by Jeremy Brown
“Yeah.”
“He takes hold, he breaks your arm, then you tap out. Because he’s so fast.”
“I get it.”
“And he runs his mountain so he won’t get tired.”
We were on a long stretch that seemed almost flat compared to the rest. It curved to the right up ahead, and I could see part of what came after, a tight switchback that headed for the top. It looked like it should have rungs.
I said, “What’s your point?”
“Don’t look past him. Don’t think about nothing else but him.”
“Nothing else, like Carrasco?”
“Not even that name. Aviso. Only Aviso.”
“What about Marcela?”
He ran a few dozen steps without saying anything. “No man, not her either. Better to start now.”
He took off up the switchback and left me gasping and choking, grinding my way to the top and wondering what the hell that meant.
I thought downhill would be better.
It was, in the way getting stabbed is better than getting shot. I never got close enough to Jairo again to talk about Marcela, and when I walked into the house there were people everywhere.
Javier and Edson were chopping up fruit. Cecilia had a carafe of coffee for anyone with a cup. Gil took all of it.
Antonio sat at the table reading a newspaper, but his eyes followed me while I walked on wet noodles toward the hall to my room.
He said, “Jairo came through here.”
I turned, wobbled to the table and put a hand on it. “Yeah?”
“He said you ran the mountain.”
“That’s right.”
“What did you think?”
“I think I used to like this mountain.”
He smiled. “You did good. You didn’t quit.”
“Is Marcela awake?”
“Awake? She is already at the academia. She teaches the morning class on Thursday.”
I rapped the table with two knuckles, maybe a bit harder than I’d wanted. Antonio’s coffee cup jumped. Aviso got slapped out of my head, replaced by Carrasco and Malhar, the stained framing hammer, Eye Patch and his bag of grenades.
All of them staring at me, nudging each other: See, he tried to forget.
I said, “She’s by herself?”
“No, with the students.”
“Enjoy your breakfast.”
I ran into Gil on my way through the kitchen. “So you did the mountain.”
“When are we leaving for the academy?”
He checked the clock. “Eddie wanted to start filming with Antonio and Jairo around ten, so—”
“We leave now.”
“There’s plenty of time.”
I stepped close, just me and him. “Marcela is there alone.”
“Okay, easy. I’m sure she’s fine. She does this all the time.”
“That was before last night.”
“You kind of stink.”
“I’ll shower there.”
“You’re not going anywhere alone. Not with those favela guys thinking they can grab you off the street.”
“Then you better get ready.”
Gil nodded. “I can see you’re a bit intense about this. I’ll get the van.”
I was already moving.
I drove. Gil braced himself against the dashboard and the door and gave directions between bursts of profanity. A lesser man would have worn his coffee, but he coddled the mug like a newborn.
When the academy was in sight I scanned the road for smoke, shattered glass, little bloody gis hanging from the power lines. When I didn’t see that, I looked for Carrasco or his men, ready to take me for the Coluna.
A man stood outside the front door. He was waiting for us. I can count on a closed fist how many times I’ve been happy to see Eddie, and that was one of them. His media crew were swarming in and out of the door, hauling cords and lights and cameras.
He looked up from his phone long enough to nod at us. “One of you stinks.”
“It’s me.”
“Well, take a damn shower before we start shooting, yeah? I don’t need anybody gagging on my promo. Hey, you tell Gil about the WarriorDome?”
“No.”
“I thought that name was a joke,” Gil said.
“You two talk about it.” I went through the door. Marcela was on the mats with a group of teenage girls, showing them how to make sure they were choking off blood to the brain and not air to the lungs.
She looked up and smiled, then must have remembered she was mad at me. Her eyes and mouth squinted down. I didn’t care—she was safe. My stomach unrolled itself and let my diaphragm work again.
I carried my bag into the men’s room and took a fast, hot shower. When I came out Jairo was at the base of the stairs in his forest green Arcoverde Academy gi. His head was extra shiny.
“How your legs feeling?” he said.
“Like they got run over. How are yours?”
“Fine. Why wouldn’t they be?”
“You’re an asshole.”
He slapped an arm around my shoulders. “Come on, they want to start.”
I stayed put, watching Marcela work with the young women, looking them each in the eye while she spoke in Portuguese.
“What’s she saying?”
Jairo echoed her words: “You are never powerless. People will treat you the way you allow them to. A boy approaches you with disrespect, or another woman? It is your choice to allow it or not. Me, I never do. Never. You don’t treat me with respect, good-bye. I tell you good-bye and you don’t leave? That gets us to the next lesson: armlocks.”
My girl.
In English, she said, “We need a volunteer. Woody, hello. Come here please.”
She was smiling ear to ear now, very happy with herself.
Shit.
Eddie poked his head around the stairway landing. “Hey dicks, you’re wasting my time. Let’s go.”
Twice in the same hour I was glad to see him. This was getting unhealthy.
“I gotta go film.”
“Of course you do,” she said. Then something in Portuguese to the girls that made them all look at me and laugh.
Jairo said, “She told them—”
“Yeah, I got it.”
