Pound for Pound (9 page)

“Cash.”

Chicky had known guys like this from the Victoria Courts, gaunt men who always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned tightly at the wrist, the cuffs held in place by a loop of dirty elastic. He pegged Trini for a doper the first time he saw him. Eloy had bought morphine in squat little brown bottles from Trini when Dolores was in terrible pain at the end. Prescriptions written by Dr. Ocampo were not enough. Chicky had watched from the hallway when Eloy injected Trini’s stuff into his grandmother’s arm. He had heard his grandfather sob every time he shot her up. When Mamá Lola continued to linger in agony, Chicky wondered if maybe Eloy had started to use some of the squirt on himself.

Trini and Paco had trained Eloy his whole career. They had been in Eloy’s corner the night Eloy had lost his title shot. But they were poor technicians who valued tough over fundamentals. They expected their fighters to stand Mexican style and take punches in order to land punches, yet they saw themselves as bold tacticians equal to Santa Ana in his cruel prime. Their relationships with all their fighters were strictly business, and they were quick to lure a boy from another trainer. They were equally quick to dump him should he lose a couple of fights.

Eloy had left the Santa Rosa Hospital in a hurry. Once Doc Ocampo confirmed that Eloy’s heart and liver were shot anyway, the Wolf decided to have a few thousand
tequilazo
shooters with salt and lime, though he knew that the booze was what was killing him. He’d swallowed that idea the way he had swallowed a thousand
mezcal
worms, with a wince and a smile, but he wouldn’t be able to smile his way through Chicky. And he knew it. How to tell the kid? He inhaled deeply from his third cigarette. Better not to tell the kid at all. Chicky had enough mud to haul as it was. If the kid was to be saved, it would be through boxing. He hadn’t been working with Chicky at home in the improvised gym because he couldn’t. He didn’t have the gas. He was hurting every hour of every day. But the Cavazos could keep Chicky in the game. They weren’t the best, but they weren’t the worst, despite what they’d pulled on him, and on others. Trini’s habit could make things tricky, but Eloy figured he’d be square with the boy, what with their having watched him grow up, and because they’d stayed tight with Eloy down through the years. It was a reasonable choice to Eloy, on the surface at least. He was too drunk to dive deeper, but for some reason he remembered the time he’d broken a knuckle in training. Trini had given him shots in the hand so he could fight. And in the years to come, more needles would follow.

Chicky motioned Paco Cavazo off to one side at the San Ignacio. “You know my
abuelito
a long time, right?”

“Yeah, hell yeah,” Paco said. He was short and athletically built, had a pencil-line mustache like the old-time movie actor Gilbert Roland. He still combed his dyed black hair in a
pachuco
ducktail that was thick with pomade. He liked Lone Star longnecks, but he had kept in shape through the years by training fighters. He’d been the muscle, Trini the brains. To Chicky, his yellow-brown eyes were from dinosaur times. “Me’n my
brother trained the Wolf here and in Houston, too. Almost got him the title.”

“What went wrong with him?” Chicky asked.

“Lots a things, you know, he got old, couldn’t do roadwork, that shit.”

“Did he always drink?”

Paco stepped back, looked at Chicky sideways.
“Chico, chico,
you know how we are.”

“Not this Mexican,” Chicky said, pointing a finger at himself.

“Ojo,”
Paco said, “watch it, here he comes.”

Chicky looked up and saw Eloy weaving toward them. Chicky glanced at Paco, who was grinning as if he and Eloy were
hermanos de leche,
brothers in milk, like they were screwing the same woman. Chicky knew that, at this stage, Eloy could hardly find his dick to piss.

Paco embraced Eloy, who then moved to embrace Trini.

Trini said,
“Hola, carnal,”
hello old buddy.

Eloy put on a show, got in a little dig. “Here we are again, the three Mousecateers.”

Trini said, “Your kid’s been waiting for you, homes.”

“Had some bidness with a big outfit about my spread,” Eloy said, thinking fast to come up with a plausible lie.

“You packin in the farm, ése?” Paco asked, using a word pronounced like the English “essay” and meaning
that,
or
that one;
but when used by the
vatos, ése
means buddy, or pal, or homeboy.

