Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  ‘You get that in writin’ ’bout the three more fights?’

  ‘Pretty sure. Man’s so damn desperate for somebody with a decent chin, he’ll throw in a weekend with his wife.’

  ‘I don’t want his damn wife, I want it in writin’ ’bout the fights.’

  ‘You ain’t seen his wife! That bitch got a wiggle take the kinks outta a couch spring.’ Delighted by his wit, Leon laughs; the laugh turns into a wet, racking cough.

  ‘I’m gon’ need you on this one,’ says Mears after the coughing has subsided. ‘None of this bullshit ’bout you runnin’ round all over after dope and pussy while I’m bustin’ my balls in the gym, and then showin’ up when the bell rings. I’m gon’ need you really working. You hear that, Leon?’

  Leon’s breath comes hard. ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Square business, man. You gotta write me a book on that Vederotta dude.’

  ‘I’ll do my thing,’ says Leon, wheezing. ‘You just take care of old Señor Nazario.’

  The deal concluded, Mears feels exposed, as if a vast, luminous eye—God’s, perhaps—is shining on him, revealing all his frailties. He sits up straight, holds his head very still, rubs his palms along the tops of his thighs, certain that everyone is watching. Leon’s breathing is hoarse and laboured, like last breaths. The light is beginning to tighten up around that sound, to congeal into something cold and grey, like a piece of dirty ice in which they are all embedded.

  Mears thinks of Vederotta, the things he’s heard. The one-round knockouts, the vicious beatings. He knows he’s just booked himself a world of hurt. As if in resonance with that thought, his vision ripples and there is a twinge inside his head, a little flash of red. He grips the seat of the chair, prepares for worse. But worse does not come, and after a minute or so, he begins to relax, thinking about the money, slipping back into the peace of morning in the gym, with the starred light shining from on high and the enthusiastic shouts of the young fighters and the slap of leather making a rhythm like a river slapping against a bank and the fat man who is not his friend beginning to breathe easier now beside him.

  When Mears phones his ex-wife, Amandla, the next night, he sits on the edge of the bed and closes his eyes so he can see her clearly. She’s wearing her blue robe, slim-hipped and light-skinned, almost like a Latin girl, but her features are fine and eloquently African and her hair is kept short in the way of a girl from Brazzaville or Conakry. He remembers how good she looks in big gold hoop earrings. He remembers so much sweetness, so much consolation and love. She simply had not been able to bear his pain, coming home with butterfly patches over his stitched eyes, pissing blood at midnight, having to heave himself up from a chair like an old man. It was a weakness in her, he thinks, yet he knows it was an equivalent weakness in him, that fighting is his crack, his heroin—he would not give it up for her.

  She picks up on the fourth ring, and he says, ‘How you been, baby?’

  She hesitates a moment before saying, ‘Aw, Bobby, what you want?’ But she says it softly, plaintively, so he’ll know that though it’s not a good thing to call, she’s glad to hear his voice, anyway.

  ‘Nothin’, baby,’ he says. ‘I don’t want nothin’. I just called to tell you I’ll be sendin’ money soon. Few weeks, maybe.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I’m makin’ it all right.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you can’t use a little extra. You got responsibilities.’

  A faded laugh. ‘I hear that.’

  There is silence for a few beats, then Mears says, ‘How’s your mama holdin’ up?’

  ‘Not so good. Half the time I don’t think she knows who I am. She goes to wanderin’ off sometimes, and I got to—’ She breaks off, lets air hiss out between her teeth. ‘I’m sorry, Bobby. This ain’t your trouble.’

  That stings him, but he does not respond directly to it. ‘Well, maybe I send you a little somethin’, you can ease back from it.’

  ‘I don’t want to short you.’

  ‘You ain’t gon’ be shortin’ me, baby.’ He tells her about Nazario, the twenty thousand dollars, but not about Vederotta.

  ‘Twenty thousand!’ she says. ‘They givin’ you twenty thousand for fightin’ a man you say’s easy? That don’t make any sense.’

  ‘Ain’t like I’m just off the farm. I still got a name.’

  ‘Yeah, but you—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says angrily, knowing that she’s about to remind him he’s on the downside. ‘I got it under control.’

  Another silence. He imagines that he can hear her irritation in the static on the line.

