Everyone brought food—carne asada tacos, hot tamale pie, chorizo and beef chimichangas, cinnamon-sugar churros, zesty orange custard flan and sopapilla cheesecake. Dr. Seibert allowed the influx of visitor food only after certain confiscations were made for further examination and analysis at the nurses’ station.
Of the food, I managed to choke down half of a taco and, courtesy of a stealthy Tomás, a life-affirming sip of Don Julio tequila from his flask.
“You look good, padrino,” I said to Tomás. “Getting shot seems to agree with you.”
“And you look like shit,” he said. He tried to maintain a tough guy’s stoicism, but his bottom lip occasionally trembled, and he frequently looked away from me.
Tomás had been getting back into fighting shape at Club Brutus, which sure as hell beat the dusty free weights in his basement next to his gun locker. Before winter, I’d given Tomás and Elena memberships at Club Brutus. Elena had been enthusiastic about the membership, seeing it as both an opportunity to stay in shape and an activity she and Tomás could do together without actually having to be together at the gym. The further convolutions of marriage, I suspect.
Tomás hadn’t been as receptive to the membership. At least initially.
“Ain’t that where the snooty patooties go to get their sweat on?” he’d said. “I ain’t about frontin’ with no jelly-ass socialites in ugly designer tracksuits.”
“Tell you what,” I’d told him. “How ’bout one boxing session?”
He agreed.
A black eye, bruised rib and split lip later, Tomás was a convert. “I get there and Brutus puts me in the ring with a girl! A freakin’ girl! I told him, ‘I ain’t fightin’ no girl!”
“You mean ‘young woman.’”
“Any woman whose half my age and weight is a girl,” Tomás said.
I knew the boxer he was talking about: Abby Cosi, a twentysomething electrical engineer who was drop-dead gorgeous. A lethal beauty with lightning in her feet and thunder in her fists, the latter delivering punishment through hot-pink gloves. Brutus always put new light-to-middleweight boxing students—men and women—to the test with Abby. Part psychology, part physiology. Abby loved the sport and respected its history. Most important, she’d even rung Brutus’s bell a couple times. And that’s a hard feat for anybody, including me.