Max Baer and the Star of David Read online

  “A-nonymous,” I whispered.

  “That too,” Max said, and he pointed to one of the boxers. “So what are you waiting for? Ring that bell, and let’s get to it. But first—Frankie Jr.—you take another bow, okay? You take two bows, one for you and one for your father, and you know what? Take one for your mother too, and for your wife, and for your two little kids, and it don’t matter where the money comes from, right? The main thing is to use it to give us a chance we wouldn’t get otherwise. Like I’d still be chopping up sides of beef, and Horace here, who could have been a champion, folks, let me tell you that—oh Horace had the goods for sure—and Horace, he might be washing pots and pans somewhere but instead he’s got a wife and a son who’s the smartest kid in California and who’s best buddies with my own boy, Max Jr. But for Horace friendship came first, see, and that’s another story for another day, so what’s important for you to know is that I love Horace like I love my own brothers—only more because he ain’t my brother, if you get what I mean—and let’s have him take a bow for all the great work he does here—!”

  People cheered, and the bell clanged, and while I raised my gloved hands in a gesture of thanks and waved to my boxers and well-wishers, Max came at me, hit me two hard punches to the gut, then clipped me on the chin.

  “Gotta pay attention, friend,” he said. “That bell rang, and when it does you gotta be ready to come out fighting, because my name is Maximilian Adelbert Baer and I was once heavyweight champion of the world, in case nobody told you.”

  I fell back on the ropes, shook my head to clear it, feigned collapse—as if I were going to fall flat on my face—and when Max put his gloved palms out to catch me, I caught him with a good left hook to the gut, and then a solid roundhouse right.

  Max did a wobbly backwards jig across the ring and, beaming with happiness, shouted out so everyone could hear: “See what I mean about what a great fighter he is, and how he got the one thing I never had?” He tapped on the side of his head. “And we all know what that is … or ain’t.”

  Then he came at me again, and we sashayed around the ring together, trading feints and jabs, and when the bell clanged to end the round, Max gave me a big hug—“This is a genuine Baer hug, if you get my meaning!” he called out to the crowd—and then he told me to choose a half-dozen fighters, and each of them would get a minute in the ring with him, and if any of them was able to land a glove on his gorgeous kisser, he would be rewarded with a kiss from Ilana! I chose six of my best boxers, and one at a time they got in the ring with Max and went at him, but Max skipped and danced around just beyond their reach, and sometimes he leaned back against the ropes and let them come at him, toying with them, slipping punches deftly, and batting away their blows as if swatting away flies. And after he was done with the six boxers, my boys started to urge me to go in against Max and win a kiss from Ilana, and began a chant that grew louder and louder.

  “Ho-race! Ho-race!” they chanted. “We want Horace! We want Horace! We want Horace! Ho-race! Ho-race!”

  I started back into the ring, and Max hugged me again, and told the crowd that he couldn’t make the same wager with me that he’d made with my boys. And why was that?

  “Because Horace here is a happily married man,” he said. “He’s married to the most wonderful woman in the world, and I’m proud to say she’s my friend too, and if she heard that I was responsible for him getting kisses from Ilana, why I’d be in deep soup, my friends.”

  Everyone laughed, and I was feeling so happy in that moment—proud of my teams, and proud to be Max’s friend, and happy the two of us could give and take the way we could—that I was wishing the afternoon would never end. So I did something I had not expected to do. I suggested that we turn the prize for our prizefighting around, and that for every blow Max landed on my face, he would get a kiss from Ilana.

  Max beamed. “Now I’ve got a wonderful wife and kids too, like Horace, and I’m a married man too—” he said, and paused for a second or two “—but I’m not a fanatic about it.”

  And then he and I waltzed around the ring for a while, and gave the folks a show they would never forget, and I made sure that, try as he might, Max did not win a single kiss from Ilana.

