Don't Skip Out on Me

by Willy Vlautin

  Horace said nothing. He stared at the ground as they walked.

  ‘Don’t look so down, Hector. You’ll get to fight soon enough. Anyway, you got lucky. Purcell is the real deal. He’s on a different level than the rest.’

  ‘I could have beat him,’ Horace said and looked up.

  Ruiz laughed and then sighed wearily. ‘Well, that’s the right attitude to have. It’s true, you gotta believe in yourself. That is the main thing. But once in a while you need luck too, and we got lucky. So eat now and then watch Owen and Johnny. ’Cause when you’re not fighting, you’re …’

  ‘Supporting,’ said Horace.

  ‘Right,’ Ruiz said.

  Horace put on his sweats and walked to the concession stand and ate the insides out of a hamburger and drank a glass of water. From a back seat he watched Johnny lose a decision in the eighty-pound weight class, and then two bouts later Owen entered the ring at fifty-four pounds. When the bell rang he sprinted toward Davey Edwards, a fourth-grader from Flagstaff, and began throwing wild punches. Edwards continued to back up until he nearly fell out of the ring. But then, his face red and streaked with snot, Edwards came rushing back and began throwing haymakers and the round ended. Owen came out exhausted in the second and Edwards began to box him. He got Owen with two hard rights to the face, but with that Owen became enraged. He again threw wild punches, connecting enough that the referee stopped the fight and Owen was declared the winner.

  Ruiz seemed better when Horace entered the ring at two forty-five. The sweating had ceased, as had the coughing and gagging attacks. He grabbed Horace by the shoulders, looked him in the eyes and whispered, ‘Hector, you got lucky again. You saw this kid fight earlier, you saw how he struggles. He barely won his first bout. He’s a white farm kid from Yuma. It’s the best possible set-up for you, but don’t get foolish. Don’t get cocky either. He looks like he hits hard, but he’s slow and his combinations are slower and he doesn’t throw a lot of them. You got this kid. So go in there and get the goddamn job done. Okay?’

  Horace nodded over and over but he was was too nervous and excited to listen. And then, suddenly, the fight began.

  The farm kid from Yuma came out cautious and when he did connect there wasn’t much power behind his punches, and Horace’s combinations were getting through. His opponent’s face became covered in red-flecked snot. The kid was already fading as the first round ended.

  Ruiz chewed Nicorette gum as he spoke to Horace in the corner. ‘You got him, Hector. Just throw combinations and remember to move your feet and keep your hands up. He hasn’t hurt you, but he could. And remember to move your goddamn feet. What do you have to remember?’

  ‘To move my feet,’ Horace said and looked out to the small crowd.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  Horace shook his head. ‘I’m just getting going.’ He again looked at the crowd. A third of them were watching him. Ruiz gave him a drink of water and said, ‘Don’t look out there. It’s in here you have to look, inside the ring. It’s that kid from Yuma you gotta focus on. This fight’s just beginning.’

  The second-round bell rang and Horace went to work. He landed two combinations to the farm boy’s face that sent him reeling. Thirty seconds later Horace landed the hardest body shot he’d ever thrown. The kid from Yuma fell to his knees and couldn’t get up. The referee went to him, paused for a moment and then called the fight over. It took nearly a minute before the kid finally got to his feet, shaky and hurt. Blood trickled from his nose. In the blue corner, a man who looked like his father shook his head gravely.

  The referee stood between both fighters, Horace to the left and the farm boy to the right. The announcer’s voice came out of the PA so loud it began to feed back. He declared Horace Hopper the winner and the referee lifted Horace’s arm and they were both handed trophies. Horace’s was a foot taller than the farm boy’s and read Arizona Golden Gloves Lightweight Champion 2015.

  Horace got down from the ring and walked past the spectators, the boxers and the parents, and for the first time in his life he didn’t feel like an outcast or a failure. He didn’t feel like a misfit, he didn’t feel off or defective. Finally, after so much work and heartache, Horace Hopper was leaving him. He was being cut away and left to disappear into nothingness. He had the trophy in his hand and the respect of the people in the room. He had won.

