Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,13
not reaching for my shades, are you?” He sounded alarmed.
I pulled back. “No,” I said, surprised by his reaction.
He relaxed a little and put his hand down. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a thing with blind people. Some of us are sensitive about our eyes, like deaf people are about their voices. I usually know someone awhile before I go without sunglasses around them.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I am,” he said. “I shouldn’t have assumed you were going to try to take off my shades. The other thing is, blind people get used to folks touching us without warning. People think it’s okay if it’s well intended, like when someone just takes your arm and pulls to show you which way to go. I don’t like it.”
“I wouldn’t, either,” I said.
“I don’t think you’re like that,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Then, for a minute, I wanted to tell him about my tumor. Because then I could say I understood what it was like to not want people to think of you as an “asterisk” person. If I told people about my cancer, I’d never just be Hailey again. I’d be the girl with the deadly little poison pill deep in her brain. Or maybe it’d come off like one-upmanship. So instead I said, “If we keep running into each other, eventually I’m going to say something stupid about you being blind. It’s inevitable. I mean, you’re probably giving me too much credit.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shifted position slightly, touched his white cane. “Listen, do you have a phone number? I’m not hitting on you,” he added quickly, “but it’d be nice to know someone in the neighborhood, just in case I get stranded after the buses stop running, something like that.”
I had a brief idea of his hands on my stomach, the way riders hold on to you when they’re riding pillion. “Sure,” I said. I dug into my backpack, found a pen. “Hold out your hand,” I said. “I’ll say it out loud, but I’m also going to write it on your palm.”
“You do know how being blind works, right?” he said quizzically.
“I know, but this’ll help you remember. It’s tactile reinforcement. We learned about it in school.” I ran the pen point back and forth across my own skin, along the base of my thumb, to get the ink to flow. “Hold out your hand.”
He did, and I recited the numbers slowly as I wrote them. “There,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“I should get going.”
“Are you going to work?”
“Not right away.”
“You’ve never said what you do for a living.”
“Oh,” I said, “the usual dead-end wage-slave stuff.”
5
twelve hours later
“Come on, girl! Harder! You can hit harder than that, babe!”
I wasn’t sure who the guy with the clear, sonorous voice, intelligible over all the rest of the chaotic crowd noise, was yelling to, me or my opponent. I liked to think that I’d been fighting here long enough to have supporters in the crowd, but there was a good chance he was encouraging my opponent. Generally the men who came to illegal fights favored the prettiest girls, and “Kat” qualified. She had gold-brown braids and light olive skin; the men had whistled their approval at first sight.
Every week, beyond the mesh of the cage in which I fought, I saw many of the same faces in the crowd, and it was always heavily male. Some were motivated by the prospect of illegal gambling gains, others simply loved to watch fights. I don’t know what drew them here when there was boxing and mixed martial arts on TV about every night of the week, as well as club fights at gyms around L.A. But some people need that thrill that comes from knowing it’s illegal.
This was the Slaughterhouse.
It was Serena who’d gotten me into this line of work, in the early days after my return to L.A. One Saturday afternoon, when neither of us had plans for the evening, she’d asked me, “Do you still like to watch fighting?”
“Sure,” I’d said.
“Do you want to see some fights?”
“You mean, like on HBO?” I didn’t think either of us knew anybody who had premium cable.
She said, “Not at all like HBO.”
The venue she took me to was just west of the river, in a mixed-industrial neighborhood near the Fashion District. The building had once been a meatpacking plant, hence the name. Now the main floor was empty and refitted with an octagonal cage and bleacher seating on all sides.