Pound for Pound (41 page)

Cooley tried to look over to Shortcake, his trainer and chief second, who squatted on the steps leading up to Cooley’s corner, but Cooley’s eyes were scrambled and he couldn’t line up the lights and the shadows. The line on Garza was that he fought with his face; that he waded in throwing punches from all angles, but lost power from lack of balance and leverage; that his relentless attack took opponents out with an accumulation of punches rather than with one big shot; that he’d fade as the fight wore on. But the line on Garza was no longer straight, and Cooley couldn’t decipher the rules of the new game. Pain stung him like a bamboo cane to a bare leg.

Garza was so busy throwing punches that he hadn’t seen Cooley’s body go slack, hadn’t realized that he’d missed an opportunity for a quick KO. But his corner men, Trini and Paco Cavazo, had seen it, saw Cooley as a toasted marsh-mallow, and congratulated each other.

“Está a puro chingazo, mano.” He’s fucked completely, my brother.

“¡Ay-yai-yai!” whooped Paco.

Shortcake saw it just as the Cavazos had, and signaled with his pumping left hand for Cooley to jab out of the corner. Cooley stuck his jab and moved free. He pivoted, then fired a lead right hand and then a left hook behind it that hurt Garza, but Garza came on anyway. Cooley had been hit in his career, all fighters get hit, but he had never before felt as if a tenpenny nail had been driven into his jawbone. He shoved his glove into his cheek as if he had an abscessed tooth, looked for his blood on the glove, saw none, and went back to work. Hit and don’t get hit, Cooley reminded himself, yet he was not at all sure how Garza had even hit him, much less hurt him so badly.

But this is the first round, Cooley also told himself, the round in which fighters are most easily knocked out, that time in the fight where they are not yet
completely warmed up, when they are most vulnerable to shock, when they can lose their legs. He got on his bicycle, pivoted off the front leg, off the back, thought that Garza would tire himself from throwing and missing so many heavy punches, that Garza’s legs and wind would go from the movement Cooley imposed on him.

Garza continued to miss, and Cooley put bumps on him with his peppering jab and solid right hands, but Garza would come on in a crouch and shove Cooley into the ropes with his elbows and fire his heavy artillery. Cooley, if for only two or three seconds, was unable to block or slip all of Garza’s punches, especially the body rockets that tore into his liver and ribs and edged illegally around to his kidneys. Cooley knew he could take a shot with the best, had learned that time and adrenaline would erase damage, that the desire to win overcame pain, knew that pissing red looked worse than it felt, believed that he could always go one more round.

Survive this,
Cooley told himself,
then go out and fuck this Mexican up.

But the body shots in the next round left him gasping, the ball-peen hammers in Garza’s fists made Cooley’s ribs and sternum creak, caused spasms from his knees to his elbows. He was in the best condition of his life, so how could this be? Pain usually came after the fight was over, the delay of pain part of what made fighting possible. Pain had good manners, normally waited until after the dance before it came to collect, waited for the dressing room or the hotel before it invaded the jaw or the knuckles or head or lower back, then throbbed all night, diminishing with codeine when available, or diminishing with the heart rate as it ambled back down to its usual forty to fifty beats a minute. Pain could disappear overnight, or last for days, or maybe you went to the hospital for two weeks, or maybe the ring doctor stretched you on the floor in the back room of an old arena and stitched an eye that was cut to the bone, the hole long as an eyebrow, pain paying its visit only after the hypodermic needle’s wet miracle had worn off, and then even your teeth hurt.

But Cooley was in torment now, and this didn’t make sense. Cooley’s distraction allowed Garza to pound him with more hammers. Cooley fought back, cut Garza’s eye, but then he felt his first bone break as Garza caught him with a right hand to the face just before the end of the third round. It broke Cooley’s
nose, set his face on fire, felt as if hot coffee had been thrown into his eyes. His nose went sideways, spurted raspberry down and across his chest that mixed with sweat collected in the hair. The cracking-bone sound banged against Cooley’s eardrums, warned him that it might be best not to engage further in this activity.

