The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  “Hey, puto,” I suddenly hear behind me. “You like throwing down to defend asses that don’t belong to you, huh?”

  I crane my neck around to see who’s touched my shoulder, just in time to see a coppery fist coming at my cheek at light speed. I don’t even have a chance to helmet my eyes. Gobsmacked, I’m knocked from the bench onto my ass on the ground. I see little stars and feel blood start streaming out of my mouth and onto my chest.

  “Fucking wetback!” continues the yup with the flowers, the chickadee’s puppitonic one true love, the one who was hitting on her left and right. “You think you’re real macho, fucking ass-robber. Who the fuckety-fuck gave you permission to go around defending culos that ain’t yours, huh?”

  “Oh, shit, motherfucker,” a guerrilla scruff shouts, running up when he sees me sprawled on the pavement covered in mole sauce, “beat the shit out of that motherfucker.”

  I don’t know how many of them are crowding around to kick the shit out of me, but I feel an army of prickly ants kicking me all over. I just shield my goods and curl up in the narrow space between their feet. From there I see the cars still rolling by, and for a moment the universe fills up with their blows. One, two, three, four, a thousand, eight thousand.

  “Leave him alone, cabrones.” A shout soars over the herd of dicks. The kicking suddenly ceases.

  “If I ever see you near my pussy again, fucking wetback,” the austral yup hisses at me, “I’ll kick you in the balls so hard, you’ll end up coughing them up.” He gives me one last wallop and heads out of the knot that is gradually disappearing behind my lowering headlight covers. The scruffs slope off and scatter as quickly as they appeared.

  “Are you all right, son?” asks a man with a gray beard as he hands me a handkerchief. He squats down next to me and stares at me as if trying to penetrate the river of blood flowing from my crown to my roots. “Madre santa, you look like a post-Passion Christ! They really gave you what for.”

  I take the cloth from his hands and start mopping up the blood mixed with sweat that’s tattooed across my forehead.

  “Are you hurt anywhere else besides your head?”

  I say no with my noggin. I suck at my mouth, yes, my blossoming mouth, but I’m not missing any teeth. One of my ribs hurts, and one shin, my eyelids, my hair, under my fingernails, under my tongue, but I’ll survive or whatever.

  * * *

  [My godmother always said to me when I’d show up with my headlights battered in, all brambled: “Bad weeds never die, you goddamn thug.” Because down in Mexico the only way you survive is by fighting. That’s why I came up here; I was sick and tired of wiping my nose with dirt and chewing on the earth’s entrails.]

  “Hold on, son, take your time getting up,” the man says when the knot finally dissolves completely. I think they were even recording me with their fucking cell phones, fucking assholes, and I don’t want to keep being a rug for their eyes. I stand up, and the man grabs my arm when I stagger as an oceanic surge of nausea laps at me. “You’d better sit down before you hurt yourself again.” I obey and sprawl on the bus bench. My temples are still pounding at a hundred fifty miles an hour. “Do you have any family you can call?” I stare at him in a stupor, utterly temerical. I shake my head again. “Let’s see,” the man says, scrupulizing me. “You’ve just got some bruises and a few scratches. Take a couple of aspirin, apply some ointment and a couple of butterfly bandages, and you’ll start looking like yourself again in a few days’ time. Do you have a place to stay?” I shake my head for a third time, shrugging my shoulders. “Well then, why don’t you come with me, son? You can stay at my place for a couple of days and we’ll figure out what to do with you after that.” I look at him with deep suspicion, hardened from all those brawls, tempered by the boiling oil I’ve been sizzling in. “Let’s go,” the man breaks in, noting in my eyes all the fear, all the rage, all the resentment tamped down at the bottom of my soul, ready to go off at any moment and blow everything to fucking hell. “Come now, son,” he bleats, “the world isn’t as bad as it seems. There’s always hope, boy, there’s always that, oh yes,” he tells me passiflorally. He’s quiet a moment, looking at me with his druilic eyes, and then holds out his hand to help me up. “I’m Mr. Abacuc,” he says. “What’s your name, kid?”

