The Best of Lucius Shepard (56 page)

“The
Heat, man? You fightin’ the Heat? No shit! Hey, you better watch your ass with
that white boy! I seen him fight Reggie Williams couple months back. Hit that
man so hard, two his teeth come away stuck in the mouthpiece.”

Mears
slides the twenty across the bar and says, “Keep it” to the bartender.

“That’s
right,” says the man with apparent relish. “That white boy ain’t normal, you ax
me. He jus’ be livin’ to fuck you up, know what I mean? He got somethin’ wrong
in his head.”

“Thanks
for the drink,” Mears says, standing.

“Any
time, Bobby, any time,” the man says as Mears lets the hooker lead him toward
the stairs. “You take my advice, man. Watch yourself with that Vederotta. That
boy he gon’ come hard, and you ain’t no way slick as you used to be.”

*
* *

Cold
blue neon winks on and off in the window of Mears’ room, a vague nebular shine
that might be radiating from a polar beacon or a ghostly police car, and as the
hooker undresses, he lies on the bed in his shorts and watches the light. It’s
the only thing he sees, just that chilly blue in a black field, spreading
across the surface of the glass like some undersea thing, shrinking and
expanding like the contractions of an icy blue heart. He has always been afraid
before a fight, yet now he’s afraid in a different way. Or maybe it’s not the
fear that’s different, maybe it’s his resistance to it that has changed. Maybe
he’s weaker, wearier. He is so accustomed to suppressing fear, however, that
when he tries to examine it, it slithers away into the cracks of his soul and
hides there, lurking, eyes aglow, waiting for its time. Vederotta. The man’s
name even sounds strong, like a foreign sin, an age-old curse.

“Ain’t
you wan’ the lights on, honey?” asks the hooker. “I wan’ you be able see what
you doin’.”

“I
see you just fine,” he says. “You come on lie down.”

A
siren curls into the distance; two car horns start to blow in an impatient
rhythm like brass animals angry at each other; smells of barbecue and gasoline
drift in to overwhelm the odor of industrial cleaner.

Training,
he thinks. Once he starts to train, he’ll handle the fear. He’ll pave it over
with thousands of sit-ups, miles of running, countless combinations, and by
fight night there’ll be just enough left to motivate him.

The
hooker settles onto the bed, lies on her side, leaning over him, her breasts
spilling onto his chest and arm. He lifts one in his palm, squeezing its heft,
and she makes a soft, pleased noise.

“Why
you didn’t tell me you famous?” she asks.

“I
ain’t famous.”

“Yeah,
but you was.”

“What
difference it make? Bein’ famous ain’t about nothin’.”

She
moves her shoulders, making her breasts roll against him, and her hot, sweet
scent seems to thicken. “Jus’ nice to know is all.” She runs a hand along his
chest, his corded belly. “Ain’t you somepin’,” she says, and then, “How old’re
you, baby?”

“Thirty-two.”

He
expects her to say, “Thirty-two! Damn, baby. I thought you was twenty-five, you
lookin’ good.” But all she does is give a littlemmm sound as if she’s filing
the fact away and goes on caressing him. By this he knows that the connection
they were starting to make in the bar has held and she’s going to be herself
with him, which is what he wants, not some play-acting bitch who will let him
turn her into Amandla, because he is sick and tired of having that happen.

She
helps him off with his shorts and brings him all the way hard with her hand,
then touches his cock to her breasts, lets it butt and slide against her cheek,
takes it in her mouth for just seconds, like into warm syrup, her tongue
swirling, getting his hips to bridge up from the mattress, wise and playful in
her moves, and finally she comes astride him and says, “I believe I’m ready for
some of this, baby,” her voice burred, and she reaches for him, puts him where
she needs it, and then her whole dark, sweet weight swings down slick and hot
around him, and his neck arches, his mouth strains open and his head pushes
back into the pillow, feeling as if he’s dipped the back of his brain into a
dark green pool, this ancient place with mossy-stone temples beneath the water
and strange carvings and spirits gliding in and out the columns. When that
moment passes, he finds she’s riding him slow and deep and easy, not talking
hooker trash, but fucking him like a young girl, her breath shaky and musical,
hands braced on the pillow by his head, and he slides his hands around to cup
her ass, to her back, pressing down so that her breasts graze and nudge his
chest, and it’s all going so right he forgets to think how good it is and gives
himself over to the arc of his feelings and the steady, sinuous beat of her
heart-filled body.

