The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Read online

  James Carlos Blake

  The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

  FOR

  the Sisters of the Holy Ghost

  at the old Saint Joseph’s Academy

  in Brownsville, Texas,

  who taught me the language.

  And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,

  None knew so well as I:

  For he who lives more lives than one

  More deaths than one must die.

  —OSCAR WILDE, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

  I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you….

  —JOYCE CAROL OATES, On Boxing

  Contents

  Epigraph

  The Golden Smile

  Circumstance and Mean Luck

  The Getaway

  Bindle Stiff Days

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  The Michigan Assassin

  A Season of Wrathful Sorrow

  Miss Molly Yates

  Under the Bear Flag

  The Illinois Thunderbolt

  The Colonel

  Sidewalks of New York

  Resolutions

  The Galveston Giant

  The Hustler

  Evelyn and La Fée Verte

  Reformation

  A Reckoning in Reno

  Pair of Jacks

  Ambush Country

  Goldie and Walt

  Three Ranch Days

  Bad Saturday

  Finales

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by James Carlos Blake

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Golden Smile

  Ketchel’s manager, Willus Britt, lays it out plain and simple. “We put in the contract that if there’s no knockout the fight’s a draw. All Stevie and Jack have to do is make it look good from start to finish. The white hope middleweight against the Negro heavyweight. Like David and Goliath, only better. And only it’s a draw. I’m telling you, the whole country’ll go crazy. They’ll be screaming for a rematch. And that’s when we make a real killing.”

  Across the table, George Little, who manages Johnson, smiles and nods.

  It is late summer of 1909. They are in a secluded booth next to a window in a San Francisco hilltop restaurant. The fog banking in from the bay is blue in the city’s early evening light. Even from this vantage it is difficult to believe that a little more than three years ago the town had been charred rubble.

  “Not that we won’t do plenty good on this one,” Britt says. “Hell, we’ll pack Sunny Jim’s to the top rows. Plus, the odds’ll be so heavy on Jack, we’ll rake in even more with side bets on the draw.”

  “We’d have to spread them bets around so’s not to raise suspicion,” George Little says.

  It’s the remark of a man who’s decided he’s in, and Britt smiles. “Naturally. We’ll use fronts to lay the bets.”

  George Little nods.

  Britt leans farther over the table toward him. “Christ almighty, man, they’ll pour in for the rematch like the Johnstown flood. We’ll charge even more for tickets and still need a place double the size of Sunny Jim’s to hold them all. I’m telling you, we’ll need a goddamn freight train to carry off the gate money.”

  He sits back and fingers his red bow tie to ensure its proper lay. A spare man whose perpetual half-smile and sleepy aspect can fool people into thinking he lacks astuteness.

  George Little leans back too, smiling small, eyes narrow.

  Beside him Jack Johnson grins. His gold teeth gleam in the lamp glow and his shaven head shines like polished ebony. Arthur John Johnson is thirty-one years old and the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. At 210 pounds and just shy of six feet two, he is by far the largest man at the table. The stickpin of his cravat is also of gold, the fob chain looping from his vest pocket, the head of his walking stick. He wears a diamond on his pinky. His suit is custom-tailored. His shoes are of crocodile hide.

  Sitting next to Britt, Ketchel smiles too, and thinks how grand it would feel to knock out those gold teeth.

  On Johnson’s other side is a slender strawberry blonde with cool green eyes, her cheeks and nose powdered with freckles fine as cinnamon. She’d been introduced as Sheila. Although Ketchel is appalled that a white woman would keep company with a Negro, especially a woman as pretty as this one, and especially in public, he affects indifference. Yet he is intensely aware of her, of the push of her breasts against her shirtwaist. He would bet they were freckled too.

  Johnson catches Ketchel’s appraising glance at her. “She a pulchritudious eyeful, ain’t she, Mr. Stanley? Lady from Australia. Say something in Australian for the man, honey.” He has a fondness for polysyllabic words, especially of his own concoction, and is prone to the malaprop.

  “We speak English in Australia, Jack, as you bloody well know.”

  “Spake,” Johnson says. “Aus-try-lya. Blooody well. Man, I loves that lingo.”

  She rolls her eyes and looks out the window at the encroaching fog. Johnson puts his hand under the table and she smiles and gives him a sidelong glance.

  “What say we stick to business, Jack?” George Little says. He is clearly uncomfortable with the woman’s presence, has repeatedly admonished Johnson to be more discreet about the white ones.

  Ketchel smiles to mask his indignation. The dinge pawing her in a public place with three white men looking on and the bitch barely shows a blush.

  “So?” Britt says. “We got a deal?”

  George Little turns to Johnson. “What say, Jack?”

  Everybody knows what his answer will be. His share of the purse when he won the title was a pittance, and he hasn’t been able to get a big-money fight in the ten months since. He needs the cash. He’s a high-roller. He likes the night life, flashy clothes, the horses, the dice. Bold white women. A fight with Ketchel means a payday too big to turn down.

  “I say fine,” Johnson says. “Make me feel kinda lowdown to mix it up with a little fella, even if it ain’t for real, but sometimes you got to take what you can get.”

