“Whoa! You trying to take my head off? This ain’t Mexico City. Hey, we got no cut man here. Maybe I’m a bleeder. Help!” Krause said, dancing, his sky-blue gloves at his sides.
Cholo reminded me of old film clips of Two-Ton Tony Galento, wading forward with the plodding solidity of a hod carrier, throwing one wild overhand punch after another.
Except Cholo’s fists could not find his opponent or the smile that mocked him.
Krause jabbed Cholo around the eyes with his left, pow, pow, pow, that fast. Cholo’s face twitched, his eyes watering as though he had been Maced. Then Krause hooked him on the ear and caught him hard on the jaw with a right cross, knocking his mouthpiece through the ropes. When Cholo tried to clench him, Krause thumbed him in his bad eye and nailed him again, this time in the mouth.
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.
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“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.