Suckerpunch: (2011) (22 page)

Tezo squatted down at the edge. “Tell you what. You the one comes out of there, we’ll all go find her and bring her back here, yeah? For another kind of show.”

That got Jairo’s fingers up there. He moved faster than Tezo anticipated and got his right hand on the lip and pulled so he could reach for Tezo with his left. He touched his shirt, but Tezo tipped backward out of range and got to his feet with a little more urgency than he probably wanted to show in front of his crew. He spit on Jairo.

Jairo bellowed and punched a dent in the particleboard and screamed at them in Portuguese.

“Kendall Percy,” I said.

Tezo looked at me and things got quiet. “What?”

“Kendall Percy. We’re here for him.”

Tezo nodded at Jairo. “I thought you were here for his cousin.”

“Long story,” I said. “Bottom line, we’re here for Kendall.”

He nudged the kid with the shotgun. “Anybody here look like a Kendall to you?”

I said, “Chops says you know him, work with him.”

“Chops is the piece of shit that put you down there; you think he’s the rope gonna pull you out?”

“Do you work with Kendall or not? He has a lot riding on us being somewhere tonight.”

“Besides here?”

“I don’t think he’d appreciate you sticking your dick in his soup,” I said. Tezo stared at me.

Something warm from my tumble into the pit slid off my forehead into the corner of my eye and started to wiggle. I fought the urge to dig it out.

Tezo kept staring and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. No hurry. I pictured him engulfed in flames, strolling toward a fire extinguisher. Added it to my bucket list. He flipped the phone open and thumbed to the number he wanted and put the phone to his ear. “Hey, it’s me. You know some big boys trying to be hard, looking for some cousin?” I held my breath.

“They in the pit right now,” Tezo said. “Both, yeah. The white one says you guys got something going.”

I tried to read his face while he listened, but it looked the same as it always did.

“Yeah? Okay.” Tezo flipped the phone shut and sniffed and took a year putting it in his pocket.

“What did he say?” Jairo asked.

Tezo leaned forward so he could look past the edge of the pit at him. “Who?”

Jairo spat some Portuguese.

“Oh, that wasn’t Kendall,” Tezo said. “That was Big Jake. You know him?”

I let my breath out.

Tezo said, “Yeah, Big Jake says, ‘Let the best man win.’”

Tezo nudged the kid with the shotgun and nodded toward the bleachers.

The kid walked around the pit and sat on the top tier and lit up.

Tezo said, “We got some people coming for this, so relax. Stretch out. Only one of you is getting out of there, so you might want to start hating each other now.”

He marched through the tarp with the others and left us with the kid on the bleachers, who watched us with a flat face and dead eyes.

I’d been in fighting pits before, and I knew how to get out of them. Nothing like Tezo’s sewer, but the concept was the same. Thunderdome bullshit. Fighting to the death is rare and a stupid business plan; there’s no profit in fighters getting killed. But the smell in this place was unmistakable, and Tezo wasn’t interested in careers.

Muscle memory from all the way back to the empty swimming pool kicked in. I started to pace and survey the floor, if you could call it that. There was standing water in the corners, enough to drown a man in if I could get on his back and push his face down.

The footing’s terrible, so nothing fancy. Short, hard-punches.
I shook out my arms.

Forehead into nose, temple. Again and again.
I rolled my neck.

Elbows into throat, knees into groin.
I pulled my left knee up toward my chest, then my right.

Don’t let him grab hold, because he won’t let go. He’s bigger and stronger and a black belt in jiu jitsu.

He was watching me, staring me down.

Don’t put your eyes on me. I’ll close them for good.

I would make it out.

No, he wasn’t staring. Just watching. I stopped pacing.

He was Jairo.

I came back. Marcela. Burbank. Lance. I bent over and put my hands on my knees.

Jairo squished over and squatted next to me.

“I’m sorry about this.”

“We need to get out of here.”

The insight made me smile. “That’s true.”

“Isn’t Jake Kendall’s man?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would he let you fight in here?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I busted his nose, so we aren’t exactly best friends. But still, Kendall wants me in the Burbank fight.”

A thought hit me then, and Jairo saw it on my face. His eyebrows went up, then came together. His jaw muscles knotted around each other. “If Marcela is dead already, they won’t want you in the fight tonight. If she’s dead, they want us to die here. This is a blessing to them.”

“I know.” There had to be another explanation why Jake would leave us in the pit. If it was because Marcela was dead—and probably Lance too—there wasn’t any reason to get out. “Maybe he’s working against Kendall behind his back. Wants him to fail.”

“We have to get out. At least one of us. Marcela is waiting, either for us to get her or get them.” He nodded. “Okay, so which one of us?”

“They’re not gonna let one of us leave the building. Whoever doesn’t die in here is going to either keep fighting until he does or get shot. Or stabbed. Or strung up for dogs to work on.”

Jairo stared at the wall. “If we get out of this hole, we can fight our way to the outside.”

Outside. We were one wall and ten seconds away from it, but it may as well have been a date with Marilyn Monroe. “Do you have a chain gun I don’t know about?”

