by F. X. Toole
Trini said, “Ol’ Lamar’s in on this up to his nuts, you didn’t figure that? Unless you got a wire on you, and I don’t figure you’re smart enough for that, then you got no proof on me or on anybody else.”
Eloy tossed in his last card, the remaining blank. “I’ll go to USA Boxing in Colorado Springs.”
Trini said, “Shit, ol’ Lamar’ll put on his white outfit and swear on a stack of Bibles the whole deal was a simple fluke done by a unknown party or parties. You think they won’t believe him over you?”
Eloy said, “Chicky’ll believe me.”
“Sure, oh, hail yeah,” said Trini. “Are you sure you want Chicky to believe? How about he finds out all about you and your needles, too?”
That stopped Eloy like a stiff jab on the way in. He could see Chicky loading up the Mossberg, and packing the over-under along for backup. He wouldn’t let that happen to Chicky, no matter what the Cavazos did to him. He held the Buck up, thumbed the safety, and closed the blade. He was about to slip it into his back pocket when Trini nodded.
“Okay, that’s better, now that’s important, and yeah, I fucked the kid over, okay? That’s the truth, but he ain’t dead, right? And the way I see it, job one is to make sure he don’t get hurt no more.”
Eloy’s voice was deep and the words hard. “I want you hurt, sinvergüenza cocksucker puto maricón queer faggot, that’s what I want, and this ain’t over yet.”
Trini didn’t let nobody call him cocksucker. It was time to bring in his hopper from back down the street. He tapped the brake pedal, as if musing on what next to say and do, but he already knew what to say and do. Paco saw the blinking brake lights from his place next to the ivy, reached for his gun, and raced for the parking lot, the 9 millimeter out and cocked.
Trini said, “‘Cocksucker,’ ‘faggot’—them’s fightin words what could take you and Chicky both down a rat hole on the far side of the Río fuckin Bravo you say ‘em to the wrong vato, right? Listen close, ‘cause way I see it, we both gotta protect Chicky. That’s our job.” Trini sighed, shook his head. “That’s why Chicky’s gotta up and leave San Anto.”
“Chicky leaves town, you pimp!” roared Eloy, his hand trembling on the Buck. He went to flip it open, but it slipped from his sweaty hand and fell between his knees to the cluttered floor mat. As he fumbled for it, Trini started up like a crazy man.
“Okay, fuck it, you dumb fuck. Here!”
Trini ripped open his shirt to expose his bony chest. Buttons clicked off the windshield as Eloy got hold of his knife.
“Do it!” raged Trini. “Get yourself off! Then who you go to for your drugstore pure? You think them hustlers out there don’t know a little punk boy-virgin like you when they see ‘im? Little virgencitas,” Trini spat, intentionally ending with the ita, the feminine form.
Eloy backed against the door, addled by Trini’s hollering. Things had gone all haywire, and the noise rocking through the car and crashing in his head kept him from working them out.
Paco’s truck squealed up alongside, and Paco was out and the 9 millimeter was out and stuck into Eloy’s neck, and Eloy had nowhere to go.
“¡Déjalo, déjalo!” Trini shouted across Eloy to Paco, the noise loud like gunshots to the Wolf. “Leave him alone, Paquito, ¡déjalo!”
Paco yelled back, his words tearing into Eloy’s eardrum. “I’ll kill this shit piece of fuck asshole culero!”
Trini waved Paco off. “No, git back into the truck, git!”
Paco sat down sideways in his truck’s driver’s seat, but both arms were extended straight down between his legs, the gun held tight. All he had to do was raise his hands, cop an angle away from Trini, and squeeze his trigger finger.
Trini whistled one soft, high note, settled back, then spoke awful quietlike. “Things’s gettin real radical here? In case you ain’t happened to notice?”
As happens in San Antonio, fat raindrops suddenly came down big as your thumb, banged on Trini’s car like buckshot at a turkey shoot. Trini reached up for his keys. He and Eloy rolled up the side windows, and Paco pulled back into his truck. The inside of Trini’s windows fogged up as if they’d been sprayed with WD-40.
Trini carefully dried off each key. “Uh, remember that guy you fought out in Al-lay? You know, that bolillo dude you fucked up so bad?”
