The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  “Your call, champ,” Coach Bald said, blocking Jefe’s way. “Should I kick this greaseball out?”

  “I’ll help!” growled Truddy, standing up and looming over Jefe.

  I saw Jefe’s Adam’s apple rise up to the tip of his nose and plunge back down again.

  “Hey now, hey.” Jefe started perspiring ink.

  “Boss!”

  The coaches stepped aside.

  Jefe moved toward me looking like he’d already been given a thrashing. “Um . . . I . . . well . . . uh . . .”

  “It’s all right, boss. They were just messing around.”

  Jefe attempted one of his alebrije laughs, but he only managed to cough out a few feathers.

  “I . . . uh . . . I came because . . . uh . . . I saw they put up a mourning ribbon across from the coffeeshop, and your secret love, that super-hot chickadee, is wearing black . . . I thought you might want to know . . .”

  “What!” I leaped at him and grabbed him by the lapels. Jefe went paler.

  The coaches had to pull me off Jefe to keep him from shitting his pants.

  “I’m sorry, kid, I’m really very sorry,” he said.

  My soul wouldn’t fit inside my body.

  “I have to get out of here right now,” I told the coaches.

  “You can’t.” Coach Bald blocked my path.

  “What the fuck do you mean, I can’t?” I glared menacingly, looking like I might beat them up.

  “Well, all right, you can, but you shouldn’t,” Coach Truddy said a little more calmly.

  “They’re right, little bastard,” Jefe chirped, observing the whole scene.

  “See? Even this greaseball knows it!” Coach Bald shouted. “If you leave, things will all come crashing to a halt and then fall apart. There won’t be any turning back.”

  I headed out to the ring, my eyes blurry. I could tell there were a lot of people, and some of them were chanting, “Indio, indio, indio,” while others chanted the name of my opponent: “Murder, Murder, Murder.” A man just as dark as me shouted at me, “I hope Murder kills you, fucking dark-ass indio.” But I wasn’t hearing anything at that point, or if I heard it I wasn’t processing it. I was in a daze. What had happened at Aireen’s house? Was that why she’d disappeared over the past few weeks? What if her grandfather had died? Aireen didn’t have any more family. Would she try to keep her old promise and fulfill it from the roof of the building, leaping into flight?

  Coach Bald shoved me into the ring. “Focus, boy. It’s time to see what you’re made of.” He inserted my mouthguard and climbed down from the ring.

  The referee called us over.

  The boxer in front of me had a face like a dog. He had a lot of tattoos, like he’d been a fucking canvas in a previous life.

  “Come on, hurry up, I don’t have time to waste,” I said as the referee gave us our final instructions.

  The tattooed dogface showed his teeth.

  The referee separated us, and as soon as the bell rang I sprang at my opponent. He put up a classic block. With no time to lose, I unleashed all my veins, all my blood, all my rage at that poor bastard, and before the dude could take a step backward, I threw a punch that smacked into his defending gloves, which smacked into his face. The impact was so powerful that his feet remained glued to the floor even as his body tipped backward, bouncing his head against the ring. He didn’t even put out his hands to catch himself as he fell, like a vermin, in the realm of the unknown.

  I turned around and headed for my corner, spitting the mouthguard out into Coach Bald’s hands.

  “Let’s go!”

  Mr. Abacuc, Naomi, and Double-U had stayed out in the Gatbrick Palace parking lot.

  “Calm down, son,” Mr. Abacuc told me even after Coach Truddy told him what had happened.

  Naomi and Double-U looked out at me through the window. “I’m sorry, kidlet. Sometimes things happen against your wishes, and other things, however much you wish for them, don’t happen at all.” Double-U looked at Coach Bald and then leaned out the window and gave me a kiss.

  Naomi looked into my eyes and gave me a little flower made from newsprint.

  “Come back soon,” she said.

  Coach Bald removed my gloves in Coach Truddy’s Fairmont.

  Neither of them said boo about the fight.

  Coach Bald toweled off my sweat and passed me the T-shirt for me to put on. Then I took off my boxing boots and put on my pants and tennis shoes.

  “It’s past Wells Park, right?” Coach Truddy asked.

  Before the car had even come to a stop, I had already leaped out onto the curb. Yes, it was true, the ribbon hung there like a large black butterfly, making my eyesight even foggier.

  “Run, we’ll catch up with you in a minute,” Coach Bald yelled at me.

  I raced up the stone steps as if they didn’t exist. I opened the door and ran up to her floor. I started to see strange people milling around. Suddenly a familiar face appeared.

  “I’m so sorry about your grandfather, son.” It was Mr. Hundred. He hugged me. “Whatever you and your cousin Aireen need, I’m here for you.”

  With that, my soul tumbled out of my body. My legs turned to jelly. I couldn’t breathe. I walked slowly down the hallway toward the open door of Aireen’s apartment. Everybody there was a stranger to me. When I reached the threshold, I saw chairs all lined up in rows; I got a little closer and spotted a metallic gray coffin covered with flowers. Some wreaths were arranged around it.

  Without knowing why, without understanding, I started to cry. Gradually my eyes were flooded with salt. I felt a pressure in my chest that had turned me into a statue there in the doorway. Nothing. Death shouldn’t be so serious, Mr. Abacuc would say—but what if it is? What if it’s the last time we’ll see the person we love? What if we’ll never see the person who’s left us again? I remembered Aireen’s love for her grandfather. And I remembered when the old man had showed me the photos of her, her all happy, satisfied, proud. How could life be slipping away from us like this?

