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Lights Out

Mark Scott

��A cold front followed us from New York down to San Antonio and the streets iced over the day before the fight. “It looks like that place has rooms.” I pointed over the steering wheel at a sign that said Comfort.
��Louie pulled the old van into a vacant lot and we got our bags. It was a cozy spot right off the river-walk that used to be a jailhouse. Somebody had posted old San Antonio Light articles about cops-and-robbers on the walls. A clerk who looked like a hair-gel commercial was counting bills behind the check-out stand. “All the rooms are booked, guys.”
�� “The parking lot is empty.” Louie snorted through his nose and glared the way he always did when he figured somebody was trying to pull a fast one.
��“Hmmm. There’s room 320 if you want that.” He licked his thumb and peeled off a twenty. “It’s a double and there’s really nothing wrong with it.”
��“What does that mean?”
��I plunked down my bags. “That’ll be fine. I know Comfort from other towns and you guys always do me right.”
��“Next time try to get a reservation, umm-kay?”
��“The Ruiz camp said they would put us up at the Hyatt. We just got the word this morning that they overbooked.”
��The clerk did a curtsy and his face lit up. “You’re Joey Talbert, the challenger!”
��“Right, the challenger.”
��“I saw you fight Rollins. Now, he was a big boy!”
��“Yeah, up in New York. I got lucky.”
��Rollins was a light heavyweight who wanted to come down to middleweight because the money was better. He came in eight pounds over the weight at 168. Louie pitched a fit but the fight went ahead. In the third round Rollins had me in a corner with blood coming down into my eye from a two-inch cut on the brow. I threw a left hook with everything I had and caught him flush on the chin. He fell like a sack of bricks.
��“Lucky is right, mister! It looked like he was going to take your eye out with that jab of his.” He licked his index finger and pointed at me. “Bang!”
��“My eye is fine now.”
�� He looked over at the wall. “You know, the last guy they hanged here—” Just then a group of hombres who looked like mariachis came strolling in and the clerk gave them the elevator-eyes. “Anyway, you can read those articles.”
��I’ll fess up that I never was much for reading. That don’t mean I’m stupid or un-literate. It’s just that a fighter needs to concentrate and do what his trainer says, especially when he’s going for the title. If I had done that, maybe I would have never heard of Clemente or the kid he cut up down at the river.
��We sloshed down the river-walk until we found a restaurant that served something other than Mex. Their food is okay, but you don’t want to get logged on enchiladas the night before a long hard fight.
��Title fights went twelve rounds instead of fifteen ever since Boom-Boom Mancini killed that Korean boy on television. In my book that kid was kicking Boom-Boom’s ass up until he went down in the fourteenth. He couldn’t duck right but he had the spirit, a real Commie-kazi.
��I’m here to tell you that twelve rounds is a long time, even when you’re in shape. They scheduled the pelea between Ruiz and me for early on Saturday morning, which was strange as far as Louie was concerned. They wanted to show it on abado Gigante or somewhere like that.
��Louie didn’t like it, not one bit. ”I just don’t trust those people.”
��“Whatever.” I ordered some gringo grub off the menu and Louie intercepted my fries when the plates came.
��“Tomorrow you watch Ruiz’ right, okay?”
��“Everyone I seen him knock out, it’s been his left hook.”
��“That one you can see coming. But his right is like-- what? It’s Montezuma’s Revenge in a Spalding glove.”
��“Montezuma? Didn’t he fight Napoles for the welterweight title in ‘74?”
��Louie just sat there so I said, “Or maybe it was Benitez in ‘76. I’m sure he was a welterweight.”
��“No, he was an Aztec. But don’t worry about it. Ruiz has a sneaky right that he slips over your jab and you never see it. If you do get tagged and hurt, you make sure you hold him.”
��“Lock up both his arms?”
��“Yes. And don’t let him talk to you in the clinches.”
��“He can talk all he wants. It don’t bother me.” After the food was gone I still felt hungry. I figured I’d come in a pound under the one-sixty limit but Louie didn’t want to take any chances. His boxing talk was getting on my nerves and I knew it was up to me to make the conversation more educated. “I wonder if that river’s ever froze.”
��“I really don’t know, Joey. They sure know how to keep it clean, you can say that for them.”
��“Yep.”
��By the time we got back to our room it was pitch dark outside. The money-counting dude was gone and a foxy black chick sat there watching a rerun of The Jeffersons. George had screwed up somehow and Wheezy was giving him a talking-to.
��As soon as I cut on the light in our room it started popping on and off like a strobe. I called Foxy Brown in the lobby and I could tell right off she was from England or some state other than Texas. Accents are something you get a feel for when you travel around fighting as much as I do.