Afterward
there is something shy and delicate between them, something he knows won’t
survive for long, maybe not even until morning, and maybe it’s all false, maybe
they have only played a deeper game, but if so, it’s deep enough that the truth
doesn’t matter, and they are for now in that small room somewhere dark and
green, the edge of that pool he dipped into for a second, a wood, sacred, with
the calls of those strange metal beasts sounding in the distance from the
desolate town. A shadow is circling beneath the surface of the pool, it’s old,
wrinkled, hard with evil, like a pale crocodile that’s never been up into the
light, but it’s not an animal, not even a thought, it’s just a name: Vederotta.
He tolds her tight, keeps two fingers pushed between her legs touching the
heated damp of her, feeling her pulse there, still rapid and trilling, and he wants
to know a little more about her, anything, just one thing, and when he whispers
the only question he can think to ask, she wriggles around, holding his two
fingers in place, turns her face to his chest, and says her name is Arlene.

*
* *

Training
is like religion to Mears, the litanies of sparring, the penances of one-arm
push-ups, the long retreats of his morning runs, the monastic breakfasts at
fourA.M. , the vigils in the steam room during which he visualizes with the
intensity of prayer what will happen in the ring, and as with a religion, he
feels it simplifying him, paring him down, reducing his focus to a single
consuming pursuit. On this occasion, however, he allows himself to be
distracted and twice sleeps with Arlene. At first she tries to act flighty and
brittle as she did in the bar, but when they go upstairs, that mask falls away
and it is good for them again. The next night she displays no pretense
whatsoever. They fuck wildly like lovers who have been long separated, and just
before dawn they wind up lying on their sides, still joined, hips still moving
sporadically. Mears’ head is jangled and full of anxious incoherencies. He’s
worried about how he will suffer for this later in the gym and concerned by
what is happening with Arlene. It seems he is being given a last sweetness, a
young girl not yet hardened beyond repair, a girl who has some honest affection
for him, who perhaps sees him as a means of salvation. This makes him think he
is being prepared for something bad by God or whomever. Although he’s been
prepared for the worst for quite a while, now he wonders if the Vederotta fight
will somehow prove to be worse than the worst, and frightened by this, he tells
Arlene he can’t see her again until after the fight. Being with her, he says,
saps his strength and he needs all his strength for Vederotta. If she is the
kind of woman who has hurt him in the past, he knows she will react badly, she
will accuse him of trying to dump her, she will rave and screech and demand his
attentions. And she does become angry, but when he explains that he is risking
serious injury by losing his focus, her defensiveness—that’s what has provoked
her anger—subsides, and she pulls him atop her, draws up her knees and takes
him deep, gluing him to her sticky thighs, and as the sky turns the color of
tin and delivery traffic grumbles in the streets, and a great clanking and
screech of metal comes from the docks, and garbage trucks groan and whine as
they tip Dumpsters into their maws like iron gods draining their goblets, she
and Mears rock and thrust and grind, tightening their hold on each other as the
city seems to tighten around them, winching up its loose ends, notch by notch,
in order to withstand the fierce pressures of the waking world.

That
afternoon at the gym, Leon takes Mears into the locker room and sits him on a
bench. He paces back and forth, emitting an exhaust of cigar smoke, and tells
Mears that the boxing commission will be no problem, the physical exam—like
most commission physicals—is going to be a joke, no eye charts, nothing, just
blood pressure and heart and basic shit like that. He paces some more, then
says he’s finished watching films of Vederotta’s last four fights.

“Ain’t
but one way to fight him,” he says. “Smother his punches, grab him, hold him,
frustrate the son of a bitch. Then when he get wild and come bullin’ in, we
start to throw uppercuts. Uppercuts all night long. That’s our only shot.
Understand?”

