The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Read online

  The bouncer had materialized, armed with a short club. He braced the puncher, whom he called O’Malley, and told him it was time to say good night.

  “Fuck sake, Harris,” O’Malley said, “the bastard sloshed me whisky out of—”

  Stanislaus hit him in the mouth and O’Malley’s hat took wing and he crashed against the bar and sat down hard. The startled Harris was too slow in attempting to apply his club to Stanislaus, who butted him in the face and loosed a gush of blood from his nose, then punched him four or five or six times so fast there would be debate among the witnesses about the exact number. Harris’s legs quit him and men moved aside to let him fall. His head struck the foot rail and his eyes rolled up white. But now O’Malley was risen and swinging, and Stanislaus hunched his shoulders and fended with his arms. A fist struck his crown and he saw stars but O’Malley yowled with the pain of a broken hand and Stanislaus lashed into him with another blur of punches. O’Malley again went down and Stanislaus began kicking him and he curled up tight with his arms around his head. “Enough! Enough, for fuck’s sake!” O’Malley yelled. Stanislaus gave him one more to the ribs and stopped.

  The surrounding crowd whooped and applauded the entertainment. The whole room aware now of a good fracas and avid to know what happened, and those who had seen the fight began describing it to those who had not. Somebody clapped Stanislaus on the back and somebody put a foaming mug in his hand and somebody asked his name. He said Steelyard Steve and several of them laughed, knowing a hobo handle when they heard one. He fingered a small lump under one eye and a cut on his upper lip, the only signs he showed of having been in a fight. In two days his face would show no sign of bruise, a remarkable recuperative power that would obtain for all of his brief life.

  O’Malley was helped off the floor, his lips raw and distended, an ear like a purple fig, the broken hand already gone big as a bible. He put his good hand to his mouth and tongued out a tooth and regarded it with rue. They slapped at Harris’s cheeks and tugged at his ears and someone upended a mug of beer over his face and that brought him around.

  Stanislaus spotted the strawberry blonde smiling at him from the edge of the crowd and asked the men nearest him if they knew her name. Gretchel, he was told. Its resonant similarity to “Kaicel,” which name he had renounced forever, made “Ketchel” come to mind.

  A beefy, silver-bearded man in a cream suit pushed up beside him, introduced himself as Richardson, manager of the place, and asked his name and the name of the mine he worked for. He said he was Steve Ketchel and was no miner and didn’t care to be, but he could do with a job.

  Richardson’s aspect suggested he had witnessed more foolishness in his time than any man should have to. He watched glumly as glassy-eyed Harris was assisted to his feet and someone handed him a bar rag to put to his bloody nose.

  “It happens this place is in need of a bouncer, Mr. Ketchel,” Richardson said, “and you appear to have the proper aptitude. Pays twenty a week.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Now would be good.”

  They shook on it. Ketchel asked if he could have a couple of dollars in advance to see him through to his first payday. Richardson gave him two silver dollars and then returned to his backroom office. He made the loan so readily that Ketchel wanted to kick himself for not having asked for more.

  AN HOUR LATER the Gretchel girl pushed through the throng to where he stood at the bar with several mugs of beer in front of him, all of them bought by admiring miners. He was half-buzzed and still a little charged with the adrenaline of the fight, and she had to lean close and speak loud for him to hear her through the enveloping din. He’d been giving her the eye all night, she said, and she couldn’t help wondering if he was just too shy to ask for a dance.

  “All you need’s a pair of nickels, honey.” Her scent was a heady mix of perfume and woman musk.

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “I never learned.”

  “Well now, darling, I’ll teach you. But like the man said, first things first.” She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers. He gave her one of the silver dollars.

  It proved less a matter of teaching than uncovering a natural talent. She showed him the basic step-step-close of the waltz and in minutes he was whirling her as smoothly as any swell to the strains of “The Band Played On” and “Daisy Bell.” Then came the box step and swaying to “After the Ball” and “Sidewalks of New York.” Then the jaunty two-step and some other basic moves and they were bouncing happily to “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” and “Hello, My Baby.” After ten dances he gave her the other dollar and they used up that one too, and she accepted a mug of beer in payment for still another turn.

  When he said he was interested in something more than a dance she said she sometimes let a fellow have something more than a dance but it sure cost more than a mug of beer. He asked if she would accept his marker. She said, “Hey, honey, it’s not the sort of thing gets sold on the cuff. You welsh on me, I can’t exactly take it back, can I?”

  He said if he couldn’t clear his debt in cash he’d repay her in kind. She laughed and said he might not have any jack but he sure wasn’t short on cheek.

  When her work shift was done they went to the Buffalo Hotel where she lived, hugging close as they made their way against the biting cold of the wind. The hotel was a block outside of the notorious red-light district he’d heard so much about, including Venus Alley, the heart of the quarter. She told him she’d starve before she’d work in a whorehouse, and shoot herself before sinking as low as an alley crib. She might once in a while be a whore, she said, but she was always her own whore.

