The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  “People change, you symphonic idget.”

  “No, Jefe, some people never change.”

  The October 17 flight was over pretty quickly. Only Mr. Abacuc, Naomi, and the coach went with me to the Dorvac Forum. Double-U was going to look for me there. She’d just published an article in the Sun about an unknown dark horse who was going to make the Latino community in the United States feel proud of its blood, its language, its skin color. She wrote such flattering things about me that I didn’t recognize myself in the article. I passed it on to Naomi, who insisted on reading it.

  “I’m already proud of you,” she told me when she finished.

  The dressing rooms were different from the luxurious ones at the Ford Foundation Center. This room was larger but much more crowded. It was like a mini-gym, and we were all crammed in like turkeys. Mr. Abacuc had gone to find seats in the front row for him and Naomi in her wheelchair. Coach Bald led me down the dark corridors. All we were carrying was a small suitcase.

  “This is all you need,” he said. “That’s why we were making fun of you and Coach Truddy when you came in that day—you looked like you were moving house.”

  “Do you miss your brother?” I asked.

  “Sometimes, but now that we don’t work together we get along better.”

  “Have you ever been married, Coach Bald?”

  “No, boy, I never have. I was with a lot of women, of course, when I was young. You know, I had a promising future, and when you’ve got victory by your side, you always have lots of friends of both sexes. But once you experience your first setbacks, everyone runs away from you like you’re the plague.”

  I was going to be competing in the flyweight youth category, the lightest category, because of my malnourished weight, against a dark vato who was barely able grow a mustache and who was clearly very pissed off, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger.

  “Watch out for that guy,” Coach Bald told me. “He’s been training since he was nine years old. He’s Ruder Soch’s son—do you know who that is?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a former professsional boxer who goes around promoting his son all over the place. He wants to make him a champion. He taught him lots of dirty tricks, so watch out, boy. I’ve seen that guy fight.”

  “Does he know who I am?”

  “How could he, when this is your first fight on this amateur circuit?”

  “So I’ve got the advantage, right, coach?”

  We were the second fight of the night.

  As soon as the bell rang, the guy tried to plant a fist in my face, but I quickly ducked it and then threw an uppercut, putting all the weight of my body behind it. I barely grazed the tip of his chin, I swear, but the kid writhed and fell back against the ropes like a rag on a clothesline and hung there even after the referee counted down the ten seconds. It took three guys to pull him down and take him off to the hospital with all of his teeth knocked out.

  “Well done, boy,” the coach told me as Naomi waved more paper pennants. She was wearing a wig she’d made out of newspaper to proudly represent the entire cheerleading squad, which hadn’t been able to come. “First fight won less than twenty seconds into the first round.”

  They gave me a participation medal and a certificate, which Naomi hung up in our library. We now had twenty books, since I’d bought twelve—a hundred twenty dollars’ worth—from Jefe.

  Back in the dressing room, the coach started putting our equipment away.

  “Your next fight is on November 9th, boy.”

  “Isn’t there anything sooner?” I asked, wanting everything to happen faster.

  “Don’t be hasty, boy, we’re just getting started here.”

  Naomi, Mr. Abacuc, and Double-U were waiting for us at the exit. Double-U was wearing a skirt and high heels under a leather jacket.

  “Congrats, champion.” Double-U leaped into my arms, kissed me on the cheek, then spun around. “Look who I found.”

  “That’s right,” says Mr. Abacuc.

  “He’s the one who helped you when those scruffs or whatever you call them beat you up.”

  “She’s very generously donating more books to the library,” Naomi says excitedly.

  “And not just books, kid,” says Double-U. “I’m also going to write an article about the work the shelter’s doing. Hopefully someone important will read it and things will start looking up.”

  “You’re very kind, Miss Wendoline,” says Mr. Abacuc.

  “Not at all, I see now that there are lots of us fighting on the same side, but we don’t know each other so we could never help one another before.”

  “It’s true,” Mr. Abacuc says.

  “Hey,” I say to Double-U, “this is Coach Bald.”

  The coach takes off his flat cap and holds out his hand.

  “Oh, I see why you call him that,” Double-U giggles. “Pleased to meet you, Coach Shaggy.”

  Coach Bald and Double-U started seeing each other in early November, but I remained oblivious for a while till I put it all together.

  “Tactical preparedness means being able to anticipate what’s going to happen in the future,” Coach Bald told me as I rested after a series of imaginary defenses and counterattacks. A couple of days earlier, the coach had brought me a sparring partner he’d borrowed from his brother Sergi’s gym, and instead of telling the new guy to hit me gently “so you don’t hurt the boxer,” he said to me, “For the love of God, don’t put him in the hospital.” But I swear, I barely bumped his stomach with a cross and the guy doubled over at the waist as if I’d given him a case of the runs. Coach had to take him back to his brother and hastily promise never to bring me to the sparring sessions because I was laying out all Sergi’s chickens. So Coach Bald himself started putting on the face mask, a baseball umpire’s chest guard, and the gloves to make me dodge all kinds of punches.

  At the end of the training, as we were drinking water, he asked, “So where’s that lady jokester of yours from?”

