The Harder They Fall Read Online Free

at sixty miles an hour, you could make out the words ‘Sailor Beaumont, the Pride of West Liberty’. That’s the kind of a fellow he was. Lots of times, especially in the beginning when they were still getting along together, I remember Shirley riding in that sidecar, with her dark redhair flying out behind her. She was something to look at in those days, before the beers and the troubles caught up with her. You could still see some of it left, even with the crow’s feet around the eyes and the telltale washed-out look that comes from doing too many things too many times. She still had something from the neck down too, even if her pin-up days were ten years behind. She was beginning to spread, just this much, in the rump, the belly and the bust, but there was something about the way she held herself – sometimes I thought it was more in her attitude toward men than anything physical – that made us still turn around.
    ‘Have one with me, Shirley?’ I called over.
    ‘Save it, Eddie,’ she said.
    ‘Not even two fingers, to be sociable?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe a beer,’ Shirley said.
    I gave Charles the order and went over to the booth. ‘Waiting for anyone?’
    ‘For you, darling,’ she said, sarcastic. She didn’t bother to look at me.
    ‘What’s the matter? Hung?’
    ‘Aah, not really, just, oh, the hell with it …’
    Shirley was in a mood. She got that way every now and then. Most of the time she was feeling good, a lot of laughs – ‘What the hell, I’m not getting any richer and I’m not getting any younger, but I’m having fun.’ But once in a while, especially when you caught her alone in the daytime, she was this way. After it got dark and she had had a few, it would be better. But I’ve seen her sit there in a booth for hours, having solitary beers and dropping nickels in the slot, playing ‘Summertime’ or ‘Melancholy Baby’ or another of her favourites, ‘EmbraceableYou’. I suppose those songs had something to do with the Sailor, though it always struck me as profane to associate the tender sentiments of those excellent lyrics with a screwball slugger like Beaumont. He’d lay anything that stood still for thirty seconds. If Shirley ever asked for an explanation she got it – on the jaw. He was one of the few professionals I ever knew who indulged in spontaneous extracurricular bouts in various joints, a practice which did not endear him to Jacobs Beach and brought him frequently and forcibly to the attention of the local gendarmerie. When he finally had a blowout on that hotcha motorcycle of his and left in a bloody mess on the kerb at Sixth Avenue near 52nd Street what few brains he had salvaged from ninety-three wide-open fights, the people who took it hard could be counted on one finger of one hand, and that was Shirley.
    She reached into her large red-leather purse, took out a little white bag of fine-cut tobacco, carefully tapped it out onto a small rectangle of thin brown paper with a practised hand. She was the only woman I had ever seen roll her own cigarettes. It was one of the habits she brought with her from the hungry years in West Liberty. While she twirled the flat wrapper into an amazingly symmetrical cylinder, she stared absently through the glass that looked out on Eighth Avenue. The street was full of people moving restlessly back and forth in two streams like ants, but with less purpose. ‘Summertime,’ she sang under her breath lackadaisically, a snatch here and a snatch there.
    The beer seemed to do something for her. ‘You can draw me another one, Charles,’ she said, coming up out of her mood a little, ‘with a rye chaser.’
    After all these years, that was still one of the pub’s favourite jokes. Shirley looked at me and smiled as if she were seeing me for the first time.
    ‘Where you been keeping yourself, Eddie? Over in Bleeck’s with my rival again?’
    This had been going on for years. It had been going on so long there probably was