Million Dollar Baby (4 page)

“I know I do, man, but you gotta know how broke I been since the suspension. It’s over now, but now my old lady’s got cancer in the tit,
ese,
and it’s costing me, but I’ll give you your bread, no sweat, man.”

“Is Tweety going to be there?”

“No, man, I’m squeaky clean for this one, shit.”

“Here’s my deal,” I said. “It’s something like three hundred miles from here to Kansas City. That’s all day both ways and three tanks of gas. So if I do come, I don’t want to waste my time, understand?”

“No doubt about it.”

“How much you gettin? Level with me.”

“Yeah, yeah, only fifty grand, see? I’m takin it cheap just to get a shot at that
maiate
Big Willie mothafuck.”
Maiate
is a word some Mexicans use for black people. A
maiate
is a black bug that lives in dung. “I’ll take his black ass easy.”

I don’t trust Hoolie the fight’s only for fifty thousand, not with his name on the card, but if I can make a grand, it’ll buy the paint I need to finish the work on my brother’s buildings.

“I’ll come,” I say. “But up front, you send me my hundred you owe me by overnight mail. I don’t get it overnight, forget it. Once I drive up to Kansas City, the day I get there you pay me one thousand up front, which is two percent. Or I turn around and come back home.”

“You got it,
ese,
no problem, man.”

“When’s the fight?”

“A week from Saturday. We’re flying in day after tomorrow.”

“When you want me there?”

“Promoter says two days before the fight, to get your license and all. I already got a room in your name. Your meal tickets will be at the desk.”

“I don’t want to lay around that long, so I’ll be there one day before. Give my name to the Commission at the weigh-in. I already got a Missouri license from a fight last month in Saint Louis.”

He gave me the name of the casino and the address. I gave him my P.O. box number, and the deal was made. It took three days for my hundred to get to me, because I live way out in the hills. I cashed Hoolie’s money order and drove down to Gaston’s on the White River for catfish, hush puppies, and pecan pie.

The day before the fight, at six in the morning, I picked up highway #5 out of Gainesville, Missouri, and slowly headed up the climb north to Mansfield. It had snowed in the night, and the shivery landscape glowed in the high light before the Ozark dawn. Before the turnoff to Almartha, I watched a ten-point buck and three does race below a line of cedars, the snow kicking up like puffs of fog behind their white tails. Going west from Mansfield took me through the rolling hills of Amish country. Along #60, a four-lane divided highway, black horse-drawn buggies were driven by bearded men in black wearing wide-brimmed, round hats. I passed through Springfield and on up #13 and across the backwater of the Harry S. Truman Dam to Clinton. #7 took me to Harrisonville. #71 put me on #435, which brought me on into the jarring cityscape of sooty Kansas City.

The snow on the highway had been melted by pounding semis long before I got to Springfield, but there were drifts of dirty white along the road most of the way north. Up from Springfield and Humansville, there’s a stretch of gas stations and a little spot called Amy Jane’s Café at Collins, Missouri. Amy Jane’s sign says
HOME COOKIN & HOMEMADE PIES
. With a gut rumble, I wheeled my brother’s ’64 Chevy pickup right on into Amy Jane’s parking lot. Inside, I was greeted like folks. There was a billboard high on the wall with a day-glo handwritten pie menu. It offered sixteen flavors, everything from coconut cream to blueberry. I had two pieces of lemon with my coffee, which was country good. Most of the customers were good ol’ boys and their buds. There were truckers and families as well. Everybody ate pie.

Pie and radio is how, in my family, we entertained ourselves during the Great Depression. Even after World War II, when not everybody had TV sets. Picking up crumbs with my fork, I sat there thinking back. I do that more and more. I’ve started to miss people I’ve never missed before, to return to scenes from my childhood that are as fresh as if I was standing there again.

After taking the wrong exit twice in Kansas City, I got to the casino at three-thirty in the afternoon. At the front desk they told me the weigh-in had been at noon and that Hoolie’s fight would go off at eleven the following night. From fight guys, I also learned that Big Willie Little had been three pounds overweight and had to take them off in the steam room. Three pounds is a ton to a featherweight. It sounded good for Hoolie.

