by Jack Tunney
Vicky walked slowly, cautiously into the room. She wore only a black satin robe, tied closed, which didn’t quite make it to her knees. Her hair was tied back, exposing both bright emerald-green eyes and the ragged red scar. Ben watched her legs as she crossed in front of him.
She sat on the end of the couch nearest to him and pulled her feet up next to her. She wrapped one hand around them and picked at the arm of the couch with the other. She looked at the couch arm. “You looked great in there tonight.”
Ben shook his head. He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs. “Why did Joe leave with your son?”
Her gaze remained on the spot on the couch. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do.” He tried to catch her eye as he had when he had her against the pillar. “I want to talk about it.”
“Well, I don’t.” Her eyes flashed at him for a moment. “Why do you care, anyway?”
“No.” Ben shook his head. “We’re not playing that game. You know I care and you know why.” He reached out with his left hand. She froze it with a glance, but he pushed through and cupped his hand over her bare calf. “If there’s been other fighters, there’s been others fighters.” He stroked with his thumb. “This is your child I’m talking about.” He gave her leg a squeeze. “This is something else.”
“I can’t.” She stared at her spot on the arm of the couch with glassy eyes. “I just can’t talk about it.”
“Why?” Ben asked, but the sound of his words were swallowed up by the sound of the door unlocking and Vicky’s gasp. She jumped to her feet with the couch between her and the door.
Ben stood between the love seat and the couch, his right arm out in front of Vicky.
The door swung open. Scissor face and another, much bigger, man entered. Scissor face grinned, then sort of frowned. “Thought we might find you here, Harman. Why don’t you go on back to the flop? I need to talk to Vicky.”
“She’s right here.” Ben rotated his wrist to point his right thumb at Vicky. “Talk to her.”
“Nah, c’mon, Harman.” Scissor face stepped away from the door and motioned Ben toward it. “In private, we gotta talk. In private.”
Ben glanced from scissor face to the big guy and back. He tilted his head at the big guy, who appeared to be staring at something above everyone else’s head. “What’s his end of the conversation gonna be?”
“Whatever he’s got to say.” Scissor face clasped his hands near his groin. “He’s gonna say it in private.” He rocked up and down on his toes. “Now, c’mon, Harman, hit the bricks. You’re gonna have a fight with Jackson from what I hear. Gonna make everyone a lotta money.” He waved a finger between himself and Vicky. “This ain’t even about you, so why don’t you just go on home, huh?”
Ben looked to Vicky. “Should I go?”
“Sure. Why not?” She shrugged a little, flashed a quick grin. “Sharp and I are old friends.” She looked past Ben to scissor face. “Ain’t we, Sharp?”
Everywhere Vicky was exposed, from her face to her feet, was as white as her robe was black. And her little grin got nowhere near her eyes.
Ben looked to the aptly named Sharp, who was smiling and nodding. He extended an upturned hand Vicky’s way. “See, Harman? From the broad’s mouth herself. We’re old friends.”
Ben glanced back at Vicky, then looked at the big guy, who hadn’t moved, then looked back to Sharp. Ben’s right arm hadn’t moved a fraction from its position between Vicky and the visitors. “Think I’ll stay around a while.”
Sharp rolled his eyes and stepped forward. The big guy stepped forward, too. Sharp shook his head.
“Look, Harman, we know what you’ve been up to with the slut there. Think you’re the first? You ain’t. I think you know that.” He stopped within a yard of Ben’s left arm. “You gotta know, what we’re here to talk about ain’t about nothing that’s got to do with you.”
“Well, I appreciate that.” Ben’s eyes narrowed. “But now we got the word slut between me and you.” He widened his stance just a bit. “And I can’t have that.”
The big guy, who had stopped next to Sharp’s left shoulder, made a grunting laugh noise, but he still looked like his concern was with something near the ceiling. Ben looked from him to Sharp, who held a short, serrated knife in his right hand and a left-leaning, lopsided grin on his face.
