by Aura Xilonen
“Uh-huh,” I say absently, biting my lips, my mind far from my body.
Mr. Abacuc has an ancient Voyager van that he uses to transport supplies to keep the shelter going. He hardly ever drives it for personal use because he prefers walking; besides, he says the traffic in the city has gotten worse and worse since the seventh decade of the last century. “An old man can’t go through life being cursed at for driving too slowly by all these neurotic people. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Don’t forget to take this case,” Coach Truddy says as he anxiously places a black-and-yellow crate in the trunk of his own car, a 1981 automatic Ford Fairmont that he restored himself; it’s in mint condition. We’ve packed the crate full of all the boxing equipment we’ve been able to find. I also stuck in a pair of red shorts and an ancient T-shirt with the name of some gringo vato that I found in the boxes of winter donations. Mrs. Merche gave me a pair of athletic socks. “After all, your socks, which I’ve never seen you wear, have more holes in them than a colander. And without sockrags, feet stink like Gruyere cheese, ugh.”
Ms. Webber has an assignment too. With her arid eyes, she’s responsible for assembling the boys and girls who are going to go with us to the boxing match—“because Mrs. Marshall needs to show us off for the press” to demonstrate that her charity cases are flesh-and-blood and not just figments of her imagination.
“Remember to jump the rope with each syllable, kid, and don’t forget the other chants I taught you,” Mrs. Merche tells me as she places a basket of food in the front seat of the van, “so you don’t go around starving. Remember, as they say, ‘Full belly, happy heart.’” She’s going to stay behind and look after the shelter while the rest of us go to the Ford Foundation Center.
Naomi’s coming too. She is, she claims, the official cheer captain of Bridge House’s cheerleading squad. She’s made some little paper flags from pieces of old newspaper and they’ve painted them red, green, and blue. She tells her subordinates, “We’ve got to shout a lot and make a lot of noise, all right?”
“Like this?” asks a little lieutenant of about four, and then emits such a piercing shriek that we all turn to stare. “Aaaaaaaaaah!”
“Just like that!” Naomi says after she takes her fingers out of her ears.
“We also need to take a cooler of water,” the coach says.
“We don’t have any coolers, coach,” Mrs. Merche replies. “Let the rich people provide that.” She pulls out a couple of large empty bottles. “And if you can, have them send along a sack of sugar too.”
Mr. Abacuc goes into his office and comes out carrying a Kodak camera.
“Ms. Webber, do you think they still sell rolls of film for this camera?”
The teacher glances at the camera in Mr. Abacuc’s hands and says sarcastically, “They don’t even make that brand anymore.” She makes a sour face. “I think your best bet is rolls of bandages to bury this relic.” And she keeps giving the kids instructions. “Coach Truddy . . .” She calls to him and walks over to the Fairmont, where the coach is putting away the empty bottles of water.
I finish loading the cases into the rear of the van and settle down there. I take out the sheet of paper the trainer gave me this morning and read it again so I can memorize it: “No hitting below the waist. No head-butting. No kicking your opponent. No biting. No elbowing. No spitting. No hitting after the bell rings. No insults . . .” No, no, and no. “Fuck!” I say to myself again. “And I thought this was going to be easy.”
“Is everything loaded up, son?”
“Yes,” I tell the coach. “Though I don’t know if we’re missing something.”
“How are you feeling? Are you nervous?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? I was like jelly when I used to fight on the battleship.”
“How many times did you fight, coach?”
“Enough.”
“I don’t know how I feel. This boxing business sure has a lot of rules. Why are there so many?”
“So what happened to me won’t happen to you, son: debut and dismissal.”
The Ford Foundation Center looks small from the road. Naomi points it out to me from the passenger seat.
“There’s the Ford complex, Liborio.” We’ve got her wheelchair tied to the roof of the van.
Coach Truddy and the four oldest kids from the shelter are in the car in front of us. Mr. Abacuc is driving the Voyager, and there are eight of us in the back: three boys, four girls, and me.
The kid from the library looks at me as we turn at an intersection and continue onto a cobblestone drive with lights and splendid arches and decorated with neatly pruned trees. “Are you scared?”
“How can I be scared, Bambi, when nothing’s happening yet?”
“Oh . . .” He sits there with his mouth open, drooling a little.
Naomi exclaims, “Look! It’s the fountain of dancing lights!”
The kids stretch wildly and plaster themselves to the lefthand window. The fountain gets big and then little, and it has lights that make its guts glow: blue, purple, red, green, yellow, rose, oak, carnation, marmot. I, too, am amazed and nudge a kid to give me some room at the window until we reach the guardhouse of the complex.
We see Coach Truddy hand over his access pass to a guard, they give him instructions, and the automatic arm rises. He enters the complex. Then it’s our turn.
“Where are you going?” the guard asks.
“Where do you think? We’re from Bridge House and we’re here to win!” says Naomi, not mincing her words.
Mr. Abacuc hands over the invitation and the guard reads it.
“Keep going straight, sir, and park in front of walkway B.”
The arm goes up, and we go in.
