Free Blood Game by Ed Gorman Page B

the sweltering fields, where they put the worst of them—as they defined the worst of them, anyway—those fit not for social skills or the subtle machinations of being a servant. He was fit only for stoop labor where his hands got bloody from pulling everything from turnips to cotton from the ground and where on a lucky day in the com he might have sex with a young girl.
    He broke his first jaw when he was fifteen. A white man had watched as Franklin Rooney had at first resisted and then given in to the taunts of another black boy. Rooney went up to him and broke the boy’s jaw with a single punch. How the boy had wailed. How the boy had backed away, terrified.
    By age seventeen Rooney was a fixture on an eastern “colored” circuit of boxers. While the whites scorned him, as whites always did, the advantage to being a fighter was that it earned respect from certain types of black people, especially those who inhabited the taverns and brothels of Rooney’s choice. Men feared him and women adored him. Sometimes even white women came to watch him fight, and there was no mistaking what he saw in their soft blue eyes.
    But early on Rooney knew that despite his cunning, stolid body, his deft right hand, and a certain amount of ring skill, he would never be major. He watched other fighters, black and white, work their way up, but somehow it never happened for him. He stayed on the “circuit,” as folks called it, and watched as other men, lesser men, succeeded. He was told it was because he “just wasn’t ready for it.” He knew it because he was so ugly, the nose too splayed, the lips comically thick, the eyes seeming to pop from his head. People who followed the fights wanted their man to look, if not heroic, at least decent. No matter what he did, Rooney couldn’t look good. He fussed with his hair, he grew a beard, he had his teeth worked on, he took to wearing a gray cutaway and matching top hat. It didn’t matter. No matter what you did to Rooney’s face, you couldn’t alter it. It was the sort of face that, no matter how long you stared at it, you never quite got used to.
    He beat Jackson in ’88 and Salivar in ’89. He even beat a Chilean named Estafen. He awakened one day and noticed how gray his hair was getting. A few weeks later, fighting a plump kid he should have had no problem with, he nearly got knocked out. It wasn’t that the kid was so good. It was that Rooney was getting so bad. Strength, endurance, quickness—by the time he was age thirty they had all left him. And they would never come back.
    Wifeless, even finding few prostitutes who were willing to welcome him into their beds, he spent his life trying to make some sense of forces he sensed but could not understand. Why had he been bom not only colored but so ugly? Why were less gifted men promoted when he was not? Would he ever know anything remotely like a normal life? The other day, walking up the street, he’d noticed a small cottage surrounded by a picket fence. A man and woman had stood in the yard, hand in hand, watching a dazzling little blonde girl play with a calico dog. Rooney had almost been overcome by a feeling that started out envy but ended up sadness. Would he ever have a life like that? Ever?
    â€œYou know what we’re looking for, Rooney.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWe want a show.”
    Rooney nodded.
    â€œA good show, Rooney.”
    Rooney nodded again.
    â€œHe hits you, you get up. Meanwhile, you hit him every chance you get.”
    â€œYou ever see Carter anymore?”
    â€œNot anymore.” John T. Stoddard’s eyes dropped, and Rooney wondered what was wrong.
    â€œHe head east?”
    â€œI’m not sure where he headed. He—died,” Stoddard replied.
    â€œDied?”
    â€œIn the ring.”
    â€œCarter?”
    â€œHad you seen him in a while?”
    â€œNot for a while, no.”
    â€œHe’d started to