Ramon was dabbing at a watercolor of a giant hibiscus on an easel. Around the walls and leaning against furniture were similar big flowers, each with four or five lines of poetry inscribed on it in a cursive hand. As Sister Erasmus whispered to the boy, Jack
Liffey glanced at the nearest poem, beside the stalk of a big water-spotted iris.
Cooling rain at dusk.
The croak of frogs beyond
A wall that divides the calm
Within from the noisy threat of time
Advancing.
Almost a haiku, he thought, and not at all the mawkish teenage twaddle he would have expected.
“Mr. Liffey,” the boy advanced and held out his hand.
“Lovely poem. Truly. And the flower.”
“Thank you,” the boy said gravely.
Jack Liffey explained his ground rules: that he found errant children, he never did anything against anyone’s will, and right now he only wanted to talk. While Sister Erasmus kept a discreet distance, the boy walked him around the studio and explained how he had found exactly what he wanted to do in life, exactly where he fit comfortably in the world. In another year he could go to art school and in the meantime he could stay at the center. His silk screens were already selling and he could support himself.
“If the subjects were a little odder, they would call me a concept artist, but some people compare me to Sister Corita. I don’t reject that.”
“What went wrong at home?”
The boy puffed his cheeks and shook his head a little. “You mean, in addition to everything? Maybe if 1 painted jet planes or tanks or just boxers, dad would have accepted it, though, honestly, he didn’t want me to be an artist of any kind. Opening yourself up that way is weakness.”
“He has a thing about weakness, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, yes.” The boy shook his head sadly again. “It’s his devil. You must be strong, and strong has a very special meaning to him. Closed up. Hard. Mean. Self-sufficient.”
The boy looked at Jack Liffey for validation or at least understanding. “Afraid,” Jack Liffey suggested.
The boy smiled at last. It was a bit spooky, Ramon’s sense of inner peace. “Yes. My brothers and my sister Lula accepted everything he forced on them and built their lives around his obsessions. They may be all right eventually, if other people love them enough, but they are very wounded people. Mom and I had a special bond and it protected me. But he took it out on her.”
“Do you hate him?”
“Oh, no. I don’t hate.”
Jack Liffey told him about Leon Krane’s hard time in college. He wondered if he could somehow establish an understanding between father and son that would be sure to get him back on the karma gravy train. They went on talking for a long time and the boy gave him a vivid sense of what it must have been like to ride out his strange family life. Not only was his father forcing a particular vision of masculinity on him, but much of that stiffness was reinforced by the macho culture that had surrounded him—the very culture that had probably drawn his father to East L.A. in the first place. To resist all that, he seemed to have drawn a lot of strength from his mother and from the example of a pacifist priest he met who had been through the civil rights movement.
“Father Gregg told me you can only resist power with love. I think I can love Dad, it’s tough, but 1 know I can’t be around him. It would wreck me and destroy Mom. Are you going to make me go back?”
Jack Liffey stared at a beautiful golden columbine over a tattered sofa, and the first line of its poem:
I know there is no protection...
He wasn’t much for garden flowers, but this one grew wild along mountain streams and he’d always loved it.
“I won’t make you do anything. But I have to talk to your dad. Maybe he’ll see what a wonderful son he has.”
The boy shrugged. “I think you’re overestimating his flexibility.”
It plagued him for two days. Leon Krane-Carne called and called, and he put him off because he simply did not know what to do. He wanted to try to get Leon to allow his son to develop in his own way, but deep in his heart he knew it was far too late in life for that. His son was a total repudiation of whatever adjustments he had made with his private gods to save his own life. In the face of unremitting harassment, he’d closed his shutters against everything the boy now represented. Leon Krane-Carne was set in concrete by now. Yet, the boy was technically still a minor, and if he refused to tell Leon where his son was, the man would just hire somebody else to find him. The boy hadn’t been that hard to find.
There was no ducking it. He had to talk to Leon and try to solve this exasperating problem.
The mother hovered across the living room, eavesdropping in trepidation. She clearly hoped the boy had permanently absented himself from his father’s control and was afraid that Jack Liffey was going to drag him back.