  Owen and Johnny held the trophy while Horace went to the bathroom, cleaned up and changed into his sweats. At the concession stand, a man wearing a green suit bought his two hot dogs, Red Vines and Coke. Two other men sitting in the twenty-one-and-older section yelled out his name and gave him a thumbs up.

  When he finished eating, he walked back to Ruiz’s corner and sat down. Owen and Johnny were wrestling while Ruiz’s two kids were eating popcorn and playing the handheld video game. Horace leaned back against the wall, relieved and full of pride, and closed his eyes.

  11

  Mr Reese climbed out of his truck and walked across the parking lot to the Banc Club. Inside, he passed through the aged casino and the din of the slot machines to the diner, where his oldest friend, Ander Zubiri, sat drinking a glass of wine and filling out a keno card.

  ‘I don’t see how can you drink wine at seven in the morning,’ Mr Reese said and took off his cowboy hat, threw it on the booth seat and sat down.

  Ander shrugged his shoulders. He wore bifocals, a stained straw cowboy hat, dirty jeans and a green threadbare western shirt. He hadn’t shaved in three days. ‘I ordered for both of us when I saw you pull in,’ he said and went back to filling out his keno ticket.

  ‘The new kid couldn’t take it,’ Mr Reese said and put his elbows on the table.

  Ander looked up. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell exactly. He only speaks a Peruvian dialect, so I didn’t have much of a way to communicate with him. He’s a relative of Pedro’s, that’s why I hired him, but I don’t think he’d ever been out with sheep. I’m not sure he’s even spent much time outside a city. I don’t know … I was hoping he’d be a good fit and then Pedro would have a relative with him and I could buy Conklin’s flock before lambing season. Double my size. But now, with Horace gone, and the amount I spent on the well, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.’

  Ander took a drink of wine. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking anyway,’ he said. ‘You’re only two years younger than me, your health’s worse than mine, and now you want to expand. You want more employees, not less. More headache, not less. And prices keep going down. You know, I went to the grocery store yesterday and there was no lamb in the entire meat department.’

  A middle-aged waiter with greasy black hair and Band-Aids on three of his fingers came to the table. He picked up the keno ticket and the $10 sitting on top of it, and poured Mr Reese a cup of coffee.

  ‘I know,’ Mr Reese said when he left. ‘I know you’re right.’

  ‘So what happened exactly with the new kid – what’s his name again?’

  ‘Víctor. He ran away from Pedro and was hiding maybe a mile up the mountain in an aspen grove.’

  ‘Hiding?’

  Mr Reese nodded. ‘Horace found him and brought him back to the ranch and we put him on a bus to Los Angeles.’

  ‘Los Angeles?’

  ‘That where he wanted to go.’

  ‘How’s Pedro?’

  Mr Reese shrugged his shoulders. ‘The last time I saw him, he seemed alright. The dogs look good. He’s moving the flock the way he should. He’s shaving and eating. But I think we’re on borrowed time. My gut says it’s going to happen again, that he’s had enough of it up there.’

  ‘It was pretty rough the last time,’ said Ander.

  ‘That image of coming into camp, finding him like that on his bed, naked and all cut up with the knife still in his hand … That’ll never leave my head.’

  ‘People go crazy being alone too long, but I’d never heard of a guy cutting himself up like that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said M
r Reese. ‘I tried to get him to see a doctor, and I guess he did go once and was put on some sort of medication, but I don’t think he takes it. I also told him to go back home for an extended vacation, but he just clams up when I say that. He has three kids that I don’t think he’s hardly seen, and even so he doesn’t want to go back. I give him phone cards and got him a solar charger, thinking if he called home more it would help with the loneliness.’

  ‘Maybe calling home makes it worse.’

  ‘Could be.’

  Ander took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with a brass lighter. ‘Back in the thirties, my dad’s cousin came out from a small town maybe thirty miles from San Sebastián. From what I was told, he wasn’t from the mountains, not really. He’d grown up working on a boat. But like so many people he couldn’t find work, so he came over here. He spoke only Basque. They said he was a meek sorta kid. Maybe he was depressed or mentally ill to start out with, I don’t know. And he was a distant relative. So no one’s direct responsibility. They put him out near Alturas and left him with the sheep after only his second week in the States. And remember he didn’t speak English, and only pidgin Spanish. A lonely boy in a country he didn’t understand and then thrust into the mountains alone. They checked on him but I don’t think anyone really cared to understand how he was doing mentally. He was just a worker, another relative who needed a job. The boy grew more and more depressed. He began to let himself go, didn’t shave, didn’t bathe. But even so, they didn’t pull him off the mountain. He was out for nearly four months when they found him hanging from a tree, dead, with a pocketknife stuck into his leg.’

