Bullets and Fire Read online

  The Big Blow

  ‘Lil’ Arthur ran down to the Sporting Club that night and stood in front of it, his hands in his pants pockets. The wind was brisk, and the air was just plain sour, like milk that had dried on a rag.

  The Sporting Club was a huge building with many windows and great columns that held up a vast expanse of second floor, and all around grew manicured trees, and beyond the trees was a wrought iron fence where each spike of the fence was tipped like a spear head; beyond that there were more scattered trees, then the street and a staggering of glowing gas street lights.

  There were no lights on in the building, and the tall windows that ringed the first and second floor were like a row of rectangular mouths, dark and foreboding, hungry, picking up occasional flickers of light from the gas lamps.

  Unless he was fighting, unless he was invited and went in the back door at a prescribed time, he could not walk inside The Sporting Club. No niggers were to pass through the same door as the lily whites.

  ‘Lil’ Arthur closed his eyes and opened them slowly and imagined himself walking through the gate that led up to the club; walking through it and then the door, all dressed out in fine clothes with a bowler hat, and just to make it more amusing, a colored woman on one arm, a white woman on the other. Maybe, just to make things better, he could have one black hand on the white woman’s ass as he went through the door.

  Hell, why not a finger up her ass?

  ‘Lil’ Arthur had heard his ancestors had been sold by their own people into slavery and that they were friends to the white slavers who bought his people.

  It was rumored that one of his distant ancestors had been born in a grave in Mississippi. A pregnant colored woman named Ida had died after a Held accident, had been dumped in a ditch near the corn Held about dusk and covered.

  A little later that night a muffled cry was heard, like a young panther screaming”.

  Somehow, that woman, in death, a rigor spasm perhaps, or maybe she had been barely alive when buried, had given birth to a child and that child was alive and screaming to be noticed.

  When Massa sent slaves to see what the wailing was about, they dug up a child, attached by his umbilical cord to his dead mother. They pulled the childout, a boy, a huge boy, cleaned him up, and he lived and was named Hercules by the plantation owner. He was Massa’s boxer, and he beat all comers. All blacks, that was. No white man would fight him.

  ‘Lil’ Arthur believed he was the descendent of that boy who became a man named Hercules, famous for his strength and his ability to work any man down. He didn’t know it for a fact, but it was the family story and one he wanted to believe.

  But Hercules—born of a woman determined even in death to finish bringing him into the world—in spite of his strength, in spite of his pride, never walked through the front door of a white man’s building or fought a white man.

  ‘Lil’ Arthur was going to be the first of his ancestral line to do that, and this fight, he felt it in his bones, was his ticket of admission through that door, and others.

  By God, thought ‘Lil’ Arthur. I’m gonna change the world.

  Yes sir, Saturday, he was going to fight a heavyweight crown contender, and though it would not be listed as an official fight, and McBride was just in it to pick up some money, he was glad to have the chance to fight a man who might fight for the championship some day.

  If he could beat him, even if it didn’t affect McBride’s record, ‘Lil’ Arthur knew he’d have that; he would have beaten a contender for the Heavyweight Championship of the world.

  It was a real beginning and a far cry from The Battle Royales he had first participated in. There was a time when he looked upon those degrading events with favor.

  He remembered his first Battle Royale. His friend Ernest had talked him into it. Once a month, sometimes more often, white “sporting men” liked to get a bunch of colored boys and men to come down to the club for a free-for-all. Would put nine or ten of them in a ring, sometimes make them strip naked and wear Sambo masks. He’d done that once himself.

  While the coloreds fought, the whites would toss money and yell for them to “kill one another.” Sometimes they’d tie two coloreds together by the ankles, let them go at it. Once, ‘Lil’ Arthur saw a fight between two one legged colored boys, hopping about the ring and clubbing each other. Blood flowed thick as molasses on flapjacks. Bones were broken. Muscles torn.

  For the whites, it was great fun, watching a couple of coons knock each other about. For them, it was one step below a dog fight. Whites had some feelings for their dogs.

  ‘Lil’ Arthur found he was good at fighting, and even knocked his friend Ernest out, effectively ending their friendship. He couldn’t help himself. He got in there, got the battling blood up, he would hit whoever came near him.

