Gregorio had taken his magazines to his room with him but the morning paper was on the table. I was leafing through it and having my second cup of coffee when old Moises came down and looked surprised to find me there. “Buen año nuevo, joven!” he said.
I waited till he sat himself with a cup of coffee, then gestured for him to put the tin horn to his ear. He did, and I asked if he had been to the party at the Morales place last night.
“Como?” he said, pressing the horn harder to his ear. “Qué?”
I leaned over the table and asked the question louder.
“La fiesta de Morales? Sí, yo fui, claro que sí. Era muy buena fiesta.”
Had he met Avila’s relatives from Brownsville?
“Que?” he bellowed, twisting the horn like he meant to screw it into his skull.
With my mouth right at the ear horn, I loudly and slowly repeated my question. He listened hard, then said that there had been many people at the party, a few he had never seen before, but with the music and laughter and his bad ears he hadn’t caught their names.
Was there a pretty girl he hadn’t seen before?
“Ay, hijo!” But of course there had been pretty girls! Every woman in the world was a pretty girl in her own way, did I not know that? As a man ages he gains wisdom and comes to see the eternal beauty of all womanhood. Why, if he were only ten years younger…
I patted his shoulder and cursed myself for a fool to have thought he might be of any help, then took my plate and cup to the sink and washed them while he rambled on about all the women he’d known, large and small, darkskinned and fair, all of them lovely, all of them a wonderful mystery, although of course there had been a special one, a girl back in Michoacán whom he’d known for less than a month, when they were both nineteen, one whom Death the Bastard took from him but whom he had not failed to think about every day since…
He was still going on and on when I said goodbye and went out the door.
The holiday street traffic was of course much lighter than usual for a Wednesday. Most businesses were closed and a lot of people were still in bed with aching heads and new regrets.
The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the sea, but the wet and littered streets still carried tinges of the town’s hangover, the faint odors of booze and tobacco ash and rank bedsheets. A sickly yellow seadog still arced through the light mist over the Offatt Bayou.
But holidays were good for the gambling business. Even at this midmorning hour I found the betting room behind the Turf Grill already half-full and loud with talk of the day’s favorites and longshots at the Florida and California tracks. The Juárez and Tijuana races would get a lot of play too. The parlor betting would be heavy all day long.
Up on the second floor I went into Rose’s outer office and spoke with his secretary, Mrs. Bianco. A lot of the guys called her Momma Mia, and she seemed to enjoy it, but to me she was always Mrs. Bianco. She had a pronounced Italian accent and a motherly manner and could have been on an advertising poster for pasta or tomato paste. Portly and beginning to gray, always dressed in neat and matronly fashion. She lived alone in a boardinghouse down the street from the Club. Not many knew it but she was one of Rose’s highest-paid employees and among the handful of people he truly trusted, and there was no aspect of Maceo business she wasn’t privy to. She knew how I stood with Rose too and tended to be more direct with me than she was with others—and I’d caught glimpses of the .38 bulldog she kept in the bottom righthand drawer of her desk. I once asked Rose if she knew how to use it and he smiled and winked and left it at that.
She told me Signore Maceo had sent LQ and Brando and one of his slot machine mechanics to the Red Shoes Cabaret near Alvin. I knew the place. It was in Brazoria County, just west of the Galveston line, and it rented its machines from the Gulf Vending Company. The place had changed hands a few months before and the new guys had been consistently slow about toting up the daily take from the slots and handing over the Maceos’ cut. Artie Goldman suspected they were shaving their revenue reports, and Artie’s suspicions were good enough for Rose.
The Red Shoes guys would be surprised when the mechanic showed up that morning to check their machines. Each of the slots had been geared to keep a tally of the money it took in—a running tally that wasn’t erased each time the machine was emptied, as many of the joint owners had been led to believe was the case. LQ and Brando would ensure that nobody interfered with the mechanic’s inspection of the slots—and they would take the necessary measures if the machine tallies didn’t match the ones on the Red Shoes reports. It was a job I normally would’ve been tending to.
I told Mrs. Bianco I’d be in the gym if Rose wanted me, then went up to the third floor.
The health club was always open to members—weekends and holidays included—and there were already a dozen guys there, the usual bunch who always showed up early. Club rats, Watkins the trainer called them. As the morning wore on, still more members would come in for their regular workouts or just to sweat last night’s booze out of their system.
The large room echoed with the huffing and grunting of hard effort, with the slapping of jump ropes and the clanking of barbells, punches smacking the heavy bags. The daily reek of sweat and liniment was already starting to build.
It had been a good while since my schedule let me have a morning workout, and Otis was glad to see me come in during his shift. I figured he’d want to go a few rounds and I was ready to oblige him. But he was booked solid with his club rat boxing lessons for the next two days.
“I got a ten o’clock open on Saturday,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ll be out of town.”
I said I had to hang around town all week, so Saturday was fine.
“I’m locking us in at ten,” he said, writing “lesson to hotshot” in ink on his big desktop calendar.
I took the pen from his hand and drew a line through the word “to” in his notation and wrote “from” above it.
“Cocky sumbuck,” he said. “We’ll see. Three three-minute, no headgear, Watkins refs?”
“You’re on,” I said.
I went to my locker and got into my shorts and T-shirt and ring shoes. I’d never been in a gym before I got to Galveston, never fought with gloves or according to any rules. I’d known how to fight—not box, fight—since I was a boy. Nobody had taught me how, I just knew. And I learned early that a real fight had no rules. And nobody stopped it. A real fight wasn’t over until one of the fighters couldn’t fight anymore, and even then it sometimes wasn’t over. Boxing wasn’t real fighting, it was an exercise of skill and endurance, a test of your self-control. It required you to hold to the rules no matter if you were losing, no matter how hurt or angry you might be, no matter how sure you were you could kill the other guy if you just said to hell with the rules. Fighting in the ring exercised your discipline. It’s what I liked about it.