by Zahra Girard
I settle in to my desk, wearing yesterday’s clothes, and looking like a mess, I’m sure, and I get to work.
I know, somehow, I’ll figure my way out of this mess.
I flip through page after page of invoices and bills and bank statements. There’s got to be some way.
“Come on, inspiration, any time now,” I mutter to myself.
I work and I think and I wrack my brain for some sort of answer. But, even though I feel great, I can’t get around the reality. Dad owes something in the high five figures to the Russian mob and, no matter how the hell I look at things, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re stuck.
They’re not going to forgive it. They’re not going to bargain. They’re going to keep their claws stuck in us and drain every last drop out of us before they cast us aside.
By the time noon rolls around, I’m wishing today hadn’t started so well. Falling from an emotional high to this is worse than waking up feeling like shit.
I just want to have a normal life. I want to be free from these killers and criminals.
I get up and look out over the sales floor. Frank’s talking with one of Ethel’s friends, leaning casually against a shelf and working whatever magic he has with that older set of customers. At least I know we’ll have a few good sales today. Usually when he sells something to one of Ethel’s group, word gets around and more of her friends come in to make a few other big purchases.
But even that’s not enough to lift my mood because, sitting in my store room are some crates of something that I’m holding for Vladimir. It’s all just another link in the chain that keeps me tied to them.
After a while, I get an idea and, the second I have it, I know it’s rash, but I’m not in a logical mood right now. I’m angry.
I leave my office and head into the back.
I grab a pry-bar from the shelf and use it to jimmy open one of the crates.
Boards creak, nails come free, and the lid peels back to reveal, tape-wrapped plastic bags packed to the gills with white powder. Heroin? Coke? I have no clue, but it’s enough to scare the fuck out of me, whatever it is.
The pry-bar slips from my hands and clatters against the concrete floor and I back away from the crate.
What the hell am I doing? What the fuck am I mixed up in?
This just keeps getting worse and worse.
Between this crate and the others, there’s enough here to cover my dad’s debt several times over.
But that doesn’t matter. These criminals are just going to pull me deeper and deeper.
If they’re already doing this, how much further will they go?
Or how long until the cops find out?
And Luca? What would he think if he found out?
Last night, he was honest about his mistakes and about wanting to turn his life around. How is he going to react to find the woman he thinks he’s helping — and having sex with — is holding drugs for the Russian mob?
I’ve been lying to him all this time. And the worst part is, I know I’m going to have to keep lying until I can find a way out of this mess.
I’m going to be sick.
Not hesitating, I pull a hammer from one of the supply shelves and I close the crate back up, making it look like it’s never been opened.
I leave my tools on the floor and stalk out to the parking lot, not saying a word to anyone.
My brain is frazzled. The end feels so much closer, so much more real. Before, it was just a vague idea, something that would happen eventually, off in some distant time if I failed to figure a way out of this mess.
But now, I’m not just trying to pay off a debt. I’m committing major felonies for some people who won’t hesitate to sell me off or kill me.
I wish I’d never looked in those crates.
I need to do something to clear my head, to feel better again.
I get in my car and drive and let instinct take over.
* * * * *
“Dios mio, what’s wrong?” An older Hispanic man says to me as I storm into the main gym at Reyes Boxing.
Lounging in a beat-up folding chair, with a wrinkled copy of the LA Times and a cup of coffee in hand, he doesn’t look like he belongs here.
I’m not surprised at him saying something, though. I look like a wreck — I checked myself out in my car’s mirror in the parking lot and just gave up at trying to fix myself up.
“Where’s Luca?” I say, not even looking at the guy, my eyes scanning the room.
I have this urgent need to hit something. I need to feel some control.
“Out. Ana Maria sent him on some errands.”
I freeze. I just expected him to be here. Needed him to be here.
“Is something wrong?” he says.
So many things. It must be written all over my face. And I can’t say a single word about it.
I turn to the older man. He’s got a lifetime of wear on his leathery face, like he’s subbed in for a punching bag on more than one occasion.
“I was just looking for him… We were going to train.”
He nods. “I know. He was talking about you, Stephanie. I’ve never seen him in as good of a mood as he was this morning.”
“Who are you?”
The old man holds out a gnarled hand. “Jose Reyes. This is my gym.”
I shake it.
“Do you know when Luca will be back?”
I’m anxious, my whole body is on edge and wanting that feeling of safety and security I get when I’m around him and he shows me how to hit things.
Jose shrugs. “Could be a while. There’s a lot of stuff to do. You sure you’re ok?”
“Just work problems is all,” I say.
I look down at my workout duffel and the boxing gloves and tape I’ve got in there. I don’t want to go back to the store, but I also don’t want to work out on my own.
“Will you teach me?”
It feels wrong saying that, like I should wait for Luca, but I need to do something.
He looks thoughtful for a second, then settles back in his chair. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Will you tell me why you think it’s any of your business?”
