A Fighting Chance

by Sand, A. J.

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me, Jesse,” she says in a clipped tone.

  This is going downhill fast. “Okay, that’s true. But the girl I remember didn’t hold her tongue. So tell me what you’re thinking. Say what you want to say.”

  “Fine, yeah, maybe upgrading is just a euphemism for what happened.” Drew leans over the console with a smile so caustic it could melt the metal around us. “How about this…the person I was in love with completely erased my existence from his life. Is that better than calling it upgrading?” I can’t deny it. I let Drew fade out like the burn in a damaged film reel that eats away the footage. Still, the words are a punch in the gut, and because I have none of my own to say back, we just sit there staring at each other. Neither of us breaks eye contact until someone honks behind me to drive forward. My stomach is still knotted during our brief chat with the border official as he sifts through our documentation before waving us into Mexico.

  Miguel lives in Tepatitlán, which is ten hours away, and I’m already exhausted from the sheer sprawl of country ahead as we navigate entry traffic. We stop at a Mickey D’s and I wander into a nearby pharmacy to pick up more water and snacks for the long haul. Back on the road, we pass blocks and blocks of tourist-congested open-air markets and gift shops in border towns, before the true city life emerges. Maybe before this I would have thought they were ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but given the reason I’m cruising through Mexico, I accept that there’s probably no such thing. We’re all just faking it under grocery shopping and little league baseball.

  Miguel warned Drew that we’d be moving through clusters of towns notorious for gang activity, and I prefer not stopping again, so we alternate between air conditioning and open windows to preserve gas until we’re closer to our motel destination for the night. The only way to deal with the Mexican heat is to keep as still as possible, so that your only movements are the ones you can’t control, like blinking and breathing. Being from the South has not made hot weather more tolerable at all. I don’t care what anyone says; you don’t ever get used to feeling like you’re suffocating. Everything is sticking to me: my clothes, the air…Drew’s aggressive (but justified) animosity. I want to make small talk, like ask her how to pronounce the name of the town we’re heading to. But her back’s to me. Seems fitting for the way I turned mine on her.

  “Remember that night during the summer after we graduated, when we drove all the way to the Louisiana border?” I ask. “You dared me to keep driving until we ran out of gas. I really wish I had. I don’t know where we’d be right now, but I bet you’d still be saving my ass. So, thanks for doing this,” I say. The space between us is choked with memories and unresolved issues, but I figure I can’t go wrong with gratitude to cool the immediate tension. We will hopefully talk about four years ago when we can do it somewhat more peacefully.

  Drew snorts. “Your ass looks pretty saved to me.”

  “I still wouldn’t be able to do this without you.”

  She takes a tentative peek at me over what’s still a pretty icy shoulder. “We haven’t done anything yet…”

  “I feel like Henry right now. I’m coming into your life and disrupting it for something I need, but no one else would be able to handle what has to get done. So, I just want to say thank you.” Reaching into my pocket, I toss a tiny bottle of pink nail polish I picked up at the pharmacy to her lap. It’s my olive branch.

  I watch as she examines the bottle and tries to keep her smile at bay. “I suppose this one will chip soon. Thank you.” She twists around to the backseat and puts it into her bag then swings back, clutching my sketchpad. “Whoa. Was this your mom’s?” Before my mom lost her sight, she used to sketch. She never studied it in school or pursued art professionally, but it was her favorite hobby.

  “No, it’s mine. I’m an architecture major. We don’t really get to draw on paper anymore because of all the computer software, which I really like, but I’m old school deep down.”

  “Do you mind if I…?” She flutters the pages between her fingers.

  “Go ahead.” But the minute I give her permission, I want to take it back. I feel self-conscious around her all of a sudden, and I fixate on her unknown impression of my drawings. I’m dangerously shifting my eyes between what she’s doing and the road.

  “Is this your old house?”

  “Yup.”

  “Is this from a picture?” Her fingers trace the dark ink. “Because the Johnsons have changed it so much.”