��“That room has been rather a nuisance ever since this establishment opened. The repair firm didn’t connect things as they should have done.”
��“Rather a nuisance?”
��“Yes, quite.”
��Louie twisted the bulb around so it would strobe no more. Other than the bulb the room was okay at first. It had cable with most of the stations but Louie didn’t let me watch because a fighter has to concentrate. “Sleeping ten hours won’t hurt you at all.”
��I hit the hay and hadn’t dozed off but probably a few minutes when the television busted on real loud. “Damn,” Louie said. “Is the television shorted too?”
��The guy on the tube was saying they quit hanging criminals because it wasn’t humane and the gas and electricity people weren’t making any money off of it. Some woman named Saran Dawn said they executed innocent people half the time, but she shut right up when they asked what to do about the other sixty or seventy percent. She was a real looker and I had a hard time turning her off.
��Next the sprinkler system goes off. It just hosed us down all of a sudden for no damned reason. Then as I’m finally getting to sleep this crazy ghost starts trying to tell me why he killed a boy in 1923. It was to keep the river clean. I told it to shut up because a fighter has to concentrate. But I barely got any sleep.
��
��The two white boys in the preliminary bouts both got knocked out in the first round so my fight was a little early. Louie hadn’t even taped up my hands properly when they came in. “Talbert, you’re in the blue corner.”
��In the first round nothing much happened. I circled to my left and kept a jab popping in his eyes to keep him off of me. In the second round I shot a hard right hand down at his chin that should have ended the fight. His head swiveled so that his chin flew up above his shoulder, and his legs went rubbery. But his eyes stayed fixed on mine like black coals from the nether world.
��I couldn’t finish him but when the bell rang I felt cocky sitting there on my stool. That’s when I saw the Mexican honey in the third row. She was a petite little thing and I just couldn’t help but think she would freeze there in that sundress and espadrilles. “Andale! Mata el gringo!” It sounds nuts to say it now, but I was jealous that she was rooting against me.
��Next round in a clinch I looked over at her and saw she was standing on her tippy toes trying to see around some jug head in front of her. That’s when I took it on the chin. An uppercut from out of hell crashed against my chin and I was in a dizzy room. Ruiz stood back and pounded his chest with the glove that just caused the explosion in my head. “I am the ghost of Clemente Apolinar!” That’s what he said. I am not at all particular about how a man or a ghost introduces himself, but it was weird.
��The next few rounds were a blur, but he told me the story of Clemente that I’ll never forget. Then he smacked a hard one against my brow where Rollins had opened it up before. Blood filled up my eye, and Ruiz kept talking to me.
��Clemente killed the boy down at the river for teasing him, and to keep the river clean. He kept the boy’s eyeball in his vest to light his way back home. Then Ruiz told me how it is to choke while you’re dancing from the end of a rope. I was sucking in air as hard as I could while he dug both fists into my mid-section. A numb kind of death crept into my arms and legs and the lights started to go out.
��But I was in shape and hung on. When I locked up his arms he would talk to me. Clemente’s ghost had been hanging around town ever since they hanged him in ‘23. I knew then that all Clemente’s hate didn’t have anywhere to go until it got bottled up in this middleweight I was fighting. I never thought much about an eye for an eye. A fighter has to concentrate or otherwise he ends up babbling and repeating himself.
��By the eighth my sweetheart in row three was cheering for me. The fog started to lift off of my brain. He was dipping to the left each time he threw a left hook and I started to time the dips and shoot a right hand over. He pitched forward like a bull that the picador has stuck with five lances.
��When he went down I saw him give up the ghost. It floated up into the rafters and I could hear it say softly, “Goodbye, San Antonio.”
��So that’s how I ended up middleweight champion. Ruiz became an actor and now he’s down there in the Distrito Federal starring in tele-novelas, which is the Mexican version of soap operas. I knocked the ghost right out of him. Ruiz had a mean spirit in him but I was meaner that day. That’s how I won the middleweight title. Some other time I’ll tell you how I lost it and submitted myself to holy matrimony.
��I married the girl in row three. Her name is Esmerelda. She is sitting here beside me now at Comfort to make sure I get the story right. The ghost don’t bother us no more and Comfort is the greatest place in the world to stay, especially if you like to read stories about cops-and-robbers.



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