  After Max and I had showered and dressed, and he was done giving out autographs, he and I walked to his car, exchanging news about our wives and our children, and when we were at the car, he put his arms around me and held me close to him.

  “You’re looking great, Horace,” he said, “and I’m glad we got this time to be alone, you and me, because I want you to know something I ain’t even told Mary Ellen or the kids, see—because even though I made a joke from it, it was true what the doc said to me about my ticker, so here’s what I’m gonna ask you to do. I’m gonna ask you to give me a little more time the next few months, especially when I’m out on the road, so you can keep an eye on me.”

  “Sure, Max,” I said.

  “I meant it when I said you’re my best friend in the world,” he said. “And I know you got your troubles too, so I kept away from your eyes, and I appreciated that you never used them as an excuse for us not to go at each other, because that shows the kind of classy guy you are. You trusted me on that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And hey—you were quick as ever with those hands of yours.” He faked an uppercut to my chin, and I blocked it. “Like old times, right? You and me shuffling around, everybody cheering us on and loving us to death. And speaking of loving, there’s something else I know, ’cause you got a certain look in your eyes I never seen before, and it tells me you’re a man in love, and I bet I got that right.”

  This was when I noticed Hawkins standing by the side of the building, between two large trash containers. He was staring at us without trying to hide, and he was holding an envelope.

  I turned away. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Nothing important—just that I love you, Horace,” he said. “And it ain’t that I love men, see, but that I love you, okay? And with the news I got from my doc this morning, and seeing Frankie Campbell’s boy, I figure why hold back now. So I’m saying what I been wanting to say, which is I never loved anyone the way I loved you. None of my wives, and none of the actresses and chorus girls I played patty-cake with, and not even Joleen, but you don’t tell her that, okay? I wouldn’t want to make her feel bad, or—” he broke off “—it’s just that I miss us hanging out together the way we did, on the road and stuff, and me being the crazy man-about-town, and making people happy wherever we went, and you there to keep me out of real trouble. I ain’t sorry for anything I did in this life, though, good or bad. No regrets, Horace, right? I mean, I never wanted to hurt nobody, see, and…”

  He was crying softly, and I realized that until the doctor had warned him about his heart, it had probably never occurred to him that he was going to die some day. I held him close to me, and while I did I began preparing myself for Hawkins.

  “Will you be all right?” I asked.

  “Oh sure,” he said. “Like Ilana says, only in Hungarian, a saying her people got—‘Everything’s fine except for all this blood pouring out of a hole in my neck.’”

  For a brief moment, in return for what he was confiding in me, I considered telling him the truth about me and Joleen. But what would be gained by telling him now, I asked myself. Instead, I told him I had been missing him too, and to give my warm regards to Max Jr. and his family.

  “And you do know me well, yes, because there is someone now,” I added. “It’s very unexpected and quite wonderful—in truth, it’s as if I’ve fallen in love for the very first time in my life.”

  “Yes,” Max said. “Sure, Horace. I’m glad for you, but with me, see, it’s always been like a hunger that no matter what I eat, I want more, so I just keep eating. Not just for the ladies, or food, or for going out on the town, but for life. People say you can’t have everything—but hey—I want everything!—and the truth is I’m a little bit scared now, that
before I get to have it all they’re gonna tell me time’s up, the show’s over, and that’s why…”

  I glanced toward the YMCA. Hawkins was gone, and Ilana was walking toward us, arm in arm with two of my boxers, Leo behind them, the four of them laughing.

  “So you be good, and say hi to Joleen and Horace Jr.,” Max said, “and I’ll call you, and let you take care of me—we got a deal, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you tell Joleen I’ve been thinking about her too.”

  “Yes.”

  “You fought good, Horace,” he said, and he said good-by to my fighters, gave them a Confucious saying about it being good for a girl to meet a boy in the park, but better for a boy to park meat in a girl, and then he got into his car with Ilana and Leo, and drove away.

