Suckerpunch: (2011) (23 page)

Jairo stood at my end and shook his arms loose and rolled his neck and came at me again. He spread his arms out, and it looked like he could have tickled both walls. He closed in like a trash compactor, like a hawk zeroing in for the bash and snag.

The crowd started making screeching sounds with their arms out.

Jairo crossed the middle ground into my space, watching me to see where I was going. I looked left and he leaned that way; then I darted right but he was already there. He got his left hand on my shirt and pulled me in. We were close to the bleacher wall, and the light changed as people crowded the edge to look down on us.

Jairo grabbed the back of my belt with his right hand and snaked his left hand over my right shoulder and got another handful of shirt and hugged me close. I dropped my weight down to avoid getting hip-tossed into the sludge.

But Jairo didn’t try to throw me. He pushed and held me away from him at bent-arm length and ducked and put his face directly above my right knee. Muscle memory put my hands on the back of his head and brought my knee up. A half inch before it connected I shoved his head away, and my knee went past his ear.

The gang whined about how close they’d come to seeing blood.

Jairo let go and skidded away. Squared up, he raised his hands and slopped toward me. I got ready to sprawl to defend his takedown shot, but he surprised me again by throwing a straight left that missed by two feet, then standing in the pocket with his fists next to his cheeks.

I had no idea what he was doing. First he put his face in front of a cannon; then he wanted to stand and bang. His striking had gotten better since he’d come to Gil’s, but that was like a shark’s walking improving when it washed ashore. We were fighting in a grappler’s dream—bad footing, confined space, no time limit—and one of the best grapplers in the world wasn’t trying to take it to the ground. So I asked him, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Saving Marcela,” he said and threw a right jab I could see coming since last Christmas.

I moved my head and waited for him to reel his arm back in. When he did he kept that hand low and his chin out. His gaze flicked to my left hand, like he was waiting for it. A hook would put him down. I couldn’t throw it. I glanced at Tezo up on my left. The revolver was still out, and he was tapping it against his leg. If we didn’t knuckle up quickly, someone was going to get shot.

Jairo hadn’t given up; he just thought it was inevitable only one of us was going to get out of the pit alive. He’d thought it through and decided Marcela had a better chance if I was the guy who got out.

Flatterer.

Bottom line, though, we were just in advanced negotiations with Tezo. When he put us in the pit, he gained more from one of us dying than keeping us both alive. We had to change that. We had to become more valuable or useful alive than dead. Standing in that cesspit, there was only one route: put on a fucking spectacular show.

Step one was getting both fighters to actually fight.

Jairo dropped his hands even lower and looked at my left again.

I slapped him with it. Hard. It sounded like two planks of wood clapping together.

The crowd in the bleachers inhaled as one.

Jairo’s eyes popped wide. His mouth opened and pulled toward the cheek I’d stung.

I had a few reasons for slapping. It’s humiliating, it sounds great, and if we made it out of the pit and I got the reward of fighting Burbank, I didn’t want to do it with broken hands.

Jairo’s hands stayed down so I cracked him again, open-handed on the other cheek. While he tasted that I kicked him in the shin.

“Ay.”

I said, “That’s right,” and shoved him. He jutted his chin at me and said, “Come on. Just do it.”

I stuck my finger up his nose and kicked him in the other shin.

“What the fuck?” He shook his head and snorted and rubbed his shin. “Woody—”

I slapped him in the ear once, twice, dug my foot into the mud, and launched a grapefruit-sized chunk that hit him in the throat. It splattered around his neck and dribbled down his shirt and must have smelled like he was wearing a diaper necklace.

And that did it.

Jairo charged and the bleachers cheered. He came with his shoulders square and his head low. I tried to smack him again, but he ducked and got his head outside my left shoulder and bear-hugged me off my feet. He crushed me against the plywood at the tarp end of the pit. The wood flexed enough to cushion the blow some, but I wouldn’t take it over a massage. Jairo yanked me off the wall and spun to his left and pulled so he was almost behind me, hooked his left leg in front of mine, and shoved me forward.

I went face-first into the muck. I tried to brace the fall by putting my arms out—a good way to get a broken elbow in the cage—but my hands sank six inches into the dark brown sludge and plowed forward. Jairo dropped his weight over my shoulders and drove my face down. I shut my eyes but couldn’t do anything about my nose and ears; the mud slid in, and I could feel things squirming in my nostrils. Something in my left ear spoke high-pitched German. I thought Jairo was punching me in the back, but I couldn’t be sure.

I pulled my arms in and did a push-up with him straddling my kidneys. He tried to shove me down, but my head was slick with filth. His left hand and arm slipped into view, and I hooked it with my left arm and rolled that way. He tried to wrap his legs around to take me with him, but I powered out and stood over him. He lay on his back and invited me into his guard.

I dug everything out of my ears and looked at it. What I saw made me want to stomp somebody in the groin. That would pretty much end the show, so I blew my nose at Jairo and told him to get up.

The bleachers were coming apart from the jumping and stomping. The people were screaming at us in Spanish and making some tongue sound that must have been a battle cry of their ancestors. Or hip-hop lyrics.

Jairo stood. He shook his arms to get the muck off and gave up after three tries. Came forward again.

I put a teep kick into his belly and left it there long enough so he could grab it. When he did I bent my leg and leaned forward and slapped a Thai clinch behind his head, pulled his ear close to my face. “Don’t you cut me, you crazy fucker.”

