Don't Skip Out on Me

by Willy Vlautin

  ‘I have a proposition,’ he said and took out his billfold. ‘I want to buy your dog off you for fifty bucks.’ He held the money out so they could see it. ‘He’s in rough shape, you must have noticed that. He can’t stand on his right paw and his eyes are infected. He’s underweight and you said he has worms. And you won’t be able to get him across the border. Most likely they won’t let you. Even if you can, it’ll be harder for you to catch rides with a dog. My wife and I live on a ranch. He’ll have a good life with me.’

  Captain looked at Mr Reese. ‘How about you throw in the cooler too?’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘No, fifty is what I have to spend. Fifty is the offer.’

  Captain didn’t look at Bob or the dog. He only nodded. Mr Reese gave him the money and Captain unhooked the leash from around his belt and handed it to the old man. ‘How about you give us a ride to Las Vegas?’

  ‘I can’t do that either,’ Mr Reese said. ‘I’m not going that way.’

  Captain shook his head, and without saying anything the two of them began walking away.

  14

  Horace sat outside El Maida Shrine Auditorium. Even after a shower and a change of clothes, he was still sweating in the evening heat. His face was swollen, his nose was busted and both his eyes were black. Ruiz said it wasn’t a bad break, not bad enough for an emergency-room visit, but still it was bleeding and it wouldn’t stop.

  El Paso seemed to Horace a never-ending sprawl as he looked out toward the lights of the city. He’d been so nervous as they drove in that he remembered nothing of getting there and nothing of the parts of the city he had seen.

  Cheering rang out from inside the hall and cars came and left from the parking lot, and finally, after he’d waited a half-hour, a cab appeared in the distance and he walked toward it waving his hands back and forth.

  *

  When he had gotten home from Salt Lake City, Horace had declared to Ruiz that he wanted to go pro. He told him he knew he needed work, but he was certain that, if he started slow, started with a few easy fights, then it wouldn’t take long before he’d be prepared to take on someone real. Ruiz was sitting on an orange plastic chair outside the back of the gym, in the alley, chewing Nicorette gum and looking at his phone while Horace spoke.

  ‘I’m not sure about you going pro,’ he said as he continued to stare at his phone. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, but I’ll see what I can do’ – and with that the conversation ended.

  It was nearly six weeks later when, after a session, Ruiz took Horace aside. ‘I’m afraid the only way I can get you a fight is gonna cost you money.’

  ‘Cost me money?’

  Ruiz nodded. ‘I can get you a fight next week, a four-rounder against a kid from Mexico. His opponent just got popped for a bad green card and got deported. They called me today asking if I knew of anyone. Most likely I can get the fight but it’ll cost you three hundred and fifty dollars.’

  ‘How much do I get if I win?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just the way things work now. You do this to get in the door. You do this so the next time you get paid. It’s modern boxing.’

  Horace shook his head. ‘So win or lose it’s going to cost me three hundred and fifty dollars?’

  Ruiz nodded. He looked tired and bloated and had stains on his shirt. He coughed. ‘I’ve told you time and time again to find someone else. I’m not a promoter. Look, I’ll help pay expenses, gas and food and all that. But you’ll have to pay the three-fifty up front. It ain’t much of a deal so it’s your call.’

  Horace came back next evening with the money. The gym was empty but for two middle-aged women in matching workout tights standing next to each other, trying to hit the speed bags. He handed the cash to Ruiz and Ruiz put the money in his shorts pocket.

  ‘So who’s the guy I’m fighting?’ he asked.

  ‘Edgar Samaniego,’ Ruiz said. ‘He’s seven and O, a street kid from Oaxaca. People say he’s a good prospect. They say he’s fast, has a good chin and is a true warrior, but they say that about every kid out of Mexico. He’s never fought over six rounds and he ain’t fought anybody good yet.’

  ‘How many rounds is it again?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘You think I got a chance?’

  ‘You are one hard-hitting son of a bitch. He’ll definitely find out what El Paso is like.’

  ‘El Paso?’

  ‘That’s where the fight is.’

