The Ultimate Good Luck

by Richard Ford

  Acclaim for RICHARD FORD

  “[Ford is] one of his generation’s most eloquent voices.”

  —The New York Times

  “Mr. Ford has joined the small group of artists whose reputations are genuinely national in scope and importance.”

  —Atlanta magazine

  “Ford is … a Babe Ruth of novelists, excelling at every part of the game.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Ford is a masterful writer.”

  —Raymond Carver

  “Richard Ford is a … voice with situations and characters of considerable power.”

  —E. L. Doctorow,

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  “An enormously versatile writer, a perfect ventriloquist who achieves his end in voices that vary from swamp-deep to mirror-flat.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  Books by RICHARD FORD

  A Piece of my Heart

  The Ultimate Good Luck

  The Sportswriter

  Rock Springs

  Wildlife

  Independence Day

  RICHARD FORD

  The Ultimate Good Luck

  Richard Ford is the author of Rock Springs, a collection of stories, and five novels: A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife and Independence Day.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION AUGUST 1986

  Copyright © 1981 by Richard Ford

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in hardcover by

  Houghton Mifflin Company, in 1981.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Ford, Richard, 1944–

  The ultimate good luck.

  (Vintage contemporaries)

  I. Title.

  [PS3556.0713U4 1987]

  813’.54 86-40463

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76371-6

  A portion of this book has appeared in TriQuarterly.

  I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and to the National Endowment for the Arts, who supported me generously while I wrote this book.—R.F.

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  Kristina and for Edna Ford

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  1

  QUINN KNEW HE NEEDED to get lucky.

  Rae was coming from Mexico City in the afternoon, and if they placed the money right, Sonny stepped out of the prisión three days later and disappeared.

  Luck, Quinn thought, was always infatuated with efficiency. A Persian proverb said that very thing. And since he’d been in Oaxaca, he’d been efficient to every stinking particular. He’d been efficient, in fact, if he hadn’t been anything else. The only thing he couldn’t be sure about—and it worried him—was if it still ran in his character to get lucky.

  In the afternoon he had met an Italian girl in the Portal de Flores. She had wandered out of the park through the street tables as though she was looking for someone in particular, and sat at his table. She smiled when she sat down and turned and looked back up the Portal at the hippies and the blanket beggars and the English tourists having coffees. She looked at him and smiled confidingly, as if he should understand why she was there. Quinn had begun to make it a habit to have no nonessential conversations. Talk was risky. You couldn’t tell what you’d say, and seven months alone had taught him to be quiet. But he didn’t mind sitting across from her. Nobody got pregnant looking. The Portal boundaried the central park with a long vaulted commercial arcade with the interior side open. It was the center of evil and good commerce in Oaxaca. He met Bernhardt in the Portal on the days they went to the prison, waiting underneath the suspended Raleigh package for Bernhardt’s Mercedes to turn the corner into Hidalgo Street. And on days they didn’t go to the prison, he liked to come down in the early evening when the Centro wasn’t full of fresh tourists and the light was chartreuse and less precise and there seemed to be a kind of small impersonal welcoming life in the streets, a sense of confidence that everything you saw was functioning predictably.

  The girl was in her early twenties with a round Scandinavian face that didn’t make her pretty, but made her plainness appealing. Her mouth had dark expressive lips. She took a pair of sandals out of her bolsa and worked on the straps awhile without speaking, and finally put them on. Quinn read Excelsior for the ball scores. The girl looked back down the Portal and tried to get the attention of a waiter but couldn’t. She looked at Quinn again and smiled and asked for a cigarette. When she had begun smoking she asked where he was from and he only told her the States. She said, blowing smoke, she was from Milano and had been in Oaxaca a week resting up. She said she had come down from Mexico City with a friend in a van and he had left her and gone, and that she was waiting one more day for him, then taking a bus to San Cristóbal, where she knew people. She had thick brown hair with a green ribbon braided into one thin strand. She thought it was her nicest feature. She kept running the backs of her fingers through it as though it was getting in her way, which it didn’t. She seemed prettier when she talked, and he didn’t mind listening to her. She asked him why he was in Oaxaca, and he said he was a tourist. She told him the best Zapotec ceramics were in the poor pueblos beyond Mitla, and the best dyed woolens were sold in the mountains near Teotitlán, and that the best mescal was made in the fábricas away from town, and that only shit was for sale in the Juárez Market. She asked him how many plaquettes of quaaludes he thought it would be safe to send back to the States in the mail without arousing suspicion, and he told her he couldn’t guess, and she seemed satisfied that the idea didn’t upset him.