  “She lives on the other side of the city.”

  “Huh.” And that was the end of it.

  When Double-U called me up to tell me to read the article she’d just published in the Sun about the Dorvac Forum fight, she asked, “Is that bald guy really a coach? He looks more like a low-rent hobbit.”

  “Well, he knows a lot about boxing. I don’t know if you need some kind of certificate for this boxing thing. Do you?”

  “I don’t know, papi. But I’m coming to the shelter tomorrow with a photographer for an interview.”

  “What time?”

  “I’m not sure, we’ll see. Whenever the photographer’s free.”

  “All right, I’ll let Mr. Abacuc know.”

  “O.K.,” she said before hanging up. “Oh, and don’t forget to read the article—I hope you like it.”

  I went to Naomi and asked her to use the iPod Touch to look on the Sun’s web page for Double-U’s article: “Chronicle of the Birth of a Latino Hero” by Wendoline Wood.

  When Double-U arrived, the coach and I were practicing some combinations on the crazy bag, a small bag that’s attached to the ceiling and floor by a stretchy cord and that goes wherever it feels like it when you punch it. The coach had told me, “Use your intuition, boy, not logic. Intuit where the crazy bag’s going to go and throw it a jab and then a cross. Jab and cross. Then you smash it with a hook and finish it off with an uppercut. That way we’ll increase your speed for offense and defense. You’ve got something in your genes that’s been smiled on by the gods.”

  “That’s what I like to see, papi!” Double-U shrieked as she strode into the gym. “Get a photo of him training.”

  The photographer comes up and points his camera at me and the coach.

  “No, man, just get the kid. The other guy ruins the photo, and this is going on the front page.”
r />   Coach Bald steps to one side so the photographer can get photos just of me.

  “Are you always this rude?” Coach Bald asks her.

  Double-U spins around to look at him disdainfully.

  “No, coach, sometimes I’m worse.” She turns her attention to me. “Papi, act like you’re punching that bag and flex all your muscles so the veins in your arms and neck pop out. That’s it, like that, don’t breathe.”

  I’m suffocating. The photographer gets a few more shots. Then he puts me on the bleachers and primps me like I’m a magazine model. He arranges my gloves in front and tidies my sweaty hair. He throws a little water on my chest and takes another photo.

  “You look sick,” Coach Bald tells Double-U.

  “I do?” Double-U falters a bit for the first time and smooths her wig.

  “You clearly need to go to bed.”

  “Bed?”

  “Yes, so somebody can give you a good screw.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Witch.”

  “Did you read Miss Wendoline’s article?”

  “No, Naomi. Did it come out already?”

  “Yes, she let Mr. Shine know just a little bit ago. He just told me.”

  “What does it say?”

  “All good things. It says we’re a shelter that’s full of hope. That we have faith and goodwill. It says wonderful things about Mr. Shine. There’s even a quote from Ms. Webber. Look: ‘We’re like a big family, and though my husband is still convalescing at home, we’ve tried to make this world a better place.’ Mrs. Merche’s in there too, and all of us. Look: ‘. . . and sitting in a wheelchair is Naomi, the little girl who wants to be a lawyer when she grows up and who, with Liborio, has been the driving force behind setting up the shelter’s Liberty and Nature Library. She hopes to receive donations so that all the children will be able to read (coloring books accepted too) and improve themselves and achieve success.’ It also talks about you, and there’s a photo of you on the page. Look: ‘ . . . and, as we wrote in our previous article, this is where our humble hero is from, the young man who, through his hard work and initiative, has shown that heroes can be born anywhere on Earth and into any circumstances.’”

  “Does it say anything about me?” Coach Bald asked when I showed him the article.

  “No, coach. Not a word.”

  “I can’t stand that hag.”

  “Come on, she’s not that bad.”

  “No, no, she’s not bad at all. She’s just liver and onions.”

  The next day Naomi came in while I was straightening up the kids’ room and fixing the shelf for their stuffed animals; it had fallen down when the little runts were playing Tarzan and dangling from it, paying for their fun with a lump and a scrape.

  “Come on, hurry!” Naomi said, her face shiny.

  Immediately I thought there’d been an accident, so I ran down to the entrance—but no, outside they were unloading two boxes from a truck.

  “Is anything wrong, Mr. Abacuc?”

  “Not at all, Liborio. They’ve come to drop off some books.”

  “They should have brought some bags of sugar instead,” Mrs. Merche grumbles.

  “Listen to the note, everybody: ‘Sometimes it’s good to give an imperfect memory a little nudge. Mrs. Dorothy Marshall. P.S. I read the article in the Sun News and I liked it.’” The kids, Naomi, and I jump for joy.

  “Wahoo!” We all leap into the air, and even though the littlest kids don’t know how to read, they join in with our celebration.

  “Seeing is believing,” says Ms. Webber.

  “Let’s put them inside,” says Mr. Abacuc.

  I grab one of the boxes, everybody gathers around to help push it because it’s really heavy.

  We make it to the library. Naomi can’t wait any longer and opens it right up.