  “Memory...” Even now, through my mind’s eye, I can see the small ranch house with its red brick and stucco exterior, Mom’s potted plants on the two steps leading up to the wraparound porch, and the large windows flanked by black shutters and tucked beneath wide eaves. “Sometimes I sketch just to see if I remember.” As bad as things sometimes were growing up in Glory, thanks to my mom our house was always a shield, a place of tranquility.

  “Wow. This is so good. It’s exactly like I remember, too.” She smiles and sinks into the seat. “God, we sat on that porch so many nights, for hours…” Her smile becomes the widest grin, and a tremor of pleasure coasts down my chest. “Just making up things about our future lives.”

  My mom isn’t the only person my old house reminds me of. We made out a lot on that porch, too. Especially when we found the perfect spot to stand where Mom couldn’t see us through the open window. “And we drank all of Mom’s sweet tea…with a little of your dad’s SoCo mixed in,” I add with a small smile of my own.

  “With a lot of his SoCo mixed in,” Drew says, and we both laugh. She reaches for the radio and tunes it to something neither one of us can understand, before she turns on her own iPod playlist.

  “See,” I say, “talking to me, that wasn’t so bad. So, can we try to be friends for however long you’re here? I won’t even mention how your iPod is still shitting bubble gum. Jesus, it’s like someone’s tossing syrup on a chalkboard with nails scratching down.”

  Drew gasps but I see a hint of a smile under her mock offense. “Fine…we have a lot to do and you’re right, it’s better if we get along. I promise not to say anything mean about your princess.”

  Sunlight catches her ring as she turns up the volume. “And I promise to pretend that you’re not marrying Beaver Bucky,” I say, laughing.

  Drew slaps my shoulder. “Ha! He wore braces after high school. His teeth are fine now, thank you very much.”

  “So, how’d you like College Station?” Drew went to Texas A&M, just like her dad. Before we lost contact four years ago, our breakup was amicable because we had always known we would go to separate colleges. College seems like safe conversation territory; granted, she could still answer with, “You’d know if you had picked up the phone every once in a while,” but the fight is gone from her eyes, and that is always the first place to check. “What’d you study? History?” She always had an unnatural ability to retain information.

  “Yup. Double majored in that and museum studies. Now I just have to hope that the man Carol Duncan’s been talking to on Match.com moves her to Wherever, USA and I can take her job. For now, I work part-time with her when I’m not at Tickles or the pie shop.” Carol Duncan is Glory’s historian at the library, and she has been since I was born; yet, the only history I’ve ever seen her archive happens on her web browser.

  “So you’re—you and Buck—plan on staying in Glory?”

  “Yeah. Farm’s finally doing well again, now that the boys know what they’re doing, with their uncle’s help. After almost ten years in Glory, I feel like I have a duty to the place. I just want to make it better, not somewhere people pass on their way to see something better. That’s why the arrival of all those people who are coming there because of Henry makes me really angry. That place is my home.”

  “You’re not buying that Alejandra is just a jealous girlfriend?”

  “Not unless he’s into kinky gunplay, but then again, with your father, who knows.”

  I wish I could di
sagree. “His Ponzi scheme story is plausible, but I can’t see Henry trying to go corporate legit. Maybe it’s just about owing money from gambling on the fights, and he was ashamed to tell me.”

  Drew’s expression darkens as she turns the radio down. “Could be. Look, the truth is, Buck and I still go to fights. Sometimes. All over Texas. We haven’t run into him, so if he’s betting on fights still, he’s doing it somewhere else.” She shifts until her knees are nearly touching the gearshift. Like Mexico. “And death threats against kids, chopping off fingers, psycho Mexican ladies, guns…I bet that’s cartel.”

  “Fuck.” I know as much but it’s still startling to hear. Are we really getting ourselves involved in this shit? Yes, but for HJ. I clench the steering wheel until the polyurethane burns my palms. We fall into silence again, but it’s not that awkward kind from before, so we leave the music low and settle into the comfort of the quiet car. With a magazine in her lap, Drew puts her feet up on the dash and waves her fingers in the breeze at her window. I set my seat to a deeper recline and drop my arm to the back of her chair. It might be a while before we’re able to just relax like this.