A wave of shame choked Eloy, and Trini had him by the balls for all time.
Eloy knew it, but he tried to play innocent anyway. “What fight was that?”
“The big fight in Al-Lay. The Olympic Auditorium, ése. I figure Chicky don’t know nothin ‘bout what you did that night, right?”
“We did it, we,” Eloy said, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
Trini puckered his lips, blew a little kiss. “Chicky could find out all about you, the way I see it.”
“Aw, screw you and the whole deal,” Eloy said. Capitulating, he held the Buck out so Trini could see it was still closed, then inserted it down the leg of his left boot.
Trini sat there spider-eyed, said, “That’s the first smart thing you done. But do I see you thinkin on comin back on me so’s to fight another day?”
“Not hardly,” said Eloy. He had to piss, but wanted to do it in an open field somewhere, because his pee was so stinky and dark. Then some more gut-nasty came up to his throat, and he swallowed several times to get it back down where it belonged. He needed some Rolaids. “You got my word on it.”
Trini spoke as if to a child. “That means you don’t go hog wild on me no more ever, right?”
“You know my word’s good.”
Trini said, “‘Cause now I’m gonna reach down for a present for you, somethin special I got right here under the seat, okay, carnal? Say okay.”
Eloy twitched hopefully at the sweet sound of Trini’s baby talk. “Okay.”
Trini leaned slowly forward, nodded once, then came up real careful-like out from under the front seat with a doubled-over brown market bag. Trini jiggled the brown bag so Eloy could hear the bottles clink. “This here’s a ten-day supply, needles and all, and it’s free of charge for my Wolfcito.” He presented Eloy with the bag of morphine bottles and a few hourglass ampoules. “Now, soon’s Chicky gets his ass out of town, there’ll be more where that come from, and the price’ll be right, ¿comprendes?” You get me?
Eloy held the brown bag to his chest, his head down. “Yessir.”
“Where’ll you send him to?”
Eloy didn’t hesitate. “College Station, so’s to make somethin of the farm.”
“And he stays there until this blows over.”
“Yessir.”
Trini and Paco took off in the downpour. Eloy was clutching Trini’s brown bag under his jacket as he ran to Fresita. He dropped his keys twice before he got the door open. Drenched and breathing hard, he fumbled in the bag for a throwaway spike and a 20 -milliliter brown bottle. The rain smeared his windshield. He felt safe inside. He selected a vein, and administered what was now a light hit for him, enough to stop hurting for a while, but not enough to keep him from driving home.
He sat stick still, his knee up while he pressed his thumb against the oozing puncture left by the needle. When the blood stopped, he licked his thumb clean, liked the chemical taste. His body had gulped the morphine, and his brain had come back again to hang plumb. All he could think of was how lucky he was—rain meant mud, and mud on his wheels meant that Chicky couldn’t check around Fresita’s tires and rims to see if there had been a flat tire for real.
Chapter 22
Chicky sat in Crockett’s picking at his bread pudding. He’d eaten half his baby backs, and the rest were on the table in a doggy bag.
Eloy came through the door swatting rain from his hat and jacket. Thirty minutes had passed from the time he’d called Chicky boy, but it felt like thirty years.
Chicky gave him no time for small talk. “Did you file the protest?”
Eloy lied. “Tried my best, but Steuke said the walkover’s a done deal.”
> Chicky fiddled some more with his pudding. “Was I set up, Granddaddy?”
Eloy said, “What? Hail no, why’d you think that?”
“‘Cause I never heard a such a thing.”
Eloy hadn’t either, but was sure it had happened. Everything happened in boxing, just like in everything else. “Shit happens.”
“What in the name of rotten cotton am I supposed to do now?” Chicky asked.
Eloy didn’t answer right away, acted like he was pondering. This was like heart, brain, and eye surgery all rolled into one. “Well, you could sign in for a couple of years at Palo Alto CC like you always talked about.”
“But I’m a fighter now.”
Eloy had to use reverse English on the kid, had to say one thing and hope he would bounce opposite. “With good grades and all, couldn’t you later transfer up College Station? Study all that tricky new plant stuff at A & M?”
Chicky looked at him like he was a nut. “That was for later.”
