When Vito was knocked down, then on one knee, catching his breath, when they saw him rise to go on, it wove into their memories of fording flood-raging rivers and almost being drowned before catching a second wind and moving on to the other side.
Boxing fans believed he had at one time gone without food or shelter, been detained and worked back-breaking labor, and that he was, daily, punished in countless ways for being Chicano in a society ruled by the rich. And when Vito cried out to them, the crowd went wild with joy. He posed the question: Make it a crime to serve hot meals to illegal immigrants? I say feed them! Prosecute, imprison, deport you? No, my brothers, I don’t think so! You deserve admiration! Welcome! Welcome to America!
33
July 2007
Pickups creaking with people eased up to the mountains east of Albuquerque and headed north from the Mexican-owned cement plant nestled in the hills to the Sandia Peak picnic grounds.
It was César Chávez day and Mexicans and Chicanos had spent the hot morning marching in the streets for justice and equal rights, so many people that they shut the city down for hours. With the march over, a sense of renewal permeated the air and peoples’ complexions seemed to glow with hope. Barbecues flavored the air and the parks were filled with grandparents, toddlers, lovers, and pick-up football games. As music blared Los Lonely Boys and Los Lobos, lowrider kids walked among the people, hawking tickets for the night’s fight between Vito and the favorite, ranked ninth, named Phoenix, who was the draw for now. Vito was determined not to waste time with him, he would go in and pluck and fry him in the fire flames of his jabs and uppercuts, beat him down.
Later that afternoon, Vito met Rafa in the worker’s locker room at the cement plant. Vito suited up, laced his beautiful blue and red beaded deerskin shoes, sparred and danced around to break a sweat. He talked to himself to work up a fighting fever, visualized himself left, right, counterpunching, and upper hooking the opponent down.
Crowds started showing up and fans of all nationalities and colors poured into the huge warehouse used for storing and shipping cement bags. The giant loading-dock doors swung open and more people streamed in, queuing up in the betting line that snaked its way to where bookies were taking all comers. Puro was among them and, flanked by bodyguards, he put his money on the table. He waved to Vito and gave Rafael a nod that meant, “take care of business.”
The announcer entered the ring and took the mic but before he could even start to say a word Vito grabbed it. Everyone was shocked. Rafa didn’t know what to do. He looked at Puro to see if this was some kind of behind-closed-doors betrayal and he could tell by Puro’s puzzled expression that he was equally confused. Not even Ignacio, who was standing in the ring in the corner, knew what to expect. He shrugged and shook his head at Rafa.
Vito roared into the mic, “This is a worker’s fight and the ring is a people’s court where I am judge and jury. People are marching out there for basic rights.” He paused. “This afternoon, caballeros y trabajadores, migrants workers and Chicanos, you were supposed to see preliminary matches by two boxers from Tijuana but they didn’t make it. No,” he yelled with an indignant pitch. “Why? La pinche migra got them, wouldn’t let them pass the border. La pinche migra is going to pay today for that. Why? Because do you know what kind of work Phoenix does when he’s not training? He works for ICE, the worst kind of la migra!” The drama soared and the crowd reeled with hysterical satisfaction that their suffering now had a target.
Vito gave the mic back to the ref, who looked at Phoenix for proof of Vito’s allegation but even Phoenix seemed bewildered, moving his head sideways, in shock, trying to convey that it wasn’t true, but the crowd took it as defying Vito’s threat to beat him up.
Then, before the ref could start the fight, Vito swiped the mic out of his hand again and blurted out, “Build a wall on the border? I’ll beat it down and crush it with these!” He waved his gloves. “Make an honest working immigrant a felon? Fuck you, Congress, fuck you, senators! I offer amnesty to all of you living and working here!”
They clapped, whistled, and cried out, rocking the dock and warehouse roof. They came from everywhere: techies, military men in helicopter jackets, tow-truck drivers, bikers with Nazi helmets, gangbangers, gamblers on their way down, drug dealers on their way up, security guards, bus drivers, Indios and tattooed Mohawk gringos, secretaries, nose-studded runaways, goth speed freaks, skateboarders, and more. The room was thick with Old Spice, cigar smoke, and the smell of fried chorizo and tacos.
