by Joe Jiménez
Because the little office is cramped and hot, your eyes struggle to focus, and you are sweating like every other thing in this building is sweating. Everywhere you look someone is hitting something—from long bags of sand to short, bulbous ones that sprout from the ceiling and rebound quickly, as if the bag had legs and breath of its own and shadows. You stand beside your uncle, your heart pounding. Certificates, old trophies, plaques adorn the wall cracks, fat ones, tributaries that run amok and slide down the entirety of the office’s walls.
“Your uncle, he tells me you fight.” A thick, glum man behind the desk, his lip curling over itself. He sports a black straw hat, the ends frayed and fuzzy from age, much like his dark mustache, which also hangs over his lip.
“Yes,” you say.
“I got the next Mayweather here. Let him show you what he can do,” your fast-talking uncle interrupts, his quick fist on your shoulder and his gold ring gleaming.
“Fonso! Give this boy some gloves!” the old, thick man at the desk shouts to a younger guy.
Fonso rushes over with a pair of raggedy red gloves. Semirotund, the tips of the gloves look like they were once filled with air but have deflated over time. The glove skin is flaky, as if scabs once existed but have long since peeled off. Fonso tosses you the gloves.
“Find me somebody,” the old, thick man says. “See what this youngster’s made of.”
Instantly, a boy near your age appears in the ring. He is solid, slim, too, and jets across the canvas like a fox. Perched on his muscled shoulder, a tattoo of a black eagle flexes its wide wings each time he moves. Wrapped in tape, the boy’s fast fists hiss as he hits at the air, at an invisible opponent who, with each strike, is slashed in quarters and halves. Jabbing and uppercutting, his hands flaunt, float, full of what he can do to you.
So you strip off your jacket and toss it onto the floor. Sweat has gathered in your undershirt, and your teeth clamp down on themselves like locks. Your walk to the ring occupies the only two considerations in your brain—get in that ring, beat his ass.
You don’t know how you’ll do it.
It takes a minute for you to get your bearings.
A minute here might cost you.
Sludge overtakes your legs, and your mouth fills with mud.
Over the canvas, a naked bulb in a tin shield swings and steadies. The light it gives is dirt clad, filthy and dense, like a too-big promise.
Your uncle helps arm you with the red gloves. They add heaviness to your hands. You take a few swings. Awkward swings, off-balance and slow.
The lights everywhere else in the room are dim, and you can smell bleach.
Around you, a few of the others have halted their workouts and stare.
You climb up and through the ropes. Before entering the center of the ring, you shake your arms and stand with your chest thrust forward, full of its hopes and as broad as you can make it, as broad as the body can falsify its belief in itself. The truth is you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’ll do it.
“What the hell y’all waiting for?” the old, thick man from the office, now standing by the tattered ropes, yells. He leans, and one of his legs wobbles. “Get the damn show on the road.” With a pañuelo, he wipes the glow from his forehead and spits.
Your uncle grabs you by the arm and says, “Do this. Let’s do this, Papo. Knock this bitch out.”
When you enter the ring, a short mule of a man in a beanie hands you headgear. This is to guard your temples, but when you look at your uncle for a hint at what to do with it, how to put it on, he shakes his head firmly, says, “He don’t need that shit.”
So you drop the headgear over the ropes and down to the floor.
You fear the other boy is smirking, finding you inferior, a less than worthy opponent. He wears headgear, and this obscures much of his face. You shake the numbness out of your legs as you stare directly into the other guy’s eyes, looking for some weakness, some hint at what he thinks of you. He’s taller than you, but not by much, and after two seconds of you staring, he looks away.
Thin throated, he gulps, a swallowing you hear in your own mouth as you think of the parts of him where you’ll swing. You are beefier, you know, which might benefit you in a street fight like the ones you are accustomed to, but in the ring, on this canvas, surrounded by a square of dingy ropes and men who need someone to triumph, being fast is a blessing you do not possess.
You know you have a heavier hand.
You know all it takes is one hit.