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ Horace said, beginning to get worried.

  ‘I’ll drive you. I have to pick up a couch there. We can stay at my friend Russell’s house.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Texas.’

  ‘Texas is just a line in the dirt. It’s all the same, anyway, once you get hit.’

  *

  Horace woke up at 5 a.m. every morning for the next five days. He did his run, sit-ups and push-ups. He jumped rope and worked on his combinations in front of the mirror and then after work he did night sessions with Ruiz. But there wasn’t enough time to train properly, and he’d been sliding. He’d been eating at McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and there was a half-eaten quart of chocolate-chip ice cream in the freezer. And worst of all he’d been drinking soda – he’d been drinking it every day, sometimes up to four Cokes between lunch and dinner.

  The truth was, he’d been lazy. He hadn’t improved since he’d come back from Salt Lake City. He hadn’t worked on his craft like he was supposed to, like he told Mr Reese he was going to, and now he was going to pay the price.

  When Saturday morning came he walked to Ruiz’s house, exhausted. He had been so worried he would be late that he couldn’t sleep. He arrived an hour before he was supposed to and waited in the carport. At eight he knocked on the front door to find Ruiz missing. He hadn’t come home the night before. It was two hours later that he finally drove up. His wife stood in the driveway yelling at him in Spanish.

  ‘Eres un borracho!’

  ‘Goddamn it!’ he cried. ‘I just got home.’

  ‘No podrías incluso llámarme por teléfono?’

  ‘I tried,’ he mustered and went inside.

  Horace sat on the couch watching Ruiz’s sons play video games on the TV while Ruiz and his wife continued to argue. She screamed in Spanish and he yelled back in English. This went on, back and forth, until Ruiz stormed into the bathroom. He was there for nearly forty-five minutes. When he came out, he went into his bedroom, put together a travel bag and he and Horace left.

  Ruiz’s eyes were bloodshot and he gagged and spit and farted as he drove. He stopped first at an In-N-Out Burger and then pulled over two hours later at a Burger King. Both times he spent long periods on the toilet.

  They arrived at El Maida Shrine Auditorium with less than two hours until Horace’s fight. A group of old men in Shriners’ caps played Ping-Pong in a side room, and in the back parking lot another group were loading go-carts onto a flatbed truck. The carts were red and had names on their doors: Fritz, Gary, Dotty, Lloyd and Jerry. The main hall was small, with a capacity of five hundred people. Workers unfolded chairs and moved tables around the ring, and Horace watched until Ruiz led him to a small meeting room to change. In the corner he lay down on the floor, closed his eyes and tried to visualize the fight. When he opened them, a group of men were at the opposite end of the room. All the boxers were there but only one was warming up. A Mexican. His hair was short, nearly shaved, and he wore green sweats and spoke in Spanish to a grey-haired man who held mitts. Horace figured it to be Edgar Samaniego.

  Ruiz had disappeared, so Horace went outside behind the building and warmed up alone by the garbage cans. Then he grabbed the thin cardboard box from his travel bag. He opened it and took out the red trunks with the gold waistband and embroidery. He looked at Mrs Poulet’s stitching: Hector written in large red cursive letters on the front, the embroidered Thompson machine gun on each leg, and on the back Hidalgo in cursive with an embroidered Thompson machine gun on each
side of the name. He put on the trunks and waited for Ruiz to wrap his hands.

  *

  The room was half-full and no one clapped when Horace entered the ring. He was so nervous and excited he couldn’t think. His eyes were everywhere and he couldn’t stand still.

  ‘Calm the fuck down and get over here, Hector,’ Ruiz yelled from the corner. He snapped his fingers in Horace’s face. ‘Come on. You have to focus now. You have to keep your mind in the ring. Not outside of the ring. You have to concentrate on round one. And here’s what I want you to do. Are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Horace.

  ‘I want you to throw combinations, but I want you to stay out of a brawl. I want you to get the lay of the land in this first round, stay careful, and then we’ll see where we’re at. Okay?’

