Pound for Pound (10 page)

Chicky’s next big fight was against a big-boned boy at the New Braunfels Wurtsfest, where there was a large German community. A polka band was brought over from Germany, and tubas boomed loud and deep through the town. Many in the community turned up in outfits imported from the fatherland. They ate sausages, drank beer, and did the chicken dance, a line dance that included old ladies, towheaded kids, and much sweat.

An outdoor ring was set up for the tournament, and the German boys were ready to fight. They kicked about as much Mexican ass as the Mexicans kicked German ass. In the first round of Chicky’s fight, the German kid knocked Chicky down with a right-hand body shot that
made Chicky’s guts spasm. It was Chicky’s first time to hit the canvas. He wobbled to his feet when he heard the Cavazos cursing him in Spanish, calling him a punk for letting the
gabacho
white-boy kraut mothafuck put him on his ass.

“¡Anda, desgraciado puto ojete!”
Come on shameless faggot butt-hole!

In amateur boxing, a knockdown doesn’t have the same import as one in professional boxing, but Chicky was furious with himself because he had taken the square-headed white boy lightly. As in all his fights, because of the style he’d been taught, Chicky had to fight the German shit-kicker face-to-face. He didn’t know what angles and distance and the laws of physics could do for him. Not knowing cost him a rib separation.

The aching ribs made breathing a bitch, would force him to sleep in a chair for a month, would keep him from sparring for two months, would keep him out of tournaments for three. He nonetheless came back in the second round of the fight to down the white boy. Because he was left-handed, Chicky had the advantage over his inexperienced opponent. Because his opponent had a rock-hard chin, it took a series of big right hooks to drive the German kid to his knees. Afterward, Chicky wasn’t sure which shot had put the blond boy away, but it was a vindication. The shit-faced Germans cheered them both. Once the ring doctor checked both fighters, Fritzie was up and bouncing on his thick legs as if nothing had happened.

Chicky, however, the winner by KO, was the one left to lick his wounds at midnight, the one who had to figure out precisely what he’d done wrong. Sometimes he could, sometimes he couldn’t. The Cavazos had begun to strut to and from the ring when Chicky fought. They were quick to take credit for his punching power, forgetting that it was because of Eloy’s training that Chicky could hit so hard. They didn’t do anything about the limitations of Chicky’s style because they thought tough was enough.

Chicky continued to train and win, and was rewarded with more trophies to add to his wall. His record included eighteen Junior and Silver Gloves wins from his kid fights, starting when he weighed ninety-three pounds. Overall, his record totaled fifty-six wins and seven losses, with twenty-nine clean KOs. To fight guys, twenty-nine knockouts in the amateurs meant that Chicky could dig to the body and crack to the head well enough to knock an opponent out despite headgear and a hovering ref. There were periods when Chicky would fight often, in fights at the San Ignacio, or in nearby towns, or even Austin. There were other tournaments that were too far to travel to. Chicky would also take time off from boxing because he had other things to do—keep the farm looking decent, football, exams that had to be studied for. With one exception, he’d always return to the San Nacho with his legs and lungs in shape from several weeks of roadwork. Now, for the second time, he stopped running. He told himself he just didn’t have the time, had too much work to keep the farm in one piece. The truth was that he had no one pushing him. Eloy was out of it most of the time. Trini Cavazo didn’t give a shit whether he ran or not. All he wanted was for Chicky to keep punching hard. Common sense being the hardest sense of all to learn, he would acquire the common sense of roadwork the hard way.

Eloy said it best. “If you won’t run, you can’t fight.”

It was after a knockout that deposited a boy flat on his face on the canvas that Chicky had taken a month off. He went back to the gym cocky. Stamina had never been a problem, so what was one lousy month? His string of impressive wins had made him overconfident. He sparred successfully with the local boys in his weight class he’d worked with previously. He knew their moves and faults, which made it easy for him to dominate them. It wasn’t long before no one would get in the ring with him. The Cavazos found a tubby little Indio with a flat nose who looked like a pushover. The tubby pushover, Chicky would learn, was an old pro from El Chuco—El Paso, that is—the original home of the pachucos
of the 1940 s, slick-dick dudes who wore zoot suits with reet pleats and drape shapes. Watch chains looped down to their ankles, and they kept their ducktails in place with Tres Flores pomade. Their cap-toed oxblood shoes had two-inch soles, the heels thick as a brick. Chicky had heard of them, had seen photos. He found them amusing, but he also felt a kinship with them. Who wouldn’t have some sympathy for a droopy-eyed
carnal
out there willing to shoot craps and play taps in the
yanqui
world?