  ‘A pocketknife?’

  Ander nodded.

  ‘Why would he put a knife in his leg?’

  Ander shrugged. ‘Pain? I knew of a kid down by Carson City who shot himself after eleven years with the sheep. He’d had a month off in town, he didn’t have a drinking problem, he had a bank account with money in it. His month comes and goes and then he’s back in the mountains with the sheep. He’s there only four days and shoots himself. Why wouldn’t he just quit and stay in town? Why wouldn’t he just move on to a different sorta job?’

  Mr Reese sighed.

  ‘I try never to tell a man what to do, but I’ve known you most of my life. First the well and now wanting to expand. It’s like you’re panicking. If you look at it on paper, it just doesn’t make sense. Soon they’ll change the herding laws anyway – you’ll have to pay Pedro more. And Christ, how much longer will you even be alive?’

  ‘You know who I saw last week,’ said Mr Reese and took a drink of coffee. ‘Roy Gifford.’

  Ander laughed.

  ‘I ran into him at the hardware store with his dad. He was back for a family reunion. He told me he’s running two thousand head of cattle for some big outfit in Wyoming now. In charge of the whole thing. That’s a big operation. Why couldn’t Cassie have married him?’

  ‘’Cause she didn’t love him as much as you did.’

  Mr Reese laughed. ‘Both my daughters ran out at seventeen and have never come back for more than a week or two.’

  ‘Can you blame them? They’re smart, good-looking, they went to college, they didn’t want to spend their lives out in the middle of nowhere. My boys didn’t want anything to do with the ranch either. All three didn’t. I couldn’t get even one of them to take it. Not even the bum.’

  ‘No wonder you drink in the morning.’

  ‘Remember, you didn’t want to take over your dad’s place either.’

  Mr Reese nodded and the waiter appeared with two plates of steak, eggs, potatoes and toast, and set them down on the table.

  ‘I just can’t sit around and watch TV all day,’ said Mr Reese.

  Ander nodded and they fell silent. They ate quietly and then Ander set down his knife and fork. ‘What if you just ran a small cow/calf operation? Your dad ran cattle as well as sheep. You have the hay fields. You have the water. I have two good bulls. You could do most of the work on a four-wheeler. I’ll give you mine. A retirement plan. Sell the sheep and start a new operation. Small and easy.’

  Mr Reese nodded and kept eating.

  ‘Why you so quiet?’

  ‘Just thinking, is all.’

  ‘What about?’ asked Ander.

  ‘Personally, I could leave, I could. You know I’ve wanted to, but Louise, she’ll barely go to the store anymore. Last week we got in a fight because I made her go into town for a doctor’s appointment. It never gets better. If she was never around people again, she’d be alright about it. And she doesn’t want to move in with the girls, doesn’t want to travel. She never wants to go anywhere. She wants to die there, on the ranch. So what choice do I have but to keep going? I either keep trying or give up. And if I give up, what will I do all day?’

  Ander nodded.

  Mr Reese pushed his plate away and set his elbows on the table. ‘I stopped by the ranchers’ breakfast a while back. Most of them got out or retired a long time ago. Most are living on social security and savings and are probably doing alright. But while I was there, all they did was complain. All they did was bitch and not one of them had a truck that was older than three years. What do they have to complain about? I don’t want to be like them. They don’t do anything.’

  Again Ander nodded.

  ‘Back to cattle, huh?’ Mr Reese said and took another drink of coffee.

  ‘It’ll be less of a headache on you. A small herd – a retirement herd.’

  ‘Jesus, I thought I’d care less about things as I got older, but I don’t. I care just as much. But I’m also getting tired.’

  ‘That’s why, in old age, I always drink wine,’ Ander said, and smiled.

