Pound for Pound (7 page)

As she neared the ice-cream truck, she checked her rearview mirrors again, slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and signaled to anyone who might come from behind that she’d be passing the pink-and-white truck.

Tim Pat held his change in his left hand. He was intent on getting at his juice bar, and tugged at its plastic wrapper with his teeth. The loud music was still playing. A young Hispanic mother with a toddler arrived to
place her order with the driver. She noticed Tim Pat almost drop his lemon-lime bar when the wrapper tore loose. She would later testify that she saw Tim Pat bobble the juice bar, drop his change, and then stumble forward from behind the blind side of the truck, directly in front of Lupe’s oncoming van.

Lupe hit him before she could get her foot from the gas to the brake, saw him fly into the air and hit the curb in front of the ice-cream truck. Even though she was driving slowly, it’s one of the laws of physics: F = MV. The inertial force of an object is determined by the mass or weight of the object and the velocity at which the object moves. Lupe’s van had a lot more mass than Tim Pat—and the velocity was just enough. She stopped immediately, placed both hands over her mouth, got out of the car, and ran over to Tim Pat. As she knelt down, the driver of the ice-cream truck turned off the music and sped away.

The lemon-lime bar remained whole, but had started to melt on the hot concrete, the gravel and pebbles of the old street showing through its chinked and sun-bleached cement. Dan’s coins had rolled to one side, the bills were scattering.

Lupe screamed when she saw the impossible, skewed angle of the motionless boy’s neck and the blood spreading in a widening pool from the back of his head. His eyes were wide open, filled with an expression of surprise. She didn’t have to touch his body to feel for a pulse. The child was dead; she had killed him. She sobbed and she lost her breath, but she didn’t feel the skin on her knees begin to tear as she knelt on the gritty street surface, bent over Tim Pat’s body. She bent double, her head almost in the blood. She managed to sign to Jesse, who brought the clinic’s cell phone from the van and kneeled silently down beside his sister.

“Ay, Dios mío,”
Lupe said. Oh, my God.

Dan had heard the ice-cream music stop, waited for it to resume. He became curious when it didn’t, then started for the street just in case.

Lupe dialed 911, her fingers stiff as chopsticks. She waited silently, hardly breathed, went more silent still. Neither she nor Jesse knew what
else to do. When the operator answered after four rings, Lupe reported the accident and the address and the body. The operator took her information, then instructed her to remain at the scene. Lupe made the sign of the cross. Tears streaming down her face, she began to sign to Jesse what the operator had said.

Dan saw the little body instantly, saw it as if down a tunnel of whitest light. Shock hit him and a crushing weight pushed down on his chest as his heart rate soared. He felt himself go crazy, felt his feet flop on the pavement as he raced to the motionless figure. He slid to his knees, shoved Lupe and Jesse aside. He cradled Tim Pat.

Earl heard Dan’s howl. He ran to the street. Dan was hunched over his grandson. His body was rigid, drops of Tim Pat’s blood on Dan’s lips. Dan looked again at his baby boy.

“I shouldda gone with him! Jesusjesusjesus!” Dan was sobbing.

“Dan, he’s been buyin from the truck by himself for two years,” Earl reminded him.

“I shouldda been with him.”

But Dan hadn’t, and now the last candle in his life had been snuffed out. Like some benumbed mother ape, Dan tried to shake life back into Tim Pat’s little body. But Tim Pat was dead and that was it. Two lifeless eyes looked out at him, the dull film of death already starting to form across them. Dan tried to kiss Tim Pat again. His lips wouldn’t move.

Earl bent down. He tried to get Dan to stand, wanted to get Dan someplace where he couldn’t see what was on the ground. But Dan would always see what was there, would see it in flashes of morning light off of plate-glass windows, would see it in the pale faces of heart and cancer patients waiting to die, would see it in the astonished eyes of stroke victims at the hospital where Brigid had been treated. Tim’s broken and bleeding body was the image he’d see in every red sunset, in every blood moon.

Earl saw Dan’s eyes. Nothing was in there. Earl thought of Brendan, of Terrance, of Mary Cat, of Brigid, and now Tim Pat. He looked into Dan’s eyes again. The brightness of life, the flame of the human pilot light, was burning dangerously low.

Earl said, “C’mon, Dan, c’mon, baby, here, lemme help you up.”

“I’m fine here.”

Earl saw Lupe clutching her cell phone. “You call 911?” he asked.