“You want to throw your lot in with this pig? Lay down in slop instead making money in Joe’s ring? That’s fine with me. We’ll make this a group conversation.” Sharp stepped back and brought the knife up slowly. The tip made little circles in the air.
Ben felt Vicky’s hand on his back and he knew everything he’d ever need to know about her scar.
The big guy made a lunge for Vicky’s arm, but Ben’s arm was still in the way, as was the couch, which Ben pushed forward. The upright ox stumbled against it and fell to one knee.
Sharp went for Ben with his blade, but Ben had used the big guy’s botched attack to snatch a throw pillow from the love seat. He slipped right and came to stand directly in front of Vicky. Sharp’s knife sailed wide of his left hip and he threw the pillow into the scissor-faced thug’s puss.
Most people flinch when anything comes at them. Sharp was no different.
Most fighters don’t flinch at anything.
Ben grabbed Sharp’s right wrist with his left hand. It was an awkward angle, but Ben made it work and he fractured Sharp’s ulna before the pillow hit the carpet. Sharp screamed and dropped the knife.
He saw movement to his left. The big guy had his feet again.
Ben slipped right, cutting off the ox’s angle to Vicky. He put his wrapped right on her shoulder. “Upstairs. Call the cops.”
She nodded and slipped from his field of view.
Snorting steam, the big guy heaved at Ben. Ben dipped his shoulder and met him halfway. He ducked low, rammed his shoulder to the guy’s ribs and wrapped his right arm around the big guy’s chest. The ox’s chest caved in and he lost his breath in a whoosh.
Ben’s momentum carried them over the couch’s seat to its back, where the ox’s rear came to rest. Gasping, the ox drove his right elbow into Ben’s shoulder blade, then his spine. Ben buckled, but not enough to let go. The big guy’s elbows were strong enough to do damage, but they would have done a lot more if he could breathe.
Ben pushed with his shoulder against the guy’s chest to get his balance and stood up. The ox grabbed for him, but Ben had his feet planted and delivered a roundhouse left to the guy’s jaw. The ox took the shot disappointingly well and Ben set up for something else, but the impact of the left threw the big guy off balance and he toppled backward over the couch.
He grunted or moaned and tried to twist as he fell to get his hands out, but he was too slow, too big and too awkward and his face crashed into the edge of a big, freestanding terra cotta pot with a rhododendron growing in it. The pot broke and the ox didn’t get up.
Vicky’s scream came from above and behind Ben.
Holding his right hand close to his body, Sharp held her ankle with his left through the wooden bars of the banister about halfway up the staircase. Vicky, her robed splayed open to her hip, twisted onto her back and kicked at Sharp’s hand with her free foot, but found mostly the banister supports.
Sharp’s eyes and sneer were wide. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Ben grabbed the edge of the coffee table in both hands and threw it at the kitchen door. He crossed to Sharp, stepped inside, and buried a left uppercut to the thinner man’s solar plexus. Sharp’s eyes bulged. He tried to catch his breath, but the only sound was the wet wheezing suck of someone who’s never been hit in the solar plexus before. He released Vicky’s ankle and she scrambled to the top of the steps.
Ben snatched the knife from the carpet with his left hand and put Sharp up against the staircase with his bandaged right. “You tell Joe I’m gonna bury his champion and then I’m coming for him. You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Sharp said be
tween sucks of air. “I hear.”
“Good.” Ben put his big, distended head close to Sharp’s pointy, narrow one. “If you ever go near her again, they won’t find you.”
“You can have her, pug.” Sharp gulped more air. “She’s garbage anyway.”
Ben slashed Sharp from his mouth to his eye with the knife and then buried it to the handle in the man’s shoulder, scraping the protruding bone. Sharp screamed and bled in equal measure.
When the woozy big ox finally came to, he carried the still bleeding, screaming Sharp out the front door.
