15
Two of Roth’s goons dragged me into the kitchen. The third was the one with the pipe. It was wrapped in strips of dark felt. I saw this when he laid it carefully on the table where I had eaten a good many meals. He put on yellow rawhide gloves.
Roth leaned in the doorway, still smiling placidly. “Eduardo Gutierrez has syphilis,” he announced. “It’s gone to his brain. He’ll be dead in eighteen months, but you know what? He don’t care. He believes he’s gonna come back as an Arab emirate, or sumshit. How ’bout that, huh?”
Responding to non sequiturs—at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in ticket lines at the movie theater—is dicey enough, but it’sreallyhard to know what to say when you’re being held by two men and about to receive a beating from a third. So I said nothing.
“The thing is, you got in his head. You won bets you weren’t supposed to win. Sometimes you lost, but Eddie G got this crazy idea that when you lost, you were losing on purpose. You know? Then you hit big on the Derby, and he decided you were, I dunno, some kind of telepathic gizmo who could see the future. Did you know he burned down your house?”
I said nothing.
“Then,”Roth said, “when those little wormies really started to bite his brain, he started to think you were some kind of ghoul, or devil. He put out the word all over the South, the West, the Midwest. ‘Look for this guy Amberson, and bring him down. Kill him. The guy is unnatural. I could smell it on im but I didn’t pay attention. Now look at me, sick and dying. And it’s this guy’s fault. He’s a ghoul or a devil, or sumshit.’ Crazy, you know? Toys in the attic.”
I said nothing.
“Carmo, I don’t think my friend Georgie’s listening. I think he’s dozing off. Give him a wake-up call.”
The man in the yellow rawhide gloves swung a Tom Case uppercut, bringing it from hip level to the left side of my face. Pain exploded in my head, and for a few moments I saw everything on that side through a scarlet haze.
“Okay, you look a little more awake now,” Roth said. “Where was I? Oh, I know. How you turned into Eddie G’s private boogeyman. Because of the syph, we all knew that. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some barbershop dog. Or a girl who jerked him off too hard at the drive-in when he was sixteen. Sometimes he can’t remember his own address, he has to call someone to come get him. Sad, huh? It’s those worms in his head. But everybody humors him, because Eddie was always a good guy. He could tell ajoke, man, you’d laugh until you cried. Nobody even thought you were real. Then Eddie G’s boogeyman turns up in Dallas, at my shop. And what happens? The boogeyman bets on the Pirates to beat the Yankees, which everyone knows ain’t gonna happen, and in seven games, which everyone knows the Series ain’t gonna go.”
“It was just luck,” I said. My voice sounded furry, because the side of my mouth was swelling. “An impulse bet.”
“That’s just stupid, and stupidity always got to be paid for. Carmo, kneecap this stupid sonofabitch.”
“No!” I said. “No, please don’t do that!”
Carmo smiled as if I’d said something cute, plucked the felt-wrapped pipe from the table, and swung it at my left knee. I heard something down there make a popping sound. Like a big knuckle. The pain was exquisite. I bit back a scream and sagged against the men who were holding me. They yanked me back up.
Roth stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, smiling his happy placid smile. “Okay. Cool. That’s gonna swell, by the way. You won’t believe how big it’s gonna get. But hey, you bought it, you paid for it, you own it. Meanwhile, the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.” The goons holding me laughed.
“The facts are nobody dressed like you was on the day you came into my store makes a bet like that. For a man dressed like you was, an impulse bet is ten dollars, a double sawbuck at most. But the Pirates came through, that is also the facts. And I’m starting to think Eddie G might be right. Not that you’re a devil or a ghoul or an ESP gizmo, nothing like that, but how about maybe you know somebody who knows something? Like the fix is in and the Pirates aresupposedto win in seven?”
“Nobody fixes baseball, Roth. Not since the Black Sox in 1919. You run a book, you must know that.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You know my name! Hey, maybe youarean ESP guy. But I ain’t got all day.”
He glanced at his watch, as if to confirm this. It was big and clunky, probably a Rolex.
“I try to see where you live when you come in to collect, butyou hold your thumb over your address. That’s okay. Lotta guys do that. I decide I’m gonna let it go. I should send some boys down the street to beat the shit out of you, maybe even kill you so that Eddie G’s mind—what’s left of it—can be at rest? Because some guy took shit odds and beat me out of twelve hundred? Fuck that, what Eddie G don’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with you out of the way, he’d just start thinking about something else. Maybe that Henry Ford was the Annie Christ or sumshit. Carmo, he’s not listening again andthat pisses me off.”
Carmo swung the pipe at my midsection. It struck me below the ribs with paralyzing force. There was pain, first jagged, then swallowed in a growing explosion of heat, like a fireball.
“Hurts, don’t it?” Carmo said. “Gets you right in the old kazeenie.”
“I think you ruptured something,” I said. I heard a hoarse steam-engine sound and realized that was me, panting.
“I hope he fuckingdid,” Roth said. “I let yougo,you dumbbell! I fucking let yougo! Iforgotabout you! Then you turn up at Frank’s in Fort Worth to bet the goddam Case-Tiger fight. Exact same MO—big bet on the underdog and all the odds you can get. This time you predict theexact fucking round.So here’s what’s going to happen, my friend: you’re going to tell me how you knew. If you do that, I take some pictures of you like you are now and Eddie G’s satisfied. He knows he can’t have you dead, because Carlos told him no, and Carlos is the one guy he listens to, even now. But if he sees you fucked up… aw, but you ain’t fucked up enough quite yet. Fuck him up some more, Carmo. Do the face.”
So Carmo hammered my face while the other two held me. He broke my nose, closed my left eye, knocked out a few teeth, and tore open my left cheek. I kept thinking,I’ll pass out or they’ll kill me, either way the pain will stop.But I didn’t pass out, and at some point Carmo quit. He was breathing hard, and there were red splotches on his yellow rawhide gloves. Sunshine came in through the kitchen windows and made cheery oblongs on the faded linoleum.
“That’s better,” Roth said. “Get the Polaroid out of the truck, Carmo. Hustle, now. I want to finish up here.”
Before leaving, Carmo stripped off his gloves and put them on the table next to the lead pipe. Some of the felt strips had come loose. They were soaked with blood. My face was throbbing, but my abdomen was worse. There, the heat continued to spread. Something was very wrong down there.
“One more time, Amberson. How’d you know the fix was in? Who told you? The truth.”
“It was just a guess.” I tried to tell myself I sounded like a man with a bad cold, but I didn’t. I sounded like a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of him.