“Tal vez,
could be, but only if the price is right, like on TV,” Eloy replied, then laughed and tilted his hat to look prosperous. “They might want me to run one of their deals down around Rockport.”

Chicky didn’t believe his grandfather, but he went along in order to scheme on his own. He said, “There’s good fishin down there, and soil’s richer’n the Bush family.”

Paco said, “But not much boxin down there, ‘cept for Corpus or club fights in Laredo once in a while.”

“I was thinkin the same thing,” said Eloy. “What say you boys take
over for me with Chicky? I know y’all eyeball him whenever he wins a tournament.”

By now everyone knew Eloy was lying about selling his farm and working for someone else. But it was true that the Cavazos saw Chicky as a prospect.

“How’ll I get to the gym?” Chicky asked.

Eloy said, “You’ll be legal to drive Fresita in a couple of weeks, right?”

Driving the pickup on his own made the deal especially sweet for Chicky, and everyone shook hands on it.

“We’ll take care a him good,” Trini promised. “Down the line we’re puttin on our own tournament over Uvalde.”

“Book it,” Eloy said.

Chicky had to drive Eloy home.

C
hicky missed the closeness he’d had training with Eloy. It was loyalty to his grandfather, rather than to the Cavazos, that kept Chicky training with them. He also felt trapped. Before the Cavazos deal, he had already decided to turn pro once he graduated from high school. Trini and Paco, for all their shady action, had over the years trained two boys from San Anto, and one from Nuevo Laredo, into world champions. They had the kind of juice with amateur officials and professional promoters Chicky would need, so he kept his mouth shut, partly out of respect for Eloy’s judgment. Chicky had plans—and he wasn’t quite ready to share all of them with his
abuelito.

Education was important to Chicky. He was set on heading for College Station and graduating from Texas A & M. Like other local kids who had to work with their daddies, he would first attend Palo Alto Community College, just up the road from Poteet. Boxing, however, was as important to him as a college degree, and he figured he could do both. Not at the same time, but if he got knocked out of the fight game, an education meant he’d have a place to bounce to.

Graduating from A & M and using the skills he learned on the farm was Chicky’s long-range goal. But no one, including Eloy, knew what
Chicky planned as a fighter. The last thing he wanted was to start out as a four-round prelim fighter at $100 a round. He’d lose 10 percent off the top for a trainer and another 33 for a manager. Then there was a cut man to pay if the trainer couldn’t double up as both. By the time Uncle Sam got his hooks into you, you went home with more lumps on your face than money in your pocket. There was a better way: Win the Nationals, and then win the Olympic box-offs for a spot on the Olympic team. Winning the gold medal would bring a professional signing bonus from big-time Tex-Messkin lawyers from Austin looking for the right homeboy. The next step was to win a professional World title. That would mean a good stake to invest in the sinking farm. Chicky figured he was four, maybe five years away from that title, and in between, he had to figure out some way to help Eloy. Chicky saw himself marrying the right
wifa,
retiring to the farm, and having a gang of kids. He’d teach them that soil was different from dirt. There was no way he’d ever let his granddaddy be put out along the side of the road with a little bundle tied in a bed sheet. No, sir, he had to fight and make it big for his
abuelito.
Soon as he had money coming in, he’d take care of his grandpa.

It was not as if Chicky had a choice. Eloy’s local farmhands had been laid off. Mexican stoop laborers, in their seasonal sweeps through the South Texas harvest, no longer found work along the rows of red and green at Lobo Farms. Weeds took over the long rows where berries had grown. Some of the equipment was covered with frayed tarps, some stored in sideless corrugated sheds and wooden barns. The fragile sprinklers, once connected end to end to irrigate wide stretches at a single lick, were shoved together into a pile of rusting junk. The Mexicans saw what was happening to Lobo Farms and stopped coming.

Chicky kept order as best he could, remained a good student, and was hellacious as the best defensive back on the high school football team. But he could do only so much at the farm while Eloy continued with his daily
birongas
of Lone Star or Pearl, and his late afternoon launch into
pistos
of the hard stuff. Chicky worried about Eloy’s drinking, knew it was killing him slowly. He also began to suspect that Eloy had closed
down the farm to free him from his chores. Equipment was sold to pay bills.