  “Gosh, Jack, that’s sad,” Ketchel says. He’ll be damned if he’ll let the coon nettle him with that “little fella” crack. He is the world middleweight champ, and at five feet nine inches and 160 pounds is larger than the average man of his day. In more than fifty official fights he has knocked out nearly all of his opponents, more than a dozen of whom outweighed him by at least twenty pounds.

  “Then again, everybody say you the little man with the big punch,” Johnson says. “Middleweight who hits like a heavy, I hear tell.”

  “I hear tell you got a pretty good punch yourself, Jack.”

  “What you gonna scale for me, Mr. Stanley, one sixty-five, one-seventy?”

  Ketchel shrugs.

  “Tommy Burns was one-seventy and I got to tell you, I been hit harder by some women.”

  The redhead snickers. Johnson winks at her.

  “Maybe you should fight smaller women,” Ketchel says.

  Johnson laughs and slaps the table. “Ooo-eee, little man got him a counterpunch. You a mirthaful man, Mr. Stanley.”

  “What’s it matter what he weighs?” Britt says. “It’s gonna be a draw.”

  “That’s right, makes no difference this time,” George Little says cheerfully. “Now, come the re-match, well…”

  “We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Britt says.

>   “You’ll worry about it,” George Little says. “Not me. Not Jack. Won’t play out like no David and Goliath.”

  “The thing is,” Johnson says to Ketchel, “Tommy Burns had no business being heavyweight champeen. He hardly bigger than you. He no more a heavyweight than I’m the pope a England.”

  “The thing is,” Ketchel says, “I ain’t Tommy Burns.”

  “Well now, you right about that,” Johnson says. “You beseeked me. I had to chase that man all over the world for two years before he quit the dodge.”

  Ketchel knows all about it. Everybody does. Most white boxers of the time refused to fight Negroes on the widely understood ground that it was demeaning, but there had been growing suspicion that Tommy Burns’s true reason for avoiding the much larger Johnson was fear. An indignant Burns had finally said he’d stoop to defend his title against the so-called “Galveston Giant” anytime the dinge agreed to let him have 85 percent of the purse. He was stunned when Johnson accepted the terms.

  They fought in Sydney, Australia, on the day after Christmas, and the outcome was apparent from the opening round. Both men had reputations for taunting their opponents during a match, but after the first minute or so of the fight Burns had little to say. Johnson talked constantly and made jokes and hit Burns at will, provoking the white crowd to a yowling frenzy. He’d tell Burns to watch out for the jab and then snap his head back with it. He’d warn him to guard his flanks and then stagger him into the ropes with a hook to the ribs. Johnson cakewalked to his corner at the end of every round. His cornermen implored him to quit the shuck before somebody shot him. He basked in the crowd’s execrations. He could have made shorter work of Burns but was enjoying himself too much. After each knockdown he’d lean on the ropes like a loitering thug, laughing as Burns struggled to his feet and the throng urged him up, pleaded with him to kill the big nigger, kill him. So it went, Johnson larking and japing, humiliating Burns, ruining him by slow degree. By the fourteenth round Burns’s ears looked like small bunches of grapes and his eyes were swollen to slits. He was lurching almost blindly, clutching at Johnson like a drunken lover. At which point a squadron of police swarmed into the ring and put an end to the proceedings. Both parties had been warned during contract negotiations that the police would stop the fight the moment it seemed there might be serious injury to either boxer, and the fighters had agreed that in such an event the referee would decide the winner. The referee was Hugh McIntosh, promoter of the bout. It broke his heart to raise the Negro’s hand, but only with a baseball bat could Johnson have beaten Burns more obviously. The spectators grasped a straw of solace by telling each other that Tommy had by God been game to the end and at least not been knocked out.

  Among the reporters present at that match was the celebrated author Jack London, who remonstrated in print with undefeated champ James Jeffries to come out of retirement “and remove the golden smile from Johnson’s face.” Now Jeffries is reported to be in serious training, laboriously shedding the excess weight he’s gained in more than five years since relinquishing the title. Newspapers across the republic hail him as the Great White Hope. Few whites would complain, however, if Stanley Ketchel should trump Jeffries and take Johnson down first. Indeed, Ketchel being the smaller man, his victory over the Negro would be all the sweeter.

  “So we’re agreed,” Britt says. “The sixteenth of October at Sunny Jim Coffroth’s arena in Colma. Twenty rounds. We split the gate down the middle and use fronts to lay our bets on the draw. Like the man said, boys, we’re going to do jim-dandy.”

  “Then we sign for the rematch,” says George Little, “and we make a real killing.”

  “You said it,” Britt says.

  “No, you did,” George Little says. “We’ll need a damn freight train!”

  They close the deal with handshakes all around. Ketchel’s grip feels to Johnson like a large rock, Johnson’s to Ketchel like something on a leash.

  “Let’s us absquatulate on back to the hotel, my cherry amoor,” Johnson says to the redhead. “Papa Jack got him a bad itch needs scratching.”

  She doesn’t blush at that, either. Ketchel wants to slap her.

