Shortfictions By Elizabeth Bear by Md Reda R. (Editor)

Author:Md Reda R. (Editor)
Language: eng
Format: epub

Sonny Liston Takes the Fall

1.

"I gotta tell you, Jackie," Sonny Liston said, "I lied to my wife about that. I gotta tell you, I took that fall." It was Christmas eve, 1970, and Sonny Liston was about the furthest thing you could imagine from a handsome man. He had a furrowed brow and downcast hound dog prisoner eyes that wouldn't meet mine, and the matching furrows on either side of his broad, flat nose ran down to a broad, flat mouth under a pencil thin moustache that was already out of fashion six years ago, when he was still King of the World.

"We all lie sometimes, Sonny," I said, pouring him another scotch. We don't mind if you drink too much in Vegas. We don't mind much of anything at all. "It doesn't signify." He had what you call a tremendous physical presence, Sonny Liston. He filled up a room so you couldn't take your eyes off him--didn't want to take your eyes off him, and if he was smiling you were smiling, and if he was scowling you were shivering--even when he was sitting quietly, the way he was now, turned away from his kitchen table and his elbows on his knees, one hand big enough for a man twice his size wrapped around the glass I handed him and the other hanging between his legs, limp across the back of the wrist as if the tendons'd been cut. His suit wasn't long enough for the length of his arms. The coat sleeves and the shirt sleeves with their French cuffs and discreet cufflinks were ridden halfway up his forearms, showing wrists I couldn’t have wrapped my fingers around. Tall as he was, he wasn't tall enough for that frame--as if he didn't get enough to eat as a kid--but he was that wide. Sonny Liston, he was from Arkansas. And you would hear it in his voice, even now. He drank that J&B

scotch like knocking back a blender full of raw eggs and held the squat glass out for more. "I could of beat Cassius Clay if it weren't for the fucking mob," he said, while I filled it up again. "I could of beat that goddamn flashy pansy."

"I know you could, Sonny," I told him, and it wasn't a lie. "I know you could." His hands were like mallets, like mauls, like the paws of the bear they styled him. It didn't matter. He was a broken man, Sonny Liston. He wouldn't meet your eyes, not that he ever would have. You learn that in prison. You learn that from a father who beats you. You learn that when you're black in America.

You keep your eyes down, and maybe there won't be trouble this time.

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