After leaving off my gear in the room, I went to the buffet, where, among other things, they prepared fresh Chinese food. I hadn’t had good Chinese food since L.A. In Springfield and Branson and on down in Mountain Home, Arkansas, it was hog slop. The stuff in the casino was first-rate, and I stuffed myself. I wouldn’t eat anything else that day. When I finished, I went straight up to Hoolie’s room and asked for my thousand. He was playing dominoes with Policarpo Villa, a scumbag trainer living in Los Angeles who’ll put a green kid in way over his head and then dump him for losing. By destroying the careers of his own boys, he helps other managers build a record for their fighters, and that’s how he also picks up a couple of hundred under the table each time he sells a boy out. He sports a mandarin mustache that he grows down over his mouth to hide his bad teeth, and he wears a white Stetson indoors and out. It turned out that Policarpo was Hoolie’s new trainer as well as his new manager. That saves Hoolie the 10 percent he’d have had to pay Ike, because a manager/trainer only gets 33 percent of the purse. Ike gets zip.

When Hoolie didn’t answer me about my dough and instead kept right on playing dominoes, I started tipping his pieces over so Policarpo could see his numbers.

“Hey! whatchoo doin, man? I was kickin his ass!”

“We got a deal, or not?”

“I’m playin dominoes, I’m thinkin, man, I got ten bucks ridin!”

“You got my money.”

“I was gonna pay you out of my trainin expenses,
ese,
but I had to pay more for sparrin partners back here than I thought, you know how that goes.”

“We got a deal or not?”

“We do, we do gots one. Only, look, I can only come up with three hundred now. Sparrin partners back here tapped me, man, mother’s honor, but you’ll get the rest right after the fight when the promoter pays up, I promise.”

“Do yourself a favor. Cross my name out of your chump-change address book,” I said, and started for the door.

“Come on, come on, goddamn it! Don’t be like that, you got to go with the flow.”

Policarpo said, “Screw it. I’ll be the cut man, save us both fuckin money,
ese
”

I laughed in his face. “You gonna handle cuts on
this
guy, and give him the right instructions in the corner in the one minute you got, yeah? You got a kit, one that’s ready to go? You got all the shit? You bring adrenaline? Missouri ain’t like California, you got to have a prescription for adrenaline here. And where you go in to find a drugstore that even handles it? We’re dealin with a bleeder, did you miss that? Go ahead, lose the fuckin fight for him, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m gonna hang around just to watch the fucker bleed.”

“Calm down, calm down,
ese,
be cool,” said Hoolie. He turned to Policarpo. “How much you got on you?”

“Two hundred, that’s all I got.”

Hoolie counted out his three hundred, and Policarpo added two hundred more. “Here,” said Hoolie. “Take it, homes, no shit, man, it’s all we got until after the fight. Gimme a break, okay? We’re gonna make big money together, you and me, word of honor.”

“Gimme an IOU for the five more you owe me,” I said, taking the five hundred. “You stiff me, I go to the commission.”

“Hey, you write it, I sign it, that’s how much I respect you, homes.”

I did and he did and I left. On my way out he asked, “When am I gonna see you?” all humble and small and best of friends. “We got to get together before the fight so I know you don’t split, right?”

“You want your chiselin five hundred back?”

“I trust you, my brother, I didn’t mean nothin.”

“Your bout goes off at eleven. I’ll be in your dressing room at nine.”

“Hey, homes, no hard feelins, right?”

“Why would there be?”

The next day I slept late and took a walk down by the Missouri River. It was muddy and dark, and there were patches of foam in the weeds along the snow-covered bank. This was the river that the Lewis and Clark expedition took to open a way to the Pacific. I would love to have been along on that ride. Less than two hundred years ago, where I stood was uncharted Indian land. I wondered what kind of ride Hoolie planned for me.

I’d had a light breakfast, and the cold air made me hungry. I went back for more Chinese food. I was seated by the same hostess at the same table. The place wasn’t crowded, and I noticed for the first time that the tables were arranged in little booths made up of dividers, with screens between the tables, for privacy. On my way back to my table from the buffet, I saw that Hoolie and Policarpo were bent over hot tea at the table next to mine. I took the long way around. They hadn’t seen me, and when I sat down, I realized they were speaking Spanish. I had nothing to say to them. I’d handle the cuts, I’d collect my money, and I’d go back home and start painting. That was my deal, and I’d do it. I was kicking my own ass for showing up, but now that I was here, I was going to get my other five hundred. It was a rule.

Hungry as I was, at first I didn’t pay any attention to them. When I heard them scheming on million-dollar fights, I had to smile. Then I heard something about a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fight and realized they were talking about the fight with Big Willie Little. I turned up both my hearing aids.