  He started boxing regularly, gained some skill. No more Battle Royales. He got a reputation with the colored boxers, and in time that spread to the whites.

  The Sporting Club, out of white contenders for their champion, Forrest Thomas, thought they would put together a novelty match. If it was fun watching two coons hit each other, wouldn’t be more fun to have a trained boxer, a white man, slap a coon about. It would show the superiority of the white race, proved in a match of skill and timing.

  They gave ‘Lil’ Arthur twenty-five dollars to mix it up with their man. They even promised him the club’s championship title if he defeated Forrest Thomas.

  Right before the fight, ‘Lil’ Arthur said his prayers, then considering he was going to be fighting in front of a bunch of angry, mean-spirited whites, and for the first time, white women— sporting women, but women—who wanted to see a black man knocked to jelly, he took gauze and wrapped his dick. He wrapped it so that it was as thick as a blackjack. He figured he’d give them white folks something to look at. The thing they feared the most. A black as coal stud nigger.

  A bad nigger.

  Meaner than they were.

  And hung better, too.

  And when the big event rolled around, he whupped Forrest Thomas like he was a redheaded stepchild; whupped him so bad, they stopped the fight so no one would see a colored man knock a white man out.

  Against their wishes, the Sporting Club was forced to hand the championship over to ‘Lil’ Arthur Johnson, and the fact that a colored now held the club’s precious boxing crown was like a chicken bone in the club’s throat. Primarily Beems’s throat, the current president.

  Enter McBride.

  Beems, on the side, talked a couple of the Sporting Club’s wealthier members into financing a fight. One where a true contender to the heavyweight crown would whip ‘Lil’ Arthur and return the local championship to a white man, even if that white man relinquished the crown when he returned to Chicago, leaving it vacant. In that case, ‘Lil’ Arthur was certain he’d never get another shot at the Sporting Club Championship. They wanted him out, by hook or crook. The idea of a nigger with their championship was revolting.

  ‘Lil’ Arthur had never seen McBride. Didn’t know how he fought. He’d just heard he was as tough as stone and had balls like a brass monkey. He liked to think he was same way, and he loved his championship, even if it was just a small local one.

  It was a true badge of pride, and if you came from the Flats, you didn’t have a chance to have much pride. And now he had a chance. He was even somebody in the Flats. His own people took notice, and the whites took notice, too, by hating him. He could see it in their eyes.

  That alone made ‘Lil’ Arthur determined not to give his local title up. It was the only thing that made him something more than just another nigger from the Flats.

  He’d fight anyone they put in front of him to keep it.

  He’d fight the devil himself.

  About the Author

  With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by Booklist; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times
Book Review declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”

  He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

  Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.

  Find him online at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Also by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” mysteries

  Savage Season (1990)

  Mucho Mojo (1994)

  Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

  Bad Chili (1997)

  Rumble Tumble (1998)

  Veil’s Visit(1999)

  Captains Outrageous (2001)

  Vanilla Ride (2009)

  Hyenas (a novella) (2011)

  Devil Red (2011)

  Blue to the Bone (???)

  The “Drive-In” series

  The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)

  The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)

  The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)

  The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)

  The “Ned the Seal” trilogy

  Zeppelins West (2001)

  Flaming London (2006)

  Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)

  The Sky Done Ripped (release date unknown)

  Other novels

  Act of Love (1980)

  Texas Night Riders (1983) (published under the pseudonym Ray Slater)

  Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)

  Magic Wagon (1986)

  The Nightrunners (1987)

  Cold in July (1989)

  Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)

  The Boar (1998)

  Freezer Burn (1999)

  Waltz of Shadows (1999)

  Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children's book)

  The Big Blow (2000)

  Blood Dance (2000)

  The Bottoms (2000)

  A Fine Dark Line (2002)

  Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

  Lost Echoes (2007)

  Leather Maiden (2008)

  Under the Warrior Sun (2010)

  All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky (2011)

  …And that's not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest. Get the full story at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Copyright

  This digital edition (v1.0) of “Bullets and Fire” was published by Gere Donovan Press in 2011.

  © 2009, Joe R. Lansdale

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Errata

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