Shadowboxer (6 page)

Now he was walking away from me, through the kitchen, stepping carefully so he wouldn’t get his shoes dirty on the trail of slime that the pig swill bag had left on the tiles.

‘Wait,’ I said, following. ‘Is there anything else I should know? Can you teach me some curse words?’

‘Keep practicing,’ he said, flashing a smile over his shoulder. Then Chrissie was there, an envelope with my cash in her hand, and he was slipping around her while she started asking if my cousin Luis could do anything about the ignition in her Mercedes. Then he was gone.

I went home and told Malu what Cake said. She listened while she fed the fish and skimmed their tank.

‘You, learning to take it easy? That could be asking too much. On the other hand, this could be an opportunity for you.’

‘Have you been talking to my mom again?’ I closed my eyes. Mom had called me on the restaurant’s phone—she’s resourceful, right? I wouldn’t be surprised if she took out skywriting to get her message across: STAY OUT OF TROUBLE, JADE. She yapped away in my ear. Was I sure? Did I promise to be careful? Would I call her every day? I decided to let Mr. B explain to her that I had no phone.

Now Malu flashed her eyes. ‘As a matter of fact, I did talk to your mom. And I had to swear upside down and sideways that you’ll be safe on this trip. So you better. Don’t get into it with anybody.’

‘Fine.’

I thought I kept my voice neutral, but she gave me her Look.

‘
What,
Jade? Spill.’

She knew me too well. Me and my cousin had been close since my mom moved from Queens to Union City to get away from my dad. Even in those days Malu was big and womanly-looking and smart, but she got pushed around by pretty much everybody because she never stood up for herself. I was scrawny and truant and back in Queens I’d had a lot of fights. I picked fights because I liked everybody to know that I might be small, but I was no pushover. I was Malu’s bodyguard for years, and she made me do my homework.

Then Malu got a scholarship to private school and we were separated. We lived in different worlds. Malu lived away from home, where she got educated and cultured. ‘You’re like a butterfly coming out of your cocoon,’ I used to rag her, and Malu would say, ‘You’re like bullshit coming out of a bull.’

Then my aunt and uncle moved to Virginia, but Malu stayed to go to college in the city. I was starting eleventh grade when our grandmother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and my mom went back to the Dominican Republic to take care of her. Malu moved in to keep an eye on me, and she was doing that literally right now. She was
drilling
me with her eyes. I didn’t flinch.

Eventually she said, ‘You know you’re going to tell me.’

‘Nothing.’

Malu snorted.

‘Nothing!’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘OK. OK, but it’s stupid.’

She raised her eyebrows, waiting.

‘I’m scared of Thailand,’ I said.

Malu rolled her eyes. ‘Come on. You’ve been wanting to go to Thailand to train ever since you started in with this Mr. Big dude. Now you do something really stupid, hit a movie star who could have you arrested, and with your luck you manage to turn it around so you get what you wanted to do anyway, which was to go to Thailand. Where does the scared part come in?’

‘I know it doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I have always wanted to train there. It’s just that everything’s happening so fast. And I’m... scared. Of myself.’

‘Yourself.’ Malu can lay on the mock about three feet deep just by the tone she uses. I ignored her tone. I said:

‘I think I can feel a fuckup coming on.’

Malu sighed. She went in the kitchen and came out with a plant mister. Malu is an earth-mother type. She keeps plants, and fish, and of course there’s Coltrane the iguana, who she sneaked into the apartment without Irene the super finding out. As she started spritzing the Norfolk pine, she had a disapproving pout on her lips.

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I can feel it building, you know like an electric charge before a thunderstorm. Probably my biggest yet.’

‘What have I been telling you about thinking positive, Jade?’

‘I’m not trying to make it happen. It just is. I mean, bad things happen in threes, right? Well, I’ve messed up twice so far, you know? First when I stomped that girl’s head. Second, I lose my temper and knock out the world’s second biggest kung fu movie star. This is definitely an escalating fuckup series.’

‘Number three doesn’t have to come,’ Malu said quietly, pulling some dead leaves off a spider plant. ‘This is your chance to stop it. Go to Thailand. Change.’

I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. I don’t have a choice. My fuckups never quit until I’m all out of options.’

