Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [42]
“You’re not so dark yourself.”
“Never mind that. My soul…it’s as black as night.”
“You got business in Milwaukee?”
He laughed. “Yeah, the only business I got now.” He added: “Just think, we get in a bad accident in the city. To die in Milwaukee. When I’ve been ’round the world. You…they not even goin’ to know you’re dead. It just be Ali this, Ali that. What was he doin’ in Milwaukee? Always a mystery, Ali.” He paused: “Nobody gonna remember you ever. Not even a church, ’cause you got a porpoise for a God.”
We drove along in silence for about five miles, and he said: “Tell the truth, I shook you up. You’re thinkin’, ‘Suppose he wraps me round a phone pole, who gonna care ’bout me?’ What you need to do is get you a God like me. Life is a scary place, even when you the king of the world like me.”
“The king of the barbershops.”
He folded his upper teeth over his lower lip as he always liked to do to show humor, cocked his left fist, while keeping his right hand on the wheel. “You talk like that,” he said, “we are gonna have an accident.”
“No, I was just thinking of your immortality. I figure for ten years. After you’re dead.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “We just flies, aren’t we? Just a whooooosh from God, and we’re dead all over the place, and soon all them flies that knew you, they all gone, too. Ain’t the world strange.”
We arrived in Milwaukee, and I kept waiting for him to park and go into a hotel or someplace to conduct his business. Instead, he kept cruising up and down the main street, around and around, the car now like some traveler lost in a fog bank. He’d pull up to a red light, turn full face to the car idling next to him, and wait for recognition, and there never was any, and he’d go around again, lingering at the lights, his eyes silent and almost intense as if he were searching for witnesses to his existence, then after a while his silence turning into rapid speech and sound as he reproduced the thwack of gloves tracking toward his face; the feel of first sweat snaking down his back; the comradeship of the gym; the feel of a punch shivering up his arm. For a moment, it was as if he wanted to get out and stand in the middle of the traffic, so confounded was he that not one pair of eyes had met his and said, “Yes, you can’t fool me, I know who you are.” A cold, ineffable sadness billowed the curtains of the mind as he finally headed back toward the highway and Chicago, and there was no need to point out what he had done because he was now saying that he had made the trip several times in the past, going nowhere, around and around, and if there was a larger meaning he kept it concealed in what seemed a migratory soul—as the midnight car lights streaked across a quiet face, and he said only one sentence the entire trip back: “I know I’ll never fight again.”
It was now almost two years into his exile. He was handling it with grace. The crucial point was to stay out of trouble; being picked up in Miami with an invalid license was more a reflection of FBI–local police targeting, an effort to make something happen, and they must have been badly disappointed when they didn’t find a gun or drugs that could be used to discredit him. It was rumored that he had once carried a gun for a few hours, then threw it in a river. If so, that would follow; real violence had always spooked him, and the sight of a gun in his hand or pocket would have rattled his consciousness to unbearable distraction; likewise with drugs, for even an aspirin was foreign to him. So, with the help of Belinda, he was doing more than holding his own, he was surviving with dignity. And the college lectures were keeping him afloat financially, though the money hardly supported the new limos that he said he had just purchased. Nor did the college money give him any relief from his legal bills. There was no aid from the Muslims. In Elijah’s mind—not Herbert’s, the sonmanager—Ali’s life as a fighter was history, and good riddance. He did not have to worry about his food or domicile, the Muslims would provide. Elijah was going