Near flesh, p.11
Near Flesh, page 11
“Meet the fans! Let ’em shake the winning hand! The promoter wants to talk to us. We’ll get on his show for next month, too. He needs a new prospect after what he did to Glory.” The fat man was cagey enough to say “we” and “us” when he was talking to the fighter.
Leo herded Jack out to the hall while Roach was reaching for his clothes.
“You take care of that eye now,” Leo suggested, “and he can be back in the gym in two days. You let it go, he won’t be able to spar for weeks.”
“What the hell,” Jack said. “Ya gotta sell while the product’s hot or what’s the point.”
Leo sniffed the fog of sweat and cologne. If he punched the fat man’s belly, his fist would sink in to the elbow and make splurching noises when he pulled it out.
“The point is that eye.”
“Don’t tell me my business. I’ll take this kid all the way.”
“The way you took Joe Rass and Biggie Adams?”
“You’re fucking punchy. Get outta my face.” Jack pinked up like a baby cranking to squall. “And something else, the kid didn’t bleed and you didn’t crack your kit, so I ain’t paying you a fucking dime for your flapping fucking lip.” Jelly Jack pushed back into the dressing room and slammed the door.
Leo wandered down to the end of the hall and called his gym. He took a deep, slow breath before Jupe answered.
“Any disasters?” Leo asked.
“Not a thing.” Children were hooting sharply in the background and Jupe’s wife, Lucy, was singing, “I want six crap-shooters to carry me,” drastically off-key.
“Sounds like party time.” He sounded jealous to himself. Resentful.
Jupe heard it too. His voice went flat and mechanically formal. “All schoolwork has been completed. Young Sharmain’s approach to a full page of single-digit subtraction problems has been judged worthy of Madame Curie and is being honored by a musical salute. Don’t worry about it.”
Lucy had forgotten the words and now sang, “Da-da-dum-dum, da-da-da-aa.” Sharp child voices da-da’ed along.
“No, no. Just checking in.” Just keeping himself from belting somebody. Just looking for another aggravation to distract him.
Leo had a corner to work in the main event so he went back out, watching for Eddie Em or Joe Vac. Intermission was almost over and the bartenders and hot dog dabbers were flying in front of a wall of customers.
The ballroom was buzzing with talk about somebody jumping off the top of the hotel. People were trotting up the escalator to the lobby for a peek at the gore and then drifting back down to tell their cronies. “Suicide” hissed off a hundred tongues as he went down the aisle. The word tightened Leo’s chest and coated his mouth with a metallic taste. So that’s what put the security guy’s tail in a knot, he thought.
Roach caught Leo’s arm to tell him about the jumper. “Fish all over. Come look.”
Leo shook his head. “Nah, I’ve got a corner to work.”
Squinting at the swelling beyond the edge of Roach’s sunglasses, Leo could find no creases. The skin was filling with fluid. By morning the eye would look like a tennis ball trying to hatch.
“You oughta put ice on that.”
Roach grinned and disappeared into the crowd.
Back at the ring, Rhonda stood at the press table. Her face was flushed, but her tone was dry. “You heard about the commotion on the sidewalk? I snuck out to pee between rounds and got to shoot it. I’m running up to the wire service office now. Can I call you in the morning for the results of the last bouts, a description?” Her dangling earrings barely quivered. A pro, Leo thought.
“Make it afternoon. After two. I drive a cab in the morning.”
“Great. And remind me to ask you about the undertaker downstairs from you? He told me a weird story.”
She hoisted her camera bag and swept out, her skirt moving in dark waves above her spike-heeled silver sandals. A tallish woman. Probably a hundred thirty-five pounds and most of it decent muscle. Good shoulders. She was ignorant about the sport but cheerful. She asked a lot of questions but then listened to the answers. She’d started out tagging the daily guy, Banion, but he’d gotten sick of answering her questions and sicced her on Leo. He didn’t mind.
