Free The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford Page A

still wired. He came at it from the side, curling his foot, and slid it onto the space where he’d been lying, into the sweat circle on the floor. The scorpion sat on its stomach with its tail laid behind it inert. He suddenly brought his heel down and ground it on the tile. It made him mad for the scorpion to be still. The television was screaming and the woman was swaying in a daze, the coat hugged to her chest. The word
ganadora
had begun flashing below the woman’s feet as if that was her name. It pissed him off. The scorpion had been dead, it was a nigger gimmick. It made you an asshole by making you be afraid of somethingthat turned out to be nothing. Though that wasn’t precisely it. It was just all in behalf of what didn’t matter. The thing that scared you was the thing that didn’t matter.
    He twisted his hands free, turned off the television, and picked up the Italian girl’s underpants. His heart was hitting at the sides of his ribs, and his stomach felt turned over, beginning to cramp. Sonny was supposed to be the routine part of this. Rae was supposed to be the hard. Things were beginning to go off the track all of a sudden, and he didn’t know exactly what it would take to get them on again. It was going to have to be Bernhardt’s business, that was certain. Because his own progress meant to go in another direction.

7
    T HE I TALIAN GIRL’S perfume smelled in the bed. He had no recollection from the night before, but it was all over the sheets and on the pillows and the blankets. It had been on the underwear he had flushed in the toilet. A sweet, lemony smell with sweat. It gave the filthy little bedroom a floating, locationless feeling.
    He took a drink of whisky and lay out on the bed in a nausea, waiting for the pills to buckle onto the cramps. The cramps were like animal pains, great slow fissures in his gut that were almost too dramatic to be real pain, and you could suffer them out to the point of amusement, the way a horse would when it got a pain but couldn’t recognize it for what a pain was, and liked it.
    He had had his picture made two days ago in the park. He could see it if he moved toward the bed table, himself in a white sombrero and a red serape beside the posing pony. He wanted to give it to Rae, but it seemed to fix time in a way he didn’t appreciate, put stress on his features he might not like in twenty years, if whatever was happening turned out bad. There was a picture taken nearly that long ago that showed him standing alone on the sand beach on Mackinac Island, staring gloomily into the camera as though into a dark thundercloud that threatened toruin his day. Rae said he looked saturnine and didn’t like the pose. But the truth was that he had just fucked a big Finnish girl from Ludington, whom he’d met on the boat from St. Ignace, and who had wide Finnish blue eyes and dusty skin and was older than he was. And he was, he thought, in the best spirits of his life, and had gone back in fact, the very next moment, and found the girl and fucked her again. But in his mind, over time, he had defeated the facts, become convinced that he was sour and out of sorts, and he didn’t like to look at the picture and kept it in his footlocker where he never saw it.
    Time changed things, he thought, lying on the cool sheets with the Italian girl’s cheap scent on him, and nothing more than the truth. He hoped in twenty years it would change the way he felt about this very moment, and that if he wasn’t dead, he wanted to be able to think a good thought about it, and the picture, straining at the camera beside the pony, made him sure he wouldn’t, as though the picture could trick you in some way you’d be sorry about. Being happy, he thought, and a pain flowered inside his gut, then subsided in a haywire spiral that the whisky controlled, being happy created problems, and not the least of them was being able to stand being happy.

8
    I T HAD BEGUN raining in the Centro. Above