  Horace nodded but he was too distracted. The spectators were talking and yelling and there was loud music playing on the PA. His mind was chaos. Edgar Samaniego came into the ring and the referee, a tall, thin white man wearing blue latex gloves, brought them together. And when he did, it suddenly all stopped. The whole place grew quiet and the bell rang.

  Samaniego came out stalking. He was even faster than Moffin, and he landed shot after shot for the first minute. Horace was hardly able to throw a punch. But Samaniego didn’t have power and he didn’t have the chin they said he had, because near the end of the first round Horace got him with a body shot that hurt him, and followed with a right hook that blew Samaniego’s mouth guard out. Samaniego survived the round but he was shaken.

  In the second, Samaniego pressured with a series of combinations and Horace froze against the ropes as he always did. He was pummelled. Punch after punch came unchecked and unstopped and his nose was smashed, his eyes began to swell and his lips were cut. Samaniego landed everything he threw and seemed barely winded.

  But, in the madness of it, Horace’s mind somehow cleared. He found himself accepting the punishment without anxiety or fear. The freezing dissipated and he could finally think and take control of his body. He moved to the centre of the ring and Samaniego followed, and Horace got him with a left hook and the round ended.

  In the third, Samaniego came out with a series of combinations, one of which caught Horace’s right eye and blurred it completely. He could only make out streaks of light and darkness and the eye watered continuously. But he moved to the centre of the ring and got off a single combination to Samaniego’s body that had such power it dropped Samaniego to his knees, and the young kid from Oaxaca was done. He couldn’t get up. There was a minute left in the third when the referee called the fight.

  Hector Hidalgo, victory by KO.

  *

  Inside the Shiners’ kitchen was a bathroom and Horace sat on the toilet, his nose broken and bleeding in a constant stream. The skin around his eyes was swelling and turning black. He held a towel underneath his nose as Ruiz set it and then shoved gauze into the nostrils. He told Horace to keep his head back until the bleeding stopped and left to watch the next fight. Horace sat that way for twenty minutes and then showered. His entire face hurt, as did his side, where Samaniego had hit him with a dozen clean shots. Even in such a short fight, he’d taken a lot of punishment. He’d been hit by ten times as many shots as he’d landed. He stayed in the shower for what seemed like an hour. He dressed in the corner of the room, in near darkness, and then Ruiz and a tall Mexican man in a cowboy hat came in. They didn’t see him. The man in the cowboy hat took an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to Ruiz. Ruiz opened it, took the money from it, counted it, put it in his wallet, and they shook hands and left.

  Horace couldn’t believe what he had seen. He finished packing his gym bag and went out to the auditorium to find Ruiz drinking in the bar, talking in Spanish to a broken-faced old man in a brown suit.

  ‘You need some food money, Hector?’ Ruiz drank from a rum and Coke.

  Horace shook his head.

  ‘You can have some of these onion rings if you want. Can you chew?’

  ‘I can chew,’ said Horace.

  Ruiz stood up, drunk, and put his arm around him. ‘You did good tonight. I told you that son of a bitch from Oaxaca would take a beating. How’s your nose?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

  Ruiz inspected it. ‘It looks like shit, but no worse than it did an hour ago. I think you’ll be alright. Your first pro fight, first broken nose, first win. Quite an evening. We’ll be leaving with this old man, Russell, after the last fight. You should have seen him back in the day. Fast as a cobra and mean as a badger. He’ll put us up in his trailer.’

  Horace nodded.

  Ruiz finished his drink and smiled. ‘Why do you look so goddamn sad? You just beat a kid who’s had seven pro fights, a kid people were saying might be something. You’re an undefeated professional boxer.’

  ‘I guess my head and my nose just hurt,’ Horace said, but he couldn’t even look at Ruiz.

  ‘That Oaxaca son of a bitch got in more than a few. You’re the type of fighter who’s going to take a lot of punishment. Russell and I were just talking about it. But people love a brawler. They love a brawler, don’t they, Russell?’

  The old man nodded vaguely.

  Horace looked around the room and, without thinking it through, said, ‘I just want to let you know I’m going to catch my own ride home.’

  ‘Your own ride home?’ Ruiz said.