Eloy tried another gambit. “You could come on back from A & M and turn the farm into somethin again, you could be the strawberry king of South Texas. A course, that might not sound so good now, but in a few years, with hard work, you could be playin golf and raisin Ayrab horses.”
Chicky’s dreams of the Olympics were scattered on the canvas of that ring.
He gathered his thoughts and said, “Why don’t I just turn pro?”
“I s’pose you could do that,” Eloy sniffed, “but you’d have to start out in four-rounders at a piddlin hundred a round.”
“Have to start someplace. Once I start knockin heads, my price’ll go on up.”
“If the pro boys’ll fight you, what with you bein a southpaw,” Eloy shot back, sending the words in like shots to the solar plexus. “Amateur boys have got to fight lefties, but pros don’t.”
Chicky’s innocent eyes clouded, and as they darkened, so did Eloy’s heart. Chicky said, “Trini and Paco got the juice to get me fights, right?”
Eloy took in a deep breath. “They done dropped you. They’s trainin Sykes from now on.”
“Psycho Sykes?”
Eloy tried not to blink. “Trini said so, when I went to Steuke about the protest. Said it was bidness, nothin personal.”
Chicky said, “Well, if that don’t beat the baby’s butt blue. Who’ll train me?”
Eloy said, “That’s why I got to thinkin about you goin to Community College. Hail, it’s just down the road from home.”
Eloy paid the bill and they headed for the farm. Rain was banging down outside. The more Chicky fancied himself turning pro, the better Eloy liked it, because he saw how he might use the kid’s fancy as leverage to move his grandson out of town. But he couldn’t let the kid know that.
Eloy said, “See, pros ain’t like amateurs, it ain’t enough to bang, you got to box. Boxin right’ll let your body boil like it’s supposed to, but it’ll keep your brain icy, and your face pretty, that’s why a pro’s got to be trained by the best.”
Chicky said, “I could get Mr. George to train me.”
“He’s good, but he don’t train no pros.”
They rode in silence a long ways, and then Eloy had to swerve when three deer flew across the road.
“Whoa!” Eloy exclaimed. “That was a close’n.”
“Everything’s close,” Chicky said, “except the Regionals, and I missed them by a large ration of snakebit.”
“It’s all for the best, you got to think that way.”
“Tell the truth to me, Granddaddy,” Chicky pleaded. “Say the fight was fixed. I just need to hear it so I can go do who I gotta.”
Eloy stonewalled. “Boy, don’t you contaminate your mind thinkin like that.”
Chicky ignored the Boy. “It was Trini, right? I know he was in on it.”
“Listen to me,” said Eloy. “It was one a them bad-luck deals, that’s all.”
“I never had bad luck before.”
Eloy’s jaws got tight. “Chicky-boy-Garza, what I say?”
Boy worked this time and Chicky said, “You’re right, but this is like dyin, Granddaddy.”
“I know what you mean.”
Eloy also knew that even if he hadn’t caused the stink with Trini, the passbook fix would surely get loose anyway—someone would get to bragging about it, someone like Steuke, if not the lawyers. Soon as Chicky got wind of it, he’d go hunting with the Mossberg sure as there was stink on shit.
The rain let up to a light drizzle, then stopped all of a sudden. The round black sky was filled with stars all the way to Brownsville.
Eloy said, “We’re comin up on the Palo Alto now.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t about no Palo Alto.” Chicky was digging in his heels.
Eloy pulled Fresita into the school’s big parking lot. He needed to take a pee real bad. As they passed through some deep mud, Eloy felt safer and safer. He rolled down the windows to cool things off, and to keep the windshield clear.
“Talk to me, talk to me,” said Eloy, realizing that he was echoing Trini. “I know these last years’s been hard, but the farm’s paid for, and I got some money stashed Uncle Sam don’t know about. Look how my face got all busted up. Maybe this San Antonio fight bidness ain’t for you after all?”
Chicky went for it like a bay redfish after a lure. “What if I was to go fight somewheres else?”
“Whoa!” said Eloy. This was the opening he’d hoped for, and this time he went for it like a pit bull. “You ain’t talkin about leavin town on me?”
“Course I wouldn’t go,” Chicky said, “if leavin’d cause a mess of boogers and hanks.”
