Shadowboxer Read online

  With a quick, sneaky tug she pulled the connector out of the phone behind her back. The cord drooped noiselessly. Mr. Richard was rubbing his eyes and turning in his chair. Taking the paper with its inscrutable letters, she took a half-step back. A smell of decaying meat roiled around his body.

  ‘I need to take something,’ he murmured, patting the surfaces around him for medicine. ‘I’m so tired.’

  Then his eyes lit on the scrap of paper in her hand. She had taught herself English letters, albeit not very well.

  ‘What are you writing?’ he said, and in the same moment he spotted the dangling power cord. ‘Did you touch that phone? Where is it?’

  Mya backed away, into the prayer room. This was her last chance to make an excuse, hand over the phone, cooperate with Mr. Richard in his magic.

  ‘Mya, what are you doing? Give me the phone,’ he rasped. The drug he took to make himself so wonderful and big and magnetic—it had worn off. Suddenly he looked and sounded as withered as he truly was.

  He came toward her with grasping hands, and for all his age he out-maneuvered her. The door to the room was behind him. The window was open but high above the ground.

  She had to get out of here. She suddenly felt sure he intended to devour her in some way. She couldn’t stop herself.

  ‘Put the phone down, Mya,’ Mr Richard said in a flat, deadly voice. He wasn’t sleepy now. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Put it down.’

  There was only one place she could go. Mya projected her consciousness into the dark-leaved trees outside the window, focusing on their deep roots.

  She was not permitted to travel to the forest alone. But she knew how.

  ‘No, Mya!’ His face tightened until it looked stringy. ‘Do not leave me!’

  Mr. Richard made a lunging grasp for the phone. He seized her arm, but she kicked and bit. Her heart was already outside, among the trees, and he had no drug to help him.

  Mya slipped between molecules of air and into the wood of the trees. She passed through them and out the other side. The prayer room was gone. Mr Richard was gone. Moonlight tickled the edges of the big star-shaped leaves in the forest, and the stolen phone was still in her hand. Mya’s heart turned over like thunder.

  Where's Waldo?

  to: [email protected]

  from: [email protected]

  subject: re: staph infection photo

  Stop oozing and taking pictures of yourself. You know I’m delicate. Can you write your mom more often? She calls me, like I’m supposed to know what’s up with you. She says Nana won’t be with us much longer. Your mom’s having a bad time, she needs to know you’re doing OK.

  Khari called to ask about you. I said I wasn’t in the loop and btw why don’t you dump Eva and ask Jade out? Just kidding. He’s too old for you.

  xx Malu

  to: [email protected]

  from: [email protected]

  subject: re: staph infection photo

  I skyped my mom and Nana. I can only get online at an internet cafe, I don’t come here much. My skin is almost better so I’ll be cleared to fight soon. Tell Khari I want him so bad I said hi.

  My only friend here is a cat. He seems to be a stray. He’s gorgeous. Not a Burmese, not a curly-tailed cat like you see here. He’s big and long-haired and all black. He shows up at camp and watches us train. He’s so cool. Sometimes he appears like out of nowhere. I call him Waldo because you never know where he’ll show up.

  I WAS MADE of bruises. I was always hungry, always on the toilet, and always homesick. After talking to my mom every day, or at least chatting to her online, it felt terrible to be cut off. I pictured her freaking out missing me, but the truth is I missed her like crazy. I had no friends here yet. Pepsi tried to be nice after our bad start, and he introduced me to his older sister, who often came by with her ladyboy friend Jane to watch pad work. It was kind of weird how Jane was more feminine than I am even though she’s technically a boy. I knew that ladyboys were a normal thing in Bangkok because years ago Cake had showed me a DVD about Nong Toom, a famous boxer who was born male but felt like a girl on the inside. She had fought in makeup and a bra, then saved up her fight money for surgery to become a woman in body. Jane wasn’t talking about surgery, though; I had the impression she wanted to keep her options open. I liked her and she was nice to me, too, which was more than you could say for Pook—the only other woman at camp. Pook wasn’t mean or anything, but she kept away from me. I was sure she didn’t like me.