  ‘But you always drank wine.’

  He again nodded. ‘It got me out of two marriages,’ he laughed. ‘It’s been more than a good friend.’

  12

  The crowded Greyhound bus idled in the depot, its air conditioner struggling against the heat of the day. Everyone inside was sweating and uncomfortable. Horace sat by the window two rows behind the driver and closed his eyes. He was nearly asleep when a young pregnant woman sat down next to him, holding an infant in her arms.

  ‘Is this the bus to Salt Lake?’ she asked, out of breath. She wore a T-shirt with a unicorn on it and shorts, and had thin brown hair and an acne-plagued face. Her thick sweaty legs rubbed on Horace’s Levi’s, and he moved as far as he could from her.

  He nodded and looked at the infant.

  ‘Don’t worry, she won’t cry. She don’t ever cry when it’s this hot out.’

  The driver stepped onto the bus, made his announcements and they left the station. Horace slept in spells, the infant stayed quiet and the day passed. When they pulled over for a scheduled dinner stop, the pregnant woman pushed on his shoulder and woke him. She asked if he had enough money for a Dr Pepper. Horace sat up, rubbed his eyes and gave her $5 from his wallet. The passengers got down from the bus and he watched as the girl walked across the parking lot to a Jack in the Box. He followed along slowly and stood three people behind her in line and ordered dinner. As he got his bag of food, he saw her sitting in a corner seat, the baby on her lap while she ate.

  He walked back to the parking lot and had his dinner near the bus. When people began getting back on, he did as well. The woman’s baby bag and a small stuffed rabbit were on the seat next to him. He sat down, closed his eyes and leaned against the window glass. The bus driver did the passenger count and stopped in front of Horace’s row. He asked where the person sitting next to him was, but Horace opened his eyes and said he didn’t know. The driver left the bus to look around. He came back a short time after that, shut the bus door, and they left without her.

  As they headed up Interstate 89, Horace became overcome with shame and guilt. He had helped leave a woman and her baby stranded. She was probably still sitting in the same seat in the corner of the restaurant with her baby who didn’t move or cry, who smelled like dirty diapers. And what
was his excuse? Why didn’t he speak up for her?

  He got up from his seat and walked to the front of the bus. ‘That woman who didn’t get on – she was in the Jack in the Box.’

  The driver looked at him in the rear-view. ‘It’s too late now. We gave three warnings over the PA. I told everyone a half-hour break.’

  Horace nodded and went back to his seat.

  Dusk became night and the bus struggled over the mountain passes. He tried to focus on Salt Lake City, on the motel he would pick, on the runs he would take each morning, what he’d eat for breakfast, how he would ready himself for the matches, but always the pregnant woman and her baby came into his thoughts. She didn’t have her diaper bag and she probably had a suitcase in the luggage hold. A broke pregnant girl with a baby stuck at Jack in the Box in the middle of the summer, in the middle of nowhere. He put his jean jacket over his head and collapsed into sleep.

  *

  The bus arrived in Salt Lake City at seven the next morning and Horace stepped down into the small terminal, grabbed his travel bag and took a photocopied map from his pocket. He had circled the Salt Palace Convention Center with a yellow highlighter, and he walked for half an hour before he saw the glass building and its round glass tower. He sat on a bench, worked his hand exerciser and waited for the doors to open. Buses and cars passed. There was nothing around him but miles of concrete and asphalt.

  He waited an hour, then got up from the bench. He was tired of waiting and he was hungry. He walked farther down the street to find Lamb’s Grill, and he ate at the counter: three eggs, bacon, no hash browns or toast. Afterward he kept walking. A Howard Johnson motel came into sight and he got a room on the second floor and watched TV and waited.

  It was afternoon when he went back. The Salt Palace was now open and bustling. He was in line for twenty minutes before he was able to tell them his name. A black woman wearing a Golden Gloves T-shirt sat behind a table and looked through a list and put a check by Horace Hopper, and he received a gift bag, an access badge and his schedule. He moved away from the crowd, stood against a wall and thumbed through the programme to find he was to fight Mickey Shrep from Topeka, Kansas at 1 p.m. the next day in ring three.