Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

I pulled Mario to his feet and walked him toward the car.

“Did the dirty nigger hit him?” a woman said.

“He’s drunk. He knocked himself out. You might as well break it up.”

I got in first, pulled Mario after me, and backed slowly through the crowd.

“I got one of them,” Mario said to himself. “Christ! did you see him bleed? I’ll get the others.”

“You’ll get yourself a case of sudden death.” But he paid no attention.

One of the bright-eyed girls followed the car to the sidewalk and hooked one arm over the door on Mario’s side. “Wait!”

I stopped the car. She had short fair hair that clasped her head like a cap made out of gold leaf. Her young red-sweatered breasts leaned at the open window, urgently. “Where’s Joey, Mario? I’m awful hard up.”

“Beat it. Leave me alone.” He tried to push her away.

“Please, Mario.” Her red-shining mouth curved in some kind of anguish. “Fix me, will you?”

“I said beat it.” He struck at her with the back of his open hand. She held on to it with both of hers.

“I heard you lost your boat. I can tell you something about it. Honest, Mario–”

“Liar.” He jerked his hand free and turned the window up. “Let’s get out of here, I’m feeling lousy.”

I took him home. When he stepped out of the car, he staggered and fell to his knees on the edge of the curb.

I helped him to the door. “You better call the doctor and let him look at your head.”

“To hell with the doctor.” He said it without energy. “I just need a little rest, that’s all.”

His mother opened the door. “Mario, where you been, what you been doing?” Her voice was thin and piping with anxiety, as if a frightened small girl were sunk in the inflation of her flesh.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing to worry, Mama. I went out for some fresh air, that’s all.”

There was no sign of Simmie when I got back to the arena. The man in the box office who sold me my ticket tore it in half himself and told me to go on in. The crowd was gone, except for a few small boys waiting around the door for a chance to duck in free. They watched me with great dark eyes full of silent envy, as if Achilles was fighting Hector inside, or Jacob was wrestling with the angel.

Inside, a match was under way. A thousand or more people were watching the weekly battle between right and wrong. Right was represented by a pigeon-chested young Mediterranean type, covered back and front with a heavy coat of black hair. Wrong was an elderly Slav with a round bald spot like a tonsure and a bushy red beard by way of compensation. His belly was large and pendulous, shaped like a tear about to fall. The belly and the beard made him a villain.

I found my seat, three rows back from ringside, and watched the contest for a minute or two. Redbeard took a tuft of hair on the other’s chest between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and tugged at it delicately, like someone plucking lilies of the valley. Pigeon Chest howled with pain and terror, and cast a pleading look at the referee. The referee, a small round man in a sweatshirt, rebuked Redbeard severely for thus maltreating his colleague. Redbeard wiggled his beard disdainfully. The crowd roared with anger.

Redbeard waddled across the ring to the corner where Pigeon Chest was gamely enduring his anguish, and smote the young hero lightly on the shoulder with his forearm. Pigeon Chest sank to his knees, pitifully shaken by the blow. Wrong beat its breast with both fists and looked around with arrogance at the crowd.

“Kill him, Gino,” A grandmotherly lady said beside me. “Get up and kill the dirty Russian coward.” She looked as if she meant it, stark and staring. The rest of the crowd was making similar suggestions.

Warmed by their encouragement, Gino struggled manfully to his feet. Redbeard swung again, with the speed and violence of a feather falling, but this time Gino ducked the blow and hit back. The crowd went mad with delight. “Murder him, Gino.” Wrong cowered and skulked away; all bullies were cowards. Wrong had a yellow streak down its back a yard wide, as the old lady said beside me. She could probably see the yellow streak through her bifocal glasses.

Since Right was triumphing, I could afford to take my eyes off the ring for a little while. The girl I was looking for was easy to find. Her bright hair gleamed from a ringside seat on the other side of the platform. She was sitting very close to a middle-aged man in a gabardine suit a little too light for the season and a Panama hat with a red-blue-yellow band. He had a convention badge on his lapel. She was practically sitting in his lap. With a kind of calculated excitement, her fingers moved up and down his arm, and played with his vest-buttons and tie. His face was red and loose, as if he’d been drinking. Hers was on her work.

Now Redbeard was on his hands and knees on the canvas beside the ropes. Gino was begging the referee to make him get up and fight. The referee grasped the evil Russian by the beard and raised him to his feet. Gino went into swift and murderous action. He threw himself into the air feet first and brushed the jutting red beard with the toe of one wrestling shoe. Redbeard, felled by the breeze or the idea of the kick, went down heavily on his back. Right landed neatly on the back of its neck and sprang to its feet in triumph like a tumbler. Wrong lay prostrate while the referee counted it out and declared Right the winner. The crowd cheered. Then Wrong opened its eyes and got up and disputed the decision, its red beard wagging energetically. “Oh, you dirty cheater,” the old lady cried. “Throw him out!”

The gilt-haired girl and the man in the Panama hat got up and started to move toward the entrance. I waited until they were out of sight and followed them. The rest of the crowd, heartened by their moral victory, were laughing and chattering, buying peanuts and beer and coke from the white-capped boys in the aisles. Right and Wrong had left the ring together.

When I went out the man and the girl were standing by the box-office, and the ticket man inside was phoning a taxi for them. She was clinging to the man like lichen to a rock. What I could see of her face looked sick and desperate. The fat gabardine arm was hugging her small waist.

By the time the taxi came, I was waiting in my car with the motor idling, a hundred feet short of the entrance. The taxi paused to pick them up and headed for downtown. It was easy to follow in the light evening traffic, six straight blocks to a stop sign, left on Main Street past Mexican movies and rumdum-haunted bars, down to the ocean boulevard again. Another leftward jog along the shore. The taxi paused and let them out.

Their destination was a small motel standing between a dog hospital and a dark and immobile merry-go-round. A sign over the entrance inscribed its name, THE COVE, in blue neon on the night. As I went by, the girl’s face, drawn and hollowed by the glare, was intent on the open wallet in the man’s hands. Her lean and sweatered body cast a jagged shadow beside the man’s squat open-handed one.

I parked my car at the curb on the other side of the boulevard. Beyond a row of dwarf palms the sea was snoring and complaining like a drunk in a doorway. I spat in its direction and walked back to the motel. This was a long narrow building at right angles to the street, with a row of single rooms reached by a gallery on each side, and open carports below, most of them empty. A light went on toward the rear of the gallery on my side, and for an instant I saw the ill-assorted couple framed in the doorway. Then a T-shirted boy came out, closing the door solicitously behind him. He heel-and-toed along the gallery towards the open stairway at the front. I kept on walking.