A Fighting Chance (11 page)

“Hello?”
I say into the phone.

“
Hi, baby! I’ve been worried sick. How are you? Where are you? I miss you so much.”

“I miss you, too. I’m fine.
Almost in Mexico.”

“
Oh! Is Henry with you?”

“No…just an old friend. Drew.”

“Oh. Tell him I said hi.”

“
Will do.” I’m not exactly sure why I don’t correct her right away.

“So, did you win any fights yet? Knock any guys out?”

“Lyds…can we not talk about this right now? In fact, can we just talk when I get settled?”

“You’re right. Of course. No driving and talking. It’s so good to hear your voice. Drive safely. I love you, okay?”

“I love you, too.”

Drew snickers
when I hang up, but it isn’t pleasant or friendly. “So, you
are
capable of answering phone calls,” she mutters once I chuck it to the backseat. “But I guess you do a lot of things differently in your upgraded life with your upgraded girlfriend.” There’s the Drew I know.

I shake my head, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I didn’t upgrade from you, Drew.” She scoffs several times and lets out
more stale laughter. “You want to say something, so just go ahead. I know you.”

“You don’t know
a goddamn thing about me, Jesse,” she says in a clipped tone.

This is going downhill fast. “Okay, that’s true. But the girl I remember didn’t hold her tongue. So tell me what you’re thinking. Say what you want to say.”

“Fine, yeah, maybe upgrading is just a euphemism for what happened.” Drew leans over the console with a smile so caustic it could melt the metal around us. “How about this…the person I was in love with completely
erased
my existence from his life. Is that better than calling it
upgrading
?” I can’t deny it. I let Drew fade out like the burn in a damaged film reel that eats away the footage. Still, the words are a punch in the gut, and because I have none of my own to say back, we just sit there staring at each other. Neither of us breaks eye contact until someone honks behind me to drive forward. My stomach is still knotted during our brief chat with the border official as he sifts through our documentation before waving us into Mexico.

Miguel lives in Tepatitlán, which is ten hours away, and I’m
already exhausted from the sheer sprawl of country ahead as we navigate entry traffic. We stop at a Mickey D’s and I wander into a nearby pharmacy to pick up more water and snacks for the long haul. Back on the road, we pass blocks and blocks of tourist-congested open-air markets and gift shops in border towns, before the true city life emerges. Maybe before this I would have thought they were ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but given the reason I’m cruising through Mexico, I accept that there’s probably no such thing. We’re all just faking it under grocery shopping and little league baseball.

Miguel warned Drew that we’d be moving through clus
ters of towns notorious for gang activity, and I prefer not stopping again, so we alternate between air conditioning and open windows to preserve gas until we’re closer to our motel destination for the night. The only way to deal with the Mexican heat is to keep as still as possible, so that your only movements are the ones you can’t control, like blinking and breathing. Being from the South has not made hot weather more tolerable at all. I don’t care what anyone says; you don’t ever get used to feeling like you’re suffocating. Everything is sticking to me: my clothes, the air…Drew’s aggressive (but justified) animosity. I want to make small talk, like ask her how to pronounce the name of the town we’re heading to. But her back’s to me. Seems fitting for the way I turned mine on her.

“Remember that night during the summer after we graduated, when we drove all the way to the Louisiana border?” I ask. “You dared me to keep driving until we ran out of gas. I really wish I had. I don’t know where we’d be right now, but I bet you’d still be saving my ass. So, thanks for doing this,” I say. The space between us is choked with memories and unresolved issues, but I figure I can’t go wrong with gratitude to cool the
immediate tension. We will hopefully talk about four years ago when we can do it somewhat more peacefully.

Drew snorts. “Your ass looks pretty saved to me.”

“I still wouldn’t be able to do this without you.”

She takes a tentative peek at me over what’s still a pretty icy shoulder. “We haven’t done anything yet…”

“I feel like Henry right now. I’m coming into your life and disrupting it for something I need, but no one else would be able to handle what has to get done. So, I just want to say thank you.” Reaching into my pocket, I toss a tiny bottle of pink nail polish I picked up at the pharmacy to her lap. It’s my olive branch.

I watch as she examines the bottle and tries to keep her smile at bay. “I suppose this one will chip soon
. Thank you.” She twists around to the backseat and puts it into her bag then swings back, clutching my sketchpad. “Whoa. Was this your mom’s?” Before my mom lost her sight, she used to sketch. She never studied it in school or pursued art professionally, but it was her favorite hobby.

“No, it’s mine. I’m an architecture
major. We don’t really get to draw on paper anymore because of all the computer software, which I really like, but I’m old school deep down.”

“Do you mind if I…?” She flutters the pages between her fingers.

“Go ahead.” But the minute I give her permission, I want to take it back. I feel self-conscious around her all of a sudden, and I fixate on her unknown impression of my drawings. I’m dangerously shifting my eyes between what she’s doing and the road.

“
Is this your old house?”

“Yup.”

“Is this from a picture?” Her fingers trace the dark ink. “Because the Johnsons have changed it so much.”

“Memory...” Even now
, through my mind’s eye, I can see the small ranch house with its red brick and stucco exterior, Mom’s potted plants on the two steps leading up to the wraparound porch, and the large windows flanked by black shutters and tucked beneath wide eaves. “Sometimes I sketch just to see if I remember.” As bad as things sometimes were growing up in Glory, thanks to my mom our house was always a shield, a place of tranquility.

“Wow. This is so good. It’s
exactly
like I remember, too.” She smiles and sinks into the seat. “God, we sat on that porch so many nights, for hours…” Her smile becomes the widest grin, and a tremor of pleasure coasts down my chest. “Just making up things about our future lives.”

