Pound for Pound (17 page)

Eloy said, “What the fuck’s this?”

Trini smiled. “What’s what?”

“How’d you get in?”

“Tricks of the trade,
ése.”

“Don’t fuck around. You got my
arrullo,
my lullaby?”

Trini shook his head. “I made calls all over town. Looks like things is dried up for two more weeks,
ése.”

“Things never dried up before,” Eloy protested.

“Things is tight, my nigga. When it opens up, the price’ll be jacked way up and there’s no tellin when it’ll cap out.”

Eloy stayed as calm as he could. “You got to have one
pinche frasco,
one fuckin vial.”

“Not even for myself, baby, just that rank, dark shit from Mexico, that’s what I’m sayin, my brother. I’m sick, too.”

“Who else got some?” Eloy asked, a note of desperation in his voice.

“Nobody,
nadie, nadie,
fuckin
nadie,”
Trini replied. “Go see your croaker to write you a scrip.”

“He wants me to go to detox and eat fuckin green vegetables.”

“These fuckin doctors is cold.”

Trini loved these scenes. He’d been on the wrong end of enough of them to know how Eloy felt. So fuck Eloy, the
cholo
prick. Trini hadn’t made any scratch off of Chicky yet, so he had to get paid somewhere, right? Bidness was bidness. Besides, he could see from Eloy’s yellowing eyes that the sick puke wouldn’t be around for long. Trini was just joking about raising the price. He had to have some fun; that was only reasonable. The more Trini thought about it, the more righteous he felt.

Eloy said, “How ‘bout I see you later?”

Trini said, “I’ll keep my feelers out, but only because we go way back, you and me. But things is hot, okay,
mi
Lobo Tejano?”

Eloy said, “See you at the fight. Take care of my boy.”

“Be cool,” said Trini.

“Yeah,” Eloy muttered. Something inside his liver was blinking on and off, and breathing got hard, and puke stung the back of his throat.

Trini got into his car and drove off, the muffler hanging loose. Once he was around the corner, he began to laugh. “Dumb fuckin Messkin.”

Passbooks had been turned in, the weigh-in was over, names had been drawn, procedures had been strictly adhered to. The most important thing was to protect the fighter, and Lamar Steuke was there to guarantee it. Chicky and Sykes would fight the Semi from the red corner, but in different rings, and both would share the red dressing room with a score of other fighters. Sykes drew Farrell from the blue corner, and would go first. Chicky, going second, got Torres from the blue, and the Cavazos got busy with Chicky on how he could nullify Torres’s body shots.

Mr. George and the Cavazos kept Sykes and Chicky occupied to prevent any sudden ignition between them that could disqualify one or both before the Semi began. Sykes was the kind who could find something wrong with moonlight, and was deep into being poor little Cyrus.

“Why it be me gets that wrong-handed white boy?”

Mr. George had been trying to explain the proper way to move on a southpaw, but Sykes was unreachable.

“It the luck a the draw,” Mr. George explained.

Sykes snarled, “Fuck a draw, nigga, I suppose to have that right-hand beaner boy.”

Mr. George tried one more time to get through to him. “Listen at what I’m sayin ‘bout feets.”

“Fuck you feets, I been set up!” Sykes looked like he was on the edge of a meltdown.

Mr. George decided that Sykes just didn’t get it, never would.

Sykes and Farrell were the first of the welterweights, and it soon became obvious that Sykes had trouble with the left-hander. Sykes tried to make a street fight out of it, but Farrell kept his right foot outside Sykes’s left foot, controlling him. Farrell pasted him with jabs and wasn’t there when Sykes came blasting in with both hands. Farrell was ahead on points with all the judges after the first round.

In the corner, Sykes was breathing hard. Mr. George tried to calm him first, then tried to get him to think. Sykes first had to establish who was boss of the canvas, and then throw right-hand leads, and come back with his hook. It was too much for Sykes, who had only one way to go—
reverting to the streets and attacking more like a gangbanger than a boxer.

“I’ma kill that honky and his dawg.”

The bell rang, and he charged from the corner like a mini Mike Tyson, but Farrell pivoted out of the way. When Sykes came around, Farrell hit him with a quick right-left-right combination that knocked Sykes down, his first trip to the canvas ever. He tasted blood from a cut lip and began to shake. Mortified that a white boy had knocked him down, he let loose a high, keening wail that bounced off the hard walls. The crowd keened back. He took the mandatory eight count on his feet, and roared back at Farrell, who continued to pepper him with jabs. Sykes tried to wrestle him down at one point, and the ref was there to step in and penalize Sykes with a one-point deduction. The crowd hooted at Sykes and went into a frenzy of whistles and spit. They hated the
mayate
black shit-bug for the crappy sportsmanship he’d shown in all his fights.