  Yes, they’ve left me stratospherically muddled; my headlights are burned out, racooned, straticated like a fucking panda. Black and blue. Turkeyfied. Back in my hometown they’d say I’ve got peeperitis, or what the fuck ever—like the green-eyed monster, shit. I can barely see where my peepers are reaching out their claws to touch things. My ears are asymmetrically buzzing, endecibelled by my ass-whuppative encounter with the addos. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a red bus pulling up at the bus stop; part of the knot that watched me getting beaten up by the scruffs and the yup climbs on, and another knot of citizens gets off and scatters like fucking ants in a downpour.

  The city’s still moving. Everything revolves in its toothless, pointillated gears, like a huge wheel that crushes everything in its path.

  “Liborio,” I tell the man as I pass his handkerchief, smeared with a sheen of bloody snot, back toward his outstretched hand.

  “Keep it, kid,” he says pythagorously, his smile obtuse. “Crazy old fucker,” I think, “who would help someone just for the hell of it?” There’s always got to be something super shady, dirty, yeah, or whatever in people, something canned, filthy, and foul, where the flies are bigger than vultures, flies as huge as swine. “It’s O.K., kid,” Mr. Abacuc continues. “Here”—and he holds out a couple of ten-dollar bills. “Buy yourself some ibuprofen and some lidocaine cream and a box of Überkrauz butterfly bandages.”

  “What?” I’m dumbfounded.

  “I’d better write it down for you—you’re clearly out of it. And I’ll give you my address too, in case you ever need a place to stay.” He pulls a pen out of his coat, tears a small flyer off the telephone pole next to the bus stop, and scrawls on the back while asking me, “What were you fighting over—a girl?” and then waves it in front of my swollen nose along with the grubby bills.

  “Are you loonytunes, Mr. Fruitcake?” I want to know whether I should kick him in the balls with my remaining strength and then take off running with my window shades only half open, even if I end up smacking right into a telephone pole.

  “What?” He keeps smiling.

  “Yeah, you old goat, are you fucking nuts?”

  “Ha-ha-ha, oh, no, no, no. At my age, that would be crazy.”

  I look at him a moment, my eyes blurring. Then I grab the bills and the slip of paper and stuff them in a secret place in my belt, next to my mother’s locket.

  “Perfect,” he says. “Hope you feel better soon.”

  He turns and starts walking across the street.

  “Hey,” I yell, my voice cavernous from the pain in my ribs. “Do you believe in God?”

  Mr. Abacuc stops, half turns toward me, and answers with an unwrinkled smile, “No, do you?” Then he keeps going and disappears around the chickadee’s corner. I keep standing there, frazzled, as cars drive past. I don’t want to move. I wish there were a leaf that would carry me into orbit where I could stay, nestled among the fucking stars.

  * * *

  [“But dreams are just dreams,” Jefe once told me when I said to him:

  “Sure, why not, one day I’d like to have a family of little runts playing soldier together—yeah, munchkins all over the house and courtyard, if I ever manage to have a house—a wife and brats, and collect, my hands overflowing, all the fucking bullshit people spend their time with when they’re trying to fend off boredom as they geriatrify.”

  “Hoo-hoo-hoo,” chortled Jefe. “But you’re hideous, you rancid pain-in-the-ass motherfucker. Who the hell’s going to want to tap that ass?”

  Rattled, I didn’t say anything, morticated by the thought that other people see me
as a loser. What if God doesn’t actually exist and we’re just shabby particles floating in time, destined only to destroy one another? I often wonder that, especially when trouble reaches out and shits my pants and my godmother, whom I always called auntie, used to box my ears to make me memorize the psalms.

  “This way you can grow up to be an upstanding, respectable man without all this shady stuff,” she’d say. And I’d blow her off; the priest and his catatonic pretentiousness, that useless prude, that perverted crotch-tickler, could kiss my . . .

  Who the hell wants to become a clergyman and be chaste his whole damn life?

  I asked him that one day during catechism. “Father Terán, how often do you manhandle your balls?”

  He gave me an unholy smack upside the cranium. Then he sent for my godmother, and the two of them blessed me with a peppertree branch.

