The Big Fix - Ed Lacy

     “May, that's no way to talk. I ain't bragging, but you know how good I am when I'm right.”

     May nodded. “You were good in the ring, the best. But that's yesterday, today prelim kids are cutting you up. Maybe I mined all that for you, but...”

     “Don't ever think that way, May. It wasn't you or...”

     “I don't want to discuss it. That's all yesterday. Tom, I've been thinking a lot about us. When you're lonely you think. My sickness, the army, you away training so much, we never had our chance at happiness, really being man and wife. You know what's the key to everything? A home—an apartment! We got to have the same roof over our heads before we can start a thing. I'm sick to death of rooms, sharing a bath, keeping food on the window sill, using somebody else's furniture. We have to have a place of our own, an apartment that's ours, where we can live like normal humans. A room is only a cage, and the street our living room. But with a real apartment, where we can cook and live and... God has been gracious to us. We can have Bertha's apartment, if we can raise the hundred and fifty within a month. We must save about forty dollars a week. Now I usually make about thirty-five dollars in tips here. I'm paying eight for a room, so I can hustle together about twenty-five dollars a week. I know where you can get a dishwashing job. It don't pay much, only twenty dollars a week with meals. But it's a start.”

     “May, baby, I was once a contender for the title. I'm a pug with the best left hand in the business, not a dishwasher.”

     “For once you'll do what I say, and I won't hear any more talk about fighting! I can't stand it. All the worry and fear. Tom, Tom, don't you understand, this apartment is a gift from Heaven, our last chance! Once we get the hundred and fifty up, then with the both of us working, we can easily pay the rent, in time put a little aside. We'll be together, have some... security. But you have to forget the ring. I can't carry this alone. You have to get a job!”

     “You're playing us short, May. I want nothing more than to be with you. But twenty lousy bucks for washing some stinking dishes. May, I once fought Robinson. You know what the TV cut is on a main event in Bobby's club? At least a grand, after my purse is pieced off. I haven't got many years left to grab that kind of dough.”

     “Tom, you haven't got any time left, for boxing. All I ask is you get a job, like any other husband does.”

     “Sure, people are dying to give me work. I'll tell you something, before I got this break tonight I was ready to quit. I was so broke I did look for a job. Once glance at my face and they said no dice. Or they asked what my “work background” was—and just to be a lousy messenger. The moment I said I'd been a pug, you'd think I'd said thug. I even got a Social Security card so I could deliver telephone books for a few days. Over the weekends I deliver for a liquor store, pull down a few bucks in tips. Okay, that's only marking time, temporary. I'm Irish Tommy Cork, and I don't settle for being a greaseball dish jockey the rest of my life!”

     “I don't want you to be one for the rest of your life either, but until we're settled, at least get the apartment, we need money coming in every week, money we can count on. Tom, keep the liquor store job, too. In a year, you can look around, or maybe become a counterman, or short-order cook or...”

     “May, I can't lay off a year from the ring. I'd be...”

     “Can't you forget boxing? Can't you understand what a home of our own will mean? The way we've been... existing... one miserable room after the other, the both of us living as strangers in a lonely world. It was living in rooms that made us fight and separate. Tommy, we're no longer kids. We don't have too much time left to be... us. What I'm trying to say is, we have to think of our happiness not of the ring, or of anything else. We have to start living.”

     “Don't you think I want that? What you think I'm fighting for?”

     “I suppose you are trying, in your own way, but... Oh, Tom, I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but we do have to act now, we don't find apartments we can afford every month. That's why you must take this job. Darling, I feel this is our last chance to live as we should. We've been apart so long that... that if we don't take this apartment... well, life is closing the door on us.”

     “May, don't put it like that. We're not finished.”

     “How else should I say it? That's how I feel. We must take the apartment.”

     “If a guy who should have been—and will be—a big money fighter has to settle for being a lousy dishwasher, God might as well slam that door on me right now!”

     May reached across the counter and slapped his braised cheek as she said, “It's blasphemy to talk of suicide, Thomas Cork!”

