A Better Goodbye (11 page)

Two-seventeen
A.M.
Home again. Her hair was still wet and her Vietnam War project was still waiting to be done. Wondering if she should forget about sleep and start working on the paper, she sorted through the mail she hadn't bothered to look at for days. There were notices for shoe sales she would never go to, two-for-one offers from pizza joints, pleas for donations from charities, credit card bills, and offers to get new credit cards. It was all stuff she had seen before until she reached the bottom of the pile and found an official-looking envelope from the DMV. What did they want? Her license renewal wasn't due until summer. She opened the envelope and what she found inside left her feeling like she was back under water, drowning, with no one to save her this time.

On the days when work didn't find him, which was most days, Nick walked. The only thing that could keep him inside was one of those special-effects storms L.A. had when it got any rain at all. Otherwise, he would hoof it west on Olympic, then south on Bundy, and down to Pico, where he would head west again. The closer he got to the ocean, the more homeless people he saw. They seemed to him a reminder that things always balance out: You want the Pacific, you have to take the human flotsam and jetsam. Poor bastards. Sometimes Nick would give one of them his spare change when he grabbed a sub at the Italian deli he liked on Lincoln. Problem was, there were always more of them than he had change.

He'd sit at one of the outside tables and ask himself how he was going to get out of the dead end his life had become. When it came to work, if there was any baggage to be handled, he couldn't find it. There didn't seem to be any nails to be pounded or ditches to be dug, either. Trucks to be driven, well, he'd find out about his one shot at that soon enough. He knew he should keep looking just the same, but he'd reached the point where most days he couldn't stand to beat his head against that particular wall. The best he could do was try to come up with something he hadn't thought of. When he'd gone without an answer for as long as he could stand it, he'd eat the last of his sub and head for home along Santa Monica Boulevard.

He could kill a good three hours that way, always walking, never running. Running reminded him of roadwork, and roadwork reminded him of boxing, and boxing intruded on his thoughts often enough without his encouraging it.

Some days he made it back to his apartment wishing he were still on the move. More than once, he turned around and went back out the door, walking up to Westwood for a glimpse of the pretty girls from UCLA. Then it would be down to Rhino Records, where he'd heard “The Dark End of the Street” for the first time. It was about cheating lovers who can't stay away from each other, and it sounded melancholy enough to be played at a funeral for their good sense. Nick hadn't been in a jam like that in years, but the song touched something in him just the same.

When he was out of places to go, he sat in front of his twenty-one-inch Toshiba, the nicest thing in his apartment though he hadn't paid a cent for it. The previous tenant had left it behind when he fled without paying his rent for four months. He had pirated cable service too, so Nick found himself with more channels to stare at numbly than he'd previously known existed. Ballgames ate up time the best—didn't matter which sport—and old movies were good too, particularly when Bogart was in them. Or Gregory Peck, the one his mother had always had a crush on. Nick thought it was because Peck seemed like the kind of decent guy his father had never been.

He was watching
To Kill a Mockingbird
the night Cecil Givens called, first time in five or six years, saying they should get together for a meal. Cecil's voice was still deep and mellow, a touch of the South in it even though he'd never done anything there except fight and catch the first thing smoking out of town. Cecil said to meet him at the Pantry. There was a cook there he wanted to see, a Latino guy who had done some boxing before he got in trouble with the law. Cecil needed to ask if the guy could help a friend of his get a wait job. His friend was a reformed burglar, and when Cecil said reformed, Nick could picture the laughter in his heavy-lidded eyes.

The laughter was still there when Nick spotted Cecil watching him make his way down the line that seemed to form outside the Pantry every minute of the twenty-four hours it was open daily. Cecil looked a little thicker through the middle and his forehead was higher—what the hell, he had to be in his sixties—but he still had a tidy mustache, a soul patch, and a silky way of moving. Before he'd turned to training, he had been a damned good middleweight. With a better manager, he might have been a champion—or maybe not, because no manager could have kept him from getting shot. His kid brother had beat up some crazy son of a bitch in a street fight, and the crazy son of a bitch was determined to spill the blood of someone in the Givens family, didn't matter who. Cecil never fought again.

There would be no hugs now, no backslapping or pronouncements that it had been too long. “Good to see you, man,” was all Cecil said. It was enough. He had always been about efficiency, in the ring and in life.

“I thought you were still in Vegas,” Nick said.

“I am, most of the time.”

“With Bettina?”

“Most of the time.” Cecil frowned. “What the fuck you smilin' about?”

“How some things never change,” Nick said.

The frown disappeared as Cecil rolled a toothpick on his tongue. “I like my freedom, man. She knows it.”

“This where you come for freedom?”

“L.A.?”

“Yeah. You got a place here, right?”

“Over by Crenshaw, uh-huh.”

“She know about it?”

“There's plenty in Vegas that keeps her busy.”

Cecil smiled, and Nick felt himself give in to the rhythm their conversations always had. Nick was the puncher and Cecil the counter-puncher. Nick had just been away from him for too long, that was all.

Once they were seated, a waiter as grim as a seven-year jolt at Chino slung plates of coleslaw and sourdough bread in front of them. If they wanted something in the way of vegetables or an appetizer, there was a lazy Susan filled with radishes, carrots, and celery sticks. “No fairy food,” a cut man once told Nick. The menu was on a wall that was the only color it could be, the color of grease. Maybe it had been painted since a former mayor had bought the place, but it hardly mattered with all the meat that got cooked there every day. The place wouldn't have looked right any other way. Nor would the waiter have fit in if he had brought them their Bud Lights and taken their order—a porterhouse for Cecil, a New York for Nick—with anything other than a look that suggested he had a shank in his belt.

