Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 10

You will find a paperclip in the gutter, a bit of tinfoil, a condom wrapper, page seventeen of the Boston Globe. You'll bend and fold them as you walk, into a hat or a sailboat, the canvas straps cutting your wristbone now. You'll place your creation in the gutter and watch the cataract carry it into a storm sewer, inevitably as rain. You'll have seen every ripple of its falling in the ominous neon. You will not have been surprised.

Ceroscopy, anthropomancy, planchette, scapulomancy, omens: nothing, suggestions, glimpses, glimmerings. Nothing to the truth of neon and the sorcery of electric lights.

Magicians are charlatans, for all their power. They can no longer make the future. There is no magic in knowing what happens next. All you have to do is read the signs.

You will walk-you will have been walking-tracing a pattern you will have always known. You are a true charlatan, a magician with your rings and b.a.l.l.s and cards and the three white doves who you know will always return, whenever you hold out your long and perfect hand. Your future has been immutable. You have enjoyed the serenity of perfect certainty. You will have feared and you will have envied and you will have pitied those who are not like you, for their illusion of free will. You will not have been able to imagine such a thing: You have always been able to read the signs.

You have known all your life that this is the day your life ends, because here is Boston Common, where the neon leads you out of Chinatown. And there, on the Common spread out like a banquet of darkness in the rain, will have been the mugger who will be disappointed in how little you have earned, turning scarves to doves on a coldly rainy night. And there, on the Common, will have been the diluted blood, and the silk scarves, and the white feathers sodden in the rain.

You will limp in squishy shoes onto the gra.s.sy border of the Common, resigned and a little relieved, the doves cooing in their box despite the darkness there.

And then a relay will trip. A machine will fail. A ripple of blackness like spilled ink will flutter the height of the East Coast, starting in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, New York City, Hartford, sweet old winding Providence and finally, finally, at long last- Boston.

Behind you, before you, the old gray city will settle into darkness with a sigh like an exhausted dog. And the neon, the signs, the writing on the walls will all wink out.

As you step forward onto the Common, there will come a moment when you will be offered a choice. You will have drawn a silk scarf from a secret pocket and knotted it about your hand. But the canvas strap of the tote will have slipped up your wrist, the rattled doves complaining. You will unwind the scarf, stretch it between your hands, and you will draw a deep and trembling breath. Fear will swallow you. Fear of the known and the unknown, fear of the knife in the darkness and fear of the darkness of never knowing whence the knife will come.

You will have known-a final torment, a final benediction before the curse of prophecy deserts you for an instant of free will-you will have known that you have only seconds to decide.

You will have bound the scarf about your eyes.

You will have knelt in the gra.s.s at the edge of the common, and blindly you will have fumbled the tote bag open, blindly you will have unlatched the cage, blindly you will have lifted the three white doves and set them softly on the sweet, slick, soaking gra.s.s. You will unknot your blindfold as the lights swell behind you, and you will throw the cage away. Your hair will plaster your face, sting your eyes, fill your mouth.

The doves will coo and ruffle and huddle: wet, sleepy, confused. They will sit there dumbly, blinking in the rain and the darkness, unable to see, unable to fly at night. They will cling to each other and mourn the dry safety of their cage.

You will recognize the archetypal battered fedora as it tumbles past you, one bright shivering feather trapped in the band. You will bend and catch it; it will fall into your hand as if destined. You will clap hope's chapeau over draggled curls at a rakish angle, and you will return to the overarching night.

It will be all right. The sun will rise in the morning. The doves will most likely fly away. Sooner or later, the rain will probably end.

You cannot know what will happen next.

Sonny Liston.

Takes the Fall.

1.

"I gotta tell you, Jackie," Sonny Liston said, "I lied to my wife about that. I gotta tell you, I took that fall."

It was Christmas eve, 1970, and Sonny Liston was about the furthest thing you could imagine from a handsome man. He had a furrowed brow and downcast hound dog prisoner eyes that wouldn't meet mine, and the matching furrows on either side of his broad, flat nose ran down to a broad, flat mouth under a pencil thin moustache that was already out of fashion six years ago, when he was still King of the World.

"We all lie sometimes, Sonny," I said, pouring him another scotch. We don't mind if you drink too much in Vegas. We don't mind much of anything at all. "It doesn't signify."

