Chapter X: Moxey

Moxey was a Jew boy and a catcher. His last name ended in sky, and he came from the West-side ghetto. His father and mother came from the pale in Russia when Moxey's elder brother Steve was in arms and before Moxey himself appeared.

Moxey would have been captain of the Prairie View Semi-Pro. B. B. Club, if merit ruled the world. But there was the crime of nineteen centuries ago against him, so they made McClaughrey captain; Georgia's sixteen-year-old brother Al played third base.

The Prairie Views had one triumph in the morning, it being Sunday, the day for two and sometimes three games. They had the use of one of the diamonds on a public playground from Donovan, the wise cop.

I have seen Donovan keep peace and order among eighteen warring lads from sixteen to twenty years old by a couple of looks, a smile and a silence. When there was money on the game, too.

There has been good material wasted in Donovan. Properly environed and taught the language, though he doesn't depend on language very much, he could have been presiding officer of the French Chamber of Deputies--and presided.

It was the ninth inning, last half, tie score, two out, three on, with two and three on the batter. In other words, the precise moment when the fictionist is allowed to step in. Moxey up.

He fouled off a couple, the coachers screeched; the umpire, who was also stakeholder, dripped a bit freer and hoped Donovan would stick around for a few seconds longer.

The pitcher took a short wind-up and the ball, which seemed to start for the platter, reached Moxey in the neighborhood of the heart. He collapsed. They rallied round the umpire.

"He done it on purpose--the sheeny--he done it on purpose, I tell you--he run into it----"

"Naw, ye're a liar!"

"Prove it."

"It's a dead ball--take your base--come in there, youse," waving to the man on third.

"We win. Give us our money."

All participated but Moxey, who lay moaning on the ground by the home plate.

Donovan strolled out to the debate and smiled his magic smile. "Take yer base," bawled the emboldened ump, and waved the run in. Al got five dollars for the day's playing and three dollars for the day's betting, and the Prairie Views walked off, bats conspicuous on shoulders, yelling, "Yah!" at the enemy.

"Chee," said Moxey to his playmates when they reached the family entrance, "me for the big irrigation." And it was so.

Moxey shifted his foot, called his little circle around him close and then inserted his dark, fleshless talon into his baseball shirt. "That gave me an awful wallop what win the game," he said; "if I hadn't slipped me little pad in after the eight', it might a' put me away, understand." He took out his protection against dead balls, an ingenious and inconspicuous felt arrangement to be worn under the left arm by right-handed batters. And all present felt again that there had been injustice in the preference of McClaughrey.

Whenever they asked Moxey where he lived, he answered, "West," and let it go at that. He always turned up for the next game, no matter how often plans had been changed since he had last seen any of them. That was all they knew about him. He caught for them, often won for them, drank beer with them and then disappeared completely until the next half-holiday.

Perhaps Al was his most intimate friend, and Al was the only one who learned his secret. "Say, Al," he blurted out almost fiercely one evening, "your folks is Irish, ain't they?"

"Irish-American," corrected Al.

"Well, mine's Yiddishers, and the most Yiddish Yiddishers y'ever see."

Moxey seemed very bitter about it and Al waited for more.

"My old man, well----" Moxey swallowed. It seemed to Al as if he would not go on, but finally it came out with a rush. "He pushes a cart--yes, sir--honest to God, he pushes a cart--I thought maybe I ought to tell you, Al."

"He does?" It was a shock to the Irish-American, which showed in his tone.

"Yes, sir, he does," Moxey answered defiantly, "and if you don't like it--why--well, I won't say nuthin' ugly to you, Al--you're only like the rest. S'long."

Al threw his arm around the other's shoulder. "Forget it, Moxey." Which was the only oath ever taken in this particular David and Jonathan affair.

Not long afterwards, Moxey proposed to Al attendance at a prizefight just across the State line, the Illinois laws being unfavorable to such exhibitions of manly skill or brutality, whichever it is. It was Al's first fight.

They boarded a special train, filled with coarse men bent upon coarse pleasure. But then, if they had been bent upon refined pleasure they wouldn't have been coarse or it wouldn't have been pleasure.

The prizefighting question illustrates well the gulf between the social and the individual conscience and demonstrates that the whole is sometimes considerably greater than the sum of its parts. Probably eight out of ten men in this country enjoy seeing two hearty young micks belt each other around a padded ring with padded gloves. But they hesitate to come out in the open and proclaim their enjoyment, for fear of writing themselves down brutes, and the deepest yearning of the American people at the present day is to be gentlemanly and ladylike.

So whenever sparring matches are proposed the community works itself up into a state of fake indignation. All the softer and sweeter elements telegraph the Governor and if that isn't enough, pray for him; and inasmuch as the Governor gets no immoral support on the other side from those who are afraid of jeopardizing their gentlemanliness, he yields, and appears in the newspapers as a strong man who dared beard the sports, whereas, he was really a frightened politician who didn't dare beard the Christian Endeavorers.

One of the most illuminating essays of the late and great William James concerned Chautauqua Lake. He spent a week at that beautiful camp, where sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness pervade the air.

There were popular lectures by popular lecturers, a chorus of seven hundred voices, kindergartens, secondary schools, every sort of refined athletics, and perpetually running soda fountains.

There was neither zymotic disease, poverty, drunkenness, crime or police.

