Shadowboxer (10 page)

I thought about it. It was tempting to laugh and say, ‘Of course,’ but it wasn’t that simple. I’d been trying so hard to do the opposite, to become a technician, to be cool-headed. I wasn’t sure I could turn the Old Jade back on.

‘Cake say I fight my shadow. He say be nice when I go Thailand. I try nice, good, go easy?
Jai yen?
And I try fight smart.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘That why I here.’

Coat grunted at Pook. She dumped a stack of plates in the sink and wiped her hands.

‘Come on, Jade,’ she said. ‘You and me. Put the gloves on.’

Five minutes later I was bouncing off the ropes while Pook, suited up with belly protector and pads, stalked me around the ring, picking me off from the outside, her cool eyes fixed on me like a tiger looking at lunch.

It was unreal. Pook, who had to be 45 at least, who did the cooking and cleaning, Pook was one shit-hot pad man. She was all business, and she pushed me until I had no choice but to come back at her full fury. Either she was out of condition and getting tired, or she was surprised by my sudden ferocity, because I finally got her in a clinch and started laying knees into her. Coat called it off.

When we broke up I was burned out. Pook was also breathing hard, but I’d landed some real bad knees into the belly protector and if she was hurting, she wasn’t showing it.

‘Pook, I not know you fight!’ I gasped.

She shook her head. ‘Fighting is not recommended for girls. I learned from my father, like my brother learned. Then I got married. My husband is a businessman, always traveling. He keeps a second wife in Chiang Mai. It wasn’t working out with us. So I came back here to help my brother. My son is a champion, you know Cake?’

‘You’re Cake’s
mother?
’

It was the first time I’d seen her really smile.

‘I did a good job, right? I train you now. Keep the gloves on, we have more to do.’

It’s funny. All that time I’d been looking at Pook like she was some kind of servant, and it turned out she was a better trainer than Coat. Thai pad men are revered in the West. Nobody ever told me about pad women.

‘Forget your shadow. You are not fighting that. You are fighting Jorgensen. I will be Jorgensen. You be you. What do you think she will do first?’

‘Uh... try break my head?’

And off we went. She only had three weeks to get me ready for the Lumpinee fight, and she crammed more into that time than Mr. B. had done with me in the years I’d been training in New Jersey. She was full-on.

I helped Pook clean and cook so we’d have more time together. Pepsi teased me that I was ‘not American anymore’ and said ‘at last she do woman work’. I threw my sponge at him.

We dragged out Coat’s Stone Age laptop and looked at all Jorgensen’s fights. We talked, brokenly, about how she would be training to beat me. And then we played out the scenarios, over and over. Pook couldn’t fake being six inches taller than me, but she brought in fifteen-year-old Benz to work with me as a simulated-Jorgensen. He was about the right size.

Benz might be only fifteen, but tell that to my bruises.

‘Learn to take punishment,’ Pook told me. ‘Remember Pink? When you hit her, she didn’t care. You need strong defense, too.’

I’ve been in street fights as a kid. I’ve been on the ground and kicked by a crowd. I know how to tune out pain, how to detach. But working with Benz taught me to take punishment and still fight back. And he taught me to protect my head.

Pook also made me work on my
wai kru
. Somehow I thought that training in Thailand would include my effortlessly mastering the ceremonial prayer-dance that the fighters do before every match. The reality was that I looked and felt stupid. I don’t know what my Dominican aunts and cousins would say if they could see me doing these fussy poses that have to be exactly perfect, right down to the position of your fingers and eyes. I tried. My aunts probably would have peed themselves laughing at the sight of me trying. Pook made lemon-faces.

‘A Lumpinee stadium fight is a big honor,’ Pook said. ‘You must make respects. Jorgensen has a weak
wai kru
. You can get the audience on your side before the fight begins.’

‘Audience? Why?’

‘Lumpinee is special, Jade. You need the support of the audience. You will feel it when you get in the ring. It’s a kind of power. Now practice your
wai kru
again. Make it more sincere.’

Four days before the fight I was trying to sleep, but Pepsi and the kids were playing
takraw
in the empty lot outside. It’s kind of like hacky-sack but with a plastic ball. I was wrecked from training so hard, but I tolerated the game until the ball came through the window and landed on my head.

‘My ball,’ I yelled in Thai, and the cat pounced on it. ‘Be quiet, I sleep!’

