Joe edged open the door just enough to see. The hut had the deep, sour reek of stale beer and dead cigarettes. The Hill had recruited and suffered through successions of construction men, each group meaner than the one before, as healthy workers without police records were likely to be drafted. The latest bunch were Texans who labored stripped to the waist but, like a caste mark, always wore their hats. They’d put on their good Stetsons and shirts for the evening’s entertainment and stood on sofas and chairs to root their boy on. Ray’s backers were MPs, a corps of uniformed thugs who looked nearly civilized next to Texans. Even with helmets and sticks, the MPs usually stayed clear of the huts on Saturday night. Joe saw money passing between the two camps. There was probably $2,000 or $3,000 riding on a fight like this.

The boy was left-handed, fast, aggressive. Not much face: a heavy brow, a spade nose, sandy hair and peg ears. He wore a tank shirt and denim pants; his most distinctive features were his neck and shoulders of fanning muscle. A natural heavyweight. Twenty years old, maybe less.

Ray tried to slip the right jab, but the boy pulled it back and snapped it again, then moved in to a chorus of cowboy hoots. Joe’d always felt it was a combination of the big hats and Texas sun that baked and compressed the Texas brain to the size of a boiled egg. There was a deeper mystery here, though. The Army was drafting men who were missing fingers, toes, other appendages. There was a clerk with two fingers typing in the quartermaster’s office. Joe couldn’t count fingers inside a boxing glove, but this boy seemed exactly the sort of postadolescent maniac who should be gutting Japs on some barren atoll.

Ray kept circling to his left, which was directly into the kid’s jab. In New York he had been a solid, middle-of-the-card fighter, a body puncher. Afraid of nothing in the world until he came to the Hill and had the safety course on radiation. He paid other drivers to take his place whenever there was a chance of coming within fifty yards of active material. Tonight he looked old, the eyes desperate, the muscles puffy. A painful blush spread on his skin everywhere a punch landed. He circled into a jab, ducked and moved into a straight left and was down, sitting on his ass and gloves, his legs splayed. The kid bounced and motioned Ray to stand.

Joe had already taken a step back into the dark. Through the door the scene looked smaller, like a cockfight, bettors hanging over a pit, some glum, some screaming till their neck cords popped. It depressed him. There was something about war, about murder on the grand scale, that made mere boxing sordid and unnecessary.