Jose laughs. “Now I see why the kid likes you — you’ve got some spirit to go along with your pretty face.”
“So, are you going to help me?”
Shrugging, he doesn’t make any move to stand up, instead taking a long sip from his coffee and noisily opening up his copy of the LA Times. “My terms haven’t changed. If you want to get my old ass out of this seat, you’re going to have to tell me what I want to know.”
Feeling stuck, I let out a sigh.
If I try and do this by myself, I’m just going to end up punching myself into some useless exhaustion and feeling even worse at the end because I didn’t do anything productive — I just aimlessly rammed my hands into a giant bag of sand. Which, even as upset as I am, sounds just plain stupid.
If I’m going to smack a bag of sand around, I want to get a little something out of it, at least.
“If I tell you, will you tell Luca?”
It hurts just saying that. There’s no escaping the fact that I’m going around behind his back.
He shrugs. “You think the people around you don’t have their fair share of problems? Do you know how many former gangsters, addicts, and dealers have come to my gym to try and turn things around? You might be surprised. But I promise, it stays between us.”
Fine. If this is the price I’ve got to pay, I can tell him something, even if it’s not the whole truth.
Still, this doesn’t mean admitting what I’m mixed up in is going to be easy.
I take my time. My words come out in fits and starts. “A while ago, my dad borrowed a lot of money from some guys and it wasn’t totally legal. Now, I’m involved too and there’s no way that we can pay them back and I know that sooner or later it’s going to get really bad and we’re going to get hurt.”
My answer’s vague enough. I make su
re to leave out the juicy bits about the Russian mob and the crates of drugs in the storeroom, but even so, it’s not easy to spit it all out.
Not a word of it seems to phase Jose, however.
Calmly and slowly, he sets his paper down and, bracing himself on the armrests of the folding chair, he rises stiffly to his feet.
It’s reassuring, somehow, how his expression doesn’t change, even though I’ve told him I’m basically a criminal and he’s got to know there’s more that I’m not telling him.
“Was that so hard?”
“Honestly, yeah.”
“Well, good. Use that when it comes time to punch something. It’ll help.”
The old man helps me put my gear on, expertly taping my hands and my gloves with practiced precision. He puts on a pair of handheld focus mits and beckons for me to follow him into the ring.
Inside, in front of everywhere, he starts to teach me.
It reminds me of this time, when I was finishing up in nursing school, I had the chance to visit Johns Hopkins and observe one of the pioneers in cardiovascular surgery and his team perform a heart transplant. To get ready, I’d studied for weeks just to have the basics to understand what they were doing.
When I got there, when the surgeon was explaining the new methods he’d developed, he might as well have been speaking Chinese and playing the accordion. It was baffling and eye-opening.
That’s how I feel now.
I’m dripping with sweat, swinging at the focus mitts he’s wearing, missing half the time, and Jose is just shouting at me: “faster”, “better”, “focus”, “harder”.
Any little mistake I make, he hits me and then shows me how to fix it.
Over and over we go until I feel like my hearts going to give out and my arms are going to fall off and, eventually, I exhaustedly wave for a break.
Jose shakes his head.
“Do you think those people you’re afraid of are going to let you take a break when they come to collect? They’ll fuck you sideways, señorita. Keep going.”
My heart surges in my chest.
He’s right.
My fists lift themselves. I grit my teeth and get back to work.
One way or another, I have to get out from under their thumb.
If it comes down to it, I have to be ready to fight.
Chapter Nineteen
Luca
“Some woman was here looking for you earlier. Stephanie,” Ana Maria says from the front desk, not even looking up from the copy of Entrepreneur she’s got spread open on the desk in front of her.
“What’d she want?”
I check my phone. There are no calls or texts from her. Strange.
“She trained with Jose for a while, then left,” she says. “Seemed pretty upset about you not being here, too.”
The magazine makes a raspy schick as she wets her finger and turns the page.
The gym is packed when I head inside.
It’s just past five in the evening and all of the after-work crowd is in, working off the frustration from a day on the job.
I find Jose right away. He’s by the ring, which is his usual haunt when he’s not back in the office napping. Even in his sixties, the old guy’s still a fighter and can’t resist the action.
“Keep your eyes open, puta,” he yells at one of the boxers in the ring.
One of our newer members is getting his ass kicked by some guy who’s real name no one but Ana Maria knows, but who everyone calls the Axeman because he looks like a lumberjack on steroids.
“Slip that fucking jab, you mouth-breathing fuckwit,” I yell to the new guy.
The new guy is getting eaten alive in there.
Somehow, I don’t think he’ll be back.
Putting both hands on the ropes, I stand next to Jose, watching the fight and trying to think of what to say.
“You need to take care of that woman, kid,” he says without taking his eyes off the action inside the ring.
“The hell you talking about?”
“She came in here looking for you. Something’s got her in knots enough that she thought it was a good idea to let me train her. We went through a full workout. You can guess how it went.”
