Flanagan's Run Read online

  Flanagan raised his hands for silence, and continued. “I’d like also to mention Miss Jane Connolly from Nebraska, Miss Kathy McGuire from Kansas City and Mrs Patricia Paish from San Francisco, all of whom feature in the first half of the race finishers. Could you stand up, ladies?”

  One by one the ladies rose to their feet, to be met with similar cheers, shouts and cat-calls.

  “And now to our youngest competitor,” said Flanagan. “Seventeen-year-old Jim Pierce from San Bernardino High School, lying in seven hundredth place. To my recollection, no high school boy has ever achieved such performances over these distances. So show yourself, Jim.” A slim, blonde youth shyly stood up to further cheers and clapping.

  “And finally,” said Flanagan, “to our oldest competitor all the way from Southampton, England, Mr Charles C. Fox lying in four hundred and first place. Sixty-six years old tomorrow.” The white-bearded old man stood up, to be greeted with unreserved applause, and several of the more mature runners stood up in appreciation. The cheers lasted for over a minute.

  “Okay, gentlemen, quieten down.” Flanagan raised his hands. “Now to the main business. Today we have two separate stages of twenty miles. The Coca-Cola company has generously put up prizes of $500, $300, $100 and $50 for the first stage; Ford Motors the same prizes for the second stage. Today we will have the first ‘cut’. Any competitor running outside eight hours total time for the complete forty miles is out of the race. That means an average speed of about twelve-minute miles. Any questions?”

  “If you please, Mr Flanagan,” said Volkner, the German trainer, getting to his feet. “You have rests between the two stages?”

  “Yes, four hours, so that we miss the noon sun.”

  “And what of water and feeding points?”

  “Ten per stage.”

  A grey-bearded Texan, McGraw, was next to his feet. “We camping out again?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Flanagan.

  “Well, kin I have another blanket?”

  For the first time Flanagan was lost for words, and he turned away from the microphone to Willard, smiling. Regaining his composure, he turned back to his laughing audience. “My assistant, Mr Clay, will deal with your request, Mr McGraw,” he said. “I appreciate you Texans have mighty thin skins.”

  There was a cluster of questions relating to feeding and medical matters and the meeting broke up fifteen minutes later.

  Morgan walked away from the crowd out to the fringe of the camp and sat down on a rock. Five hundred dollars: it had to be his.

  After only one twenty-mile stint he could send back six months’ money to his son Michael in Bethel. Bethel, Pennsylvania. Back there lay the focus of his life, gurgling happily in his cot, oblivious of his father three thousand miles away in the Mojave Desert . . .

  7

  Morgan’s Story

  The winter of 1929 in Bethel had been a hard time. For three months the sullen black mills had been still, the roaring furnaces silent. The great dark town had been gripped with frost, powdered with black snow, its grimy streets as sullen as the striking steel-workers who lived there.

  It had been unanimous. Italians, Scots, Poles, Irishmen: all had been part of the forest of arms that had stabbed the winter air when Morgan had finally put the strike to the vote. They had asked for just five cents more an hour, yet they had been rebutted outright. Morgan had been there at the negotiations, amongst the plump, soft-handed men who had never in their lives sweated behind a shovel feeding greedy, belching furnaces.

  He had repeated his arguments about sick pay, about insurance, about the injuries suffered in the mills, the appalling infant mortality in the town; but it was no use. These men were not concerned. They listened, but Morgan felt his helplessness even as he spoke. The only answer had been to strike.

  Morgan had planned the men’s protest like a battle campaign. Food supplies had been bought months before and were stored in the Mission Hall. A strike fund had been set up in good time and families with special needs had been satisfied. A communications system of telephones and relays of children kept three thousand families in constant touch.

  But they had not planned for such a fierce winter, and the owners knew it. By January many children had become sick; by February six of them had died, and by March mothers who had denied themselves food were also beginning to fade.

  Morgan watched his men wither, first in their muscles, finally in their minds. Daily he would look in the mirror and see a physique fashioned by years of hard work losing not fat but solid tissue. His body was consuming itself, drawing upon its last reserves, and he could feel his own resolve weaken. After all, even without the five cents extra pay they had lived: perhaps not well, but it had been a life.

