Suckerpunch: (2011) (11 page)

“Just random kids pulled off the street.” Marcela was nodding to herself, and I thought she was going to flip the table over. “But not like you. No, those poor boys didn’t want to fight. Didn’t
like
it.”

“Will you calm down? They were from other gangs, smaller ones, trying to get in with the Bulls. If they got past me, they had to fight one of the gang members. Or several. It was kind of random.”

Marcela cooled off a notch, but I was still on the endangered list. “How many got past?”

“I don’t know. Less than half.”

She asked, “Did you kill any of them?”

“Marcela.”

“Yes or no?”

“No.”

She leaned across the table. “Gangs kill people.”

I moved forward almost close enough to touch foreheads and said, “I was never
in
the gang.” Marcela stared at me, and I saw the green flecks in her eyes and forgot what we were talking about. She leaned back and I rallied. “They kept me around for fun, but otherwise white boys weren’t welcome. When they got tired of watching me beat on kids from other Hispanic gangs, they started looking around for other races. Black kids, Asians, Indians. From India, not here. Oh, and my first Brazilian.”

She said, “Listen to you, like we’re talking about sex.”

“Wait, we’re not?”

“Shut up.” Marcela resisted for a moment, then asked, “So did you beat him?”

“The Brazilian? Yeah. He was a slick little guy. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but he pulled guard on me in the shallow end of the pool. Tried to armbar me. It rained the night before, so I dragged him into the deep end and held his head underwater. Whenever he came up for air, I gave him the good news.” I smiled. “I know it sounds bad. But it helped get me ready for MMA.”

“That was your plan the whole time?”

“Plan? Nah. My plan was to not get my ass kicked. Then a guy named Shepherd showed up. He was the one with the plan.”

Marcela alarmed me by getting another Diet Coke; caffeine and short tempers liked to dare each other. She took a sip and set her glass aside and slid the salt and pepper shakers into the middle of the table. She held up the salt. “So this is you, because you’re white.” Then the pepper. “And along comes this Shepherd guy.”

“He was white too.”

“Was?”

I shrugged. “Back then. Who knows what he is now.”

She pursed her lips and considered the dilemma. “Well, we have just the one salt, so too bad.” She rocked the pepper back and forth toward the salt. “He comes along and says, ‘Hello, Woody, I’m Shepherd. Want to fight MMA?’”

“You want me to tell it? Or do you just want to make up whatever sounds good to you?”

Marcela knocked the saltshaker over. “Go ahead.”

“Nice man voice by the way. That really sounded like him. Okay, first, I didn’t have the Woodshed nickname then—I was just Aaron.”

“See, I like that name. You should keep it.”

“I still have it,” I said.

“Yes, but who knows it? Tell the story.” If she was half as tricky on the mat as she was at conversation, she could submit an octopus.

I said, “Since we’re on the whole name thing, his real name wasn’t Shepherd. He went by The Shepherd, and people just shortened it. He thought of himself sort of like a scout for criminal talent. Liked to find kids with potential and show them how to stay out of the system, work under the radar, and make money for him. He always said the only place to get a better criminal education was in prison.”

Marcela asked, “Have you been to prison?”

“No.” I waited for her to ask if I’d ever been arrested, but she didn’t, so I continued. “Shepherd worked with the Bulls and other gangs—supplying drugs, moving cars they stole, but mostly acting as a go-between for people who needed muscle. He’d tell the Bulls so-and-so needs twelve guys to work security at a party, or this guy needs a car full of guns to escort a truck through north Vegas. Somebody from the gang must have mentioned me, because one day I’m in the pool—I was probably thirteen or fourteen at this point—and I look up and this tall, hefty dude with gray hair is standing on the edge.

“I thought he was some kid’s dad at first, but he’s joking and talking with the Bulls and they give him a beer and he raises it to me. When I’m done, I climb out and he pulls this ice pack out of nowhere for my eye and says, ‘Let’s go for a ride.’”

Marcela said, “In Brazil, they never see you again.”

“Same here sometimes. But I knew the name Shepherd, and with the way the Bulls treated him, I was honored. I got into his Cadillac, this long, silver boat, and we went for a drive. With the windows up and the air-conditioning on, it was like being in a bubble floating through the city. We stopped at McDonald’s and got Quarter Pounders and fries and Cokes.”

Marcela said, “This sounds like a good date. Did you hold hands?”

“Okay, no more story.”

“Oh, stop it. Keep going, because I still don’t see how you’re any different than Jairo and the other fools. But not too much more with you riding around with this guy; it sounds goofy.”

Pushing and pulling. Reel and slack. I clamped down on the hook and tried to catch up to the boat. “All right, I’ll skip the part where we did each other’s hair and listened to a mix tape. So we drive around and talk, and he parks outside an apartment complex where I wouldn’t normally go without a full police escort. He hands me an envelope, tells me to take it to the fifth floor, and give it to a guy named Tyrone. I step out of the car, and the looks I got would have melted Superman.”

“But not you,” Marcela said. “Not tough Woody.”

I spread my hands. “Well, I’m still here.”

“So who was Tyrone?”

