"Not true. It's not the looking so much as the figuring out that keeps me going."
She nodded her head.
"That's true. Same with me. It's rewarding figuring out cause of death and even more so when that leads to justice."
"Exactly," I said. "Nothing like good old justice, and vengeance."
"Vengeance?"
I tilted my head from side to side and turned up my mouth in contemplation.
"Yeah, in a way. Sometimes vengeance is better than justice," I said in all honesty. It was how I felt right at this moment in any event.
"You are a strange bird," she said.
"I'll take that over being an odd duck."
She laughed. In fact if she'd been maybe twenty years younger I might have called it a giggle. I smiled at her laughter.
"You see what I mean."
I didn't say anything. I looked out at the blue ocean. Surfers tumbling like small rags in the waves. Others riding them almost to shore.
"Have you ever surfed?" I asked.
She shook her head and followed my gaze.
"It looks fun," she said. "What about you?"
I shook my head keeping my gaze on the men out there. At least from here it looked like men.
"I'm not originally from here," I said.
"Really?" she looked at me with pinched eyebrows. "I don't think you ever told me that."
I turned to look at her, and smiled.
"I didn't. I moved with my mother when she divorced my alcoholic father. I started junior high out here."
Emily looked at me for a while like I might have just stepped on a kitten.
"You don't like it?" I asked.
She shook her head and rested her chin on her hands.
"It's not that, you're just really quite intriguing. Seems every time we get together I get to peel another layer from your onion."
"So long as I don't make you cry, we'll be alright," I said.
She smiled.
"Where you from then?"
"I rolled in a while back from the dustbowl," I said, grinning.
"No, where are you really from?" she asked gently.
"From Oklahoma, I'm an Okie but not from Muskogee."
I was still grinning but I wasn't selling it.
"Where?"
"You've probably never heard of it," I said. "Small little town, at least compared to The Big Orange, called Stillwater."
"That sounds lovely?"
"It wasn't," I said, my face now deadpan.
"Oh, you didn't like it there?"
"The city's alright. Your average mid-western city. It's small. By the time I left it had maybe forty thousand people."
"So what didn't you like about it?" she asked.
I was saved by the waitress. She came by and served up our plates. My steak looked good. Pink in the middle with nice grill marks and dark on the outside. Tasted great too. Emily's burrito didn't look too bad either, not for a vegetarian dish anyway.
I couldn't help but take a look at the waitress' cleavage. She practically shoved her breasts in my face as she leaned in to place my plate. That's one of the things I love about The Big Orange, the color. The color in the people. You've got the Mexicans and African Americans and Europeans and other Whites all intermingling, or trying their best to figure it out.
It sure ain't no Stillwater. Maybe that's why I didn't like it too much. Too much whiteness. No color, no culture. And we all know what happens to white paint as it ages, it goes gray and cold and peels. Gets stagnant. Not that I knew downright racists in Stillwater, I was too young to really understand that. But folks were too conservative. Too untrusting of folks that didn't look like them.
I thanked the waitress as she went off.
"I like LA," I said. "There's a lot of color here. In the people, in the cultures. It's vibrant."
Emily cut a piece of her burrito and took a bite and chewed on it for a while. I did the same to my steak. Damn, it was good. But then I've always liked Mexican food.
"I know," she said. "I'm born and raised here. I love the culture, the vibe of this place and all the different cultures too. I guess Stillwater's not much like that?"
I shook my head and put my knife and fork down.
"Nope. I haven't been back in about forty years. But I don't remember it being particularly liberal."
"Then what made you so liberal?" she asked.
I looked around. It was quiet for afternoon lunch. But we were eating a late lunch and the tourists were gone. I sipped on my lemonade.
"My father," I said and picked up my knife and fork and started cutting at the slab of meat.
"He must have been a good man," she said, looking at me smiling.
I looked up at her and grinned. A piece of meat stuck on my fork.
"He wasn't," I said. "He was the biggest asshole I ever met."
I put the meat in my mouth and chewed on it. I had nothing better to do. I wasn't mad. The old bastard had been dead going on twenty years or so. I'd put him in his grave and left my anger there with him to keep him company.
"Oh," said Emily, frowning and looking down at her plate. "I'm sorry. I just thought..."
She didn't say anything. She went to eating her food.
"It's okay," I said. "I'm not mad. Not anymore. Just telling you the honest truth. That's what you want isn't it?"
She looked up at me and nodded.
"I guess, I don't understand then how the man who raised you, who you didn't like turned you so liberal."
"That's easy, M," I said. "It was because he was an asshole. When you're raised by the biggest jerk you get a soft spot for the downtrodden, those tossed away in the gutters of life. At least it gave me a soft spot. Gave me compassion, I guess."
"Tell me more about him... if that's alright?"
"It's not a problem. I buried him back in Stillwater some twenty or so years ago. Buried my hatred for him right there too."
Emily looked up at me and nodded. She smiled a smile as soft as kisses and warm as fresh caramel. She was the kind of woman I could meet the end with.
"Maybe if I'm feeling kind I could say the war did him in. The Vietnam war. My mother always said he came back different after that. I figure he was just always an asshole."
