Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  “He’s all right. He owns a gym. So what do you say?”

  That was the night that Crow had won his lifetime membership to Bigg Bodies. It was also the night he’d told Hyatt Hilton how to find Carmen Roman. He hadn’t done it on purpose. It was just one of those things. They started the game with seven players, but by midnight it was down to four: Crow, Zink, Hyatt, and Bigg.

  In the middle of a hand of seven stud, Hyatt said, “Say, Joe, you remember when I saw you last summer at the state fair?”

  Crow frowned at his cards and folded. “I remember.”

  “You remember that girl in that taco stand? Her name was Carmen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was her last name?”

  Crow replied without thinking. “Roman, I think. Carmen Roman.”

  “You know how I can get in touch with her?”

  “In touch?” Crow blinked. “What for?”

  Hyatt produced an abashed grin. “I thought she was sort of interesting. I’m trying to meet some new people, you know?”

  “She’s just a kid. Besides, you don’t want anything to do with her. You know what happened to her last boyfriend? Carmen’s mother ran over him with a pickup truck.”

  “No kidding? Was it an accident?”

  Zink, who had been listening, said, “Way I heard it, she did it on purpose.”

  “It was pretty ugly,” Crow said.

  “It was in the papers and everything,” Zink said. “The guy was robbing them or something, wasn’t he?”

  “Something like that,” Crow said.

  Zink said, “The way I heard it, the girl was behind the whole thing. It was her idea.”

  “Really?” Hyatt seemed more interested than ever. “Was she on TV?”

  “The mother was, just for a second.”

  “They get paid for that, you know.”

  Biggie said, “Hey! You girls come here to talk or play cards?”

  “What? Is it to me?” Hyatt looked at his cards. “I check.” He turned back to Crow. “So, she’s had a rough life.”

  “I’d stay away from her if I were you, Hy. Besides, what makes you all of a sudden get the hots for a girl you met way last summer?”

  “I had a feeling with that girl. You say her name’s Roman? She in the book?”

  “That’s how you found me, right?”

  It was right about then that Crow had been dealt the baby straight that had beat Bigg’s three queens and won him the membership to Bigg Bodies.

  Apparently, Carmen’s full name had been sufficient information for Hyatt to locate her. Without Joe Crow, it never would’ve happened. Now they were getting married. He should have told Axel the whole story, but he’d held back, not wishing to implicate himself further, and now—the price he was paying—he’d agreed to take a tour of Hyatt Hilton’s life.

  10

  It is our own vanity that makes the vanity of others intolerable to us.

  —François de La Rochefoucauld

  FLOWREAN PEECHE ARRIVED AT the gym at her usual time, 10:30 A.M., in a pink XXL T-shirt and oversize jeans, turned up at the cuffs. She looked like a little girl in daddy’s clothes. The shirt was so big that only a few inches of her muscular forearms showed past the edge of the sleeves. Cuffs dragging, she shuffled past the front counter, ignoring Beaut, who was on duty, and headed directly into the women’s locker room.

  It was unoccupied, as usual. That was a good thing. Flo did not like people bumping up against her, touching her. Like Garbo, she wanted to be left alone. Unzipping her nylon barrel bag, she removed a discolored leather weight belt and her dead fish necklace. She rezipped the nylon bag and beat it several times with her fist to soften its sweat-hardened contents. When she opened it a second time, an invisible cloud of funk billowed from within, surrounding her with the sweet and sour effluvium of her last fourteen workouts. Flo inhaled deeply, her head swimming with a marriage of revulsion and hunger, an energizing, sensual kick that would get her out onto the floor and under the bars. It would also serve to insulate her from the other gym rats, most of whom had learned to give her plenty of personal space, especially since she’d started bringing her fish. A few of the less-hardy pilgrims made a habit of simply going home when they saw her emerge from the locker room. That was another good thing. Bunch of muscle-brained geeks. Except for that Joe Crow. Ever since she’d seen him face off with Beaut she’d been thinking about him, the way he’d stood there like a polished stone, casting Beaut’s brutish reflection straight back at him. That Crow, he didn’t need a cloud of funk and fish to get his space. He had something that a lot of guys, guys like Beaut, couldn’t get no matter how big they grew their pecs. Crow had attitude, a force-field that the more you pushed at it, the harder it got. Anyway, that’s the way Flo thought of it.