  With his derby cocked over one eye and his gold teeth glinting, the redhead on his arm and George Little trailing behind, Jack Johnson twirls his walking stick and makes his easy way to the front door, turning every head in the room as he goes.

  Ketchel watches them leave. “I can take him, Willie.”

  “Christ, kid, that’s what I been telling you. Come the rematch, you’ll prove it to the whole damn world.”

  “I can’t wait,” Ketchel says.

  Circumstance and Mean Luck

  His mother was Julia Oblinski, born of Polish immigrants, an intelligent and variously talented woman with a gift for the piano and a special fondness for Chopin. But circumstance and mean luck wed her to Thomas Kaicel at the age of fifteen.

  Kaicel was an immigrant Russian of Polish ancestry, a large man of rough ways and rash temper. Dark rumor clung to him like an alien odor. It was said he had killed a man in Russia and fled to London and from there shipped to America. He had lived for a time in New York and toiled as a street cleaner, gravedigger, ferryman. He’d been with a red labor union, they said, had battled in the streets of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, had acquired the scar over his eye in Chicago. It was anyone’s guess why he moved to western Michigan or how he had come by the means to buy a dairy farm. Whatever the case, he knew about milk cows, and the dairy turned steady if not bountiful profits. Over time he gained a passing acquaintance with some of his neighbors, but he was not one for socializing. He lived quietly and minded his business, kept his own counsel and the nightly company of whiskey.

  He’d been in the region a year when one Saturday in town he ran into Fredrick Oblinski, whose wagon he had once helped to extricate from a mudhole, and was introduced to his wife and daughter. It was early winter. Their breath formed plumes in the air. Kaicel had for some time been in want of a wife, and the moment he set eyes on young Julia he determined that she was the one.

  Two weeks later he asked for her hand. In that rural past, farm girls married early and brides of fifteen were no rarity. Nor was it of great social import that Kaicel was the girl’s senior by at least twenty years, his age but one more thing about him no one knew for certain. Julia’s parents were aware of the frightful rumors that attached to Thomas Kaicel, yet they respected him as a hardworking man of property and were in favor of the marriage. When the girl declined his proposal with the explanation that she thought herself too young to become a mother, Kaicel dismissed her objection as irrelevant and appealed to the parents to set her straight. The Oblinskis sympathized with him, but they had been in America long enough to have assumed much of its social attitude. If their daughter did not want to marry right away, well, give her a little time, they told him, she was barely more than a child but she was smart and practical, keep wooing her, she’d come around. The mother whispered that the girl was not one to admit it but was probably just fearful of the marriage bed.

  What could he do but as they advised? He called on her each of the next three Saturday afternoons, hat in hand, black beard trimmed and hair heavy with pomade, footwear scraped of cow dung. His forefinger tugged at the unfamiliar clinch of necktie. They sat in the parlor over a tray of tea and cookies set out by the mother and made small talk punctuated by periods of silence during which the girl seemed well at ease while he sweat prodigiously in the heat of the fire and badly craved a drink. Young Julia was polite, if somewhat distant. She owned a poise beyond her years that slightly unnerved him. Nevertheless, every visit made him more determined in his suit.

  For her part, his calls were an ordeal to be endured in the name of etiquette. He did not speak English very well and never would, and it required effort to hide her amusement at his accent and maladroit diction, which in truth afforded the only fun she found in his company. His most recent visit had so bored her that she offered to entertain him at the p
iano in order to entertain herself. She asked what he would like to hear but did not know the Russian folk tunes he named, so she performed bits of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, asking with each segue if he knew the music. He shook his head repeatedly, feeling his ignorance hoisting into display like a red banner. Then she began the “Marche Funèbre” and he said “Yes, I know!” She asked him to name it, or its composer, and his jubilation fell like a swatted bee. Her smile was mocking and she left off the march for a polonaise. He sensed her perception of him as an uncultured peasant and felt an angry ache in his chest. When he got home that night he uncorked a new bottle and next morning awoke on the floor.

  OVER THE NEXT days he grew fretful that Julia Oblinski would never deign to marry him, and the looming doubt was unbearable. Late one evening, sitting before an untouched bowl of congealing stew and a nearly depleted bottle, he determined to resolve the issue without further delay. He drained his glass and snatched up his hat and coat and went out to saddle his horse. He rehearsed with the animal his apology to the Oblinskis for calling at this hour, but he was certain they would understand his need of a definite answer. He rode into a night of cold wind and rushing clouds. The snowless ground was dappled under the radiance of a gibbous moon. But it was even later than he thought, and when he came in view of the house not a window showed lamplight. He reined up under the trees beside the front gate and reconsidered. The wind had grown stronger, jostling the heavy shadows of the pines. He had sobered appreciably.

  Fool, he thought. I am a damned fool.

  He was about to rein the horse around when the moon came clear of the clouds and he saw her creep out of her second-floor window. She moved in a crouch to the end of the eave, and as she shinned down the drainpipe the wind raised her skirt and he glimpsed long pale legs. She dropped the last few feet to the ground and hurried away into the darkness, bearing for the vague shape of the barn.