Richard Ford: The Ultimate Good Luck

The girl was broke, and what he had in mind for her didn’t matter to her much. She only wanted to take a last reading on the day before giving it up and starting the night with a stranger. You made the best arrangements you could, and that always meant having a last look around. He wasn’t in a hurry. Through the whitewashed trees he watched a photographer haul his wooden pony across the park. He thought it would be nice to have a picture made.

When she had stared across the Portal for a while she bit her lip and looked at him as if he was the owner of a dangerous car that would take her a long way from where she wanted to go, but would get her there fast.

“Why do you want to go to the fights?” she asked and smiled curiously.

“I guess I’ve gotten desperate since the ballet left,” he said, and smiled back.

“I’ll bet you have,” she said.

“Do you want to go?” He folded his paper and laid it on the table.

“Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” she asked. She bit her lip again and looked at him brightly. It was her idea now, and everything came up front. She liked it tidy, no mysteries, and she had his number, like a smart fourteen-year-old.

“I’ve got business in the morning,” he said, “but I’ll work it out.”

Her face took on the appealing look. It made him feel smart. “Everyone has business,” she said. She began putting her shoes back in her bolsa. “Why would you stay here otherwise? It’s so boring. Nothing ever happens. I’m sorry I ever came. But I’m here now.” She smiled again.

“I’ll try to keep you busy,” he said.

“That’ll be great,” she said as she stood up.

The arena de boxeo was a small unventilated warehouse on the American Highway past the last streetlights at the edge of the barrio popular. The Italian girl drank mescalitos at dinner, and complained a lot about the Mexican men whom she didn’t care for and how her father had a lot of money in Milano except she couldn’t stand him, and had come to live with her mother in New York and had taken up with the wrong people in Mexico. It seemed to make her sad. The hot air inside the arena had the high pomade and liniment smell of little boxing-club halls in East L.A., from the time he’d first known Rae two years ago, air with risk in it, palpable and utterly in the present, and going right into it made him feel lucky, which was how he wanted to feel.

In the ring two Zapotec boys were feeling each other out, circling uncomfortably beneath a bluish light that seemed to make the middle of the warehouse fall below a dense black cloud. Neither boy was a boxer, and neither one wanted to get hurt. Their long, stiff jabs made their gloves dip and seem heavy, like big red balloons, and they moved without discipline and too slowly to want to fight. They were friends, Quinn thought, and that made everything too hard. It was hard to want to kill your friend. The Mexicans in the arena didn’t approve. They were drinking mescal and yelling, though the boys were oblivious. He wanted this fight to be over and better fighters to come in, and so did the Mexicans. The Italian girl had quit talking and stared up at the ring as if someone she knew was inside and something maybe funny would happen to him. She was drunk and having dreams already, and he wanted her to keep together.

The noise in the arena began to grow loud, and both boys’ handlers thumped their elbows on the apron and started yelling at them in Zapotec. The blue light made both fighters seem slow and inconclusive, and everyone realized all at once that the fight wasn’t going to work out.

A large man stood up suddenly in the back rows and threw a pop bottle that hit the ropes and bounced on the canvas, hitting the taller of the two boys in the foot. The boy stopped circling and put down his hands to look at where the bottle had stopped spinning beside his foot. He seemed concerned, and turned to the referee as if he wanted to have the bottle removed before going on. The referee glared into the crowd, wanting to find who had thrown the bottle. He was a short man in a white sweat-stained shirt and a toothbrush mustache, and he seemed to be annoyed. The taller boy began pointing with his glove, and the handler of the second fighter began screaming and beating the apron with his fists, and the boy suddenly threw a straight-in, leaning right with his thumb extended, and hit the taller boxer in the temple just below his hairline, knocking him backward off his feet into the ropes. He came down hard on the seat of his trunks, heels off the floor, and Quinn could see that the boy’s eye had been sprung out of its socket by the other boy’s thumb, and that it was hung out of his face by filaments.

“Oh please,” the Italian girl gasped. “Just please now, I don’t like this, just please.” She put her hands up to her face and rocked backward so that he got afraid she would fall off the bench. It was just a pug’s trick, he had seen it worked before. It looked plenty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. A good corner could put the eye back, and two stitches would hold it in. Except the Italian girl didn’t know that, and it began to seem like a good idea to get her out before she got crazy.

The boy with his eye out pulled himself up on the ropes and began walking stiffly around the ring, his hands on his hips, as if he were walking off a charley horse, only with his head down so that the eye swung a little on whatever was holding it. Quinn couldn’t see anything behind him except a thick swarming blackness. The Mexicans were all stunned and silent while they tried to figure if an important enough decorum had been offended and what they ought to do about it. The referee was trying to get the injured boy to stop walking and was hugging his short arms around the boy’s chest, but the boy kept going. The other boxer stood in the neutral corner with his arms draped on the ropes, talking down to his handlers, who were making fists and yelling something very emphatically. The Italian girl had begun to cry quietly, and he wished she could disappear.

The boy with his eye out all at once stopped walking and swooned back into the ropes as though he had fainted. None of his handlers would get into the ring. The referee produced a pink handkerchief and was trying to cradle the boy’s eye back up toward the socket but didn’t quite seem to understand the mechanics. The boy still had his mouthpiece, and he was bleeding from his nose and blood was sprinkling on his knees and starting to track in the sweat. He moved his legs to stand up, but they didn’t seem to have any strength left.

The Italian girl wouldn’t speak and had become rigid in her seat. Quinn wanted to move out of the arena.

The boy in the neutral corner began to survey the crowd casually. His handlers were talking fast and counting off something on their fingers that the boy was apparently supposed to hear but didn’t. He looked bemused, and he worked his mouthpiece and his knees automatically as if he expected the fight to start again but didn’t care when. His eyes were fixed, and his face looked calm. He seemed to be thinking about something far away. Suddenly he waved his glove at the men who were counting, turned toward the ring, and ran and hit the injured boy again flush in the face, knocking him off his knees onto his side, and began dancing around the center of the canvas holding his arms up. The referee started waving his arms, and the Italian girl out of instinct was moving away from where she was, straight into the men beside her, saying “con permiso, con permiso,” and then a folding chair hit the air and the crowd began screaming, and police appeared, pushing toward the ring, and Quinn knew he had to get out. He couldn’t risk police, and he began shoving the girl through the crowd toward where he thought a door was, trying to get himself back into the night before something worse happened and before he had pissed away everything.