  Ruth, his wife, though in her early months of pregnancy, had stood with him. The dark days bound them more closely together than all the happy times they had known. When the owners’ strike-breakers – a hundred men drafted in from the slums of New York’s East Side – had finally attacked the Mission she had been there, as had all the women. The men had stood four-deep in the frozen, corrugated mud with nothing but fists and fence-posts. Facing them, a hundred yards away, in front of the buses which had brought them, stood the owners’ men. Each was armed with a night-stick. The battle had been brief and bloody. The first rush on the union lines left twenty thugs stranded on the iron ground between the strikers and the buses. But the union line had been broken, and many of the steel-workers lay unconscious, or groaning on the hard ground.

  Morgan looked around him and sucked his bloody knuckles. Up the road the owners’ men had regrouped and had taken three heavy wooden boxes from the trucks. It was impossible at first to see what was in them, but Morgan felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach. This was going to be no stand-up fight to Marquis of Queensberry rules.

  A massive Scot, Cameron, his red beard streaked with blood, came up behind him. “Man, we fair bloodied their noses.”

  The words had scarcely left his lips when he fell back, his right shoulder shattered by a rifle bullet. The women screamed, begging their men to retreat. At a distance of one hundred yards, a line of the thugs knelt and began to fire a second volley. Morgan’s men started to drop around him, and the strikers’ ordered ranks were pocked by broken, wounded men.

  He shouted his men back, away from the line of fire, and he and the survivors dragged their wounded away across the frozen ground, out of the path of the oncoming owners’ men.

  The steel-workers wept, the tears freezing on their ridged, stubbled faces, as the thugs strode on past them on to the Mission Hall. It took them only a matter of minutes to burn it down, so destroying the remainder of the strikers’ food supplies.

  The strike was over, and Morgan knew it. The rest of the strike fund was soon mopped up in hospital bills, and in a fortnight the walk-out was over and the men back at work – at five cents an hour less than their previous rate.

  The owners had the muscle, and even without it they could always afford to wait. For them, time meant loss of money, but no hardship, while for the steel-workers it meant hunger and loss of life. It had all been for nothing.

  No, Ruth had said. It is never for nothing. Even when you are beaten. Every time you fight you become stronger, even in defeat. But there must surely be better ways.

  Naturally, there was no work for Morgan now at the mill. Every day he had stood hands in jacket pockets at the black iron gates and every day been turned away.

  Then, one winter morning, as he turned away from the gates he felt a hand on his shoulder. It belonged to a small, foxy-faced man in an expensive fur coat.

  “Sharpe,” he introduced himself, offering Morgan a gloved hand, which Morgan reluctantly accepted. “Saw you in a few tight spots, my friend. You’re real quick. I like the way you handle yourself.”

  Sharpe saw that Morgan did not understand. “Cut a long story short, how would you like to earn some real money-folding money?”

  “What do I have to do?”
said Morgan suspiciously.

  “Hit – like you did in that line couple of weeks back.”

  “Keep talking,” said Morgan, putting both hands in the pockets of his jacket. They started to walk away from the gates, their breath steaming around them in the sharp, still air.

  “Fights,” explained the smaller man, flipping a cigarette into his mouth. “Bare-knuckle fights. Anything goes, except feet.”

  Morgan shook his head. “I’ve never fought to hurt,” he said. “Just for what we had coming to us.”

  “What you get for it?” said Sharpe, lighting his cigarette. “Your buddies – you fought for them. Now they got work while you freeze your butt off. So what you got now, union man?”

  “Keep talking,” said Morgan again, without animosity.

  “McGrath’s warehouse, Salem. We have three fights a night, big money in side bets. You come up good, we move round the state circuit. Fancy pickings.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten bucks, win or lose. A hundred bucks a win. Either way it’s money in the bank.” Sharpe blew smoke into the icy air.

  “But what makes you think I can do it?” said Morgan, uncertainly.

  “I’ve seen you,” said Sharpe, pressing his arm. “You hit crisp, you hit neat. This ain’t no Golden Gloves, mind.”

