Million Dollar Baby

by F. X. Toole

  “Ruby Thigpen, I told you git!” Cannonball shouted. “That old white man gonna tear up you process ass.”

  “Shut you mouf, nigga! He call me a nigga, ’n’ he gonna pay!”

  Cannonball called to Mac over the racket, “You want me a call the po-lice?”

  Mac didn’t want police cars jamming into the Not Long and waved off Cannonball’s offer.

  “Then put the bitch on the ground, man!”

  Mac knew Cannonball was right, though he had hoped for things otherwise. So Mac moved out of Ruby’s way again, then suddenly faked a stumble on the loose gravel. Ruby went for the fake, quickly closing the distance between them, and flicked out with the razor as Mac slid to his left. He pivoted and with his left hand he gave a little push to Ruby’s razor elbow, taking her balance and causing her to lunge forward, her neck stretching like a sprinter at the finish line. The razor nicked the side of Mac’s neck, but he didn’t feel it, though blood began to work into his sweatshirt. Onlookers saw it; some of them sighed.

  With his right hand Mac pulled the cocked Glock. He was careful to keep his finger off the trigger, but as he gripped the heavy black plastic handle tightly, he slipped behind Ruby and whacked her full force across the temple with the heavy metal barrel. People started whooping; some let off a high whine. Ruby’s head felt full of lightning. Semiconscious, and with her balance gone, she pitched forward on her face and dropped the razor, her eyes blinking as if flashbulbs had popped her in a dark room. Mac planted the heel of his shoe on the blade of the razor, then pulled full force up on the handle against the hinge and broke the razor in two. He threw the blade up on the low roof of the gym and turned to Ruby, who poured blood from the side of her head and rolled over twice before she could get up.

  He was relieved he’d been able to disarm her, because he’d been ready to shoot her in the head. When Ruby saw her own blood, all the fight went out of her. She started to howl and began running for the street, falling twice and ripping the skin on her knees and palms.

  “You go in see! You wait, honky! We git jus’us, we burn you ass up!”

  Her yelling aroused the onlookers even more, and slowly the circle began to shrink around Mac. Hands reached out, faces were like claws. Mac trained the Glock on them, his finger now on the trigger, blood running from his neck and dripping from his hand.

  “I say the motherfucking common-ass handkerchief-head nigga bitch ho got off easy. Anybody disagree?” said Mac.

  Malik hated seeing a white man beating on a black anything, but he also knew that Mac had saved his ass, knew that Ruby had started the shit. “Whoa!” he yelled, moving the others back. “Everthang cool here!, everthang be cool!”

  Cannonball yelled at the crowd to go back to their business and quickly got Mac inside the gym before any O.G.’s drove by.

  Cannonball washed Mac’s wounds with hydrogen peroxide and stopped the blood with pressure and adrenaline chloride 1:1000 mixed with alum, an illegal mixture he used to stop blood in the corner. Puddin looked on, fascinated by the inside colors of human flesh. The forearm was worse than the neck, but the neck bled more and it took Cannonball longer to stanch the neck blood than the arm. He closed both wounds with butterfly bandages that pulled the sliced meat together for quicker healing and to minimize scarring. He used sterile gauze and ring tape to cover the wounds, which he left dry, free from ointments and salves so scabs could immediately begin to form.

  “You go in emergency?” Cannonball asked.

  “Emergency’d bring in the black-and-whites.”

  Cannonball said, “You lucky to be alive, all that Rodney King shit go in down.” He gave a little hoot. “But I like that little move you put on the bitch, baby, the one when you go to the elbow?”

  “I tried to talk, and then the pig-shit Irish in me took over, and I just about shot everyone out there.” He thought a moment and exhaled, squeezing down hard to purge himself of the residue gases and fumes of rage. “Listen, I want to apologize for calling the whore a handkerchief head and a nigger, okay?”

  “Nigga what she know,” said Cannonball, noticing Puddin’s smile, noticing how much these two cared for each other. “Hey, you one lucky-ass white boy you don’t get jump out there.”

  “I was one lucky-ass white boy to grab that razor, too.”

