Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'Take a walk with me to the drugstore, then we'll head back to the gym and talk about clocks and bombsights.'

'What?'

'Gome on, I'm over the hill. You—dump me on my butt, Zoot.'

We went into the drugstore on the corner, and I bought a rubber ball, just a little smaller than the palm of my hand, and dropped it in the pocket of my slacks. Then we crossed the street to the gym, and Zoot put on his trunks again and met me in an alcove with padded mats on the floor and a huge ventilator fan bolted into the wire-mesh windows. I hung my shirt on a rack of dumbbells and slipped on a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves that were almost as big as couch pillows.

Advice is always cheap, and the cheapest kind is the sort we offer people who have to enter dangerous situations for which they are seriously unprepared or ill-equipped. I probably knew a hundred one-liners that a cut-man or a trainer had told me in the corner of a Golden Gloves ring while he worked my mouthpiece from my teeth and squeezed a sponge into my eyes ('Swallow your blood, kid. Don't never let him see you're hurt… He butts you again in the clench, thumb him in the eye… He's telegraphing. When he drops his right shoulder, click off his light').

But very few people appreciate the amount of courage that it takes to stand toe-to-toe with a superior opponent who systematically goes about breaking the cartilage in your nose, splitting your eyebrows against the bone, and turning your mouth into something that looks like a torn tomato, while the audience stands on chairs and roars its approval of your pain and humiliation.

'Let's try to keep two simple concepts in mind,' I said. 'Move in a circle with the clock. You got that? Circle him till he thinks you're a shark. Always to the left, just like you're moving with the clock.'

'All right…' He started circling with me, his gym shoes shuffling on the canvas pad, the skin around his temples taut with expectation, his eyes watching my fists.

'Then you look him right in the eye. Except in your mind you're seeing his face in a bombsight… Don't look at my hands, look at my face. His face is right in the crosshairs, you understand me, because you know it's just a matter of time till you bust him open with your left, maybe make him duck and come up without his guard, and then pull the trigger and bust him with your right.'

He circled and squinted at me above his gloves with his puffed left eye.

'Hit me,' I said.

His jabs were like spastic jerks, ill-timed, fearful, almost pathetic.

'I said hit me, Zoot!'

His left came out and socked into my gloves.

'Hit me, not the glove,' I said. 'You're starting to piss me off.'

'What?'

'I said you're pissing me off. Do you have some problem with your hearing?' I could see the verbal injury in his eyes. I flipped a left jab at his head and drove my right straight into his guard. Then I did it again. His head snapped back with the weight of the blow, then he caught his balance and hunched his shoulders again. I saw him lower his right slightly and a glint form in one eye like a rifleman peering down iron sights.

His left missed me and scraped past my ear, but he had forced me to duck sideways, and when he unloaded his right he snapped his shoulder into it, the sweat leaping off his face, and caught me squarely across the jaw.

I lowered my gloves and grinned at him.

'That one was a beaut,' I said, and started pulling off my gloves.

'You quitting?'

'I told you, I'm over the hill for it. Besides, I have to get back to New Iberia.'

'Go three with me.'

I reached in my slacks, took out the rubber ball I had bought at the drugstore, and tossed it to him.

'Squeeze that in each hand five hundred times a day. Do that, and keep working on that right cross, and you'll be able to tear off your opponent's head and spit in it, Zoot.'

When I walked toward the exit, I looked back and saw him shadowboxing in front of the ventilator fan, his right hand working the rubber ball, his head ducking and weaving in front of the spinning fan blades. Advice might be cheap, but there is nothing facile about the faith of those to whom we give it. I wished Zoot lots of luck. He was probably going to need a pile of it.

* * *

chapter nine

I was almost out the front door of the gym when Tommy Lonighan came out of his office and shook my hand like a greeter at a casino. His muscular thighs bulged out of a pair of cut-off gray sweat trunks. His light blue eyes and pink face were radiant with goodwill.

'I saw you working out with Zoot,' he said.