Pound for Pound (8 page)

“Come on, at least try it
huevón,”
lazy big balls.

Chicky would laugh and try, but he felt better fighting as a left-hander. “I hit harder my natural way, Grandpa.”

“That’s because you don’t practice at it.”

The mischievous kid in Chicky would always stall the old man. He’d stumble purposely, or pretend he’d hurt his hand when he worked right-handed. “Maybe
mañana,”
he’d tease, stretching the Spanish syllables.

“Ay-yai-yai,”
Eloy would say.
“Mañana
don’t never come, you don’t know that yet,
huevón?

C
hicky and Eloy left the farm one afternoon in 1994 and drove to the San Ignacio Gym in San Antonio. Chicky operated tractors and trucks on the farm, but, at fifteen, was too young to legally drive roads and highways. As usual, he rode shotgun with his grandfather. The sun was bright as a white duck’s bill, and he had to squint to see through the broken bugs and wings and yellow gut smears that nastied up the windshield.

Once they got to San Antonio, Eloy steered his pickup along Santa Rosa and into the San Ignacio parking lot at the corner of Travis. The Greyhound bus station and Crockett’s barbecue were a couple of blocks east of the gym, the Cathedral of San Fernando a few blocks down from there.

“Made ‘er,” said Eloy.

Chicky softly closed and locked the passenger door of the truck, Fresita, Eloy’s nickname for his pampered strawberry red 1981 Chevy pickup. “Fresita” was a play on the Spanish word for strawberry,
fresa.
His grandfather carefully locked his side. Chicky started for the nearby double doors of the gym, which was a sprawling, two-story enchilada red brick building located just up the street from the Santa Rosa Hospital.

The gym dated from the late 1950 s, and had originally been funded by the Catholic Church. The far wing was an indoor basketball court with bleachers on opposite sides. Basketball and boxing tournaments were often held there, and drew large crowds. The gym was known to the regulars as the “San Nacho,” the nickname for San Ignacio. At the door, Chicky looked back.

Eloy was still by the truck, his eyes sad. “Go on in and git to work.”

Chicky didn’t understand. “What about you?”

“Got to go to the hospital to see Doc Ocampo,” Eloy replied.

“What’s wrong?”

Eloy said, “Nothin’s wrong. I had tests is all.”

“You sick?”

“Naw, it’s just tests,” Eloy assured him.

“When’ll you be back?” Chicky asked.

“Soon’s Doc Ocampo does his checkup on me. So you gonna fish or cut bait?”

Chicky said,
“Órale,
later,” and started for the door to the gym, grateful to be training again, but worried about his grandfather. He looked back once more, and Eloy was smiling. Things couldn’t be too bad.

Chicky wished for times past, for suppers together when Eloy used to tell him about traveling to far places and winning big fights. It was fine even when supper turned into hastily consumed TV dinners once Chicky’s granny was gone. Chicky feared those times had slipped away forever. So when Eloy had asked him earlier that day if he wanted to head into San Anto for a workout at the San Nacho, Chicky said, “Book it,” unconsciously mimicking his grandfather’s way of talking.

Chicky loved the old-timey Texas way Eloy spoke, his accent even more pronounced than El Paso’s great and charming golfer Lee Trevino. Once Chicky began to wear boots and a wide-brimmed hat, he quickly gave up the
vato
street talk of Victoria Courts to sound as much like Eloy as he could. He soon sounded as Texas as guys with nicknames like Cooter and Cotton. When Eloy let him drive the tractor alone that first time, the kid thought he’d burst with pride, but he never forgot how afraid he’d
been when his mother left him to live at Eloy’s farm that distant Thanksgiving Day, how he’d huddled in the thin little coat his mother had gotten from Goodwill. And he never forgot how his grandfather and grandmother had made him feel as if he had lived with them always. When the Longhorns were playing the Aggies on TV, Eloy talked to Chicky as if he were a peer and it made him feel like a man, like an hombre.

Before their first game, they’d flipped a quarter for first pick of a team. Years later he realized that his grandfather had rigged the toss so Chicky would win. Chicky chose the Aggies because he liked the sound of their name, and thereafter would remain an Aggie. Eloy rooted for the Longhorns. They made a pact to watch the annual Aggie-Longhorns game ever after and had never missed one. Before she got sick, Dolores, nicknamed Mamá Lola, had served hot dogs made with Polish sausage, and sauerkraut and spicy mustard. Afterward, they ate homemade flan with strawberries. Lola made coffee she got from Nuevo Laredo.

