by F. X. Toole
Christ the King had been built in the mid-twenties, stood on Arden Boulevard just south of Melrose. The church was only a few blocks from Dan’s house on Cahuenga, and another few blocks from Shamrock Auto Body. It had a high, red-tiled roof, and inside there was dark wood—a beamed ceiling and old pews. Stained, leaded-glass windows brought shafts of springtime light to the quiet interior all year round. High above the simple but majestic altar was a brilliantly colored triptych of Christ as King.
Dan entered the dim, cool interior of the church reluctantly, someone venturing into enemy territory. But despite himself, Dan’s hand moved toward the holy water and he remembered how he had knelt before the statue of St. Pat for consolation in his worst times—all but that one time, that last time. His instinct, ingrained for over sixty years, was to kneel, but his anger and bitterness kept him upright, standing at the rear of the church and watching Chicky kneel in a pew right in front of him.
He could hear Chicky whisper, “God, don’t let my granddaddy die, please. Virgencita de Guadalupe, ayúdame Little Virgin of Guadalupe, help me.
Dan heard it, felt the old hatred, and immediately left the church, stood out front cursing while he waited for the kid.
“Fuck the Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgen de Fatima, and fuck the Queen of the Angeles, too.”
Chicky followed in five minutes, and looked better than when he’d gone in. They had dinner at Mario’s, a Peruvian seafood restaurant owned by a Peruvian-Japanese. Chicky wanted to pay the tab, but Dan waved him off. They drove in silence back to the shop.
Dan knew that Chicky was itching to talk, but now that he’d seen the kid in church, Dan wasn’t all that sure that he wanted to.
Chicky coughed and cleared his throat. “Uh, did I have much left after the ticket money?”
“You started with nine hundred in the safe. The late ticket cost you five-ninety and change.” Dan offered Chicky a thick brown envelope. “Here’s some extra.”
It was eight-thirty after a nerve-wracking day. Dan and Chicky had entered the gym through the entrance at the back of the shop. The gym’s license had been renewed and it was officially listed as the School of Hard Knocks, Inc. For tax purposes, Dan had always had one license for his auto business, a different one for the gym. Moonlight filtered in through the crusted skylight and made patches on the worn hardwood floor.
Dan touched his bad eye, then held out the envelope again. “You might need it.”
“Makes me feel gawky,” said the kid.
“Malarkey,” Dan growled.
Chicky could use the extra dough, but he wasn’t sure taking Dan’s money was right, especially since Dan had caught him in a lie. He was afraid this might be kiss-off money.
Dan offered the envelope a third time. “Take it. If you and me stick it out, you can pay me back from wages, or outta your next fight.”
Chicky’s chin lifted. “You mean I still got a job?”
“Yeah, you do, but lie to me again and you won’t.”
“I don’t like to borrow, Mr. Cooley,” said Chicky, his Tex-Mex South Texas drawl gone all to cotton in the dim light of a bare, sixty-watt bulb.
“You got no choice,” said Dan. When the kid called him Mr. Cooley, Dan knew things were as serious for the boy as they were for him. “And this isn’t like you’re on a vacation, right?”
Chicky took and opened the envelope. It contained his ticket home and back to Los Angeles, plus ten hundred-dollar bills. “I ain’t gonna need all this.”
“It’s walking-around money.”
“That’s a lot of walkin.”
“You can rent a car,” Dan suggested.
“Granddaddy’s got a flatbed I can use.”
“So buy the old man a new suit.” Dan caught himself too late, wished he hadn’t said it.
“Think he might need it?”
Dan shrugged, not wanting to say more.
Chicky coughed again. “We still gonna talk?”
“Oh, yeah.”
When Dan had gotten the call from Coach Oster, he was taken back some forty years to that night when he and the Wolf got to know each other inside the squared circle of L.A.’s Olympic Auditorium. Except for a few blacks, and a handful of blue-collar Poles and Italians, the essential mix was Mex and Mick, close to fifty-fifty. All five rounds still flickered black and white in Dan’s memory. He replayed this fight in his imagination almost every day. It had been an elimination bout that should have taken him to a title shot. Near the end of the fifth, the referee stopped the fight and Dan watched himself go to one knee, his crushed face cradled in his shiny gloves.