  ‘But I do worry,’ she says. ‘God help me, I still worry about you after all this time.’

  ‘Ain’t been that long. Three years.’

  She does not seem to have heard. ‘I still think about you under them lights gettin’ pounded on. And now you offerin’ me money you gon’ earn for gettin’ pounded on some more.’

  ‘Look here—’ he begins.

  ‘Blood money. That’s what it is. It’s blood money.’

  ‘Stop it,’ he says. ‘You stop that shit. It ain’t no more blood money than any other wage. Money gets paid out, somebody always gettin’ fucked over at the end of it. That’s just what money is. But this here money, it ain’t comin’ ’cause of nothin’ like that, not even ’cause some damn judge said I got to give it. It’s coming from me to you ’cause you need it and I got it.’

  He steers the conversation away from the topic of fighting, gets her talking about some of their old friends, even manages to get her laughing when he tells her how the cops caught Sidney Bodden and some woman doing the creature in Sidney’s car in the parking lot of the A&P. The way she laughs, she tips her head and tucks her chin down onto her shoulder and never opens her mouth, just makes these pleased, musical noises like a shy little girl, and when she lifts her head, she looks so innocent and pretty he wants to kiss her, grazes the receiver with his lips, wishes it would open and let him pour through to her end of the line. The power behind the wish hits his heart like a mainlined drug, and he knows she still loves him, he still loves her, this is all wrong, this long-distance shit, and he can’t stop himself from saying, ‘Baby, I want to see you again.’

  ‘No,’ she says.

  It is such a terminal, door-slamming no, he can’t come back with anything. His face is hot and numb, his arms and chest heavy as concrete, he feels the same bewildered, mule-stupid helplessness as he did when she told him she was leaving. He wonders if she’s seeing somebody, but he promises himself he won’t ask.

  ‘I just can’t, Bobby,’ she says.

  ‘It’s all right, baby,’ he says, his voice reduced to a whisper. ‘It’s all right. I got to be goin’.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really am sorry. But I just can’t.’

  ‘I’ll be sending you somethin’ real soon. You take care now.’

  ‘Bobby?’

  He hangs up, an effort, and sits there turning to stone. Brooding thoughts glide through his head like slow black sails. After a while he lifts his arms as if in an embrace. He feels Amandla begin to take on shape and solidity within the circle of his arms. He puts his left hand between her shoulder blades and smooths the other along her flanks, following the arch of her back, the tight rounds of her ass, the columned thighs, and he presses his face against her belly, smelling her warmth, letting all the trouble and ache of the fight with the Cuban go out of him. All the weight of loss and sadness. His chest seems to fill with something clear and buoyant. Peace, he thinks, we are at peace.

  But then some sly, peripheral sense alerts him to the fact that he is a fool to rely on this sentimental illusion, and he drops his arms, feeling her fading away like steam. He sits straight, hands on knees, and turns his head to the side, his expression rigid and contemptuous as it might be during a stare-down at the centre of a boxing ring. Since the onset of his blindness, he has never been able to escape the fear that people are spying on him, but lately he has begun to worry
that they are not.

  For once Leon has not lied. The fight with Nazario is a simple contest of wills and left hooks, and though the two men’s hooks are comparable, Mears’ will is by far the stronger. Only in the fourth round does he feel his control slipping, and then the face of a hooded serpent materializes where Nazario’s face should be, and he pounds the serpent image with right leads until it vanishes. Early in the fifth round, he bulls Nazario into a corner and following a sequence of twelve unanswered punches, the ref steps in and stops it.

  Two hours after the fight, Mears is sitting in the dimly lit bar on the bottom floor of his hotel, having a draft beer and a shot of Gentleman Jack, listening to Mariah Carey on the jukebox. The mirror is a black, rippling distance flocked by points of actinic light, a mysterious lake full of stars and no sign of his reflection. The hooker beside him is wearing a dark something sewn all over with spangles that move over breasts and hips and thighs like the scattering of moonlight on choppy water. The bartender, when he’s visible at all, is a cryptic shadow. Mears is banged up some, a small but nasty cut at his hairline from a head butt and a knot on his left cheekbone, which the hooker is making much of, touching it, saying, ‘That’s terrible-lookin’, honey. Just terrible. You inna accident or somepin’?’ Mears tells her to mind her own damn business, and she says, ‘Who you think you is, you ain’t my business? You better quit yo’ dissin’ ’cause I ain’t takin’ that kinda shit from nobody!’