“You don’t think I can cut it? You didn’t know I was fixin to plant again next season?” said Eloy. “You ain’t seen my weight come down?”
Chicky said, “Yeah, I seen it, but I’d have to know you was okay inside.”
Eloy got out of the truck, went to some bushes to pee. As soon as he got back in the truck, he said, “Weeeell, Corpus Christi ain’t all that far.”
Chicky said, “Corpus ain’t got enough fights or trainers, and I’m fed up with Texas. I was thinkin on New York or Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s got good fighters.”
Eloy pretended to hesitate. “Yeah, but who’ll train you? How’d you live?”
“I’d find a trainer, I’ll get me a hotel busboy job.”
“Only problem’s they ain’t got that many of us back there.”
“They got Porto Ricans, ain’t they?”
Eloy said, “Yeah, but the way they talk Spanish ain’t hardly worth listenin to.”
“There’s always Los Angeles,” Chicky suggested.
“Yessir,” Eloy said thoughtfully. “That dawg might hunt.”
Chicky was warming up to the idea. “I can always come back and go to school. And if you get to feelin poorly, I’m just a plane ride away. So let’s make her L.A.”
Eloy stalled a tad, pretended some more. “Yeah, they’s lotsa raza out there. Course they won’t be many of us Tex-Mexes, but they’ll be Chicanos and other-side Mexicans, both. But I don’t cotton to you out there layin around on your ass.”
“I’ll get a job, I promise!”
“You know what?” Eloy said, picking his words like emeralds and sapphires out of cow pie. “There’s a trainer out there I heard about, feller name a Cooley.”
“Coolie?” Chicky blurted out. “What is he, some kind a Chinaman or somethin?”
“Not that kind of coolie,” Eloy said. He spelled it out so the kid would remember. “This is C-O-O-L-E-Y, Irish, Dan Cooley.”
Chicky said, “Have I heard of him?”
Eloy said, “Could. At one time he worked TV fights a lot.”
“How do you know about him?”
“He’s a top-ten, that one,” said Eloy. “Feller with a bad eye. But he’s a great trainer.”
Eloy swallowed hard. This would be the tough one. “I want you to keep me outta this. Cooley don’t need to know that you was trained by an old bum like me. I wa
nt him to take you on because he sees how good you are.”
Eloy thought fast and decided to cinch it down tight. “Besides, we met once a long time ago and … well, we didn’t get along. Fact is, bringin me into this ain’t gonna do you any good.”
The rain came back and slowed the go-away for a week, but Chicky had his stuff together and was ready to take off soon as there was a break in the weather. He’d grab the Greyhound bus to Los Angeles to keep expenses down. He figured L.A. had plenty of buses to get around on. He’d heard of trains and subways, too. He was sure he could hack it.
“How’ll I find this Cooley guy?”
“I’d say check around the gyms,” said Eloy, “or maybe call the Boxing Commission.” He intentionally left out just how he had come to know Cooley. What the kid didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Besides, Cooley had probably forgotten about him.
No sense to open a can of worms.
The sun was bright enough to split your eyeballs as Eloy and Chicky headed for San Antonio. Eloy had gotten a lube and oil change the day before, and Fresita was full of gas. Chicky had six hundred dollars saved, and withdrew it in twenties and tens and fives. It felt like a lot more than it was. His two bags were in the back of the truck, the big one filled with his gym goods.
When they got to the bus station, Eloy got out of Fresita and stood by his door instead of driving into the adjacent lot.
Chicky said, “What’s this?”
“Get out.”
Chicky did, and crossed around to Eloy. It took everything Eloy had to keep from breaking down, but he managed a smile instead, and hugged his grandson to him, squeezed hard as he could, knew this could be the last time he’d ever hold him. He turned away for a lick to wipe his eyes, then faced the boy.
“In case for some dumb reason I don’t see you again,” he said. He held out a pink Lobo Farms envelope. Inside were twenty century notes. “Here,” said Eloy, “you take this.” “What is it?” “Take it, it ain’t much.” “I got money.”
“Now you got more,” said Eloy. “There’s enough to get you that brand-new birthday hat out there, and then some.” “Aw, gee, Granddaddy.”