His next fighter was a twenty-three-year-old Montana heavyweight with doughy skin and so much scar tissue in his eyebrows that he’d bleed if you spit at him. Reminded Leo of himself at that age. The kid, Reggie, confessed that he was a welder, out of work and expecting a baby. The bouts he’d had since his shop shut down barely kept the rent paid. He trained by hitting a bag on his porch and chopping firewood for ten bucks a cord. He hadn’t had any coaching since he quit the amateurs years before. Hopeless. A patsy.
The other guy in the corner was the fighter’s big brother, a truck jockey who’d done all his fighting on pavement and had never worked a corner before. He was scared of his ignorance, scared that it showed.
At the weigh-in, the brother balked when the inspector suggested he hire a cut man for the fight. “Pay some asshole for what? Them little scars of Reggie’s are nothing,” he growled. “I cut myself worse shaving!”
The trucker announced that he wouldn’t pay more than five bucks for some featherbedding bastard who was probably kicking back to the promoter. Leo usually asked for fifty but he shrugged and accepted. The scar map on Reggie’s forehead was a serious challenge.
It was a ten-round bout against the local hero and that Montana eyebrow was pumping red by the first round. Leo calmly applied pressure with his thumb and then, when the gush stopped, spooned on the powder. The cut stayed dry and tidy for a full minute until a stiff right hand started it seeping again. Meanwhile, the kid’s nose sprang a leak. Leo couldn’t stuff the powder up the kid’s nose and had to rely on the old standby, Preparation H on a cotton-tipped stick.
By the end of the third round, there was a cut on the lid of the other eye and another one on the nose and the bashed eyebrow was flowing again. Reggie took a thumping but he went the distance so Leo felt all right. The blood didn’t beat him.
In the dressing room, Leo stuck the heavyweight together with butterflies of surgical tape and sent him off to the emergency room for stitches.
* * *
It was after midnight by the time Leo got to the bar upstairs in the Wizard’s Lounge and paid for a beer. He turned slowly on the barstool, soaking in the soft light and soft voices, dark wood and deep upholstery. Eddie Em had gone home. The after-fight crowd was thinning but there was an odd, scattered energy as people leaned over window booths for a view of the sidewalk, or went out the door and came back to chatter together in clumps. The jumper had them all excited.
Roach’s shiny suit and too-wide shoulders were leaning against a pillar. He was gesturing wildly in some grand description for the woman in front of him. It was Liza Moore in her plunging work satins. Leo turned his back casually and sat both elbows on the bar.
Some guys claimed it was the worst thing you could do, go get laid immediately after a bout. “Take the legs right out from under you. Make ’em relax too much.” Even Joe Vac agreed: “Even worse than getting laid before a bout.” But Leo didn’t hold with that crap. Besides, you don’t interfere with a hooker at work. Especially if you’re her babysitter. And Liza Moore was a nice, clean woman. She wouldn’t say anything mean about Roach’s swollen eye. Or his weird tattoos. Or his English. The kid could do worse than spend half his night’s pay on her.
Leo caught himself wondering if Roach had real potential and had to slap himself mentally. Next, he’d be imagining an electric voice bellowing, “New world champion…” and he’d be off in the crocodile zone for good.
It was too easy to lose perspective. Old farts were always going cuckoo, pinning their fantasies on some poor kid who didn’t know his ass from his elbow. Leo had his dreams lined up and numbered. He had to keep them in order. Working championship corners was locked in a box labeled SOME OTHER FOOL’S FANTASY and stuck away down in the shadows.
Jelly Jack was at a corner table making Jensen, the promoter, laugh. Probably hitting him up for a bigger payday in the next show. Leo read the foam in his glass until the bartender brought his change and insisted on telling him about the high diver and the aquarium.
“I thought the waitresses would all flip out on me, but they calmed down as soon as somebody hosed off the windows.” The bartender used a clean towel on his damp hands. “And the diver was a hotel employee so the marine biology convention wants the hotel to pay for their fancy display tank and all their precious critters. Right now there are a thousand fish freaks in the hotel wailing about rare specimens being destroyed.”
