Redhanded (9 page)

I opened the front door quietly, not wanting to wake anybody.

I stumbled. My mom's duffel bag was there, right by the door, with a pair of hiking boots tied together, and a makeup kit, incongruously pink, with see-through stripes, lip gloss and eyeliner inside.

Dad was up, padding around in his sheik of Araby bathrobe, watching the coffeemaker dribble as though it absorbed all his attention.

“So,” Mom said as I made my entrance. “The new Steven doesn't sleep until noon every day.”

Much of the night I had watched videos with the sound turned to a murmur, respecting my parents' privacy. I have a small collection of championship bouts, mail-ordered from a catalog Loquesto loaned me, grainy black-and-white footage. The old-time boxers looked leaner and paler than modern men, their ears sticking out from their old-fashioned haircuts. In those days, when a boxer was hurt, his opponent hung on with one fist and pounded him with the other.

Mom briskly made small adjustments in her luggage, first aid kit, waterproof snack bag, the kind of travel equipment you could take into the Himalayas.

“You do this every morning?” Mom was asking.

I was busy using my mental antennas, sensing how things were between them. Surely she wasn't leaving right now.

Her question sounded simple, but I answered warily. “Run?”

“Run, that's what I'm asking.”

“Just about.”

“Maybe you're learning some discipline,” she said.

Mom gives a compliment when she's about to slam-dunk a criticism. Only a fool gets too pleased when she's being nice.

“It's good someone shows some maturity around here,” she said.

Dad studied the coffee leaking into the pot.

“All you have to do is survive, Steven,” she said. “Just another year and a few months and you'll be eighteen. You can come live with me then. We'll track black bears, do a coyote count, do some rock climbing. I look forward to it.”

Her features softened. “I need it—I want to spend more time with you.”

She was close to tears.

I stuffed her baggage into the cute little compact car, a Tercel, the lowest-mileage car she could find.

She took a deep breath and let it go, not a form of respiration with her, but a form of communication.

She said, “Think about coming down to see Gram and Daddy.”

I told her I would think about it, finally giving her a little proto-smile, all I could manage.

I looked away for a moment, studying a long thin crack in the parking lot, subtle earth movement happening all the time, temblors we couldn't feel but only read about in the paper.

She flicked her gaze upward, toward the upper floors and our apartment.

“Some men never grow up,” she said.

I watched her Tercel accelerate up the street, toward the overpass.

Mr. Torrance watched his dog force out a noodle of poop. I didn't want to go up to the apartment right then and listen to my father acting upbeat, reading lines from the
Chronicle
horoscope out loud, what kind of day we were going to have. Mrs. Torrance had waved her bejeweled pinkies at my mother—I don't know if Mom had waved back.

I didn't want to talk to anyone, but I didn't want to hurt their feelings.

Mr. and Mrs. Torrance must have had many questions about my mom and dad, whether my mother was going to move back here soon, where she was going right then. Mrs. Torrance had a sweet, courteous smile, and said that it was so nice to see my mother again.

“I bet your father is the happiest man in the world,” said Mr. Torrance.

Mrs. Torrance knelt with a plastic bag, the task she was undertaking looking all wrong for her. She should have had a lady-in-waiting or a lab assistant to help her remove this dog stool from the pavement.

“With that new piano,” Mr. Torrance was saying, making playing motions with one hand, the other gripping the leash, “I bet he has a ball.”

This was the reaction my father always got—people who didn't know him very well caring about his state of mind. I could also see the unasked questions, the conversation this elderly couple was too polite to have right in front of me, why my parents couldn't get along.

“I used to play drums, myself,” said Mr. Torrance, stepping hard on a half-smoked cigarette.

I tried to imagine this crisp, white-haired man hammering out a drum solo. I could very nearly envision him being in the army, in dress uniform, maybe playing drums for a color guard.

“I had a Ludwig drum kit, with a custom hi-hat a music shop over in Alameda ran up for me. Played jazz with a trio over in the city, in a little hole in the wall off Green Street. Never made much money at it, but we cooked.”