  Her room was surprisingly ample, impeccably neat, warmed by a radiator. He wrote “I.O.U. $2, Steve Ketchel” on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She placed it next to a Victor Talking Machine on a table beside the bed, the phonograph equipped with a rigid tone arm and a stationary horn. She said it was her prize possession “of all my worldly goods.” He sat in the only chair and watched her select a record, position it on the turntable, crank the machine, and set the needle in the groove.

  He recognized the tune as the “hoochie-coochie song,” though its correct title was “The Streets of Cairo.” He’d never before seen the dance performed outside of a carnival tent or at such close range or by a prettier woman. Or seen the dancer shed all of her clothes.

  They left the lamp on while they had their sport, and after a short break went at it again in a reprise of gasping and breathless profanities and heaving fits of giggling. She was eight years older than he and hadn’t enjoyed herself this much with a man in some time. When she asked if he had a place to live and he said not exactly, she said he could stay with her and they would see how it worked out. He said all right, but only if she permitted him to pay half the cost of the room for however long he was there. She agreed, then went to the dresser and tore up his marker. “No charge for a roommate,” she said.

  He believed he’d come to the right place.

  The next day he recovered his bindle from the bushes. He unrolled it on her bed to reveal his extra shirt and socks, a tin of matches, a piece of soap. “All my worldly goods,” he said. And laughed when she said there was no reason to sound so proud about it.

  IN HIS FIRST week on the job he was tested by a dozen of the town’s most eminent toughs, every man of them a miner. They had all heard how he’d put down O’Malley and Harris and they wanted to try him, and each night the place was packed with those who wanted to see the action. The Copper Queen’s business boomed.

  He dispatched all challengers, knocking them out or beating them into submission, not always without getting bloodied himself. He sent the quitters on their way with a kick in the pants, he dragged the insensate to a side door and chucked them into the alley. The miners marveled at the prowess of someone so young. By the middle of his second week the deliberate trials fell off and he was dealing chiefly with unruly drunks disposed toward threatening the bartender or harass
ing the piano player or, the most common call for his intervention, taking excessive liberty with the girls.

  The Queen’s girls doted on him. Like Gretchel, most of them were his elder, some by more than a decade, and as he was only seventeen they tended to mother him in all the best ways. But he was also good-looking and a more capable protector than any of them had ever had, and their impulses ranged beyond the maternal. Gretchel was annoyed by their flirtations and even more by his obvious pleasure in them. But experience had taught her the folly of jealous accusation, and she kept her discontent to herself and hoped for the best.

  He lived with her for nearly three weeks before moving in with a girl named Olga Harting who worked at a dance hall a few blocks from the Copper Queen. Gretchel came home from the bakery one afternoon with a warm sack of the cinnamon doughnuts he was fond of and found a note atop the phonograph informing her of his departure and expressing gratitude for her help, saying he would see her later at the Queen.

  Callow as he was about women, he had but a vague inkling of the depth of her affection, the intensity of her hopes. When he showed up for duty that evening he was prepared for a mean look, maybe a hard word, but not the drunken wrath he was met by. She berated him for a lowdown bastard and sloshed a mug of beer into his face. He thanked her for the refreshment, then ducked the empty mug she threw and it smashed a mirror behind him. The onlookers whooped, but when she snatched up a slicing knife from the bar-top platter of pumpernickel and salt ham they all drew farther back. She swiped at Ketchel twice before he caught her wrist and disarmed her. She beat at him with the heels of her fists, cursing incoherently, beat at him until she tired, then burst into sobs and ran out.

  It was another first-rate diversion for the patrons. Richardson had come out of his office and witnessed the tail end of it, and when Stanislaus asked him not to fire her, he said the thought never crossed his mind, she was too popular with his regulars. He would simply deduct a share of her wages every payday until she’d compensated for the busted mirror.

  Gretchel did not speak to him for the next two weeks, not until she deigned to say “Thank you” after he flattened a miner who would not quit pawing her on the dance floor.

  HE NEXT TOOK up with a moody, raven-haired girl named Kate Morgan. She had the prettiest legs and shapeliest bottom he’d ever seen. They lived in a room with a small porch in a spacious boardinghouse owned by a former employee of Venus Alley named Miss Juno who kept her nose out of her tenants’ affairs so long as they did not disturb the neighbors or do damage to the furniture. They shared the premises with Kate’s two cats, a caramel-and-gray called Harry in honor of Harry Longbaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, a man she had always admired, and a black-and-white named Otto because of a black splotch over its mouth in the shape of a Prussian moustache. She had named them in kittenhood a few weeks before realizing they were both females. By then she felt it wouldn’t be right to change their names, thinking it might confuse them.

  “Some clever kid I am,” she said. “Can’t even tell the boys from the girls.”

  “You must’ve had your fingers crossed the first time I took my pants off for you.”

  She threw a pillow at him.

  She came from a wealthy ranching family in Wyoming. Her father’s success the more remarkable in light of her grandfather having landed in America a penniless cowherd from County Cork. She received a good education and extensive ballet training at a private school in Denver, but she’d been a wild-hearted sort even as a child and, to everyone in the family but her father, something of a black sheep. She was fifteen when her father was killed in a hunting accident, and she despised the man her mother married only a year later. At seventeen she joined with a company of entertainers who traveled in wagons all over the West, putting on shows in rough, remote regions. She was with them for three years, until the day the troupe finished up a stint in Butte, where she stayed behind and went to work on the stage of the Big Casino Saloon. She’d now been in Butte almost as long as she’d been with the troupe.