The grounds are beautiful, full of green and lights. Large grassy lawns and planters filled with perennial flowers. Trees all in a row and ringed by white river stones and reddish bark. The paving stones are octagonal and perfectly suited to the landscape. The large dome of the foundation’s building looks huge now. Round and virginally white. We reach the parking area and Mr. Abacuc finds our assigned spot. There are already lots of cars, like at the mall.
He parks the van with a single movement of the wheel.
“Wow, we’re here, can you believe it?” says Mr. Abacuc as he raises the power windows and shuts off the van.
“Don’t open the doors till I get out,” directs Ms. Webber.
She gets out and then, yes, she opens the doors for us and we spill out of the van.
Two spots over, Coach Truddy is emerging from his Fairmont.
Ms. Webber lines the kids up in single file and instructs them to hold hands. She leads them out of the parking lot toward the main terrace.
Mr. Abacuc opens the trunk while I untie Naomi’s wheelchair and get it down from the roof, placing it on the ground next to the passenger door.
“Do you want me to help you, Naomi?” I ask.
“No thanks, Liborio, I can do it on my own.”
Naomi grabs on to the handle hanging from the roof, gathers momentum, and swings her legs out of the van. With some effort, she stands up and hovers there for a moment, then twists her body in the air and, like a genuine miracle, lowers her rear end into the wheelchair. Then she takes each of her legs in her hands and lifts them onto the footrests.
I’m staring at her like a monkey.
“You’re a force of nature,” I tell her, agape.
Naomi leans back in her chair and turns toward me.
She smiles.
“I hope you are too and win this fight. I’m just your cheer captain, you know!” she says. Then she goes over to Mr. Abacuc, picks up her box with the little flags, and puts it on her knees. She wheels herself toward Ms. Webber and the flock of kids.
I grab another box and go to help Coa
ch Truddy lower the box of whatsits we’ve brought. The coach has already dragged the kids over to the terrace. He leaves them there and comes back to the van. We pick up all our things and head over to the group.
“Follow me,” says Mr. Abacuc, leading the procession.
Naomi has already passed out the little paper flags to the kids, who start horsing around. Ms. Webber is carrying a flag too, though she’s waving it reluctantly. We move down the terrace until we reach a large passageway full of planters and fountains. Mr. Abacuc turns right, and we all follow him like a freight train being pulled by elephantious camellage.
We enter the ballroom, and my jaw drops. It’s an apollonian space, almost tragic in its circular beauty. All around it are Roman columns and capitals above marble friezes, like a modern pantheon built of gold and silver to bury Doña Blanca, like in the children’s song. The ceiling resembles the Sistine Chapel. Impressive windows sweep from the floor to the ceiling. The walls are hung with large portraits in gilded frames of prominent men and women who may all be dead, since they look really old and have lots of wrinkles around their eyes.
On the floor, which is paved with herculean slabs of stone, blue chairs are arranged around the ring, which rises, immense, in the middle of the splendid room. Some members of the cleaning crew, dressed in light-blue overalls and wearing name tags pinned to their chests, are putting the finishing touches on the floor, the air, and anything else that looks out of place.
I study the ring. It’s got blue in one corner and red in the other; the rest of it is white. Its ropes are black, and it’s skirted with swaths of blue, white, and red cloth with gold trim. In the middle, printed on the canvas, are a large ad for the Ford Foundation and smaller ads for Montblanc, Google, and a few dozen other companies whose names I can’t read because they’re upside down.
Below the ring are the tables covered with blue cloth where, Coach Truddy tells me, the judges usually sit. “But because today is an exhibition match, there will probably just be some members of the press sitting there.”
We keep walking until we reach a table with some dapper men in navy blue suits and red ties. Mr. Abacuc speaks to them. They tell him that we need to split up: the kids will go sit in a special area where the other children from the other shelters will be. The handicapped and retarded kids will be in front. The coach and I are supposed to go to one of the doors at the rear, they say, where you see those satin curtains with yellow lace. There, they continue, we’ll find the maintenance staff’s bathroom, which will serve as the dressing room today. Across the room are the tables where the dappers will eat dinner after the boxing event.
“If we get going,” says Mr. Abacuc, “we’ll make it on time.” He looks at his wristwatch. “Two minutes to five. Ms. Webber, please get the children seated. Coach, go with Liborio and explain everything to him again to make sure nothing goes wrong.” He turns to me. “Focus, son!” Then he speaks to the group. “In the meantime, I’ll go find Mrs. Marshall to let her know we’re here.”
“Don’t let that Medusa catch you off guard,” says Coach Truddy, looking around the room. “Remember our leaky roof.”
When I push open the bathroom door, I find three scruffs in shorts, a little taller than me, already jumping and stretching, rotating their wrists and opening and closing their jaws to warm up. Two old-timers are sitting in one corner, talking.
The fucking maintenance staff bathroom is bigger than Aireen’s entire apartment. Almost as big as the fucking bookstore. There are some gray lockers mounted on the wall and four wooden benches right in the middle. It has two showers, two toilets, and two urinals. One wall has a large, gleaming mirror above four sinks and a beige marble counter. Across the room are some large shelves stocked with cleaning equipment: brooms, squeegees, rags, mops, yellow wringer buckets, two huge vacuum cleaners, and two floor polishers. Beside them is a high counter with a table lamp, a bound notebook with a pen attached by a chain, and a black chair.