“So where is he now?”
“It’s not that easy, Leon.” He explained that the boy had found a studio space to work and was supporting himself by selling his art.
“He’s a minor.”
“Would you let him go to art school?”
“That’s none of your business. This is my son we’re talking
about.”
As he’d feared, Leon was starting to bridle and turn belligerent.
“Did you ever think that there might be other kinds of strength than yours? Gentle and determined strength. Like Cesar Chavez, maybe.”
“What’s this crap? I hired you to find my boy.”
“I found one of the brightest, most resilient boys I’ve ever met. He is radiant with a kind of inner love. He might be a goddamn saint, for all I know. But he thinks all you want to do is knock it out of him.”
Léon Carne pointed harshly toward his wife, and the woman made a wounded little eep sound and scuttled out of the room, and then he walked to the front door and locked the deadbolt ominously with a key and pocketed the key.
“Where is my son?”
“I sure wish I could reconcile you two.” Jack Liffey felt a certain responsibility for what this man had become. One little change could turn around a life. Maybe if he’d tried harder back in college... “I tried to be your friend once, Leon, and you wouldn’t even take a half-step toward me.”
The small man glared at him. “Don’t you judge me! I was a contender for the world featherweight title! I built this house. I raised a family. I made something of myself, which is more than you ever did. You fucking lowlife failure.”
“Yeah, I’m a failure, Leon. But I know decency when I see it. I won’t give you a child to ruin.”
“You remember Kaz Kristowski and what I did to him?”
“Of course I do.”
“I’m going to pound you into a pulp until you tell me where my son is.”
Jack Liffey raised his palms. “I’m not a fighter. That’s not
fair.”
“I don’t give a shit about you. I want my boy. I want to save him from becoming a weakling. I’ve got to make it so people like you can’t pick on him.”
“I don’t know why people picked on you, Leon. Honest to God, I don’t. I wish I could have stopped it. But right now Ramon is stronger against it than you ever were.”
“Where is he?”
The small man advanced on him and Jack Liffey had no illusions about standing up under his relentless punches. He was beginning to wonder again about the immanence of evil in the world, and wonder if he was about to learn something about it the hard way. “Please don’t do this.”
“Where is Ramon?”
Jack Liffey pointed behind the man. “That frying pan is going to hurt.”
Leon Krane-Carne whirled, but his wife was not there with a frying pan and as he turned back, Jack Liffey swung with all his might. It turns out that there is one dirty trick from the world of bar fights that almost always works. If you clutch a roll of pennies in your fist and sucker-punch someone square on the jaw with it, the guy wil
l go down.
Jack Liffey yelped at the punch, since it broke two of his knuckles. But Leon Krane-Carne deflated all at once and slumped like a medium-size sack full of doorknobs, out cold, his jaw broken in three places.
You did me one favor in life, Jack Liffey thought, looking down at this broken form. You probably gave me my first training as a detective.
“Cadi am ambulamce,” Jack Liffey said to Rosaura Sanchez Carne, who had come back into the room. There was time now to warn the kid to hide somewhere better. And as long as the pennies stayed a secret, he didn’t think this particular almost-world-champion was ever likely to haul him to law over a one-punch amateur KO.
As it turns out, there are some problems that just plain have no reasoned solution, he thought, wincing as he pocketed the penny roll, and the problem of Leon was one of them.
MIDNIGHT EMISSIONS
by F.X. Toole
“Butcherin’ was done while the deceased was still alive,” Junior said.
See, we was at the gym and I’d been answering a few things. Old Junior’s a cop, and his South Texas twang was wide and flat like mine. ’Course he was dipping, and he let a stream go into the Coke bottle he was carrying in the hand that wasn’t his gun hand. His blue eyes was paler than a washed-out work shirt.
“Hail,” he said, “one side of the mouth’d been slit all the way to the earring.”
See, when the police find a corpse in Texas, their first question ain’t who done it, it’s what did the dead do to deserve it?