With his back to the staircase, Ben gave it his weight and flexed his hands. Both throbbed, the right one with the added pain of whatever the knockout shot to Jake Northrop had done to it. His heartbeat pulsed everywhere in his body. His sinuses burned.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” From the sound of her voice, Vicky was still at the top of the steps.
Ben closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the staircase. “Guy said the wrong thing.”
“You have no idea how much worse you just made everything. For both of us.”
“I wouldn’t, would I?” Ben stared at his hands, trying to blink his vision clear. “You don’t want to tell me jack.” He flexed his wrists. “Although I think I know enough to know you didn’t call the cops up there.”
“No. I didn’t.”
Ben pushed away from the staircase with his shoulders. “Apparently, I’ve just made things worse for myself, so, if there’s nothing else…”
“I got pregnant.” There were sounds of her getting to her feet from the top of the stairs. “Casting agent. That’s why I left Hollywood.”
Ben stopped near the overturned coffee table and looked up, massaging his right wrist.
Vicky descended each step with all her weight and no energy. She spoke as she came down. She didn’t look at Ben. “My career was going nowhere, anyway. I told you that already. So, when I got pregnant, I didn’t think getting the kiss-off in the first reel was worth doing what girls in trouble like that usually do.” She glanced his way. “And I didn’t want to live in a convent.”
He just stared at her, flexing his fingers.
She strolled toward the open front door. “I couldn’t go home to Jersey. So, I waitressed, cocktailed and drifted my way back across the country and ended up here.” She took the front doorknob in her hand. “With no money and a baby due in a couple months.” She stepped over a trail of Sharp’s blood and closed the front door. “That’s when I met Joe.” She locked the door and chained it.
Ben leaned back against the sitting room wall and held Vicky’s gaze as she picked her way through the fight scene.
“Before he ran boxing, Joe used to run girls. He still does, but the boxing makes him a lot more money. The boxing was my idea.” She reached the love seat and eased into it, one foot under her, the toes of the other brushing the carpet. “Before we started the boxing, though, Joe ran girls and, before my son was born, I organized them in this house.”
Ben looked around the room.
“After my son was born, Joe turned me out, too.” Ben’s gaze returned to Vicky, who put an elbow on the love seat’s arm and propped her head on her hand. “Joe allowed me just enough money to keep me and my son fed, and we had this roof over our heads, but it wasn’t enough, so…”
Ben folded his arms over his chest. “So?”
Her gaze wondered the room. “So I started skimming. Sometimes I’d tell my customers Joe wanted a little more, sometimes I’d tell Joe the client gave me a bit less.” She smiled a little at the carpet. “Had a good little thing going for a while.”
“But Joe found out.” Ben leaned in just a bit.
She nodded, ran her fingers across her scar. “That’s when I got this.” She balled her hands in her lap. “That’s when he took George…took my son.” She looked up at him, her glistening eyes ringed in red. “I’m supposed to get him back when I pay off my debt, but…” She shook her head. “That’s what tonight was about. I was supposed to see my son for a couple days, but Joe likes to change his mind.”
Ben turned it all over in his mind. There was pain and tightness in his chest. He unfolded his arms and wandered across the room. He felt Vicky watching him. He settled in front of the couch and a thought exploded in his head. It banged around the inside of his skull and made him dizzy. He turned, his hand on the couch’s arm, and dropped into the seat Vicky occupied earlier. “I have two questions.”
She nodded.
“The other night, at the bar, you asked me if I knew about Primo Carnera. Why?”
She held her eyes closed for a moment. “You remind me of him…you look like him.”
Ben shook his head. “Primo’s a good looking guy, at least to a point. I’m not. Never was.”
“Don’t sell yourself so short.” She nearly smiled. “You look like him to me.”
“It’s called acromegaly.” Ben waved a finger at and around his face. “That’s what this is. That’s why I look like Primo to you. He also has it.”
She shifted in her seat, pulled her feet alongside her again. “Oh.”