  In some ways he was just like her, except where she gave them stink, he gave them their own self right back at ’em. It was two real different things, but they worked the same, and that was what was important.

  Flo hoped he’d be working out today. She kicked off her Nikes, stripped off her baggy jeans and panties in one motion, and regarded her bottom half critically in the greasy, finger-smudged mirror that covered one wall of the tiny locker room. She advanced one leg and snapped it tense. Muscle jumped and quivered, quads ridged and bulging beneath paper-thin skin. Leg day today, definitely. Work on that vastus medialis. She turned to view herself in profile, flexing her left ham, admiring the slash that separated the ham from her vastus lateralis. If she could get her arms like that, that would be something. What would that Joe Crow think? Did her muscularity scare him? She didn’t think anything scared him. But did he like it? She scratched herself thoughtfully, lifting the bottom of her sweatshirt, nails catching in the black forest of curly pubic hairs, imagining her reflection in Joe Crow’s eyes.

  With her dusky-gold skin, molasses eyes, and full lips, Flowrean Peeche had grown up thinking of herself as African American. Not that her mother, Hanna—tawny-haired, green-eyed, and mozzarella-pale—had ever actually told her she was black, Flowrean had just assumed it. All the pieces were there. She’d grown up in a black St. Paul neighborhood. Her mother’s series of live-in boyfriends had all been black. Flowrean’s friends were black. She went to a mostly black school. She walked black and talked black, and she’d never thought much about it until one day she got home from school and her mother’s latest boyfriend, Bubby Roode, cornered her in her bedroom and had his way with her slim sixteen-year-old body. Her mother had come home, not in time to salvage her daughter’s virginity, but soon enough to catch Bobby with his silk boxers around his ankles. Flo remembered watching him make his final exit amidst a shower of imprecation and household items, holding his pants up with one hand, unlocking his Lincoln TC with the other. After he drove off, Flowrean had somehow expected a flood of motherly concern. What she got was a barrage of screaming accusations.

  “But I didn’t do anything!” Flowrean had protested.

  Her mother took a frowning look at sixteen-year-old Flowrean in her cornrows and baggy black jams and torn orange tank top and said, “Girl, I don’t know what you expect. You dress like a nigger girl, you’re gonna get jumped like a nigger girl.”

  Flowrean, taken aback, had replied along the lines of, “Well that’s what I am, Mama!”

  That was when her mother had given her a smack across the mouth, then informed her that her father was actually a Portuguese-Canadian sailor she’d met in Duluth—dark-skinned, brown-eyed, and black-haired, yes—but not black.

  Flowrean’s metamorphosis from black to white occurred instantaneously and effortlessly. She got herself a white girl haircut, gave her hip-hop clothing to her black friends, then told them she couldn’t hang with them anymore. Her speech patterns changed instantaneously as did her taste in music, movies, and television shows. She gave up rap for modern rock, Denzel Washington for Mel Gibson, and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air for Beverly Hills 90210.

  She was no longer the skinny littl
e black girl who let herself get jumped by Bubby Roode. That little girl was gone forever. The new Flowrean, the white girl, was still a virgin, and determined to remain so.

  Shortly thereafter, Flo found a job at Denny’s, moved out of her mother’s house and into her own efficiency apartment, and started a weight-training program at the YWCA. That had been eight years ago. All that remained of the old Flowrean was a gap between her bottom incisors and an abiding appreciation for the music of Michael Jackson who, after all, had lighter skin than most Caucasians.

  Flo’s hand clenched, grabbing a fistful of her short hairs, giving them a sharp twist. The pain brought tears to her eyes, but it worked. Pain always did that, rescued her from the past.

  She lifted her dead-goldfish necklace. The fish were getting sort of old. Two of the corpses—Arnold and Jussup, had dried out completely. She slipped the necklace over her head. Its aromatic intensity had lessened over the past week, but another of her pet goldfish would die soon, giving the necklace renewed life. Every week or so another floater turned up.