“There’s only one guy in here.” He scooped up a handful of the muck. “We can throw this shit at him until he moves, and you boost me out so I can take him.” He waited for a response, then followed my gaze to his hand. In the muck were two human teeth and a tan, mushy dog’s paw. Jairo tilted his hand and let it all slide off.

It hit him where we really were.

A grave.

We waited. We asked the kid what was happening, got the blank look in return, and waited some more.

Things were picking up on the other side of the dividing wall. We listened to raucous welcomes and laughter as people arrived for the show. Three times the tarp opened, and I looked up for Tezo, but it was just people peeking through the opening for a preview. They made excited sounds and talked in Spanish.

I asked Jairo, “Do you know what they’re saying?”

“Some. It’s not good for us.”

It got loud as more people arrived. Someone turned on music. The soundtrack for getting ready to watch two men fight to the death? Reggae.

I don’t know how long we waited in the pit. It felt like five and a half days. When the tarp opened and Tezo came through, my guts tried to wrap around my spine. Tezo held the tarp aside for a string of men and women who filed around the corner by Jairo and found spots on the bleachers, maybe fifty people altogether. Most of them were young, late teens or early twenties, but a few were older with faces like old potatoes. Nobody seemed to mind the smell coming from the pit.

The thugs from the couch helped the elders to the lowest tier and made sure they were comfortable. They smiled with no teeth and murmured to each other and passed a pouch of chewing tobacco around. One of the women saw me watching and waved. I gave her the finger and she hooted.

When everyone had a seat, they started pointing at me and Jairo and jabbering and laughing; then the cash came out. A fat guy in a white tank top and janitor’s pants collected the money and took notes on who bet on who, what, when, how. Nobody cared about why.

In MMA, you train with guys in your weight class knowing you might have to fight them in the cage someday. The only way to keep the other guy’s respect and look yourself in the mirror is to give it everything and see who gets his hand raised. Some guys from the Japanese and Brazilian clubs flip it around and refuse to fight their training brothers out of respect. If one of their guys has the belt, the second-best fighter waits until his champ loses; then he’s first in line to avenge the loss. On the other hand, American fighters will generally fight their mom as long as it’s the main event.

If you do have to fight a friend, the best part is knowing you’re going to crack beers afterward and tell the story over and over. It’s a warm fuzzy when your friend says, “No one ever hit me as hard as you did.”

I glanced at Jairo, breathing fast in and out through his nose despite the stench, his face tight and his eyes closed. His mouth was moving in a pattern, and I realized two things:

One, that he was praying.

Two, I didn’t want to hit him.

For the first time in my adult life, I was scared to fight.

When the audience got their bets down, they threw whatever was left in their pockets at me and Jairo. Loose change, wadded-up Kleenex, crumpled cigarette packs. Someone sailed an unused condom like a Frisbee at Jairo, and it bounced off his forehead and landed in the muck between his feet.

He opened his eyes, picked it up, and brushed it off. He looked into the crowd and said, “This is five years old. Why don’t you go get laid instead of watching this?”

The crowd turned on a skinny guy in his twenties sitting on the top tier with a bandana wrapped around his eyebrows and shoved him and laughed and called him names. A few of them changed their bets after that, using wit as a gauge for fighting ability. I was a massive underdog.

Tezo walked around to the edge of the pit on my right so he could look down at us and across to the bleachers. “You speak Spanish?”

I shook my head.

“Too late to learn. I’ll keep it in English for you.” Super guy. He surveyed the bleachers, which quieted down for him. “Business first. These two are a gift from Chops, so unless I say otherwise, he’s off-limits.”

Some of the males seemed disappointed; there went a chance to kill someone for Tezo.

“Hey, you know Chops. He’ll fuck up again and get back on the shit list. That happens, don’t wait so fucking long to make a move, huh? All right. Business is done. Now for pleasure.” Tezo stared at me, then Jairo. “Ready?”

I looked across the pit at Jairo. Neither of us was ready for this.

“Go”, Tezo said.

I stood still.

Jairo took one step forward, then brought his foot back.

The crowd despised him. Fifty people in that small space sounded like a train derailing. They stood and hacked their hands at us and couldn’t believe we weren’t eager to kill each other.

“What the fuck is this?” Tezo said. “Go. Go.”

Ignorance is a good way to buy time, and I’m a natural at playing dumb. I shouted to Tezo over the crowd, “What’s the goal?”

“The what?”

“Knockout? Submission?”

“Please. All that scar tissue on your head and you don’t know where you are?” He kept his gaze on me and pointed at Jairo. “You, kill him.” Reversed his gaze and finger: “You, kill him.”

“What are the rules?”

Tezo pulled the chrome revolver out of his pants and said, “I’ll let you know if you do something wrong. But don’t hold your breath, huh? Now let’s see something, or one of you is fighting on one leg.”

Jairo took another step forward. Didn’t step back. Kept coming. By the time I realized he wasn’t going to stop, I was almost cornered in my end. He had a wide stance to keep from slipping in the muck, and my left leg wanted to zip into his groin, but I kept it planted and pushed off to my right. His hands reached out, looking like they did part-time work dropping cars into crushing machines, and I slapped them away as I slid around his left side and ended up at his end of the pit.