Ben sat back. “It first hit me during the war. Makes you bigger in spots on your body and you hurt, at least in some areas, pretty much all the time. I got discharged because of it. Sent home early from Italy.” He wiped nothing from the arm of the couch. “I was always a big guy, but I was strong, too.” He hefted the air in both hands. “Weights, you know?”
She nodded.
“Wasn’t a lot to do in the orphanage where I grew up, but I got strong there and I also learned to box.” Ben’s gaze wandered the ceiling. “Father Tim thought it was important.”
Vicky opened her mouth to speak, but Ben waved her off.
“There was another guy I knew about who had acromegaly. Guy called Rondo Hatton. He played in some monster pictures a while back.”
She nodded. “I know who you mean.” She wiped at a tear.
“Yeah, that’s right.” He flipped a palm at her. “You were out there. Anyway, if you know Hatton, you probably know he played this monster called The Creeper.”
She nodded and sniffed.
“Yeah, well, I had a fight – legit fight, not like we’re doing here – out in Albuquerque with this kid. Real up and comer. Well, after they introduced me as Monster Harman this kid took to calling me monster. Then, right before the bell, he called me Creeper.” He found her eyes with his. “We came out for the second and I beat on him until he was dead.”
“Oh, my God.” She shook her head. “Ben…”
“Never got a legit fight after that.” He shrugged. “Didn’t want one, really. Didn’t think I deserved another one, I guess. And I couldn’t go back to the army. And I never learned how to do anything else. That’s how I ended up in places like this.”
She got up from the love seat and crossed to him. She took his hand and tried to tug him to his feet, but he stayed where he was, staring up at her.
Ben began talking too fast. “When I met you, I thought something might be happening, something new that I never had before. To have that, with you, I would have done just about anything. Even now, knowing who you are and where you come from and the spot you’re in. Even now, I would stick by you because of the thing I thought we had.”
“Get up.” She tugged his hand. “Let me hold you.”
“But I can’t.” He slipped his hand out of hers. “Because there’s all the other things.”
Her hands fidgeted near her naval. “What other things?”
He ticked them off with his fingers. “You know about boxing. The fights here were your idea. You need money. Desperately. I never saw you in the bar at the same time as Joe, but I did see you with some character in the flophouse lobby right after my first fight.”
She backed up to the love seat.
He leaned forward. “How many guys you got laying money down on these fights for you?”
She sat down. “A few.”
“Yeah.
” He nodded. “I bet it’s more than that.” He slid to the edge of his seat on the couch. “The thing that got me the most was what the drunk said the other night and the things Sharp said here tonight.”
She stared at the carpet just beyond her toes.
Ben’s gaze bore into the top of her head. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me I’m not just the latest horse you’ve tried to ride to pay off your debts, we can keep talking. If you can tell me the things I’ve felt weren’t just what you needed me to feel so I’d be properly motivated to win your bets, we can keep talking.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Can you do that?”
She wiped at her eyes with one hand, then the other, but didn’t look up.
“It was different with you.” She flashed the simmering greens at him for just an instant. “I know you won’t believe it, but it was.”
He stood up, stared down at her, fists clenched. “How much did you make on me?”
She looked up at him, wrists on her knees, palms up. “He’s my son.”
Ben left her there, in her ruined sitting room, and went back to the flophouse.
ROUND TWELVE
Between the door and the frame, with the chain just above it, Pete’s eye went wide. “What’s going on?”
The door closed, then opened wide. Pete stepped aside to let Ben enter. “What are you doing? You gotta stop coming here. You’re gonna blow this whole thing.”
Ben turned around in front of the chair against the wall. “What does that mean?”
“It means.” Pete locked and chained his room door. “Joe knows about you and that broad. He’s not happy about it. Apparently, she’s one of his, or was, or something like that.” He flapped a hand in front of his face. “We’re lucky he likes the money he’s making off you more than he hates the idea of you and this skirt.” He clenched his fist. “You got your fight with Jackson.” He grinned. “But act surprised when he tells you.”
Ben dropped into the chair against the wall and slumped. “I don’t want to throw the fight.”