  “That Glock what save you ass,” said Puddin. “Got all the niggas’ attention.”

  Mac was surprised. “How come you know about Glocks?”

  “Who don’t know about Glock?”

  The sun was setting and Mac was driving Puddin to the señora’s for supper. The kid had earned it. Besides, the old man wanted a Mexican beer, a frosted Negra Modelo, dark and with a thick head and cold enough to hurt his eyes. Mac was exhausted. His cuts began to creep and sting.

  “Tell you what,” Mac said to Puddin. “I’m tired like I just went ten hard rounds.”

  Puddin smiled; he was proud of the way the old man stood up to the whore and backed down the crowd. “I say more like twenty.”

  “I’ll be too stiff and sore to work tomorrow,” said Mac, “so I’m taking off, okay?”

  “What I do?”

  “I want you to run in the morning and then again in the afternoon. That way we’ll still be on schedule for Colorado Springs.”

  “On top of that,” said Puddin, “I’ll do wind sprints bof times.”

  It was the way champions thought. If Mac could have chosen a son, Puddin was it. He thought of his little boy and his daughters and gagged back a sob.

  Traffic was light, and they made good time on streets that were usually crowded. Strangely, very few people were out, neither black nor Latino. The taco stands and the Chinese takeout joints were empty.

  Mac was depressed. Not because he’d retaliated against Ruby with nigger for honky but because he feared that by jumping on Ruby with nigger that he might have damaged something in Puddin, destroyed the kid’s trust. Mac was so tired he could hardly drive. Tomorrow would be a bitch.

  “Look here,” he said, “about that nigger business back there. It’s important to me you know I don’t feel that way about black folks, okay?, but that I had to get respect. That whore had to know I can talk that racist shit, too. Because if she thought I was a punk, she’da grown on me same as an opponent in the ring, and that bitch was big enough already.” Mac glanced at the kid. “What you need to know is that my talk out there ain’t what’s in this mean old white man’s heart.”

  Puddin said, “Mac, you don’t know you my daddy?”

  Mac swallowed hard. “So we’re square, right?”

  “Sheeuh, nigga’s what that Ruby is, man. Some nasty-ass white bitch talk nigga shit a me, pull a razor?, I call her honky trash in a minute and I shoot the bitch myself.”

  “My baby boy.”

  “But my mama say, what it is makin everybody crazy, is all this Rodney King mess. Say it a field a land mines, say all peoples end up cripple they don’t watch they step.”

  No doubt, thought Mac, but he also knew that there were people out there of every color who loved those land mines. The verdicts from the first Rodney King cop trial hadn’t come in yet, but Mac thought about the charges every day. All of Los Angeles did. From the Valley to the Harbor, from the beaches to the mountains, the city was like a stretched womb, most people waiting silently, afraid of the monster that might be born. Black political rhetoric was ominous and loud.

  “No justice, no peace,” one black female politician repeatedly croaked into the cameras, the TV channels always ready to oblige her hate.

  Since the beating incident, Mac had seen that blacks were essentially of one mind, saw that most demanded a guilty verdict for an unmerciful and unwarranted beating by white racist cops of a helpless black man already on the ground. Blacks and whites both disregarded the 7.8-mile Highway Patrol pursuit prior to the incident, with King driving at speeds of 110 to 115 miles an hour on the freeway, 85 on surface streets. Instead, people focused on what happened after the chase. When Mac
first saw the tape, he did the same. Who could not have experienced dread on seeing the awfulness of the tape? But being an ex-cop, he also knew that what was shown on TV wasn’t always the whole story. What troubled him most, once it was revealed at the trial, was that the tape shown by Los Angeles TV station KTLA had been edited down from eighty-one seconds to sixty-eight. KTLA’s explanation for the thirteen-second cut was that ten of the first thirteen were blurry. KTLA could not satisfactorily explain why the previous three seconds of the tape had been cut. It was during those crucial three seconds that Rodney King charged the officer who landed the first of many blows, in each case using a side-handled metal police baton. It was primarily this officer that viewers saw delivering the majority of the blows struck by the cops on that surrealistic night, blows delivered in an attempt to get King into a felony prone position. According to LAPD regulations, head blows were illegal—unless a suspect attacked an officer.

