Thanks Gushags16 and Slink13. I appreciate what you said about my writing These passages are a preamble (prologue) that was added in later drafts. Posted below are the first five pages of the next chapter (Chapter One)... Would it be better to do away with the introduction and simply begin this way?
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Chapter One
Stella Martinez was a fight fan. She was born in Ventura in California and raised on the west side of Ventura Avenue, in a small house with a grass yard and chainlink fence, a view of the gutter and the street and, past the rust-bitten guardrail, a grove of eucalyptus through whose pale trunks and ribboning leaves could be seen the flash of traffic racing north and south on the Ojai Freeway. Her mother, whose name was Carla, was twenty-one when she had Stella and she’d lived in that city for most of her life; her father, an immigrant from Guanajuato with family in Los Angeles, worked five days a week at an auto body shop on Market Street, and when he was home he alternated between doting on Stella, battling his wife, and watching boxing. His name was Bernard.
Bernard was a fighter. Up and down the Avenue his reputation was respected, and for a long time after his death Stella would hear tales from strangers and cousins and uncles of her father’s skill with his fists.
“No one f**ked with my dad,” she said.
“Bernard was not an easy man to categorize,” Carla told me, years later. “He was very loyal and so full of passion and he worked very hard. And of course we had great times together, but we used to get in such fights. I was just a kid, really. I hated the friends he hung around with, and when he got mad sometimes he hit me. Once he dragged me across the kitchen floor by my hair. Stella saw it happen, though maybe she didn’t remember. She was very young.”
She paused. Took a sip of her drink. It was a vodka tonic, and as she drank I could hear the mutter of the ice cubes in her glass, clinks I would be able to hear later when I played back the recording of our conversation.
“Some days I loved him,” she said. “Some days I hated him. In the end we just weren’t good together. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. We had Stella and Bernard adored her. That must be said. He loved his daughter. I never saw him happier than when he was with her, watching boxing. They watched every match. She would sit in his lap. It was their special thing.”
When Stella was four Bernard was shot twice in the chest on the sidewalk in front of their house. He stumbled into the street, pitched face forward in the ankle-deep storm drain, in the thin spars of yellow weeds that grew up through the cracks in the concrete. He saw his blood run between his skinned and shaking fingers and flow in iridescent veins among the pebbles and stalks of dry grass and he seized and cast his eyes to the trees across the way and the splintered sky beyond and there he died.
He was thirty-three years old.
Years to come Stella would continue to watch boxing avidly. The fights stirred her in ways nothing else did. For a time she believed this sensation—exigent and visceral—was the memory of her father the action conjured: of his hands, his smell, the bristles of his mustache, the secret dreams he whispered in her ear—until one day it came to pass that she watched only for herself. She couldn’t say when this shift occurred. What she liked in boxing was what she sought in people—honesty, aggression and, above all, heart—and at night when she closed her eyes she lived in rings: dusty rings in city clubs and warehouse gyms; clean white rings blazing beneath arena lights; rings the size of the sea, where lean men with beautiful eyes stood and fought, their arms weighted by leather gloves the color of blood.
“No, I never cared for fighting,” Carla said. “When Bernard died I retreated into myself. We moved in with my parents—they lived off Kellogg Street—and I detached from everything that had to do with our lives before.” She sipped from her drink; the ice cubes rocked. We were in the sitting room of the home she shared with her second husband, who was out back with their son, kicking a soccer ball—in the arid fire-scoured hills a mile or so east (and a world apart) from the house Carla had grown up in. Dusk, and eldritch peach-toned sunlight slanted in through the windows facing Pierpont Bay and fell across her where she sat in the couch, and I was on the floor, taking notes, my tape recorder whirring in the carpet between us. There was a framed school portrait of Stella in the third grade set on the fireplace mantel: with her round button nose (her only feature immediately familiar), her black hair in wavy locks purling around her face, cheeks dimpled, eyes bright, smiling before a sky-and-cloud vellum backdrop. Already as a girl of eight or nine she had been strikingly pretty. “Stella could be… cold,” Carla said. “She got that from me, I suppose. Bernard was many things, but he wasn’t indifferent.”
She drank again. “I went away inside myself. I worked. I let my parents do the job of raising my daughter. She grew distant, independent—because she had to, I guess. I could feel it happening, but I just let it go on… She said she forgave me for this. Near the end. She came by with that fighter of yours, and it was the first time we all ate dinner together in years. She said she wanted us back in her life. Just like that. It was a good moment and I was overjoyed, but you know—” she nodded at the image over the fireplace—“I don’t think I ever understood that girl. I missed too much.”
“How so?”
