“The way you know Tom Case is going to win that fight on the twenty-ninth.”
“Yes.”
“Even though everybody who knows boxing says Tiger’s going to murder him.”
I smiled. “You’ve been reading the sports pages.”
“Yes. I have.” She took the piece of grass from my mouth and put it in her own. “I’ve never been to a prizefight. Will you take me?”
“It’s not exactly live, you know. It’s on a big TV screen.”
“I know. Will you take me?”
9
There were plenty of good-looking women in the Dallas Auditorium on fight night, but Sadie got her fair share of admiring glances. She had made herself up carefully for the occasion, but even the most skillful makeup could only minimize the damage to her face, not completely hide it. Her dress helped matters considerably. It clung smoothly to her body line, and had a deep scoop neck.
The brilliant stroke was a felt fedora given to her by Ellen Dockerty, when Sadie told her that I had asked her to go to the prizefight with me. The hat was an almost exact match for the one Ingrid Bergman wears in the final scene ofCasablanca.With its insouciant slant, it set her face off perfectly… and of course it slanted to the left, putting a deep triangle of shadow over her bad cheek. It was better than any makeup job. When she came out of the bedroom for inspection, I told her she was absolutely gorgeous.The look of relief on her face and the excited sparkle in her eyes suggested that she knew I was doing more than trying to make her feel good.
There was heavy traffic coming into Dallas, and by the time we reached our seats, the third of five undercard matches was going on—a large black man and an even larger white man slowly pummeling each other while the crowd cheered. Not one but four enormous screens hung over the polished hardwood floor where the Dallas Spurs played (badly) during the basketball season. The picture was provided by multiple rear-screen projection systems, and although the colors were muddy—almost rudimentary—the images themselves were crisp. Sadie was impressed. In truth, so was I.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Even though—”
“Even though. When I bet on the Pirates to win the World Series back in ’60, Iknew.Here I’m depending entirely on my friend, who got it off the internet.”
“What in the world is that?”
“Sci-fi. Like Ray Bradbury.”
“Oh… okay.” Then she put her fingers between her lips and whistled.“Hey beer-man!”
The beer-man, decked out in a vest, cowboy hat, and silver-studded concho belt, sold us two bottles of Lone Star (glass, not plastic) with paper cups nestled over the necks. I gave him a buck and told him to keep the change.
Sadie took hers, bumped it against mine, and said: “Luck, Jake.”
“If I need it, I’m in one hell of a jam.”
She lit a cigarette, adding her smoke to the blue veil hanging around the lights. I was on her right, and from where I sat, she looked perfect.
I tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned, I kissed her lightly on her parted lips. “Kid,” I said, “we’ll always have Paris.”
She grinned. “The one in Texas, maybe.”
A groan went up from the crowd. The black fighter had just knocked the white one on his ass.
10
The main bout commenced at nine-thirty. Close-ups of the fighters filled the screens, and when the camera centered on Tom Case, my heart sank. There were threads of gray in his curly black hair. His cheeks were becoming jowls. His midsection flabbed over his trunks. Worst of all, though, were his somehow bewildered eyes, which peered from puffy sacs of scar tissue. He didn’t look entirely sure about where he was. The audience of fifteen hundred or so mostly cheered—Tom Case was a hometown boy, after all—but I also heard a healthy chorus of boos. Sitting there slumped on his stool, holding the ropes with his gloved hands, he looked like he’d already lost. Dick Tiger, on the other hand, was up on his feet, shadowboxing and skipping nimbly in his black hightops.
Sadie leaned close to me and whispered, “This doesn’t look so good, honey.”
That was the understatement of the century. It looked terrible.
Down front (where the screen must have seemed like a looming cliff with blurred moving figures projected on it), I saw Akiva Roth squire a mink-wearing dolly in Garbo shades to a seat that would have been ringside, if the fight hadn’t been on a screen. In front of Sadie and me, a chubby man smoking a cigar turned around and said, “Who ya got, beautiful?”