  “I can’t put up with you anymore; you scram right now or I’ll have them put you in jail,” my aunt, who was not my aunt but my godmother, told me not long after that. And so I was run off without a thing, to a life of filth, to skid row, to al fresco under-bridge dwelling, to the hard place as a splintered rock. With my posse, crammed in there among the stoners and losers and brawlers.

  “You’ve gotta get out of here or you’re not gonna wake up tomorrow,” I’d tell myself sometimes, in the shadow of the backstitched streetlights, staring at my bloody hands.]

  But what of it. I’ve made it through to the other side now. That’s all over. It’s over? I raise the bloody handkerchief to my nose again; luckily, I’ve always been made of concrete. Not even mosquitoes could pierce my donkey flesh, or at least, thanks to the elephant skin I wear fitted like a glove, I never noticed when my blood became flying droplets inside their buggy bellies. Just then a white truck slowly pulls up in front of me and a lady in a hat and sunglasses calls to me in a constipated voice from inside it:

  “Hey, vato, get in.” She opens the door. I’m not sure if she’s talking to me, so I ipsofacto as an ignoramus. “Come on, man,” she says, “don’t be scared.”

  I keep sitting there, mulish, because things go sideways when you stick your foot in before your noodle. Seeing that I’m not budging, she closes the door of her boat and yells, sounding like an influenzal firefly, “I saw how you took that beating without flinching.” A few cars start honking wildly behind her. “Blow me, hijos de puta, if you can!” she yells at the drivers. Then she turns back to me: “You’re a real fucker of a motherfucker, huh? How old are you, kidlet?”

  “What the fucking shit do you care?” I finally answer to chill her out, wanting her to leave my life the same way she came into it.

  “Fine, then, sassbucket, I’ll come back later when you’ve calmed down and we can conversate. You work there, right?” She points at the bookstore. I ignore her. “All right, kidlet”—she takes out a camera and points it at me. Before the flash goes, I flip her the bird. “Hasta luego, güey,” she says, and laughs screechily. “Bwa-ha-ha”—she snorts—“bwa-ha-ha-ha.”

  She starts up her truck and takes off, eventually blending into the horizon of speeding cars. I turn my head toward the bookstore and see Jefe, his back to me, staring down at the floor. He didn’t notice a thing. I imagine in the face of his own tragedy, all other tragedies are minuscule to him.

  Should I go see Jefe’s missus, or should I go back and lick my balls in the bookstore? I get on a red bus that’s just pulled up in front of me, pay my fare, and zoom like a rocket toward the back row, where brutes like me tend to go so we don’t frighten the blacks and whites—because we’re gray, and gray here is a sort of limbo cut off from both God and the Devil.

  “What happened to you, kid?” the missus asks me the moment she opens the door to her casa.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” I say. “There’s been an attack on the bookstore.”

  She hops back like a frog; she brings a hand up to her chest and starts falling to bits like a wobbly pile of rocks.

  * * *

  [She wasn’t mean to me. In fact, she would give me a little food sometimes when she was in the city. She even bought me some jeans and a shirt with the bookstore logo embroidered on it and a pair of low boots a few months back, not expensive ones, but more comfortable than my huaraches.

  “Go on, take it, kid, we don’t want you going around looking all tattyraggled!”]

  So before the missus hits the ground, I grab her by one wing and help her fall, like a plucked chicken. With her lying there in her sweats, her breath clucky, I roll her inside the house. Her little misters must be at school. What do I do? Like a moron, I grab a bottle from where they’ve got a little bar and an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I unscrew the lid and start tipping the contents down the missus.

  “I’m dying,” she immediately crows, cramped coughs bouncing from her throat out to the backyard—the yard where Jefe grills his American-as-apple-pie hot dogs. “Vodka, you bird-brain? Are you trying to kill me?” the missus says when the coughing fit’s over, and snatches the bottle from me. Yeah, well, what the fuck do I know about resuscitation, just that a dead man once got up and walked, with worms, I imagine, crawling in and out of his skin.