Shortcake was able to slow, but not completely stop, the blood, and Cooley began to doubt himself. As long as a boxer can fight back, he can hang—can keep on if he believes that he can give as good as he gets. In that equation, his body tells him it won’t betray him—his trusted, beautiful body—the body that has been as loyal to him as first love. But when damage is not returned to the other fighter in equal measure, pain conquers. It leads to fatigue and to doubt and to despair and to loss. And suddenly the other guy’s hand goes into the air. And then the beaten fighter goes home feeling lower than whale shit.

The only thing for Cooley was to jab and pivot off the ropes, get to the center of the ring and stay there. He caught Garza with a right hand as Garza came in with his Mexican hook wide as a barn door. Since Cooley landed first, it was Garza who went down on his ass, but Cooley knew it could have been the other way around. His vision was still blurred from the cracked nose, and he couldn’t make out how badly Garza was hurt, but he pressed with his own power once Garza was up, fired a power hook off a jab. Garza managed to slip under Cooley’s hook, and pie-eyed as a stumbling drunk, grabbed and held. Cooley struggled to pull free, could now feel how badly Garza was hurt, suddenly knew again that he could knock him out. But Garza clung to him like paint, held on stumbling and grappling to keep Cooley from knocking him out with another straight right.

The bell rang, and the ref checked Cooley’s bleeding nose, then allowed him to return to his corner.

Cooley said, “They won’t stop it, will they?”

Shortcake said, “Naw!,” but he was guessing and hoping more than stating a fact.

Cooley’s cut man first cleaned him, then went after the inside of the busted nose with adrenaline-drenched swabs. He saturated number 2 cotton rolls, the kind dentists use to absorb a patient’s saliva, with more adrenaline using some
of Cooley’s blood to camouflage them, he bent them double, and then shoved one up each nostril and illegally left them there. The adrenaline woke Cooley up.

The cut man said, “Don’t breathe through your nose.”

Cooley said, “I can’t anyway.”

Shortcake said, “What if the cotton come out and the ref shit?”

The cut man said, “I tell him I forgot ‘em up there, what’s he gonna do?”

The cut man slapped an ice bag over Cooley’s eyes and nose and applied pressure to his upper lip, and for the time being, stopped the blood cold.

Shortcake knelt in front of Cooley, spoke quietly. “You gotta stay away from him, baby, this a hard man, fight him from outside, hyuh?, keep him at the end of your punches.”

Dan said, “Somethin’s fishy, right?”

Shortcake said, “Yeah, dass right, he too slow to be hittin so hard.”

“He don’t feel slow.”

In the fourth, Garza tried to stay in Cooley’s nose, but Cooley bobbed and weaved, countered and slipped. The bent cotton rolls remained lodged in place, and the blood flow was reduced, but the pain was as sharp as ever, and Cooley’s tear ducts kept his vision goofy, and having to breathe improperly sapped his strength. When the shots kept coming to the face, and Cooley tried to block them, Garza went to the body with the ball-peen hammers again. Cooley felt something give in his ribs, wasn’t sure if it was a separation or a break. Garza came back with another left to the ribs, and Cooley felt something crack on his right side, sensed it in his spine, gagged, had to fight off shock like it was another opponent. Cut flesh doesn’t hurt like broken bone. Stab and horn wounds cause delayed hurt, but broken bones are quick as a bumblebee bite, and Cooley’s face twisted as he lost his ability to keep his right hand up for protection.

This time Garza saw that he had Cooley hurt. He began to fire wildly, mindlessly, left himself wide open again. Cooley felt the opening more than he saw it, came up with a Philadelphia hook—half uppercut, half hook—put Garza down again. This time Garza stayed down until the last second, the count of nine. While he was down, Cooley looked to one of the time clocks that hung on opposite walls of the old arena. Visible time clocks were still common, there to help the crowd judge the progress of the fight, but fighters would cop looks hoping that
the round was about to end. Cooley looked. A whole minute remained. The first two minutes of the round had felt like twenty. The next one minute loomed like sixty, and dreading that, he began to wonder if Garza had somehow fooled the ring officials, wondered if Garza’d slipped rolls of dimes into his gloves, or maybe steel roller bearings. Cooley shook it off. A roll of coins could fracture a dirty fighter’s knuckles and metacarpals as quickly as he could break his opponent’s jaw, maybe sooner, and the gauze and the tape around the knuckles and palms would prevent him from closing his hands properly, especially if he was a lightweight who had small hands.