“Well it’s like I’m saying—I wasn’t there. When puberty hit, around the time I was starting to see Abel, and I was taking night classes at the city college, and finally beginning to feel like a real human again, she started acting out. I caught her smoking cigarettes, she would shriek the most vile curses, she refused to go to church. She got this attitude. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you Stella had a temper. By the time Abel and I were married and living in this house, she was in high school, making trouble all the time. We fought constantly, and she started skipping school and sneaking out at night. Drinking with boys. She was carted home by the police, I can’t tell you how many times. My parents thought we should send her to our family in Mexico. Abel suggested boarding school. What I did was give her exactly what she wanted, God help me. I enrolled her in independent study, which in this case amounted to the same as just letting her drop out. She begged and begged, and finally I just gave up. But I rationalized it by saying this was her life; she was almost a woman now, old enough to make these kinds of decisions for herself. She was a junior, which would have made her about seventeen, and Niko was… three. One morning maybe a year later we woke up and she was gone. I wasn’t surprised. Actually, I believed she would come back. I was naïve. Of course you know she didn’t.”
Stella walked out on their house on the hill, cut her hair and got a boxing glove tattooed on the inside of her left forearm. From Bernard she’d inherited the shape of her face, her height, her nose and her love of boxing. From her mother she had her eyes and curious nature and capacity for callousness. (Stella could turn off inside, Carla said.) By her own estimation, what remained of her parents was humility and religion, and Stella had no use for either. She’d uncovered a god of her own, fooling around with a neighbor’s son at a Quinceañera in Kellogg Park, and recognized its power at once.
She would recall this moment of epiphany, as Chuy Garza’s tongue lunged in and out of her mouth, and his clumsy fingers fumbled their way under the cotton lining of her panties. She opened her eyes and looked at his tightly shut eyelids and could see his eyeballs rolling and quivering behind them as in the throes of dream and she thought, very clearly: I can do anything I want. I am in control.
She was fourteen. By the time of her own Quinceañera, which went uncelebrated, she was long without virginity and when, just shy of her eighteenth birthday, she shoved a backpack full of clothes through her bedroom window and climbed out after it into the waiting night, there was a handful of boys and men who would do most anything for her. An icy light shone inside Stella Martinez. She was a glacier. She moved where the currents took her, and like a glacier fire seemed to radiate within her and both men and women gravitated towards it, able to perceive its glow but unable to touch or mar it. Stella kept her light for herself. She moved through the world like a glacier, powerful and misleading, and the people she left behind were like ships having split against the ice, blind to the force that killed them, seeing only the starlit spires that had drawn them in.
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Stella came into our lives the night of the Cromwell-Johnson bout, held at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara in September of 2013. She was living on her own, dating an amateur mixed martial artist named Julian “Cheeky” Arroyo. Julian worked security part-time at the Matador Cantina on the corner of Main Street and Palm in Ventura, alongside Nick Cromwell, who was also a bouncer and one hell of a fighter. Ben Johnson was Nick’s fifth professional opponent. On the night of the fight the Matador closed early so the staff could attend.
I was behind the bar, cleaning glassware under the halogen track lights. We only used those lights when closing; otherwise the joint was rather dim. The everyday business-hours lights had to sieve their way down through a many-colored canopy of fraying bras and underwear stapled to the ceiling, and the tiled floor was uneven and deeply mottled with the shadows of tens of thousands of spilled drinks. When I remember the Matador in a rush, with the crowds of people jostling at the counter, and the servers threading between them with the big trays poised above their heads, plumes of steam billowing out from the kitchen window and the jukebox jumping in a mist of human sweat—it always seems to be through a sepia lens cap.
Pat Ferris stood beside me. Pat was the cantina’s owner and head manager and with each cup he dried and polished to a crystal shine he drank a little nip of whiskey, poured from a bottle he kept under the counter next to the dishwasher. He only drank on the nights Nick fought and it had no visible effect. The Matador was known as a tequila dive; if you looked at the shelves, tequila was what you saw.
Pat Ferris hated tequila, but I didn’t mind it. He hated rock n’ roll too, but Jimi Hendrix was on the juke and I didn’t mind that either—ordinarily on a Saturday night we played the same thirteen goddamned pop songs on repeat. I watched him, holding a pint glass at the base in the ends of his fingers, passing a microfiber rag along its rim. His gray-brown hair fell in loose woodflake curls from beneath a greasy backwards Dodgers hat. The stubble on his high freckled cheeks shone like pepper in the lights. His eyes were green and sharp.
With a flourish of fabric and a glinting squeak he snapped the towel to his side and placed the glass in a row next to the others. He retrieved his whiskey and filled his tumbler.
“Don’t suppose I could get in on that?” I said.
