The Harder They Fall Read Online Free Page B

Brownie snapshot, slightly overexposed, of a well-set-up kid grinning under a ten-gallon hat.
    ‘New picture of my kid the folks just sent me.’
    While I took a dutiful hinge at it she said, ‘He’s the image of Billy. Isn’t he a doll?’
    He did look like Beaumont – the same overdevelopment from the waist up, with the legs tapering down nicely. On his face was a look of cheerful viciousness.
    ‘He’ll be nine next month,’ Shirley said. ‘He’s with his grandparents on a ranch near home. He wants to be a veterinary. I don’t care what he does, as long as he stays out of the ring. He can be a card player or a drummer or a pimp if he wants to. But, by God, if I ever hear that he’s turning out to be a fighter like his old man, I’ll go home and kick his little annyfay for him.’

CHAPTER TWO
    When I am in a pub and the phone is for me I am never too happy about it. It means the natural rhythm of my day is about to be interrupted by the unexpected. Shirley had gone back to the place, ‘to make a new girl feel at home’, as she put it, and Beth had dropped in to pick me up. She was annoyed because I was slightly swizzled when she came in. Beth wasn’t WCTU or anything, but she liked me to do my drinking with her. She thought I wasted too much time shooting the breeze with Charles and Shirley and the other characters. If my job didn’t take up all my time, she said, I should plant myself in the room at the hotel and try to finish that play.
    The big mistake I made with Beth was that once when I had her up to my room – in the days when I still had to impress her – I showed her that unfinished first act. Beth didn’t have too much to say about it, except for wanting meto get it done. That was the trouble with Beth: she always wanted me to finish things. I proposed to her once in a drunken moment and I think secretly she always held it against me for not mentioning the proposal again when I sobered up. I guess she just wanted me to finish whatever I started.
    When I first met her, Beth was fresh out of Smith College, where her Phi Bete key had been good for a $25-a-week job with
Life
, in their training squad for researchers. Everything she knew came out of books. Her old man taught Economics at Amherst and her old lady was the daughter of a Dartmouth dean. So when I first began to tell her about the boxing business, she thought it was fascinating. That’s the word she used for this business – fascinating. This fight talk was a new kind of talk for Beth, and all the time she was professing to despise it, I could tell it was getting to her. Even if only as a novelty, it was getting to her and I was the ideal interpreter of this new world that repelled and attracted her. That’s how I got to Beth myself. I was just enough of a citizen of this strange new world to  excite her and yet – since Beth could never completely recover from her snobberies, intellectual and otherwise – there was just enough Ivy still clinging to me, just enough Cottage Club, just enough ability to relate the phenomenon of prizefighting to her academic vocabulary to make me acceptable.
    I think my talking about trying to write a play on boxing gave her a justification for being interested in me, just as it seemed to justify my staying in the game.
    But this is taking us back a year and a half. It’s almostanother story. In the story I am telling here, Beth is miffed again – her impatience with me had been increasing lately – and somebody wants me on the telephone.
    It was Killer Menegheni. Killer was a combined bodyguard, companion, masseur and private secretary to Nick. I don’t really think the Killer had ever been responsible for anybody’s funeral, but the legend had sprung up that the Killer would have been a featherweight champ if he hadn’t killed a man in the ring his third time out. I had looked it up, but no Menegheni, and the
Ring Record Book
almost always gives the boys’ right names in parentheses under