Chicky would soon realize that the fat man from El Chuco might well have slipped across the toll bridge to Ciudad Juárez to turn pro at fourteen, that he’d had eighty, maybe a hundred fights. The Indian flat-out whipped Chicky’s ass.

Unconsciously, Chicky tried to use southpaw footwork to turn the right-handed old man of thirty-two the “wrong” way, move him to his right instead of allowing him to go to his left. That would make him vulnerable to Chicky’s attack, but the pro knew Chicky’s game and reversed it on him, made him go to
his
left. That immediately put Chicky on the defensive, took his confidence, left him open for a lead right hand and a follow-up left hook. Chicky tried footwork repeatedly to cut off the ring and to control the direction of movement. He failed to get his right, or front, foot outside his opponent’s front foot. It was the pro who consistently got his left foot outside Chicky’s right. That meant that Chicky was forced to defend himself from angles he was unaccustomed to. Chicky knew he was being taken to school, and lost his temper. He began throwing wild “arm” punches. Instead of having the torque of his hips behind his shots, he was using only shoulder and arm muscle to generate force, and this drained him of energy.

Not having done his roadwork, he tired quickly and began to gulp air around his mouthpiece. He tried to stand and fight, but the middle of his chest felt scalded inside and his arms came down. The
gordito,
the fat man, kept coming, not hitting hard, just relentlessly. He nailed Chicky with right-hand leads that knocked him back, and kept him moving in the wrong direction. Fatty’s right leads forced Chicky to cover his face. Exhausted in body and mind, Chicky unthinkingly exposed his body to
the
gordo’s
liver shots, hooks that sometimes wandered around to kidney shots like poisoned swords. At ringside, the Cavazos winked at each other, let it go on until the middle of the fourth round. Chicky wanted to finish the round, but Trini waved him off. Chicky felt doubly degraded.

Chicky remembered Eloy’s words: “If you won’t run, you can’t fight.” He now understood that tired means you can’t think. He never made the mistake of not running again.

The pro wasn’t the first to teach Chicky how much he didn’t know. The kid realized clearly that what he lacked had something to do with feet and floor. He also understood that there was a whole load of shit that the Cavazos did not know. He had gone to them with questions, but they treated him like he was looking for a way out, instead of in.

Trini said, “Somethin wrong with your tittie,
ése?
”

Chicky couldn’t go to Eloy. His granddaddy had been the first one to pass the Cavazos’ tough-guy system on to Chicky. Besides, his
abuelo
was shit-faced all the time.

Thanks to the work with the little pro, Chicky was able to control a right-hander easily in his next fight, and the next as well. Then he fought two speedy black fighters from the Eastside, winning both matches by a split decision. It scared him—not fighting blacks, but what it would be like to fight top-ranked blacks for a shot at the Olympics. And how would he handle them as a pro?

The better he got, the better his opponents got. Now all his fights were hard fights. He began going home with some of the lumps and black eyes he had sent other boys home with. He continued to win, but puzzled over why he had to fight so hard, why he got winded despite his roadwork. The clever boxers, even the boxer-punchers, did not have to grind out wins the way he did. He’d heard it said that there was a finite number of punches a fighter could take. Each fighter would have a different number, but they all had a limit. Chicky didn’t believe in a limit at first. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There were other aspects of boxing that troubled Chicky. Being left-handed had always given Chicky an edge with right-handers. Punches from southpaws bewildered them, especially the jab, because it came at them from the same side they used to throw their jabs. He’d tried to set up his usual attack with the El Paso pro, but the guy knew how to handle a lefty and made Chicky aware that being a hard-hitting southpaw wasn’t enough. Now he had to learn consciously what he had instinctively done in the past. He must seek to
agarrar la onda
of boxing, to dig to the depths of the sweet science and seize its hidden truths. Part of that was to strip the opponent of what he did best, take his very fight from him—take his balance, limit his ability to punch, drain him of power. Chicky knew, in his gut, that there had to be more, starting with his own spread-eagle stance. The El Chuco Indian also made him wonder if he could keep fighting as a pro, when he’d have to go twelve blistering rounds in a title fight.
¡Híjole!

