Except the Italian girl didn’t know that, and it began to seem like a good idea to get her out before she got crazy.

The boy with his eye out pulled himself up on the ropes and began walking stiffly around the ring, his hands on his hips, as if he were walking off a charley horse, only with his head down so that the eye swung a little on whatever was holding it. Quinn couldn’t see anything behind him except a thick swarming blackness. The Mexicans were all stunned and silent while they tried to figure if an important enough decorum had been offended and what they ought to do about it. The referee was trying to get the injured boy to stop walking and was hugging his short arms around the boy’s chest, but the boy kept going. The other boxer stood in the neutral corner with his arms draped on the ropes, talking down to his handlers, who were making fists and yelling something very emphatically. The Italian girl had begun to cry quietly, and he wished she could disappear.

The boy with his eye out all at once stopped walking and swooned back into the ropes as though he had fainted. None of his handlers would get into the ring. The referee produced a pink handkerchief and was trying to cradle the boy’s eye back up toward the socket but didn’t quite seem to understand the mechanics. The boy still had his mouthpiece, and he was bleeding from his nose and blood was sprinkling on his knees and starting to track in the sweat. He moved his legs to stand up, but they didn’t seem to have any strength left.

The Italian girl wouldn’t speak and had become rigid in her seat. Quinn wanted to move out of the arena.

The boy in the neutral corner began to survey the crowd casually. His handlers were talking fast and counting off something on their fingers that the boy was apparently supposed to hear but didn’t. He looked bemused, and he worked his mouthpiece and his knees automatically as if he expected the fight to start again but didn’t care when. His eyes were fixed, and his face looked calm. He seemed to be thinking about something far away. Suddenly he waved his glove at the men who were counting, turned toward the ring, and ran and hit the injured boy again flush in the face, knocking him off his knees onto his side, and began dancing around the center of the canvas holding his arms up. The referee started waving his arms, and the Italian girl out of instinct was moving away from where she was, straight into the men beside her, saying “con permiso, con permiso,” and then a folding chair hit the air and the crowd began screaming, and police appeared, pushing toward the ring, and Quinn knew he had to get out. He couldn’t risk police, and he began shoving the girl through the crowd toward where he thought a door was, trying to get himself back into the night before something worse happened and before he had pissed away everything.

In the bungalow the girl wanted to do everything, as though going to the fights had been her bad idea for a good time and not his, and she wanted to put it right. She took off her clothes in the living room without talking, took a lude, then got on her knees beside the davenport and licked him down his legs and up his chest and his arms and blew him in an expert way that made him come fast. She drank some mescal out of a bottle in her bolsa and took a crossroads, then walked him into the bedroom as though the house was hers and turned on the lights and sat on the side of the bed and looked like she wanted to apologize for something. She was a smaller girl with her clothes off, with turned-up breasts and thin legs. Her hair seemed thicker in the light, and when he got in bed with her she climbed on him and fucked him until she worked herself down into her pill and the mescal, down below whatever she’d seen in the boxing ring that was making her want to apologize. It hadn’t been what she bargained for, but he thought she was the kind of girl who made the most of things, and he admired her for it, though he had lost any philosophy that made it possible to feel sorry for her. When she was finished, she got off him and went to the bathroom, and came back with a wet cloth and wiped it over his legs, and in a little while she lay back on the pillow in the light and went to sleep.

At two o’clock he got out of bed, turned off the light and did pushups till his arms ached, then walked out onto the walled patio where he could see the city against the black Sierra and breathe the bougainvillea. In the war, this was scrounge time, when things got dicey. The incomings wasted you out of sleep, slammed your face in the dirt, clawing the deck for a flak vest and helmet. He didn’t want to be asleep at two o’clock anymore. He preferred to be alert to whatever there was to hear. The bungalow sat on a long, eucalyptus-shaded hill that humped back toward the big mountains north of town. It was the suburbs.