  “Jesus, why Butte?”

  “Well now, laddybuck,” she said in the brogue she sometimes liked to affect, “with all the harps hereabouts, it’s a right bit like the old sod to a lass of Irish root, don’t ye know?”

  “Cut the malarkey, girl. Why not San Francisco? Why not Denver? Kansas City?”

  She said she might well ask him the same question.

  He shrugged. “I like the action around here.”

  She waggled her brow. “I know what you mean, honeybunch, but it’s not like Frisco doesn’t have plenty of action. Denver too. Bigger action.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a lot more law in those places. A lot more cops. This place feels…I don’t know…freer, somehow. More like…” He shrugged.

  “The Wild West?” she said, lowering her voice like a conspirator. She pretended to draw a gun from her hip, aimed her index finger at him and flicked her thumb. “Pow!”

  He clutched at his heart and fell across the bed, kicking his feet in a death throe. She clapped lightly and said, “Bravo!”

  Their room was adjacent to the communal bathroom, and one evening she heard him singing in the tub and was amazed at the loveliness of his voice. He blushed when she told him so, and she kissed him and said he should be proud of such a voice and show it off every chance he had. Every night afterward, he sang to her in bed.

  One night she asked if his Christian name was spelled “s-t-e-ph-e-n” or “s-t-e-v-e-n,” and he confessed it was Stanislaus.

  “Really?” She sat up in the bed.

  “Yep. Polack to the bone.”

  “Daddy’s name was Stanley. When I was little, Ma used to call him Manly Stanley.” And then she was crying into her hands over the memory of her fled girlhood and deceased father.

  He held her close and said she could call him Stanley if she wanted to. He’d never before thought of using the name, but he liked it. Then sang her to sleep with her favorite song, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

  The Michigan Assassin

  He’d been in Butte less than two months when a local promoter named Tex Halliday asked if he was willing to substitute for an injured boxer on the fight card scheduled for the following night at the Big Casino Saloon. In addition to a bar and a theater, the Big Casino boasted the most popular boxing arena in town, an enormous hall with a regulation ring and enough benches to seat hundreds. Halliday had seen Ketchel in action as a bouncer and thought he might do well in the ring.

  “You’d be going against another first-timer,” he said. “He’s got the weight on you, but I’d say you got the sand on him. You won’t even have to hire your own seconds. I got a few fellas who work the corners for fighters who ain’t got their own crew.”

  Although he’d been to the Big Casino once to watch Kate Morgan dance, Ketchel had not gone into the arena. In fact, he had never seen a boxing match, not a real one, with gloves and rules and a referee. His acquaintance with boxing was entirely through hearsay and the pages of the Police Gazette, the foremost sporting periodical of the day, which had given him a standard familiarity with such famous heavyweight champions as the legendary John L. Sullivan, Gentleman Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, and the present champ James Jeffries, the fearsome Boilermaker himself. But like every boy who liked to scrap, Ketchel had often wondered how well he might fare in a prize ring.

  The winner of a Big Casino match always got fifty dollars, Halliday said, the loser no less than twenty-five. Ketchel went to Richardson and told him he was taking the next night off.

  PRIZEFIGHTING WAS A rougher endeavor in those days. In some states boxing was altogether outlawed, and in some states where it was not, the police were invariably on hand to put an end to a fight as soon as it seemed a boxer was in imminent danger of being maimed. In most legal venues, however, even a one-sided battering was permitted to continue to its last scheduled round if the boxer getting the worst of it did not get knocked out before then. Or quit. Or, as happened
every now and then, fall down dead. Fighters routinely engaged in several matches a month and sometimes fought two or three times within a week. Bouts of twenty rounds or more were commonplace. A fight to the finish—until one of the boxers was knocked out or was otherwise unable to continue—was still legal in some states, and such fights could last for hours. The referee enforced the rules against patently dirty tactics such as low blows and hitting a man while he was down, yet otherwise seldom intervened in the proceedings. Some states granted the referee the authority to name the winner of a fight unresolved by knockout, or to call the bout a draw, but boxers often agreed contractually that if there was no knockout the fight had to be a draw, even if it was manifestly one-sided. Other states, particularly in the East, altogether prohibited outcomes by decision, the idea being that a ref without authority to decide an outcome was a ref who could not be bribed. In such states, any fight that ended without a knockout was by default declared “no contest.” Reporters could grant a “newspaper verdict,” but their opinions were strictly unofficial. Montana was at this time one of the few states that used a scoring system to determine the winner of a match that did not end by knockout.

  AS ALWAYS ON fight nights the arena was packed. The clamorous room was moistly hot and smelled thickly of sweat and tobacco fumes and whiskey. The overhead lights were webbed with smoke. Ketchel wore borrowed shoes, baggy red trunks bunched at his waist by the drawstring, a tatty robe imprinted on the back with DR. WATKINS’ MIRACLE HEALTH NOSTRUM.