Dan wasn’t one to look for excuses, and surely he wasn’t one for self-pity, but it was obvious that he hadn’t been tough enough to hang with the Wolf. His weakness had cost him a shot at the Lightweight Championship of the World back when there was but one champ for each of eight weight divisions. As a pretty, stand-up boxer-puncher, what still baffled Dan was that he should have easily beaten the Wolf, a flat-footed slugger who came in face-first. He should have been able to pick Garza to pieces with his punishing jab and then taken him out in the later rounds. What hounded him still was his absolute certainty, given his speed and fighting style, that he would have gone on to beat the flat-footed champ, as well. It wasn’t to be.
Dan felt better when he looked over at Chicky. The kid had a narrow strip of scar tissue in one eyebrow, and a slightly flattened, hooked Mexican nose. This boy was tough enough, for sure. Dan’s hope was that he could get the kid smart enough, and keep him smart enough.
The kid said, “I’ll square up soon’s I get back to work.”
“I’m not worried,” said Dan. But he was dealing inside with a wound that had scabbed over years ago. Oster’s call had opened it up again.
“Your granddad was a hell of a man. He was a hell of a fighter, too.”
“Was he really that good?” Chicky asked.
Dan said, “He was damn good. He beat me, didn’t he?”
“Huh?” said Chicky, feeling his mouth hang open, his skin flush hot. “I didn’t know y’all’d ever fought Granddaddy.”
“Oh, yeah, I did. You didn’t know about that?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
Dan shook his head to clear it, couldn’t separate his feelings from his thoughts and memories. “I don’t get it,” he said. “When I asked you early on about a old-time Texas fighter named Eloy Garza, you told me there were a ton of Garzas in South Texas, but that you hadn’t heard of him. That’s right, right?”
Chicky wiped the sheen from his face and nodded shamefully. “Yessir, I did, I plumb lied.”
“Why did you have to lie to me?”
Chicky hung his head, rubbed the toe of one boot on the back of the opposite pants leg. He wanted to tell Dan that Eloy had told Chicky not to mention him because he had locked horns or something with Cooley a while back.
He decided he wasn’t going to open that can of worms, so he tried to come up with something close to the truth.
“After my gran’pa told me to come out here and hook up with you, I couldn’t find you, no matter how hard I tried. That’s when I didn’t know no better and took those first fights I lost. I was afraid I might shame myself workin with you, too, and I didn’t want to put a black mark against my granddaddy’s name on account of me losin again. I was fixin to head on home after the third one, only took it ‘cause I was next to bust-ass. I did tell you that.”
Dan said, “That’s what you said, anyway.”
“I wasn’t lyin ‘bout that,” Chicky said, sitting up straight. “If I hadn’t met you, I’d a gone straight home that night with my tail tucked between my legs. I wasn’t even gonna tell Granddaddy I had any fights out here so’s not to shame him from my losses.”
Dan sat back, lost in the tangle of what passed for the kid’s logic. This had been a hard day for Chicky, but it had also been a bitch for Dan. “Your grandfather told you to look me up?” asked Dan. “The Wolf said that?”
; “Yessir,” said Chicky. “See, he said you was the best.”
Dan felt as if he’d been hit with a Garza left hook. “The Wolf told you that? Why didn’t you say so, for chrissakes?”
Chicky hung his head again, and Dan saw that the kid’s lower lip quivered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cooley. I never meant to hornswoggle.”
“I’m sorry, kid, but that kind of thinkin makes you a screwup.”
Chicky was clear-eyed again. “Yessir, I know that now, but no, sir, I ain’t really. See, once you and Earl worked with me, I could see how good I was gettin to be under y’all, could see I wasn’t just some no-account Texas brag-mouth or a dumb-ass Messkin who fights with his face. That got me to thinkin that I could be somebody if I just hung on.”
Dan wanted to believe, but he didn’t know what to believe, yet he was pretty much persuaded by the kid’s explanation and wondered if it was the Tex part or the Mex part that was talking. “Chicky, you was livin a lie, and you made me and Earl live it with you. Hell, Earl’s got a wife and three little girls he could be givin his attention to, and one of the kid’s a heart patient.”
