5432852385743

“Only one problem. They’re asking four hundred for both nights. If I come up with two hundred,
can you come up with the other two? You won’t be getting it back from the receipts, you know. That’s
all earmarked for Sadie’s medical work.”
I knew very well about the cost of Sadie’s medical work; I had already paid three hundred dollars to
cover the part of her hospital stay that her shitepoke insurance wouldn’t stand good for. In spite of
Ellerton’s good offices, the other expenses would mount up rapidly. As for me, I wasn’t scraping
financial bottom quite yet, but I could see it.
“George? What do you say?”
“Fifty-fifty,” I agreed.
“Then drink up your shitty beer. I want to get back to town.”
3
On our way out of that sad excuse for a drinking establishment, a poster propped in the window
caught my eye. At the top:
SEE THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY ON CLOSED CIRCUIT TV!
LIVE FROM MADISON SQUARE GARDEN!
DALLAS’S OWN TOM “THE HAMMER” CASE VS. DICK TIGER!
DALLAS AUDITORIUM
THURSDAY AUG. 29
ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the
accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had
his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.
“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a
dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. An old cocker spaniel.”
“Really?”
“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body.
He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a
couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs
like Case to keep him in trim.”
It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates
art.
Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”
“The wave of the future, I guess,” I said.
“And it’ll probably sell out—in Dallas, at least—but that doesn’t change the fact that Tom Case is
the wave of the past. Tiger’ll slice him like coldcuts. Sure you’re okay with this Grange thing,
George?”
“Absolutely.”
4