“I’ll tell you who’s destroyed! That friggin’ Squirt Gun, is who!”
The joyous squawking at Leo’s elbow was Melvin Motormouth Mordecai, a dapper, balding man who made his money selling bathroom fixtures and spent it on boxers. Motormouth was the proud manager of the prelim kid who’d decisioned a hot prospect known as Machine Gun Wright.
“Admit it, Leo! You thought the Squirt Gun was too much for us! I saw the doubt in your eye when I made the fight. I’m on the phone in the gym, slinging shit to the moon for Jensen and watching you shake your head.”
“Hey, Motor, gimme fifty bucks! Leo, did you see it?” The hero, a young middleweight named Jeff Typhoon Williams, slung his arm around Motormouth’s shoulder as the manager reached for a wallet.
“Coming along,” Leo said, nodding.
“Did ya see how I set him up for that uppercut in the fourth? All them shots to the ribs. Bing, bing, BANG. That Machine Gun couldn’t punch his way out of an egg!”
Weasel Camelli and the Moyles, father and son, came up wailing that their beloved Machine Gun “had the flu and shouldn’ta been fighting.”
Motormouth tsked diplomatically. The Typhoon growled that Gun couldn’t lick his lips.
Across the room Jelly Jack was standing up to deliver a last few thousand words to the promoter. Leo headed for the door.
The sidewalk was still damp and dark inside the police barricade, but most of the mess was gone. The pavement wasn’t cracked. There was a salt whiff in the air but he couldn’t tell whether it was seawater or blood. He paused and looked up past the wall of windows. For one giddy instant he saw what the fall must have been like. Saw as though he was up there, headed down—falling rather than balanced atop his still sturdy legs and the solid sidewalk. A chill caught his spine. He twitched his shoulders and walked fast to the side street where he’d parked the mongrel Cadillac.
Process
THE MUSTY SILENCE of his childhood bred in Joseph Jaikins a susceptibility to the propaganda of solitude. He had been orphaned horribly and early and reared by a decent elderly aunt. His restlessness was quiet and his school years resigned him to frustration. At the age of eighteen he was courteous but shy, and dutiful without ambition.
He was surprised to discover a cautious liking for the first job he took after graduating. He applied to a small but reputable firm manufacturing artist pigments. During his initial interviews and tests, Joseph was found unusually able to discriminate fine gradations of color. He was placed, as an apprentice, in the bright clean room in which two master color mixers worked over small pots of the most intense pigment. In this room Joseph explored his own capacity for sustained pleasure.
He rented an attic room and returned to his aunt’s house only on Saturday afternoons. His quiet childhood had accustomed him to small excitements, and perhaps he was physically inclined to interior intensity with little outward display. Whatever the cause, Joseph’s youthful life took on a staid and contented regularity. He breakfasted on coffee in his room. He ate cheese and fruit at his workbench for lunch. He stopped at the same restaurant every evening during his walk.
Joseph loved the city. He spent every afternoon strolling, hands in pockets, with no other aim than the pleasure he took in the angle of light on the buildings and the multifarious parade of human activity. He would drink coffee in a café or look in on a friend. He seldom returned to his room before dark.
Only one thing rippled his pleasure. His two masters had worked together in the same room for many years. Their understanding of each other had gone beyond friendship or respect through simple habit. It was an almost organic unity. They rarely needed to speak to communicate. Their language had become so truncated by their specialization that what passed between them could scarcely be recognized as language by an outsider. They were kind men and made efforts to include their shy and apt apprentice, but his sensitivity was too acute to ignore their community of spirit. Sometimes during lunch at the workbench, when the raised eyebrow of one man caused laughter in the other, Joseph could barely restrain the convulsion of self-pity that his exclusion brought him.
On Sunday excursions to his aunt’s house in the suburbs, Joseph helped her with chores and the heavy work of the garden. He would spend an hour or two with a shovel and wheelbarrow, or washing windows, and then join the old lady for a lunch of the same cakes and cookies that she had always baked for him.