  Luckily Cake’s advice finally was starting to sink in. Don’t confront people, and don’t get angry. Coat told me a phrase for it: jai yen. Cool heart.

  Why was a cool heart so hard for me? I guess I was afraid that if I stopped being angry and confrontational, there wouldn’t be anything left of me. I wouldn’t be Jade anymore.

  I already felt like my identity was getting erased. The language was hard to pronounce and I was struggling to say even simple things, to act the way people were supposed to act here. It was the opposite of everything I knew. I think somehow, when I came here I thought it was going to be like going back to San Cristobal, where everybody knows me. Where things are familiar. In Bangkok, nothing was familiar.

  So I threw myself into training. Every morning we ran, then trained for two or three hours, ate, slept through the heat of the day, and trained again in the evening. Then ate again and slept. There was no chit-chat, not with my limited command of the Thai language. No TV, no video games, no Twitter. The insides of my nostrils were black from diesel fumes. And the inside of my head started to go quiet.

  Back home, I was used to thinking of myself as hard up. We never had much money, even before my mom ran away from my dad. He put her through a lot of shit, and I didn’t make it any easier by acting so much like him. Malu’s folks stayed married, got good jobs and ended up doing real well for themselves, and I knew that Malu was on a fast track to a better life. But that left me looking around at all the money and trying to figure out how to get me some. Isn’t it funny how the people who talk about material things not being important are always the people with plenty of options?

  In Thailand, I wasn’t broke. My little bit of money that I paid Coat, it wasn’t a little bit of money to the camp. The kids I was training with had nothing. Half of them were orphans. Everybody’s sneakers had holes in them. There were soap operas on Pook’s little TV that showed rich people in designer clothes weeping on each other and living in fancy houses, but the people in our neighborhood made their living selling stuff on the street, including their bodies. The kids hoped to make their living beating each other up in public.

  And people smiled a lot here.

  It made me wonder. Maybe ‘tough’ wasn’t what I thought.

  One afternoon in between training sessions I’d gone looking for a clean t-shirt. Pook had just come back from her job in a restaurant to cook and do laundry for the camp. She had laid out washing lines for everyone’s clothes to dry, but in this humidity they were always damp. As I reached up to take down my shirt, Waldo started winding around my legs like cats do. Getting all flirty with me.

  ‘Hey, chico guapo,’ I said. ‘Are you my only friend here?’

  Waldo sat on his haunches and looked up at me, blinking. Like I told Malu, he wasn’t a typical curly-tailed slum cat like I’d seen around here. He was long-bodied, long-haired, all black with golden eyes. He had a kingly way about him.

  I reached down to pet him. Waldo rose to head-butt my hand, making a purring cry of greeting.

  I startled when I heard Pook’s voice from the other side of a set of bed sheets.

  ‘That’s not an ordinary cat. He must be pedigree. Maybe he got lost from a high rise.’

  I was stunned. Pook never spoke to me unless she had to.

  ‘He reminds me of Kala Sriha,’ she added, a laugh in her voice.

  ‘Kala Sriha?’ I echoed. My Thai was improving, but I didn’t know these words.

&nbs
p; ‘Kala Sriha. From legend,’ she said. ‘He’s a lion but they say he doesn’t eat meat. This cat likes fruit, did you notice?’

  She was probably pulling my leg. But I said, ‘Like mango?’

  Pook bundled up the washing and started to go in. I guess that was the end of the conversation. She didn’t like me. I felt my loneliness like I felt the rain falling.

  ‘Figs,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘They are his favorite. I have been feeding him for a few days now.’

  She opened the door to the dorm. I heard myself say, a little desperately, ‘Please, I help you? I not busy.’

  She turned and looked at me but I couldn’t read her expression.

  ‘There’s always work to do,’ she said with a wry face. Almost a smile.

  Pink

  to: [email protected]

  from: [email protected]

  subject: fight!