Once he was gone, Nick asked Cecil, “The guy you're helping out, he have as much personality as our waiter?”

“He gettin' there,” Cecil said.

“Better not count on a lot of tips.”

“Man needs the job. Up to him what he does with it.”

“Yeah, I suppose. You said he was a fighter.”

“Not much of one. Heart like a blister.”

“And you trained him?”

Cecil took a bite of unbuttered sourdough and chewed it thoughtfully. “Favor to his daddy. Remember Bolo Garcia?”

“Saw him fight on TV a couple times,” Nick said. “He was finished by the time I came around.”

“A true-life ass-kicker. Only thing that beat him was lies. Take a dive down in Texas, they said, and he'd get a title shot.”

“Never happened, huh?”

“Hell, no.”

Nick let Cecil have a moment with his thoughts. Then he asked, “You hear from anybody I used to know?”

“You the only one I don't hear from since you ain't at the airport,” Cecil said.

“So, give me some names,” Nick said.

“John-John Causion, he thinks he a trainer now; ain't bad, either. And that crazy muthafucka Simmie Watkins got him a storefront church in Detroit.” Cecil started laughing. “You hear about the stripper Rico LaPaglia married?”

“No.”

“She shot his ass.”

“Dead?”

“Not unless she shot him again since he told me.”

Now Nick was laughing too.

“You still a good-lookin' kid, you laugh that way,” Cecil said. “Oughta try it more often. Might get you some pussy.”

“Probably the wrong time for that.”

“There's never a wrong time. How 'bout that story in the paper?” Cecil asked. “It do you any good?”

“Andy Rigby's story?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not really. I mean, the buddy I was driving for that day—when the kid jumped me—he keeps saying his boss will have something for me. A month, two months, when one of their drivers moves out of state. But every time I'm supposed to meet the boss, it gets postponed.”

“On account of you or him?”

“Him. Christ, Cecil, I got rent to pay, you know? I need a job.”

There was a flash of mischief in Cecil's eyes. “You want, I could put in a word for you here.”

Nick couldn't help smiling. “No, thanks.”

“Yeah, these sour muthafuckas, I can't blame you. But you gonna let me say I'm sorry, ain't you?”

“For what?”

“For tellin' that shitass Rigby where you was,” Cecil said.

“Don't be sorry, man,” Nick said. “You couldn't read his mind. Besides, I didn't talk to him much when he came around. All he did was dig up, you know—” He shrugged rather than say more. No sense having Alonzo Burgess at the table with them even if it was in name only.

“Yeah, I know.”

“He could have written the same thing if he'd never found me. Looked like he was pretty desperate for a story. He a drinker?”

“Might be. Was a time all them newspaper cats boozed pretty hard.”

“Forget about him,” Nick said. “I'll get by.”

“Just the same,” Cecil said, “muthafucka better not come askin' me for no more favors.”

He looked like he was still brooding on Rigby's betrayal when the waiter plopped their steaks in front of them, their orders reversed. As they switched plates, Cecil said, “You eatin' regular?”

“Regular as I can.”

“Don't look like it.”

There was always something that felt right to Nick about Cecil ragging his ass.

It was Cecil who had introduced him to soul music, to Otis and Aretha and obscure singers like James Carr and Howard Tate—anything to mellow him out after sparring. And it was Cecil who worked with him for nothing after his old man stole damned near every penny he'd made in his first seven pro fights. Fucking Matt Pafko—Nick tried not to think about him anymore, but when he did, he always wondered how a father could let gambling become more important than his son or anybody else in the family. Good thing Cecil had been there when Nick came west to Vegas to see if he could pick up the pieces.

Cecil took him to Johnny Lupo's gym for the first time, saying this was paradise for any fighter who thought he had greatness in him, who felt it in his gut. The gym had only one ring for sparring, its walls were decorated with fight posters of everyone from Ali to Little Red Lopez, and, just past the heavy bags, there was a sign on the door to Lupo's office that said “You Got to Have Balls to Conquer the World.” Nick's were big and brass, and the day he walked into the gym you could practically hear them clanging.

But they ceased to matter after Alonzo Burgess. Something else was at work in Nick then, something that had no place in the fighting life. Cecil tried everything he could think of to get Nick back to where he'd been, bitching at him, sweet-talking him, even sparring with him before his first cable fight, ten rounds on ESPN. Cecil wanted to take him out of town, maybe someplace like Portland, far from the cameras and the Vegas vultures, but Frank Delzell wouldn't hear of it. He smelled money, which is what managers are supposed to do. Nick had become a draw, his stature enhanced by his unwanted reputation as a killer, and Delzell intended to capitalize on it. Nick, thinking there was no other way to get rid of the ghost that followed him into his dreams, came down on Delzell's side.

He knew he'd hurt Cecil when he did it, but Cecil stuck with him anyway, as though he could see what was coming. It happened in the fifth round, Nick pinning his man in a corner, freezing him with a body shot, then moving to throw the right hand that would shatter him. But the right hand lost its menace in midflight and missed by six inches because Nick found himself punching Alonzo Burgess, and Alonzo Burgess had suffered enough.

Delzell erupted at ringside, screaming that Nick should have the cocksucker wearing an oxygen mask. The crowd turned hostile, its booing punctuated by mutterings of a fix. Only Cecil understood. “It's the man in front of you,” Cecil told Nick between rounds. “He the one you got to beat.” Cecil demanded more punches and an attack to the body—“Crowd this muthafucka”—and Nick had every intention of doing what Cecil said. But when he went back out there, he knew he couldn't win. He was fighting two men.