Vito put his index finger to his lips to quiet the spectators, and then he added, “I want Phoenix to stand down, just for a little bit. Not to disappoint, since there’ll be no runner-up fights to the main show, but I need to warm up and I’ll bet my purse tonight that I can take anybody in this warehouse. One round a person. Puro collects the money. So, anybody wants a piece of me, you cops and narcs and detectives in the crowd, come get your piece of kick ass now.”
Two tattooed Italians shouldered through the crowd to put their money down. Vito went to his corner and Ignacio, waiting there, whispered, “What the fuck’s up?”
“Making money.”
“You don’t know shit. These Mexicans know how to fight, you don’t know what you’re getting into.” His eyes were on two Mexicans who were hurrying outside. Through the warehouse doors, Ignacio watched them huddle with a group of men gathered in a corner. They all put their money together and the Mexicans dashed back inside.
One of the Mexicans placed the pile of bills in front of Puro on the table, and though Puro wanted to tell the Mexican he wasn’t taking any bets on Vito’s offer, he knew a riot would ensue if he refused, so he counted the money and wrote down the amount on the wager sheet. It was Vito’s most hotheaded move yet and it pissed him off so much he couldn’t speak. Others lined up and he begrudgingly took the cash and wrote down their bets.
Puro saw two Mexican men moving through the crowd and recognized one of them: he had retired years earlier, but was a seasoned fighter from Juárez, ranked in his prime, who knew he could, with a little luck, destroy Vito.
Puro’s concern magnified a hundred times when he saw a massive bull-shouldered Mexican enter through the corrugated iron sliding doors and a gasp escaped from the crowd. A pair of green-red-white Mexican-colored gloves were slung over one shoulder. The migrants recognized him as one of the pickers and as he passed everyone patted his shoulders. There was a commotion, everyone talking at once, and Puro realized that he couldn’t stop the matches now. If he tried, they’d take his actions for reneging and he’d end up getting stabbed, or worse.
He left the table and walked over to Vito, who was waving an eagle feather over himself and fanning smoke from a piece of cedar that was burning in a rock bowl.
“You think that fucking feather dumb-fuck Ignacio gave you is going to help your ass against that? Do you have any clue who the fuck he is? You stupid son of a bitch, what the fuck have you fucking done? You lose, I’ll kill you. No one fucks with me like this. No one!”
But instead of being repentant, Vito replied calmly, “After this, you’re in for an ass whopping like you’ve never had in your life.” He then mimicked Puro, “What the fuck have you done?”
Vito scanned the faces of the mob—they were unruly, excited, boisterous. He could not have been happier and he closed his eyes, praying and waving the feather over his chest and arms.
Vito placed the feather back into the paper bag and smiled at Rafa, who was staring at him an inch from his face. He told Rafa, “I don’t mean disrespect, tío, but this Chicano, I am not a fucking joke. This Chicano is here to collect his dues. It’s not funny—now you can let my arm go.”
“After tonight, I won’t be able to get you a match anywhere. You’ll be a laughingstock.”
“I’m not going to shame you or myself.” Vito stared off, his eyes floating above the crowd, then he continued. “Those jokes about Chicanos betraying the mother country, that we’re not as tough as Mexicans,
well, tonight I’m putting those ideas to sleep and rewriting history. They ain’t seen the power of Vito’s voodoo.” He raised his arms as supporters cried out in favor. “These two hot peppers, grown in the fields of oppression and poverty, are going to bring tears tonight.”
He sidestepped, danced left and right, did a few switchback moves, and then Rafa tapped his shoulder, “Okay, Elvis, let’s get it.”
Vito stared across the ring to his first opponent, one of the Italians, Mario, whose eyes were hard with wrath.
“Every minute you stare at me like that, I’m gonna take out a tooth. Mexican dentistry, Chicano style,” Vito said.
The crowd was whipped into a frenzy.
Ignacio pulled out his pearl-handled knife from his sock and slipped it into his pocket. “You’re talking so much shit we’re going to need this.”