  I’m on the fight card at a stadium near Chiang Mai! The staph infection is better but I inhaled bug poison the other day. They send around these guys with masks on spraying clouds of poison gas down into the storm drains. To get rid of roaches I guess? There are a lot of roaches here so I can’t see how it helps much. Maybe they will mutate and we’ll have GIANT MUTANT ROACHES of DOOM... don’t rule it out as a crunchy breakfast treat.

  If I win a few big fights maybe I can come home.

  luv, me

  to: [email protected]

  from: [email protected]

  subject: re:fight!

  GOOD LUCK! Kick ass/don’t get killed. OK? And you can come home whenever you want. Mr B is not God.

  love & hugs,

  Malu

  PS How’s Waldo? Send cat pictures!

  WE RODE TO Chiang Mai on the same bus as another Bangkok-based club, a bigger outfit with heavy hitters. The kind of club Mr. Big could have sent me to if he wasn’t into nepotism and trying to bust my chops. They had two fighters on the card, Flexmaster Flex (aka Sangsidt Phongpaichit whose real name I can almost pronounce now) and a middleweight called Gold Kwanchai. Coat said Gold could give Boo in his heyday a black eye. He said it to tease Pepsi, who is a big fan of Boo. It upset me a little, too. I mean, there were good fighters and then there was Boo. Gold, winking, offered to go a few rounds with Pepsi and Pepsi told Gold he should be afraid, very afraid, but his voice cracked and everyone laughed. Then Pepsi fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. I guess that made me one of the team?

  The sound of the rain was soothing, and I must have drifted off, too. When I woke up we weren’t on the expressway anymore. The bus had stopped in the middle of nowhere. We were pulled off the side of a winding road going through forest. The driver was outside looking under the hood.

  Oh, great.

  He’d picked a terrible place to stop. The road was winding, and we were on a sharp bend. There was an enormous tree by the side of the road. It had vines climbing up the side of the trunk that made it look sinewy, almost as if it had muscles and tendons. Tied around the trunk were dozens of bright ribbons. Tucked into the ribbons were little toys and dolls. It reminded me of the way people put flowers by the road where someone has died.

  I poked Pepsi and his eyes opened. I pointed to the tree. He shuddered.

  ‘It’s a bodhi tree. Ghosts live there,’ he said.

  ‘Have many people died here?’

  ‘Don’t talk about it. You’ll attract the ghosts. Why are we stopped?’

  He got up and pulled his hoodie up before stepping out into the rain.

  I sat looking at the tree and the green forest beyond. The leaves were lacy with moth holes. Water beaded on the colored ribbons. It didn’t feel spooky to me, only sad and strangely calm.

  ‘Fan belt,’ said Pepsi, returning. He offered me a little can of M-150 energy drink. It’s powerful stuff. I shook my head.

  ‘I get it,’ he said in English. ‘You don’t want to peak too soon.’

  I laughed and forgot about the ghosts.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t we be in Chiang Mai by now?’

  ‘Pook wanted Coat to stop by her husband’s farm and check something.’

  ‘Pook has a husband? And a farm? Since when?’

  ‘Her husband is sick. She doesn’t like to talk about it,’ Pepsi said. ‘Coat says we must get back on the main road or be late for the fights.’

  But he looked out the window wistfully as we drove off.

  ‘I would love to live on a farm,’ he said. ‘My uncle used to be a bee keeper. What a life. Clean air, and all the honey you could eat.’

  ‘Why would Pook work in a restaurant if she owns a farm?’ I asked.

  But Pepsi pretended to be asleep again.

  It was dark when we finally rolled in to town, and the ‘stadium’ turned out to be more like an outdoor nightclub. It was at the end of a little alley with bars all around. There were go-go dancers circulating in a crowd of mostly Australians and Russians. Betting was going on in a low-key kind of way.

  I was whacked. Fights didn’t start until after nine, and mine was the last on the card. They’d matched me up with a local girl who stared at the ground while our trainers discussed us. She was heavier than me but about the same height. All the extra weight was muscle, especially in her legs. She might even have been younger.