  He buys her another drink to mollify her and goes back to his interior concerns. Although the pain from the fight is minimal, his eyes are acting up and there is a feeling of dread imminence inside his head, an apprehension of a slight wrongness that can bloom into a fiery red presence. He is trying, by maintaining a certain poise, to resist it.

  The hooker leans against him. Her breasts are big and sloppy soft and her perfume smells cheap like flowered Listerine, but her waist is slender and firm, and despite her apparent toughness, he senses that she is very young, new to the life. This barely hardened innocence makes him think of Amandla.

  ‘Don’t you wan’ go upstairs, baby?’ she says as her hand traces loops and circles along the inside of his thigh.

  ‘We be there soon enough,’ he says gruffly. ‘We got all night.’

  ‘Whoo!’ She pulls back from him. ‘I never seen a young man act so stern! ’Mind me of my daddy!’ From her stagey tone, he realizes she is playing to the other patrons of the place, whom he cannot see, invisible as gods on their bar stools. Then she is rubbing against him again, saying, ‘You gon’ treat me like my daddy, honey? You gon’ be hard on me?’

  ‘Listen up,’ he says quietly, putting a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t you be playin’ these games. I’m payin’ you good, so you just sit still and we’ll have a couple drinks and talk a little bit. When the time comes, we’ll go upstairs. Can you deal with that?’

  He feels resentment in the tension of her arm. ‘OK, baby,’ she says with casual falsity. ‘What you wan’ talk about?’

  Mariah Carey is having a vision of love, her sinewy falsetto going high into a gospel frequency, and Mears asks the hooker if she likes the song.

  She shrugs. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You know the words?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Sing it with me?’

  ‘Say what?’

  He starts to sing, and after a couple of seconds the hooker joins in. Her voice is slight and sugary but blends well with Mears’ tenor. As they sing, her enthusiasm grows and Mears feels a frail connection forming between them. When the record ends, she giggles, embarrassed, and says, ‘That was def, baby. You sing real good. You a musician?’

  ‘Naw, just church stuff, you know.’

  ‘Bobby Mears!’ A man’s voice brays out behind him, a hand falls heavily onto his shoulder. ‘Goddamn, it is you! My fren’, he saying, “Ain’t that Bobby Mears over there?” and I said, “Shit, what he be doin’ in here?”’

  The man is huge, dark as a coal sack against the lesser darkness, and Mears has no clue to his identity.

  ‘Yes, sir! Bobby “the Magician” Mears! I’m your biggest fan, no shit! I seen you fight a dozen times. And I ain’t talkin’ TV. I mean in person. Man, this is great! Can I get you a drink? Lemme buy you one. Hey, buddy! Give us another round over here, OK?’

  ‘’Nother draft, ’nother shot of the Gentleman,’ says the bartender in a singsong delivery as he pours. He picks up the hooker’s glass and says with less flair, ‘Vodka and coke.’

  ‘Sister,’ the man says to the hooker, ‘I don’t know what Bobby’s been tellin’ you, but you settin’ next to one of the greatest fighters ever lived.’

  The hooker says, ‘You a fighter, baby?’ and Mears, who has been seething at this interruption, starts to say it’s time to leave, but the man talks through him.

  ‘The boy was slick! I’m tellin’ you. Slickest thing you ever seen with that jab of his. Like to kill Marvin Hagler. That old baldhead was one lucky nigger that night. Ain’t it the truth, man?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Mears says.

  ‘Man’s jus’ bein’ modest.’

  ‘I ain’t bein’ modest. Hagler was hurtin’ me from round one, and all I’s doin’ was tryin’ to survive.’ Mears digs a roll of bills from his pocket, peels a twenty from the top—the twenties are always on top; then the tens, then the fives. ‘Anybody saw that fight and thinks Hagler was lucky don’t know jack shit. Hagler was the best, and it don’t make me feel no better ’bout not bein’ the best, you comin’ round and bullshittin’ me.’

  ‘Be cool, Bobby! All right, man? Be cool.’