“Hipócrita!”
a stooped old Southside farmworker shouted. “Hypocrite!”

Sykes didn’t know what it meant, but knew it was bad. “What?” he shouted back.

Sykes went into his pout, and Farrell knocked him down again, hard this time, hard enough to ring his bell. He looked to Mr. George, who tried to signal to him, but the signals were too complicated for Sykes, who got up cursing. The crowd cheered Farrell. Near the end of the round, Sykes briefly trapped Farrell on the ropes, but Farrell spun free and won the round going away.

Chicky, already gloved and warmed up, watched the action from his stand-by position near the dressing room, and saw how Farrell outclassed Sykes. It appeared that Chicky would be fighting Farrell—good, thought Chicky. Sykes and his temper would have been the easier of the two to beat, but Chicky liked going against Farrell again. It would decide who was boss between them.

In the third round, with one eye starting to swell shut, Sykes came out firing to the head. He suddenly dropped down, and with Farrell’s body blocking the ref’s view, intentionally came up full power with a head butt to Farrell’s chin that knocked his head back. Sykes, during the same lifting motion, came up with the heel of his glove, which caught Farrell at the base of the nose, breaking it. Sykes’s fouls happened so quickly that the ref and most of the crowd missed them, but not Chicky, who wanted to squash Sykes like a bug. To Farrell, the nose shot sounded like a bat breaking at Yankee Stadium. Water flooded his eyes, and blood spurted down the front of his white top. He couldn’t see except for smears of light and dark. He didn’t care about the blood, but his face was on fire from the broken bone and he could barely keep his eyes open. He was punching at blurs and shadows, but still managed to whack Sykes so hard that the brother’s eyes fluttered and his mouthpiece cartwheeled across the ring. Sykes grabbed and held, and the ref crossed to separate them. When he saw how heavy the flow of blood was, he understood it meant a broken nose, and right then stopped the fight.

Farrell cut loose, “Nooooo, I had ‘im, I had ‘im!”

Chicky caught up to Farrell on his way to the dressing room. “Sykes beat you dirty, pods.”

Farrell squeezed blood from his nose. “Yeah, he did, and the ref missed it. But now you got a shot. Bust up that fuckin dinge for me, okay?”

Chicky touched Farrell’s bare fist with his glove. “I’m gonna tear him a new asshole.”

Before Chicky’s fight, Eloy had motioned Trini down a hallway and around a corner.

Trini looked over his shoulder, whispered, “I been callin my guys.”

Eloy asked, “You got some, right?”

“No way,” Trini said, but gave Eloy eight hard, sixty-milligram number four white codeine tablets. “It’s like from my own stash because I
know you’re hurtin, homes. You can gag ‘em, or you can cook up, but your face might swell.”

Eloy left Trini standing there, went at a half run to Fresita, where he chewed four of the pills and downed the bitter paste with cheap vodka.

It was five minutes later, and Chicky was in the ring. He looked nervously for his grandpa. Eloy entered and waved from the main entrance. Chicky nodded, felt safe again, and went to the center of the ring for instructions from the ref. Moments later, he returned to his corner, dropped to one knee to make the sign of the cross. He banged gloves with Trini and Paco as the bell rang. Eloy was feeling better already.

Torres came out and quickly tried to go to Chicky’s liver and ribs with his wide left hook, but Chicky’s jab and foot position took it away from him. Torres saw he couldn’t get the hook off, and tried with a straight right behind three stiff jabs. He was a good and quick fighter, and Chicky saw that he must watch his every move, slip or block Torres’s every shot.

Chicky was winning the first round on jabs to the body as well as to the head. Halfway through the round, Chicky unloaded with a left-hand lead, then came back with his right hook. The simple but crushing combination cold-cocked Torres, who lay on his face, his lips twisting involuntarily up from his teeth, his eyes twittering. The ref called the fight immediately, and the doctor sailed into the ring. It was several minutes before Torres revived and Chicky went to him as he slumped on a stool in his corner.

“You okay?”

“No, but I’ll make her.”

