Pound for Pound

by F. X. Toole

  Dan didn’t know that he was being watched as he sat there. A nineteen-year-old Chicana cowered behind the faded, striped kitchen curtains of the pink house. She had seen the Caddy as it coasted to a stop at the corner of Sixth. She couldn’t see the driver, but she knew it had to be the same old white man who had driven the Caddy the last time she’d seen it. She shook her head to clear it, the same way she shook it almost every morning as she struggled up through the black sea of sleep, at once rattled and numbed. She shook her head again, now in dismay, for she had convinced herself that she wouldn’t see that red car ever again, but now realized that she should have known better.

  Little Boy, I’m sorry, lo siento tanto. Please, Little Boy, tell him that I never saw you, tell him that I pray to God for you every night, that I would give you my own life this instant if there was a way to bring you back.

  As Dan slouched in the Caddy, he had no idea that Lupe also had frequent nightmares in which her dreaming mind replayed the accident. And the music jingling out from the truck:

  Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb …

  Each time the dream came, she would wake up. Her teeth and jaws ached, and she knew she would not be able to get back to sleep. Lupe waited for the sun to rise and for the clatter of life.

  Dan stared at the pink house for a quarter of an hour, then pulled a U-turn and drove off.

  The girl crossed to a little shrine where a candle burned. She made the sign of the cross. There was a photo of a man and two teenagers, her father and two older brothers, each wearing a straw hat. Smiling proudly, they stood next to a brand-new pickup truck, outfitted with all the tools of the roofer’s trade, manual and electric—coiled orange power lines, saws, staplers, shovels, rakes, push brooms, a heavy-duty vacuum unit for cleanup.

  It had taken the family six years to save enough to pay for it. They’d always had to work for someone else. Now they’d work for different contractors if they had to, but they’d also seek their own accounts. From now on, they’d be their own bosses. They would work seven days a week, if that’s what it took, to make it in the roofing business.

  The photo had been taken the week before all three were killed on the Sixth Street Bridge. A speeding carjacker had plowed into them head-on during a police pursuit. The carjacker survived. The girl’s mother told her how the driver’s bar-owner brother and several gangbang buddies from the bar showed up in court to give their homeboy support, how they laughed and cupped their crotches with their hands and defied anyone to fuck with them.

  The girl hung her head.

  Kyrie eleison. Christ have mercy.

  Dan headed for a green hump of hilly land near a bend in the Los Angeles River, the site of St. Athanasius Cemetery, the last home of so many of those who had made their way from the clouded skies and vivid green of Ireland to the sunshine and prosperity of California.

  Brigid had chosen St. Athanasius Cemetery because of its Celtic crosses and the Gaelic inscriptions. She made of it a special piece of what she called the “ould sod,” Ireland. Every space in the small cemetery had since been sold, and most graves had long been filled. Mexican gardeners kept the place “daycent,” as Brigid would say.

  When Dan saw the wide iron gate, he felt like turning back. Traffic wouldn’t allow it, but neither would the need that had come so powerfully over him at the airport.

  Ah, Jaysus!

  The top part of the Cooley family headstone was a high, white-marble Celtic cross, Celtic because it had a ring intersecting each segment of the shaft and crossbar, a design dating from the eighth century and Irish Viking times. The base of the cross was a dark green Irish-marble cube four feet high that stood at the head of eight burial plots. Only Dan’s plot was empty, and it would remain so. As much as he yearned to lie forever with his darlins, he’d not be buried ever in any place Catholic or in any way religious. He’d thought of cremation for himself, but gave up the idea, not knowing anyone who would flush his ashes down some toilet for him.

  Names and corresponding dates were chiseled in Celtic lettering an inch deep into the slick green base of the gravestone. On either side of the names was a perfectly reproduced Irish harp. A six-inch border around the face of the green stone framed the names with the intricate Celtic latticework and forms, both human and animal, found in the Book of Kells. It was the last name he stared at—and began to weep.

  TIMOTHY PATRICK MARKEY 1986–1997

  When Dan got back to the shop, Earl was on the phone at the downstairs counter ordering supplies.

  Dan said, “You miss me?”

  “Naw, we just had to hire ten new men to fill your place, that’s all.”

  “I had to make a stop,” Dan explained.

  Earl nodded. “Ain’t no big thing.”