I keep walking and put down my box in a corner away from the others, Coach Truddy following me. He sets his box down on top of mine, his whole porkish bulk greasily steaming.
“Have you been here before?” he asks me, out of breath and gobstoppered.
“No, coach, this is the first time. What about you?”
He coughs to dislodge a bit of lint from his throat.
“I came here once, but I was only outside on the terrace, giving out food to people who’d been affected by Hurricane Katrina.”
He slumps down on one of the benches and stares at the guys who are hopping around a few yards away. From here, the angular muscles that mark their arms, neck, and chest are clearly visible. Not to mention their shins—their legs look like horses’. The two older guys are still chitchatting in the back. One is wearing a brown flat cap and the other’s hair is slicked back. I spot a black earring in his left ear.
“Are they going to be boxing too?” Coach Truddy blunders, like that, all of a sudden.
The younger vatos stare at him, baffled. To alleviate the tension, I attempt to make a joke out of what the coach has just said.
“No, coach, we’re here to play marbles.”
The vatos don’t react, but the other men do.
“What circuit are you from, gentlemen?” the one in the flat cap asks.
“Circuit? What circuit?” the coach blunders again.
“What equestrian club do you belong to, you dolts?” the earringed one says mockingly.
They burst out laughing.
The coach decides to exit the conversation and says to me, “You go ahead and get changed, son,” and then, more loudly so the others can hear him, “Just remember what I told you: I don’t want you psyching out your opponents.”
“What do you mean, coach? Didn’t you say the opposite before?” Now I’m the one who sticks his foot in it.
“Never mind, forget it.”
At that, the grape apes laugh openly at us.
As I’m taking off my shirt, three other scruffs about my size come in. Their greeting suggests they’ve all known one another for ages. They dump their bags on the ground.
Now shirtless, I don’t even try to flex my muscles like Chinese ticks to impress the dudes. What point would there be in pretending to have what anyone can see from miles off I don’t? I take out the T-shirt, which smells like creosote, and pull it on.
“Bill for Prez,” the coach reads the lettering on my donated shirt and then exclaims, “Take that prehistoric thing off! Don’t you have anything else, son?”
“What’s wrong, coach? This was the only one in the clothes boxes that didn’t have holes in it.”
“They’re going to destroy us.” He starts sweating hard.
“Why?”
“Everyone around here is a Republican. Jesus! Let’s see the shorts.”
I take the shorts out of the bag and show them to him.
“They’re red, like Mr. Abacuc told me to look for.”
“‘Sexy,’” he reads the pink embroidery across the ass of the fucking red shorts. “Shit, shit, shit.” He gets even more flushed. “They’re going to break us in half and then excommunicate us.”
At that moment the scruffs start laughing—they haven’t missed a bit of what the coach and I were saying. As they’re chortling, the bathroom door opens and three or four more guys come in. This is starting to feel like a bus station.
“What’s going on?” asks one of the newcomers, who’s got a tattoo cascading from his cheek down to his neck. “What’s the ruckus all about? Let us in on the joke, you fucking pandas.”
The man with the earring answers, snortling, “Seems like the heavens decided to send down a couple of clownettes for our entertainment. May I present the ‘Sexy Democrat’ and her ‘Fucking Mother.’” He guffaws again, even louder, viciously, excaustic. The others laugh uproariously at us.
Coach Tr
uddy hangs his head like a beaten dog. His cheeks are contrite and livid. He’s not much for conflict. I turn around to put on the red shorts, and one of the guys pinches my nipple.
“All right, mamacita, pull down those panties and suck my cock,” says the scruff in a rough Cuban accent.
They all burst out laughing in unison, like a goddamn alebrije circus.
His hand still on my chest, I stretch back like a fucking slingshot.
“Nobody touches me.” I don’t have to say anything else. I drive my fist toward his face and clock him in the chin.
He drops like a fucking flower with its petals stripped off.
And as quick as they started laughing, now they all fall abruptly into a deep silence that cuts the air.
“What a jab!” the guy with the flat cap interjects, yanking the hat off.
“You shut up!” the guy with the earring tells him as he dives toward the scruff sprawling on the floor. “Jara! Jara!” He slaps his cheek. “Wake up, Jara! . . . Jara! . . . Get the doctor. Jara! . . . Jara! Wake up, goddammit. Get up, damn it, you’re in the first fight!” He looks up at me and rakes my peepers with a murderous glance. “We’re all screwed now, thanks to you, you fucking Indian.”
* * *
[“Have you ever cheated on your missus, Jefe?”]
The doctor hurries in with a dapper in a red tie.
“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourselves into this time, warriors?”
He sees the guy sprawling on the floor and quickly bends down and starts checking his vital signs.
“Bring a stretcher. We need to get him to the hospital immediately.”
“Is he going to be O.K.?” asks one of the scruffs.
“I don’t know,” says the doctor. “What happened here?”
“He slipped and fell,” the earringed guy says before anyone else can speak.