  ‘I have some friends here. Is that okay?’

  ‘Do what you need to do.’ Ruiz pulled out his wallet. He took $200 from it. ‘This money is for your expenses. I won’t be leaving until tomorrow midday, that’s when I have to pick up that couch from my sister-in-law. Call me if you change your mind. And cheer up, you did good tonight.’

  Horace nodded and put the money in his pocket, and walked to the opposite side of the auditorium and watched the next fight. He tried to push the image of Ruiz taking money from the Mexican man out of his mind, but he couldn’t. Maybe he was mistaken about what he had seen, but he didn’t think so. Ruiz had received money for his fight because there was no way Ruiz would give $200 away so easily. Ruiz had lied to him. Ruiz had got money for the fight and swindled him. The main event started and Horace watched it from the edge of the room, but he grew more depressed the longer he was there and left.

  *

  When the cab dropped him off at the downtown El Paso Greyhound station, the doors were locked and the lights were off. What was he going to do now? And why had he told Ruiz he was getting his own ride home? Why couldn’t he for once just use his head? Even if Ruiz did take his money, he could at least have gotten a free ride and a free place to stay, couldn’t he? Now he had nothing.

  He walked down the sidewalk. He came to a karaoke bar and could hear people inside singing. He walked three more blocks and in the distance saw an open Church’s Chicken. In the bathroom he checked his nose for bleeding and put a handful of toilet paper in his pocket. He ordered an extra-large Coke, two chicken-and-cheese sandwiches, an order of mac and cheese, an order of mashed potatoes and gravy, an order of fries and two apple pies. He sat at a table and slowly ate the mac and cheese, the fries and one of the sandwiches. He nursed the Coke until a middle-aged woman in a Church’s uniform told him and the two other men on the opposite side of the restaurant that they were closing.

  He walked for an hour more – block after block of closed stores – and ate one of the apple pies. He went past a clothing store named Los Dos Hermanos and another called Sexy Jeans. He passed a shoe store, a furniture shop and an abandoned building. Under the awning of a Dollar Tree store he saw a man sitting on a sleeping bag. Next to him slept a fat woman. The woman wore a dirty white blouse and red sweats that had been cut off at the knees. She had a walking cast on her right foot. The man drank from a quart of beer and was propped up against the building wall.

  ‘Where you going in such a hurry?’ the man asked. He was Indian and heavy, with short black hair. He wore blue sweatpants and a Dallas Cowboys T-sh
irt and had a red bandana wrapped around his neck. He had no teeth.

  ‘I’m waiting for the bus station to open,’ said Horace.

  ‘It’s closed until six,’ the man said. ‘What time you got now?’

  Horace looked at his phone. ‘It’s one o’clock.’

  ‘You got a long five hours, man … You ain’t Mexican, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Horace.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Nevada.’

  ‘What are you, a fuckin’ Paiute?’ the man said, and laughed.

  Horace nodded

  ‘Why do you dress like a spick?’

  ‘How am I supposed to dress?’

  ‘That’s a good question. You’re pretty smart for a Paiute.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘What does it matter to you – you a cop?’

  ‘I ain’t a cop,’ Horace said.

  ‘I’m just joking around with you, bro. I’m a Paiute, too. We’re brothers. What did you do, get into a fight?’

  ‘I’m a boxer. I had a fight tonight at the Shriners’.’

  ‘At the Shriners’? The guys with the little hats?’

  Horace nodded.

  The man laughed. ‘Did you win?’

  Horace nodded.

  ‘You want a drink to celebrate?’

  ‘No,’ said Horace. ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Good. You being a Paiute, you’d probably drink the whole bottle and then spit in the bottom.’ He laughed and then sighed and took a drink from the quart. ‘Indians have always been the best fighters. Always. You know about Henry Armstrong? That son of a bitch was a fighter.’

  ‘But he wasn’t Paiute.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know?’ the man said, his voice suddenly booming. ‘Were you in there watching his mother get it on night after night? Everybody knows the only good Indian in the sack is a Paiute. Didn’t they teach you anything in school?’