Billy Clancy’d been off the police force a long time before Kenny Coyle come along, but he had worked for the San Antonia Police Department a spell there after boxing. He made some good money for himself on the side—down in dark town, if you know what I’m saying? That’s after I trained him as a heavyweight in the old El Gallo, or Fighting Cock gym off Blanco Road downtown. We worked together maybe six years all told, starting off when he was a amateur. Billy Clancy had all the Irish heart in the world. At six-three and two-twenty-five, he had a fine frame on him, most of his weight upstairs. He had a nice clean style, too, and was quick as a sprinter. But after he was once knocked out for the first time? He had no chin after that. He’d be kicking ass and taking names, but even in a rigged fight with a bum, if he got caught? Down he’d go like a longneck at a ice house.
He was a big winner in the amateurs, Billy was, but after twelve pro fights, he had a record of eight and four, with his nose broke once—that’s eight wins by KO, but he lost four times by KO, so that’s when he hung ’em up. For a long time, he went his way and I went mine. But then Billy Clancy opened Clancy’s Pub with his cop money. That was his big break. There was Irish night with Mick music, corned beef and cabbage, and Caffery’s Ale on tap and Harp Lager from Dundalk. And he had Messkin night with mariachis and folks was dancin’ corridos and the band was whooping out rancheras and they’d get to playing some of that nortena polka music that’d have you laughing and crying at the same time. For shrimp night, all you can eat, Billy trucked in fresh Gulf shrimp sweeter than plum jelly straight up from Matamoros on the border. There was kicker, and hillbilly night, and on weekends there was just about the best jazz and blues you ever did hear. B.B. King did a whole week there one time. It got to be a hell of a deed for Billy, and then he opened up a couple of more joints till he had six in three towns, and soon Billy Clancy was somebody all the way from San Antonia up Dallas, and down to Houston. Paid all his taxes, obeyed all the laws, treated folks like they was ladies and gentlemen, no matter how dusty the boots, how faded the dress, or if a suit was orange and purple and green.
By then he had him a home in the historic old Monte Vista section of San Antonia. His wife had one of them home decorating businesses on her own, and she had that old place looking so shiny that it was like going back a hundred years. His kids was all in private school, all of them geared to go to U.T. up Austin, even though the dumb young one saw himself as a Aggie.
So one day Billy called me for some “Q” down near the river, knew I was a whore for baby back ribs. Halfway through, he just up and said, “Red, I want back in.”
See, he got to missing the smell of leather and sweat, and the laughter of men—he missed the action, is what, and got himself back into the game the only way he could, managing fighters. He was good at it, too. By then he was better’n forty, and myself I was getting on—old’s when you sit on the crapper and you have to hold your nuts up so they don’t get wet. But what with my rocking chair money every month, and the money I made off Billy’s fighters, it got to where I was doing pretty good. Even got me some ostrich boots and a El Patron 30X beaver Stetson, yip!
What Billy really wanted was a heavyweight. With most managers, it’s only the money, ’cause heavies is what brings in them stacks of green fun-tickets. Billy wanted fun-tickets, too, but with Billy it was more like he wanted to get back something what he had lost. ’Course, finding the right heavyweight’s like finding a cherry at the high school prom.
Figure it, with only twenty, twenty-five good wins, ’specially if he can crack, a heavy cam fight for a title’s worth millions. There’s exceptions, but most little guys’ll fight forever and never crack maybe two hundred grand. One of the reason’s ’cause there’s so many of them. Other reason’s ’cause they’s small. Fans like seeing heavyweights hit the canvas.
But most of today’s big guys go into the other sports where you don’t get hit the way you do in the fights. It ain’t held against you in boxing if you’re black nowadays, but if you’re a white heavy it makes it easier to pump paydays, and I could tell that it wouldn’t make Billy sad if I could get him a white boy—Irish or Italian would be desired. But working with the big guys takes training to a level that can break your back and your heart, and I wasn’t all that sure a heavy was what I wanted, what with me being the one what’s getting broke up.