“I
hear you.”

“Man’s
strong.” Leon sighs as he takes a seat on the bench opposite Mears.
“Heavyweight strong. He gon’ come at us from the bell and try to hurt us. He
use his head, his elbows, whatever he gots. We can’t let him back us up. We
back up on this motherfucker, we goin’ to sleep.”

There
is more, Mears can feel it, and he waits patiently, picking at the wrappings on
his hands while he listens to the slap and babble from the gym.

“Member
that kid Tony Ayala?” Leon asks. “Junior middleweight ‘bout ten years ago. Mean
fuckin’ kid, wound up rapin’ some schoolteacher in Jersey. Big puncher. This
Vederotta ‘mind me of him. He knock Jeff Toney down and then he kick him. He
hold up Reggie Williams ‘gainst the ropes when the man out on his feet so he
kin hit him five, six times more.” Leon pauses. “Maybe he’s too strong. Maybe
we should pull out of this deal. What you think?”

Mears
realizes that Leon is mainly afraid Vederotta will knock him into retirement,
that his cut of the twenty thousand dollars will not compensate for a permanent
loss of income. But the fact that Leon has asked what he thinks, that’s new,
that’s a real surprise. He suspects that deep within that gross bulk, the pilot
light of Leon’s moral self, long extinguished, has been relit and he is
experiencing a flicker of concern for Mears’ well-being. Recognizing this,
Mears is, for reasons he cannot fathom, less afraid.

“Ain’t
you listenin’, man? I axed what you think.”

“Got
to have that money,” Mears says.

Leon
sucks on his cigar, spits. “I don’t know ‘bout this,” he says, real doubt in
his voice, real worry. “I just don’t know.”

Mears
thinks about Leon, all the years, the lies, the petty betrayals and pragmatic
loyalty, the confusion that Leon must be experiencing to be troubled by emotion
at this stage of the relationship. He tries to picture who Leon is and conjures
the image of something bloated and mottled washed up on a beach—something that
would have been content to float and dream in the deep blue-green light,
chewing on kelp, but would now have to heave itself erect and lumber unsightly
through the bright, terrible days without solace or satisfaction. He puts a
hand on the man’s soft, sweaty back, feels the sick throb of his heart. “I know
you don’t,” he says. “But it’s all right.”

*
* *

The
first time he meets Vederotta, it’s the morning of the fight, at the weigh-in.
Just as he’s stepping off the scale, he is startled to spot him standing a few
feet away, a pale, vaguely human shape cut in the middle by a wide band of
black, the trunks. And a face. That’s the startling thing, the thing that
causes Mears to shift quickly away. It’s the sort of face that appears when a
fight is going badly, when he needs more fear in order to keep going, but it’s
never happened so early, before the fight even begins. And this one is
different from the rest. Not a comic-book image slapped onto a human mould, it
seems fitted just below the surface of the skin, below the false human face,
rippling like something seen through a thin film of water. It’s coal black,
with sculpted cheeks and a flattened bump of a nose and a slit mouth and hooded
eyes, an inner mask of black lusterless metal. From its eyes and mouth leaks a
crumbling red glow so radiant it blurs the definition of the features. Mears
recognizes it for the face of his secret pain, and he can only stare at it.
Then Vederotta smiles, the slit opening wider to show the furnace glow within,
and says in a dull, stuporous voice, a voice like ashes, “You don’t look so
hot, man. Try and stay alive till tonight, will ya?” His handlers laugh and
Leon curses them, but Mears, suddenly spiked with terror, can find no words, no
solidity within himself on which to base a casual response. He lashes out at
that evil, glowing face with a right hand, which Vederotta slips, and then
everyone—handlers, officials, the press—is surging back and forth, pulling the
two fighters apart, and as Leon hustles Mears away, saying, “Fuck’s wrong with
you, man? You crazy?” he hears Vederotta shouting at him, more bellowing than
shouting, no words, nothing intelligible, just the raving of the black beast.