She nodded, then looked over at Dan. She saw the blood on him. “Is this little boy his?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. I was going slowly. I can’t even say how sorry I am. I haven’t words in English or Spanish, but I am dead inside. Please ask him to forgive me.”

One siren first, then two more, the high sounds coming from two directions. The police units came down Wilcox, the ambulance headed up from Melrose. Jesse’s face had gone gray. He began, soundlessly, to cry again. Lupe hadn’t stopped. She signed to her brother as Dan glanced over.

It was an accident. The police will help.

Dan saw Lupe and Jesse clearly for the first time, saw their dark skin and realized they were Latinos. That didn’t register, neither plus nor minus. But when he saw them signing, he thought they were throwing gang signs, and he went wild.

Dan looked up to Earl and wiggled his fingers. “What’s this all about?”

Earl said, “I don’t know.”

“I do know,” Dan said.

As the paramedics and police officers came up, Dan lowered Tim Pat and got to his feet. An officer said, “Sir?,” but Dan didn’t notice. He shoved past the officer, then swooped in on Lupe and began to choke her, lifted her in the air by her throat before the police could react. Earl pulled Dan off and wrapped his arms around him. Dan didn’t struggle, but his body trembled with rage. He hissed.

“I’ll kill her, Earl, I’ll kill the little spic, and fuck the Fifth Commandment in the ass.”

“Naw, baby,” said Earl. “Don’t be talkin that killin business.” “Christ is Satan, the son of a kike whore.”

Dan gagged, nausea rising, pain flooding his chest. His hand went to his battered eye. He tried to die, but couldn’t.

E
duardo “Chicky” Garza y Duffy was five-ten, and, by the time he was seventeen, weighed in at 149, two pounds over his fighting weight. He was tall for a welter, and was sure to grow at least into a junior middleweight at 154, maybe even a solid middleweight at 160. Only a few Mexican fighters were that tall, and nearly all of those were raised in the U.S. From his mother, Rafaela, Chicky had inherited a light complexion, so you couldn’t see the Mexican in him straight off.

Chicky was a nickname that had developed first from
chico,
and then
chiquito,
words meaning small and smaller still. The name stuck because he was small and sickly as a child. Because of his light complexion and green eyes, he was often taken for white, despite his dark hair. Even Mexicans would sometimes call him
güero,
a word used to describe light-skinned, or blond, people. Once he started fighting as a boy, some of the other kids called him Zurdito, Lefty, but that nickname never stuck. Being a southpaw had helped in the amateurs, confused other fighters when he boxed in ways they were unused to, but he preferred Chicky.

Garza y Duffy came from his grandpa Eloy’s side of the family. The Duffy handle stemmed from way back, when immigrant Irish soldiers, abused under General Zachary Taylor’s command during the Mexican-American
Wars, deserted to fight for Mexico. An annual parade is held in San Antonio to celebrate them. Many Mexicans proudly carry Irish blood.

Chicky didn’t know who his father was. His mother wasn’t sure, so she gave him her family name when he was born. All the kid knew was that he was Chicano, someone of Mexican descent born in the U.S., but he was also something else entirely: a Tex-Mex, a
pocho
Tejano, a Mexican
born
in Texas, and that was something to be especially proud of. Southside poverty and the slick talk of the lawless
vatos,
pronounced
bahtos
—the toughs of the project—quickly converted the little boy’s gentleness into aggression and rebelliousness. Gang fights and
cuchillados
and
navajazos,
knife and razor wounds, were common and often fatal in the project. Jailhouse
pachuco
tattoos of a Christian cross located on the back of the hand between thumb and forefinger were commonplace. Chicky was caught riding a stolen bike. He was arrested, and a stern Tex-Mex judge named Herrera gave him a break because of his age, but promised him time in
el bote,
the can, should he see him in court again. The boy shrugged it off, thought of the slammer as a road to manhood and valor.

He was but a small package, and the darker-skinned kids teased him for his light skin, told him his father had to be a redneck GI from Kelly Air Force Base. Chicky refused to believe it. Some called him Whirly-bird, and had to fight for that mistake. His resentment toward his mother, Rafaela, for his light complexion became so great that she knew she couldn’t deflect it as long as he lived with her in the run-down Victoria Courts, temporary housing dating from the end of World War II. It was an anthill of danger and drugs and dirt where the
vatos
saw themselves as the baddest of the bad in San Anto, one of the long-standing Tex-Mex names for San Antonio.

