The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  “Didn’t you see what she wrote about me?”

  “No.”

  “Here, look.” He took a folded newspaper out of his bag and held it out to me.

  “. . . while some, like the dedicated people at Sun Bridge House, do honorable work and prove that not all hope for humanity is lost, other freeloaders try to figure out what benefit they can extract from the generosity of their betters . . .”

  “See?” he said, irritated, the veins on his bald scalp popping out.

  “But coach, it doesn’t say it’s you. It just says freeloaders.”

  “That’s exactly what the hag said when I complained.”

  “And why do you think she’s talking about you?”

  “Because I went to her lousy newspaper to complain a few days ago. . .”

  “What were you going to complain about that time?”

  “I wanted to know why she hadn’t written about me in her first article.”

  “Oh, coach.”

  At the end of October I noticed that the bookstore had turned into something else.

  A large sign high on the front of the building said “Word’s Coffee.” The mesh had been removed and they’d installed some windowboxes in its place. The sidewalk in front had been set with paving stones; above the front entrance was a curved awning with a lantern on either side. The wooden doors were wide, with beveled glass. The large windows were covered with a dark film so you couldn’t see the interior. A large Halloween decoration announced that the grand opening would be on the evening of October 31st.

  “And what are we going to do that night?” Naomi asked Mr. Abacuc.

  “Same thing as always, honey.”

  “What’s the same thing as always?” I asked.

  “Set up an altar for the dead.”

  I had the idea of inviting them separately.

  “Invited to what, sassbucket?”

  “A Halloween party.”

  “Is that Bald idiot going to be there?”

  “No, he’s going away with his wife.”

  “He’s married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Abacuc wants to know if you’re coming to the Halloween party.”

  “Where is it going to be?”

  “Here, coach.”

  “Did you invite that painted hag?”

  “What painted hag?”

  “Forget it. I’ll see if I can make it.”

  I went to Aireen’s apartment again. I knocked hard—no answer. I wanted to invite her to the shelter’s Halloween party. I needed to see her. I’d been dreaming about her for days. I dreamed about her everywhere: in the library, smiling; in the gym, sitting on the bleachers; in the bookstore, her behind the counter and me buying jugs of water; in the loft, crouching down because the light had gone out; I dreamed she was in the main hall at the Ford Foundation Center, decked out in beautiful dresses that turned into wings. I also dreamed that she was in Wells Park, swimming in the fountain in a downpour, and an enormous ship was approaching and I was trying desperately to stop the ship, and just as it was about to run her down, bam!, I woke up in a sweat. The clock said 3:40. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I got up and started writing an invitation to the party on October 31st.

  The preparations for the Halloween party started on the day itself. Mr. Abacuc brought tissue paper to make little skulls.

  “In Mexico people put out food for the dead on an altar so they can come and eat as much as they like.”

  “I know, that’s what Father Terán used to do at church.”

  “Who’s Father Terán?” Naomi asked.

  “A really crazy vato,” was all I answered.

  “Well, here we’re going to combine it with Halloween, because death shouldn’t be so serious,” Naomi replied. “Right, Mr. Shine?”

  “That’s right, Naomi. Death shouldn’t be so serious.”

  I set up some cardboard boxes we had left over after unpacking our books, and we covered them with a white tablecloth that Mrs. Merche pulled out for us. On top of them we laid out the tissue paper in a variety of colors—purples, pinks, whites, greens, blues, yellows, reds—and then fruit that Mrs. Merche reluctantly contributed.

  “That fruit is going to get all full of bugs,” she said, “but if it’s for the dead, all right, they shouldn’t care if it’s got a few extra worms. But if it’s for the living, careful you don’t make yourselves sick!” She snickered.

  We put candleholders at each corner.

  “Does this have anything to do with God, Mr. Abacuc?”

  “Death is really more an affair of men and worms than of anyone else.”

  “So why do you set all this up? Do the ghosts come eat?”

