The Dead Women of Juarez

The hall packed them in until everyone had no choice but to sit down hip to hip and arm against arm. A man in a white shirt, black pants and neat bow tie swept the ring with a straw broom. He and another man, similarly dressed, would referee the fights.

When the announcer came onto the canvas things got rolling. He introduced the three judges and read a list of local sponsors. Kelly didn’t know any of the names, and didn’t recognize the first pair of fighters, either. One was Vidal’s boy, the other a rail-thin flyweight with acne pits in his face. The crowd cheered them both the same.

Heavyweight fights got all the attention and the big money, especially in the States, but the little guys had technique. When Kelly fought welterweight, he always hit the scale at exactly 147 pounds. He had the frame to go a real middleweight back then or even super-middleweight if he wanted to push it, but those extra fifteen or twenty pounds felt like a concrete overcoat whether they were fat or muscle. Light fighters were meant to fight light.

The bell rang and the fighters closed. Vidal’s kid had long arms for his size and maybe a two-inch reach advantage if his tape was applied just the right way. He worked from behind the jab and didn’t keep still; he was circling, always circling, and even though the other kid blocked, those little impacts took their toll after a while.

It took most of the first and second rounds, but the other kid got his feet under him and started moving the fight his way. Vidal’s boy relied on the jab too much, and when his opponent moved inside he danced back like he was stung even before a punch landed.

Kelly ate his tamales between rounds and sucked on the Jarritos. The Mexicans around him were excited and he was excited, too. He’d forgotten the smells outside the ring, the sound and shape of the fight when the gloves weren’t on. The man beside Kelly nudged him and they traded smiles.

Round three was tough for Vidal’s boy; some fighters locked into a losing game when shaken, and everything narrowed into a desperate corridor of try, try again. He kept trying with the jab even though it wasn’t working anymore. A flyweight couldn’t hit with the power of a heavyweight, but solid punches to the inside rocked Vidal’s fighter. Kelly saw the old man shaking his head over his bucket.

The kid went to the corner with a visible kink in his side. Kelly watched Vidal rinse the kid’s gumshield with one hand and press a cold pack against his ribs with the other. He talked low and quiet. Kelly had never seen Vidal talk so much. The kid nodded.

The fourth round was the final round. The fighters came forward at the referee’s command. Vidal’s kid circled, started to throw the jab again, but hesitated. Kelly focused on his face, the perceptible struggle to follow corner advice, break from a losing pattern and change things up.

The other kid came in hard with more body punches. Vidal’s kid backed up, but with control this time. He still got hit, but he traded well and then jabbed his way out turning from the corner.

His aim was combinations, trying to put two or three punches together that would keep the other fighter guessing and off those swollen ribs. Vidal’s boy was used to having his way with his arms, being able to reach out and pepper the other guy with jab after jab at distance. The other kid was hardheaded, but knew how to weave in for the sharp body shots he preferred.

The clock ticked. Each punch thrown was a half-second closer to the last bell. Vidal’s kid tried to bring some technique to bear and pull some points back on the judges’ cards, but he didn’t have the ring smarts to keep the other kid away.

Bell and ref were in time with each other. One rang and the other stepped in. Both fighters dropped their hands. They were slick with perspiration and so was Kelly. He stood and clapped and hollered with everyone else. Corner men climbed through the ropes and the ring was crowded the way it always was at the end of a bout.

The other kid took the fight three rounds to one. The fighters embraced. Photos were shot. When Kelly settled back down he was smiling. This was the magic of the fight: no matter how small the purse, the fight mattered when it happened as much as any other fight for any amount of money.

“I forgot,” Kelly said aloud.

“?Que?” the man beside him asked.

“Nothing,” Kelly told him. “Good fight.”

The man nodded. “Si, era una buena lucha.”

FOURTEEN

EACH DAY HE WALKED LESS AND ran more. He’d quit smoking altogether and now he wasn’t even drinking beer except on those nights when he and Esteban did business. Running the same route along the main roads got boring, sucking up the smog, so he changed it up with smaller streets and neighborhoods far from his usual haunts.

He found the gym this way. A pack of short, lean Mexican fighters crossed his path on the run. Kelly recognized them immediately the way fighting animals know their own kind. He fell in with them without having to say a word and they loosened their ranks to accommodate him.

Theirs was a humbler section of Juarez, well away from the bright lights and clean sidewalks of the tourist district, but not as broken or filthy as the colonias. Boxing was a poor people’s sport, maybe poorer even than futbol. Kelly saw kids playing futbol in the streets with cheap plastic balls or even bags of leaves, but boxing could be had on its own terms, fighter by fighter, on the strength of the body alone.

Kelly ran with the fighters until he thought he couldn’t run anymore, but he didn’t fall out. He kept up with them until at last they reached the gym: a solid square of high-windowed concrete beside an attached auto yard walled high with the rusting hulks of cars behind a sagging chain-link fence.

Most filed through an open front door heavy with shadow. It was morning, but bright and there were no clouds in the sky. Inside it would be cooler and darker and it would smell of perspiration and mildew. One fighter waited. “Bueno,” he said. “?Cual es su nombre?”

It was a formal way to ask, but Kelly was white and certain things didn’t change. Kelly put his hands on his knees and sucked air. “Me llaman Kelly,” he said after a while.

“Jacian,” the fighter said. He was tiny and as lean as a strip of leather. He reminded Kelly of the hardheaded kid that beat Vidal’s fighter, but he was older and his face showed the lines of premature age. “Do you fight?”

“Sometimes,” Kelly said.

“Come on in.”

It was better out of the sun. The gym was small but clean and the expected odor of mildew was replaced by motor oil. Dusty ceiling fans stirred the air around.

The gym had a ring with cracked-leather ropes and shoe-scuffed canvas, three hanging heavy bags and two speed bags. An uppercut bag patched with successive layers of duct tape dangled from a hook on one wall. There were pads on the concrete floor, ancient medicine balls and a pair of weight benches near neat stacks of iron. Men and boys were working, some using muscles and others their minds, student to teacher to student in an endless loop.

Jacian introduced Kelly to Urvano; a man perched on a high stool near the door, partly shielded by a desk like a lectern and piled high on one side with thin gray towels. Urvano was older, going white, but still fit. His face looked familiar, and when the old man shook Kelly’s hand, he said, “I know you: Ortiz brought you around Gonzalo Lopez’s place.”

Kelly nodded. He was sweating and his face was already hot, but he felt his cheeks go red anyway. “Yeah,” he said. “Yes, sir.”

“You should stay away from Ortiz,” Urvano said. “He’s no good for anybody.”

Kelly nodded again, but he wasn’t sure what to say.

“Good run,” Jacian told Kelly, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Hasta luego. I need a shower.”

He headed for the back and left Kelly alone with Urvano. The old man didn’t move from his stool; he watched Kelly the way fight men do, as if from behind a curtain. “You looking for a place to train?” Urvano asked at last.

“Depends. What’s it cost?”

“Fifty-five pesos a week for towels and the shower. Eighty pesos on the first Monday of every other month.”

“You got hot water?”

“For fifty-five pesos a week? Don’t be stupid,” Urvano said, and he almost smiled.