The timekeeper was jerking the rope on the bail, waving one hand in the air for Krause to stop.
Krause set himself and drove his right fist straight into Cholo's unprotected face, bouncing him off the ropes, spiderwebbing his nose and chin with blood. Cholo rolled on the canvas, disoriented, and fell off the apron onto the cement, turning over the spit bucket.
'We don't have no dirty fights in here. What's wrong with you?' the timekeeper said.
'You got it turned around. He was trying to scramble my eggs,' Krause said.
He climbed through the ropes and dropped to the cement, avoiding the wetness from the spit bucket.
'You all right, buddy? You were coming hard. You didn't give me no choice,' Krause said.
Cholo got to his feet, his eyes crossing, and pulled his gloves off one at a time by trapping them between his arm and his chest. He tossed them to the floor and hitched up his genitalia.
'I got your lunch hanging,' he said.
'What can I say?' Krause said.
Cholo walked unsteadily toward the dressing room, a towel crumpled against his mouth and nose.
'You got crazy people in here. What kind of dump is this?' Krause said.
Someone picked up Cholo's gloves off the floor and started to put them in an equipment box under the ring.
'Them are my gloves,' Krause said, popping open a paper bag for the man to drop them in.
But if Cholo Ramirez was indeed intended to embark on the Ghost Trail of his Indian ancestors, its entrance was not marked by Cottonwood trees along a riverbank on a windswept green plain. The Ghost Trail for Cholo lay inside the incessant scream of a shorted-out car horn and the heated smell of car metal and exhaust fumes and asphalt only a block from the Alamo. That's where the paramedics pried his hands off the steering wheel of his '49 Merc and tried to abate the convulsions in his body and the hemorrhage that was taking place in his brain.
While they strapped him down to a gurney, a frustrated policeman popped the Merc's hood and tore the wiring from the horn like a severed snake.
21
Cholo's funeral was held three days later in a white stucco church with a red tile roof and a small neat yard next to the elementary school he had once attended, the only well-maintained buildings in a neighborhood of dilapidated one-story, flat-roofed homes that could have been machine-gun bunkers. His fellow gangbangers tried to turn the funeral into a statement about themselves, dressing out in black cloaks with scarlet linings, posting somber-faced, narrowed-eyed lookouts in the church vestibule and parking lot. But basically it was a pathetic affair. The back pews were empty; the gangbangers sweated inside their cloaks and smelled themselves; obese women in black wept with such histrionics that the other mourners took deep breaths and raised their eyebrows wearily; and Cholo lay in a cheap wood casket, dressed in a shiny suit that looked like it had been rented for a graduation ceremony, a rose in the lapel, his hair stiff with grease against the rayon pillow, a rosary wrapped around fingers that still had dirt under the nails.
If there were two people there who seemed genuinely saddened, it was Ronnie Cruise and Esmeralda Ramirez. They sat on opposite sides of the church. Neither looked at the other, nor at anyone around them.
I caught Ronnie on the church steps after the service.
'You're the man,' I said.
'You're always talking in code. I don't understand what you're saying. I think you got shit for brains being here,' he replied.
He got in his car and drove away. I followed him to the graveside service, then to the rural slum neighborhood where he lived. He turned into his dirt driveway, staring in the rearview mirror when I turned in behind him. But he went inside as though I were not there.
The house had probably been built from a double-wide trailer and modified and added on to over the years. There was a picture window in front, a carport on the side, and the bottom portion of the walls was covered with a half-brick shell, to affect a suburban 1950s home. A solitary mimosa grew like a huge green fan in the dirt yard, and in back, beyond the carport, I could see banana trees bending in the wind along a drainage ditch.
A woman with breasts like watermelons and black hair wrapped in a bun on her head opened the front door and looked at me with a neutral expression, then closed it again. A moment later Ronnie came from around back, barefoot now, in a pair of beltless jeans and a T-shirt, a bird dog pup trailing behind him.
'Why'd you say I was the man?' he asked.
'Cholo's dead. That means you're going on the stand.'
'For what?'
'To tell everyone about Earl Deitrich's dealings with Cholo.'
'That's called hearsay. Even I know that much.'
'It's called a subpoena. You'll be in court of your own accord or you'll be there in handcuffs, Ronnie.'
'I've heard it before. I'm gonna be picking up the soap in the county bag. It don't flush.'
'Cholo was murdered,' I said.
'You mean the guy busted a vein in Cholo's head?'
'I've got a friend named Doc Voss. He's buds with the pathologist who did the postmortem on Cholo. The pathologist thinks a toxic substance of some kind was rubbed in Cholo's face. Something that acts like cyanide.'
'Thinks?'
'This ex-con, Johnny Krause, the guy who got Cholo into the ring? He loaded up a vice snitch with angle iron and put him in the San Jacinto River for Sammy Mace.'
Ronnie pulled on an earlobe, then picked up a soft cloth off a workbench under the carport and rubbed it on the hood of his T-Bird.
'Sammy Mace's dead. He got blown away by a cop a year or so back,' he said.
'I think Johnny Krause found a new employer. I'd like to ask him that, but nobody can find him. You have the same information on Earl Deitrich that Cholo did. Where's that leave you, Ronnie? You want Johnny Krause looking you up?'
He held up one palm and ticked at a callus with his thumb, staring at it as though it held special meaning for him. He hooked his thumbs inside the pockets of his jeans and looked at a spot six inches to the right of my head and sucked in his cheeks, then cleared his throat before he spoke.
'Your boy, the one sleeping with Esmeralda? He don't run scared. But you think I do. Is it 'cause I'm Mexican and you think I'm dumb or 'cause I got a sheet and I ain't as good as other people and you can work my stick? I think you better go, Mr. Holland. I don't want you coming around my mother's house no more.'
Later that afternoon I looked out my back porch and saw Pete sitting on the top rail of Beau's fence. I picked up a glass of iced tea and took a can of Pepsi from the icebox and walked out to the lot. The breeze smelled of rain out in the hills and the windmill had turned north, its blades ginning furiously.
'What you doing out here by yourself, bud?' I asked.
'You said we was gonna look for arrowheads.' He ignored the can of Pepsi I balanced on the rail.
'Sorry, I forgot. Let's hitch the trailer on the truck and get Beau in.'
But his face remained preoccupied. He kept squeezing a half dollar in his palm and looking at the red lines it made in his skin.
'I seen Ms. Deitrich in town,' he said.
'Oh yeah, Ms. Deitrich.'
'She was coming out of the grocery. She had two big sacks in her arms. One was fixing to split. I tried to take it from her before the milk bottle broke on the cement.'
He stopped and watched Beau walking from the pasture toward the lot.
'Go on,' I said.
'She said I was gonna make her drop it. She said, 'You're in the way. Take your hands off the bag.''
'She didn't mean anything by it.'
'You weren't there. She was mad. The bag split all over her hood. She said, 'See what you made me