I started to say that I thought he was an accountant.

“Harry was a very good drummer,” said Mrs. Torrance with feeling.

“Tax preparation wasn't my whole life, Steven,” he said, laughing that juicy, smoker's hack. But I wondered if maybe I'd hurt his feelings, acting surprised that he ever dreamed of anything but decimals and sacrifice bunts.

He said, “Everybody's got another side or two to their personality hidden away.”

“It's a disappointment,” was all Dad would say. Not
I'm disappointed
or
I bet you're disappointed, too
.

He was putting on a freshly laundered shirt and necktie, a dazzling blue silk, a new plan for the day already under way.

“She'll stop by on her way back,” I said, half question, half statement.

He looked at himself in the mirror, his features oddly backward.

He said, “I don't know what's going to happen anymore.”

I felt that I should say something to make him feel better.

But in the next breath he was asking me what I thought of his Robert Talbot tie, a present from a friend.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Stacy Martell got out of his van in the gym parking lot. He didn't simply step down out of the vehicle—he swung himself out, one hand on the door frame, too muscular to move like a normal person.

He pulled out his gym bag, fussed with the van door, making sure it was locked. Raymond dug an elbow into my arm as we strolled across the parking lot, as though I would fail to see my opponent unzipping his bag, peeking inside, checking his pants pockets. Stacy was always a steady presence around the gym, signing up for cleanup duty, suggesting that we could bring our own towels to cut down on expenses.

“Lose something?” said Raymond, the sort of question timed to annoy rather than help, and hard to respond to—it sounds friendly, but it isn't.

Stacy's face folded into a smile. “Hi, you guys,” he said softly.

Then Stacy took an extra moment and gave me a look side to side, up and down, almost the way a man will size up a woman. “I guess you're going to teach me some moves today.”

“I'm here to learn from a master,” I countered, just the right sauce on the words,
master
implying: veteran, old.

“Oh, you'll learn,” he said.

I admired him, the way he respected and mocked me at the same time, guarding his composure. Even the way he betrayed his nerves, patting his pockets to make sure he had his car keys, was the right kind of double-checking. It's the one rule in boxing you never forget: protect yourself at all times.

He was square-headed, black-haired, sturdy, and fit. We strode along together, the three of us, and I couldn't help thinking that with his linebacker's neck and broad feet he would be hard to hurt. He had a six-year-old son going to Hawthorne Elementary School in Oakland, and a four-year-old girl he brought to the gym to jump rope in the shadows while he hammered the speed bag.

Raymond held the heavy steel door for us, making a little after-you gesture.

Stacy laughed, very quietly.

I wanted to delay the fight indefinitely.

The ceiling of the gym was darkness shot through with steel beams. Lamps hung straight down from the void, fluorescent racks too dazzling to look at.

Loquesto held the ropes wide so I could step through them. He huddled with Stacy, putting both hands on the man's shoulders, speaking directly into his face.

Then Loquesto sauntered over to me and gave me his full-face stare. “I'll tell you what I told him,” he said. “Keep your punches up, and fight clean. Don't try to be a hero, if you get in trouble; we're not here to see you get hurt. You understand?”

He meant, Did I understand what he was saying and also what he was not saying. He added something I suspected he had not told Stacy. “You're ready for this, Steven.”

Del Toro was at ringside, in snakeskin cowboy boots and a western-style hat, chewing gum and giving me an upward nod as he caught my eye. He lifted his right hand and made a slow motion punch, as though to encourage me to calculate down to the millimeter where and how my own right hand would find its target.

Mr. Monday, the referee, clapped his hands together, getting Andy, the timekeeper's, attention, and an excited crowd gathered. No iron clanked in the weight room, and the machine-gun staccato of the speed bag was silent. Everyone was here, under the brightest lights, as close as they could get to the ring.

Raymond was attending my corner, and Mr. Monday said, “Hello, Raymond, how's your dad?”