He had what you call a tremendous physical presence, Sonny Liston. He filled up a room so you couldn't take your eyes off him-didn't want to take your eyes off him, and if he was smiling you were smiling, and if he was scowling you were shivering-even when he was sitting quietly, the way he was now, turned away from his kitchen table and his elbows on his knees, one hand big enough for a man twice his size wrapped around the gla.s.s I handed him and the other hanging between his legs, limp across the back of the wrist as if the tendons'd been cut. His suit wasn't long enough for the length of his arms. The coat sleeves and the shirt sleeves with their French cuffs and discreet cufflinks were ridden halfway up his forearms, showing wrists I couldn't have wrapped my fingers around. Tall as he was, he wasn't tall enough for that frame-as if he didn't get enough to eat as a kid-but he was that wide.

Sonny Liston, he was from Arkansas. And you would hear it in his voice, even now. He drank that J&B scotch like knocking back a blender full of raw eggs and held the squat gla.s.s out for more. "I could of beat Ca.s.sius Clay if it weren't for the f.u.c.king mob," he said, while I filled it up again. "I could of beat that G.o.dd.a.m.n flashy pansy."

"I know you could, Sonny," I told him, and it wasn't a lie. "I know you could."

His hands were like mallets, like mauls, like the paws of the bear they styled him. It didn't matter.

He was a broken man, Sonny Liston. He wouldn't meet your eyes, not that he ever would have. You learn that in prison. You learn that from a father who beats you. You learn that when you're black in America.

You keep your eyes down, and maybe there won't be trouble this time.

2.

It's the same thing with fighters as with horses. Race horses, I mean, thoroughbreds, which I know a lot about. I'm the genius of Las Vegas, you see. The One-Eyed Jack, the guardian and the warden of Sin City.

It's a bit like being a magician who works with tigers-the city is my life, and I take care of it. But that means it's my job to make d.a.m.ned sure it doesn't get out and eat anybody.

And because of that, I also know a little about magic and sport and sacrifice, and the real, old blood truth of the laurel crown and what it means to be King for a Day.

The thing about race horses, is that the trick with the good ones isn't getting them to run. It's getting them to stop.

They'll kill themselves running, the good ones. They'll run on broken hearts, broken legs, broken wind. Legend says Black Gold finished his last race with nothing but a shipping bandage holding his flopping hoof to his leg. They shot him on the track, Black Gold, the way they did in those days. And it was mercy when they did it.

He was King, and he was claimed. He went to pay the t.i.the that only greatness pays.

Ruffian, perhaps the best filly that ever ran, shattered herself in a match race that was meant to prove she could have won the Kentucky Derby if she'd raced in it. The great colt Swale ran with a hole in his heart, and no one ever knew until it killed him in the paddock one fine summer day in the third year of his life.

And then there's Charismatic.

Charismatic was a Triple Crown contender until he finished his Belmont third, running on a collapsed leg, with his jockey Chris Antley all but kneeling on the reins, doing anything to drag him down.

Antley left the saddle as soon as his mount saw the wire and could be slowed. He dove over Charismatic's shoulder and got underneath him before the horse had stopped moving; he held the broken Charismatic up with his shoulders and his own two hands until the veterinarians arrived. Between Antley and the surgeons, they saved the colt. Because Antley took that fall.

n.o.body could save Antley, who was dead himself within two years from a drug overdose. He died so hard that investigators first called it a homicide.

When you run with all G.o.d gave you, you run out of track G.o.dd.a.m.ned fast.

3.

Sonny was just like that. Just like a race horse. Just like every other G.o.dd.a.m.ned fighter. A little bit crazy, a little bit fierce, a little bit desperate, and ignorant of the concept of defeat under any circ.u.mstances.

Until he met Ca.s.sius Clay in the ring.

They fought twice. First time was in 1964, and I watched that fight live in a movie theatre. We didn't have pay-per-view then, and the fight happened in Florida, not here at home in Vegas.

I remember it real well, though.

Liston was a monster, you have to understand. He wasn't real big for a fighter, only six foot one, but he hulked. He loomed. His opponents would flinch away before he ever pulled back a punch.

I've met Mike Tyson too, who gets compared to Liston. And I don't think it's just because they're both hard men, or that Liston also was accused of s.e.xual a.s.sault. It's because Tyson has that same thing, the power of personal gravity that bends the available light and every eye down to him, even when he's walking quietly through a crowded room, wearing a warm-up jacket and a smile.