‘How do you think I felt when I went to boarding school with five pairs of Walmart underwear and there were girls there with their own polo ponies? You get used to feeling freaked out all the time. Being freaked is just a sign you’re challenging yourself.’

‘For real now?’

‘For real. Go with it. So tell me, are you going to that big place where all the Westerners go?’

‘Fairtex gym? No. It’s a tiny place. Mr B said they don’t have a website.’

‘So it’s authentic. Are you going to be in a little hut somewhere in the forest, picking fruit off the trees?’

‘It’s in Bangkok so I don’t think it’s a hut. It better not be a hut. I need a real bathroom. Especially with all that unfamiliar food and my... um... delicate stomach.’

‘I’m way ahead of you,’ Malu said. ‘I bought you Imodium AD on my way home. Four boxes. You won’t shit the whole time you’re out there.’

Got Smelly Bottom

R
AIN DRIPPED THROUGH
the leaky roof of the PortaPotty and plopped on my head. I was holding the last three sheets of toilet paper in my hand, trying to save them until I was sure the eruption in my guts had ended. So far that wasn’t happening.

This kid called Pepsi was banging on the door and calling to me in a piping voice.

‘Come out now, Jade!’

Sweat dripped off my eyebrows as another spasm gripped my intestines. It felt like a bunch of snakes were biting me all up and down my guts, poisonous snakes with fangs who also did that boa-constrictor-type thing that snakes do. At the same time. I just wanted to run away from my insides and leave them to shoot rocket fuel out my butt without me.

But running away from my own insides was not an option. I opened my eyes. It was about 379 degrees outside and pouring rain in the building site adjacent to the gym. There was no seat, so I was squatting. My legs trembled with exertion and my teeth were chattering with that shivery feeling caused by shitting and hurling almost at the same time.

‘Please go away!’ I yelled. Malu had given me a Thai language book to study on the plane, but I’m not good at learning from books. So far I’d been getting by with gestures and English and the bits of Thai I’d learned over the years from Cake.

‘Time to eat, Jade,’ the boy sang, knocking again. I knew he was laughing at me; they’d all been laughing at me since the minute I got here. It was like I was some kind of traveling freak show. First I got on the wrong bus from the airport, then I got on another wrong bus to try to fix it. I’d walked about six miles, jetlagged, in the rain, until I found some college students who spoke English. They were so nice I almost cried, especially when one of them helped me buy this incredibly yummy fruit drink with salt in it.

When I got off the bus I changed my mind about the college students. They must have tricked me. This couldn’t be the right place. Who builds a boxing gym in the most polluted area of the city, in open air under the arches of a superhighway? The air reeked of exhaust. Rain was pouring down in sheets from the roadway that passed overhead. Instead of houses there were makeshift shacks, and outside one of them two men squatted on the ground passing a bottle back and forth.

I’d stood there in the warm dawn listening to the roar of traffic and shifting the weight of my bags on my shoulders. I could see the boxing ring and the bag alley, right out in the open by a railway siding. This couldn’t be it. A gym like this couldn’t have any association with Mr. B and his Humvee and his gold chains. No way.

A tired-looking woman in flip-flops and a skirt had opened the doors of what looked like a shed and started sweeping the concrete. I remembered to make a
wai,
a polite little bow, before I showed her the address.

She examined the paper. She didn’t smile, but her voice was soft.

‘Jade Barrera. I’ll get Coat.’ She turned and walked away.

When I heard
Coat
my stomach had taken a dive, and my guts started to boil. This was the gym where I was going to spend my summer vacation?

I’d waited on the wet pavement trying not to choke on the diesel fumes. I hadn’t expected Fairtex with clean mats and air conditioning and famous boxers, but I had expected to be able to breathe. Then I heard voices.

Kids started pouring out of the dorm. They were all boys, from teenagers on down to eight and nine year olds, more than a dozen of them. They were wearing shorts and filthy sneakers, no shirts, and they were all laughing like everything was one gigantic joke.

‘What is this, day care?’ I said. ‘Where are the adults?’

