"Chombo" (1958)

“Chombo” is a cunning boxing story, done Lafferty style. Our title character is a fighter living as a brush-cutter in the chaparral. He turns down an offer from his promoter, Doc Guzik, for a sanctioned fight. "I don’t believe I’ll fight in the states any more," Chombo says, preferring to "stay down here in the chaparral and just cut brush." When Doc questions his identity ("Isn't that Jerome?"), Chombo deflects: "My English is very faulty." His training regimen includes running thirty miles a day under a hundred pounds of brush, kicking a peccary to death, and fighting a puma on a cliff ledge. He tells Doc he is turning down the fight because he has a feeling he "had better stay on this side of the border for a few weeks right now."

Enter Big Ben Bagby, another promoter (there will be a twist), who approaches Doc to arrange a fight between Doc’s “light Mexican boy” and a maverick he represents named Jerry Camus. Doc agrees and drives into the chaparral, telling Chombo, "I'll put my shirt and my house on you. I know you can whip him." Chombo agrees to the fight upon hearing the name Jerry Camus. He says, "I know Jerry pretty well, Doc. He's a very good boy." But Chombo can handle him. He gives Doc a warning that the fight might be a trap and that he should be careful.

On the night of the big fight, Chombo arrives disguised as one of the Ironhead Indians, wearing a conical hat and a red poncho over his trunks. Revealing himself to be blue-eyed and laughing, he asks Doc, "Am I Chombo? . . . and where is Jerry?" Confusion erupts when Big Ben introduces the opposing fighter—a large, heavy man—as “Chombo.” The blue-eyed fighter calmly tells Doc, "No, Doc, he isn't . . . I am."

In the ensuing fight, Doc begs his fighter to lose because his money is on the other man, but Chombo refuses: "If I knew how to let anyone else win I wouldn't be a border jumper without a name."

Before a later round, Chombo points out three men in the crowd who are there to arrest him and tells Doc that the lights going out is part of a plan. The lights go dark. Then they’re back on. The fighter has vanished from the ring. Big Ben, it turns out, is has a warrant for the arrest of Jerry Camus on an old manslaughter charge. And it is soon discovered that the strongbox with the prize money has been stolen. Later, Chombo calls Doc and explains the entire scheme: the other fighter’s name was also Jerry Camus, and the event was a setup to steal the strongbox while Doc was jumping up and down on it. He adds, "Tell Big Chombo I'm sorry I had to hurt him. But he didn't have any business borrowing my name, just because it happens to be his own."

From Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Croxley Master” (1907) and Jack London’s gritty boxing tales, through Ring Lardner’s “Champion” (1916), the pulp energy of H. C. Witwer’s The Leather Pushers (1919–1920), Ernest Hemingway’s great fight stories of the 1920s, and Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan brilliant hack work of the 1930s—alongside the colorful ringside sketches of Octavus Roy Cohen and Damon Runyon—boxing fiction has always fascinated me.

One of my favorite writers is the incomparable A. J. Liebling, whose The Sweet Science (1956) is unmatched in its classical excellence. Last week, a colleague asked me about Norman Mailer, and I had to qualify my answer because of Mailer’s involvement in boxing and political journalism: the man wrote some truly great essays on the sport, especially The Fight (1975). It’s a shame that a once-great literary genre now looks spent in the age of mixed martial arts. Still, if you’re anything like me and love the sweet science, you really ought to read “Chombo.” 

Though it is ostensibly a boxing story, it's really a heist tale disguised as one. What impresses me most isn’t its border atmosphere or its depiction of a low-rent fight world, but its intricate, clockwork plotting. The story builds the familiar expectations of a classic sports showdown, only to subvert them through reversals. The boxing ring, we discover, is not an arena but a stage, and the fight itself a calculated, if pummeling, misdirection. The various elements, from the opponent’s identity to the timed power outage, fit neatly into its swindle.

The protagonist is far more than a mere fighter, in at least two senses. Viewed through Lafferty’s development as a writer, the fighter is one of those early “exteriorized schizo-gashes,” from before Lafferty had built the ingenious narrative machinery he would later engineered to handle the theme. In that sense, the fighter recalls “Other Side of the Moon,” only this time the main character isn’t anarrant fool. Both stories come from Lafferty’s induction period, when he was working with doubleness and double worlds in more conventional ways. I wonder if Lafferty worked out the limits of that approach by writing stories like “Chombo” and “Other Side of the Moon,” arriving at his later permutations through an assessment of genre limits.

On another level, the fighter isn’t a simple person because he’s a true Lafferty hero, part McGilly, a strategist and con artist whose brains are more important than his brawn. Though he first looks like a mark, one drawn into a bad match by Doc, he is in fact the architect of the whole affair, walking into a trap he has already repurposed to his own advantage. The fight is rigged, but the blue-eyed fighter rigs it on his own terms, a twist on stories going back to London’s The Abysmal Brute (1913), where the fascination is the power game both inside and outside the ring. Jerry manipulates everyone around him. He turning their assumptions and their greed against them. It’s surprising that “Chombo” remains unpublished and missed the cut when the early stories were getting attention from small presses, given how good it is. It’s early Lafferty, but it has sharp dialogue and plays out as a taut thriller. As in anothe early heist story, “Johnny Crookedhouse” (1957), the man who thinks he is the smart one is the dupe.

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