  I help her up and a few minutes later we’re in her truck, heading for the bookstore. “Why didn’t you call my cell?” the missus asks once we’re on the freeway. She keeps dialing Jefe’s number. In the distance, the city looks glassily blue, lapis lazuli, drowsy from afar, its virous swarms hidden inside it. The tall buildings look like pillars—herculeonic, atlantidous—that hold up birds in flight, those birds I finally saw last autumn as they were leaving Wells Park, soaring high above me toward who knows where. “And did they point guns at you or what? Did they beat you up? Is my husband badly hurt? How many were there? Did you call the police? Why didn’t he call me? I’m going to call the kids’ school. Oh, their godmother can go pick them up. Yes! What else happened? Do you know who they were? What time did it happen? Did anyone help you? And has anyone taken a look at those bruises of yours? How many attacked you? Holy Mother of God! Oh, kid, if anything’s happened to my husband, I’ll just die.”

  The missus isn’t exaggerating—she truly loves him, loves him with every bit of her, as we could see, smell, and feel in her baskets of food, her hyperbolic caresses, and her pozole kisses.

  * * *

  [“Look, you little prick,” Jefe once told me at his house, at the second or third barbecue he invited me to, when tequila was already strangling his tongue, “you see that old broad? That old broad is my lady, you greasy little prick—but you know that already, don’t you? See her? And you know what? She loves me, she loves me; I know it, hand to God, here in my heart, I know it. And you know what? I love her too. Otherwise . . . For her, for her I’d, I’d do . . .” And Jefe just stood there, rapt, agog, staring at his empty glass of tequila.

  Later the crazy Argentine came up and sat down next to me. Jefe loves betting with him on all kinds of things and used to invite him to all his ragers.

  “You’re the guy who helps him out at the bookstore, right?”]

  We cross over the last freeway and enter the city. The missus turns on the third cross street and heads toward downtown. We pass the shopping center overflowing with McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, 7-Eleven, Sam’s Club, Domino’s, a Cinemark movie theater, and ads for Coca-Cola, Western Union, FedEx, UPS, Apple, and Microsoft.

  We bend left and skid onto the street where the bookstore is, burning rubber from sixty to zero in no time flat. She parks in a space out front and tumbles out in a frenzy, racing toward the store. I stagger after her.

  The door of the bookstore is ajar, the books are still strewn around, and I see that the bookcases have been knocked over again. The lights are still on like fucking turn-of-the-century ghosts.

  “Virgen María! Mi amor! Cariño!” The missus’s shrieks scatter all over.

  “Jefe! Jefe! Jefe!�
� I shout behind her, like an off-tempo echo.

  “Where’s my husband, kid?” the missus asks. I shrug my shoulders and stand there, fucking zombificated. “Did he tell you he was going to report it? Was he going to go to the police station? What did he say? You guys called the police, right?” she asks again. With every blink, her eyes are turning into red, swollen pools, into sharp, toadish lines under her neat eyebrows. “The loft!” She heads up the little staircase while I look for Jefe in the basement for the fourth or fifth time. Maybe he’s wrapped up next to his fucking books of love poems like a goddamn cocoon, filling up with worms; or maybe he’s in the bathroom, jammed in the drain by cowardly rage—because I know fear and bile change the way we smell; temper makes our phlegms oily, ambrous, viscous, bloody. But dogs can sense fear, and that’s why they bite like crazy when your pores sprout feathers.

  “No, there’s no sign of him.”

  Jefe seems to have ghosted away.

  I go out the bookstore’s broken door, but there’s nothing. I stop in its outline. The people are walking past like they always do, looking only at their feet with their eyes lowered or with their cell phones enmeshed between their heads and their hands. In that moment in the air, in the intemperance of the chaos of that awful day or whatever, my face starts prickling again like hundreds of little stingers going off; I sure am banged up, I think, but it’ll pass.

  Outside, evening is coming on in squally torrents. The sun’s lowered its angles and is heading out, as it does every day, bouncing orange among the cirrus clouds. The cars are still going by. The scruffs are starting to emerge from their lairs. The chicas are swinging their behinds like pieces of expansive, miniskirtish waves. The bookstore’s totally destroyed and no one’s gawking? What’s wrong with this goddamn world?