“I know they take taxes, but I don’t get what we do with what’s left of the two hundred thousand,” said Hoolie. “The promoter said we could cash his check here if we want to, but then what? I mean, we don’t want to pack it to L.A., right?”

Policarpo said, “Two ways. First, we could trust the promoter, and cash his check in L.A. But what if the check bounces? I say cash it here, so we got it in our hands. Then have the casino transfer the money to banks in L.A., one third to me, two thirds to you, like the big guy said.”

“How much we got left over from trainin-expense money?” asked Hoolie.

“About thirty-five hundred. One thousand for me and two for you, after the cut man gets his five.”

“The cut man gets it in his ass,” said Hoolie, “that’s what he gets for hustlin me.”

“He’ll be pissed,
raza.”

“Son cosas de la vida
—that’s life.”

“Can we get away with that?”

“What’s the old Paddy cunt gonna do?”

“You signed your name,
ese.”

“What I signed was Julio Cercenar Bauzá, not Julio César Garza.” They laughed about the one word,
cercenar
—to trim, to reduce. “Dumb old fuck didn’t see the difference.”

It was true. Because of Hoolie’s scrawl and fancy whorls, I hadn’t picked up the name switch.

“What if he says you signed it phony?” said Policarpo.

“I say I never signed it at all. He’s the one who wrote the IOU, not me, right?”

“What, we just split his money, one third/two thirds?”

“No,” said Hoolie, “half and half. After I kick the nig’s ass, we’ll go buy us some black pussy on the old man, eh?”

When they gave the high five, they saw me for the first time. I turned to one side and didn’t make eye contact.

“Hey, man,” said Hoolie, looking through the screen, “how long you been here?”

“Couple minutes,” I said, shoveling rice into my face with chopsticks. “What’s up?”

“We’re gonna take a little walk, it’s not too cold, and then maybe I’ll have me a little siesta,” said Hoolie as he and Policarpo came around the divider. “How come you don’t say hello or nothin, man?”

“I was eatin. Didn’t see you.”

“Yeah, we didn’t see you, too.”

They stood there while I continued to eat.

Policarpo said, “You don’t speak no ehSpanish, right?”

Hoolie’s eyes flicked between Policarpo and me.

I shrugged, kept eating. “About like the rest of the California
gringos,”
I said.
“Cerveza,
and
puta,
and
cuánto
—beer, and whore, and how much.”

That got a laugh, and they left feeling satisfied. I went back for seconds, took my time, and chewed on the fact that I should be getting four thousand dollars, not one. There were 24-by-36-inch posters of Hoolie and Big Willie in the café. More were set up throughout the hotel. This was Big Willie’s fourth defense of his title, and he hadn’t looked good in his last fight. With his weight problem, and with Hoolie’s speed and boxing ability, it figured that Big Willie was due to lose his title. But he was a durable little battler who loved being champ, and under pressure he was mean. He was big in the back and shoulders and neck. He would have gained weight and regained his fluids since the weigh-in, and Big Willie could bang, even when he was tired. Of course Señor Julio Cercenar Bauzá was known to bleed.

When I didn’t see anyone around that was connected with the fight, I went into the casino and checked the line. Big Willie was a three-to-one underdog because of his weight problem. That’s when I went to the nearest ATM and pulled some cash from three banks.

I looked for someone who knew me from nothing. There were hillbillies and bikers and college boys. There were sorority girls and telephone operators and welfare mothers. Old people and young. Sporting types, squares, drunks, and junkies. All colors. None looked right, so I waited.

I got a whore, a skin-and-bones Thai whore with frizzed hair, who was all knee bones, ankles, elbow joints, and skull. No ass left on her. She was maybe thirty but looked fifty. Nobody looked at her, neither males in lust nor females in sympathy. I wondered how she could make a dime much less pay the rent. I don’t know if she was a crack-head or had AIDS, but for sure she had lived hard in the night. She made me for a typical old John, someone who wanted to feel her, not fuck her. I told her what I wanted and that I’d pay two hundred. I told her that I’d be right on her tail, that if she made a run with my money, I’d stab her. She understood. What I did was slip her 15 one-hundred-dollar bills in an envelope, and had her lay it all on Big Willie Little for me at the Sports Book. I win the bet, I pick up a fast forty-five hundred. Afterward, I tailed her to a videogame room. She gave me my fifteen-hundred-dollar printout, and I gave her 4 fifties. She shoved them into her training bra.