But he is faster. But he has done this before. But you don’t really know what you’re doing, and your hands feel as heavy as lead.
In one strike, you could put him down. One good, solid connect.
Or he could do the same to you.
It works both ways.
In the middle of the ring, your opponent holds his gloves out for you to bump your gloves with his, as you’ve seen fighters do on TV. There is no bell. There are no cheers. No popcorn or ring girl displaying a fancy card telling the audience some detail about the fight. No TV cameras or professional ring announcer booming his big bull voice through a fancy mic that falls from the sky. The light is dim, and beneath your steps the canvas grumbles.
It begins, and with his first few punches, the eagle boy makes direct contact. Swift shots to the upper body, a jab to the jaw. These sting, an electricity that holds the skin in its quick grip, yet these punches do not inflict much pain, and your legs do not move swiftly. It’s as if he is dancing around you, your neck twisting and following his paths, but the first couple of times you strike, he dodges, and you stumble forward, off-center, awkward, like a fool.
Later you will understand that in boxing, hits score points, and accumulating points is how you win, although in life, in the fights you are accustomed to, there is no one keeping score or taking count, no referee officiating to ensure everything is done fairly, by the rules. It’s the pummeling that matters. The blood loss and the bruising and the words of exultation after the fact that matter most.
“Floating like a bee,” the short, skinny man who handed you the headgear grins.
“Let’s go!” your uncle shouts. “Stop pussying around!”
You do it, then. The little animal inside the box that sits in your ribs begins to stir.
In a breath, the muscles of your chest crest and shriek, and some part of you denies it will ever be owned, not by anyone else, not by you, and with this, like before, like so many times before, the lid comes off.
One blow.
It’s all that it takes. From behind you, your fist grows fat like a mace, and you thrust your determined arm forward. The boy steps in, perhaps as he’s been told to do, as boxers will do, you learn later, in order to absorb an opponent’s power, in order to offset the coming force, and this is strange, an idea that boggles you—that to take a hit, you really do have to take it.
One pop. And you’ve floored him. Your fist to his mouth, and he plops down on the canvas like a useless coin, a worn shoe.
“Money, baby!! That’s what’s up!!” Your uncle leaps up and down and cheers, pumping his fist in the dense air, looking around at the other guys.
You jump on your opponent, straddling his belly, which is flat and limp. Blood leaks from his nose, and he’s out cold. You raise your hand high in the air, but before it comes down, some guy pries you off.
The lamp above you sways. You’re on your back, the canvas quaking, and two guys are tending to the fallen fighter.
He’s woozy, and they’re holding a rag to his face, forcing him up. Meanwhile, your uncle is cavorting, leaping out of his skin. The whole room is quiet again. Quiet and rubbing its hands together and dim.
“So, whaddaya say? When can you give us a fight? We’re ready to get this shit going,” your uncle trumpets, his face full of ring light and teeth.
At the edge of the canvas, you sit, and your body jerks a little, the gloves still on your fists, throbbing and hanging there by your side like two small sacks of somet
hing you cannot name. You wonder what Ophelia would think. You wonder if the eagle boy is all right.
“Well?!” your uncle says to the man who sent you into the ring. “The next Mayweather, right?”
But the man from behind the desk just smirks and says, “Come by next Monday. We can put him on one of the bags. To start . . . ”
But your uncle interrupts.
With disbelief leaking from his tongue and eyes, as if he’d been the one to succumb to a punch, your uncle steps forward. “The fuck you talking about? Did we just watch the same fight? ’Cause the fight I saw, Abram knocked your guy the fuck out. What else you need to see to line him up a fight?”
From the canvas, you can see it takes the man by surprise, your uncle’s approach, his insolence. It takes the man a few seconds to compose himself, and when he responds, he straightens out his tie and breathes in air, dropping his shoulders and holding his chin firm. He says, “First, the kid has to learn to box. He’s too big now. So he needs to lean up. You can come back on Monday. We can start him off on a bag.”