Chicky and his grandfather had clapped and jumped on each play of the game. Whenever the Longhorns were behind, Eloy would clap his hands once and urge them on in that way of his. “All rat, ‘horns, ‘bout time t’open up a can a whip-ass.”

If Eloy thought the referees had made a bad call, he’d rumble low in his throat, “Yessir, somebody got to the zebras.”

It was Eloy’s influence that made Chicky a throwback. It was because of Eloy that Chicky’d never cottoned to Lone Star
cholo
—Mex-American—rap like so many of his contemporary Tejanitos, why he liked
rancheritas
and polkas, and the honky-tonk music played in juke joints and ice houses.

Once Chicky had passed into the bright interior of the gym, Eloy crossed Santa Rosa against the red light, and walked slowly down the block to the hospital at the corner of Houston Street. Old at fifty-eight, and heavy for his height, he still walked like a fighter—short steps, chin tucked, shoulders slightly rolled forward. The Santa Rosa Hospital was where

Chicky had been born. It was where Dolores’s cancer had been diagnosed and treated before she decided to go home. Now Eloy was going for a treadmill test, X-rays, and to get the results from previous blood and urine tests. They had been ordered by Dr. Rodrigo Ocampo, the family doctor of forty years, who promised a rush on the findings and that he’d be there to explain them.

“Somebody musta messed up here,” Eloy protested when he was given the results.

Dr. Ocampo said, “Guess who.”

Ocampo was nearly eighty years old, but looked sixty. His full head of stiff white hair and Zapata mustache gave him the look of a revolutionary, but his black almond eyes were those of a poet. He was one of the few who knew the truth about why Eloy’s boxing career had effectively ended in a dreadful fuck-up,
desmadre,
out at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A. Ocampo had forgiven Eloy—what else could he do?—even if Eloy hadn’t forgiven himself.

“We got to dry you out, pods. Your liver is getting as hard as a rock.”

“I don’t want to hear about no cures,” Eloy said firmly.

“You know I saw this coming, right?”

“It ain’t no big surprise to me, either, if you had any doubts,” Eloy replied.

Ocampo slipped into a heavy
cholo
accent, “Come on, come on, goddamnit, this is the fuckin doctor’s orders, man.”

Eloy answered the same way. “Eloy Garza don’t take no stinkin orders.”

“What about the kid?”

“I’ll last awhile.” But Eloy knew he might not have a hell of a lot of time.

“He’ll do better with you around longer than shorter,” Ocampo told him.

“Doc, I’d’a changed a long time ago if I couldda.”

Ocampo nodded. “You got my number if you change your mind, hear?”

Eloy swore Dr. Ocampo to silence about the results of the tests. The Wolf, his soiled T-shirt stretched tight over his distended gut, would never share the results with anyone.

The San Ignacio was a bustling gym, crowded primarily with Latinos, but there were a few blacks as well. No white fighters, though Chicky was often taken for one. There were two large, elevated rings and swaying body bags hung on cables and chains from the high ceiling. There were several rows of long benches near the entrance, and light from bright overhead lamps spun off the lime green walls as if dancing with the racket of the banging speed bags and whapping leather jump ropes. Some trainers huddled to whisper with their fighters, some moved through the commotion like monks gliding to evensong. There was one old-time white trainer who moved lithely despite his age. Some youngsters tried to teach each other, none of them teaching or learning much.

Two longtime trainers in the San Nacho, the brothers Trini and Paco Cavazo, went back almost to the day the gym had first opened. They always staked out territory near the back of the ring, and barked like jailers at their fighters on the premise that either discipline ruled or chaos would erupt.

Chicky took his time changing into his outfit—jock and T-shirt, sweatpants, and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off below the elbow. He wore dark blue gym shorts over the pants, and over the shirt he wore a kind of vest made from a faded black sleeveless sweatshirt. Layers meant perspiration. By the time he laced up his high boxing shoes, he figured Eloy would be in the gym waiting. He wasn’t. Chicky wrapped his hands. He warmed up for three rounds, then stretched. He went on to shadowbox, and after three rounds had broken into a good sweat. It felt good, his sweat steaming him, his body feeling oiled inside. He was ready to work the punch mitts, but Eloy was still at the hospital, so Chicky worked the big bag. He took it easy for two rounds, wanting to
save some gas for Eloy, still known around San Nacho as the Wolf, who hadn’t returned.

