattress, swigging Cokes and puffing cigarettes, the sparring match was the highlight of the day. We jeered and hooted “Beep! Beep!” as Hop Jump, the human roadrunner, ducked and dodged and scrambled all over Deke’s backyard, dust puffing up out of the dead grass around his sagging white socks, Meinecke in awkward, earnestly determined pursuit.

Up and down, back and forth, from corner to corner, from pillar to post, around the clothesline pole and the smashed trike they went, Meinecke occasionally unleashing a looping roundhouse which nearly always missed the mark, or at best, landed a glancing blow to Benyuk’s shoulder or back, pinching a squawk of terror out of him and spurring him on to swifter flight.

When I asked Hiller about this strange pairing, inquiring why he had assigned Meinecke a sparring partner whose one aim was to avoid an exchange of blows at all costs, he gave me a long, steady look before answering. “I don’t want Meinecke getting used to getting hit – and Hop Jump isn’t going to hit him. I don’t want Meinecke hitting nothing but the bag – nothing human – and Hop Jump sure the fuck isn’t going to let nobody hit him. Perfect,” he concluded enigmatically.

Meanwhile, the changes in Kurt were growing more and more pronounced. It was bad enough that he did exactly what Hiller told him to do when Hiller was there, but now he went even further, obeying his instructions to the letter even when Norman had no way of checking up on him. Hiller had ordered him to get lighter on his feet and now Kurt minced along on tippy toes. Walking home with him was like taking a stroll with Liberace. It didn’t stop there. Each night he poured half a box of Windsor salt into the bathroom sink filled with water and soaked his head in it because Hiller had told him that fighters who cured their skin in brine toughened it, making themselves harder to cut.

Kurt may have been having the time of his life, but for the rest of us, the novelty began to wear off soon enough. Even Hop Jump’s scampers around the backyard weren’t as funny as they once were. We’d seen too many Road Runner and Coyote cartoons, they’d begun to pall. Nobody said it, but all of us were thinking it. What was the point?

Norman, with his exquisite sense of timing, broke the news just when interest was nearly dead. “Having just concluded extensive and lengthy negotiations,” he reported, “I am pleased to reveal that I have signed Meinecke for a fight.”

“What?” I said. “You negotiated Hop Jump into a phone booth? Because that’s the only way you’ll get a fight going between those two.”

Everybody laughed. Everybody but Hiller.

“I got him a fight with Scutter,” he said flatly, in a tone that judges in the movies use to hand down a death sentence.

Nobody spoke. We all avoided looking at Meinecke. A kind of deadly hush embraced the seven of us.

“Nothing to worry about,” Norman said calmly. “Scutter’s a street fighter. This is way different. If Scutter can’t flash the boots he ain’t much – and he can’t flash the boots in a boxing match. Never fear. He’s soap on a rope. Our boy’s got the training, our boy’s got the know how, our boy’s got the neck and he’s got the hands.” Hiller gave us a significant look. “Our boy’s got the
team.”

The team didn’t say anything, the team was thinking of Blair Scutter. Scutter was unquestionably the most dangerous of the local psychopaths, a square, stocky kid with acne so bad that his head looked like a gigantic raspberry perched on a cigarette machine. When he was twelve he had given up terrorizing contemporaries and started picking fights with teenagers; when he was a teenager he graduated to brawls with miners at dances in the community hall. When Blair Scutter walked down one of the humanity-choked corridors at R.J. Plumber
High, an avenue opened in the congestion, everyone shrinking back against the lockers so as not to risk brushing up against his brutish shoulders. Brushing up against Scutter was like rubbing shoulders with death.

Hiller could see we weren’t convinced. “Everybody heard what I said?” he demanded. “I said we got the team. And the team backs Kurt here a hundred and ten per cent. We all
think
positive. We all
do
positive. As President Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what Kurt can do for you, but what you can do for Kurt.’ Right?” He looked at each of us in turn, gouging out of us grudging nods of agreement. What we were thinking went unvoiced.