  Quinn began watching her. She wasn’t Italian, but that didn’t matter. She could be Pennsylvania Dutch for the difference it would make, and moving quaaludes into the States didn’t make you dangerous. He doubted she was even doing it, or she wouldn’t have asked. It was just a way to make life interesting when you’re bored and broke, which he thought she was. She hadn’t made a serious attempt to get a waiter, and was waiting for an offer. He liked the way her face darted up and down when she talked, so that her features turned appealing then plain then appealing again depending on whether she smiled. The change back to appealing surprised him every time, and he kept looking for it. She was the first woman he had talked to in a month, and he wondered which face you’d see late at night and which one you’d remember. Since Rae had left he had a habit of only remembering the bad ones. He asked her if she wanted a mescal an
d she said she did and smiled.

  After an hour the Portal began to empty. The Americans left for cocktails at the Victoria, and the hippies faded away to the sleazy hotels back of the market. It was the time of day he liked best in Mexico, a time he never liked in Michigan. In Michigan things were finished now, but in Mexico action was just beginning again. He wanted to stay until the army band started up in the park, and then he was going to the fights.

  The girl stopped talking, as if she hoped something interesting would happen. She asked for another cigarette and sat back in her chair with one arm on the table and watched the park empty of tourists. She had no place to go, that much was clear. She was slumming. But he didn’t know if he should take a chance. Women had been off the routine since he’d arrived. They pushed things out of shape too fast. Everything you relied on could tip. Whole empires had gone over for smaller risks. But sometimes you had to adjust your routine to serve the circumstances, and the circumstances added up that he wanted the girl to stay.

  When he had sat for a while without speaking, he asked her if she’d like to go across to the Monte Albán and eat the comida and go to the fights. He had been watching the posters on the comerciales all week, and he wanted to see a fight. He liked Mex fights. He had a memory of the chicos in Michigan, down between the long barracks houses in the cherry groves, north of Traverse City. He would sneak out late at night and stand in the tight circles and watch the slender shirtless boys go bare knuckles in the kerosene light. They were stand-up and correct fights, and the punches drew blood precisely. The boys whispered while they fought in the hot dirt, until one boy couldn’t get up, then everyone in the circle would close and pick him up formally, and file back into the whitewashed houses to get drunk, and he’d be left alone in the dark with his heart pounding. It was always a war, and he didn’t remember cowards. Cowardice seemed as far away as death, and when it was over you felt lucky, even left by yourself.

  The girl laughed strangely when he mentioned the fights and glanced around her at the empty tables down the Portal where the waiters were standing motionless. Some street boys had begun to hustle a fat German woman for change. The woman batted her hand at them as if they were flies. Things, Quinn felt, would be starting up again in an hour.

  The idea of a fight seemed to confuse her. It wasn’t what she had expected to be offered. Light had died in the Centro in the time she had sat there. The air was cool and plum tinted in shadows along the Portal. Traffic had cleared. The Zapotec women in the plaza had taken their backstrap looms down off the benches and were packing them in bundles. The afternoon was over, and the day, he thought, probably looked different to her now from when she sat down. It was a bad time to have to be alone someplace. He could tell she felt that. The military band had begun to muster below the raised kiosk. The musicians stood patiently, holding their instruments, waiting for someone to unlock the low door. They seemed remote and practical.

  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.