  What the tape didn’t show was King’s resistance to arrest, that he had, from the ground, flung officers off like pillows when they tried to swarm him, a technique developed by police precisely to do minimum harm to suspects resisting arrest.

  The media was quick to report that fifty-six blows had been thrown, but what the public didn’t know until the trial was that just over half the blows actually landed. Only three were power blows. Mac knew three power shots had to be true, otherwise there would have been significantly more damage to King than his fractured face and shinbone—he’d have been dead. As to blows to the head, only one could be verified, the first one, which was in response to King’s attack.

  The officers were accused of racist postarrest comments as well. But Mac had seen enough combat in the Pacific, on the streets, and in the ring to know that remarks made by victors as well as losers were generated by exhaustion and adrenaline overload, that jokes were attempts by the mind to relieve convulsed stomachs and twitching nerves and pissed pants. Hadn’t he himself just said and done things to Ruby he would never think of doing under normal circumstances? Mac was nonetheless unconditionally opposed to the use of excessive force. But that didn’t keep him from being furious with politicians, black and white, yammering for justice—justice being a code word for either white convictions or black violence.

  None of this had affected Mac’s relationship with his many black friends and acquaintances in the fight game, and despite the heightened racial tensions, he had been surprised by the absence of hostility he had experienced as he traveled daily through South Central Los Angeles prior to his incident with Ruby.

  The Acapulco was nearly empty as Mac and Puddin entered. Always before, the señora would smile and wave them over, no matter how busy she was. Not this time. Four young male blacks, wearing oversized $400 leather team jackets and new $150 basketball shoes, stood talking quietly with her at the cash register. Mac had never seen them in the café before. He judged the oldest at twenty. The youngest, nicknamed Fridge, looked sixteen. The two others were eighteen or so. Each was at least six feet tall. Fridge was thin, maybe 160 pounds, same as the twenty-year-old. The other two were 200-pounders. Each had his baggy pants slung halfway down around his ass, six inches of underwear showing. Their jackets hung on them like outsized cocoons.

  Aside from the four, the place was nearly empty; two tables were occupied with a total of five people, two of them black. Usually the place was full of people unashamedly stuffing themselves.

  Instead of flashing her big smile, the señora glanced away. Dirty dishes hadn’t been cleared from three tables, one of which had been used by a party of four. Empty tables with dirty dishes were never seen at the Acapulco. It was clear to Mac that something was wrong, and he guided Puddin to the rear of the café, where both could sit with their backs to the wall.

  “How about some service?” Mac called out, acting like a stranger to the place.

  The señora excused herself and crossed to Mac and Puddin. She took their order without looking at them. She went back to the counter, said something Mac couldn’t hear, and turned to go to the kitchen. The oldest of the group stepped in front of Señora Cabrera, slightly raising a black cane with a brass duck’s-head handle to block her way. Mac drew the Glock, kept it hidden between his knees, and waited.

  The twenty-year-old leader pointed a finger at the señora. He whispered something, and then he and the others ambled out of the café as if they were leaving a church. Three of them ranged from dark to very dark in color. The leader was close to albino white, except that he had a slight coppery hue to his pockmarked skin. He had green eyes. He wore his kinky auburn hair in lumpy dreadlocks and was ugly as a scab. His Negroid features were misshapen, parts of his face lumpy and looking like they didn’t belong. Mac made them all for criminals, but he also knew that the ugly brick-top would be so easy to finger in a lineup that he’d be spending most of his life in the joint.

  Mac waited three minutes before he holstered the Glock. When there was no movement in the doorway, he and Puddin both went to the señora.

  She was trembling, but her slanted Indian eyes flashed fury. “Bastard sons-of-shit whores,” she said in Spanish. “I shit in their shameless mothers’ milk.”

  “Did they hurt you?” asked Mac.

  “No yet.”

  “Did they rob you?”

  “No yet.”

  “They have a gun?”