  In the meantime, she’d have to make do. If she couldn’t lay a taint, she’d blow ’em all away with attitude, just like Joe Crow. It came down to feeling right about yourself, and being there. Flo closed her eyes, took a deep breath, stepped up to the mirror, and placed her palms flat against its cool, oily smoothness. Opening her eyes a slit she said, breath condensing on the glass, “You’re in the present, you beautiful thing. Be there.”

  She kissed the mist.

  Arling Biggie breathed, “God’s Blood!” His nose was less than six inches away from Flowrean’s lips, on the other side of the glass.

  Until Flowrean had entered the locker room, Biggie had been sitting in his six-by-eight-foot office reading a pornographic adventure novel, a story about a seventeenth-century English sea captain who was stranded on an island ruled by women. With each orgasm—he averaged about one every seven pages—the sea captain cried out, “God’s Blood!” Biggie had been in the middle of a scene wherein the Queen of Isla Mujeres was having her attendants bind the Right Honorable Captain Richard MacGregor Smith, known to the islanders as Captain Dick, to the four posts of her royal bed, when he had heard the faint sound of the women’s locker room door opening—his signal to close his office door, turn off the lights, then let himself into the narrow closet space that separated his office from the women’s locker room. Sometimes it turned out to be a waste of time. It depended on who it was and which locker they used, and how quickly they dressed and undressed, and how good looking they were. He couldn’t see into the shower, unfortunately. In fact, the only way he could get a really good look was when one of them would stand right in front of the one-way mirror.

  He could always count on Flowrean to give him a show. Were it not for these displays, he’d have eighty-sixed her the first time she’d showed up with those goddamn fish around her neck, but with the glass between them, the smell just wasn’t an issue.

  Ten thousand cars could have cruised down Excelsior Boulevard at thirty-eight miles per hour without a problem. Even a dredlocked black man in a purple Cadillac with curb feelers and a white woman by his side might have made it past this Officer Johnson, badge number 2952. But not a lemon yellow 1969 Pontiac GTO. The car was a cop magnet. This was the third ticket Crow had earned since he had acquired the car six weeks earlier. His insurance rates, which were already over three hundred bucks a month, would be rising again. All in all, Crow thought, a lousy beginning to an unpromising week.

  Officer Johnson, who looked as if he had been born about the same time the Goat had rolled off the line in Detroit, frowned at Crow’s driver’s license. Then he frowned at the car. He was working on a permanent frown. By the time he turned forty, it would wrap all the way around his chin.

  “How long have you been driving this vehicle in the state of Minnesota?” Officer Johnson asked.

  “Six weeks,” Crow said, countering Officer Johnson’s scowl with a sunny smile.

  “You’ve got to get those plates changed, you know.”

  “I’ve got six months.”

  That had been a mistake.

  Officer Johnson, badge number 2952, had put a little extra muscle into his scowl and returned to his patrol car to play with his computer. He wouldn’t find anything. Crow had assumed ownership of the vehicle in a legitimate transaction, which had been duly notarized and entered into the public record at the courthouse in Alma, Nebraska. Crow thought about asking him to check into Hyatt Hilton’s record while he was waiting for the plate to run, but he suspected that that wouldn’t go over very well. The mere ownership of this saffron paean to gas consumption and virility pretty much killed any chance he’d ever had to come to friendly terms with Officer Johnson. To be fair, it wasn’t really the cop’s fault. It was the car.

  He should have known better. Actually, he had known better, but his choices had been few. Crow had not gone looking for a muscle car. The Goat had come to him like a lost cat in search of a new owner.

  Six weeks ago Crow had been driving a Jaguar XJS, one of the great road cars, from Las Vegas to Minnesota after a disastrous series of poker games at the Golden Nugget. He’d gone to Vegas with thirty-two thousand dollars—nearly everything he had—planning to play a little Texas Hold ’em, maybe enter some of the spring tournaments. Maybe even enter the big one, the World Series of Poker, where a ten thousand-dollar buy-in could win a million. Everything had gone according to plan. Unfortunately, it was someone else’s plan. His thirty-two thousand had dwindled with alarming speed. The games were tough, his luck ran sour, and he began to doubt his own judgment. By the time the World Series of Poker got underway, Crow didn’t have the cash to make the entry fee.

