Damaged Goods Read Online Free Page A

anything better to say and the sight of Doc Almeda’s needle sliding in and out of Moodrow’s torn flesh was making him queasy. “Stanley,” he asked, glad to change the subject, “don’t you feel that?”
    It was Jose Almeda who responded. “Jus’ a pinch,” he said. “An’ after, you look beautiful again. Like a young girl.” Almeda, short to begin with and shrunken further by a painfully curved spine, was standing on a milk crate. He continued to sew as he spoke. “You tole me you was a fighter, Jim, so you must’a been sewed up once or twice.”
    Tilley took a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, began to unwrap it. “I admit it looks a lot worse than it feels,” he said. He popped the gum into his mouth, began to chew thoughtfully.
    “ Mira, Señor Stanley,” Almeda said. “I think you are a crybaby. I would give my sight to jus’ one time put a pendejo li’ that in a garbage can.”
    Moodrow snorted. “I never said things couldn’t get worse.” What he didn’t add was that they were already worse, but that given Jim Tilley’s reception to his first story, he’d decided to save the second for Betty and dinner. “You almost finished, Doc?”
    “I’m gonna bandage it now. Then you go home, take the penicillin I gave you, an’ stay quiet. You gotta watch out you don’t have a concussion.”
    “Don’t make the bandage too thick, Doc. My girlfriend’s gonna flip as it is.”
    Moodrow watched Lee Tilley, now wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, walk into the trainer’s room. “Christ,” he muttered, “this is gonna be worse than facing Betty.”
    For the better part of two years, he’d been lecturing the boy about fighting on the street. “Sure,” he’d explained, “somebody starts up with you, it feels good to punch him out. I’m even willing to admit that, for the most part, it’s easy, too. Only you can’t live that way, Lee. Self-defense is one thing, but you can’t solve your problems with violence. People who solve their problems with violence never get anywhere in life. It’s like an anchor.”
    “Uncle Stanley, what happened?”
    Moodrow glanced at Tilley, noted the smirk on his friend’s face, knew he’d find no help from that quarter.
    “Would you believe,” he said, “I was attacked by the entire New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club?”

THREE
    “W HAT I HAD TO do was tell Lee the truth, Betty. Which is what I’d already told Jim. I swear, I felt like a complete schmuck.” Moodrow was sitting at a small table in his Fourth Street apartment, toying with the remains of a thoroughly overcooked leg of lamb, a bowl of pearl onions in a muddy cream sauce, and a wrinkled baked potato the size of a boiled egg.
    “How did he take it?” Betty, even as she asked the question, was trying to decide how she was taking it. She was scheduled to depart La Guardia Airport at ten the following morning, her destination Los Angeles and her cousin, Marilyn, badly injured in a freeway accident. What she needed, in her own estimation, was a farewell dinner with her lover of the last six years, quiet (or maybe not so quiet, depending on how many drinks they had before they got down to business) sex, and a decent night’s sleep. Marilyn was her only living relative; the trip would be painful, perhaps devastating.
    “He let me finish without saying anything,” Moodrow responded. “Then he gave me a lecture, told me these weren’t the ‘good old days,’ that everybody’s got a gun and I was lucky to get slammed with a puny trash basket.”
    “Lee’s a smart kid,” Betty observed. “You could have been killed.”
    Moodrow began to clear the table. He and Betty had a firm rule: One cooked, the other did the dishes. As a result, they ate dinner out more often than not. “It wasn’t like I planned it.” The excuse sounded lame, even to him.
    “How many bodies did you see in thirty-five years on the job? How many homicides because somebody had to be macho