  Instead of going home, I made my way down to the Embarcadero, and walked along the harbor until I was under the Golden Gate Bridge, after which I meandered side streets I recalled from when Joleen and I had first lived in San Francisco. I walked and I walked, seemingly without purpose, but wound up where I knew I would, at the house Joleen and I had been living in at the time we met Max Baer, and before I could allow memories to wash through me—the sun had gone down by now, and though my visual acuity was weaker than usual at this time of day—I could make out a man standing in the alleyway next to our old house, and I knew it was Hawkins. I was not surprised.

  “Got what you want,” he said, showing me the envelope. “Had your chance to show me the man today, but you lost it. So now I gonna do what I tell you I gonna do and bring that man down big-time, make myself a dowry like you never got for Joleen.”

  I hung my head as if I were a defeated man. But I was ready for him. He was determined to destroy Max Baer’s life, or to grow wealthy in the attempt, and I was equally determined to do whatever was necessary to keep him from doing so. But, like Max, Hawkins was afflicted with an insatiable hunger, I knew, and once he was done with me, Max, and Joleen, he would surely move on to Horace Jr., Miss Hémon, Mary Ellen, and others.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said, and glanced around to see if anyone had followed either of us, or was out walking. The neighborhood, to judge from debris in the street and the sorry state of the houses, several of them abandoned, had clearly fallen on hard times. Next to a three-storey Victorian house that was being demolished—two houses away from where ours still stood—there was now an empty lot, and—my good fortune—two dumpsters sitting in it, one of them overflowing with debris.

  “Well before we get to that, I tell you about your wife and what she be to me, so we got no secrets between us,” he said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Now since I been calling you brother from the time we met, we gonna add to that by telling you that I be brother to Joleen too,” he said. “But you know that already, don’t you? Because Joleen, you two being close as any brother and sister I know, and she and me getting acquainted again, talking about how we killed our old selves off, made them into new folks—into born-again critters, like they like to say.”

  This was and was not news to me, but I could not, in the moment, understand for how long this had and had not been so.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “But what you don’t know is that she be good to me and all her brothers, the old man too, the way she be to you,” he said. “She tell you all that, right?”

  I said nothing.

  “Way I see it, you been a blind man a long time before you get the diabetes,” he said. “You been blind all your life, because—”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “The money, man,” he said. “I tell you that before. I want the money. You get me the money however you do, maybe from your bumboy Max, all the loot he gets from movies and shit, and I let you know where to bring it, and I give you the pictures, and then I be on my way, you never see me again, and that’s a promise.”

  I could hear Joleen telling me and Max about her brother James, and my only disappointment, I realized, was that I had no container of lye buried nearby. Whereas James had been imaginary, however, Hawkins was real. He was real, I imagined telling Joleen, in the way Abel was real to Cain, and Jacob to Esau, and Isaac to Ishmael, and Joseph to his brothers, and Judas to Jesus. Whether or not he succeeded in doing in Max, the probability that he would continue to shadow me for days, months, or years was a prospect that induced in me a supreme weariness—an overwhelming desire to close my eyes and sleep, and dream, and in my dreams, to tumble into deeper sleep.

  “Let me see the pictures,” I said.

  He laughed. “You think I some dumb nigger, just give them to you and then you conk me out again, you got another think coming,” he said. “Anyways, even you beat shit out of me, and take these, there’s another envelope I give to somebody, for insurance, like they like to say.”

  “You’re Simon, aren’t you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, and you get my apologies for me not being the Simon I was when you was a boy—but I had some hard times, wasn’t like you, her there feeding you every damned day of your life,” he said. “But once I got away, didn’t want nobody to know who I was, so I watched you two and done what you done and got me a name with a new life of my own.”

  “And what happened to our father?”

  “He died of the diabetes, like I told you,” he said. “Only I helped it along a little bit. Had it coming, stuff he did to us, and bet you agree on that.”

  “I do.”

