Ed Gorman: Blood Game

Mothers bellowed harshly for their children, threatening enormous violence if the kids did not show their faces soon. Drunks wound and wove amid it all, one poor bastard puking into a garbage can, puking blood. There were cats and dogs and a few horses, all rib-gaunt and glassy-eyed from malnutrition, and here and there you saw a man smack a woman hard in the face or belly, and you saw a woman bash a man with a broom. White faces, black faces, brown faces, red faces, all showed the toil taken by living here. The sadness so easily became rage, and the rage so easily became despair. This was the part of city life Guild hated, the eternal poor and their eternal doom.

When he stepped off the platform of the streetcar, he took from the pocket of his coat the piece of paper John T. Stoddard had given him containing Victor Sovich’s address.

The house stood two stories tall. It looked as though it had once been green. Now there was so much grime it was hard to tell what color it was. Not a single window remained intact. Cans, newspapers, pages of magazines, and plump brown dog turds covered the thin grass of the front yard. A small mulatto child, perhaps a year and a half, lay naked on the front step, fondling himself and crying.

A woman with a leaf-shaped paper fan bearing the name of a funeral home on its front side leaned in the doorway, watching Guild approach. Next to her squatted a dog with dirty white fur. From what he could see of the woman, she looked Mexican.

“Hello.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for a man named Victor Sovich.”

“I don’t know a man named like that.”

Beneath the thin white cotton of her dusty dress, a beautiful, breathtaking set of breasts rose and fell with her breathing.

Guild sensed eyes watching him from all the windows of this tightly packed neighborhood. A word from her and two or three young men would no doubt appear, and Guild, if he wasn’t quick and ruthless enough with his.44, would most likely be sorry.

“I have some money for him. Five hundred dollars.”

He felt sorry for the quick, cheap light in her brown eyes. She had so little money, the child at her feet obviously malnourished, that mention of it made her almost ugly with desire. “Money you say?”

“Money. Five hundred dollars.”

“For this Victor?”

“For Victor. Yes.”

Guild would never be sure what happened next. No matter how many times he tried to reconstruct it, he just couldn’t get the sequence straight.

Apparently Victor Sovich had been hiding in the vestibule right behind the woman. No other position would have allowed him to catapult out of the house. Or maybe he didn’t catapult out of the house. Maybe Sovich came from behind him. Or from the side.

Not that it mattered.

The man with the fancy tattoos and the gray chest hair and the slick-shaven head and the biceps like coconuts started his attack by hitting Guild in the ribs.

Not that Sovich gave him a chance to do anything about it.

Before Guild’s fists came up reflexively, Sovich hit him twice in the face and once more in the stomach.

Guild knew that he was bleeding, knew that he had peed his pants, and knew that he was making some kind of vague mewling sound.

Then Sovich slammed a right cross straight into Guild’s crotch.

If Guild was not precisely unconscious at that point, he certainly was when his head slammed against the ground.

“You keep this one there,” the Mexican woman said twenty minutes later, bending into Guild’s face with her soft breasts and her breath smelling of spicy Mexican food.

Guild lay on a red daybed in a white room. The hot sunlight shone directly on him through the room’s single window. The room stank of food and tobacco smoke and heat. His head hurt and his jaw hurt, but neither hurt half so much as his groin. In the hallway outside, he could hear kids running up and down the wooden steps, screaming and laughing. One of them kept saying the dirtiest word Guild ever heard anybody say. The kid couldn’t have been more than five.

“He lost his temper, Victor.”

Guild tapped his sports coat. “He also took his money.” “You know what he did with the money?”

“What?”

“He burned it.”

“What?”

He saw tears in her eyes. She shook her head in anger and a curious kind of fascination. “Look.”

She showed him the white envelope John T. Stoddard had given him. She opened it up like an oyster. He peeked inside. Black curled ashes filled the white envelope.

“He is crazy sometimes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was cheated.”

“Victor?”

She nodded. “I do not blame him for being mad.”

“Who cheated him?”

“Stoddard.”

“How much did he cheat him out of?”

“Many, many thousands. They have a-what is the word? Paper you sign?”

“Contract?”

“Yes. Contract. They have contract giving Victor half of everything. He gets nothing except five hundred dollars every three or four months. It is not fair.”

“Where is Victor now?”

“He’s in the kitchen.”

Guild raised his head. He could never recall being hit so hard or so often without being able to swing back.

“What’s he doing in the kitchen?”

“He’s waiting for you.”

“He wants to hit me again?”

“No. He only wants to talk.”

“To me?”

“Yes.”

Guild patted his right hip. His.44 was there. He drew it out and looked it over. “I’m taking this into the kitchen with me.”

“He will understand. He knows how he can get.”

“You tell him if he tries to hit me again, I’ll kill him right on the spot.”

She surprised him by smiling. “He scares you?” There was a certain pride in her voice.

“Absolutely. Now you go tell him.”

She went away with her sweet, swaying breasts and long, good legs and bare, slapping feet. Guild sat up. He moaned several times and cursed. He checked his Ingram. He had been out for over half an hour. He focused his eyes. There was no evidence of concussion that he could tell. His groin was so painful, he was afraid to move.

The Mexican woman came back. “He asked if you would like a glass of beer.”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“He asked if you would like a cigarette.”

“That would be nice, too.” He paused. “Did you tell him what I said about killing him if he tries to hit me?”

“He is calm now. The only time you have to worry about Victor is when he is not calm.”

Guild tried to stand up.

The undignified mewling sound came from his chest again.

The Mexican woman reached down and helped him stand. She put her arm around his shoulder and walked him across the sunhot floor and down a small hallway past walls the kids had drawn circles and lines and sort of Aztec faces on with pencils.

The kitchen was a tiny room with a wobbly wooden table and four chairs and a stove and an icebox. It smelled of sour milk and beer and beans. Fat black flies squatted everywhere, the webs of their wings iridescent blue and green in the sunlight.

Victor sat naked to the waist behind the table. His shaven head was sleek and sweaty in the yellow daylight. From a bucket of beer he poured two glasses. He set one on the table for himself. The other one he shoved toward Guild.

“You’ll be all right,” Victor Sovich said.

“Thanks for the diagnosis, doctor.”

“I’ve hit men a lot harder than I hit you, and they’ve been fine.” He nodded to an empty chair. “You going to sit down?”

“The woman told you what I said?”

“About killing me?” He grinned.

“I’m glad you find it funny.”

“Look, friend, your pride’s been hurt. You’ll get over it.”