Bubblegum and Kipling. Tom Mayer

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СКАЧАТЬ looking down at Melvin, and my father yelled, “For Chrissake get to a neutral corner. Quick. Remember Dempsey and Tunney.” Johnny didn’t hear him, though, and stayed there standing over Melvin. When Mr. Gonzalez saw the blood he stopped counting and said, “The fight is over.”

      Mr. Gonzalez and Johnny helped Melvin up and began to walk him around. “Keep your head back,” Mr. Gonzalez said. I brought over one of my unused towels and said, “Here. Take this.”

      Johnny was walking with Melvin and finally he said, “Are you okay, Melvin?”

      Melvin nodded.

      “I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “I’m not sore at you any more.”

      Then Mr. Oglethorpe and my father came over, and we all stood around Melvin, who was standing in the middle of the mat with his head back and a towel over his face. Except for Mrs. Oglethorpe. She stayed in her seat and she looked very mad.

      Melvin nodded again. He was still crying.

      My father said to Mr. Oglethorpe, “You got a game boy there,” and Mr. Oglethorpe said, “Yours is okay too.

      “You fought hard,” my father said to Melvin. “You got pretty fair power.” Melvin looked as if he might be trying to smile underneath the towel.

      “That boy a yours,” Mr. Oglethorpe said. “If I was his size I wouldn’t a climbed in the ring with nobody, much less a kid the size a mine.”

      “My boy’s been training,” my father said.

      “I could tell.”

      Then Mr. Bascomb, who had been standing there listening, said, “Are the young men reconciled?”

      “I think so,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

      “I’m not sore any more,” Johnny said.

      Melvin shook his head to show that he wasn’t sore either.

      “Let’s get out of here,” Mrs. Oglethorpe said loudly from her chair.

      Mr. Oglethorpe turned around and looked at her and said, “As soon as I get ready.”

      My father told Mr. Gonzalez he did a fine job refereeing, and Mr. Gonzalez said if the truth be known he didn’t like anything about boxing. My father didn’t know what to say to that. He knew that I had liked Mr. Gonzalez from the year before when he was my teacher, but Dad thought only women didn’t like fights. I got Dad away before he’d have time to think about it any and ask Mr. Gonzalez questions about why he felt the way he did. Dad probably wouldn’t have said anything more though anyway, because he never did well in school himself and is still afraid of teachers and only talks to them when he has to. He thinks teachers are different from other people.

      In the car on the way home my father didn’t say anything, and neither did Johnny, but you could tell they were happy. Johnny would jerk his head to the side every so often, without moving any of the rest of him, and I knew he was practicing a head feint Dad had showed him that he hadn’t had a chance to use.

      When we got home we told my mother all about it, and she made Johnny sit on her lap, which he plainly didn’t want to do. She felt his forearm where he had been hit, and said perhaps it was broken and ought to be X-rayed. It was getting black and blue. My father said he knew it wasn’t broken. Then my mother asked Johnny again why he had been mad at Melvin.

      “He insulticated me,” Johnny said.

      “But what did he do?” Mother asked. “You must have had something happen to you to bring all of this on.”

      Johnny said, “It’s all over now.”

      “You’re not the slightest bit angry any more?”

      “No.”

      “Well at least we can quit this ridiculous training program,” my mother said.

      “For a while,” my father said.

      “Training was kind of fun,” Johnny said.

      “I can’t imagine how it could be,” my mother said.

      “You fought a good fight,” my father said.

      “Yeah,” I said.

      “Showed you can take it too,” my father said. “Fighter’s got to be able to do that.”

      “I wish Mr. Bascomb had kept time right,” I said. “I didn’t know when to put his mouthpiece back in.”

      “Johnny is not going to fight any more,” my mother said. “Not ever.”

      “I might have to,” Johnny said.

      “No,” Mother said.

      “You can’t tell about things,” Johnny said.

      “He can hit too,” my father said, more to himself than to the rest of us. “I was keeping time myself.” My father had a wristwatch that was a stopwatch too, if you needed it to be. It was a flyer’s watch from World War II that he picked up surplus. “That was a good right in the first and he TKO’d him in a minute forty-seven of the second. That’s not bad at all, for the first time out.”

       TIGER CAT

      THE FIRST SUCCESS of Tiger Cat’s life, and one of his biggest, was not getting eaten by Old Mike, the Airedale. Old Mike was my father’s best friend, and everywhere my father went Old Mike went too. They had a lot of trouble that way with motels that didn’t like dogs, and years later, when my brother Johnny and I were old enough so that we wouldn’t get shocked, my mother would say at dinner parties that it was a terrible problem keeping Old Mike out of the bedroom. My father kept the other dogs at the ranch pretty much, but I think if you had offered him a thousand dollars to send Old Mike away for a week he would have told you to go to hell.

      Old Mike hated cats, and, furthermore, unlike most dogs, he killed a lot of them. When he killed a cat he would bring home its carcass and leave it on the lawn for my father to see. My father hated cats too—they were the only kind of animal he didn’t like, snakes included—and my mother used to say that my father gave Old Mike a box of chocolate marshmallows every time he brought a cat home. Old Mike had a great weakness for chocolates of any kind, but he liked chocolate marshmallows the way an alcoholic likes Haig and Haig Five Star.

      Anyway, as soon as we got Tiger Cat we knew we were going to have trouble with Old Mike. It was actually my grandmother who found Tiger. She was a painter, and she found him one afternoon while she was sketching up on Camino Escondido. She said Tiger kept following her around, and he looked lost and hungry, so she brought him home. My father and Old Mike were at the ranch, and at first my mother said we had to send Tiger Cat off to the animal shelter as soon as we had fed him. She said he was very scraggly and probably had tapeworm, and Old Mike would eat him up the first time he saw him. But Tiger Cat was still a small kitten at the time, and after he had drunk three bowls СКАЧАТЬ