  “Thanks for coming, dude,” I heard behind me. It was Aireen’s voice. I didn’t have the courage to turn around. I couldn’t look at her. No, because I should have been with her before all of this, helping her through everything. Embracing her as we consoled each other about the calamity that death brings with it. She came around in front of me and lifted my chin so I would look at her. “Thank you, dude, with all my heart.” I opened my eyes and saw her. She’d been crying, but just then her tears blossomed again; they rolled slowly, lithographically, toward her mouth, lethargic. We looked into each other’s eyes for an eternity, an eternity the size of all our lives. She smiled at me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Is everything all right, Aireen?” A tall, blond, well-groomed man came up to us.

  “Yes.” She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. “Look, Alexaindre, I’d like to introduce a great friend of mine, Liborio.”

  The man held out his hand and said, “I know these aren’t the best circumstances under which we could meet, but . . . any friend of Aireen’s is a friend of mine too. Thank you so much for coming to be with her in this time of such profound sorrow. Can I bring you anything, Liborio? A cup of coffee?”

  Coach Bald came in first, followed by Coach Truddy. I was sitting in one of the back rows of the chairs that had been set up in Aireen’s apartment. Her grandfather’s coffin was there in front of us, gradually growing chiller. The coaches sat down on either side of me. I was falling apart. I couldn’t process anything people were saying. All I knew was that everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Aireen went to sit up front, Alexaindre beside her. Then a lot of people dressed in black and navy blue. Hanging behind the coffin was the painting Aireen’s grandfather had done, the one that looked to me like colors had been spit at the canvas.

  A little bell ra
ng and an elderly man stood up. He was wearing a black suit with a white flower in his lapel. He leaned on his cane.

  “Abraham Reinder painted to be happy, not to earn money. That is the difference between happy and unhappy men. And boy was he happy, but one day his body said no, and it was an everlasting no . . . Let’s have a minute of applause for this great artist, father, and grandfather. May he rest in peace.”

  Everyone started clapping. Aireen bent her head forward and stood up. We all stood. The applause, I imagine, could be heard off beyond the hills.

  As we were going down the stairs of the buiding, Aireen caught up to me.

  “Dude!”

  We stopped. The coaches looked at Aireen, then looked at me, and then looked at each other.

  “We’ll wait for you downstairs, champ,” Coach Bald said, tugging on Coach Truddy’s arm.

  Aireen watched them leave. Then she rested her beautiful eyes on me.

  “Thank you so much for coming, I mean it.”

  “I’d have liked to be there with you, by your side, in the hospital,” I told her, placing my hands on the wooden bannister.

  “You were there,” she answered. “Your letters were beautiful. You have no idea how much they eased my pain and helped me think about other things while my grandfather was still with me. I thought about your past, about what you wrote about your godmother. About all the hardships you’ve lived through since you left Mexico, and your life here in the US About the border and the desert, and the way your paisas saved you, El Pepe, on that sunburned highway. About how you met me, and how you loved me from the first moment you saw me in Wells Park. I thought about that a lot, sabes?” She paused, still looking at me, and then continued. “My guess is the tall one’s Coach Truddy and the one with the flat cap is Coach Bald, am I right?” She smiled, beautiful as always, forgetting for a moment all the pain she was feeling. Then she stopped—Alexaindre was calling for her to come back to the apartment to see to her visitors. “Remember this, dude: I’m never going to forget you. Not ever.” She turned around and disappeared through the doorway.

  We reached the shelter at dawn. Coach Bald and Coach Truddy made no effort to interfere with my silence. They just told me to take the day off, that we wouldn’t be training the next day.

  “Get some rest, champ,” they said, and then left.

  Mrs. Merche opened the door for me.

  “Oh, son, you look like you’ve been horsewhipped. You need a nice bowl of chicken soup.” She bustled into the kitchen, heated the soup in a pot, and served it to me.

  She sat down across from me and silently watched me eat.

  “Promise me something, monkey,” she said suddenly as I strove to swallow the soup, which tasted to me like soggy pebbles. “Promise me you’re never going to hurt Naomi.”

  “Why would I hurt her?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know. Don’t you see how she looks at you? She’s still a little girl, but one day she’ll grow up. If you ever hurt her, for whatever reason, I’ll split your head open.”

  When I woke up, the first thing I saw was Naomi’s face leaning over me.

  “I brought you a muffin before they ran out. See, Liborio, we’re always hungry here.”

  “Thanks, Naomi.” I smiled at her over the black circles under my eyes, taking the muffin from her.

  “I’m up to the windmills in Don Quixote.”

  “Oh? Do you like it?”

  “I love it! I want to be Doña Quixota!” She hugged me.

  “You will be, Naomi. I think you will be.”

  “And you’ll be my Sancho Panza!”

  Then she rolled backward and turned her wheelchair around.

  Lying there in the middle of the bed, I watched her leave, her making that riotous, stratospheric hullabaloo I love so much.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Aura Xilonen is a novelist and filmmaker. She won the 2015 Mauricio Achar Prize for her first novel, The Gringo Champion.