Suckerpunch: (2011) (28 page)

We added a knee at the end of the one-two—jab-cross and grab the crown of his head in the Thai clinch and drive the knee into his belly. Keep him in the clinch and sneak some elbows across his face. Between combos Gil looped some half-speed strikes at me with the pads. I covered up and countered three times faster.

“Good,” Gil said. “Let’s work some ground. Bait the powerbomb, just like we worked on. If they come back here with a camera, you get up quick and just shadowbox. No reason to show Burbank anything. Javier, you ready?”

“Yes,” Javier said. He had his shirt and shoes off and walked over to the mats stretching his wrists and fingers. Edson guided Jairo into the room with a towel around his waist and a fresh white rectangular bandage taped from his collarbone to the top of his shoulder blade.

“How is it?” I asked.

“Not bad. It has a pain rhythm to my heartbeat.”

Gil pointed at the giant bag. “I got Advil and some of your T-shirts and some warm-up pants that might fit. You’re gonna have to free ball it.”

“Lucky pants.” Jairo got dressed while he and Edson talked in low voices near the TV. It showed an empty cage and a rowdy crowd under spinning colored lights.

“All right,” Gil said, “Woody, you just got taken down and Burbank here has side mount, so let’s work on what we drilled yesterday.”

I laid down on my back with my knees up, and Javier dropped next to me and put his chest across mine with his head over my left arm.

Gil said, “Slow now, slow. Nobody’s getting hurt on fight day. Woody, get that knee through.”

We worked it until someone rapped on the door. It opened and a guy wearing a headset ducked in. “Twenty minutes. You ready?”

“Good to go,” Gil said.

The headset vanished and Hollywood Andersen, one of the top two cutmen in combat sports, floated in. He was near sixty and had worked on the prettiest faces in boxing and MMA and kept them that way. He smiled and pointed to the couch.

The brothers cleared out and I sat down.

Hollywood spun a metal folding chair backward in front of the couch and sat down with his tackle box between his feet. He peered at my lumpy eyebrows while he unwrapped a new roll of gauze. “No offense, but I don’t want to spend all night trying to keep your face from falling apart.”

“How is that offensive?”

A state inspector came in and closed the door behind him. He nodded to everyone and stood behind Hollywood to make sure he didn’t include any engine blocks or kryptonite in my wraps.

Hollywood said, “Just try to keep that meat loaf you call a forehead out of the way of his fists, all right?”

“There goes the game plan.”

He laughed and pulled a strip of tape off the roll. “All right, all right, what’s it gonna be? The knockout wrap or the tapout wrap?”

I stuck out my left hand. “Knockout.”

Hollywood wove a tapestry of tape and gauze over and through my knuckles, across the back of my hands, around my wrists. Grapplers and jiu jitsu guys usually like a looser, lighter wrap so they can grip and hold and squeeze; strikers like it tight and hard. When he was done, it felt like I had wrecking balls hanging off my arms.

The state inspector approved and signed Hollywood’s work. Hollywood should have autographed them too; Michelangelo would have admired the sculptures.

Gil got my fighting gloves on, and we taped them down, and the inspector liked that too. I stepped into my sandals and pulled my Arcoverde T-shirt with all the sponsors on it over my head, and things started happening fast.

The guy with the headset jumped through the doorway and said, “Ready? Ready? Come on.”

Gil and the Arcoverdes and I followed him into the hallway where a camera crew waited. Six burly security guards in slacks and maroon blazers filled in around us.

“Right here,” the headset said, then, “No, come with me.”

He led us toward a black curtain and a wave of sound that would make a riot cop ditch the Taser and call in the tanks.

The headset stopped us about thirty yards from the curtain and said, “Wait for my signal; we want to get you walking to the music.”

I asked Gil, “What’d you pick?”

The speakers answered: “Superbeast” by Rob Zombie. I could barely hear it over the crowd. Colored lights and strobes sliced through a gap in the curtain. Gil stayed close and talked to me. I didn’t really listen, but it was familiar and solid. Jairo offered me water. I shook my head. He worked his fingers into my neck and shoulders.

The headset said, “Yeah? . . . Okay, let’s go!”

Someone pulled the curtain aside, and the cameraman backed through the opening with his lens pointed at me. I walked through and looked up. At first all I could see was a huge, boiling mass of arms in the air, waving, shaking fists, throwing middle fingers and devil horns, but mostly clutching cups of beer.

The arms gave way to faces pulled into all sorts of arrangements, none of them pleasant. Anyone rooting for me was vastly outnumbered, and I hoped they had the good sense to either keep quiet or fake it. Burbank’s fans had been lathering up since the weigh-ins and wanted blood, and if I didn’t give them some, they’d settle for anything red and warm.

“Let’s move!” the headset said.

The place got louder. Canada braced for an earthquake. The lights popped and blazed. Gil yelled something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. He pointed straight ahead. Past the camera, past the faces leering into the corridor to taunt me or cheer me, past it all, I saw the cage.

My oasis.

I took a step toward it. Another. The crowd screamed toward liftoff.

By the third step I was running. I blew past the cameraman and left the security guards behind. Gil and Jairo and the others almost kept up, but I was going home and couldn’t get there fast enough.

