“Because your elbow came up with the punch. Way out from the side of your body. Keep your elbow right in close to your body as you bring your fist up. First the left, then the right.”
I tried again. Louie looked pained but patient. “Now look,” he said. “Take off that right glove for a minute. I want to show you ‘something.”
And he showed me. And he told me, and then he kept me shooting out the left until I could hardly raise my arm.
“It ain’t good,” he said, “and it ain’t bad. You’ll improve. Now, let’s try a straight right. Now when you throw a straight right—”
A voice from the window said in a sleepy drawl. “Wouldn’t it be easier to take a licking than go to all that trouble, Louie?”
I looked up at the bedroom window. Helen Framley, her elbows perched on the sill, a kimono falling away from her throat, was watching us with an amused twinkle in her eyes.
Louie said, in all deadly seriousness, “There’s times when a man can’t afford to take a licking, Miss Helen — maybe he’d be fighting for you.”
“Save it,” she told him. “I like men with black eyes, and besides I have to clean my teeth.”
She left the window. Louie turned to me with that grin pulling his lips back so that the missing teeth showed as black spaces. “There,” he announced, “is a girl for you. Buddy, what I mean that’s a girl!”
I nodded.