There was culture, kindness, cheapness, equality, in short what mankind has been striving for under the name of civilization, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

And yet when he left the camp he quotes himself as saying to himself: "Ouf! What a relief. Now for something primordial to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninteresting. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice cream soda is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things--I cannot abide with them."

But whether he could or not, the rest of us have to, and the country moves Chautauqua-ward with decorous haste. From anti-canteen and anti-racing to anti-fights and anti-tights, the aunties seem to have it, the aunties have it, and the bill is passed.

Al viewed this national tendency with mixed feelings; with joy when he tasted forbidden fruit and sneaked off across the state line with Moxey in a special train full of bartenders and policemen off duty and gay brokers and butchers to see more than the law allowed; with sorrow when he considered the future of his country, as a gray, flat and feminine plain.

The preliminaries had been fought off; there was the customary nervous pause before the wind-up. Young men with official caps forced their ways between the packed crowds with "peanuts, ham sandwiches and cold bottled beer." The announcer, a tall young man in shirt sleeves, who looked as if he might be a fairly useful citizen himself in case of a difference, made the customary appeal.

"Gen-tul-men, on account of the smoke in the at-mos-phere, I am requested to request you to quit smoking." (Pause.) "The boxers find it difficult to box in this at-mos-phere, and you will wit-ness a better encounter if you do." (Applause, but no snuffing of torches.)

"The final contest of this evening's proceedings," called the announcer, first to one side of the ring, then to the other, "will be between Johnny Fiteon and Kid O'Mara, both of Chicago, _fer th' bantamweight champ'nship o' th' world_."

Handclappings and whistlings. But the announcer, being gifted with the dramatic instinct, knew how to work up his climaxes, which, so far as he personally was concerned, would culminate with the tap of the gong for the first round. It was his affair to have the house seething with excitement when that gong tapped.

"Gen-tul-men," continued the announcer; then he spied two plumes waving in the middle distance and made the amend, to delighted sniggers: "Ladees and gen-tul-men, I take pleasure in in-ter-ducing Runt Keough of Phil-ur-del-fy-a." A diminutive youth with a wise face stepped in the ring and bobbed his head to the cheers, and muttered something to the announcer. "Runt Keough hereby challenges the winner of this bout, for the championship of th' world in the 115-poung class, _to a finish_." A tumult ensued. The Runt backed out of the ring to hoots of "fourflusher" and howls of approbation.

"Ladees and gen-tul-men, I now take pleasure in in-ter-ducing to you Mr. Ed Fiteon, father and handler of Johnny Fiteon, who wears th' bantamweight crown _o' th' world_."

The crowd made evident its vehement gratitude for Ed's share in Johnny's creation.

"Chee," whispered Moxey to Al, as they sat close and rapt, with shining eyes, on the dollar seats high up and far away, "they'd tear up the chairs for Johnny's mother if they'd perduce her."

But now something was happening by the east entrance. The cheering suddenly ceased, A low anxious buzzing whisper ran over the entire assemblage. Men stood up to look eastward regardless of monitions from behind to sit down. Something was cutting through the crowd from the east entrance to the ring. It was Kid O'Mara in his cotton bathrobe preceded by a gigantic mulatto and followed by two smaller Caucasians.

Moxey's bony fingers dug suddenly into Al's biceps. "Kid, you gotta do it, Kid, you gotta," he whispered. "O, fer God's sake, Kid."

Al was surprised. "Are you with O'Mara?" he asked.

"Am I with him?" answered Moxey with a sob in his voice; "am I with him--he's me cousin."

"O'Mara _your_ cousin?"

"Lipkowsky's his right name--same as mine. Look at his beak and see."

There was no doubt of it. "Kid O'Mara's" proboscis corroborated Moxey's claim.

Johnny's entrance a few minutes later was still more effective and his reception warmer. Fight fans are courtiers, always with the king.

When the two boys stripped, Johnny showed short and stocky, the Kid lank and lithe. Johnny depended on his punch, the Kid on his reach.

They fought ten rounds and it was called a draw, probably a just decision inasmuch as the adherents of each contestant proclaimed that the referee had been corrupted against their man.

Besides, a draw meant another fight between them with plenty of money in the house.

This evening in fistiana was perhaps the most powerful single experience which influenced Al at this period of his life. For a long time he sat silent beside Moxey on the return trip, pondering the physical beauty of Johnny and the Kid and ruefully comparing their bodies with his own.

He sighed, "And now I s'pose your cousin'll go out and kill it to-night!"

"Not him," Moxey reassured; "he never touches it in any form or shape, understand."

"He's training all the time?" continued Al, bent on deciphering the secret ways of greatness.

"Yep. So you might say."

"Oh," then Al relapsed into silence to wrestle with the angel of training all the time.

Like most young fellows, Al regarded his body as the source of all the happiness that amounted to anything. The brain was merely its adjunct, its money maker and guide. Its operations might lead to life, but they were not life like the body's.

It flashed upon him in the train bound home from the fight that he might achieve joy in either of two ways, by going in for sports or "sporting," by perfecting the animal in him or by abusing it, by getting into as good shape as Kid O'Mara or into as bad shape as the pale waster crumpled in the seat across the aisle.

So began a struggle in him, not yet ended, between the Ormuzd and Ahriman of physical condition. His high achievement thus far has been sixth place in a river Marathon swimming race, his completest failure thirty-six successive drunken hours in the restricted district.