The old man was sitting on the porch, swigging from a bottle of cough syrup. He had his BB pistol in one hand, absently taking shots at a formation of balsa wood airplanes lined up on the lawn. I parked, then walked over to him. His clothes were flecked with vomit and his bones protruded underneath them, poking out like they were joined to him at all the wrong angles. His breath stank, his eyes were yellow and filmy and the skin I could see underneath his crusty white beard was flush with broken veins. I reached down to help him to his feet; he swatted my hands, jabbering, “Scheisskopf! Kleine Scheisskopf!”
I pulled the old man up into a standing position. He dropped the BB pistol and Expectolar pint and said, “Guten Tag, Dwight,” like he had just seen me the day before.
I brushed tears from my eyes. “Speak English, Papa.”
The old man grabbed the crook of his right elbow and shook his fist at me in a slapdash fungoo. “Englisch Scheisser! Churchill Scheisser! Amerikanisch Juden Scheisser!”
I left him on the porch and checked out the house. The living room was littered with model airplane parts and open cans of beans with flies buzzing around them; the bedroom was wallpapered with cheesecake pics, most of them upside down. The bathroom stank of stale urine and the kitchen featured three cats snouting around in half-empty tunafish cans. They hissed at me as I approached; I threw a chair at them and went back to my father.
He was leaning on the porch rail, fingering his beard. Afraid he would topple over, I held his arm; afraid I would start to cry for real, I said, “Say something, Papa. Make me mad. Tell me how you managed to fuck up the house so bad in a month.”
My father tried to pull free. I held on tighter, then loosened my grip, afraid of snapping the bone like a twig. He said, “Du, Dwight? Du?” and I knew he’d had another stroke and lost his memory of English again. I searched my own memory for phrases in German and came up empty. As a boy I’d hated the man so much that I made myself forget the language he’d taught me.
“Wo ist Greta? Wo, mutti?”
I put my arms around the old man. “Mama’s dead. You were too cheap to buy her bootleg, so she got some raisinjack from the niggers in the Flats. It was rubbing alcohol, Papa. She went blind. You put her in the hospital, and she jumped off the roof.”
“Greta!”
I held him harder. “Ssssh. It was fourteen years ago, Papa. A long time.”
The old man tried to push me away; I shoved him into the porch stanchion and pinned him there. His lips curled to shout invective, then his face went blank, and I knew he couldn’t come up with the words. I shut my eyes and found words for him: “Do you know what you cost me, you fuck? I could have gone to the cops clean, but they found out my father was a fucking subversive. They made me snitch off Sammy and Ashidas, and Sammy died at Manzanar. I know you only joined the Bund to bullshit and chase snatch, but you should have known better, because I didn’t.”
I opened my eyes and found them dry; my father’s eyes were expressionless. I eased off his shoulders and said, “You couldn’t have known better, and the snitch jacket’s all on me. But you were a cheap stingy fuck. You killed Mama, and that’s yours.”
I got an idea how to end the whole mess. “You go rest now, Papa. I’ll take care of you.”
That afternoon I watched Lee Blanchard train. His regimen was four-minute rounds with lanky light heavys borrowed from the Main Street Gym, and his style was total assault. He crouched when he moved forward, always feinting with his upper body; his jab was surprisingly good. He wasn’t the headhunter or sitting duck I expected, and when he hooked to the breadbasket I could feel the punches twenty yards away. For the money he was no sure thing, and money was the fight now.
So money made it a tank job.
I drove home and called up the retired postman who kept an eye on my father, offering him a C-note if he cleaned up the house and stuck to the old man like glue until after the fight. He agreed, and I called an old Academy classmate working Hollywood Vice and asked him for the names of some bookies. Thinking I wanted to bet on myself, he gave me the numbers of two independents, one with Mickey Cohen and one with the Jack Dragna mob. The indies and the Cohen book had Blanchard a straight two to one favorite, but the Dragna line was even money, Bleichert or Blanchard, the new odds coming from scouting reports that said I looked fast and strong. I could double every dollar I put in.
In the morning I called in sick, and the daywatch boss bought it because I was a local celebrity and Captain Harwell wouldn’t want him rattling my cage. With work out of the way, I liquidated my savings account, cashed in my Treasury bonds and took out a bank loan for two grand, using my almost new ‘46 Chevy ragtop as collateral. From the bank, it was just a short ride out to Lincoln Heights and a talk with Pete Lukins. He agreed to do what I wanted, and two hours later he called me with the results.
The Dragna bookie I had sent him to had taken his money on Blanchard by late-round knockout, offering him two to one odds against. If I took my dive in rounds eight through ten, my net would be $8,640—enough to maintain the old man in a class rest home for at least two or three years. I had traded Warrants for a close-out on bad old debts, with the late-round stipulation just enough of a risk to keep me from feeling too much like a coward. It was a tradeoff that someone was going to help me pay for, and that someone was Lee Blanchard.
With seven days left before the fight, I ate myself up to 192, increased the distance on my roadwork and upped my heavy bag stints to six minutes. Duane Fisk, the officer assigned as my trainer and second, warned me about overtraining, but I ignored him and kept pushing up until forty-eight hours before the bout. Then I decelerated to light calisthenics and studied my opponent.
From the back of the gym I watched Blanchard spar in the center ring. I looked for flaws in his basic attack and gauged his reactions when his sparring partners got cute. I saw that in clinches his elbows were tucked in to deflect body shots, leaving him open for jarring little uppercuts that would bring up his guard and set him up for counter hooks to the ribs. I saw that his best punch, the right cross, was always telegraphed with two half steps to the left and a head feint. I saw that on the ropes he was deadly, that he could keep lighter opponents pinned there with elbow steers alternated with short body blows. Moving closer, I saw eyebrow scar tissue that I would have to avoid in order to prevent a stoppage on cuts. That rankled, but a long scar running down the left side of his ribcage looked like a juicy place to throw him a lot of hurt.
“At least he looks good with his shirt off.”
I turned to face the words. Kay Lake was staring at me; out of the corner of my eye I saw Blanchard, resting on his stool, staring at us. “Where’s your sketch pad?” I asked.
Kay waved at Blanchard; he blew her a kiss with two gloved hands. The bell rang, and he and his partner moved toward each other popping jabs. “I gave that up,” Kay said. “I wasn’t very good, so I changed my major.”
“To what?”
“To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history.”
“I like a woman who knows what she wants.”
Kay smiled. “So do I, but I don’t know any. What do you want?”
I eyeballed the gym. Thirty or forty spectators were seated in folding chairs around the center ring, most of them off-duty cops and reporters, most of them smoking. A dissipating haze hung over the ring, and the spotlight shining down from the ceiling gave it a sulfurous glow. All eyes were on Blanchard and his punchy, and all the shouts and catcalls were for him—but without me getting ready to avenge old business none of it meant a thing. “I’m part of this. That’s what I want.”