  “How do I start?” ‘

  “First we see Clancy,” said the little man. “Back at Milligan’s speakeasy.”

  Morgan knew Milligan’s well, but nothing of Clancy.

  “This Clancy – where does he figure?”

  “Clancy makes fighters,” said Sharpe in explanation. “Used to work legit at Stillman’s in New York. If he likes you, you got it made.”

  They walked slowly through the morning mist to Milligan’s.

  Eamonn Clancy hit the seven ball into the middle pocket, put down his cue, and removed a cigarette from his mouth. Like Sharpe, he was a short and squat man, but with a flat, fleshy boxer’s nose.

  “Gimme your hands,” he said.

  He pressed Morgan’s hands in his and turned them round, looking closely at each knuckle in turn as if they were pieces of fine china. The knuckles were flat, the hands hard and firm.

  “Make a fist,” he said. He looked up quickly at Morgan. “Ever bust these on some Polack’s head?”

  “No,” said Morgan sharply.

  Clancy turned away and picked up his cue. “No bones sticking out – okay, so his hands are made for hitting. But does he have heart?” He leant forward to the edge of the table, made a bridge, slowly withdrew his cue, and slotted the black into the middle pocket.

  “I seen him with the mill mob,” said Sharpe, stepping forward and placing both hands on the table. “I seen him, Clancy.”

  The other man laid down his cue. “So you told me. So you got me another Dempsey. What you want I should do, phone Tex Rickard? I give him a month with me in the mountains, then we try him out in the warehouse. Okay?”

  Sharpe sighed with relief and looked across at Morgan, standing in the darkness away from the pool table.

  “What do you say?” he said. “We got a deal?”

  Morgan nodded, smiling.

  “One more thing,” said Clancy. “Does he cut?”

  Sharpe looked at Morgan.

  “I don’t know,” said Morgan. “I’ve never been hit.”

  Clancy grimaced. “We’ll see.” He nodded at Sharpe. “The last boy Sharpe brought me cut like a tomato taking on a Bowie knife.”

  Morgan’s jaw tightened. Clancy walked past him and replaced his cue on the wall-rack. Then he turned, smiled and put out his hand.

  By the end of that day Morgan had been bought a new set of clothes, a pair of training boots and a light grey sweatsuit. A week later he set off with Clancy in an old Ford for a log cabin in the Tuscarora mountains, north-west of Harrisburg.

  The month of training with Clancy in the Tuscaroras was the hardest Morgan had ever experienced. He had not told Ruth what he was going to do. She had accepted that he had to leave Bethel to look for work, and Sharpe had advanced him twenty dollars to send back to her. He felt lost the first days he was away, but soon the homesickness was submerged in the pain of Clancy’s training. Five miles daily he ran across the mountains, his breath spuming ahead of him. Sweat froze on his face, ice matted his hair, while his body boiled in his thick, fleece-lined tracksuit.

  “You gotta die before you can live,” said Clancy, pulling the cork out of a bottle of whiskey with his teeth, as they sat in front of a roaring fire at the end of a day’s training. “Sharpe’s right. You got guts, Morgan. Soon we’ll see if you can take a punch.”

  Finally, after a month of running and strenuous exercises, Clancy drove Morgan over to a nearby farm. “Hitting time,” he said without further explanation.

  Together they trudged through soft mud and snow to a big wooden barn. The floor of the barn was brown and springy, a mixture of dirt and sawdust. Clancy opened a brown Gladstone bag and gave Morgan a pair of light leather boxing gloves. “Put these on,” he said. “No point in busting up your hands.”

  Morgan slipped on the tight, padded gloves. They felt strange. Clancy laced them up for him and pulled the strings tight. “How does that feel now?” he asked. Morgan’s answer was broken by the squeal of a car’s brakes outside the barn.

  “That’ll be Fogarty,” said Clancy, still without further explanation, and continued to tighten Morgan’s gloves.

  A man in a thick woollen turtleneck sweater entered the barn, carrying on his shoulders boxing gloves similar to those Clancy had provided. He was older than Morgan, in his mid-thirties, but was the same height, though more heavily muscled about the shoulders and chest.

  “This is the guy you’re gonna fight,” said Clancy. “Chuck Fogarty.”