     He stood up. Butch was walking slowly toward them behind the counter. Tommy said, “I seem to be wide open for a right tonight. Guess you might as well take your turn. May, I rushed here to tell you about how you'll be able to stop working. Live in a real apartment, maybe a hotel suite, have people waiting on you, for a change. For two years I been trying to get any kind of manager backing me. Now when I finally get this rich buff, you want me to give it up. That don't make sense, May.”

     “God forgive me for striking you,” May said, sobbing. “You're talking dreams, Tom. What I'm saying is real, what we have to do now.”

     “May, listen to me. If I can have one good year in the ring, one or two big paydays, I'll retire with ten or twenty grand in my kick. You're right, it is something I have to do now. I can't afford to wait even a week. Next time you see me I'll have a pocketful of dough, really set us up.”

     Shaking her head, May covered her face with her hands and wept softly.

     “It will come true this time, May, it has to—the luck of the Irish and this is the last throw of the dice. It's now or never for me, my last break.” Tommy wheeled around, saw Butch watching them, snarled, “What you want?”

     “No trouble in here is what I want,” Butch said gently, his hands fondling a large soda bottle wrapped in a towel. He'd bounced plenty of men in his time—big men, even battled a few stick-up jaspers—but the look in Tommy's eyes made him uneasy. “I don't want you hitting her, in here.”

     “I never struck May in my life. There's a fin on the counter, take out what I owe and give her the rest. And don't come around the counter or you'll get hurt.”

     Tommy grabbed his suitcase, walked out fast.

TOMMY

     He was dreaming. In the stuffy darkness of his narrow room it was impossible to see the smile on Tommy's rough face. He was seeing May when she was sixteen—the pretty, wistful face under the soft auburn hair, her body blossoming with delicate curves. He was reliving a scene on the stoop of the tenement. May's eyes were big with delight as she fondled the wrist watch he'd given her. Tommy, fighting amateur and bootleg pro bouts then, had won the match for flattening some wild kid in an uptown club in the first round. It was a night for firsts—the first watch May ever owned, the first any neighborhood girl had, and the first time she let him put his arm around her, right out on the stoop. May's hand wags on his back, gently stroking him... gently....

     Arno was shaking Tommy, standing over the cot, careful not to touch the empty pint wine bottles on the floor. On a string hung across the room Tommy's ring togs were drying. Drunk or sober he always washed and took good care of his ring clothes. Jake was near the closed door, face screwed up with the smell of the room.

     Tommy opened his eyes, tried to bring the darkness into focus. He sat up, holding his head with one hand, reached over with his left to snap on the one light. (In the old days when this had been the maid's room in the ancient apartment house, it wasn't thought necessary to give a servant more than one light. A window was out of the question.) Tommy's bloodshot eyes hit Arno's good overcoat,, traveled up to the plump face.

     “How did you find me?”

     From the door, Jake asked, “What makes you think you're hard to find, Pops?”

     Tommy ran his tongue around his mouth, flexed his arms —he was sleeping in his heavy underwear—and belched loudly. “What time is it, Mr. Brewer?” Except for the big head he felt okay.

     “A little after six p.m.” Arno daintily touched one of the dead soldiers on the floor with his shoe, said softly, “I see why you didn't call at my hotel.”

     “Don't get the wrong idea,” Tommy said, his brains rusty as he tried to think straight. “I'm not a rumdum. I really meant to be at your hotel. But I had a... a... run-in with my wife, tried to lose myself in a bottle. I guess you're sour on me?”

     Jake said, “Let's get out of here before I puke. I'd open the door but it smells worse in the hallway.”

     Without turning his head, Arno said, “Shut up.” Brushing off a corner of the cot, he sat on the gray sheet. “I don't give up on things easily, Tommy. You ought to move out of this fleabag.”

     Tommy split the soggy quiet of the room with another long belch. “Yeah? With what? I'm not living here out of choice, Mr. Brewer.”

     Arno took out a tooled leather cigarette case, offered the pug one. When Tommy told him he didn't smoke, Arno lit a cigarette, blew out a thick cloud of smoke as if fumigating the room, said, “That's good. You certainly know more about training than I do. I don't mind you hitting the bottle, but not too often. If I take you on I expect you to be in shape—when I need you. Otherwise drinking is your own business.”