  Dan smiled. Earl knew him better than he knew himself. Dan nodded in the direction of Earl’s paperwork. “Want me to handle it from here?”

  “Naw,” said Earl. He knew that Dan’s offer was an apology for being late, but he could also see that Dan’s eyes were red, and that his mind was off somewhere. “Why don’t you take off?”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “I’ll take a day off next week,” Earl said.

  Dan climbed the stairs to the office, then sorted through several cartons of stored receipts until he found the two scrapbooks he wanted. He dusted them off, put them in a paper bag, and hurried down the stairs. He waved to Earl, then drove the Caddy home.

  Inside the house, he placed the scrapbooks on the coffee table in the living room, then went to the kitchen and poured two fingers of Basil Hayden’s Kentucky Straight bourbon into a Waterford crystal tumbler, no ice in whisky this good. He took the drink and bottle back to the scrapbooks. He sat on the couch, which, like all the other upholstered furniture, was covered in custom-fitted clear plastic. Brigid’s call. The plastic got hot and stuck to you, but beneath the plastic, the thirty-five-year-old fabric was like new, the colors of the leaf design sharp and clear.

  Dan sipped the whisky, noticed wistfully that “whiskey” with an e on the bottle was spelled incorrectly. It was Brigid who’d taught him that only Irish whiskey was rightfully spelled with an e.

  The house was a two-bedroom 1922 Spanish stucco. It had a red-tile roof and hardwood floors. There was a large service porch at the rear, but there was only one bathroom. That made for hectic times when the kids were little. It was worse when Mary Cat was learning about makeup and boys. Dan had lived his happiest days here. Now it was worth ten times what he’d paid for it, but he had no one to leave it to.

  Dan opened the first scrapbook. Pages of photos led him through his amateur career. A forgotten Manila envelope contained photos of Tim Pat as a baby in the arms of his mother and father the day he was baptized at Christ the King; as a toddler peeking out from under the kitchen table; and as a freckle-faced, green-eyed tyke in his first-grade school uniform, two front teeth missing. Dan touched his eye. At the bottom of the stack, one photo showed Tim Pat wearing golden headgear and a pair of huge boxing gloves. He was in the ring during the Silver Gloves tournament at the American Legion Hall in Carson, his hand raised in victory. His was the only white face in the picture, the mostly Mexican crowd in the background on its feet applauding him. It was the last photograph of him ever taken. He’d won with his hook.

  Dan had to put the photo of Tim Pat away. He tossed off the last of his whisky, and reached again for the bottle, wanted more burn, was about to fill the tumbler full.

  Dan took the bottle and glass back to the kitchen, rinsed the glass. He returned to the couch and the second scrapbook, and then sat for a half hour before he opened it. Then he quickly flipped through the photos and clippings of his pro career. Next came the shots taken of him in the dressing room of the Olympic Auditorium prior to his fight with Chicky’s grandfather. Brigid had saved the program. There were two ten-round “main events” scheduled that night, his fight the second one, the one people had come to see, the last fight of the night.

/>   Dan took a deep breath, then turned the page. The next photo showed him standing alone in his corner waiting for the opening bell. In the corner across the ring from him, also standing and waiting, was Eloy Garza, the Lobo Tejano. As in all main events, both fighters were wearing new gloves, pristine red things that glistened under the lights.

  The black-and-white film played out in his mind. Suddenly it was sharper than ever, as if a new, fresh print had been made from the negative of his memory.

  Cooley threw and connected with the first six shots of the fight. He knocked Garza back into the ropes, where one of Garza’s knees buckled. Cooley thought for sure that he’d be going home early, but Garza used the ropes to launch himself back into Cooley’s face with a stiff jab. Garza also began firing power shots without caution, one after the other after the other, bang, bang, bang. Cooley slipped and countered, stuck and moved, and Garza was unable to tag him cleanly. Garza looked like a four-round fighter in there, not a ten, and missed three more power shots that tangled his feet and made him stumble. He took two more stinging Cooley jabs, but slipped the third, and like a football player, Garza used his shoulder and elbows to force Cooley into the corner. He threw more power punches, landing punishing shots where Cooley’s shoulders and chest joined, then landed a left hook that almost knocked Cooley’s mouthpiece out. This was a Tex-Mex street fight.