  “Just because I’m not religious doesn’t mean I can’t tell when to throw a party. Remember, even the worst party is still much better than the greatest war. Plus, I love sugar skulls.”

  “So do you celebrate Christmas too, even though you don’t believe in God?”

  “I do, son.”

  At five in the afternoon, everything was ready for the Halloween party. The altar was a thing to behold, the marigolds lit by votive candles. We were a bit rushed to get our costumes ready though. I’d told them we’d go out into the street to ask people for our calaverita, but Naomi stared at me with saucer eyes.

  “What are you talking about, asking for our calaverita?”

  “You know, asking people in the street to give you coins and then buying something with them.”

  “What planet are you from, Liborio?”

  “That’s how we did it in my village. I’d take a shoebox and poke holes in it for eyes and a mouth, put a lit candle inside it, and go out every Day of the Dead to collect pesos.”

  “Here we call that ‘trick-or-treating,’ but we go out as a group in costumes and knock on people’s doors and then we sing them songs and they give us candy, not coins. Though since Coach Truddy isn’t here, I don’t know if they’re going to let us go out.”

  “That’s so boring! Just candy? Money’s way better.”

  At six in the evening I was wearing horns. I’d decided to dress up as the devil and made some cones out of newspaper and tied them on my head like a hat.

  “Ha,” Naomi laughed. “You look more like a goat than a devil with those things on your head.”

  “You’re a goat!” I poked her with one of my horns.

  The other kids were dressed up in sheets, bandages, and paints, whatever we had: ghosts, mummies, ghouls, pumpkins, and two kids who we had no idea what they were but if you went near them they went, “Groaaar!”

  Mrs. Merche had dressed up like a kitchen witch with her magic cauldron, which was actually one of the pots she used for cooking rice. Mr. Abacuc was wearing a tux with a bowler hat, patent leather shoes, and a gleaming black wooden cane.

  “And who are you dressed up as, Mr. Abacuc? James Bond?”

  “James Bond? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m Chucho el Roto.”

  “But ‘roto’ means ragged—shouldn’t your costume be the opposite? Holes in your shoes, holes in the knees of your pants, that sort of thing?”

  “Back when Porfirio Díaz was president of Mexico, that was what they called the snobs, the dandies, the aristocrats. Chucho el Roto was a bandit who stole from the rich to give to the poor and had to pass himself off as a rich man to pull off his exploits.”

  “Like Robin Hood?” Naomi asked.

  “Yes, exactly, like Robin Hood, except this was real and they sent him to the worst prison in the world: San Juan de Ulúa.”

  “Like Alcatraz?”

  “Even worse. But he escaped and nobody knows where he died, if he actually died.”

  “What?” Naomi asked again, the kids swarming around her.

  “When they opened his coffin, what do you think they found?�
� He paused dramatically. He raised his hands and cried, “It was full of rocks!” Then he leaped forward and scared the children who were wandering nearby. They fled into Mrs. Merche’s arms in terror.

  “And what’s your costume going to be, Naomi?” Mr. Abacuc asked her.

  “What else? I’m going as a princess.”

  At seven on the dot, Mr. Abacuc and I opened the main door of the shelter. We’d already strung up some streamers made from strips of orange and black plastic and drawn pumpkins on cardboard boxes we’d covered with orange paper. I’d cut some candles in half and arranged them in a little path to the gym. Naomi was dressed up like a princess now. She had a hat with feathers made of newspaper, her hair was braided with colored ribbons, and she was wearing a white dress.

  “Which princess are you? A Disney princess?” Mrs. Merche asked her.

  “No, I’m Princess Catrina.”

  “Who’s that? What movie was she in?”

  “None—she’s the only real princess.”

  “But she’s just bones,” I said, recalling a book I’d flipped through that had an image of La Calavera Catrina.