  ‘Pink got a 4-0-0 record,’ Pepsi confided later in English, while we were killing time waiting for the fights to start. ‘Three of her wins by knockout and one TKO when she broke somebody’s rib. Watch out!’

  ‘Pink?’ I said. It wasn’t my idea of a name.

  He shrugged. ‘Jade?’ he said, grinning.

  ‘That’s my real name. It’s on my birth certificate.’

  Coat came over and gave me one of his ‘wakeup’ massages that feel like you’re a piece of meat being tenderized. When it was over I felt better. Because it was over.

  ‘Keep her on the end of your left hand,’ he instructed in Thai. ‘Don’t let her clinch. Use your teep. Whatever happens, no clinch.’

  My teep—a pushaway front kick—was OK, but I hated to rely on it. It doesn’t do damage.

  ‘What if she clinch me?’ I said. ‘What I do?’

  ‘Don’t get caught. Pink was trained by Pot, so she is dangerous in the clinch. You can’t handle her there. You don’t have the strength. Understand?’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ I bleated, not like ‘ha, ha!’ how funny but ‘ha, ha!’ like, I am so screwed.

  The quality of the fights got progressively higher as the night went on, which is normal. But the girls’ fight was the last one on the card because the promoters didn’t want our femaleness to spoil the luck of the ring (I know, right?). So my fight wouldn’t even start until around 1 am. I usually go to bed at 8:30.

  I wandered away from the crowd thinking maybe I could take a nap leaning up against a wall, but there were mangy dogs begging for rice and they made me think about Waldo. I was missing him. And Quinton.

  This was what I’d gotten for protecting Quinton. I could be back washing dishes for $8.50 an hour and training in Secaucus and living with Malu, going to student films with her for free and meeting her brainy friends who argue about micro-banking and intersectionality and which of Mary J. Blige’s songs belong in the canon, whatever that is.

  If only I hadn’t beat up Mr. Hollywood because he was rude to a stray cat.

  The only way I could get my own back now was if I made a name for myself over here. If I made Mr. Big want me back, because I was a good fighter. A proven fighter. And if that meant being a small fish, then I’d be a small fish in a big pond. I’d be the guppy with the biggest teeth you ever saw. I’d be Hell Guppy.

  Pepsi won his fight by knockout. I felt sorry for the other kid. When I was ten I thought ten-year-olds had every right to beat the shit out of each other, but now I cringed when I saw those little kids whacking each other. Flexmaster Flex won by judges’ decision; there was heated last-minute betting on that one, and Coat looked amused because FF’s win
was a real upset. More fights, then Gold lost on points against a title-belt holder called Superman, but gave Superman a lump on his head that looked like a duck’s egg. Conclusion: Gold is good, but he’s no Boo.

  Just before my fight I took two shits and then puked. Coat said, ‘Mai pen rai,’ which kind of means de nada, I guess.

  The ringside orchestra was already playing. Traditionally, it would be the soundtrack to all the fights. Thai boxing music always sounds off-balance and sort of aimless to me, but it has a way of getting under your skin. Even in the noisy drunken crowd something happened when the tempo started to increase, driving the fighters on. It was like the music opened a window to another age and brought the air alive. You couldn’t help feeling it.

  Pink and I started our wai kru. I had only been practicing the ceremonial prayer dance for three weeks. I must have looked like a dying chicken.

  Pink’s wai kru was good. Ouch.

  Whatever. We’re not dancers; we’re fighters. I tried to look her in the eye but she wasn’t going for it. I just stared at her and thought, ‘I’m gonna nail yo ass to the canvas, Pink.’

  The bell rang.

  Pink came out slugging. She was slow on her feet with her heavy thighs and low center of gravity. She would’ve made a great wrestler. But she had long arms and she could outreach me. Nothing got through to my head but that didn’t matter because her body shots were savage. She bruised a rib on the very first punch. Breathing was tough after that.

  I teeped her away from me and went on the attack, working simple combinations and trying to weaken her by repeatedly attacking her lead leg with my low round kick. It was like kicking a log. Her leg was solid. I felt like a bird throwing myself against a window.