So that was Liston. He was a stone golem, a thing out of legend, the f.u.c.king bogeyman. He was going to walk through Clay like the Kool-Aid pitcher walking through a paper wall.

And we were all in our seats, waiting to see this insolent prince beat down by the barbarian king.

And there was a moment when Clay stepped up to Liston, and they touched gloves, and the whole theatre went still.

Because Clay was just as big as Liston. And Clay wasn't looking down.

Liston retired in the seventh round. Maybe he had a dislocated shoulder, and maybe he didn't, and maybe the Mob told him to throw the fight so they could bet on the underdog Clay and Liston just couldn't quite make himself fall over and play dead.

And Ca.s.sius Clay, you see, he grew up to be Muhammad Ali.

4.

Sonny didn't tell me about that fight. He told me about the other one.

Phil Ochs wrote a song about it, and so did Mark Knopfler: that legendary fight in 1965, the one where, in the very first minute of the very first round, Sonny Liston took a fall.

Popular poets, Ochs and Knopfler, and what do you think the bards were? That kind of magic, the old dark magic that soaks down the roots of the world and keeps it rich, it's a transformative magic. It never goes away.

However you spill it, it's blood that makes the cactus grow. Ochs, just to interject a little more irony here, paid for his power in his own blood as well.

5.

Twenty-fifth child of twenty-six, Sonny Liston. A tenant farmer's son, whose father beat him b.l.o.o.d.y. He never would meet my eye, even there in his room, this close to Christmas, near the cold bent stub end of 1970.

He never would meet a white man's eyes. Even the eye of the One-Eyed Jack, patron saint of Las Vegas, when Jackie was pouring him J&B. Not a grown man's eye, anyway, though he loved kids-and kids loved him. The bear was a teddy bear when you got him around children.

But he told me all about that fight. How the Mob told him to throw it or they'd kill him and his Momma and a selection of his brothers and sisters too. How he did what they told him in the most defiant manner possible. So the whole f.u.c.king world would know he took that fall.

The thing is, I didn't believe him.

I sat there and nodded and listened, and I thought, Sonny Liston didn't throw that fight. That famous "Phantom Punch"? Mohammed Ali got lucky. Hit a nerve cl.u.s.ter or something. Sonny Liston, the unstoppable Sonny Liston, the man with a heart of piston steel and a hand like John Henry's hammer-Sonny Liston, he went down. It was a fluke, a freak thing, some kind of an accident.

I thought going down like that shamed him, so he told his wife he gave up because he knew Ali was better and he didn't feel like fighting just to get beat. But he told me that other story, about the mob, and he drank another scotch and he toasted Muhammad Ali, though Sonny'd kind of hated him. Ali had been barred from fighting from 1967 until just that last year, who was facing a jail term because he wouldn't go and die in Vietnam.

Sensible man, if you happen to ask me.

But I knew Sonny didn't throw that fight for the Mob. I knew because I also knew this other thing about that fight, because I am the soul of Las Vegas, and in 1965, the Mob was Las Vegas.

And I knew they'd had a few words with Sonny before he went into the ring.

Sonny Liston was supposed to win. And Muhammad Ali was supposed to die.

6.

The one thing in his life that Sonny Liston could never hit back against was his daddy. Sonny, whose given name was Charles, but who called himself Sonny all his adult life.

Sonny had learned the hard way that you never look a white man in the eye. That you never look any man in the eye unless you mean to beat him down. That you never look the Man in the eye, because if you do he's gonna beat you down.

He did his time in jail, Sonny Liston. He went in a boy and he came out a prize fighter, and when he came out he was owned by the Mob.

You can see it in the photos and you could see it in his face, when you met him, when you reached out to touch his hand; he almost never smiled, and his eyes always held this kind of deep sonorous seriousness over his black, flat, damaged nose.

Sonny Liston was a jailbird. Sonny Liston belonged to the Mob the same way his daddy belonged to the land.

Ca.s.sius Clay, G.o.d bless him, changed his slave name two days after that first bout with Sonny, as if winning it freed up something in him. Muhammad Ali, G.o.d bless him, never learned that lesson about looking down.

7.

Boxing is called the sweet science. And horse racing is the sport of kings.