  The hooker caresses Mears’ shoulders, his neck, and he feels the knots of muscle, like hard tumours. It would take a thousand left hooks to work out that tension, a thousand solid impacts to drain off the poisons of fear lodged there, and he experiences a powerful welling up of despair that seems connected to no memory or incident, no stimulus whatsoever, a kind of bottom emotion, one you would never notice unless the light and the temperature and the noise level, all the conditions, were just right. But it’s there all the time, the tarry stuff that floors your soul. He tells the man he’s sorry for having lashed out at him. He’s tired, he says, got shit on his mind.

  ‘Hey,’ says the man, ‘hey, it’s not a problem, OK?’

  There follows a prickly silence that ends when Aaron Neville comes on the jukebox. Mears goes away with the tune, with the singer’s liquid shifts and drops, like the voice of a saxophone, and is annoyed once again when the man says, ‘Who you fightin’ next, Bobby? You got somethin’ lined up?’

  ‘Vederotta,’ Mears says.

  ‘The Heat, man? You fightin’ the Heat? No shit! Hey, you better watch your ass with that white boy! I seen him fight Reggie Williams couple months back. Hit that man so hard, two his teeth come away stuck in the mouthpiece.’

  Mears slides the twenty across the bar and says, ‘Keep it’ to the bartender.

  ‘That’s right,’ says the man with apparent relish. ‘That white boy ain’t normal, you ax me. He jus’ be livin’ to fuck you up, know what I mean? He got somethin’ wrong in his head.’

  ‘Thanks for the drink,’ Mears says, standing.

  ‘Any time, Bobby, any time,’ the man says as Mears lets the hooker lead him toward the stairs. ‘You take my advice, man. Watch yourself with that Vederotta. That boy he gon’ come hard, and you ain’t no way slick as you used to be.’

  Cold blue neon winks on and off in the window of Mears’ room, a vague nebular shine that might be radiating from a polar beacon or a ghostly police car, and as the hooker undresses, he lies on the bed in his shorts and watches the light. It’s the only thing he sees, just that chilly blue in a black field, spreading across the surface of the glass like some undersea thing, shrinking and expanding like the contractions of an icy blue heart. He has always been afraid before a fight, yet now he’s afraid in a different way. Or maybe it’s not the fear that’s different, maybe it’s his resistance to it that ha
s changed. Maybe he’s weaker, wearier. He is so accustomed to suppressing fear, however, that when he tries to examine it, it slithers away into the cracks of his soul and hides there, lurking, eyes aglow, waiting for its time. Vederotta. The man’s name even sounds strong, like a foreign sin, an age-old curse.

  ‘Ain’t you wan’ the lights on, honey?’ asks the hooker. ‘I wan’ you be able see what you doin’.’

  ‘I see you just fine,’ he says. ‘You come on lie down.’

  A siren curls into the distance; two car horns start to blow in an impatient rhythm like brass animals angry at each other; smells of barbecue and gasoline drift in to overwhelm the odour of industrial cleaner.

  Training, he thinks. Once he starts to train, he’ll handle the fear. He’ll pave it over with thousands of sit-ups, miles of running, countless combinations, and by fight night there’ll be just enough left to motivate him.

  The hooker settles onto the bed, lies on her side, leaning over him, her breasts spilling onto his chest and arm. He lifts one in his palm, squeezing its heft, and she makes a soft, pleased noise.

  ‘Why you didn’t tell me you famous?’ she asks.

  ‘I ain’t famous.’

  ‘Yeah, but you was.’

  ‘What difference it make? Bein’ famous ain’t about nothin’.’

  She moves her shoulders, making her breasts roll against him, and her hot, sweet scent seems to thicken. ‘Jus’ nice to know is all.’ She runs a hand along his chest, his corded belly. ‘Ain’t you somepin’,’ she says, and then, ‘How old’re you, baby?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  He expects her to say, ‘Thirty-two! Damn, baby. I thought you was twenty-five, you lookin’ good.’ But all she does is give a little mmm sound as if she’s filing the fact away and goes on caressing him. By this he knows that the connection they were starting to make in the bar has held and she’s going to be herself with him, which is what he wants, not some play-acting bitch who will let him turn her into Amandla, because he is sick and tired of having that happen.