I blink. God damn.
When I first came here, I was good. Damn good. I could brawl with the best of them and make whoever I was fighting like an amateur who had no place in the ring. The kind of life I lived will either sharpen you or shatter you and I sure as hell didn’t break.
Then, one day, I worked out with Jose. I finished, but I nearly needed a cane the next day.
“If you don’t un-fuck yourself, you limp-wristed puta, I will get in this ring and beat you so fucking hard your dead grandmother’s asshole will pucker,” Jose screams to the new guy.
This new guy is re-defining what it means to be a dumbass. Somehow, mid-fight, he’s managed to turn his gloves around backwards on his hands. It boggles the fucking mind.
And the Axeman is just toying with him.
“Are you trying to suck this much? Are you trying to fucking piss me off? Slip that fucking jab, you brain-dead culo, or I will get in this ring and stomp the shit out of you myself.”
I can’t resist screaming at him. Sometimes, work is a great kind of therapy.
But I still can’t stop thinking about Stephanie and what’s got her so upset.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“She needed to hit something. You know how it is. So I helped her out, made sure she didn’t hurt herself. But I’m telling you, man, she’s acting like she’s near the end of a twelve-rounder and it’s not going her way.”
We watch boxing for a little while, both of us yelling pointers to the new guy, who’s still getting his absolutely killed by the Axeman.
“Jose, Stephanie is the first ‘regular’ girl I’ve dated. She isn’t a stripper, she isn’t some wise guy’s little sister. I can’t just throw some cash or booze at her and expect her to get better. When you need to do something special for your wife, what do you do?”
He goes silent for a minute.
“This isn’t like you’re trying to get out of the doghouse. She cares about you, kid — you’re the one she wanted to see. Her problem’s with her dad’s shop, you probably know that. So find a way to help her with that and get her mind off those troubles.”
“How?”
“That’s for you to figure out.”
I chew on his words for a while while I watch the Axeman pummel his opponent in the ring. Fact is, I’m still at a loss and that’s something I do not enjoy. In my past life, that’d get you killed. In my current line of work — in the boxing gym — you’ll wind up lights out on the floor.
I head back to my office to think. In just a couple minutes, I’m sure I’ve got an answer.
I pick up the phone.
“What do you want?” Ana Maria’s voice comes back over the intercom.
“What sort of a gift would you get for someone who’s dealing with work problems and maybe doesn’t have the easiest job in the world?”
There’s a long stretch of silence and I’m about to buzz her again because maybe she’s hung up on me.
“Is this for me?” she says.
“No, it’s for Stephanie, the chick I’ve been seeing.”
“Oh, so you’re hooking up with members, now? Is that your latest recruiting strategy?” she says. “Ok, I’m going to think real hard here and put myself in her shoes. I’m working a tough job, maybe with people that aren’t the smartest, and I’m handling a lot more responsibility than was in the job description and — even though I’m absolutely killing it — it’s stressful.”
Ana Maria’s one of the only people that I’d let talk to me like this. Without her, this place would grind to a standstill. We both know that.
“Alright. So, you’re in her shoes now. You’re feeling under-appreciated, even though you’re brilliant and you work your ass off and everything would fall apart without you —”
“Str
angely, this feels familiar. I don’t know why.”
“What can I get you that would help you relax?”
“I know just the thing,” she says, with no hesitation.
Even though she’s all the way in the front lobby, I can hear her smile.
“Whatever it is, get two.”
Chapter Twenty
Stephanie
Days go by, and every passing hour, it feels like nerves are being stretched out like bungee cords and I’m just waiting for them to snap.
I go through my usual routine — work, training with Luca, nights at his place — doing my best to keep it together.
I manage, somehow, because even though there are plenty of times where I’m feeling frazzled, Luca doesn’t seem to notice. He’s his usual self, busting my ass while we’re training and sending me to sleep every night with a dreamy smile on my face and my body lit with exhausted afterglow.
We do other things besides training and sleeping together. I help him unpack. I help him buy furniture for his place. He tells me that he finally feels right settling in.
It’s cute.
We even make a small shelf and a small nightstand together. We build it here at work while taking breaks together.
The man makes me feel good. Confident. Hopeful.
Without him, I don’t think I could keep it together.
But even with him, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and I just know that when it does, things are going to come apart.
He’ll find out about my secret, who I owe money to, who I’m working for, and he’ll leave. He’ll have every right to because who the hell would want to associate with some criminal like me?
“Ms. Turner, can you come up to the front, please?”
Sabrina’s voice crackles over my phone and she sounds confused about something. Which means either something is wrong, or someone asked her a question she can’t answer: like which end of the hammer is the bashy-end.
“I’ll be right there,” I say, standing up and leaving my work on the desk. I’m halfway through writing a check to purchase another batch of dehumidifiers and air conditioners and I’m pretty sure the check will actually clear this time.