See, training’s a hard row to hoe. It ain’t only the physical and mental parts for the fighter what’s hard, but it’s hard for the trainer, too. Fighters can drive you crazy, like maybe right in the middle of a fight they’re winning, when they forget everything what you taught them? And all of a sudden they can’t follow instructions from the corner? Pressure, pain and being out of gas will make fighters go flat brain-dead on you. Your fighter’s maybe sweated off six or eight pounds in there, his body’s breaking down, and the jungle in him is yelling quick to get him some gone. Trainers come to know how that works, so you got to hang with your boy when he’s all alone out there in the canvas part of the world. He takes heart again, ’cause he knows with you there he’s still got a fighting chance to go for the titties of the win. ’Course, that means cutting grommets, Red Ryder.
Everyone working corners knows you’ll more’n likely lose more’n you’ll ever win, that boxing for most is refried beans and burnt tortillas. But winning is what makes your birdie chirp, so you got to always put in your mind that losing ain’t nothing but a hitch in the git-along.
Working with the big guys snarls your task. How do you tell a heavyweight full-up on his maleness to use his mind instead of his sixty-pound dick? How do you teach someone big as a garage that it ain’t the fighter with the biggest brawn what wins, but it’s the one what gets there first with deadly force? How do you make him see that hitting hard ain’t the problem, but that hitting right is. How do you get through to him that you don’t have to be mad at someone to knock him out, same as you don’t have to be in a frenzy to kill with a gun? Heavyweights got that upper-body strength what’s scary, it’s what they’d always use to win fights at school and such, so it’s their way to work from the waist up. That means they throw arm punches, but arm punches ain’t good enough. George Foreman does it, but he’s so strong, and don’t hardly miss, so he most times gets away with punching wrong. ’Course he didn’t get away with it in Zaire with Mr. Ali.
So the big deal with heavies is getting them to work from the waist down as well as from the waist up. And they got to learn that the last thing that
happens is when the punch lands. A thousand things got to happen before that can happen. Those things begin on the floor with balance. But how do you get across that he’s got to work hard, but not so hard that he harms himself? How do you do that in a way what don’t threaten what he already knows and has come to depend on? How do you do it so’s it don’t jar how he has come to see himself and his fighting style? And most of all, how do you do it so when the pressure’s on he don’t go back to his old ways?
After they win a few fights by early knockout, some heavies get to where they try to control workouts, will balk at new stuff what they’ll need as they step up in class. When they pick up a few purses and start driving that new car, lots get lazy and spend their time chasing poon, of which there is a large supply when there is evidence of a quantity of hundred-dollar bills. Some’s hop heads, but maybe they fool you and you don’t find that out till it’s too late. Now you got to squeeze as many paydays out of your doper that you can. Most times, you love your fighter like he’s kin, but with a goddamn doper you get to where you couldn’t give a bent nail.
Why shouldn’t I run things? the heavy’s eyes will glare. His nose is flared, his socks is soggy with sweat, his heart’s banging at his rib cage like it’s trying to bust out of jail. It’s ’cause he don’t understand that he can’t be the horse and the jockey. How could anyone as big and handsome and powerful and smart as me be wrong about anything? he will press. Under his breath he’s saying, And who’s big enough to tell me I’m wrong?
When that happens, your boy’s attitude is moving him to the streets, and you may have to let him go.
Not many fight fans ever see the inside of fight gyms, so they get to wondering what’s the deal with these big dummies who get all sweaty and grunty and beat on each other. Well, sir, they ain’t big dummies when you think big money. Most big guys in team sports figure there’s more gain and less pain than in fights, even if they have to play a hundred fifty games a year or more, and even if they have to get those leg and back operations that go with them. Some starting-out heavies get to thinking they ought to get the same big payday as major-league pitchers from the day they walk into the gym. Some see themselves as first-round draft picks in the NBA before they ever been hit. What they got to learn is that you got to be a hungry fighter before you can become a championship fighter, a fighter who has learned and survived all the layers of work and hurt the fight game will put on you. Good heavy-weights’re about as scarce as black cotton.
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