They all came in shyly and sat on my ‘bed.’ The kids made me feel old because even after a hard day’s training they still had the energy to play, and I just wanted to be a puddle. I gathered Waldo in my arms and let his purring soothe me.

‘Hey Jade, tell Coat we want to go watch you fight at Lumpinee.’

‘He know you want,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but he won’t bring us. No money.’

‘I will win,’ I said. ‘Then maybe Coat get more money student.’

‘Jade, why did you come here?’ Pepsi said. ‘Everybody’s rich in America, right? Why do you come?’

I laughed. ‘I no rich!’

Pepsi grabbed my cheapo mp3 player and threw it to Moo, who stuck it in his ears.

‘Why did you really come here?’

‘Train. Get better. Be fighter.’

‘No,’ Moo laughed. ‘You could have gone to Fairtex, Saisinprapa with the other foreigners.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I here because I got demon. In heart. People say I fight my shadow.’

Moo nodded like it made total sense.

‘I must beat demon,’ I said in my lousy Thai. ‘I keep get disqualify. I fight dirty. I try be good.’

Pepsi shook his head in disagreement.

‘If you are nice in the ring, your opponent will wipe you out,’ he said. ‘What is your demon?’

We were talking in a mixture of English and Thai depending on what words I knew. I struggled for words, and Waldo’s eyes tracked the movements of my hands as I waved them around, gesturing.

I said, ‘Hard to explain. My dad was boxer, American boxer, you know?’

‘Like Muhammad Ali?’

‘Yeah. My dad teach me boxing.’ I mimed. ‘I think he so great, but he got demon, too. He hit mother. We...’ I was struggling for words to explain what had happened. My father’s drinking. The night he almost killed her, broke her neck when he threw her across the room. The hospital, the social workers, the court dates. My mom’s depression. Having to leave the city and move out to Jersey, hide from my father because they hadn’t been able to catch him. In case he came back and she was weak because she still thought she loved him. They convinced her we needed to start our life over. Like witness protection. How do you explain that to a kid? At seventeen I still didn’t understand it.

‘Police come,’ I said. ‘My mother hurt bad. My heart... angry. So angry.’

They watched me with shining eyes. Waldo stretched out and I scratched his belly.

Funny, all the therapy I had, all the talking about it they made me do, I never said it simple like this. I never said it with the words sticking in the back of my throat, the tears so close to the surface.

‘Then I doing bad stuff,’ I said. ‘Get... wrong friends?’ Wrong boyfriend, to be exact.

‘That’s bad,’ Pepsi said. ‘Friends must help you, not make trouble.’

If only Malu hadn’t gone away to school, maybe it would have been different. But she’d gone, and there’d been no one to hold me down.

‘My boyfriend steal cars. I got in trouble police. Then Mr. B start training me. But... I still got demon. Angry.’

They looked at me sweetly. I felt ugly.

‘No big deal,’ said Moo with the air of an 80-year-old. ‘Everybody has problems. You can find a way to live a good life.’

He was only twelve, but I wanted to believe him.

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE
the fight Pook shook me out of that beautiful black pit I call sleep.

‘Day off,’ she sang in my ear. ‘Get up! Hurry!’

I moaned. Sleep dragged me back down like quicksand.

‘Jade! You deaf?’

‘Mmm... day off, why I get up?’

She shoved me with her toe. ‘Get up, girlfriend. Special day. Today you get a tattoo like other fighters.’

I was up!

‘Really?’ She must mean like when the monks tattoo a tiger on a fighter’s back. ‘Cool! Can I get bulletproof tattoo?’

Her mouth twitched. ‘They say you have to be good Buddhist for it to be bulletproof. Are you a good Buddhist, Jade?’

‘Um... OK, what about waterproof?’

The tattoo artist wasn’t a Buddhist monk. In yet another instance of unfair treatment of the ladies, it turned out that the monks weren’t allowed to tattoo women. Apparently we’re lower on the reincarnation ladder than men. But higher than animals. When I found out, did I get mad and attack anybody? Nope. I am the New Jade. I flow with the
mai pen rai
.

I got my tattoo from a layman, a friend of Pook’s called Mint. He spread out his designs on the pavement in the sun.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mint said softly in English, bending over my right thigh. ‘I can give you an invisible one, with henna. Office workers get them. Nobody will see.’