  “The thing is, Joleen—I call her that out of respect—she loved it more than any woman I ever know, used to say it made her blind, ain’t that a pisser, given me with my eye, and you with both yours gone soon,” he said. “‘Oh you screwin’ me blind, Simon,’ she’d say to me. ‘You screwin’ me blind’—only what she did with you must have been upside down and inside out, ’cause it make you the blind man.”

  “Let me see the pictures,” I said.

  “Not on your life,” he said.

  “Then on yours,” I said, and I faked a left to the stomach, rattled him with a solid right to his blind eye. He was ready too, though, and as he staggered backwards, he clicked a knife open, warned me he was quicker than he looked, that he’d used his little friend before and not to ask about the blood it knew in its lifetime. He could give me an eye like his if I wanted, no extra charge.

  “You just get me the money, and we be done,” he said. “’Cause you got a son now, and we wouldn’t want him hurt no ways, and you got a wife who got what I like to call ‘family feeling’ for us all, and don’t know how she go on living, her son have an accident on his way home one night.”

  “Get him, Max,” I said then, and when Hawkins turned around and jabbed the air where he thought Max would be, I hit him with a single rabbit punch to the back of his neck that did most of the job I intended it to do.

  He lay there, lifeless, though his heart continued to beat. I opened the envelope and there was nothing in it but a sports page from the San Francisco Examiner with an article about Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants. I was not surprised. I lifted Hawkins, draped one of his arms over my shoulder, and walked with him to the empty lot as if walking a drunken friend home. When we got to the dumpsters, I laid him on the ground, took out my syringe, lifted his sleeve, filled the syringe with air, found a vein, and injected the air.

  He twitched, but only two or three times, and a minute later, I took two steps up the metal rungs on the side of the dumpster that was mostly empty, and heaved him up and over the edge. I walked away, checking out garages until I found a gas can next to a lawnmower. I borrowed the can, went to the dumpster, poured the gasoline in on Hawkins. Then I lit the envelope that had no pictures in it, and dropped it into the dumpster. A few seconds later, the flames whooshed and rose, and I tossed the syringe in, and before the sun rose, I knew—something I would love to have been able to say to Max, because he was a man who appreciated bad jokes as well as good ones—Simon Abraham, good son of the South th
at he was, would be gone with the wind. And who will miss you? I heard myself ask. Who will care?

  When I arrived home, Joleen did not ask me why I was late or where I had been—she rarely did—and she set out dinner for the two of us. She did ask how the event at the YMCA had gone, but I told her it had gone well, and that Max had asked about her and Horace Jr.

  “Simon will not bother us anymore,” I said.

  “Simon?

  “Our brother,” I said.

  “Then you know,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “But we had a talk, and I persuaded him to leave San Francisco and never return.”

  “You saw to that?”

  “I did.”

  “Whatever he told you about us, you should take with the proverbial grain of salt.”

  “Not a pillar of salt?”

  “I am not Lot’s wife—or your wife either, for that matter,” she said.

  “True enough,” I said.

  “I’ve never been one to look back.”

  “Of course.”

  “He was a nasty man, like our father,” she said. “He led a pitiable life, and against my better judgment, I felt sorry for him at times—blood is blood, Horace—and I probably should have told you about him years ago.”

  “He’s gone now,” I said.

  “A ghost become a ghost?” she asked.

  “You might say that,” I said.

  “Then I thank you for seeing that he will not haunt us anymore,” she said. “You must feel relieved.”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “In truth, I didn’t know what to say when he came calling and made himself known to me, for if he hadn’t made himself known to me, I would not have recognized him,” she said. “What to do, I kept thinking. What to do. But everything that came to mind would, in my mind, have only made things worse. So I did nothing.” She gave me a half smile. “I am sorry, Horace, but seeing Max today must have been a joy, and you have been looking quite good of late—remarkably good, in fact. Despite Hawkins, and the diabetes, and living with me and my clouded moods, I have never seen you looking better, and that makes me happy.”