“I got my own. Just wasn’t none clean today.” Earl was already unbuttoning his gray and white striped shirt. He threw it on the bed, pulled the T-shirt, tight, short, yellowed under the sleeves, over his head, uncovering a dark muscular trunk. “What’s yours is yours. Oma want me to throw your stuff out, but I say a man’s stuff is his stuff, when he show up around here I want to send him off with what he come for.” By now the T-shirt was in Tully’s hand and Earl was rebuttoning the striped shirt on his way to the closet. Tucking in the tails with one hand, he brought Tully his suitcase.
“You can take that and shove it up your ass,” said Oma.
“You hush now. He just come for his things and he leaving.”
“Don’t hush me, you bunch of bums. What do you know about it, anyway?”
“Don’t pay no attention to her. She been drinking.”
“Get that shitbird out of here.”
“We been out on the town tonight.”
“Take the shirt off a man’s back. If that isn’t just so perfect. If that isn’t just like him.”
Earl edged toward the door. “She just like to blow off steam. Don’t listen to her. We gets along. How I handles her, I just don’t pay her no mind. Thing you got to understand about her is she a juice head.”
“I know,” said Tully. “And she won’t eat, either.”
“It all on account of her unhappy life and all that shit, and there nothing I can do about that, so I don’t let it worry me. Look like you had your fight. How you come out?”
“I won.”
“That right? I seen you on the poster. Like to watch a good fight now and then. Maybe I catch you some time. But they no point in you coming around here no more. She don’t want to see you. Oma, you wants to see this man?”
Oma, her brown curly hair in disarray and the broken bridge of her nose shining under the overhead light, replied with an incoherent oath and kicked out her foot, her shoe flying off toward them and falling on the floor.
“You see how it is. I been away — man give me some shit and I don’t take shit — now I’m back. You a fighter, you know what I’m talking about. They a right way and a wrong way to take care of yourself.”
“That’s right,” agreed Tully.
“One thing I don’t need is trouble. Man see trouble coming he better off walking down the other side of the street. You got your stuff.”
Tully raised his hand, still holding the T-shirt, to Oma. She did not look at him. Earl closed the door.
To hell with her, Tully thought, going down the stairs. Don’t think you’re hurting my feelings. To hell with you, lousy bitch. That poor sucker can have you.
Before he had reached his hotel a ghastly depression came over him, a buzzing wave of confusion and despair, and he knew absolutely that he was lost.
22
Tully was drunk for several days before he changed hotels, and the strange thing about that melancholy time was that he did not think of his wife. It was as if in losing Oma he had lost his love for Lynn. It had been overwhelmed by the monumental misery of the present. He yearned for Oma. Desolate, he could think of no relief but her. When he remembered how she had irritated him beyond endurance, he detested himself for his weakness; if he had loved her before as he did now, he could have tolerated her. But his love had come too late. That he had not felt it before was reason for bewilderment. For his wife he felt nothing. She seemed not even to exist.
Ruben came on the third day and found him in bed. Outside it was already dark. The rain that had kept Tully in the room with a fifth of whiskey and a loaf of whole-wheat bread was still falling. At first he had not responded to the knocking, but after a moment of keeping silent, afraid it was Ruben out there in the hall, he began to think it might possibly be Oma. When the knocking came again he called: “Who is it?” And he heard that composed inevitable voice.
“Ruben.”
There was nothing for Tully to do but open the door. After he did so he got back under the covers. Ruben switched on the light and stood at the foot of the bed, his hands around its scratched metal tubing.
“Billy, you can talk to me. What is it? Why you doing this? Is this any way to treat your body?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“You’re going to ruin yourself with that stuff.”
“Only had a few shots.”
“Why didn’t you come to the gym yesterday? Work up a little sweat be good for you. Let me have a look at that eye.”
“Been laid up with a cold.”
“I was by yesterday and you weren’t in.”
“Must of been asleep.”
Ruben was now removing the adhesive strips from Tully’s brow. “I looked through the keyhole. You weren’t here.”
“Out to eat, I guess.”
“Looks good. Think I can leave these off. You’re still a good healer. Be a nice firm scar. You could go again in two or three weeks. You won, so what you boozing for? You stink, I mean it’s disgusting. You’re not fooling anybody. I can see what’s going on.”
“You don’t know how bad I feel.”
“Pains?”
“I’m hurting, all right.”
“Is it your kidneys?”
“Lost my girl.”
“That all that’s wrong? You sure? What girl’s that?”
“My girl. Left me for a colored guy and I just sat around and let it happen and now I’m sick over it. Should of cut him from asshole to belly button.”
“That same one? You left her.”
“It wasn’t my idea. You’re the one made me move out.”
“I didn’t have a thing to do with it. You wanted to leave her. So I gave you the room rent. You don’t want a pig like that tied onto you, fine young athlete with your future still ahead of you.”
“I just needed a few days to myself, then I was going back to her.”
“You said you were going back to your wife.”
“How could I go back to my wife? I don’t even know where she is. And I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t want that other one, either. She can’t give you nothing. You can get a thing like that on any street corner.”
“Don’t call her a thing. I’ll get up and belt you one. There’s nobody like her on any street corner. There’s only one her.”
“If you’d get up and come down to the gym you’d work this out of your system. Anybody’d think about women, laying in bed all day.”
“I’m just sick over it. I can’t think straight. Think I want to fart around the gym after something like this? I never felt so bad in my life.”
“You’re a lot better off without her. You can take it from a man with a family. I’m settled. My mind’s at ease. You guys run around making love in bars don’t know what a good woman is.”
“I’m just sick about it, the way I bungled this thing.”
“Let’s go out and get you something to eat.”
“Not hungry.”
“Come on.”
Tully slid farther under the twisted blankets. “What do you care? I should never listen to you anyway. You’re the one got me into this and now you don’t give a shit.”
“Well, I’m sorry about it, but everything’ll work out for the best.”
“You don’t give a shit about what I’m suffering.”
“Tough, I know. Why don’t I come back tomorrow? I’ll pick you up and take you to the gym. So keep yourself clean. I want you in shape for a workout.”
“You don’t know,” Tully mumbled, and as Ruben went on talking, he pretended to drowse.
The next day Tully lurched down the stairway with his bags. Leaving no message for Ruben, he moved to the Owl Hotel. After resting on the sagging bed, one foot on the floor to slacken a sensation of backward sinking, he went down to the street to approach nourishment obliquely, drinking a Bromo Seltzer at the Old Peerless Inn, then eating a pig’s knuckle. Hours later he returned to the Oxford Hotel and found his key no longer worked.