A different ref, a short Mexican still wearing his brick-laying clothes, gray concrete dust on his boots, pants, and gray palms, stepped between the boxers and waved them in.
“Okay, you know the rules—last man standing. Have a good clean fight.” Although the tone of his instructions was impartial, his eyes glazed with contempt when he glanced at Vito.
The fighters circled a few minutes until Mario flexed the rattlesnakes of his huge arms and uncoiled two fists, striking a left that slammed Vito in the chest and lifted him off the floor. Vito winced, rubbed at the burning in his chest, then immediately he was bobbing and weaving, counterpunching, protecting the sore place on the left side of his chest. He pretended he was tired and covered up as he drew the big man in but then he responded furiously, attacking with a blinding flurry of powerful jabs. Vito dazed the giant and then launched an overhand and caught his jaw. Even spectators six and seven people back heard something shatter. The concrete shuddered with two hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight colliding against it.
Vito gave a toothy grin as he danced around the ring. He saw the alarm in Ignacio’s expression just as the second Italian fighter hit him from behind and Vito stumbled forward.
A little wobbly, he turned and said, “Oh, you want to play. Well, let’s play my way. Andale cabrón, let’s fry up some meat-balls and boil the spaghetti.”
Vito knocked him out in eleven seconds.
Next was a tall bone-gaunt biker. He spit tobacco and motioned Vito to bring it on.
“Let’s get the steak on the grill,” Vito said. He entertained the crowd, asking, “How you want it, medium-well, well-done? With a little blood?”
Blood was the resounding answer. A bunch of white bikers sporting clubhouse bandannas and sleeveless denim jackets with gang patches growled for Vito’s dismemberment. And as Vito was squaring up for the barbecue, another biker, built more across than up and down, stepped into the fray. Whatever rules they might have abided by evaporated and to up the ante, a third biker—adorned with facial tattoos and with a red swastika cut across his washboard stomach muscles—frowned, slapped his low brow, smacked his jaw and flat nose, and snarled, “I want my money, bitch.”
They bum-rushed him and the audience roared but, undeterred, Vito crouched low, protecting his head, and provoked them even as a hail of fists and elbows came at him from all sides. After they tired of beating him and were gasping, arms dangling at their sides, Vito did a quick one-two move with his feet and spurted away from the corner, telling them, “Let’s see what we got here now.” He slapped his gloves together, flared his nostrils, and, snorting in short bursts, he moved in.
Blood and snot ran, their heads swelled up like soccer balls and their eyelids puffed shut. He was easily fending off their sluggish attempts at hitting him and countering with a marksman’s precision. Blow after blow opened new cuts. The crowd was rabid for knockouts, but Vito was punishing the fighters, working each section of their body until it cracked, bled, purpled, and oozed.
He focused his uppercuts, midsection crunches, right crosses to the face, snappy jabs, and powerhouse lefts. Their faces resembled nothing, each a mass of welts and gashes, bleeding skin rags.
The spectators grew concerned and disbelief widened their eyes but Vito would not relent. He hit harder, spraying blood into the crowd. And his three opponents rallied only to be crushed, charged only to be rebuffed, until finally they fell and had to be dragged off.
Vito, as usual, pranced on his tiptoes, a thoroughbred still anxious to run. And then, from his blind side, another man flung himself at Vito, attempting to lock him in a bear hug and hold him, but Vito butted him with an elbow and landed a right to the ear and the would-be warrior crumpled. And Vito kept beating him, even though he was on his knees, inhaling and drinking his own blood. Vito then knelt down beside the man and, from a kneeling position, punched at him until the crowd filled the place with a deafening demand for Phoenix.
Here and there certain fans were getting unruly. Friends of the beat-up fighters pushed their way through the standing-room-only crowd as people tried to stop them. In the commotion, Puro’s thugs closed ranks around Vito, each cradling a handgun that they’d clearly have no qualms about using.
Vito yelled out to Puro, “A joke, eh? Nobody’s laughing now.”