“I was only waitin for the right time to come clean, and I could see it comin.” The Tex and the Mex were both talking. “All I needed was one good payday. See, I was savin so’s to bring Granddaddy out here so y’all could meet up, and so y’all’d be proud of me and so I could thank y’all together, and so I could take you and Earl and Granddaddy to some famous Hollywood hot spot for a fancy spread.”
Dan said, “Hell, I’d a loaned you the money to bring the goddamn Wolf out, I’d a given it to you, for chrissakes.”
Chicky still felt shame, and again had a hard time looking at Dan. His granddaddy had been the only father he’d ever had, and Chicky’d come to think of Dan almost in the same way, had felt downright saved when Dan told him he still had a job.
Chicky tried to explain “See, when you asked about Granddaddy, I didn’t know how you knew him personal. I’d a told you if I’d a known, I truly wouldda.”
“Whatever the hell reasons you had, it kept me’n Earl in the dark.”
“But I always trained and worked hard as I could for you,” said the kid, “and I never once cheated or stole off you, and I never would, Mr. Cooley, and I always fought my heart out.”
“Follow me,” Dan ordered.
He led Chicky from the gym to the shop, then took him to the coffee machine and the sink, where the crew always left their unwashed cups and spoons and such.
Dan said, “See that stuff in the sink?”
“Yessir.”
“Wash it.”
Chicky grinned, knew things’d worked out. He got right down to it, even dried everything and stacked it proper. But all the while his mind was on his grandfather back home in Poteet, Texas.
Chapter 34
Chicky took his time driving as Dan showed him surface-street shortcuts to LAX from Hollywood. When they hit the 405 Freeway off of La Cienaga Boulevard, there was an unexpected break in traffic, and Chicky took the Caddy up to sixty-five for the last open stretch before the Century Boulevard off-ramp.
He drove the Caddy into the airport entrance and Dan guided him to the upper level. Instead of parking downstairs and having to walk a half mile, Chicky could carry his one small bag through one glass door.
Dan said, “You got your ticket?”
“I got her.”
Dan said, “Take all the time you need back there.”
“‘Preciate that,” said Chicky. “Don’t be surprised if I bring Granddaddy back out here with me.”
“Do it,” Dan said, and Chicky knew Dan meant it.
Chicky nodded and touched the brim of his hat. Dan waved good-bye as Chicky headed through the glass doors.
Dan edged into airport traffic, made the big loop that took him back to Sepulveda, part of early California’s El Camino Real, the Royal or King’s Highway that was originally built by the missionaries. Cars crawled, this was maybe worse than the freeway, but Dan liked this piece of road, knew it had once passed between pastureland and bean fields, and decided to take it instead of the freeway. Earl needed him back at the shop, but by now Dan knew he had to make one stop along the way.
Before exiting the airport, Dan put the Caddy’s top up so people couldn’t see his face.
He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. What he saw was still the same old man he’d seen in the office mirror, but the strange thing about getting old was that you never saw yourself aging from day to day, even year to year. Despite his bad heart and family heartache, Dan hadn’t deteriorated like so many his age. He weighed 20 pounds over the 135 -pound fighting weight of his twenties and was always taken for younger than he was. His hair had gone white early, that had happened on both sides of his family, as it often did with the Irish, but like many men who go white early, he had kept most of his hair. He sometimes thought of Bette Davis’s line, Getting old ain’t for sissies. Dan agreed. Of course he could have dyed his hair, back to the the wavy sable of his youth, but he would have been embarrassed; women dyed their hair. His only concession to vanity was the plastic surgery he’d had on his eye, but mostly that had been done so he could see better.
Dan drove thirty minutes north on Sepulveda, then turned right onto Venice Boulevard and headed east. A wide median had once separated east-from westbound traffic. Railroad tracks had run down the middle of it. Red “interurban” trolleys had taken thirty minutes to shoot people from downtown L.A. all the way to the beach. The “red cars” had been scrapped for buses after World War II, in the name of progress, but buses took an hour and more to make the same trip. He could still remember riding on them and the faint metallic smell of lubricating oil.