  “I don’t care. She’s really elegant,” said Naomi. She grabbed Mr. Abacuc’s arm so he could push her in the wheelchair. They paraded toward the exit like a king and queen.

  A minute later some of Mr. Abacuc’s guests started to arrive—his friends were older folks who tended to go to bed early, which was why they were on time. Mrs. Merche’s sister and three of her children also arrived. She was dressed up as a crow with her little crowlings in tow.

  At a little before seven fifteen, the Fairmont arrived with Ms. Webber at the wheel and Coach Truddy in the passenger seat. All the kids, Naomi, and I went out to greet them. We surrounded the car, shouting, “Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” Coach Truddy rolled down the window and started passing out candy to every little boy and girl. When he finished giving out candy, he bent forward in his seat and suddenly reappeared with a mask with a pimply nose like a monster. The kids shrieked and took off running in fright, leaping everywhere. He got out of the car. I moved to help him, but he said, “I can do it, son, thank you. I’m not as old as I seem.”

  Ms. Webber was dressed up as a nurse; she had a white cap on her head, a stethoscope hanging around her neck, blood-red lipstick, and a prop syringe that she waved threateningly at the children. “Come here, little monster, I’m going to give you a shot.”

  They ran in terror, trying to protect their innocent buttocks.

  Just then, Coach Bald and Double-U arrived at the same time. I think they didn’t recognize each other at first—they kept walking through the knot of children running back and forth, pursued by the crazy nurse. Also, Coach Bald was wearing a long wig, a leather jacket and leather pants with chains hanging from them, tall boots, and white makeup all over his face, like a rock star from hell. Meanwhile, Double-U was sporting a pink wig, fake eyelashes, dark black eyeshadow, and black lipstick. She wore a black minidress and a garter belt that was visible even though she was standing up. She had on boots with really high heels.

  “Papito,” Double-U said to me, “don’t you want to whip me?” She started laughing like a madwoman.

  Mrs. Merche stared at me, her face fiendish.

  “Uh . . . I . . .”

  “Don’t worry, papito,” she said, finally putting me out of my misery. “It’s a joke. Now you owe me some candy.”

  “Uh . . . I . . . okay . . . What kind?”

  “I like a really traditional one that’s typical in your part of the world.”

  “Which one’s that?”

  “I want a lollipop to suck!” She started laughing like a mad cow.

  Then she skipped off inside the building.

  “Who’s that babe you were talking to?” Coach Bald asked me as music started drifting out from inside the gym.

  We’d brought down one of the computers to play music on. I’d requested Calle 13. Naomi was our DJ, if only reluctantly because nobody else knew how to work the machine, and she came through for me—that was the first song she played.

  “Let’s dance!” I yelled euphorically, my horns twisting in the air around me.

  And I started flailing around like a crazy person on the improvised dance floor. The kids followed me, and then Naomi pulled in Mr. Abacuc, who, one after another, pulled Mrs. Merche in, who pulled her sister in, who pulled her kids in. Coach Truddy joined in of his own accord and pulled his wife with him. Then I pulled in Coach Bald and Double-U. We all started dancing. The kids spun around everywhere, under our feet; they screamed and cheered and went crazy. Naomi whirled and whirled in her wheelchair. I was deeply contented, happy—I saw that Double-U and the coach, neither realizing who the other was, were getting along. Ms. Webber was smiling as she leaned against Coach Truddy’s chest. Mrs. Merche snatched a piece of candy from one of the kids, roaring at him like a lioness. Mr. Abacuc did the danza de los viejitos, the folkloric dance of the old men, with a mob of children around him. Naomi pirouetted like a top in her wheelchair. Yes, I was happy, satisfied, but from time to time, when nobody was looking at me, I’d glance toward the door to see if maybe it was swinging open.