"So your mother met him before he went off to fight?"
I nodded and stuffed more meat in my face.
"Yeah, Stillwater was a pretty small town back then. Guess it still is. They were childhood sweethearts. That wasn't uncommon back then. Met in the eighth grade. She waited for him get back from the war and then they got married. She tells me the first few years were pretty good. Even when I was a baby she says he wasn't drinking too hard. I don't remember any of that."
"You only knew him as an alcoholic?"
I nodded again.
"Yeah. He thought I was a sissy because I liked art and liked drawing. My mother wasn't like that. But that was the start of it. The fights between them. Him telling her he was gonna make a man out of me. And he meant it to."
"I'm sorry," she said, sipping lemonade. Her eyes were sad. The saddest blue I'd ever seen. Deep blue pools where a man could drink for ages and never get tired.
"Don't be," I said. "He helped make me the man I am now. This bleeding-heart liberal."
I grinned at her, and raised my glass. She clinked with me.
"To the cracks in us," I said, "that let out the rainbows."
"That's lovely. I'll drink to that."
"I guess your childhood was pretty good, huh?"
Emily nodded.
"It was. I can't complain. I had two loving parents."
"Good for you," I said, and I meant it.
"But please go on," she urged.
I took a bite of meat and chewed for a while.
"When I was around five, at least this is when my memories start, he started to teach me how to box. That was his way of trying to toughen me up. Make a man out of me. He was a semi-pro boxer, just wasn't ever good enough to break into the
pro circuit. He was a failed man in pretty much everything he did. He got a horrible job in Stillwater that he couldn't keep. He was in and out of more jobs than I've been in and out of fights."
Emily nodded. She had finished her meal and pushed her plate off to the side.
"My biggest memories of him are of his whiskey breath and his bad temper."
"He wasn't actually violent, was he, towards you and your mother?"
Emily looked at me, resting her head on her hands. Her face was placid but her eyes remained sad. I nodded.
"Yup," I said. "He beat the shit out of me regularly. Always used boxing as an excuse. It was worse when he was drunk though. He'd tell me it was time for a round in the ring to practice boxing, he'd say. What he really wanted was a moving punching bag."
"That's horrible," she said, turning her mouth upside down.
"Yeah, it was. Now I don't want it to sound worse than it was. I mean he never broke my nose or jaw, or anything like that, but he'd punch me hard. Harder than the other boys could punch at the boxing club he had me join."
"Wow, and your mother never did anything about this?"
"She didn't know any better. She just thought it was how we roughhoused. She probably suspected he was rougher than he should have been, but I got beat up in the ring plenty too, so you can't blame her. It softened me up, but it also toughened me up."
"How do you mean?"
"I learned a hatred for those abusing their power over the vulnerable, like my old man did by abusing me. That gave me my liberal views, and it toughened me up in that I learned how to take a punch. Whether literally or just to roll with the punches that life throws your way."
"Still, that's an awful way to learn those lessons for a child."
I nodded and finished up my food. The waitress came by and asked how everything was. It was great and I told her as much. We ordered a Mexican coffee for me and a regular coffee for Emily. She was back to work this afternoon and couldn't afford the tequila and Kahlua.
"It wasn't ideal. There are only two gifts my father gave me that I ever appreciated."
"What are those?"
"Boxing and compassion. Though that last one was probably the last thing he was trying to give me. He wasn't a compassionate man. I wouldn't say he was racist but he had prejudice. I know that for a fact."
"How?"
"Just the way he'd treat the less fortunate, especially any bums who happened not to be white. It was just the things he'd say to me after, that's all. Not outright hatred, but prejudicial."
"So what happened that caused your mother to leave him?"
"He happened. He'd been off work for several months. I grew up poor, and when the sole breadwinner is out of work for some months you get even poorer. I remember lots of weeks when the only meal I had was what I could get from the school lunch lady."
"That's awful," she said. "I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault. I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm just telling you how it was. That's all. I'm a big grownup man now. I've made peace with it."
Our coffees came back and mine looked like something that Emily would have liked with the cinnamon stick in it and the whipped cream. I offered her a sip and she took me up on it. The whipped cream stuck to her upper lip till she licked it off. Made her lips look like cherries with whipped topping.
"So I came home one day at the end of my grade seven year. I was twelve, coming on thirteen. He'd been hitting the bottle real hard. Come dinner time he was just looking for a fight and he found one with my mother. She'd done the best she could, but dinner was rice with some diluted tomato sauce. He wanted to know where his meat was. She told him she couldn't afford any on account of him not working all this time."
I took a break to take a sip of the coffee. It was damn good. I don't usually go for fancy coffees, but this one hit the spot.
"They got to arguing back and forth. He eventually slid the plate at her and it fell off the table and broke on the floor. He told her to pick it up and she told him to clean it since he'd made the mess himself. He smacked her so hard across the face she was bruised for weeks. It also knocked her down. I'd never seen him hit her before, and I don't think he had. Anyway, that was the straw that broke my camel's back. I got up and punched him in the nose. We got into it then, had a great old fight, it was the first time I'd been knocked out, but not before I got some good licks in myself."