My mom isn’t the only person my old house reminds me of.
We made out a lot on that porch, too.
Especially when we found the perfect spot to stand where Mom couldn’t see us through the open window. “And we drank all of Mom’s sweet tea…with a little of your dad’s SoCo mixed in,” I add with a small smile of my own.

“With a
lot
of his SoCo mixed in,” Drew says, and we both laugh. She reaches for the radio and tunes it to something neither one of us can understand, before she turns on her own iPod playlist.

“
See
,” I say, “talking to me, that wasn’t so bad. So, can we try to be friends for however long you’re here? I won’t even mention how your iPod is
still
shitting bubble gum. Jesus, it’s like someone’s tossing syrup on a chalkboard with nails scratching down.”

Drew gasps but I see a hint of a smile under her mock offense. “Fine…we have a lot to do and you’re right, it’s better if we get along. I promise not to say anything mean about
your princess.”

Sunlight
catches her ring as she turns up the volume. “And I promise to pretend that you’re not marrying Beaver Bucky,” I say, laughing.

Drew slaps my shoulder. “Ha! He wore braces after high school. His teeth are
fine
now, thank you very much.”

“So, how’d you like
College Station?” Drew went to Texas A&M, just like her dad. Before we lost contact four years ago, our breakup was amicable because we had always known we would go to separate colleges. College seems like safe conversation territory; granted, she could still answer with, “You’d know if you had picked up the phone every once in a while,” but the fight is gone from her eyes, and that is always the first place to check. “What’d you study? History?” She always had an unnatural ability to retain information.

“
Yup. Double majored in that and museum studies. Now I just have to hope that the man Carol Duncan’s been talking to on Match.com moves her to Wherever, USA and I can take her job. For now, I work part-time with her when I’m not at Tickles or the pie shop
.
” Carol Duncan is Glory’s historian at the library, and she has been since I was born; yet, the only history I’ve ever seen her archive happens on her web browser.

“So you’re—you and Buck—plan on staying in Glory?”

“Yeah. Farm’s
finally
doing well again, now that the boys know what they’re doing, with their uncle’s help. After almost ten years in Glory, I feel like I have a duty to the place. I just want to make it better, not somewhere people pass on their way to see something better. That’s why the arrival of all those people who are coming there because of Henry makes me really angry. That place is my home.”

“You’re not buying that Alejandra is just a jealous girlfriend?”

“Not unless he’s into kinky gunplay, but then again, with your father, who knows.”

I wish I could disagree. “His Ponzi scheme story is plausible
, but I can’t see Henry trying to go corporate legit. Maybe it’s just about owing money from gambling on the fights, and he was ashamed to tell me.”

Drew’s expression darkens as she turns the radio down. “
Could be. Look, the truth is, Buck and I still go to fights. Sometimes. All over Texas. We haven’t run into him, so if he’s betting on fights still, he’s doing it somewhere else.” She shifts until her knees are nearly touching the gearshift.
Like Mexico.
“And death threats against kids, chopping off fingers, psycho Mexican ladies, guns…I bet that’s cartel.”

“Fuck.”
I know as much but it’s still startling to hear.
Are we really getting ourselves involved in this shit?
Yes, but for HJ. I clench the steering wheel until the polyurethane burns my palms. We fall into silence again, but it’s not that awkward kind from before, so we leave the music low and settle into the comfort of the quiet car. With a magazine in her lap, Drew puts her feet up on the dash and waves her fingers in the breeze at her window. I set my seat to a deeper recline and drop my arm to the back of her chair. It might be a while before we’re able to just relax like this.

We race the sun through central Mexico, crossing urban sprawl, villages, mountains, and plains. And as we pass town after town named after saints, I think about how holy this country is; yet, people like us only come
here when we want to do things that are anything but.

****

After a night at a forgettable motel, another three hours of roadway puts us at Miguel’s place. It’s one of many one-story, tan stucco, red tile-roofed homes on the block, with a haphazardly constructed picket fence wrapped around a pristine lawn.

“
Mi amor
!” Miguel says, dashing from the low stone steps out front to greet Drew as I pull up to the curb. He’s lifting her up a few seconds after I park, and swinging her around. I give them a moment, reluctant to intrude until she invites it. He prattles off in Spanish, even though Drew admitted to me that she’s only fluent in the insults and curse words. When she shoves him backward, he finally speaks to her in English.

He’s a few years older than we are, she told me, though
, he doesn’t look like he can even grow facial hair yet. He’s in loose jeans, a white t-shirt, and there’s short, wild hair poking out from under a Dodgers cap. Miguel has dark features—complexion, hair, eyes—and he’s lanky with long limbs. He doesn’t have the musculature for fighting. I catch him sizing me up, too, over Drew’s shoulder, but I can’t read his face. I’m anxious to impress him because he’s the gatekeeper to the underworld.

After Drew’s introduction, Miguel
gets in the backseat, preferring to talk away from his house. “My mother and little brother, Eduardo, live here, too,” he explains as he texts rapidly on his phone. “My older brother, Santi, was killed during a shootout at a fight four years ago. My father, too, was killed in the ring when I was a child. If Mamá knew I was involved with fights, she would never speak to me again.” I’m struck by the casual way he talks about death, but I get the feeling I’m only hearing the abridged version of what he’s seen. His English, learned from years of
The Price is Right
and
Jeopardy
Internet downloads, is near perfect, and he speaks very quickly about everything, from the mundane to the important, like he’s always pressed for time. His day job is a bunch of day jobs, and he promotes new fighters at night. He grew up in Guadalajara, but his mother moved them around a lot, trying to keep a house full of sons from ending up like their father. Not that it mattered. With a chuckle, Miguel says, “Sometimes fathers pass on more than just high blood pressure.” Don’t I fucking know it.