  Fogarty’s flat face creased into a smile.

  “You got another boy for me, Clancy?” he said in a light voice. He bent down, slipped on his gloves with ease and reached out to shake Morgan by the hand. “Real nice to meet ya,” he said taking Morgan’s right hand lightly in his. As he did so, Fogarty’s left fist curved in a long arc and clubbed Morgan viciously on the right side of the face.

  Morgan fell heavily to the floor, spitting blood from split, pouting lips. He felt as if he had been hit by a brick.

  He looked up at Clancy, to find the trainer watching him intently. Morgan’s head swam and his teeth yielded a bitter gunpowder taste.

  Only his instincts kept him in contention in the bitter, spinning moments that followed. At first he stayed down on all fours, gasping, stealing vital seconds as his mind cleared. Then he was ready. He got to his feet, shaking his head. He sensed that Fogarty was standing back from him, confident, ready to set himself up for the final blow. He was right. Fogarty was standing back, smiling, both gloves pressed together and his guard, Morgan noticed, had dropped slightly, ready for what would be the final easy hit.

  Morgan made a weak feint with his left. Fogarty pushed it away with his right and closed in for the kill. But Morgan’s right now came over like a whip to land plumb on Fogarty’s nose. There was a small cracking noise and Fogarty went down spurting blood and groaning, his chin furrowing the dirt floor. He slowly raised himself on one knee and then collapsed. The fight was over. Clancy threw a ten-dollar bill to the ground beside the fallen street-fighter and moved towards the door.

  “Thanks, champ,” he said. “I’ll buzz you when I got me another likely boy.” He put a thick jersey over Morgan’s shoulders and dabbed his charge’s nose and mouth with a towel. They walked back together through the snow and mud to the car. Once in the Ford, Clancy put the car into gear and looked ahead at the glassy frozen road. “Sharpe told me you could hit. And you proved you could dig deep running out in the hills. But the big yes/ no is always what happens when you get hit. That’s where Fogarty always comes in.”

  He moved into top gear, then looked to his side. “You see, this is the way it usually pans out. Nine outa ten guys go back when they get h
it. It shocks the hell outa them when they get sight of their own blood. So they wanta get the hell out. Don’t get me wrong: they ain’t cowards. No guy who works twelve hours a day in mills or down a mine is yellow. It’s just they ain’t fighters, that’s all. You are. How do I know? Item one, you came up off the floor. Item two, you came up fighting. Item three, you came up thinking. And item four, you can hit.”

  He took his right hand from the wheel and put it around Morgan’s shoulders. “Let that mouth heal up, Morgan. Two weeks from now, next stop Salem warehouse.”

  They stayed a final week at the cabin in the mountains to allow Morgan’s mouth to heal. It was only then that Clancy started to open up, to deal with the real meat of street-fighting. This related directly to the game of combat chess which would enable Morgan to survive. Clancy drew upon fighting lore that had been known since the 18th century, when the Englishman Jack Broughton had created the first rules of prize-fighting. Morgan absorbed every word of Clancy’s advice and com-mitted it to memory, and the week in the lonely cabin passed quickly. Soon it was time to travel back to Bethel, to prepare for his first fight.

  Salem warehouse, Clairton, had not been used for years. Even the rats, which had fed on the rotted fruit that had been stored there, had long since scuttled off to other feeding-places. As Morgan looked around him he shivered. The warehouse was vast, still and cold. In the darkness, in the centre of its concrete floor under a pool of light, was a dense square of men, the mist from their breath hanging in a cloud above them as they shouted odds at each other.

  In the opposite corner to Morgan, stripped to the waist, his back to him, hands on the shoulders of his handlers, was Morgan’s first opponent. He wore black shorts over a pair of black woollen training tights. As his opponent turned to face him Morgan saw that he had a tough, flat-nosed face similar to Fogarty’s. He was glad. Now there would be no room for pity. The man’s white muscular body steamed in the chill dank air of the warehouse. He pressed his fists together as if sharpening them for battle, turned and sank down on his stool. Above him, his handlers stroked and kneaded his neck and pectorals and whispered advice from the corners of their mouths.