Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [42]
“Let’s go,” he said to her.
“Don’t interrupt,” Mona said without looking at him. “I’m talking.” One of the sailors eyed Jack nervously. They were both young and smooth-cheeked, with the slack mouths of punks. One of them was trying to grow a mustache, and he had his hand resting on Mona’s arm. He looked at Jack, and let his arm drop to his side. Jack turned away and went out the door and walked back to the hotel alone.
He got a room only a few doors from Denny’s, unpacked his clothes, squared the room away, undressed, and went in to take a shower. He let the hot water run hard on the back of his neck; lately the muscles there had been cording up tight, and he had discovered that hot water loosened them as well as or better than whiskey. Before every fight he had spent almost an hour in the shower, letting the water run over him, and nipping at a pint. He had always been about half-loaded when he went into the ring. The whiskey calmed him down, and he could be more mechanical. Castelli had told him he had two great problems as a fighter: his skin broke too easily—bled too much, and he had a tendency to slip from boxing to street fighting if he seemed to think he was losing. He could control the last with whiskey, but the first had spoiled what might have been a solid career as a boxer. It got around that he cut easily, and so his opponents would go for his face and make him bleed, and he lost his last seven fights through TKOs, boxing the final rounds with a film of blood over his eyes and the salty taste of it in his mouth. This is what made him get wild, and he was an easy mark for any half-bright fighter. Prado Vasquez, a kid he liked and drank with, almost killed him the fight before his last one, when there was so much blood in his eyes that he stopped moving for a second and tried to wipe his eyes and Prado (Jack could see the tight little Oriental face) got him setting solid, a short blow to the point of the jaw, and for the first time in his career Jack went out, and came to in the dressing room. For a couple of days after that he felt as if his heart had come loose, and after one more loser Castelli cut him loose.
But that was all right. He was getting tired of it. Everyone was being entertained but him.
While he was drying himself there was a tapping on the door.
“Who is it?” he said.
“Who did you expect?”
He opened the door and let her in. His nakedness caught her by surprise, and for a few moments she was disconcerted into silence, walking rapidly across the room and looking out the window into the light shaft. He continued to rub himself off.
“Well, really,” she said at last. “Aren’t you proud of yourself.”
“You can leave if you want,” Jack said. “But I don’t think you want to.”
“You know everything, don’t you.”
He laughed at her. “Are you going to take a shower?”
She actually looked embarrassed. “I guess so,” she said.
But Jack didn’t want to be mean. “Listen, you girls can use my room to clean up in and change, and I’ll wait with Denny. Are they through in there?”
She closed an eye and squinted at him, as he put on his underwear. “How come you walked off on me? I was just talking to a boy I used to know. You have a good build, do you know that?” She made a face. “Sure you know it.”
“You go get your things while I finish dressing,” he said.
As she was passing him she stopped and then came close to him, reaching to touch the muscles of his upper arm. Jack noticed that she had orange lacquer on her fingernails, and that one of the nails was cracked. He could smell her perfume and it made him suddenly dizzy with expectation; there was a shout in him to throw her to the floor, but he stilled it; he knew that they would certainly make love and there was no reason to be brutal; it would be better—more delicious—to move into it slowly. He waited, his eyes on the small curve of her breasts.
“What a body,” she said, almost to herself. She held her mouth up to