“Champ first and foremost,” he said, weaving back into clarity for the moment. I looked over at him. I could tell it took some will to bring himself out of the past, or to at least make himself present enough to speak of bygone days. To think or talk was to test his mettle now, as much perhaps as boxing once had been.
It seemed almost to be a physical effort to think, and his body trembled so that his chair shook and the tiles below his chair legs rattled. His tremors caused him to tap his foot in time for a moment.
Luna’s hand came out reflexively, as fast as if he was falling off a cliff and she’d caught him by his hand. He steadied, said, “Soldier, actor, greeter, but fighter foremost.”
“That’s right.” Luna held him until the tremor sufficiently subsided, as if it were an electric current and she was the ground. When the last of his shakes had passed from him to her, when she had healed him with her steadying touch, she let go of him and stood. Her eyes caught mine, and I stood and followed without being asked.
She walked into another room on the other side of the kitchen, this one’s doorway draped with a curtain of white dentalium shells interlaced with turquoise glass beads. The sheet rattled in our wake. We entered a den with a barrel-stave floor the color of an aged cognac cask, across which the golden pelt of a brown bear stretched, virtually camouflaged against the unvarnished wooden floor.
The stone fireplace was big enough for a tall man to stand in. It was sooty and blackened from a recent, roaring blaze someone had made in the river-stone hearth. Above the fireplace but below a set of massive steer’s horns was a bejeweled belt. There was a diamond-studded buckle in its center that looked like an oversized scapular medallion, only rather than being tin or gold-dipped it boasted what looked like real precious stones that caught a prism’s worth of light as I walked toward them.
Matted in the glass case on a black background was a sepia photo of a man in a ring, togged in boxing shorts and hand wraps. His face had swollen almost beyond recognition, his ear so engorged with blood it seemed like it might drop off the side of his head, unable to support the weight of the claret spilling from a busted blood vessel, with the red stuff swelling the lobe faster than a condom fitted over a water tap going at full-blast.
It was the old man in the room next door, in the flush of life. Maybe he had been suffering worse back then than he was now, though there was no way for me to know that for sure. I could have asked him, but men of his generation didn’t bitch about such things.
“IBC screwed me.” His voice echoed from the other room, and I shivered, not sure whether it was a draft from the desert that had broken into the old adobe house or if it was something else. “Redman Lopez clocked me on the break, the bastard.”
Luna looked at me, beaming. I dropped my eyes, embarrassed by the trust I saw in her face, as if my respect for the old man’s accomplishments could outweigh the electric charge of being this young and this close to her. I felt that the old warrior was worthy of her presence, or more worthy of it than me. But her beauty and manner made me ashamed to exist.
“So I didn’t get the IBC belt, but the Police Gazette boys knew what was what and gimme that.”
I looked up, not courageous enough to meet her eyes with my own, but at least graduating from keeping them on the floor and at my toes. I looked somewhere over her shoulder and said, “I’m guessing you’ve heard the story he’s telling before?”
“Many times,” she replied, glancing at me and then staring at the strapping young warrior drenched in blood in the old photo, smiling through the down-pouring veil of his red wounds and lifted on-high, chaired by cornerman, trainer, and whatever well-wishers had broken the police cordon to lay hands on the champ hoping some of his magic might rub off on them.
I wondered if Luna had lived back then and run into him in some hotel lobby or train station, if they might not have slept together. Maybe even gotten married and had babies.
She looked away from the mantle and spoke to my great-uncle still in the kitchen, sitting with his now-empty cup of soup. “Are you ready for your bath, Champ?”
“Yes.” He tried to stand up from the table, writhed a bit. She padded quickly across the den, the open toe of her sandal kicking the Kodiak bearskin lightly on its nose as she walked over the rug. She leaned down to my uncle. “Beat the ten count, Champ!”
He looked in her direction, as if she was his cornerman and collodion dripping from a cut filled his eyes. “How about we say they paid me to swan dive and I stay down? I could nap right here.”
She smiled, teeth creeping out of her mouth to bite the reddish bow of her bee-sting fat lip. “One, two…” Her muscles strained slightly, and he pushed off with a groan. The struggle had caused the rest of the buttons on his shirt to pop free and after he stood he walked now, unashamed and open-shirted, like a drug boss promenading at the beach.
Luna looked at me. “You follow us.” She touched the air just next to his elbow in case he needed steadying. “Your room is on the left.”
I followed them back through the den, stealing a last glance at the photo of the bloody man in his prime. Then I turned my attention back to Luna leading me deeper into the house. Her hips were narrow but her ass was ample, its teardrop shape causing each cheek to move in counterpoint to whatever motion she took, as if it had a mind of its own and was defying her. I stole a couple glances at the swaybacked booty and then looked back up, hopefully before she caught me.
“You’ll be sleeping there.” She pointed to the left as we entered a corridor.
I stepped into the guest room. The bedroom was silo-shaped, and the walls sloped up to a domed ceiling with crossbeam rafters made of creosote staves. I’d seen one of those red-tiled minarets on top of the house when we’d been driving up; now I was in that room.
There was only one window, carved into the deep slab of the far wall. The room was probably lit by a warm brown color during the day, but the light of the Hunter’s Moon coming through the window bleached the quarters bone-white. In the center of the space was a double-bed covered in a straw-brown comforter, a couple Navajo blankets piled on a steamer trunk at its foot.
I took in the rest of the room: there was a kidney-shaped earthenware pan next to an old jug on the nightstand where a jade-colored lamp sat and two old burlap gunnysacks that may have once contained flour or potatoes sat stacked along the walls.