He knew how things were. In the fight game, a man was headed up or out. It wasn’t the kind of career where you punched a clock for forty years and then they gave you a gold watch. Every boxing gym had old fighters hanging around, sweeping the floor and doing odd jobs for a few bucks a week and a place to flop. Some of them could still remember their big fights, some couldn’t recall their own names. Young fighters ignored the punch-drunk cases and told themselves that was what happened when you weren’t good enough. The week of his last fight, Jake walked into the men’s room in the Shaughnessy Gym and saw Dink Hudson, a former welterweight only ten years older than himself. When Jake got his start in the business, Dink Hudson was knocking them out in front of big crowds. Now Dink stood at the urinal with an odd, lost smile on his face as a stream of urine soaked his trousers and left a spreading yellow pool on the floor. He had forgotten to unzip his pants.

Jake collected his money for the Butterfield fight and told Moe he was done. Moe shrugged. Jake had been the best fighter in his stable, but he was thirty-three. Another fighter, Moe might have tried to wring a few more dollars out of him. But Jake had made a lot of money for Moe. Moe shook hands with them both and wished them well, then reached into his wallet and pulled out a C-note, a little something to help them get a start. Jake started to protest, but Moe waved him off. It was the least he could do, he said. Jake tucked the hundred away.

“People are too hard on you, Moe,” he said. “Way down deep, you’re all right.”

Moe took a long puff on his stogie. “No,” he said. “I aint.”

The next morning, they left for Scottsbluff. All Jake’s furniture from his rented house made barely half a trailer load. On the drive, they talked it over. Jake wanted to head to California, make a life out among the orange groves. Emaline wanted to take the cash Jake had left, pool it with her savings, buy a little farm in Nebraska.

“We have some money in the bank now,” she said, “better to get ourselves a place than to fritter it away.”

She didn’t mention the De Soto or the Henderson motorcycle, or various other fripperies which he seemed unable to resist. Left to his own devices, Jake would eat in restaurants three times a day. He wasted money on pop and candy bars. He dressed to please the ladies. She had yet to see him in a pair of bib overalls. If they were going to make a go of it farming, he would have to change his ways.