Richard Ford: The Ultimate Good Luck

Sonny was let in the yellow metal door at the end of the cafeteria. The guard halted him, put his rifle against the wall, and patted Sonny down while Sonny stared into the room and smiled, his long fingers sensing the new air.

Sonny had been good hoops. He was six three and soft-palmed and ball smart, and at a distance he didn’t look like somebody muling Baranquilla cocaine through Mexico into San Diego. He had once scored 100 points in a high-school game in New Rochelle, which was a state record, and when Quinn showed up a month ago, he looked like he could still do it, though he didn’t look that good anymore. He had gone to J.C. and quit to play pro, then gotten waived and wound up playing in Sweden for two hundred dollars a game. He had come back in a year with a Benzedrine problem and a Swedish wife and begun playing I. leagues in L.A. and got into the business of delivering animal tranquilizers to the dog tracks in Tijuana for fixed rates. He was just starting to move lorazepam when Quinn had moved with Rae to Seal Beach two years ago, and even then muling didn’t seem like a job you’d retire from. Sonny had floating, graceful arms and pale eyes that faked his moves and a way of walking toes-in that made you think he wouldn’t go anyplace very fast, which was wrong. He had dropped thirty pounds in a month, his complexion had grown speed bumps, his eyes had gotten wide, and he had begun to tie his hair in a ponytail. He looked to Quinn like a freak, somebody you wouldn’t stop for on the on-ramp.

Sonny smiled as he sat down. “Fucking flies, man. Carry you off.”

Quinn looked down at the guards. “We’re set now,” he said in a whisper.

Sonny looked at Bernhardt and back as if he hadn’t heard something correctly. His eyes narrowed alertly. Quinn shoved across the paper sack with Sonny’s Allowable Personals — toothpaste, Super Plenamins, Lomotils, and a week-old copy of the Houston Chronicle . The guard who had passed Sonny in was staring at the paper sack, as if he thought it might contain something wrong. “Make this look right, please,” Quinn said. “People are watching.”

“When?” Sonny said softly. He looked inside the sack and made noise with it. His pupils were too dilated. They looked like fresh fish eyes, but his face was still controlled.

“Two days, three days,” Quinn said. It irritated him to have Sonny show up loaded. “It’d help if you’d stay straight for just a fucking day or so.”

Sonny rearranged himself on his stool and squared his shoulders. He laced his large hands on the table and bent forward. “Sure,” he said and blinked rapidly. “No problem there.” He looked at Bernhardt and then alertly back at Quinn and smiled. This was killed-time starting now, and Quinn wanted out, but it was too fast. Short visits meant special things to the guards. “Where’s Rae?” Sonny said.

“In the air. She’ll be here.”

“You two gonna patch your act up?” Sonny said and tried to extend the smile into a leer.

He wanted to stay cool. He wanted it right so Sonny could get out. But he didn’t want to take shit. “That’s none of your business,” he said.

Sonny blinked again and forced his hands together as though he was trying to hold himself in on the center of something imaginary. The muscles in his arms kept seizing and relaxing. He was freaked, but that was his own problem. “I’m just a little wiped, you know? I did some crystal.” He grinned and looked up at both of them apologetically. “It’s like a strain, you know, in here.”

“You bet,” Quinn said.

The first time he met Sonny, Sonny was playing I. leagues in San Bernardino against some black noncoms from Victorville. Sonny was twenty-six and had some moves left. He was controlled and knew where the ball was when he didn’t have it. Quinn had driven out after a day hunting fitter’s work up the Catalina Channel. Rae was answering crisis phone calls and he was ready to get out of the basin and into something less weird. Sonny’s team folded halfway and he let it slide in the last quarter, and when the game was over they drove in Sonny’s yellow Cadillac back to San Pedro to a Japanese restaurant where Sonny knew people. At the table Sonny drank a beer and relaxed and studied his hands as if they were instruments he admired but couldn’t quite figure out. “I could do that, you know, every day, twice a day. You know what I mean?” He looked up at Quinn confidently in the glassy bar-darkness. He turned his hand over, palm up. “But then where do I make a buck, you know?” His eyebrows twitched and he smiled. Quinn rubbed the beer glass around in his hands. He’d been digging up fitter’s work and he hadn’t thought anything about where Sonny was going to make a buck. “Sports is for kids, you know how that goes? Kids and niggers.” He bit at his lip. “Sweden, I could dex up, shave six to make spread, and waltz out loaded. But that’s not sports, Harry.” He looked up. “That’s business. I might as well be in the fucking record business. I’m getting old in this sports shit.” He looked innocent, as if he were the first human to apply the truth of the world to his own private case. In a week he was trunking lorazepam to Tijuana, and Quinn didn’t see much of him anymore, and in two months he and Rae had split east.

Down the room, the other American, a skinny boy with a clean T-shirt that read “Try God,” was mumbling to the woman who had sunk down on her stool, letting the boy work her under the table with his foot. It seemed to interest Bernhardt.

“I got a card from Kirsten today,” Sonny said and looked up respectfully. “She said if you were down here, Harry, she wasn’t going to worry about me. She thinks you’re smart because you were in Nam. You know?”

“Great,” Quinn said. Kirsten had split when Sonny started muling. She had driven his Cadillac to the L.A. airport and flown to Uppsala and didn’t tell Sonny where his car was for a month, and Sonny couldn’t call the police because the trunk was full of lorazepam. She wasn’t stupid, and Sonny knew it. And he knew he was. And that was why he was staying so mad about it.

“She’s a cunt, you know?” Sonny said. He still seemed glad.

“You need anything else?” Quinn said. Enough time was by now for dress-up. He wanted outside. Sonny made him weak-stomached.

“How’re the Tigers?” Sonny looked at both of them as if he wasn’t sure which one would answer. He seemed suddenly nervous, and squeezed his hands together harder. His breath smelled impure.

“Read it.” Quinn shoved back the bag with the Houston Chronicle in it. Sonny’s breath was making his saliva ropy.

Sonny began glancing at Bernhardt off and on. “I like the Tigers,” he said. Bernhardt was still interested in the whore and not paying strict attention. He was just along for the ride this time, a public appearance. “Look,” Sonny said indecisively. He stared back at Quinn. Sonny’s face was pathetic, and he suddenly exhaled a lot of bad air all at once. “There was a guy here today.” He kept staring at Quinn as if the words meant less if you didn’t acknowledge them.

Bernhardt’s attention settled back onto Sonny’s face and he looked at Sonny oddly. Sonny opened his fingers deliberately on the tabletop and breathed in deeply.

“What’s that mean?” Quinn said.

“An L.A. guy,” Sonny said softly. He looked down. “It’s fucked up.”

“What kind of fucked up?” Quinn said. It surprised him, but there was a sense he wasn’t hearing it right. He didn’t want to raise his voice, that wouldn’t be the way, except he wanted to hear it right. He felt muscles in his arm crawl.

“What are you talking about?” Bernhardt said patiently.

Sonny looked at Bernhardt, then back at his hands as if Bernhardt were talking about his hands. “They think I skimmed the stuff,” he said meekly.