“I want a fight.”
“I mean between you and me I begin to wonder about some of these guys. Who can you count on any more? If it wasn’t for you kids I guess I’d just quit.”
24
Ernie arrived in Salt Lake City on the morning of the fight and strolled yawning in the shade and sunlight along broad, tree-lined streets where water flowed in the gutters. He stared up at the granite spires of the Mormon Temple and ate ham and eggs while reading the sports page. So the fans would know he was white, Ruben had listed him as Irish Ernie Munger, over Ernie’s protest that there was no Irish in his family.
Listless after a vibrating night of open-mouth sleeping on the Greyhound, Ernie bought a magazine and took a room in a lobbyless hotel, where he rested most of the day. His was the opening preliminary, and he believed afterwards that if he had not felt so torpid and had warmed up thoroughly he would not have been knocked down by the first punch of the fight. It caught him cold — a right to the jaw thrown by an opponent with a ruddy rural face and a body as rangy as his own. Ernie dropped to his hands and knees, sprang up before a count and was slugging back without fully realizing what had happened when the referee intervened to wipe the resin dust from his gloves. Then, stunned by blows as powerful as the first, his knees sagging but resisting, he was not even aware of being hit, only of impact already past and survived; and he knew he would not go down again, that the straining face he was smashing could not summon the power to overcome him. Punching with deadly excitement, he sensed he was going to win, saw it in the other’s altered stance and in his eyes, and he rushed forward, belaboring the suddenly blood-smeared face until his opponent lay out of his reach.
Elated in the dressing room, he wanted to return to Faye, and to his infant son, for whom, until this moment, he had not yet been able to feel any love. Now he believed it was for them that he had come all this way and fought. On the ride up he had decided he would hitchhike home and save half his expense money, and now he wanted to set off. He was elated by the shower over his body, by the feel of the towel, by simply being himself here pulling on his clothes, hearing the muffled shouts of the crowd.
Conscious of recognizing glances, he came back into the arena. The main event ended with Luis Ortega’s substitute, an overweight Negro, sitting on the canvas. The spectators filed up the aisles, Ernie, full of hot dogs, was paid his fifty dollars, and ten of it he gave to the two nervous men who had seconded him. A half hour later he was on the highway at the city’s edge, standing near a closed service station, his thumb directed west.
A silent man took him to the airport turnoff. There, with his canvas bag at his feet, the lights of the airport in the distance behind him, Ernie waited on the gravel shoulder, blinded by the swift approach of headlights and left behind with fluttering pants cuffs. From one car something came flying in a chorus of derisive howling, striking the ground near his feet. In the lights of the following car he saw a paper milkshake cup rolling along the shoulder, and spots on the legs of his pants. A plane roared out over the desert, lights winking green and red in the black sky.
In time a car swerved off onto the shoulder beyond him, dust streaming up over the glowing taillights. Ernie ran toward it, and ran on and on, the car braking, then coasting, as if the driver had changed his mind and was starting off again. But the brake lights once more glowed bright and the car came to a stop. When Ernie jogged up beside it the door swung open and he saw two young women peering out at him.
“Hi. Sit up here,” said the one by the open door. “The back’s full of junk.”
Flustered, he ducked in, dropped his bag in back and slammed the door. The light went out, the car lurched ahead, the tires roared on the gravel, and Ernie, who before his marriage had spent so many futile nights looking for pickups, sat in wonderment at women like these.
“Where you going?” asked the one beside him.
“California.”
“Yeah? So are we,” she said, and he was thinking of motel accommodations when the driver asked: “What town?”
“Stockton.”
“What would anybody want to go to Stockton for?”
“That’s where I live.”
“I guess it takes all kinds to make a world,” said the driver.
“Where you going?”
“Where we’re going is a matter of conjecture, but we’ll get you down the road a way.” The driver was tall and, Ernie could see in the approaching lights, powerfully constructed. Her dark hair, combed back at the sides, was cut like a man’s. Her chin was heavy; she wore glasses, jeans, and filled a plaid shirt with a large bosom. Her companion was smaller, with blond hair cut in the same style, her face plump and slightly haggard, her hips, in jeans, wide on the seat.
The car hummed on and now the road ran along the edge of Great Salt Lake, the water vast, motionless and black, with a stripe of lambent moonlight extending toward the car. Bathhouses, piers, a dark pavilion loomed on its shore, passed and fell behind. Along the sides of the road the sand glowed white in the beams of the headlights. On the left a range of mountains stood darkly against the sky.
“How long were you out there?” the woman beside him asked after a prolonged silence.
“Quite a while.”
“Nobody’ll give you a ride up here. They’re all Mormons. I saw you were just a boy so we stopped. We’ve seen other guys along the road, but we didn’t pick any up.”
“Hard cases,” the driver interjected.
“They’re probably all still standing back there. I don’t know what finally happens to them.”
“Somebody picks them up and gets rolled,” said the driver. “Tough guys. You can have them.”
“Not me.”
“You can have them, baby.”
“I don’t want them.”
“You want to help out, they’re all yours.”
Ernie listened to this exchange with misgivings and decided he would not mention his bout. When asked what he was doing in Utah he answered: “Business venture.”
“Business?” said the woman whose thigh rocked at times against his. “At your age?”
“I’m not so young. I got a wife and a baby.”
“You don’t either.”
“I do too.”
“Do you really? You look so young.”
“You don’t have to be old to have babies,” said the driver.
“Well, it’s good to have babies,” contested the other. “What’s wrong with having babies?”
“I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.”
“You implied it.”
“I did not. If he wants to have kids that’s fine with me. Why should I care?”
“Well, it didn’t sound like that when you said it.”
“I can’t help the way I sound.”
“Never mind.”
They passed through a settlement and Ernie studied the profiled face beside him, believing that preferences had been established, though what was expected of him now he was not sure. Surrounded again by desert, they raced on. Far ahead points of light appeared and drew closer, shifted down to the road or remained in high cones, glaring in the eyes of the three squinting out the windshield, the dimmer clicking on the floor, the woman behind the wheel saying: “Son-of-a-bitch.” After a considerable time of alternated silence and pointless talk, Ernie let his leg fall lax against the plumper leg beside it. The woman did not move. The two thighs jiggled together through miles of humming darkness.
“You going to be able to drive, Noreen?”
“I can drive.”
“Because when I give out I’m going to give out all at once.”