Chicky cut loose, worked four hard rounds on the big bag, then went flat. He dogged it on the speed bag for two more rounds, painfully aware that he wasn’t in the shape he liked to be in. He forced himself through only two rounds on the jump rope, then did a hundred sit-ups in four sets of twenty-five. Ordinarily, he’d do five or six sets of thirty. No Eloy.

Chicky showered quickly. He dried his close-cropped hair, then changed back into boots and jeans. Disappointed, and growing more concerned, he returned to the floor, which was nearly empty. Good fighters will go as many as fifteen, even twenty rounds nonstop in less than one and a half hours, then leave the gym promptly, no socializing. Chicky took a quick look around, nodded to the Cavazo brothers, Eloy’s former trainers, and then hurried out to check Fresita, but the pickup was gone. He’d known from experience what to expect, but tried not to believe it. He waited ten minutes in the dark, then gave up and reentered the gym. He crossed over to where the Cavazos were finishing up.

“You seen my grandpa?” Chicky asked.

Trini, the older of the brothers, said, “You need a ride?”

Chicky said, “Naw, he’s late, that’s all.”

Trini, the nickname for Trinity, as in the Holy Trinity, had also been known as Flash, but that was when he had a fine pro record of twenty-two and four, with sixteen KOs. Then the booze, the
chicas,
the gambling, and, finally, all the coke and the other shit he ingested made him a functioning addict. He thrived, became a dealer himself, and had maintained his habit for more than half his life. No street drugs for him, and none for what he referred to as his
GQ
customers, his uptown junkies.

Trini was a “thoroughbred,” a dealer who sells only laboratory-pure narcotics. His current supplier was the civilian head of shipping and receiving at Lackland Air Force Base. Trini was able to obtain pharmaceutical-quality drugs for zip compared to their street value, and took the comfortable top piece of a 75–25 split. Trini’s previous contact
had been a pale old junkie pharmacist at Kelly Air Force Base, before it started closing down. Trini loved the flyboys. He loved to sing their song as he drove out through the gate with sealed cartons of morphine sulfate, codeine, Demerol, and Dilaudid in his taco wagon. Very few tacos were sold out of his gaudily painted vehicle, only enough to justify keeping his license and selling a few when he went on base. It gave him good cover, made him a familiar figure. Pearly rosary beads dangled from the rearview mirror, and the ragged fringe around his windows wiggled in the rushing wind, as he belted out

Trini never used a needle more than once. He would sometimes collect and toss them on a dope corner where junkies would pick them up and use them. Dumping his darts this way made him feel superior. He saw himself as a class act, the Cisco Kid of dope fiends. He ingested only the best, none of that street shit. He used Dilaudid if he was low on morphine, but preferred “Miss Emma.” Morphine didn’t give him heroin’s hilltop high, but that dirty brown street horse was too hard to ride, guns rode that nag, along with stumblebum spic violence, and there was AIDS in that saddle as well. Demerol had a market, but it took six times as much Demerol as morphine to get you where you wanted to be. Even though his stuff was drugstore pure, Demmie often caused infection at the point of entry, forcing people to go to the doctor. That meant someone might rat him out, so he trafficked less in Demerol than in the other pills and liquids his uptown clientele delighted in. He focused on lawyers, stockbrokers, athletes, and media people. All they wanted was fresh needles and the pure shit, clean and sterile, pretty pills and little tamper-proof bottles. Trini’s people had the money to pay for pure and sterile, and pay they did when they met him in gas-station crappers, or sometimes
right there in the courthouse of Bexar County. Athletes were his favorites. They had all that money and they were so big that they needed shit by the tubful. Besides, he got off on ruling those big mothafucks. Women were a trip, too, liked to score when they were sitting with Trini in their Beamers or Audis in car washes with the water going. Some, even the marrieds, offered to barter tits and ass and blow jobs.

Trini, the old-line junkie, would answer, “I don’t even fuck my own wife, man.”

Some would feel insulted by being turned down, some would laugh, but they all paid. He’d suck on lemon drops and watch the sheets of water flowing over the windshield while they dug into their purses for cash. One offered him two gold credit cards and said she’d wait a week before she reported them missing.