  “I don’t see one. But the ugly one he say he got sonthing for me inside he cane.”

  “Did they say they would hurt you?”

  “No quite. The young one come in my kitchen and rattle my knives. The redhead ugly say there is bad people have started hurting stores and I hab to pay him to protect me. He say they hab they four dinners free tonight for down payment of what I owe.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I say I no espeak no Ingli. They say they don’t believe.”

  Mac turned to Puddin. “You know them?”

  “I know ’em.”

  With Puddin able to I.D. the punks, Mac knew that he could trace them, but aside from walking out on their tab, which would be hard to prove, no crime as such had yet been committed. Besides, as a cop he’d been called in to similar extortion situations, but there was nothing cops could do until the perps actually collected money or beat on people, and by then the victims were so scared they wouldn’t testify. There was Puddin to protect as well, because if Mac called in cop friends to roust these small-time hoods, they would know that Puddin had identified them. Mac had wanted to shoot Ruby, but he wanted to vaporize the four punks who’d leaned on the señora. He told her to cancel his and Puddin’s food order and to go ahead and close up, that he’d help. She insisted on serving them. Mac turned to Puddin.

  “Who are these pukes?”

  “Couple still in school, but all are runnin wit the 43 Stokkers, that a feeder gang for the Five Tray Gangsta Crips. “Air Jordan” what they call the ugly nigga.”

  “Call him air-what?”

  “Air Jordan. You know, he try you for you new jacket and shoes you alone on the street, or you look easy. Stealin new Nike shoes what give him his name. Hit you upside you head and while you down, he use scissors to cut off the laces. You fight back, Air Jordan stab you dead and steal you stuff right off you bones.”

  “They ever mess with you?”

  “They know they try me, I won’t be the only nigga get stretched on satin. They mess wit Señora Cabrera, I stretch all they raggedy ass.”

  “You let me handle this, okay?”

  Puddin shrugged, nodded, knew Mac was right.

  Señora Cabrera served them steaming shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce with peppers, onions, and cilantro. She served the shrimp with rice and beans and corn tortillas. The remaining guests paid and left. Mac drank down a cold, dark Negra Modelo before he began to eat and ordered a second. The señora sat at their table while they ate.

  “I work so har’,” she said. “My girls work here before they go to nurse school, speak two language. No one neber rob my food
.”

  “These guys been here before?” asked Mac.

  “Firs’ tine.”

  “Best be they last,” said Puddin, finishing his meal. He thanked Señora Cabrera and said, “Want me a walk on home or stay wit you and help close up?”

  “I’ll help her, but I don’t want you out there alone tonight,” said Mac. He turned to the señora. “I’ll drive him home. It’s two minutes. I’ll be back to help you close.”

  “No, I’n okay.”

  “I know you are, but I want to.”

  Mac and Puddin hadn’t been gone a minute when Air Jordan and the others pushed past the señora as she tried to lock her door.

  “We back for forty-two takeout tacos a go.”

  “I’m close.”

  “You open now,” said Air Jordan. He threw a chair across the room and flicked off some of the lights. “Cook, bitch, make the shit to go.”

  “Cook what?”

  “Somethin good for twenty people, what you think chili peppah?”

  “What you wan’?”

  “I don’t give a fuck what!” shouted Air Jordan. “Make sure we like it, that all!”

  Señora Cabrera went to the kitchen wanting to kill and wishing to God she had her .44. She went straight to her storeroom for rat poison instead. She’d dump it into these rateros’ fish tacos. Mac came in before she could use it.

  He didn’t waste time. He crossed directly to Air Jordan, pulled a chair over from another table, and sat down at the gang’s table. He looked Air Jordan dead in the eye and smiled a little smile that had no humor in it.

  “Am I glad to see you, bro. You won’t believe this shit, but there are some white boys coming into the neighborhood, ugly like rotten meat. They go around to small stores and threaten to fuck over the people, you know I’m sayin?, small store people like the señora here got to come up with their money, or else, you dig?, like these cockroaches want folks to turn over their hard-earned bread, hear I’m sayin’? I mean, how low-down can white trash be?, understan I mean?”