The Hurt Business by George Kimball & John Schulian

Author:George Kimball & John Schulian [Kimball, George and Schulian, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781312056
Publisher: Aurum Press

He signed it “Dick Tiger Ihetu.”

We walked across Eighth Avenue in the brilliant, chilly afternoon, and up the post office steps. Tiger said, “If they ask me how much it’s worth, what should I say?”

I shrugged. “We should try to pawn it and find out.”

“I’ll say a million dollars.” Tiger laughed for the first time. “I’ll say fifty or a hundred, just so it gets there.”

The clerk behind the registry wicket hefted the package and shook his head. “No good, you got Scotch tape on it. Go around the corner, they’ll give you some brown paper.”

Another line. He stood very quietly, a small black hat perched on his head, his body muffled in a fur-lined coat. I would always remember him for being overdressed and patient. He was always cold, and he was always willing to wait, for a bout, for a return bout, for a shot at a title. He was forty then, picking up fights wherever he could, waiting for one more big payday. If there had been no war, he would be retired in Aba, a rich man. He had been financially wiped out, but he said he could not complain, many others had lost all their property, and many, many others had lost their families and their lives.

A clerk finally handed him a long strip of gummed brown paper and a wet sponge in a glass dish. Tiger took it to a writing desk and began to tear the brown paper into small strips, his thick fingers careful and precise, the fingers of a man who taped his own hands.

When he finished the package he proudly held it up for me. “Now I know there is something else I can do.”

We waited for the registry clerk silently. “Okay,” he said, nodding at the package, then flipping it. “What’s in it?”

“A medal,” said Tiger softly.

“What’s it worth?”

“I don’t know. Fifty, hundred dollars?”

“No value,” said the clerk, to himself. He weighed it, registered it, asked Tiger if he wanted it to go airmail. Tiger said, “Yes.”

“One sixty.”

Tiger gave him two dollar bills, and counted his change. He adjusted his scarf as he walked out into the bright street, and smiled, and shook my hand gravely and could only say, “Well . . . ,” and shrug, and start down the steps. I never saw him again.

In the summer of 1971, after working briefly as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dick Tiger returned to his native land. He was penniless, and brought nothing home except the cancer in his liver. He died that December, in Aba, at the age of forty-two.

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