  Cooley tried to look over to Shortcake, his trainer and chief second, who squatted on the steps leading up to Cooley’s corner, but Cooley’s eyes were scrambled and he couldn’t line up the lights and the shadows. The line on Garza was that he fought with his face; that he waded in throwing punches from all angles, but lost power from lack of balance and leverage; that his relentless attack took opponents out with an accumulation of punches rather than with one big shot; that he’d fade as the fight wore on. But the line on Garza was no longer straight, and Cooley couldn’t decipher the rules of the new game. Pain stung him like a bamboo cane to a bare leg.

  Garza was so busy throwing punches that he hadn’t seen Cooley’s body go slack, hadn’t realized that he’d missed an opportunity for a quick KO. But his corner men, Trini and Paco Cavazo, had seen it, saw Cooley as a toasted marsh-mallow, and congratulated each other.

  “Está a puro chingazo, mano.” He’s fucked completely, my brother.

  “¡Ay-yai-yai!” whooped Paco.

  Shortcake saw it just as the Cavazos had, and signaled with his pumping left hand for Cooley to jab out of the corner. Cooley stuck his jab and moved free. He pivoted, then fired a lead right hand and then a left hook behind it that hurt Garza, but Garza came on anyway. Cooley had been hit in his career, all fighters get hit, but he had never before felt as if a tenpenny nail had been driven into his jawbone. He shoved his glove into his cheek as if he had an abscessed tooth, looked for his blood on the glove, saw none, and went back to work. Hit and don’t get hit, Cooley reminded himself, yet he was not at all sure how Garza had even hit him, much less hurt him so badly.

  But this is the first round, Cooley also told himself, the round in which fighters are most easily knocked out, that time in the fight where they are not yet completely warmed up, when they are most vulnerable to shock, when they can lose their legs. He got on his bicycle, pivoted off the front leg, off the back, thought that Garza would tire himself from throwing and missing so many heavy punches, that Garza’s legs and wind would go from the movement Cooley imposed on him.

  Garza continued to miss, and Cooley put bumps on him with his peppering jab and solid right hands, but Garza would come on in a crouch and shove Cooley into the ropes with his elbows and fire his heavy artillery. Cooley, if for only two or three seconds, was unable to block or slip all of Garza’s punches, especially the body rockets that tore into his liver and ribs and edged illegally around to his kidneys. Cooley knew he could take a shot with the best, had learned that time and adrenaline would erase damage, that the desire to win overcame pain, knew that pissing red looked worse than it felt, believed that he could always go one more round.

  Survive this, Cooley told himself, then go out and fuck this Mexican up.

  But the body shots in the next round left him gasping, the ball-peen hammers in Garza’s fists made Cooley’s ribs and sternum creak, caused spasms from his knees to his elbows. He was in the best condition of his life, so how could this be? Pain usually came after the fight was over, the delay of pain part of what made fighting possible. Pain had good manners, normally waited until after the dance before it came to collect, waited for the dressing room or the hotel before it invaded the jaw or the knuckles or head or lower back, then throbbed all night, diminishing with codeine when available, or diminishing with the heart rate as it ambled back down to its usual forty to fifty beats a minute. Pain could disappear overnight, or last for days, or maybe you went to the hospital for two weeks, or maybe the ring doctor stretched you on the floor in the back room of an old arena and stitched an eye that was cut to the bone, the hole long as an eyebrow, pain paying its visit only after the hypodermic needle’s wet miracle had worn off, and then even your teeth hurt.

  But Cooley was in torment now, and this didn’t make sense. Cooley’s distraction allowed Garza to pound him with more hammers. Cooley fought back, cut Garza’s eye, but then he felt his first bone break as Garza caught him with a right hand to the face just before the end of the third round. It broke Cooley’s nose, set his face on fire, felt as if hot coffee had been thrown into his eyes. His nose went sideways, spurted raspberry down and across his chest that mixed with sweat collected in the hair. The cracking-bone sound banged against Cooley’s eardrums, warned him that it might be best not to engage further in this activity.