  We race the sun through central Mexico, crossing urban sprawl, villages, mountains, and plains. And as we pass town after town named after saints, I think about how holy this country is; yet, people like us only come here when we want to do things that are anything but.

  ****

  After a night at a forgettable motel, another three hours of roadway puts us at Miguel’s place. It’s one of many one-story, tan stucco, red tile-roofed homes on the block, with a haphazardly constructed picket fence wrapped around a pristine lawn.

  “Mi amor!” Miguel says, dashing from the low stone steps out front to greet Drew as I pull up to the curb. He’s lifting her up a few seconds after I park, and swinging her around. I give them a moment, reluctant to intrude until she invites it. He prattles off in Spanish, even though Drew admitted to me that she’s only fluent in the insults and curse words. When she shoves him backward, he finally speaks to her in English.

  He’s a few years older than we are, she told me, though, he doesn’t look like he can even grow facial hair yet. He’s in loose jeans, a white t-shirt, and there’s short, wild hair poking out from under a Dodgers cap. Miguel has dark features—complexion, hair, eyes—and he’s lanky with long limbs. He doesn’t have the musculature for fighting. I catch him sizing me up, too, over Drew’s shoulder, but I can’t read his face. I’m anxious to impress him because he’s the gatekeeper to the underworld.

  After Drew’s introduction, Miguel gets in the backseat, preferring to talk away from his house. “My mother and little brother, Eduardo, live here, too,” he explains as he texts rapidly on his phone. “My older brother, Santi, was killed during a shootout at a fight four years ago. My father, too, was killed in the ring when I was a child. If Mamá knew I was involved with fights, she would never speak to me again.” I’m struck by the casual way he talks about death, but I get the feeling I’m only hearing the abridged version of what he’s seen. His English, learned from years of The Price is Right and Jeopardy Internet downloads, is near perfect, and he speaks very quickly about everything, from the mundane to the important, like he’s always pressed for time. His day job is a bunch of day jobs, and he promotes new fighters at night. He grew up in Guadalajara, but his mother moved them around a lot, trying to keep a house full of sons from ending up like their father. Not that it mattered. With a chuckle, Miguel says, “Sometimes fathers pass on more than just high blood pressure.” Don’t I fucking know it.

  He directs me down a scenic route to the Plaza De Armas, the busy town square, where people are milling about. On the way, we cruise past a cathedral and the fortress of a city hall that loom over the quaint, quiet town. I marvel at my academic wet dream and try not to bore them by pointing out the imposing, symmetrical French Baroque elements in the structures. Tepatitlán is beautiful, and just beautiful enough to hide the pipeline to a seedy underground fighting nightlife.

  We end up at a popular upscale café that doubles as an art gallery, a place not too far from our motel, where twenty-something hipsters and urban sophisticates are sipping wine under impressionist paintings. The sea of foreign words swamps me and leaves me feeling incredibly out of my element. Miguel orders for the table when a waiter approaches: beers for them, mandarin Jarritos for me, plus tamales and panes dulces for everyone. After eating in our comfort zone at American places during the drive, Drew and I indulge and get seconds of everything. While we’re cramming food into our faces, Miguel explains that all fights here are not created equal. Amateur fights, which have a lot of unknown fighters, don’t draw much attention or bets, which means the prize money is abysmal. The next tier has some cartel-sponsored fights—and better fighters—and these attract bigger audiences and have a more respectable payout. But the five-figure wins, The Cull fights, will be out of reach until I either get a drug lord sugar daddy or I’m just so popular that it doesn’t matter.

  “So,” Miguel says, rubbing his palms together like some evil mastermind, “which clubs are we hitting up tonight?”

  “We’re not,” I say. “I need a gym, and I need you to get me into a fight in a few days.”

  Miguel frowns. “Yeah…yeah, but this part is important, too. This is how you get people to notice you. This is how they get to know your name. We’ll walk in, get a table, and buy a couple bottles. Make some noise, you know?”