The crowd bellowed and roared and crowed, Mick and Mex together, but Cooley heard only Shortcake yelling for him to finish Garza off.

“Get him, Danny, put him asleep, baby, one-two hook to the body come back hook to the head knock him out le’s go home! Do it!”

The ref waved the fighters together. Cooley knew he had to get Garza, knew it because his body had turned to broken glass inside, knew that he could never go the distance hauling the damage Garza had done to him. Garza, demoralized himself, couldn’t understand what was holding Cooley up.

The bell rang, ending the round. Both men coughed from deep in the chest. As Cooley wobbled to his corner, he thought again of the rolls of dimes.

Cooley sat on his ring stool and said, “Somethin’s wrong, Cake, somethin’s hard in those gloves.”

Shortcake said, “Boy, you been hittin him more than he been hittin you.”

Cooley said, “Look at me and look at him. Gotta be somethin inside the gloves.”

Shortcake yelled at the ref, said Garza had loaded his gloves, said he wanted Garza’s gloves cut off. He knew the ref wouldn’t delay the fight, would think he was trying to steal some rest for his fighter, but he wanted the complaint on the record.

The referee scowled. “I been doin Cooley a favor lettin it go this long, right? Now take that packin outta his nose, you think I didn’t see it? “

Shortcake squatted back in front of Cooley, “Muhfuh,” he said, and picked out the cotton. “You got to fight him, kid.”

Both fighters made it to the fifth, and both were used up, but it was Cooley
who was broken and lumpy and turning blue in spots. He couldn’t believe Garza was breaking him down. Cooley knew he was the better fighter, knew that he hit harder. He’d known that Garza was no chump, but he also knew that his own style should have sapped Garza’s will, should have siphoned off his wind, should have stolen Garza’s ability to hang. Yet here they were, in round number five, and it was Cooley who was sucking wind, it was his five-and-six-punch combinations that had been stolen. He knew that he should have stopped Garza by now, but he hadn’t, and now all he had left to go on was tit.

They were halfway into the fifth when Cooley was turned sideways by a left hook to the body that frightened him for the first time in his fighting life. He felt more bones creak and shiver, and the stabbing pain of the rib that was already broken caused him to groan. He instinctively dropped his right hand in an effort to protect his body, but then a hook to the head landed and he heard the bones breaking at the outside of his right eye, the sound like a cracked claw. Sweat and blood from his nose headed sideways again, and so did the vision in his right eye. The white area of the eyeball turned crimson from internal bleeding, and the eye and right side of Cooley’s face swelled immediately, looked like a sweet potato had been slipped in under the skin. Pain tore through the eyeball and the shattered socket and into Cooley’s soul. Blind in one eye, Cooley fought on, as fighters who are fighters will, fought a brown shadow and a smear of black hair, but Cooley’s legs were almost gone and he knew he had only seconds left if he was to win.

Garza had forgotten defense early on, and Cooley was able to catch him with a liver shot that made Garza keen. Cooley thought he might still win if he could catch that liver again, but another Garza left hook from Cooley’s blind side broke more bones in the eye socket. Cooley sagged, caught himself. Because of the busted rib, he had to use one glove to lift the other up to protect the socket from more damage. But he also covered part of his left eye in the process, and was clearly unable to see the punches Garza was throwing at him. The referee slid in to stop the fight, and Cooley dropped to one knee as Garza raised both hands in victory. The Cavazos rushed in to lift the Lobo Tejano into the air.

The side of Cooley’s face continued to swell, looked like something dead alongside a country road. His cut man sat him on his ring stool, wrapped his
head in the icy wet towel from the bottom of his ice bucket. The glove attendant removed Garza’s gloves, then removed Cooley’s, and left the ring. Cooley was exhausted, almost in shock, but even before the ring announcer could proclaim Garza the victor, Shortcake yelled for the ring doctor. Shortcake also called to the referee and demanded that Garza’s hand wraps be inspected. The ref waved Garza over while the Cavazos were still cutting off the wraps. Shortcake and the ref examined them.

The ref said, “You satisfied?”

Shortcake said, “No, I ain’t, I wanna see them gloves.”