The Ultimate Good Luck
Acclaim for RICHARD FORD
“[Ford is] one of his generation’s most eloquent voices.”
—The New York Times
“Mr. Ford has joined the small group of artists whose reputations are genuinely national in scope and importance.”
—Atlanta magazine
“Ford is … a Babe Ruth of novelists, excelling at every part of the game.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ford is a masterful writer.”
—Raymond Carver
“Richard Ford is a … voice with situations and characters of considerable power.”
—E. L. Doctorow,
The New York Times Book Review
“Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“An enormously versatile writer, a perfect ventriloquist who achieves his end in voices that vary from swamp-deep to mirror-flat.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement
Books by RICHARD FORD
A Piece of my Heart
The Ultimate Good Luck
The Sportswriter
Rock Springs
Wildlife
Independence Day
RICHARD FORD
The Ultimate Good Luck
Richard Ford is the author of Rock Springs, a collection of stories, and five novels: A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife and Independence Day.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION AUGUST 1986
Copyright © 1981 by Richard Ford
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover by
Houghton Mifflin Company, in 1981.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ford, Richard, 1944–
The ultimate good luck.
(Vintage contemporaries)
I. Title.
[PS3556.0713U4 1987]
813’.54 86-40463
eISBN: 978-0-307-76371-6
A portion of this book has appeared in TriQuarterly.
I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and to the National Endowment for the Arts, who supported me generously while I wrote this book.—R.F.
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
Kristina and for Edna Ford
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
1
QUINN KNEW HE NEEDED to get lucky.
Rae was coming from Mexico City in the afternoon, and if they placed the money right, Sonny stepped out of the prisión three days later and disappeared.
Luck, Quinn thought, was always infatuated with efficiency. A Persian proverb said that very thing. And since he’d been in Oaxaca, he’d been efficient to every stinking particular. He’d been efficient, in fact, if he hadn’t been anything else. The only thing he couldn’t be sure about—and it worried him—was if it still ran in his character to get lucky.
In the afternoon he had met an Italian girl in the Portal de Flores. She had wandered out of the park through the street tables as though she was looking for someone in particular, and sat at his table. She smiled when she sat down and turned and looked back up the Portal at the hippies and the blanket beggars and the English tourists having coffees. She looked at him and smiled confidingly, as if he should understand why she was there. Quinn had begun to make it a habit to have no nonessential conversations. Talk was risky. You couldn’t tell what you’d say, and seven months alone had taught him to be quiet. But he didn’t mind sitting across from her. Nobody got pregnant looking. The Portal boundaried the central park with a long vaulted commercial arcade with the interior side open. It was the center of evil and good commerce in Oaxaca. He met Bernhardt in the Portal on the days they went to the prison, waiting underneath the suspended Raleigh package for Bernhardt’s Mercedes to turn the corner into Hidalgo Street. And on days they didn’t go to the prison, he liked to come down in the early evening when the Centro wasn’t full of fresh tourists and the light was chartreuse and less precise and there seemed to be a kind of small impersonal welcoming life in the streets, a sense of confidence that everything you saw was functioning predictably.
The girl was in her early twenties with a round Scandinavian face that didn’t make her pretty, but made her plainness appealing. Her mouth had dark expressive lips. She took a pair of sandals out of her bolsa and worked on the straps awhile without speaking, and finally put them on. Quinn read Excelsior for the ball scores. The girl looked back down the Portal and tried to get the attention of a waiter but couldn’t. She looked at Quinn again and smiled and asked for a cigarette. When she had begun smoking she asked where he was from and he only told her the States. She said, blowing smoke, she was from Milano and had been in Oaxaca a week resting up. She said she had come down from Mexico City with a friend in a van and he had left her and gone, and that she was waiting one more day for him, then taking a bus to San Cristóbal, where she knew people.
1 comment