They shook hands.

Sykes had seen the KO, saw how the boy dropped like a bank sack full of nickels, and saw how the crowd came roaring to its feet. Mr. George
watched as Sykes blinked, watched as Sykes’s eyes jittered toward the green
exit
signs.

Good,
thought Mr. George,
boy has earned him his ass whippin.
Mr. George also watched as Chicky and the Cavazo brothers and Eloy were whooping. Seth and Toby watched them, too, had seen the devastating KO, and had seen Sykes’s scurrying eyes.

“Sheee-it,” said Seth.

Toby said, “What now?”

“Well …” Seth tried, but he couldn’t go any further.

The referee raised Chicky’s hand. Chicky and Sykes were proclaimed winners of the Semi. They would meet the next day at noon.

“Sheee-it,” said Seth, repeating himself. His first instinct, lawyer style, was to cover his ass. For the first time since he’d passed the bar, he didn’t know how.

Toby felt the same. “This is bogus, man.”

Both had known that six of Sykes’s losses had come at the hands of southpaws, but being new to the game, and not understanding its geometry, they’d decided the losses had been quirks. They had believed that proper training by Mr. George would solve the problem with lefties, but Sykes hadn’t improved, so they decided that it must be Mr. George’s fault. Now that they’d seen what Sykes had to do to beat Farrell, they realized that their plans for getting to the big time were about to go down the tubes unless something could be done with this badass southpaw Garza kid. They wondered how much the Messkin would charge to take a dive.

On the way to the dressing room, Trini massaged Chicky’s neck and shoulders. He said, “You hit like the Wolf, kid, right, Lobo? Yeah, he hits like his
abuelito,
right?”

Eloy had calmed down from the vodka and the spreading codeine, and smiled. “Hits harder’n me,
más recio, mucho más recio.”
A lot harder.

Dressing rooms are the best places in the world when you win. But they knew that they still had to win the Final.

Paco looked at Chicky. “It’s comin up nine. Eat good first, but I want you in the sack before ten-thirty, okay? No dirty movies.”

Chicky nodded. The pressure was on, and he knew from past tournaments that he’d be dreaming all night. He’d see himself punching in slow motion while his opponent would be firing on him full blast and at will. He’d wake up a dozen times before the alarm went off.

“Weigh-in’s eight o’clock,” Paco reminded them. “I’ll be there early.”

“I’m sleepin in,” Trini said.

“I’ll be early, too,” Chicky promised.

Trini asked, “Both you stayin in the hotel?”

Eloy looked at Trini. He had schemed on his own. “Chicky is. I’m drivin on home, make sure everything’s still where I left it.”

It made sense to Trini. Traffic would be zip that time of night, and the same coming in the next morning. Being rid of Eloy’s motor mouth would be a relief.

“You got my cell phone number if home don’t answer?”

“Yeah, yeah, and you got all my numbers,” Trini assured him. “What time’ll you be up?”

“Early,” Eloy said, confident that Chicky had no idea of the real meaning of this conversation. “Sunup.”

“Why don’t you call me at nine and we’ll all have pancakes?”

“I could call earlier.”

“Yeah, do that, I might as well go to the fuckin weigh-in with y’all.”

“Don’t hang me up, hear me?”

Trini sucked on the wooden end of a blue-tipped kitchen match. “Would I do that?”

At Crockett’s, Chicky drank water, more grapefruit juice, more water, and then ate Mexican-style scrambled eggs with beans and corn tortillas. He had more bread pudding, and two glasses of milk. Getting their business square at the arena had taken an hour. Chicky was hungry and dug
into his food. Eloy looked on, sipped coffee he’d loaded up with four sugars. He noticed that Chicky had dropped in weight. Eating and the fluids had taken another forty minutes, but food and drink meant the lost weight would come back on.

They went to Chicky’s room, and Chicky took a quick shower. His hair was clipped almost to his scalp, so drying off was quick.

“Why you goin all the way home, Grandpa?”

Eloy already had his lie. “It’s the ranch. We been away.”

Chicky said, “But you’ll be here tomorrow in plenty of time?”

“I’ll come back and get you up at seven. We’ll feed you early, and then again after the weigh-in.”

Eloy could see the boy was tired, but was sure he’d be fine in the morning, even if he would toss and turn getting to sleep. He was proud of the boy. He saw much of himself in Chicky.

“You’re gonna be better’n me,
verás,
you’ll see.”