A tall, stocky man showed up wearing a Fila t-shirt and shiny basketball shorts. He looked me up and down and sniffed, then gestured for me to join in the run. The woman took my bags and I was off, running along the railway siding through clouds of bluish exhaust in a neighborhood that made the Port Authority bus terminal look like the Ritz. I hadn’t slept longer than 20 minutes in the last two days, and I’d only eaten snacks from food carts off the street—and that fruit juice cocktail that had tasted gorgeous at the time.

I knew a 10k run was a standard part of the day in many camps, but I didn’t expect it to kick in on the first morning. Maybe it was a test. Well, guess what? I failed. Because after only a couple miles I’d fallen behind the rest—even the eight-year-olds. The air was like hot sludge, and I was regretting drinking that juice. All the way back to camp, I was wishing I’d taken that Imodium before I started running. The only thing that kept me going was fear of messing myself in public.

Finally it was over. We turned down an alley and returned to the highway, passing beneath its shelter and back to the open-air gym.

‘Please!’ I panted in my pathetic Thai, staggering after the others. ‘Where’s the toilet?’

The boys all started giggling. Like they were embarrassed. I was the one about to mess myself—did I not have the right word for toilet? What was so embarrassing?

‘You want the day care toilet?’ A kid was speaking English with a huge smile. ‘Sure, no problem. I am Pepsi. I will be your guide. Come this way!’

Great, I thought. I was rude, so now they’re going to take advantage of my delicate stomach and play games on me. I couldn’t blame them—I’d have done the same. But no way was I following him.

Luckily I spotted a PortaPotty, which they obviously didn’t want me to see. It stood crookedly among tall weeds in what looked like a building site next to the gym. The bottom of the door had been kicked in. Snarling at the boys, I went in and held what was left of the door shut.

‘No!’ the English-speaking boy was shouting at me. ‘Not there!’ He grabbed at the door but I closed it and held it shut.

Just in time.

It smelled like something died. And there was no seat. Just a hole.

There’s no feeling quite like squatting in an unfamiliar toilet knowing that a stranger outside is holding your passport and wallet and phrasebook.

I was helpless.

‘You OK in there?’ said Pepsi in English. ‘You need some help?’

‘No,’ I gasped. I held that door shut for all I was worth. I could just see the Instagram post:
Jade Barrera on PortaPotty, Bangkok
.Nobody was getting a picture of this.

The boy went away and came back. This time his hand reached under the broken edge of the ‘door’ and shoved half a roll of pink toilet paper at me.

I burst into tears.

‘Oh, thank god,’ I sobbed.

‘We going now,’ Pepsi said in English. ‘Better hurry. You miss training.’

When I finally showed up, the training was in full swing. The gym was open-air and everything looked like it was about to fall apart. Two older kids were doing pad work in the ring and others were drilling pads on the concrete around the ring. Some were working bags. Some were doing sit-ups and lifting concrete weights held by ropes in their teeth. Some were jumping rope. Coat lounged against the ropes and watched the older fighters.

I felt weak. I took a few swigs from the bottle of water in my bag, but it barely kept me on my feet. I’d thought the rainy season would be cool, but the place was like a steam bath. Everyone ignored me, so I decided to do bag work. The bag was hard, and where the filling had settled at the bottom it felt like concrete.

All around me a random chorus of shouted ‘Ay’s’ and ‘Oh’s’ sang out as the boys trained. ‘Ai-ai-ai-aaaaaay!’ they’d yell as they let off a series of shots. The older boys were real hardbodies. They prowled around, stalking each other, one guy holding the pads and the other hitting, sometimes clinching, sometimes even throwing. They weren’t training in anything like all-out fight mode, but there was no way I could keep up with them the way I was feeling right now.

The gym might be shabby, but I had to admit the standards were pretty high.

‘Jade.’

I hadn’t noticed Coat coming up behind me. Winded, I stepped away from the bag I’d been working on and
wai
’d to him; he’d squared up to me with a set of pads on his forearms. Towering over me, he nodded for me to hit.

I was blowing hard by then, and nothing I did had much effect. Coat signalled the shots he wanted from me but kept his evasive footwork going so that I didn’t have enough time to get in. He was definitely checking me out, and I was coming up lacking. But I tried. I landed a couple of good round kicks, and I was aware that some boys had stopped training to watch the foreign girl. Coat turned to them and said, ‘keep working,’ with a smile, and they did.