The Big Enchilada

of them before it was time to meet Stubby. I told Maria to stay around for another couple of hours and then lock up. She seemed genuinely disappointed that I wouldn’t be back. A nice trait in a secretary.
    I went to the used-car lot and found that some bozo had put a card on my windshield saying “Must Sacrifice—$750.” I kicked my front tire and decided I wouldn’t pay it. I put the card over the official one on a two-year-old Cadillac and drove off.
    I got nothing at the first two gyms I visited. Hardly surprising since the grunters that were hanging around needed cue cards to get their own names right. One of the guys was trying to read a comic book. He took a liking to me when I helped him with several of the tougher words and told me I should try the Regal over on Fifth.
    I still had time, so I drove over there. The sign over the door was so chipped and faded as to be nearly illegible. With effort you could read that it said “Regal Gym—Training Ground of Champions.” At one time that might have been wishful thinking, but now it was only the grossest irony. The closest the Regal had ever come to training a champion was in ’35 or so when some sixth-ranked contender worked out there before he was kicked out of boxing for throwing too many fights. The guy took so many dives that he should have practiced in a swimming pool. Since then it had all been downhill for the Regal. Now a few has-been wrestlers hung out there, hoping to get on a card in Turlock or some other armpit town, and low level goons worked out there, honing their reflexes so they could intimidate seventy-five-year-old shopkeepers. It was a class operation.
    I went through the door and up the narrow flight of stairs that led to the gym. Halfway up I was met by an almost visible locker-room smell of stale sweat, unwashed underwear, and cheap cigars that had been accumulating for five or six decades. The rivers of raw sewage in a Saigon slum gave off a no less appealing aroma. Lighting up a cigarette and being ireful to breathe through my mouth, I pushed ahead.
    The gym itself was small and dominated by an ancient, sagging ring in which a couple of overweight candidates for a retirement village were sweating heavily as they threw one another around with a maximum of noise and grimacing and a minimum of skill and realism. Off to one side a pair of greasy young punks with sloping foreheads and vacant, moronic expressions were trying to flip cards into a hat on the floor about six feet away from them. I thought that was only done in ’40s gangster movies. That feeling was heightened because they were both dressed in shiny black shirts and skinny white silk ties. No one had told them that this was the age of denim.
    I walked over to them and asked if they knew a monster named Mountain Cyclone, but they didn’t look at me and just continued to toss their cards. I stood in front of the hat and repeated the question.
    “Hey, man, you’re in the way,” the one with no chin said.
    “I asked a question.”
    “Fuck off. We ain’t no information service.”
    They thought that was pretty funny, and started braying and snorting like a pair of mules.
    “I’m looking for this Mountain Cyclone, and I heard he hangs around here,” I said, suppressing the impulse to kick in their stupid faces.
    A look passed between them that told me they knew him. They whispered together a minute, and the one with a squint yelled to the back of the gym.
    “Hey, Cueball, ya better come out here.”
    A door at the back opened and this thing appeared. I could see why he was called Cueball. He was short and damn near as wide as he was tall. He had a huge barrel chest and a belly to match. His waist measurement must have been equal to his height, and his arms were as thick as most people’s legs.
    , There was a lot of fat there, but there was also a lot of muscle. He was an albino, and his skin was that pasty white-pink that you sometimes see—so white that it seemed to blend into his T-shirt and white canvas trousers. He was a giant white ball, and as he rolled over toward me I saw that he was also completely hairless. No hair on his scalp or face, no eyebrows, not even any fuzz on his arms. It wasn’t shaved off; he just didn’t have any hair. He rolled to a stop close to us. His small red eyes flicked at me and then turned to the two punks.
    “What is it?” His voice was high and squeaky and totally out of keeping with his appearance. It sounded like he might