The Night Watchman(15)
Someone gave an incoherent shriek.
Valentine yelled, “Hit ’im hard!”
Patrice, using Chippewa in her excitement, screamed, “Bakite’o!”
She could see Thomas and Rose and their children a few rows in front of her, Thomas quiet, watching intently, holding Fee in his arms, Wade and Sharlo hopping around throwing rabbit punches. For a moment, she wondered about Thomas. There was something about his stillness within the motion of the rest of the crowd. As if he were watching something other than the fight. And it was true. There was a visceral quality to his watching.
Thomas was flinching mentally at the blows, but he was seeing something different than the rest of the crowd. The Wobble fans had begun to cluck and laugh. The Indians called desperately, hope sinking. Thomas saw that the blows that Joe Wobble landed slid away, harmless. He saw that Wood was accepting but deflecting the punishment. Then he saw three other people in the crowd were tense and quiet as he was—up front ringside, Barnes and his sidekick, the English teacher who directed all of the school plays. And Juggie Blue. They were anticipating something. There was one minute left to the round when Wood found the opening he’d been studying. He stepped away as if in fear, drawing a greedy swing. It would have been a knockout blow had it landed. All Joe’s strength was behind it, which put him off balance and open to Wood’s full-on left hook to the jaw. Followed swiftly by a right blow to the side of the head. Then a musical combination. Joe’s guard went to pieces and he stumbled. Wood moved in and the bell rang, too soon.
Barnes jumped into the ring shouting, “Foul! Foul! Fifteen seconds left!”
The referee fended him off, checked the clock, admonished the timekeeper, and restarted the round. Which went on points to Joe Wobble although anyone could see that the timekeeper had cheated for Wobble and interrupted the momentum, rattling Wood Mountain, who surged back twice in the next round but ultimately lost the fight.
Everyone filed out quietly, Indians shaking hands with Indians, farm people now satisfied. The fight had turned out as it was supposed to turn out and they, too, were muttering peaceably. The excitement had fallen out of everyone and nothing new had happened. There was a stiff black wind and people hurried to cars or pulled their coats close and hunched along quickly through the streets.
On the way home, the girls mourned. But Thomas had seen that Wood Mountain had improved to such a degree that he was becoming the faster, cannier, even better fighter. He’d come close on points. Thomas wondered if Barnes could fix whatever was holding back Juggie’s boy. Even with the cheating timekeeper, Wood Mountain could have triumphed.
Within the first five miles everyone but Thomas fell asleep. As usual, he was left to think. Wood Mountain’s father, Archille, had been well over six feet tall, powerful, with a beak of a nose and a broad smile. He and Thomas had train-hopped together, following the winter-wheat harvest through July, hiring on to threshing crews until finally the last crop, corn. In those days, corn had to dry on the stalk late into the season so the workers could pick by hand. One year, they started south and just kept going all the way down to where the desert began. Somewhere in Texas, in 1931, they were passing by a church on Sunday morning when the sheriff appeared. Squads of just deputized police agents pushed them toward the church, then surrounded the people who poured out of the church, all Mexicans.
“Damnitall,” said Archille, “they think we’re Mexicans.”
They were swept up in one of the hundreds of Depression-era raids in which over a million Mexican workers, many of them citizens, were rounded up and shipped across the border. Texas didn’t like Indians any better than Mexicans, so their papers didn’t help. Working on the harvest crews, both Thomas and Archille had learned to be elaborately polite to white people. The surprise worked better up north. Sometimes it set them off down here.
“Excuse me, sir. May I have a word?”
“You’ll go back where you came from,” said the sheriff.
“We’re from North Dakota,” said Archille. His easy smile didn’t work on the sheriff. “We’re not Mexicans. We’re American Indians.”
“Oh really? Well, consider this Custer’s payback.”
“Since my grandfather killed him,” said Archille, “there is a certain justice to the idea. Still, Thomas here is a bona fide American citizen. I’m Canadian. My brother fought in the trenches. My uncle was at the Somme.”
The sheriff’s neck enlarged and he bawled out an incomprehensible epithet. Then he gestured at a couple of the officers. Thomas and Archille were thrown in a truck with the others, trundled down to the border. Along the way, they learned some Spanish and Archille became infatuated with a girl who pinned up her elaborate braids and dressed in only white. This was the first time they had ever met a woman with a certain “look” and they talked about it after. How she, Adolfa, possessed this distinction. Maybe it was a discipline. She was doubtless poor, but the white dress and the hair gave her an air of wealth. Her father wore a straw fedora hat, suspenders, and a white shirt. The two of them, in the same truck but looking like they carried first-class tickets, were an inspiration to Thomas. When they were finally able to sneak back over the border, he bought a wide-brimmed fedora made of soft brown felt. They headed back up north on the freights. The people at the stations were whiter and blonder with every stop. And at each stop the hoboes in the yards were colder, wearier, sicker. They paid for the last tickets, on the Galloping Goose. The two got off at St. John. There was Juggie waiting at the station with her hands on her hips. How she knew they were coming in on that train was a complete mystery.