     “I never touch the stuff,” Tommy mumbled. “It was the argument with my wife. She wants me to quit fighting.”

     “That what you want, Irish?”

     “Hell, no.”

     “All right. As I told you last night, I have money, so managing fighters is merely a hobby with me. Sign with me and I'll pay your room and board, buy you some clothes, give you modest spending coin. But don't think I'm a sucker; it will be a loan. I'll get it back from your purses.”

     “Know what I took down last night? Nineteen bucks!”

     Arno shrugged. “Since it's my money and my hobby, let me worry about it. When you fight for me, you'll be well paid.” He pulled a folded contract from his pocket, then counted out two hundred dollars—an imposing pile of five-dollar bills. “I want you to sign this, after you read it. Legally I won't be your manager of record, for reasons I'll explain some other time. But this states that I'm staking you, buying a sort of interest in your career. You agree to give me twenty per cent of your purses until the money I loan you is paid. It's legal. Show it to a lawyer, if you wish. Take this money and pay your rent here, buy a suit, and be at my hotel, the Southside, at nine in the morning. We're leaving to train in the country for a few weeks. Buying that?”

     “Yes sir! Listen, Mr. Brewer, you'll see I still got the stuff, the fastest left in the racket.”

     Jake, standing by the door, laughed silently.

     Arno got to his feet, knocked over one of the empty bottles. “Lay off the booze, for now. Don't let me down.”

     “Don't you worry, Mr....”

     “Cut the mister line. Call me Arno.”

     “Don't you worry, Arno, I'll be on the ball,” Tommy said, getting out of bed, a comical little man in crumpled and stained underwear.

     “We don't worry, Pops.” Jake's voice managed to sound sharp and cold in the stale air of the tiny room.

     “Let's make that ten a.m. tomorrow,” Arno said, walking toward the door, ducking under the string on which Tommy's trunks were drying. “Give you time to buy some clothes. When we return to town you'll be staying at the hotel. I want you to look like a coming champ. Meantime, keep this quiet. I'll explain that later, too. Sign the contract, get yourself straight. I don't want a cent of my money spent on booze. We understand each other?”

     “You bet. You can trust me, Arno. I'll be at the Southside tomorrow, ten o'clock.”

     “Sharp,” Jake said, opening the door for Arno.

     Outside in the hallway Jake whispered, “You shouldn't have given him so much dough. He'll drink himself stiff.”

     “Don't talk loud,” Arno said. “Sure he'll drink. Is that bad? Main thing, he took the dough, he's into us.”

     “But he hasn't signed the contract yet?”

     “Leave the thinking to me. He'll sign.”

     “But we're running low on dough? Two hundred...”

     “Let me handle this end, you just start training. Run your legs off instead of your dumb mouth. There's an East Indian restaurant I want to try—once I get the stink of this dump out of my chest.”

     Tommy got out his shower shoes, stuffed the money inside his underwear, and clopped down the hallway to the John. Returning to his room he locked the door, put the one chair against it, and counted the money. Then he put the bills in his underwear again and stretched out, slept for awhile.

     He awoke an hour later and counted the money once more. It was still two hundred bucks. It wasn't a dream. For a split second he considered giving May a hundred and fifty for the apartment she wanted so badly, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. No point in risking Arno getting sore at him. He'd already goofed. Beside, within a couple of months he'd buy May a regular house if she wanted it.

     He dressed and packed all his stuff, including the damp ring togs. It didn't take more than a few moments. Downstairs he paid the two week's rent he was behind, told the astonished and unshaven elderly man behind the desk he was moving. The cold night air took all the wine-sleep out of his head. He stopped at a laundry to leave his dirty clothes, opening the battered suitcase on the counter. The old woman running the shop insisted on a dollar deposit and Tommy flashed his roll, to spite her. He stopped for a fast cup of coffee and a buttered roll. The wall clock said it was twenty after seven, and he raced across town to a pawn shop which closed at eight. Here he purchased a decent suitcase for fifteen dollars and a small leather bag for six, and took out a suit and overcoat he'd put in pawn during the summer—as a means of safe storage. It cost him thirty-two dollars to redeem the clothes. He carefully packed all his things into the new bag, except the gym clothing, which he placed in the smaller bag.