None of Eloy’s suffering, his slide into dereliction, made sense to Chicky. The old man had achieved his dreams, and more. He couldn’t grieve for Dolores forever. He had to get on with life. But what could a boy say to his grandfather, the man who had saved and loved him? What could he do but endure and stay loyal? Chicky did it, but he let fury loose on the football field and in the gym. It would be the same during tournaments. Chicky could punch, Eloy had taught him well. Other young fighters swallowed hard when they thought about facing Chicky Garza.

Living in Poteet and driving to the gym six days a week got old quick for Chicky, but he did it. At first Eloy made the trip north with him, but more and more he stayed at home. After busting his hump in the gym, it was no fun to come home to Eloy snoring in front of a blaring TV set.

Chicky knew he had to focus on the Cavazos’ shitty tournament in Uvalde. He had started running again, having learned from his other fights that he had to be fit, inside the ring and out, physically and mentally. Being ready was the key, but sometimes fights with other southpaws were his toughest fights. It was often that way for left-handers. Because lefties came at each other differently from right-handers, and because southpaws fought many more right-handers than lefties, left-handed fighters became used to fighting right-handed fighters. But being left-handed also made boxing seem easy sometimes, especially when Chicky’d see the look of confusion in right-handed boys with little or no experience with left-handers. In any case, should he get cocky and lose concentration, either while sparring with an orthodox fighter in the gym or duking it out in a fight, the Cavazos were there to push hard and relentlessly.

“All right, you fuck, what’s this bullshit?”

It was one of the many ways they began a criticism, especially if a fighter got tired. Chicky had to give them credit—they got their fighters
in shape, or else. Fighters came to the Cavazos because of their reputation as winners, and had to be ready to absorb personal assaults for a chance at the big time. Being dropped by the Cavazos was like a dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

When the day of the tournament came, Chicky drove and Eloy rode shotgun. They took the 173 up to Devine and then hooked a left on the 90 down to Uvalde. The tournament was held in a church community center that had a small playground for kids and a senior center. A ring was set up in the auditorium. Farm boys, white and Tex-Mex, as well as boys from the other side of the border made up the card. Amateur boxing would change from three three-minute rounds to four two-minute rounds soon after Chicky left the amateur ranks, but on this day, Chicky and the other amateurs would fight the usual three rounds. Chicky won his class easily, took every round, and got a unanimous decision. The Cavazos were smugly silent after the victory, but Eloy hugged Chicky to his beer gut and hooted.

After the Uvalde fight, Chicky went on to win in several tournaments in other towns around San Antonio, sometimes fighting as low as 142 pounds in the 147 -pound classification. He tried to get below 139 in order to fight in a lower weight division, but couldn’t lose the weight and stay strong. He also tried to gain weight, but remained the same, and usually had to overcome the disadvantage of being lighter than most of his
147-
pound opponents. He was awarded the winner’s trophy for a two-night tournament when he won the second night by a “walkover,” a free ride. Walkovers occur when one of the scheduled fighters can’t make weight, doesn’t pass the medical exam, shows up late, or for some reason decides not to fight. When that happens, his opponent simply walks across the ring for the win. The boy Chicky was to fight on the second night failed to appear once he’d seen Chicky kick ass the first night. It was an easy
trophy, but Chicky had wanted to win with his gloves, not by default. He’d been pumped with adrenaline, and it took him a night and a day to calm down.

An amateur fighter can default for a number of reasons: a medical problem; failure to present his passbook; a flat tire on the way to the arena. To coordinate the complex details of bringing a large number of young fighters together, the weigh-ins are usually held several hours before the matches are scheduled. Fighters must pass a medical exam each day they fight. They must also present their passbook or they are not allowed to participate. The passbook identifies them, and also contains the complete record of their fights. The passbook was designed to show a boy’s record—not only to document his experience, but also to indicate how he’d won or lost. A boy losing by a knockout is not allowed to train again for thirty days, depending on the circumstances: In certain cases, a boy could be prohibited from training for as much as 180 days. The passbook is primarily there to protect the fighter. If a fighter doesn’t have, or fails to present, his passbook, he cannot fight. It contains his photo identification, his date of birth, and other pertinent information. Boys’ participation in tournaments that could place them on the U.S. Olympic team must also prove United States citizenship.