Don't Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin

Author:Willy Vlautin [Willy Vlautin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571301669
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Inside the Shiners’ kitchen was a bathroom and Horace sat on the toilet, his nose broken and bleeding in a constant stream. The skin around his eyes was swelling and turning black. He held a towel underneath his nose as Ruiz set it and then shoved gauze into the nostrils. He told Horace to keep his head back until the bleeding stopped and left to watch the next fight. Horace sat that way for twenty minutes and then showered. His entire face hurt, as did his side, where Samaniego had hit him with a dozen clean shots. Even in such a short fight, he’d taken a lot of punishment. He’d been hit by ten times as many shots as he’d landed. He stayed in the shower for what seemed like an hour. He dressed in the corner of the room, in near darkness, and then Ruiz and a tall Mexican man in a cowboy hat came in. They didn’t see him. The man in the cowboy hat took an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to Ruiz. Ruiz opened it, took the money from it, counted it, put it in his wallet, and they shook hands and left.

Horace couldn’t believe what he had seen. He finished packing his gym bag and went out to the auditorium to find Ruiz drinking in the bar, talking in Spanish to a broken-faced old man in a brown suit.

‘You need some food money, Hector?’ Ruiz drank from a rum and Coke.

Horace shook his head.

‘You can have some of these onion rings if you want. Can you chew?’

‘I can chew,’ said Horace.

Ruiz stood up, drunk, and put his arm around him. ‘You did good tonight. I told you that son of a bitch from Oaxaca would take a beating. How’s your nose?’

‘It’s okay,’ he said.

Ruiz inspected it. ‘It looks like shit, but no worse than it did an hour ago. I think you’ll be alright. Your first pro fight, first broken nose, first win. Quite an evening. We’ll be leaving with this old man, Russell, after the last fight. You should have seen him back in the day. Fast as a cobra and mean as a badger. He’ll put us up in his trailer.’

Horace nodded.

Ruiz finished his drink and smiled. ‘Why do you look so goddamn sad? You just beat a kid who’s had seven pro fights, a kid people were saying might be something. You’re an undefeated professional boxer.’

‘I guess my head and my nose just hurt,’ Horace said, but he couldn’t even look at Ruiz.

‘That Oaxaca son of a bitch got in more than a few. You’re the type of fighter who’s going to take a lot of punishment. Russell and I were just talking about it. But people love a brawler. They love a brawler, don’t they, Russell?’

The old man nodded vaguely.

Horace looked around the room and, without thinking it through, said, ‘I just want to let you know I’m going to catch my own ride home.’

‘Your own ride home?’ Ruiz said.

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