I made it through the gauntlet of hands and ran into Hollywood again at the bottom of the steps to the cage door. I pulled my shirt off and kicked my sandals somewhere.

Hollywood grabbed my shoulders and held me still. “Easy, son, it’ll still be there in a minute.” He had a gob of Vaseline waiting on the back of his latex glove and pulled half of it off, looked at the flesh and scar tissue around my eyes, and went back for the rest. He smeared it across my forehead and around my orbital bones and down my cheeks, a thin barrier that would hopefully reduce the friction between my face and Burbank’s gloves and keep me from getting cut right away.

As for the elbows and knees, well, I’d just have to block those with the back of my head instead of the front.

“Go get ‘em,” Hollywood said.

I turned and Gil and Jairo were there.

Gil hugged me and said, “You know what to do.” He stuck my mouthguard in and gave me a sip of water.

I clamped down and liked the pressure in my jaw.

Jairo kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. “Marcela, she’s smarter than all of us, and she’s not worried. Okay?”

I nodded.

“So don’t worry. Just kill him.”

I turned toward the steps. I showed one of the Warrior referees my mouthguard and rapped my cup, and he checked my hair and skin for grease.

“Clear for takeoff,” he said.

I ran up the steps.

I stood in my corner and faced the fence during Burbank’s entrance, focused in on Gil and Jairo and whatever they had to say that I could hear over the crowd and music. The music cut off and I could hear Gil better. Then Jim Lincoln, the Warrior announcer, took the center of the cage and started his roll on the microphone and everybody shut up.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lincoln said, sounding like a movie preview, “this is the co-main event of the evening, pitting two honorable warriors against one another in a battle of heavyweights.”

I turned around and saw Burbank for the first time since the weigh-in. He only took up half the cage and looked twice as big as when we’d fought three years earlier. He smiled at me. His mouthpiece had something printed on it, but I couldn’t tell what. That was odd, because his mouth looked big enough to hide a van.

I checked out the arena. The only people sitting down were the cage-side officials and commentators. Davie Benton was there in a headset, grinning and talking and moving his hands like he was bending something in half while the play-by-play guy, Ken Vincent, nodded.

The biggest house I’d fought in before tonight held five thousand people. The Golden Pantheon could hold five times that, and people were standing in the aisles and blocking fire escapes. I couldn’t even see the upper tier of seats.

“Knock that off,” Gil said behind me.

I came back down to the cage and the man across from me.

Lincoln had been working up to a crescendo, and I didn’t know he was talking about me until he pointed his note card my way and said, “The only fighter to defeat Junior Burbank: Aaron . . . Woodshed . . . Wallace!”

The crowd treated me like I’d canceled weekends. I nodded at them.

Lincoln must have decided I wasn’t going to be carried outside and thrown off a bridge. “And in the red corner, standing at a massive six feet six inches, bringing a ten and one record into the rematch. Warrior fans, here is Junior . . . Burbank!”

Jesus might have gotten more noise, but only if he came out dancing. Burbank held his arms out and turned in a slow circle, his head back and eyes closed to take it all in. He stopped while he was facing me and opened his eyes and smiled again.

The crowd ate it up like free steak.

Lincoln said, “The referee for this matchup is Mel Wilkins.”

Wilkins walked to the center of the cage, and Lincoln ducked behind him so he could get the microphone under his chin. Wilkins waved me and Burbank toward the center.

I walked to him and tried not to let Burbank’s stomp across the canvas affect my balance.

Burbank came more than halfway across and pushed against Wilkins’s outstretched arm. Wilkins tried to move him and should have practiced by knocking mountains over with a straw. He said something about a clean fight and obeying his commands at all times.

I worked my mouthpiece and nodded and didn’t blink.

Burbank tipped his head toward mine until our foreheads touched. He pushed. I pushed back. Wilkins tried to pry us apart. I smiled at Burbank. I was going to eat his head.

He smiled, and I could read his mouthpiece:

Marcela.

Everything stopped—heart, lungs, brain. Drops of sweat halted halfway down my face and waited.

Burbank laughed at the look on my face.

Wilkins said, “Now touch gloves, and let’s have a good fight.”

I couldn’t raise my gloves, but it didn’t matter.

Burbank strolled to his corner while the crowd screamed its throat raw.

I backed into my corner and heard Gil over my shoulder: “He’s gonna come out fast. Weather the storm and wear him out. Lateral movement. He’ll make a mistake before you do. Make him pay for it.”

I tried to tell him about the mouthpiece but couldn’t find the air.

Wilkins pointed at me. “Fighter, are you ready?”

For the first time in my professional career, I wasn’t sure. But I nodded.

He pointed at Burbank. “Are you ready?”

Burbank roared.

“Fight!” Wilkins moved out of the way, and someone shot a torpedo at me from the other side of the cage.

Burbank ran across the canvas and got to me before I could take three steps. He faked an overhand right and shot in for an immediate double-leg takedown. I sprawled and pushed him toward the canvas, but he drove forward and backed me into the cage and tried to get his long arms behind my thighs. I kept my legs straight and punched him in the back a few times. It would have been a good way to crack open some oysters or walnuts.