Raymond had adopted an expression of artful weariness, as though nothing that happened here today would touch him. This was a lie, of course, but a boxer's seconds, his pals and cornermen, are supposed to look like that. Mr. Monday's pleasantry brought a different expression onto Raymond's face, a lively, sincere friendliness.

He said that his dad was doing great, still running goats.

Mr. Monday shook resin from a beanbag sack of the stuff, all over canvas near Stacy's corner, and he powder-puffed my corner, too. And then he looked around as though surprised to see everybody, and leaned against the ropes, letting his weight test the tension.

Mr. Monday and the timekeeper often talked about politics, in a philosophical way. Andy was a senior at Hayward State University, a PE major, and brought
US News & World Report
along with his bag lunch. Mr. Monday's view was generally that life was complicated, while Andy felt that repealing income tax would solve every problem.

Now Andy was alert only to his boxing duties, testing the sports watch he wore around his neck.

At last I took a long look at my opponent, garbed now in a gray T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, jogging in place, his face compressed by the headgear and glistening from a coat of Vaseline.

“Go crazy,” said Raymond, slipping through the ropes and down, out of the ring.

This was reasoned advice—Raymond had often discussed his theory that if an out-of-shape maniac fought a well-conditioned normal person, you had to give the odds to the insane combatant. The unpredictability and stamina of berserk behavior counted for a great deal, especially early in a fight, but I recognized that underneath Raymond's encouragement was another, worried message: Unless you fight like a madman, you don't have a chance.

Andy's wooden hammer sang off the bell.

Stacy, as though in an afterthought, slipped the mouthpiece between his lips. He made a chimpanzeelike grimace.

He waltzed across the ring, looking like someone who used to be able to ballroom dance and was testing out his footwork.

He hit me.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I tried to hit him back, and I missed.

I had seen Stacy box often before, liking his peekaboo, step-by-step approach, the way he edged his opponent into a corner and then hurt him with left hands to the face.

It's even more disturbing when it's happening to you, his predictable left fist a jack-in-the-box that scored on my mouthpiece whenever he wanted it to.

The cartoon figures crowded around the ring howled, but I could not hear a sound. I had pictured this fight so vividly that I felt a confused boredom, the ropes whipsawing against my back as I ducked and yawed, my lower face going numb, my legs turning to water.

Raymond was shouting something, one hand crumpling his hair, one eye squinting, afraid to look.

It's always a jolt—how loud a punch is, and how much air it thuds out of the lungs.

I held on to Martell, a hand cupped around each of his shoulders, leaning into him, shoving him backward with all my weight. He took a half step back, and then shoved me all the way off, and snapped that jab after me.

I did it again—leaned into him, slipping jabs with my head, his leather glove making a squeak off my headpiece. I stayed on him, climbing to him, and he dug me in the ribs with both gloves, waiting for Mr. Monday to yell “Break!”

Mr. Monday barked, “Watch your heads,” as our two cushioned skulls nearly collided.

Stacy swung at my sides, hooked into my belly, and I began retaliating, tight, self-protective little punches. A feeling of relief kept me where I was, letting Stacy punch me as hard as he could to the liver.

His punches were loud, with a little explosion of sound coming through his lips as he fought.

But he wasn't hurting me.

Not really.

I puzzled over this joyfully as I followed him, staying right in front of him as he backed up. He was treading steadily away from me. This quickened me, and I tackled him into the ropes.

“Get off him, Beech,” said Mr. Monday, with the quietly irritated voice of a playground supervisor. “Box,” he said. He meant: Don't wrestle.

But it's one thing to be cautioned or advised by the referee, and another to be warned. This was not a warning. Mr. Monday gave me a smile when I shot a peek at him. Mr. Monday bent forward like a baseball umpire who relished his work, and gave a back and forth movement of his head—keep fighting.

Martell adjusted his mouthpiece and stepped sideways, trying to matador me into the ropes as I charged into him. I swiveled on my toes and danced after him. He tried to keep me away with his left hand, and this was punishing for me, my jaw going numb again, my mouth filling with blood.