Pound for Pound (40 page)

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.

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.