Emily was shaking her head slowly.
"I can't imagine. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard. He actually punched your mother in the face in front of you?"
"No, he didn't punch her, he slapped her. Not much of a difference to the outcome though. The really bizarre thing about all of this was how proud he looked when I was coming too. Not proud of himself, but proud of me. He'd cracked my cheek, split my lip and broken my nose. Next morning when he went down to the unemployment office my mother got me to pack my bags and we left. No note. No anything. I wouldn't see him for almost ten years."
"And that's when you made it out here?"
I nodded and sipped on my coffee.
"Yeah, nothing but a few thousand bucks she'd squirreled away doing odd jobs in Stillwater. No job. I've got a lot of respect for what she did for us. I used to wish she'd done it sooner. But like I said, there're two things I got from my father that I'm now happy for."
"It must have been tough for you. I can only imagine," she said.
I grinned at her.
"You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. We were so poor in Stillwater that I might as well have been raised by a single mother. So coming out here wasn't that bad. Started having regular food on the table. My mother was working two jobs. Worked as a secretary for a used car dealership and then waited tables at a greasy spoon a lot of nights. Never had so much financial security as I did then. Best times of my life started when I got out here."
Emily nodded.
"But like I said, we were poor. But we had each other and we had peace."
"But the first few months must have been hard, coming out to a new state and a new school. Did you have any trouble fitting in?"
I chuckled under my breath and grinned at her.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"My father got rid of most of my fears," I said. "By the time I got out here, I wasn't afraid to make friends or stand up to bullies. The first few weeks were awkward for sure."
"What do you mean by that?"
"You know kids, they can be unkind, mean. I was in Grade Eight and a couple of Grade Ten kids figured it'd be fun to tease the new kid about where he was from. So they got to calling me the Okie from Muskogee. I don't like being called Tony, but that's more of a personal preference. Now if you go insulting where I'm from, that's different. So the first time they did that at recess I knocked them both on their asses. Everything was gravy then."
I was grinning at Emily, and she smiled wryly at me.
"Fighting isn't always the answer," she said.
I nodded slowly.
"I learned that lesson the hard way. See, my father had only shown me that one language. And sometimes that's the language you've gotta use when talking to some folks, but I learned its better to walk slowly, speak quietly and only then use a big stick if necessary."
"How did you come to realize that?"
"Because there's always someone better than you," I said. "I joined a boxing club after I arrived here. My mother thought it would give me a sense of belonging and a feeling of home, like Stillwater. She wasn't very wrong. There was this club close by where we lived in University Park. It was called Moe's Gymnasium. Very old school. Anyway, the owner was Moe Hirschwitz. We all called him Hershey, because even though he was a tough son of a bitch he had a real sweet center."
"What was he like?" she asked, sipping coffee.
"Just like how you'd imagine a benevolent uncle. He was a Jew from Poland originally. Left with his folks during the war. They were lucky if you can call it that, in that they made it out alive, all of them. But th
ey suffered a lot of hardships too, on their journey to get here. Plus, it wasn't easy the first years in the US either."
Emily nodded, holding her coffee mug between us.
"I can imagine," she said.
"When I met him he was in his fifties. He had thinning gray hair, eyes that bulged out his face, thin lips and a nose that had smelt too many fists. It lay against his face like a used gray hankie."
Emily giggled.
"You have a way with words," she said. "You're a poet, you know."
"Well, I don't know about that. It's just that's how it looked to me. Anyway, he was a great man. Really took me under his wing, but he took no crud. Not from me, not from anyone. But he offered respect and expected it in return. He boxed for the US in the 1960 Rome Olympics. Got the silver in the middleweight division, when he lost on points to a Russian. Incidentally, one of his teammates was Cassius Clay, since known as Muhammad Ali. Hershey said Ali was the best boxer he's ever seen, any way you look at it. I'd agree."
"You really like boxing," she said.
"I didn't, not at first. Not until about a year after I got here and Hershey really taught me all about the sweet science. What I was trying to say is that Hershey was a really great boxer, but more than that, a great man."
"If I can interject quickly," she said, and I nodded, "why is boxing called the sweet science? It seems brutally barbaric if I'm to be honest."
"I know, and it is. But it's also very tactical. It's fisted chess is how I like to think of it. You have to be very strategic, and you'll see that sometimes. Sometimes the best technical boxer is defeated by a less technically proficient but greater tactician. Anyway, it was coined the sweet science by an English journalist named Pierce Egan back in the early 1800s and it's sort of stuck ever since."
Emily lifted her eyebrows in surprise and also disagreement.
"Anyway, you were saying about Hershey," she said.
"Yeah, well, he was a great boxer and great man. He taught me about the nuances of boxing, the sweet part of it, the science. But he always instilled in us the fact that it was a sport and an athleticism, and that its ultimate aim was not about fighting for anger or aggression's sake. I didn't believe him of course, but I came around."
"How did that happen?"
Anthony Carrick Hardboiled Murder Mysteries: Box Set (Books 1 - 3) Page 52