  He blew his last three grand at the craps table. And he never played craps.

  Then, crossing Nebraska, wondering if he had enough gas money to make it back to Minnesota, he noticed the oil light beaming at him from the dashboard.

  “Not now,” he muttered, looking out at the endless fields of newly planted corn. The oil pressure gauge read zero. That couldn’t be right. He had checked the oil a thousand miles ago. The engine sounded fine. The gauge must be broken. Would that make the oil light come on? He had no idea. He kept his foot on the gas. There was a town coming up, another ten, twelve miles. He’d stop there and check the oil.

  Two minutes later Crow heard a faint clattering sound. Was that the engine? It became louder, a troupe of manic tap dancers under his hood. Crow lifted his foot from the accelerator and was rewarded with a metallic squeal and the unmistakable reek of superheated metal.

  Two hours later the Jag, its black exterior spattered with dead bugs and road dust, sat parked in front of Hansen’s Garage, hood up, its back end still hooked up to the tow truck. Crow stood with the garage owner and his mechanic, staring down at the engine.

  “He smoked ’er,” said the mechanic in a nasal twang, avoiding Crow’s eyes. Both men wore shirts with the name Harl embroidered on the chest. Harl the mechanic’s baseball cap read “Go Big Red.” “Smoked ’er good.”

  Crow felt a wave of despair and shame wash over him. He had abused his fine European automobile, and he was stuck in Alma, Nebraska, with fifty bucks in cash and a maxed-out VISA card.

  “What will it take to get me back on the road?” he asked.

  Harl the mechanic snorted.

  Harl the garage owner said, “What you think? Three, four weeks?”

  “Take longer’n that just to get the motor shipped out here,” the mechanic said.

  Crow said, “You telling me it needs the whole engine replaced?”

  The mechanic stared at the ground. “You fried both cams, mister. You run your oil out, that’s what happens.”

  “I checked the oil in Vegas,” Crow said.

  The mechanic shrugged, refusing to look at him. “This ain’t a lawnmower,” he said.

  It took the two Harls another ten minutes to convince Crow that his car was, in fact, going nowhere.

 
Crow said, “Well if you can’t fix it, how about you buy it from me?”

  It took a few minutes, but Crow was finally able to coax Harl the garage owner into the driver’s seat of the crippled Jag. A car salesman had once told him that was the key to making a sale. Get the guy in the car and let him imagine it’s his.

  “I dunno,” said Harl, gripping the Jaguar’s pink steering wheel, looking about as comfortable as an aborigine in a tuxedo. Reaching down with one thick-fingered, grease-rimed hand, he poked the pink leather passenger seat. The Jag had once belonged to one of the Crow’s former clients, a flaky plastic surgeon who had custom ordered the pink leather upholstery.

  “I dunno,” Harl repeated.

  Crow said, “It’s a nice car. Worth twenty, twenty-five thousand.”

  Harl the owner shook his lumpy head. “Not like this it ain’t.”

  “So figure it with a new engine. Cost maybe, what? Four thousand?”

  “More like eight,” said Harl the mechanic.

  Crow said, “Okay then, eight. So it’s worth, worst case, it’s worth twelve.”

  Harl the owner stared at the pink leather knob on the shifter, moved his hand, pulled back before touching it. “Not in Alma it ain’t.”

  “So you tow it into Lincoln. Sell it to a dealer.”

  “Prob’ly have to take ’er all the way to Omaha.”

  “So you take it to Omaha.”

  “Long friggin’ drive, that.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to come out on this. I just want to get into something that runs. I’ve got to get back to Minneapolis.” In reality, there was nothing waiting for him in Minneapolis. He just wanted to get the hell out of Alma.

  “Can’t say I blame ya.”

  “You’re in the car business. I’m offering you a chance to make a few bucks.”

  “I dunno. You want twelve? I don’t got that kind of money.”

  “So make me an offer.”

  Harl the owner shook his head, opened the car door. He stood and hiked up his jeans, recovering his confidence now that he was free of the Jaguar’s hot pink grasp.