Billy said, “That’s cash, Kenny. So you don’t have to pay no taxes on it.”
“I’ll get you the title, Mr. Clancy.”
“Billy.”
I looked at Dee-Cee, knew the head of his dick was glowing same as mine. Damned if Coyle wasn’t back in the gym working hard and doing road work in only three days. Billy’s word was good, and I was there when he paid Coyle off in stacks of hundreds. Money smells bad when you get a gang of it all together.
Wouldn’t you know it? Old stinky-head went right out and spent the whole shiteree on one of them new BMW four-wheel-drive deals what goes for better than fifty thousand. Coyle got to bragging about the sports package, the killer sound system, how much horsepower it had. Who gives a rap when you can’t afford tires and battery? Buying them boogers is easy, keeping them up what’s hard.
Besides, it was about that time that Coyle’s knees went to flap like butterfly wings. See, the ladies took one look at Coyle and thought they had the real deal, what with him having that big car and flashing hundreds in the clubs.
Dee-Cee said, “How many times you get you nut this week?”
Coyle said, “That’s personal.”
Dee-Cee said, “So you been gettin’ you nut every night.”
Coyle said, “No, I ain’t.”
Dee-Cee said, “You is, too. If it was one or none, or even two times, you’da said so.”
Coyle looked at me like he’d never heard such talk.
I said, “He’s sayin’ when your legs get to wobblin’, you been doin’ it too much. He’s saying that when your legs’re weak that your brain gets to wonderin’ why’s it so hard to keep itself from fallin’ down. That’s when your brain is so busy keeping you on your feet that it don’t pay attention to fightin’. Son, you got to have your legs right so your mind can work quicker than light, or you end up as a opponent talkin’ through your nose, and the do-gooders wants to blame us trainers. No good, it’s you and your dick what’s doin’ wrong.”
Coyle said, “I’m a fighter livin’ like a fighter.”
Dee-Cee said, “Way you goin’, you won’t be for long.”
I said, “Dee-Cee ain’t wrong, Kenny.”
Dee-Cee said, “Boy, you can fuck you white ass black, but that ain’t never gonna make you champ of nothin’.”
Coyle snorted, said, “I’ll be champ of the bitches.”
Dee-Cee said, “You go out, screw a thousand bitches, you think you somethin’? Sheeuh, you don’t screw no thousand bitches, a thousand bitches screw you — and there go you title shot, fool.”
Coyle said, “Fighters need release.”
Dee-Cee said, “Say what? All you got to do is wait some. You midnight emissions’ll natural take care of you goddamn release!”
I said, “Look, we’re tryin’ to get you around the track and across the finish line first, but you’re headin into the rail on us.”
“Yeah,” said Dee-Cee, “workin wit’ you be like holdin’ water in one hand.”
Coyle thought about that and seemed to nod, but next day when he come in his knees were flapping same as before.
Come to find out, Coyle wasn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell. Billy found out Coyle had been with three gals in the stall of the men’s toilet at one of his hot spots — that they’d been smoking weed hunched around the stool, yip! Billy didn’t jump Coyle. But instead of seeing him as a long-lost White Hope in shining armor, he saw him same as me and Dee-Cee’d come to — like a peach what had gone part bad. So, do you cut out the bad part and keep the good? Or do you shit-can the whole deal? Billy decided to save what he could as long as he could.
Billy told Coyle to flat take his partying somewhere else, like he was first told. If I know Billy, there was more he wanted to say, but didn’t. ‘Course big old Coyle didn’t take it too good, and wanted to dispute with Billy. So Billy said not to mistake kindness for weakness. Coyle got the message looked like, and was back in the gym working hard again — he wanted that twenty-five hundred a month. We figured the bullshit was over, leastways the in-public bullshit. But who could tell about weed? And who knew what else Coyle was messing with? By then, I got to feeling like I was a cat trapped in a sock drawer.
I told Coyle that what he’d pulled on Billy wasn’t the right way to do business.
Coyle said, “He’s makin’ money off me.”
I said, “Not yet he ain’t.”
That’s when things got so squirrelly you’d think Coyle had a tail.
First thing what come up was that stink with the plain-Jane cop’s daughter who said Coyle knocked her up — said Coyle’d gave her some of this GHB stuff that’s floating around that’ll make a gal pass out so deep she’s a corpse. Cop’s daughter said the last thing she remembered was that she was in Coyle’s pool playing kissy face. Next thing she knew she was bare-ass on the floor and Coyle was fixing to do her. She said she jumped up and fled.
Coyle claimed that he’d already done her twice, said she was crying for more.
See, it wasn’t until it come out she was pregnant that she told her daddy, who was a detective sergeant of the San Antonia P.D. She was a only child, and Daddy had them squinty blue eyes set in a face wide in the cheekbones what the Polacks brought into Texas. That good old boy got to rampaging like a rodeo bull, and right about then his neighbors got to thinking about calling Tom Bodette and checking into a Motel 6.
Once Daddy’d killed a half bottle of Jim Beam, he loaded up a old .44 six-gun, put on his boots and hat, and went on over to shoot Coyle dead.
Coyle told Daddy he loved plain-Jane more than his life itself, said that he wanted to marry her.
Cop was one of them fundamentals and figured marrying was better’n killing, so he let Coyle off.
Arrangements was made quick so the girl could wear white to the altar and not show. But then Coyle ups and says he’d have to wait till after the kid was born, that he wanted a blood test to prove he was the real daddy. The cop went to rampaging again and was fixing to hunt Coyle down, but he was took off the scent when his daughter stuck something up herself. Killed the baby, and liked to killed herself. The family was in such grief that Daddy started to drink full-time. The girl was sent off to live with a aunt up Nacogdoches. The cop had to go into one of them anger management deals or get fired from the force. ‘Course Coyle slapped his thigh.
Second deal was about sparring, and was way worse for me’n Dee-Cee than the cop-daughter deal. All of a sudden Coyle started sparring like he never done it before. Everybody was hitting him — middleweights we had in with him to work speed, high school linemen in the gym on a dare, grunts for God’s sake. The eye puffed up again, and we had to take off more time. All of a sudden Coyle’s moving on his heels instead of his toes, and now he can’t jump rope without stumbling into a wall. A amateur light heavy knocked him down hard enough to make him go pie-eyed, and Dee-Cee called the session off. Most times like that, a fighter’s pride will make him want to keep on working, but not Coyle. He was happy to get his ass outta there. Billy heard about it and quick got Coyle that second Mississippi fight for seventy-five thousand. Got Coyle ten rounds with a dead man just to see what was what.
The opponent was six foot tall, three hundred twenty-eight pounds, a big old black country boy from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who couldn’t hardly scrawl his own name. But in the first round, with his damn eyes closed, he hit Coyle high on the head with an overhand right and knocked him on his ass. Me and Dee-Cee couldn’t figure how he didn’t see the punch coming, it was so high and wide. Coyle jumped up, and to his credit, he went right to work.
Bang! Three bitches to the eyes, right hand to the chin, left hook to the body, all the punches quick and pretty. The black boy settled like a dead whale to the bottom, and white folks was dancing in the aisles and waving the Stars and Bars. It was pitiful, but Coyle strutted like he just knocked out Jack Johnson. Me and Dee-Cee was pissed, and our peters had lost their glow. Dressing room afterward was quiet as a gray dawn.