And to this, your uncle bites his jaw and shakes his head, and you’re afraid of what comes next. But the stout man never takes his eyes off your uncle, and everyone else around you is watching and stepping in a few steps closer, too. A few of the fighters have amassed behind the gym owner, and your uncle has nowhere to go but out. Angrily, he storms out, flinging the heavy door open. You aren’t fast enough to follow him without staring at the gym owner ruefully and shrugging your shoulders, then grabbing your jacket and running as fast as you can to catch up to your uncle, who is already backing up the car.
14
“You know, I’m going to stop fighting. No more. But this is the deal,” you tell Ophelia beneath the pecan tree in front of your grandmother’s house. She’s come by to drop off cookies she baked for you and your grandmother and Becky—chocolate chip with pecans harvested from the tall tree underneath which you stand.
“No more?” Ophelia’s eyes light themselves up, as if a tiny machine inside of them suddenly, fondly and fiercely, has summoned up courage.
You wield the cookies, still warm, and their heat bleeds through the plate into your fingers.
The day looms. Raking leaves, Thanksgiving dinner and football on TV for you—for Ophelia, it’s helping her aunt cook, then going to her other aunt’s house for dinner and then cleaning up. There are things to do, so many things. But often in life there are necessary minutes, minutes that cannot be spared or postponed or squandered. These are moments to be had before the routine of the day starts, before anything else happens.
“Really? You promise?” Ophelia asks.
Her eyes stare into you the way someone can show you how much of her is there with you, not with her worries about chores or with her friends or with her homework, but there, with you, listening to you, thinking of each word you say and how it means something precious and precise to her. Her eyes ask you to give her some part of a promise.
Later in life, you learn that in these small moments she was teaching you how to love—if only you’d listened.
“My uncle took me to a gym. I’m going to be training. In a gym. I could be the next Mayweather. Can you imagine it?”
Ophelia’s smile is as big as the river. Her heart shines through her eyes, and her laugh is the kind that always makes you think of goodness.
“Like boxing? A pro?”
You nod. “Everything is gonna change.”
She smiles, and you hold her hand, and she asks you if you’ll text her throughout the day.
“I have work to do, and my mom might be Skyping. Thanksgiving, you know.” Her cheeks as red as the new gloves your uncle promised to buy for you to wear when you train.
“Of course. Of course.”
You hope her mother comes through. You hope a bad thing has not happened. Inside, you wish you might do something to ensure this, to help fulfill the promise her mother made her to come back. By this time, you don’t know what it is, this little fire in your gut, how it rises up in the darkness like little stars shining in the night sky over the buildings and the houses, over the river that cuts through the city and the short, squat trees with their leaves falling to the earth to finish their lives. Maybe this is Love? Maybe this is the feeling people spend their entire lives pursuing, this thing people have suffered for and given their lives to have and to guard and to seek?
Across the street, a man removes lights from two large cardboard boxes. He lays the strings of lights along the ground, then stops his work to watch you and Ophelia. From their porch, his wife staggers three electric white deer who’ll roam their yard until Christmas. You eat a cookie and wave to the couple while holding the plate of cookies in one hand. Ophelia waves, too. He smiles, and so does his wife, and you offer them a cookie. Politely, he shakes his head, and she mouths the words “No, thank you.” Together they go back to laying out the lights and preparing the white deer. The man starts nailing the strings onto the house.
For a minute, watching Ophelia walk down the sidewalk, you imagine yourself like this man. It is a nice thought, pleasant, and it holds in its warmth Ophelia and joy and every happiness you can fathom, and for the rest of your life, it is the only thing you can ever believe you want.
15
All afternoon you think of the next time you will go to the gym. Weights or boxing, you don’t care. The anticipation fumes in your hands, hot like a coal.
Your Uncle Claudio has disappeared. Your Uncle Claudio with his fast car and his tough talking, his fancy clothes and his gold and the girls who all like him—you never thought he’d do something good, but he has.
In the kitchen, your grandmother and Becky work on the turkey and manage the sides, and from time to time you hear their laughter, warm and buttery and brimming with calm.