Memory was a strange thing. He could remember the long-gone trolleys. He could even remember back to age four, maybe earlier, but now some of his short-term memory had begun to slip away, and it pissed him off that he sometimes had to go to the kitchen twice to remember why he had gone there in the first place. He also wondered about Alzheimer’s disease, wondered if he was prone to it. Both of his parents had died of heart disease—his mother at sixty-two, his father at fifty-eight, both before the miracles of angioplasty and open-heart surgery—so he had no way of knowing if Alzheimer’s came programmed in the hard drive of his name. The Cooleys in Ireland had died too young, from work and disease and hunger, for Alzheimer’s to sink its teeth into them. Having inherited a bum ticker, like his parents and two of his brothers, Dan figured he’d check out like they had, which he hoped would be a long time before he went dotty. Until then, he’d always remember the day he bought this very car for Brigid, and how Brigid drove the Caddy from the showroom, the backseat full of red roses and the six bunches of shamrocks he’d had flown in from Dublin. And he knew he’d always remember the laughter and tears of those who had left him behind.
Dan knew almost every inch of L.A., had even driven a cab for close to a year after his boxing career had crashed. But it was Brigid, a former domestic in a Bel Air Estates mansion, who’d convinced Dan to open his own body-and-fender shop.
Brigid, with three other Irish girls, had shared a two-bedroom apartment in an old Spanish stucco building on Curson Street near Hollywood Boulevard. Dan had met her at a Sinn Fein St. Patrick’s Day picnic in Griffith Park. The first thing Dan attempted, after thickly spreading his usual cheap line of blarney, was to try to ply her with poteen and get her in the bushes. Her refusal kept him interested. What she did a few days later was march him to confession and communion at Christ the King. He loved her for it.
Dan checked himself in the rearview mirror again, mentally moved back in time, and focused on his right eye. Four of the six muscles that extended from the socket to the right eyeball had been damaged in his fight with Chicky’s grandfather. Dan’s eye had been repaired somewhat, but he’d been left slightly wall-eyed on the right side. He could see well enough to drive legally, but during the beating he’d taken from the Lobo Tejano, part of his eye socket had been
shattered and bone fragments had pierced his sinus cavities. Several surgeries had repaired part of the zygomatic arch, but the lumpy edges of the smashed brow and socket could not be made entirely round. Most of the feeling on the right side of his brow and cheek returned, but not all. Stony left hooks from a lesser puncher had retired him.
Chicky had a snack of tasteless airline food, then napped. When he woke up and peered out the window, he saw that the plane was over the low hills and mesquite of South Texas. The massive hole of San Antonio’s old cement quarry, now a ritzy golf resort with mansions on its bluffs and a high-ticket shopping center, signaled that the plane would land shortly, and that Chicky would be almost home after living and fighting in Los Angeles for a year. Sitting up, his hat nearly slipped from his lap.
Getting down to Poteet, thirty miles south from San Anto, wouldn’t be a problem, what with el bus Greyhound leaving every few hours for the small town of Pleasanton, on the way to Corpus Christi. What did worry Chicky was the condition of his sick abuelito. Chicky couldn’t understand this weakness in Eloy—hell, Eloy was a fighter! But when he was fourteen, Chicky had caught Eloy drinking bottom-shelf vodka straight from the bottle.
The old man shrugged, rubbed a stubbled cheek, said, “Boy, you know us Mexicans.”
It was then Chicky understood that his grandfather was drinking himself to death, and turned away near tears.
While Chicky worried on the plane, Dan worried in the Caddy, wondered if he could indeed drive on to that place that he was always afraid to go back to. At La Brea, “Tar Avenue,” he should have turned north to Melrose and then east to Cole and the shop, but here he was, still on Venice Boulevard. Continuing eastward toward old Los Angeles. At some point Dan stopped thinking. He just let the car drive itself where it wanted to go.
As Dan passed Hollenbeck Park, he felt his pulse quicken. He parked the car on Breed and stared at Lupe’s house. It was still the same parched pink and green from three-plus years earlier, the same color it had been for twenty years, or more. Although he knew he was absolutely wrong, something in him still wanted to blow the fucking pink house away, still flirted with the trigger in his mind.
