Cliff Chatsworth waited for the street-car on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin.
It
was early in the morning, still dark, and there wasn’t any activity on the
street, with the exception of old-blind Arnie setting-up his newsstand across
the street.
Cliff was on his way to Gibbon’s Gym
where he coached a few boxers; the Number Two car would take him down Franklin,
past Little Earth then Augsburg College, before taking him across the river to Pig’s
Eye.
There
was a young-man helping Arnie, a fellow Cliff recognized from The Rose, as the
fighters called it, in the basement of the Hamm’s Brewery.
Johnny
Holiday was his name and Cliff thought that he had promising boxer, even though
he looked more like a movie star, talked like an egg-head, and at this moment he
was moving about like a drunk.
It
was an early start to the day, probably just a late night for the boy, Cliff
thought, but still, booze and boxing don’t mix, may as well be pouring whatever
talent he might have into the gutter.
The two seemed to be friends; Cliff
couldn’t make out their conversation but they were laughing a good bit, and it
appeared to him that they knew each other well, and Johnny Holiday was being of
good-service, which he took as a sign of a well-formed character.
Earlier, Cliff had come out of his
apartment on the corner of the intersection, said good morning to Arnie and bought
his paper before crossing the street to wait for his transportation.
That
was when Johnny pulled-up in his convertible.
Cliff folded the gray sheet tightly and began
to look at the headlines on the front page, but the jovial antics of the two
men across the street made it difficult for him to concentrate and he allowed
his mind to wander…
It
had been five days since the last gunfight in the city, and there had been no
other murders to speak of during that time.
These
last few violence-free days were the longest stretch that St. Anthony had
experienced since January, when Karl Thorrson’s street-war with Colonel
Forrester had begun…and which now appeared to be over, with the giant Thorrson
having gotten the upper-hand. Or so it seemed, Cliff thought.
Cliff had worked for the Colonel
when he was younger, not directly, but he had met and spoken to the great-man a
couple of times…never about business. At the age of sixteen he had accepted a
post as a road agent, with the objective of stopping commerce along the
Mississippi, Minnesota and Red Rivers, along the full length of the border Minnesota
shared with the Lakota Confederacy; it was difficult and dangerous work, and it
had often been brutal.
After that Cliff had spent a dime in
the Stillwater Penitentiary for Bank Robbery, a job he had done on the Colonel’s
behalf, for which he never received any help, not even so much as a word of
thanks for his service.
Those were the breaks, he told
himself while he did his time, it’s how the poor get along.
Cliff
might have had a great life as a gangster, he certainly enjoyed it while it
lasted. He might also have ended up in an early grave, like so many of the fellows
who had lost their lives in the year of terror St. Anthony had just endured.
Cliff tried to shake these thoughts
from his head, and he knew as well as anything else that there is no escaping
the past. He had learned to box in prison…coaching came natural; that’s what
they told him down at the gym. He felt good about being on the straight path, he
was student and teacher of the sweet-science, and by following it he had found his
purpose, no regrets.
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