  There are books of all kinds: for coloring, for beginning readers, for advanced readers, an encyclopedia. There are also games for kids. Some wooden jigsaw puzzles. Some boxes of colored pencils. Pens and markers. Watercolors. Boxes of paintbrushes. Sketchpads. Rulers and erasers.

  “Let’s open the other one,” Naomi cries, and all the little girls and boys shriek with excitement.

  We all go outside and bring it in—we look like laborers hauling on the final stone for the Tower of Babel.

  Naomi opens it. We all stand there with our mouths open: Mr. Abacuc, Mrs. Merche, Ms. Webber, Naomi, the oldest kids, and, why not, the littlest kids too.

  The box contains four sealed packages with apples on them that say, in large letters, “iMac.”

  “What are they?” Mrs. Merche asks anxiously.

  “I have no idea,” replies Mr. Abacuc. “But they look really beautiful.”

  “They’re computers,” says Naomi, practically drooling.

  “Sweet Jesus, we’re finally going to enter the twenty-first century,” sighs Ms. Webber as she helps Naomi unpack one of the machines.

  The library looked phenomenal when we were finished, all stentorian. We had, as Ms. Webber said, totally reengineered the room. I installed some shelves on the left-hand side all in a row so the books would be right there when you entered the library. Naomi counted up a total of five hundred twenty-one books including our original twenty volumes. I helped her decide how to organize them. “After all,” I teased her, “who’s the expert here, huh?”

  We put the games, paints, and art supplies on the right-hand side. And under the shelves I used some boards left over from the chicken coops to build some little worktables for the kids. I made benches out of some of the leftover roofing materials and screwed them down so the kids could perch on them like birds on a wooden wire.

  In the rear I built some tables that Ms. Webber requested for the computers. I made tabletops with part of a piece of furniture that was missing two of its legs that I turned upside down. I attached a crosspiece and then installed it, fastening it to the wall with some steel brackets I took from another piece of furniture that I used for parts for the computer desks.

  “But you guys should set them up,” I told Naomi. “I don’t know anything about technology.”

  I plugged in an extension cord, and they started unpacking the monitors and keyboards.

  “Where are the cables?”

  “Oh, Liborio, these are wireless now.”

  “Well, the only one of these I ever used was the one in Jefe’s office, and it had cables everywhere and its screen was green and the only thing on it was the list of the books we sold in the bookstore.”

  “That’s so prehistoric!” She laughs loudly, showing her missing teeth.

  After a few hours, the library has been transformed. Mr. Abacuc has brought the floor lamp from his office and made a formal donation to the largest and only library ever established at Sun Bridge House.

  “Now we have to have the grand opening,” says Naomi.

  “She’s right,” chimes in Mrs. Merche, who also helped out earlier sanding the kids’ little worktables (“Even though it’s pointless,” she said, “because they’re going to end up even more scratched up than they were already”).

  Mr. Abacuc brings some string from his office and stretches it from a nail to one of the door handles at the entrance.

  “Now all together we’re going to pull on it to inaugurate our beautiful library.”

  “Wait, wait!” shouts Naomi through the uproar. “We have to take a photo with the iPod Touch.”

  She stands in front of the group to take a selfie. All of us are standing with our backs to the camera, our hands on the string. She says, “All right, on the count of three. One, two . . . three.”

  She takes the selfie with her in front, smiling, happy. And all of us behind her, breaking the string, looking into the camera.

  Naomi and I made a deal. I would tell her what books I thought were the best one
s so she could start reading as soon as possible, and she would show me how to peck at the keys on the computer.

  “All right, Liborio, you type here and then you go there and open up a window so you can log in. O.K.?”

  “And then what?”

  “You put in your details and provide a password.”

  “A what?”

  “A secret word that only you know.”

  “You’re sure this is right?”

  “Pshaw. You don’t watch TV. Everybody has Facebook and Twitter now. This is what computers are like these days.”

  “We should read books and leave this stuff to the robots.”

  “Well, you can do that too. Look, you can use this link to download two million books. Which one do you want?”

  “But that’s not the same as having a paper copy that I can read in bed without having to plug it in.”

  “All right, fine, don’t get agitated. Which book should I start with?”

  “Well, you should start with the picture books at first, otherwise you’ll just fall asleep.”

  “But I’m not a little kid.”

  “All right, fine, read Don Quixote if you want, that’s your call.”

  “Hey, Liborio,” Naomi said to me two days after starting Don Quixote de la Mancha. “What do encomium, visage, appertain, refulgent, sow-gelder, vouchsafe, redress, and vermilion mean?”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me too, because I can’t make heads or tails of this stuff. What’s googling, re-tweeting, texting, hashtag, hyperlink, emoticon, and emoji?”

  During the last week of October, as I was coming back from running in Wells Park and slipping another note under Aireen’s door, I saw Coach Bald’s car go by. He was driving like a bat out of hell.

  “Hey, coach, I saw you driving by this morning on Seventh headed toward the highway junction. You were going pretty fast.”

  “I wasn’t going. I was coming back from the hills. I went up to voice my complaints to the hag.”

  “Why?”