“Ya mero.” Almost done, your grandmother tells you, leaning over the sofa’s thin back and kissing your hair.
good cookies. dang good. You text Ophelia that you’ve eaten five, maybe six.
:), she replies.
wanna go to riverwalk? lots of lights.
tomorrow?
tonight.
tomorrow. yes. can’t tonight.
It is the best day in the world, and you eat two more cookies, but your grandmother slaps your hand. “You’ll ruin your appetite,” she says in her sweet Spanish.
“Ay, let him,” Becky interjects. “He’s young. Not like us,” she jokes. “He can always work it off in the gym.”
She smiles, and you smile, and your grandmother pouts playfully, dropping her face into Becky’s shoulder so that Becky can wrap her arms around her and make it all right.
Smoldering is the word to describe how you want to go back to train. You sit in front of the TV, and you go to your room to do push-ups, counting them out by twenty-fives, then add crunches, and you think that if you get some money, you’ll buy some dumbbells, 20s or 30s, maybe 25s. You do this a few times, until your arms ache and your belly is on the verge of a cramp.
“This is the big time, kiddo,” your uncle on the drive home gripped your knee and told you. His teeth were shiny, white like spearmint gum squares, his arms muscled like knots in the ropes the coaches make you pull in PE. “If that weak-ass gym don’t believe in you, I can. Learn to box? Calling you too fat? What the hell! Like we wasn’t watching the same beatdown. We got this,” he added. “Big time. All you, Papo. Our lives are gonna change.”
Each time he picked something up or when he showed you his moves, all jabs and uppercuts, you thought perhaps your arms would grow as rippled and large as your uncle’s. Who’d have thought you’d ever want to believe yourself anything like him? In the backyard Uncle Claudio has promised to hoist a punching bag for you to hit while you’re at home. You can see yourself going at this bag, unleashing on it, beast mode. To this, you smirk. Beast mode. You can see Ophelia cheering you on, and you imagine all the stuff you can buy her and how you’ll pay off your grandma’s bills and get her a car and tha
nk Becky for all the good things she’d done for you over the years.
When it’s time to eat, Becky says grace. It is a nice prayer, and you know one day this will be your job, to say grace. Your plate is as full as can be. You’ve eaten nearly half your meal when the doorknob squeaks and you hear the jangle of keys.
“Where have you been?” your grandmother asks when your uncle shows up with a bag of potatoes and a pie.
“Around.” His chin dribbles with scruff, and his eyes droop as if they haven’t shut themselves and the daylight has been too bright. He drops the bag of potatoes near the sofa and suckles air far back into his lungs.
Before you’d never seen your uncle for more than a few hours. But now that he is back in your grandmother’s house, you’ve convinced yourself that maybe, just maybe, he isn’t that bad, that although he’s not perfect, there is enough good in him.
“Well, sit. Join us, m’ijo. Let me get you a plate.”
Something like happiness coats your grandmother’s voice, and you wonder if it is coating or perhaps the happiness is more deeply ingrained than just this artifice, so momentary and fleeting.
But your uncle is silent.
Your heart beats very fast, and you bite your lip and stare over at Becky, whose face has turned to stone.
“Let me serve you. Here, ¿qué quieres?” What do you want? your grandma asks him.
“Nada, Amá.” Nothing. His mouth lags and the words emerge slurred, as if they’ve been thrown against a wall and are compelled by gravity to slide downward. “I can’t stay that long. I have some stuff to handle.”
Your grandmother’s face drops. And she drops the plate she was about to fix him, her anxious fingers fumbling to forgive themselves. When she speaks, the sound that emerges is a low, even tone: “Well, perhaps just some pie. Perhaps maybe just some pie, no? Maybe a tamal? They’re very good. Can I get you that?”
Watching this, hearing it, you remind yourself of why he shouldn’t have come.
Leave. Leave now. Get out! you imagine yourself shouting, and then the voice inside roars like a big rig barreling down the highway. Rightfully, you would pummel the man who’d hurt your grandmother again and did whatever he did or didn’t do—who knew—to or for your father.