  The training sessions for my second fight were more intense than the first ones had been. Now Coach Truddy had joined the team as Coach Bald’s assistant. Between the two of them, they made me train like a champion. I had to do twice as many exercises in half the time, with four eyes sternly watching me. In the mornings I would go running after feeding the chickens, which to Mrs. Merche’s dismay were greatly diminishing in quantity because the coaches had ordered a diet high in protein and carbohydrates for their scrawny athlete. Coach Bald found some cheap vitamin supplements at a sporting goods store, and they gave him some bottles of albumin so my puny muscles would turn to puny steel.

  Coach Bald always insisted that discipline was the only way to achieve victory. “No slacking off. Slackers never get anywhere. Train, eat, sleep! The three pillars of success.”

  Coach Truddy agreed. “You see, son, that’s what I’ve been telling you all along.”

  One morning Coach Bald showed up lugging a sack of cement.

  “Sergi wouldn’t let me bring over any weights, but I managed to grab this bag from the basement.”

  “What’s that for?” asked Coach Truddy.

  “You’ll see, coach. Liborio, bring me those tubs of cream and those two buckets.”

  I brought them to him.

  He cut the top of the bag of cement open and started emptying it into one of the buckets; then he asked me to bring him some of the sand left over from making the punching bag filled with sand and sawdust. Finally he added some gravel and started mixing in water with a metal trowel.

  “Half a tortilla is better than none,” he said. “We’re going to make some weights out of concrete. There are some pipes over there.”

  Once the mixture was ready, he started filling up the tubs to the top and then, as if they were ice pops, stuck the pipes upright in the middle of them.

  “We’ll let those dry, and tomorrow we’ll make the ones for the other side. Easy, right? Piece of cake.”

  We made a total of three dumbbells of different weights. And two barbells for doing bench presses, squats, and arm and back exercises.

  After eating lunch and lifting weights like mad, which at first dried me out like a tree again so I couldn’t bend in any direction, I would go to the library and start writing the letter that I left under Aireen’s door each day after my runs. There, as I wrote those letters surrounded by Mrs. Marshall’s donated books, things poured out of me that I hadn’t even known I was carrying inside me. I remembered lots of things. I was like an ocean roiled by the pain of it all. An expiation of the marrow, of the flesh. I saw myself as being in exile from myself. And I started to write, I don’t know why—to try to get Aireen to forgive me or s
o that I could gradually come to understand myself.

  “What are you busy writing all the time?” Naomi asked me one afternoon.

  “Things.”

  “What things?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Tsk, Liborio, that’s super old-fashioned. Repeat after me: ‘None of your business.’ Tsk.”

  “Right.”

  “Can I see?”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s private.”

  “Is it a love letter?”

  “No.”

  “I think it is—you just blushed.”

  “It’s the heat.”

  “It’s not hot in here, Liborio.”

  My second fight was on November 9th, this time in Gatbrick Palace. Thanks to Double-U’s article, which had been picked up by several local outlets, including the Chronica News and the Daily News Open, some Latinos were expecting to see “the descendent of Montezuma, the Quetzalcoatl of the Sumerians, the Inca of the Babylonians, the Aztec Hercules,” and any other description that occurred to that crazy broad as she was writing.

  I was in the dressing room getting ready with Coach Truddy, who was putting on my gloves, when Coach Bald said to me, “Someone’s looking for you outside.”

  I felt my temples do this: plop.

  I imagined Aireen coming through the door and reassembling all the molecules here in this vacuum into solid, pure, beautiful matter.

  “Who is it?” I asked Coach Bald eagerly.

  “It’s a man.”

  His answer brought my heart back down to earth; it stopped absinthifying me like a hypochondriac.

  “Can’t this wait till after the fight?” I asked, my mood suddenly shifting.

  “That’s just what I said, but he’s a goddamn idiot, boy.”

  “Send him in.”

  Even before he entered, I recognized Jefe’s musty odor.

  “Well, well, little ass-tard, I suppose somebody’ll want you someday! You see? You didn’t focus on studying, you anemonous triglyceride, so now you’re reduced to fucking people up with your fists.”