One Sunday he was helping his aunt clean the crowded attic of the house. The space was crowded and stuffy with the furniture of members of the family who had died or gone off on such journeys as never seem to end. Among the trunks and lamps and photograph albums, Joseph found a large canvas, perfectly primed, and stretched on an excellent wood frame. His aunt had no memory of how it had come to be in her attic. She thought it might be a relic of her dead brother’s dead wife, who had been known to harbor bohemian fancies.
His aunt was willing to consign the canvas to the trash, but Joseph disliked the idea of it rotting in the wet and being stained by garbage. He carried it back to his room and set it on the small table next to his window. It conveniently covered several holes in the wallpaper.
In the next year, Joseph made such progress in his work that his masters invited him to their homes occasionally for supper. The youngest daughter of one of them took a liking to Joseph. She was a warm and clever girl who made him laugh and play Monopoly every Saturday.
That winter a new idea crept into Joseph’s thoughts. It troubled him for weeks before he brought several small pots of paint home from the factory and set them on the table in front of the blank canvas. The next day he brought a selection of brushes. A week later he came home from work and began to spread paint on the canvas. For days he painted every afternoon, putting off his walk until the light failed.
Joseph himself thought it was a strange thing to do. It seemed presumptuous and, in some way he could not quite name, extremely risky. A queer vibration took over his chest, a continuous wave that traveled from his breastbone to his spine and back. Occasionally he could feel it expanding to fill him from armpit to armpit. The excitement frightened him at first. He imagined it was a sensation that would come to him when he was dying.
When the canvas was covered, Joseph was disgusted by what he had done. His painting was stupid and bad. He stared into the river for hours wondering why he could not erase his failure by drowning himself. He was silent at work. After several days he scraped the surface of the canvas and primed it with white. When the primer was dry, he began again. He worked slowly, carefully, but the result horrified him. He primed the canvas before work the next morning.
His third approach to the canvas was a deliberate siege. It took weeks to complete. He was unusually quiet during visits to his master’s daughter. He played Monopoly in spurts of attention and laughed nervously when she told him he was bankrupt. Several times he came close to blurting out an account of his preoccupation, but he always stopped himself. He looked at her puzzled smile but was only conscious of the odd quiver that, by then, had established itself permanently in his lungs and throat.
The finished painting was wrong but tantalizing. He stared at it in confusion for two whole afternoons. He decided that there was an area the size of his hand in the upper left quadrant that actually pleased him. He whistled as he scraped and primed the canvas.
He spent two months on the new approach and when it was finished he found it so depressing that he went to a tavern and drank until they threw him into the street. He walked around the same block for hours, crying softly, and wondering about his parents’ death and the murky light at the bottom of the river. He was sick for days and turned the canvas to face the wall.
He ignored the canvas for weeks, telling himself he had given it up. He visited his master’s daughter frequently, told cynical jokes at work, and played checkers with anyone at all in the café where he took supper. His chest was heavy and still.
Caught by a spring rain during one of his walks, he took shelter in a bookstore displaying dozens of volumes of color reproductions. He looked through them reluctantly at first and then became absorbed. When the rain stopped he returned to his room and primed the canvas while deliberately contriving not to look at the previous surface.
He began a hesitant exploration, a series of attempts that, though they always ended in the priming of the surface, gave him enough ground to persuade himself that he was learning, however slow and piecemeal the process. He recovered his steadiness of manner. The vibration in his breathing apparatus become a constant. He was at ease with his companions in the factory.
His old aunt died as she had done everything else, discreetly and amiably. He disposed of her possessions methodically, keeping a half-conscious watch for another canvas that might have been forgotten in the clutter of her life, but none appeared.
He had noticed a slight change in the manner of his master’s daughter but did not know how to interpret it. He spent Christmas Day with the master’s family and met, at dinner, a young man who worked in the same office as the daughter. That evening, with the company assembled in front of the lighted tree, the master proudly announced the engagement of his daughter to the young man.