The Phoenix fight was the last match of the night and by then Vito had psyched him out so badly that after a few punches Phoenix went down. After that night, and for the next seven months, Vito climbed the ranks to become a serious contender. But that didn’t keep him from fighting off the record, and the people adored him.
34
October 2007
While he waited for Carmen to arrive at the warehouse, Lorenzo decided to pack some chili. The conveyor belt looped in and out at the blemish stations, then the spray station, then carried the chili to the end where workers alongside the belt plucked and packed. It was at this time of the evening—seven—that his mother used to bring him to the warehouse to pack, and the resinous fragrance of the chili brought back memories that made him forget Carmen was late.
He missed his mother and recalled that she used to say how nice and soft the tortilla dough felt in her palms, drawing out the aches from her fingers and forearms. He’d seen the scarred claws of other workers, the blistered husks or whatever you want to call what passed as human hands. Every part of the body bore the mark of excessive work, even dreams—he’d often hear his father mutter in his sleep, whimpering from pain, hurrying from the rows to the sheds, his knees swollen with arthritis. Now he just grunted. His mother, however, used to tell him she came up with songs while rolling and kneading dough; the constant rhythm of rolling and squeezing gave her lyrics a soft roll. “Tortilla dreams” she called those songs.
There was another part of his mother few knew about.
When she got up and dressed before the sun rose, when the trucks came into the camp to load up the workers, he noted how she listened to their voices with sorrow. When he looked at her sitting in the back of the truck he saw she loathed the chili fields and he saw, after each day, how she vigorously scrubbed at the dirt and the day’s dried sweat that coated her body.
There was no such thing as a promotion or a high position in the camp. You might have a different title, but everyone had to work in the fields. His mother sometimes stared with envy and resentment at the motorists pulling up to the stands at the end of the dirt road. Women from Las Cruces and El Paso, wearing flowing Spanish pleated-hem skirts, white blouses, and sunglasses, sat in their cars while the workers loaded their trunks with melons, chili, and squash.
He knew the woman part of her, sensed her female desire in the way she sprinkled water into the flour on the cutting board. He saw how while the neighbors chatted in the kitchen she would drift into a reverie while flattening the dough smooth, flipping it back and forth between her hands and placing it on the comal.
Standing at the front door, behind the screen, facing the compound and fields, she imagined leaving the camp with Casimiro and going to Chicago, where her singing career could flourish. Lorenzo could tell she’d been trapped—Casimiro loved her and she could
not leave him—yet when she scanned the labor camp a deep loathing suffocated her. She had seen too much of it, smelled too much, and she had to fight off the terrible thoughts that crept into her heart—thoughts of packing up and leaving, especially when those cowboys came in with trailers to pick up hay. They looked at her in such a way that their eyes followed her into her bed.
Once a month on the weekend, she joined the other camp women going into town for groceries. Walking the aisles she studied the white women: strangers with unhappy faces, dyed and styled haircuts, they were fat and thin, pale creatures in workout clothes, their lives seemingly as neat as stainless steel forks and spoons lined up in a silverware drawer.
She was invisible to them. She learned a long time ago to avoid eyes, to never complain, to conduct herself in public as a prisoner of war.
After shopping, the white women would go back to their private, secure worlds and she would return to the flat iron plate on the woodstove, to sprinkling the exact amount of flour on the cutting board, powdering another dough ball, and kneading it out round. Fear coiled at the pit of her stomach, fear for her future, of growing prematurely old; fear worked into her eyes, fingertips, ears, and legs, rattling a warning of wariness at vehicles in the distance raising a cloud of dust coming down the road.
She’d wrap the stack of tortillas in a towel to keep them warm and then, hiding behind them, she’d make her way to the baptism, wedding, funeral, party, or communal meeting, and when Monday came, she’d give the grower her labor, her pride, her sweat, until nothing was left.
But never respect.
Carmen was so much like her.
35
Carmen entered the packing shed, set her backpack down, and crept up to hug Lorenzo. The migrant meeting had gotten her worked up. Talking about rights, strikes for higher wages, and a healthier work environment made her adrenaline pump faster, ignited her libido.
A Glass of Water Page 11