Though Rafaela was far from an ideal mother, she feared the loss of her son to the prison system. She figured his only chance was for her to get him out of the project. She bundled his things up in a sheet one day and delivered him to her parents at their strawberry farm in Poteet. She
said she was doing it for the boy. But her father, Eloy, also knew that she was doing it because of her part-time pimp, an over-the-road truck driver who aimed at increasing his income by taking her with him and working her at truck stops.

Chicky never saw her again. His respect and growing love for his grandparents, Eloy and Dolores, coupled with the responsibilities of the farm, would change him back into the decent child who at five had promised his mother to work hard and earn money and move them out of La Vica. Chicky could recall what she looked like only if he saw her photograph at an aunt’s or uncle’s house—there were no photos of her at the farm—but he was reminded of his time at La Vica whenever he heard of a stabbing or a drive-by shooting.

Amateur boxing would change the world for the scrawny little boy. His grandfather had been a fighter before he was a farmer, an amateur who turned pro and became known as el Lobo, the Wolf. Under Eloy’s tutelage, the kid grew and got strong. He stopped wearing wife-beaters and baggy pants down to the crack of his ass, outfits designed by homeboys to trumpet their
cholo
toughness, their
valor mexicano.
Eloy had inherited fourth-generation Mexican-border poverty, but with the encouragement of his wise and hardworking parents, he had worked and boxed his way up through it, and he would not let it destroy his grandson.

Instead of turning to violence and drugs like so many other boys his age, Chicky, with his grandfather’s encouragement, won several amateur competitions that were held for all kids of every background, ages eight to fifteen. From there he progressed to the open, or senior, ranks, and one wall of his room was gradually covered in trophies from every weight and age division he fought in. When Eloy told him that his green eyes and light skin came from the San Patricios side of the family, Chicky’s shoulders relaxed for the first time since he was a little kid. He knew about the San Patricios from the parades.

“You mean I got the blood of those Irish men in me, the ones who fought for Mexico?”

“A huevo.”
Eloy grinned. “Just goes to show that the Irish will marry anybody.”

By the time Chicky was almost sixteen, he’d already begun to take more responsibility for the farm. With his granddaddy always
pedo o crudo
from the booze, drunk or hungover, Chicky worried that some
gran chingadazo,
or enormous screwing, was on its way.

His grandmother Dolores had once attempted to make light of Eloy’s alcoholism. She said that Eloy had swallowed the worm at the bottom of a
mezcal
bottle, and had to keep drinking so the worm wouldn’t die. Realizing the depth of his grandmother’s suffering, Chicky swore to her that he would never drink alcohol. That was tough in Texas, where roadies—ice-cold beer for the road—were as legal and common as blue-bonnets. But despite offers from kids at school, girls as well as boys, Chicky had kept his promise.

After Dolores died in 1991, Eloy would get up sick every day, and pass out early. His foreman ran the farm for a couple of years, but got fed up and moved on. Chicky suddenly realized that he was his grandfather’s caretaker and the boss of the farm. He took over as best he could, and he was glad to do it, but seeing pain in his grandfather was to suffer pain himself.

Eloy had his devils, but he was always protective of Chicky. The boy would not suffer the burnout so many youngsters experience when pushed too hard in any sport. Eloy would allow Chicky to train seriously only when upcoming tournaments were scheduled. Afterward, Eloy would lay the boy off for several months so Chicky could absorb what he had learned. Besides, there was football as well as other sports to play. But the kid was fascinated with boxing, wanted to be a fighter the way Travis, Bowie, and Crockett had wanted to hold out at the Alamo.

Since Chicky lived out in the country, this last year had been especially hard for him because he depended on Eloy to drive him to the gym. What he needed most was to spar. Without sparring, a fighter can’t get sharp, can’t become accustomed to pain, can’t develop the speed and hand-eye coordination necessary to win. But now Eloy either sat around
or slept. Chicky missed the workouts in their homemade gym, starting when he was brand new to the game. Eloy would talk strategy in his rough and funny way, and had even tried to get him to convert from southpaw to fighting orthodox, or right-handed. Eloy argued that fighting orthodox would give him the advantage of having a bigger left hook than most right-handed fighters. He also pointed out that right-handers, especially the pros, would do their best to “duck” southpaws, avoid them whenever they could, because facing left-handers was a handicap for most orthodox fighters.