Javier pulls open the matte-gray door and sees the fresh black and yellow paint and so much heat. The gym’s heat is palpable, visible even. The heater’s flat hum leans on the beeping timer as three sounds pierce the haze of summer South Texas humidity. There is a deep stench of old perspiration and new latex sealant.
“He wanted it bad the other night,” Javier says to himself, “now we’ll see what the little bitch’s got.”
He snickers at the formality of gloving-up, headgear, vaseline. His first three overhand rights push Enrique backwards, landing: shoulder, shoulder, collarbone. But the little guy straightens and raises his gloves, white mouthpiece protruding.
Javier’s hands weigh 40 pounds each now.
The timer beeps thrice, someone calls “Tiempo!” and Javier spits his bloody mouthpiece out the ring and bites down on the top of his left glove, gnawing and tugging.
“C’mon, dude,” Enrique says, “we’re just starting to move around.”
*
Javier starts at how full the gym is inside. There must be 10 guys for every car in the lot out back. He recognizes no one but everyone looks familiar. No one talks. A few take terse instructions – “yab, gancho; no upper” – from a round coach with thick, prickly black hair. He squirts water in their mouths.
There is little sound except smacking, rope on rubber, wet leather on wet leather.
Soon as both gloves are tied tight round Javier’s wrists, his left palm starts to itch. The little brown guy who puts one strip of tape over his laces smiles and shrugs. Then he theatrically slaps the knuckles of each glove and says, “Listo!”
The bleeding parade down the four steps from the ring is embarrassment tempered by exhaustion, and shaking legs underneath a forehead enveloped by unnatural heat, the veins in his temples throbbing hundreds of times that minute.
*
Javier pauses at the top of the ramp to reminisce on the smacking sound it made when he cuffed Enrique behind the ear outside Bar Cielo last Thursday morning round two. One of Enrique’s crew, tatted on the neck with a sleeve to his left wrist, stepped between Javier and the putito.
“Vamos al gimnasio, mejor,” he said.
“Que sea, cabrón,” said Javier. “Tuesday, don’t be late.”
Javier feels stung and even a little concussed by Enrique’s left hook. Those gloves looked so round and soft, shapeless and dumb, till Enrique put the center of the left one on Javier’s right nostril.
Yup, that’s what blood tastes like. Warmer’n you’d think.
Mostly Javier feels fatigue. His hip bones hollow-out and everything below, clear to his heels, starts to shake.
*
Javier strides down the ramp, eyes fixed on the table with piles of headgear and 16-ounce gloves. So old, used and putrid, that gear, smack-faded red and sweat-yellowed white. The leather spokes atop the headgear were gone years ago, and got replaced with elastic bands that say “why bother?”
Get in quick. That’s how you do at Bar Cielo. Then go all maníaco on him. Hit him till the bouncers pull you off. Make him take the steps back. Just beat him down, it don’t matter where, but go for the head. It ain’t gonna last but five minutes. Hold and smack. Make him bleed, take a souvenir of shirt collar or something. Shake it at las pollitas, show’em what you did to their man.
*
Javier likes that nobody stirs when he gets to the table. Nobody shows him his respect. You’re just making it worse for your bitch, he thinks. Enrique and his boy are there, but neither does more than tip his forehead slightly upwards. Settle this like men?
“You are ready, or you want the warm-up?” says a little brown guy in a white t-shirt, worn green sweatpants and scuffed oxblood penny loafers. “I hit you the pads, yes?”
“Just put the gloves on,” Javier says. “Nice shoes.”
“I go to the work after,” the little brown guy says, and he shrugs.
Javier doesn’t bother to touch gloves when the bell rings. He flies at Enrique. First three rights land somewhere. Easy work.
*
Javier climbs the blue-painted steps on the opposite corner of the ring. It’s elevated a little. He pushes through the narrow space between the third and top ropes. He sees Enrique use the space between the second and third. Use my height, he thinks.
Wherever he puts his head, now, Enrique smacks it. Javier points his face at the gray mat and pulls his palms against the headgear. Just make myself tiny, he thinks. So Enrique smacks Javier’s gloves.
Javier comes out his crouch and lashes at Enrique with a right haymaker. But Enrique is evasive, now, without moving. There is no available air. Javier’s eyes bulge. Enrique nearly fits three knuckles of his left glove in Javier’s mouth.
The little brown guy in the penny loafers smiles, shakes his head and waves at Enrique’s friend in the other corner.
“Basta, ya,” he says, and he pulls the strip of blood speckled medical tape from round Javier’s left wrist. “Ya.”
*
Javier notes how rough-taped the ropes are, like shaking strings with full rolls of shiny white and red wrapped their lengths. Give him a burn when I mash him against them, he thinks.
He is sure they extended the round on him. He was so strong that first minute. Chasing Enrique, smacking him. They extended the round, los cabrones!
There had to have been five minutes, then, before that single beep made the little brown guy yell “30 segundos!”
Everyone looks at Javier, shaking and scuffing up the ramp to the matte-gray door. None of them says a thing.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com