I winked at Marcela. She fought a smile and lost.
I went up the stairs, grinning like a fool and happy for the first time since I’d sat on the bench with her looking down the mountain, thinking she was coming home with me. We felt like us again.
The feeling lasted until I got to the second floor and saw what Eddie had done.
Bright lights on tripods cooked the room. The monastic walls of the Academia de Arcoverde were draped with Warrior banners made to look like alleyway graffiti—neon colors shouting words like DOMINATION and NO MERCY, all of it covered in a fine mist of blood splatter.
Antonio stood in the far corner in his faded Arcoverde gi with his hands behind his back, as if he was afraid to touch anything. His red belt and the black and white stripes around it were frayed. By the look on his face, the thing he wanted to touch most was Eddie’s exposed heart.
I’d never seen a red belt before, let alone one with degrees. It hit me again what this man was: a grandmaster. Gil’s sixth-degree black belt was the highest jiu jitsu rank in Vegas unless Jairo was in town. The two of them were talking with Eddie in the middle of the green mats. The green mats that were covered by a Warrior canvas crammed with more gaudy sponsor logos than a stock car.
“This is my promo,” Eddie told them. “You don’t want to be in it, that’s fine. We’ll use the whole time on Preston, show this all-American kid and his big right hand going up against the royal fucking Brazilians who were too good to talk to our cameras. You want that, let’s do it. It’ll play real well in the flyover states.”
Jairo said, “You told us you wanted to show the tradition of the Arcoverdes. The pride, the honor.”
“Yeah. The new tradition. The new pride and honor. Nobody gives a shi
t about what you can do on a jiu jitsu mat. It’s what you can do inside the cage. That’s what I’m here to show, but you don’t even have a cage. You have a goddam fence. Gil, you know I’m right.”
“That’s entirely untrue.”
Eddie held his hands up, let them drop. “What we’re trying to do here is link your heritage with the Warrior name. The Arcoverde style is what fighting used to be. Warrior is what fighting is now. We serve each other, see? MMA is built upon what you did, and now MMA is lifting you up to what it’s become.”
Jairo shared a look with Antonio. Antonio nodded a fraction—he was leaving it up to his son.
Eddie smelled blood. “Get left behind if you want. But this is your debut. Your one chance to make a first impression. Are you going to make fans around the world say, ‘Holy shit, I need to get an Arcoverde Warrior shirt’? Or are you going to make them say, ‘Who the hell is Arcoverde? Whoever he is, I hope he fucking loses’?”
I’d seen Eddie yank the puppet strings before, over the phone or on his staff during fight nights. A few times with Burch. When he did it to me, it was hard to look up and see them when he had the contract down on the table. Only after I signed it could I see the filaments trailing back to his middle fingers.
But with Jairo, I was watching Eddie manipulate my friend, my brother, into taking the first step along the path of selling his soul. Antonio, Jairo, and Gil all had emotional attachments to what Eddie was pissing on.
I did not.
Eddie turned to me. “Woody, tell them what’s up. This is how it goes.”
I told them, “This is how it goes,” and started tearing the banners down.
Eddie tried to stop me. He grabbed my arm with one hand, two. He let go when his feet came off the floor.
Kevin the producer stepped between me and the next banner. “Hold up, Woody.”
I reached over his shoulder and pulled it down on top of him. From inside his shroud he said, “Nice. Real mature.”
I lifted one corner of the Warrior canvas. “Pardon me, gentlemen.”
Jairo and Gil bit down on their grins and stepped off. I gathered the canvas in a heap and threw it down the stairs. The green mats felt much better underfoot. Less oily.
Eddie asked Antonio, “You going to let him do this?”
“I think he is done.”
“Almost,” I said. “Eddie, you want to show the world what a real warrior is? And that’s lowercase, the true version. Not whatever you’re selling. Just turn the cameras on and leave. There’s more honor in Antonio Arcoverde walking across the mats than anything you clowns could slap together.”
“You mean like your promo?” Eddie said. “Oh wait, your promo just got scrapped, along with my banners. It’s going to be all about Aviso, baby. Now get off the set. Your stupid face isn’t showing up anywhere in this.”
“Jairo, you good?”
He gave a thumbs-up. “I am good, my friend.”
I kicked the banners into a pile and scooped them up to make sure Eddie didn’t slime them back onto the walls. The bundle came up to my chin. I felt my way to the stairs and started down.
“Hey, watch it.”
I swiveled in the narrow space and caught a glimpse of Marcela’s head below me. She had the canvas in her arms. We looked like two sumo wrestlers trying to shake hands.
“This was on the landing,” she said.
“Here, set it on top of mine. Where’s the trash?”
“It is out back, but just drop it at the bottom, I’ll take care of it.”
There was something in her voice. Not apologetic, but . . . sorry. I moved again, trying to see her face. “Is your class done? Let’s go get some lunch, just you and me. I feel like we haven’t had any time for just, you know. You and me.”
Words. We didn’t get along.
“No, we can’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Woody, there’s a policeman here for you.”
Before I met Gil and got into serious professional fighting—and got my shit somewhat together—whenever someone told me, “The police are here for you,” I would say, “What for?”