As Chicky began to meet better fighters, he found that he could only land punches within the distance of his own, limited reach. Even at that range, he’d sometimes miss openings wide as a barn against slick fighters “on their bicycle,” boxers who continually bobbed and weaved, guys who baited him in so they could take him out. With such fighters, his punches would come up short, usually by inches, but sometimes by half steps as well. Those black fighters from San Antonio’s Eastside had given him fits, though he didn’t like to admit it. Range and distance were a problem the Cavazos’ style of fighting would never help him solve. It meant, bottom line, that he had to stay close and trade shots. He’d been hit hard, so he knew he could take a shot. He knew he hit harder than anyone he’d ever fought, but he also knew that power couldn’t always save him. Knew that there had to be others who could punch as hard as he, maybe harder. What if he had to face some black bird who could move him to his left and hit like he hit? It cost him sleep.

Chicky watched how the Cavazo brothers taught newcomers, and
listened to them as they called instructions to experienced fighters. When he finally broke the code of their style, he almost laughed. The Cavazo style was no style. Essentially, it was street fighting—plant your feet wide apart and swing hard, homeboy, and forget that your face will fucking wear out.
Ay, madre de Dios,
Chicky thought. It was a style that worked well when fighting Mexicans who fought the same way. What you had to do to beat most of them was to absorb more punishment than they. And there was the Cavazo hook, the same big, wide Mexican hook used famously by Mexican executioners like Castillo, Olivares, and Pintor. The problem was that their style of hook left you as wide open as the Texas sky, made you take shots to land shots. Chicky wanted to fight like Salvador Sánchez, clean, classically, a fighter who fought only as hard as he had to fight in order to win. If it took a knockout, he could put you to sleep, too. The Sánchez and the Julio César Chávez styles were made of the stuff Chicky’d need to beat the black lightning that was sure to fight him for an Olympic spot. Black fighters often beat Cavazo fighters. Chicky thought about getting a black trainer, but decided against it. He knew Eloy would have to put up with shit from the Cavazos about betrayal; shit about all the work and time they’d wasted; shit about
raza,
Mexican blood and solidarity, though they didn’t give a dead duck’s dick about
raza.
Chicky was just another investment for them.

And if a fighter didn’t produce a return on that investment, then
adios, chico.

A
s Father José Capetillo finished saying Tim Pat’s funeral mass at Christ the King, yellow sunlight changed to pink as it beamed through the stained glass above the altar. Except for the old priest, two altar boys, Earl and his wife and Dan, the church was empty. Dan was oblivious to the priest’s eulogy and final blessing.

Father Joe was near retirement. He’d often had dinner with Dan and Brigid at their home. Through the years he had followed boxing on TV and bullfighting through the Spanish-language newspapers he subscribed to. It was his interest in the fight game that had jump-started his close friendship with the Cooley family. He became a frequent and welcome visitor and often had a shot or two of top-shelf bourbon with Brigid, who preferred it to Irish whiskey. He would sometimes have more than two shots when he came by after watching an old friend or a newborn die, his eyes filled with pain from a lifetime of hearing and seeing what most couldn’t bear for a day.

He was grateful to God he’d been called to the priesthood, grateful that he’d met and served people like the Cooleys. He’d loved to listen to Brigid’s brogue, and knew that what remained of his Mexican accent pleased her as well. He’d wept at her funeral mass, said in Latin, as she
had wished. Now, saying this mass for Tim Pat, and seeing Dan’s dry, desolate face in the empty church, Father Joe barely suppressed a sob when he said
Dominus vobiscum,
the Lord be with you.

There was to be no wake, and Dan chose to drive alone in the Caddy to the cemetery. “No offense,” he said to Earl. “I just want to be alone behind the hearse.”

Dan had the top of the Caddy up because he didn’t want anyone to see his eyes. He followed the hearse as it headed east on Sunset. The ride was a quick one, the motorcycle patrolmen clearing the intersections, and soon Sunset became Chávez. Earl and his wife followed. Father Joe drove his own car, said he had stops to make at retirement homes and at Cedars. Shortly thereafter the small procession moved left onto North Broadway and up to St. Athanasius.