  “Just get me a fight…”

  “Are you sure?” Drew asks, her hand landing on my knee. I want to treat it as a friendly gesture, something people do when they’re interacting, but this is Drew. So electricity explodes on the spot then travels to far-off nerve endings. The weight of her hand is heavy with the memories of being touched in other ways, of touching her, too.

  “Yeah, I might as well get it over with.” I keep my eyes fixed on my pastry, afraid she’ll see my attraction to her shining in them. She’s absently stroking me where her fingers are and, holy fuck, my erection is growing quickly. “We’ve got a long way to go,” I choke out. Jesus Fucking Christ, get your hand off my knee, Drew.

  “I need to take you out and introduce you to people,” Miguel argues.

  Drew rolls her eyes. “He took Buck and me out the last time we were here, and he kept us out until five….introducing us to people.” She squeezes my thigh, causing ripples of heat to roll through my body. “You just want to go clubbing, Mig.”

  “And you don’t?” he says as he links their hands and swings them to whatever rhythm is in his head. I shudder out a deep breath, grateful to have her hand gone. But also dreading the blue balls I’ll have to deal with later.

  “Fine. We’ll scope it out. Me and you,” Drew says, relenting. “But only if you make sure he has a place to work out and he’s in the ring in a few days.”

  ****

  Miguel finds a gym for me just outside of the city limits. It’s not really a state-of-the-art boxing gym, but it has a lumpy heavy bag and a flimsy speed bag. I even convince a guy there to spar with me, and then I spend my evenings on a treadmill, while Miguel and Drew go on their recon missions. After enduring almost an entire week of Miguel’s failed insistence that he show me off, we get a call from “his guy,” who tells him to just be ready when he calls again. The call comes a day later. Miguel leads us to a rendezvous point on the outskirts of Tepatitlán, and a bus shuttles us off to the unknown. The fight locations change often, Miguel tells me, to elude the few cops who refuse to take bribes. Very few people know the actual address of the fights; most just get a text a few hours before with the meeting point of the buses, which look exactly like regular tour buses. Everyone has to remain at the fight location until all the night’s fights are over. Then everyone is dropped off again or they find their own way home.

  Tonight’s site is a warehouse tucked away in Guadalajara, an hour’s ride, in one of the industrial districts. It’s a gigantic, dingy space with flickering, buzzing lights, and
it’s hot as fuck, too. There’s an octagon in the middle, and I know from my days fighting around the South that it’s an easy setup. With a visit to a hardware store and a little Internet research, anyone can build one in a couple hours. There are people from all walks of life here: a few frightened tourists, and lots of excited locals and serious enthusiasts.

  “How is it that I’m showing this much cleavage and I’m still overdressed?” Drew whispers to me as we follow Miguel to where I check in. She’s stunning tonight in a low cut orange dress, standing out from the grunge and the grit. But she’s right. She may as well be in a moo-moo. The female dress code here is tight, short and bare. The men, I’m guessing, seem like they are more interested in accessorizing. Probably with razorblades and guns, even though I don’t actually see any, but it’s a rough-looking crowd. All neck tattoos. I’m stereotyping, but people who come to a secret full-contact fight are probably not knitting and feeding the homeless the next day. There’s security, but according to Miguel, they’re local cops who realize government salary won’t put their kids through college or their mistresses in rented villas on the coast.

  “How are you doing?” Drew asks as I’m stripping out of my shirt and shoes.

  “Good.” But a strange and familiar feeling engulfs me as she wraps my wrists and I slip my fingerless fighting gloves on. It’s a giddiness to be in that cage.

  “Good,” she says, but her tone is flat, like she’s not convinced. She cocks her head over to a group of fighters. “It’s hard to know who you’re fighting, but most of them are amateurs hoping to make it into Cull fights. Might be a few in the bunch who are really good, but not many.” When she gets quiet, we aim awkward smiles at each other because a long time ago, this would have been the point when we’d make out in front of everybody. Drew pinches my chin between her fingers. “Make it quick, okay? No showing off.”

  “Got it, boss. Thanks for being here with me.”

  “I don’t want to see anything bad happen to HJ.” She runs her fingers up my jawline, and it feels so good I close my eyes for just a second.