Reason being, there was a list of possibilities.
This time I asked because I had no idea.
Marcela said, “He wouldn’t tell me.”
She and I stood in the small area between the locker rooms, watching the Brazilian policeman. He looked about fifty, tired of everything, short with a little belly poking through the flaps of his brown blazer. He was talking in Portuguese to the class of young women.
“What’s he saying?”
Marcela whispered, “He’s telling them not to be prostitutes. Get him out of here.”
I walked the white fringe to the door. “You’re here for me?”
He feigned surprise, leaned back with his fists up as he looked me over. “Hey, big boy. You are Aaron Wallace?”
“That’s right.”
He stuck his hand out. “I am City Detective Rubin. Your security.”
“Security for what?”
“You are here to fight Aviso, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Security for that. Have you had any trouble?”
“Nope.”
Marcela did a poor job of casual eavesdropping long enough to hear that much. She resumed her class. Rubin had a solid grip. Up close, there were small white lines in his eyebrows and the bags under his eyes became old, swollen scar tissue.
“You used to box,” I said.
“Ah, hundreds of years ago, before they invented defense. So you haven’t run into anybody who wants to make your time here in beautiful Rio anything less than spectacular?”
“I’ve only talked to the Arcoverdes.”
“Oh, such a great family, eh? They are a national treasure to us. Jairo is going to win his fight on Saturday, yes?”
“Anything can happen, but I wouldn’t want to be Preston.”
Rubin laughed. “For sure, for sure. I see the rental vehicles outside—Mr. Takanori is here now?”
“You can call him Eddie. He’s upstairs shooting a promo with Jairo.”
“I won’t disturb him.” Rubin waved a hand at his ear. “These girls are getting loud. Let’s step outside, eh?”
I didn’t know how it worked in Brazil, but when a cop asked you to step outside in the States it usually led to ducking into the back of a squad car. I also didn’t know if they could shoot you for running away, so I got ready to take a ride.
Rubin put his hands in his pants pockets and smelled the air on the street. “You like it?”
I shrugged.
“You didn’t even try. Come on, with me.”
We both took in a deep breath.
“See?” Rubin said. “That is Rio, my friend. The food, the earth, the smell of happy people enjoying life. I love it. Are you having a good time here?”
“Sure.”
“You are ready for your fight with Aviso?”
“Yes.”
“You are used to speaking with policemen, eh? Yes. No. You want your lawyer here to chat with me? I ask him if his client is having a good time. He whispers to you, then says to me very seriously, ‘No comment.’”
“Nah.”
Rubin nudged me with an elbow. “Come on man, loosen up. You going to be a pain in my ass the whole time?”
“No comment.”
“Ah, there we go. I’m going to keep an eye on you during the press conference and weigh-ins tomorrow. I’ll have some officers with me too, and we’ll be with you the whole time. We’ll drop you off—wait, where are you staying?”
“You said you’re a detective?”
“Shit man, I liked you better when you didn’t talk.”
“I’m at the Arcoverde estate.”
Rubin clutched his heart. “Way the fuck up there? Now we have a budget crises, paying for gasoline to babysit you. Okay, damn. So we take you halfway around the world, pick you up before the fights on Saturday, and we take you home after.”
“Once you see the crowds and hear the chants about how you should die, you’ll believe it.”
“I guess. But I don’t see how this falls on a detective’s desk.”
“Because this detective has seniority, and he likes the fights. Even more when he is paid to go watch them.”
“Got it.”
“Now Sunday, we’ll come get you and take you to the airport, but only if you beat Aviso.”
The look on my face made him explain.
“Aviso wins, nobody gives a shit about you anymore. You got your whipping already. But if you beat him, some people will want to avenge him, avenge Brazil.”
“Sounds about right. Plan on making that trip on Sunday.”
He looked into the street. “Eh, I’m not filing the request for officers until Sunday. No offense.”
“You rooting for Aviso?”
“Of course. I wish he would learn to box, but hey, maybe he doesn’t need to.”
“You ever seen my fights?”
Rubin shrugged, scanning the traffic and the people flowing past. “They show the highlights whenever they talk about Aviso.”
“You want to cheer for a boxer, come on over.”
“That’s not boxing, big boy. What you do, I don’t know. I’ve seen better technique in street fights. You ever been in a street fight?”
He still wasn’t looking at me.
I didn’t say anything.
He nodded. “No comment.”
Marcela met me on the white border and attached herself to my hip while we cut into the space between the locker rooms.
She pivoted in front of me and grabbed my hands, made sure I had both eyes on her. “He is here to protect you?”
“Yeah, his name’s Rubin. Warrior set it up.”
“But he will protect you from all things, not just crazy Aviso fans.”
“You mean Carrasco.”
“I mean yourself. He will make sure you don’t do anything stupid when I am not close.”
“No mortal can accomplish that.”
“Be serious. When is he coming back?”
“He’ll meet us at your place before the weigh-ins on Friday.”
“And he will be with you for that? And for the fight on Saturday.”
“That’s what he said. Him and some policemen.”