He jerked his head back and frowned at me, but I was already falling. I let my right leg shoot out from under me like Jairo’s pulling had thrown me off balance, then flopped in the sewage. Jairo dropped down in half mount and drew back to hammer me in the face.

I hoped he’d figured it out.

His fist slammed into the muck a quarter inch from my ear and made a geyser four feet high. I crossed my forearms in front of my face, and he flailed away at them, half the time skipping off into the muck and letting me take a breath while he reset his base. Every fourth or fifth punch he’d slam one into my ribs for realism. I believed him.

The bleachers liked watching me get pummeled but wanted variety. Or at least some blood. They booed and threw things again.

I started returning punches between every second or third from Jairo, tagging him in the ribs and shoulders like I was going for his face but he was too fast for me, and that made them happy for a few seconds. When they began to boo again, I flicked my gaze over to the right, letting Jairo know I was going to sweep him that way; maybe me in top position for a while would cheer them up. He winked at me and I tried not to grin.

I planted my feet and was starting to buck when Tezo shot Jairo.

The sound of the gun in that confined space made me flinch and cover my head for real. I tried to get my shoulders into my ears. The bleachers cut to silence. I felt Jairo topple off to my right and heard him hit the muck. I checked to see if Tezo was going to keep shooting; the gun was up but not pointed at anyone, and it was hard to tell with all the ink but Tezo looked slightly disappointed.

“I was aiming for your knee,” he said.

I knelt between him and Jairo, who was lying on his left side and not moving. His right arm was bent and tucked next to his head like he was doing old-school crunches. I tugged on the arm, but it wouldn’t budge. Sometimes when a person got shot in the head everything seized up, like instant rigor mortis.

I tried again with more force behind it, and his whole body started to roll so I let go. The pinnacle of the Arcoverde bloodline, dead in a filthy Las Vegas garage fighting pit. Marcela was as good as gone. Because of me. I wanted to be furious but couldn’t find the traction for it. Just kept slipping into misery.

The arm rose and Jairo looked furious enough for both of us. “I’ve been shot.”

I cleared my throat. “Where?”

He peeled his hand away, and fresh blood coursed from a deep groove in his right trapezius muscle. It looked like a baby crocodile had taken a bite out of him and gotten all muscle, no bone or connective tissue.

I reached out to help him keep pressure on it, saw the slime on my hands, and pulled back. The wound wasn’t bad, but if he stayed in the pit longer than two minutes, he’d die from rampant infection in four. I found the cleanest part of the bottom of my shirt and tore it off, slipped it between the groove and Jairo’s hand, and pressed it all down. “Hold that there as tight as you can.” I faced Tezo. “You like money?” I had no idea what I was saying.

“You like dick?”

The bleachers laughed, their first sound since the gunshot.

“Get us out of here. Now. Get him cleaned up. Then you and I can talk about how you can get some nice new money.”

“How much money?” Tezo asked.

I pointed at Jairo. “It goes down every second he bleeds.”

“Where’s this money coming from?”

“I got a sure thing on a fight tonight. Ticktock.”

Tezo sucked a tooth. Shrugged. “Okay. But he stays in the pit while we talk. I like what I hear, maybe he gets a Band-Aid. I don’t, you go back in, and we’ll see how both of you fight with holes in you.”

Tezo said something in Spanish and the bleachers emptied, the gang members and elders shuffling and grumbling single file through the tarp. The music started again on the other side.

One of the couch guys and the shotgun kid stayed and rummaged behind the bleachers and came out with a twelve-foot aluminum ladder spattered with paint and drywall mud. The feet were caked with dry sludge from the bottom of the pit, and they sank six inches when they dropped it in near me. The kid put the shotgun on Jairo, who was a serious threat sitting against the wall and wincing. The other one had his black automatic on me.

“Out,” Tezo said.

“I’ll be fast,” I told Jairo. I climbed the ladder and looked down. He was staring at the rotten plywood, hugging himself to keep the blood from flowing. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked small.

Tezo walked around the corner near the garage doors and headed for the room in the corner. I followed, passing the guy with the automatic. He had
Parasite
tattooed like a necklace beneath his throat.

“What time is it?” I asked him. It felt like we’d been in the pit for days, but it couldn’t have been more than two hours, tops.

“Fuck you thirty.” He fell in behind me, and I heard the shotgun kid pull the ladder out of the pit.

Tezo went through the door and waited in the center of the room. It was a small space, maybe twelve by twelve, and looked like it used to be an employee bathroom. The walls were bile-yellow and dirty. An old metal bench was pushed against the left wall with a row of coat hooks over it. Three gray sinks hung off the wall across from the door under a cracked and crusty mirror. In the corner there was a window made up of square glass blocks that let in light but blurred everything, and on the right wall I could see two slightly cleaner silhouettes where the urinals used to wait. The pipes were still there, but they’d been capped with spigots. The stall in the near corner on my right was miraculously intact, but the door was closed, and I wanted to believe all it hid was a toilet so I didn’t peek.

A stained claw-foot bathtub full of trash and a few inches of water squatted under the urinal shadows. There was a framed rectangle of tight wire mesh leaning against it, big enough to cover the top with some overlap. It looked like something out of an exhibit from a serial killer’s experimental period. Parasite closed the door behind me.