  Shortcake was able to slow, but not completely stop, the blood, and Cooley began to doubt himself. As long as a boxer can fight back, he can hang—can keep on if he believes that he can give as good as he gets. In that equation, his body tells him it won’t betray him—his trusted, beautiful body—the body that has been as loyal to him as first love. But when damage is not returned to the other fighter in equal measure, pain conquers. It leads to fatigue and to doubt and to despair and to loss. And suddenly the other guy’s hand goes into the air. And then the beaten fighter goes home feeling lower than whale shit.

  The only thing for Cooley was to jab and pivot off the ropes, get to the center of the ring and stay there. He caught Garza with a right hand as Garza came in with his Mexican hook wide as a barn door. Since Cooley landed first, it was Garza who went down on his ass, but Cooley knew it could have been the other way around. His vision was still blurred from the cracked nose, and he couldn’t make out how badly Garza was hurt, but he pressed with his own power once Garza was up, fired a power hook off a jab. Garza managed to slip under Cooley’s hook, and pie-eyed as a stumbling drunk, grabbed and held. Cooley struggled to pull free, could now feel how badly Garza was hurt, suddenly knew again that he could knock him out. But Garza clung to him like paint, held on stumbling and grappling to keep Cooley from knocking him out with another straight right.

  The bell rang, and the ref checked Cooley’s bleeding nose, then allowed him to return to his corner.

  Cooley said, “They won’t stop it, will they?”

  Shortcake said, “Naw!,” but he was guessing and hoping more than stating a fact.

  Cooley’s cut man first cleaned him, then went after the inside of the busted nose with adrenaline-drenched swabs. He saturated number 2 cotton rolls, the kind dentists use to absorb a patient’s saliva, with more adrenaline using some of Cooley’s blood to camouflage them, he bent them double, and then shoved one up each nostril and illegally left them there. The adrenaline woke Cooley up.

  The cut man said, “Don’t breathe through your nose.”

  Cooley said, “I can’t anyway.”

  Shortcake said, “What if the cotton come out and the ref shit?”

  The cut man said, “I tell him I forgot ‘em up there, what’s he gonna do?”

  The cut man slapped an i
ce bag over Cooley’s eyes and nose and applied pressure to his upper lip, and for the time being, stopped the blood cold.

  Shortcake knelt in front of Cooley, spoke quietly. “You gotta stay away from him, baby, this a hard man, fight him from outside, hyuh?, keep him at the end of your punches.”

  Dan said, “Somethin’s fishy, right?”

  Shortcake said, “Yeah, dass right, he too slow to be hittin so hard.”

  “He don’t feel slow.”

  In the fourth, Garza tried to stay in Cooley’s nose, but Cooley bobbed and weaved, countered and slipped. The bent cotton rolls remained lodged in place, and the blood flow was reduced, but the pain was as sharp as ever, and Cooley’s tear ducts kept his vision goofy, and having to breathe improperly sapped his strength. When the shots kept coming to the face, and Cooley tried to block them, Garza went to the body with the ball-peen hammers again. Cooley felt something give in his ribs, wasn’t sure if it was a separation or a break. Garza came back with another left to the ribs, and Cooley felt something crack on his right side, sensed it in his spine, gagged, had to fight off shock like it was another opponent. Cut flesh doesn’t hurt like broken bone. Stab and horn wounds cause delayed hurt, but broken bones are quick as a bumblebee bite, and Cooley’s face twisted as he lost his ability to keep his right hand up for protection.

  This time Garza saw that he had Cooley hurt. He began to fire wildly, mindlessly, left himself wide open again. Cooley felt the opening more than he saw it, came up with a Philadelphia hook—half uppercut, half hook—put Garza down again. This time Garza stayed down until the last second, the count of nine. While he was down, Cooley looked to one of the time clocks that hung on opposite walls of the old arena. Visible time clocks were still common, there to help the crowd judge the progress of the fight, but fighters would cop looks hoping that the round was about to end. Cooley looked. A whole minute remained. The first two minutes of the round had felt like twenty. The next one minute loomed like sixty, and dreading that, he began to wonder if Garza had somehow fooled the ring officials, wondered if Garza’d slipped rolls of dimes into his gloves, or maybe steel roller bearings. Cooley shook it off. A roll of coins could fracture a dirty fighter’s knuckles and metacarpals as quickly as he could break his opponent’s jaw, maybe sooner, and the gauze and the tape around the knuckles and palms would prevent him from closing his hands properly, especially if he was a lightweight who had small hands.