“Some dude with another gang. I took that envelope through the gauntlet of hard stares and itchy trigger fingers to the building. The elevator was gone, so I took the stairs. The lights were out and I’m pretty sure there was a dead guy on one of the landings. I kept thinking, ‘Just look straight ahead and put one foot in front of the other.’ I get to the fifth floor, some guy the size of a bus asks me if I’m crazy. I ask him, ‘Are you Tyrone?’ To this day I’m amazed my voice didn’t crack.”

Marcela’s eyes were wide, and she had one corner of her bottom lip pulled in.

I drank some water, got an ice cube and worked on it.

She slapped the table. “So he was Tyrone?”

I took another drink. “No. But Tyrone heard me say his name, and he came over and grabbed the envelope. Told me to get the hell out. I did, and it was a lot harder to
not
run down the stairs than it had been to walk up them. Back at the car the air-conditioning hit the sweat pouring out of me and I was trying not to shake. Shepherd laughed, but then he said something, calmed me right down. I’d never heard it before. Made me forget about shaking.”

“What did he say?”

“That he was proud of me.”

Marcela put her hands over mine and made a sound like she was looking at a puppy. “This guy, Shepherd, he was like a father to you?”

I was uncomfortable. I handle sentimentality like I do sprints: horribly and as short as possible. “Kind of. He got me out of the pool. By the time I was sixteen, he had me delivering packages alone and working the pit fights.”

“Pit
fights?”

“Shepherd and guys he knew would arrange to meet at a spot, and everyone brought some fighters. We all got numbers, and my name went in a hat with everyone else’s. When they called my number, I fought.”

Marcela hooked some loose hair behind her ear and smoothed it down. It looked like a relaxation exercise, and I gave her all the time she needed. When she was done, she asked, “In a pit? How is that better than the pool?”

“Sometimes it was in a pit, if we met at a construction site or something. Sometimes it was at a parking garage or somebody’s backyard. One time it was at an empty hockey rink. Complete disaster.”

“So this guy didn’t help you at all. Just got you to fight in different places.”

“I did the courier work too,” I said, “delivering packages.”

“What was in them?”

“I never looked.”

“Oh, good.” She offered me up to the room so everyone could see how much sense I was making. “It could have been drugs, guns, terrorism, whatever.”

“It could have been coupons for free French fries.”

Her look was flat enough to balance a quarter on edge. “I don’t think so.”

There was a lot more I could have told her. I’d worked all kinds of action for Shepherd’s associates, their associates—whoever needed the things I was good at. But I was having enough trouble convincing her it had been a good thing I’d met Shepherd, so I stuck with him. “When I turned twenty-one, he bumped me up to bouncing in his clubs and escorting VIPs.”

Marcela raised her eyebrows a fraction. She was coming back around.

“And their prostitutes,” I said and spent the next twelve seconds trying not to get kicked under the table.

No one ever hired me to do the talking.

Marcela said she had to use the ladies’ room and left the table. Ten minutes went by. I’d fought for five times as long and didn’t sweat half as much. The server asked if she could take our plates. I was torn between clearing the table of everything sharp and breakable, or making sure Marcela had something besides me to tear into if she came back. I kept the salads.

After fifteen minutes, Marcela returned without any chain saws that I could see. She slid into the booth and said, “I’m ready to go now.”

“What? Why?” Feigned confusion is a good way to stall for time.

“You just told me you were a pimp.”

“What?” Actual confusion isn’t good for much. “No, I was never a pimp. I provided security for people, and some of them happened to be prostitutes. I never . . . no.”

“But you gave security to pimps.”

“Whoever was paying for it.”

“So who was the whore?” she asked. One eyebrow was cocked, but she didn’t need to fire any more rounds. It was checkmate.

“Look. What I did then wasn’t always nice. It wasn’t always legal. But somehow it got me here, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve been in a continuous fight since that first day in the pool to
not
end up facedown in the deep end, and I have no idea when that fight is going to be over or how I’ll know it when it is. It feels close, though. It feels like I’ve climbed out and I’m just about far enough away from the edge to not get shoved back in.”

I was on a roll, but Marcela wasn’t really listening. She was looking out onto the dance floor and seemed interested in it, and I got ready to panic. But she didn’t want to dance. She said, “I think that guy is staring at you.”

I turned and scanned the churning crowd until I saw him. He waved and grew a smile that never reached his eyes. I nodded at him and hoped that was enough to move him along. Instead, he headed to our booth.

The edge of the pool got a lot closer.

The guy disappeared into the crowd like a shark fin slipping underwater.

Marcela said, “Do you know him?”

“I used to. Hopefully he just wants to say hello.”

“You’re not good friends?”

“We worked together.”

“Is
he
a pimp?”

I spotted him a few booths away, edging between people and dodging servers, his eyes on me and the smile still there and still only at his mouth. “No. This guy’s a snake.”

He got to the booth and said,
“Fuckin’
A-Wall, man, holy shit.”

“Lance,” I said.

He looked worse up close. I hadn’t seen him in over five years. He was thinner than I remembered, his wrist bones poking out enough to open envelopes, arms disappearing into the short sleeves of a purple silk button-up shirt that looked like it had stains on it. I could never tell with those shirts. His neck was straining to hold his head up, and I could see the muscles under his chin working, the tongue doing something in there his lips and teeth were smart enough to hide.