I felt compelled to speak to Norman and hung around until everybody had left that afternoon.

“What is this?” I said to him. “You know he hasn’t got a chance.”

“He does if he does what I tell him,” said Norman. “But the rest of you got to back me up. No fucking with his head, putting doubts in it. A right attitude is a winning attitude. Anybody gives him doubts is a traitor in my books.” It was clear whom he was thinking of when he used that word. “Anybody’s a traitor in our camp better watch out.”

I left that alone, tried another tack. “But why Scutter?” I asked. “Why start him with Scutter?”

“Box office,” said Norman abruptly. “You promote a fight you got to have a draw. Scutter’s a name attraction. I got a hall to fill.”

Things were moving too fast. “What do you mean hall? What hall?”

“Kingdom Hall. That Jehovah Witness place a mile out of town. Deke’s old lady has the key to it because she cleans it. So Deke’ll steal her key and we have the fight out there on a Thursday night. It being out in the country it won’t attract too much attention if we borrow it a couple of hours. If somebody drives by and sees cars and lights they’ll just figure the
Jehovahs are having one of their singalongs or circle jerks or whatever they do out there.”

“You’re going to throw a fight in a
church?”

“Hall,” Norman corrected me. “The place is called Kingdom Hall. It isn’t a church.”

There was no debating with Hiller. Arguments with him were conducted in a twilight zone where normal mental operations were suspended and invalid. I switched tracks. I wanted to know what was in this for Scutter.

“Twenty-five bucks,” said Norman. “I guaranteed him twenty-five to fight and fifty if he wins. But no sweat. We can charge two bucks a head at the gate for a fight like this. And there’s no problem getting a hundred guys in there. I got Murph to drive me out so I could look in the windows yesterday. They don’t have pews. Just those tin stacking-chairs. We can clear a space easy. It was made for us.”

“And what about Kurt?” I asked. “What are you paying him? What does he get out of this?”

Norman gave me one of his dangerous stares, the kind in which his eyes went flat, unreadable. “Don’t play stupid with me, genius. You fucking know as well as I do what Kurtie gets. He only gets what he’s been begging for all along. Nothing else.”

“So tell me, what’s he been begging for?”

“Just what he’s going to get,” said Norman.

Maybe at seventeen I was already as cynical at heart as I hoped to be in those future haunts – London, Paris, Vienna, Rome – which I imagined for myself. When Hiller unveiled his fight plan naturally I assumed Meinecke was being set-up, jobbed. Norman claimed that the way to beat Scutter was to blow his mind the way Paul Newman had blown George Kennedy’s mind in
Cool Hand Luke
. How had he done this? By absorbing all the punishment that Kennedy could hand out while proving that it was not enough to break him. This totally fucked a guy’s head when he was giving you his best shots and
you were laughing at them. “Meinecke will not even think of throwing a punch until he gets the nod from me,” said Hiller. “Meinecke will let Mr. Hardass wear himself out hitting him. He will inform Mr. Hardass that his sister can hit harder than that. He will Cool Hand Luke him. He will be trained for this. He is going to show Scutter that when you got the tree trunk neck, when you got the Floyd Patterson peekaboo defence, when you got the team behind you – then you are unstoppable.
You
are the hardest ass in town, none harder. You got the plan to twist all the bolts and nuts loose in Scutter’s head. Once they are good and rattling I will turn Meinecke loose. He will execute.”

I didn’t point out the obvious to Kurt – that being forbidden to hit back in a boxing match is a handicap. I was busy trying to convince myself that he was asking for whatever he got. I felt disgust for his naked need, for his gullibility, for the soft, accommodating clay he had become under Norman’s hands. In one of Hiller’s favourite movies,
The Magnificent Seven
, a ruthless bandit, who has been robbing and terrorizing poor peasants, poses a question to Yul Brynner, the gunman who has become their protector. He asks: If God did not wish them to be shorn, why did he make them sheep?