I laughed, but then said OK to the invisible tattoo. My mom would freak out if she knew—not about the ink, but about the unsanitary conditions. Besides, who can resist a secret power?

I’d decided to put it on my right glute. I’m not really into ink, but a Thai tattoo is special. You get an animal, and if you have that animal tattooed you can call on its power. The animal can even possess you, supposedly. Malu would say
Grow a brain cell
—but me, I like to keep an open mind. And in the Jorgensen fight? I’d take any advantage I could get.

‘I was thinking a tiger,’ I said to Mint in English. ‘Or maybe a monkey. A monkey could be more realistic, like, closer to my animal spirit? You know what I’m saying?’

Mint pursed his lips. Then he shook his head.

‘You need gecko,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

Pook intervened. They talked to each other a couple minutes. Then Pook said, ‘This is how Mint works. He can only give you the animal he sees for you. They talk to him. The animal spirit must choose you, not the other way. You need the gecko.’

‘Gecko? They’re just little funny lizards. Who’s going to be afraid of a gecko?’

‘The gecko is a very lucky animal,’ Mint said. ‘Always warn you when there is trouble. Helpful and auspicious. You need the gecko.’

The idea of a gecko did nothing for me. ‘A cat? Waldo?’

They weren’t happy. I could almost see the
mai pen rai
forming on Pook’s lips, and I knew that in a minute we’d be getting up and leaving and I wouldn’t get any tattoo.

‘OK, OK. Gecko me up. Does it hurt?’

The answer to that was yes.

Kala Sriha

M
YA SCROLLED THROUGH
phone menus with fierce concentration. She was familiar with Mr. Richard’s smart phone even if he didn’t know how much she’d handled it, but this one was more sophisticated. By the time she found the call register the sound of the lion’s breathing was louder than the insects and birds, and a wind stirred her hair. The lion had dropped the translator on the ground. The man stirred a little, so she knew he wasn’t dead.

She found the last number in the call register and redialled.
Please, mother, please, someone, tell me what to do...

Now the man was completely still, but the lion walked around him in a circle. Kala Sriha was the size of a water buffalo, but black and long-haired, with the coiled musculature of a big cat.

‘Mya, you must never call this number again,’
snapped her mother’s voice in Burmese.
‘Don’t even try. Next time no one will be here.’

‘Mother, please don’t hang up,’ she breathed into the phone. ‘I promise not to call again. Please only tell me what to do.’

The voice on the other end sounded anguished.
‘I wish I could. But it’s too dangerous. Trust me as I trust you. Do what you must.’

Could this really be Mya’s mother, who was notorious for telling everyone what to do and expecting to be obeyed? What if the voice was just some cruel trick?

‘I can’t interfere again. This is a turning point. You must act for yourself.
’

Kala Sriha’s shadow lay heavy on the prone body. The immortal bent its rough-maned head and nuzzled the man’s neck. Then it lowered its body until the man was covered in blackness.

Luck was excited. ‘Kala Sriha is going to devour the translator!’

Mya turned her face away. She felt sick.

‘I thought Kala Sriha ate no flesh,’ she murmured.

‘He does not eat flesh. He’s going to take the reporter into his shadow. He must have done something worthy of Kala Sriha’s respect to meet this fate.’

To the phone, Mya said, ‘Make it stop. Please.’

‘I don’t have that power, Mya,’
said the voice of the woman who was like-and-yet-unlike Mya’s mother.
‘I’m not even there. You are. If you want it to stop, you must make it stop.’

Mya scowled at the phone. She looked at Kala Sriha where the god lay on the man’s body. The zone where black fur met the man’s filthy clothes was semi-transparent, so that Mya could see the lion through the man and the man through the lion. The lion was so huge it made the man look like a doll.

Mya stepped away from the tree and Kala Sriha’s golden gaze took her in. There was a sensation as though a gong had been struck. Her bones began to vibrate. Her hairs lifted away from one another. The man tried to lift his head, and Kala Sriha opened its jaws to grip the man’s skull.

‘No!’ Mya shouted, and threw the phone. It hit Kala Sriha in the face and bounced off, tumbling across the ground until it came to rest at Mya’s feet again. Kala Sriha turned its attention on Mya. Which of them was the more surprised by what she had done could not be said.