5
twelve hours later
“Come on, girl! Harder! You can hit harder than that, babe!”
I wasn’t sure who the guy with the clear, sonorous voice, intelligible over all the rest of the chaotic crowd noise, was yelling to, me or my opponent. I liked to think that I’d been fighting here long enough to have supporters in the crowd, but there was a good chance he was encouraging my opponent. Generally the men who came to illegal fights favored the prettiest girls, and “Kat” qualified. She had gold-brown braids and light olive skin; the men had whistled their approval at first sight.
Every week, beyond the mesh of the cage in which I fought, I saw many of the same faces in the crowd, and it was always heavily male. Some were motivated by the prospect of illegal gambling gains, others simply loved to watch fights. I don’t know what drew them here when there was boxing and mixed martial arts on TV about every night of the week, as well as club fights at gyms around L.A. But some people need that thrill that comes from knowing it’s illegal.
This was the Slaughterhouse.
It was Serena who’d gotten me into this line of work, in the early days after my return to L.A. One Saturday afternoon, when neither of us had plans for the evening, she’d asked me, “Do you still like to watch fighting?”
“Sure,” I’d said.
“Do you want to see some fights?”
“You mean, like on HBO?” I didn’t think either of us knew anybody who had premium cable.
She said, “Not at all like HBO.”
The venue she took me to was just west of the river, in a mixed-industrial neighborhood near the Fashion District. The building had once been a meatpacking plant, hence the name. Now the main floor was empty and refitted with an octagonal cage and bleacher seating on all sides.
Though most of the fights were between guys, Serena told me that a girl could get a hundred dollars just to fight and five hundred dollars to win. The steep difference between winner pay and loser pay was designed to weed out the dreamers and wannabes.
“Really? Five hundred?” I’d said. The next week I’d gone back alone. I wondered if Serena had known all along that I would.
I learned pretty quickly that there was more to the Slaughterhouse than just fighting. I’d had good boxing instruction at West Point, where I’d also learned some submission moves, and I’d carelessly assumed that those things alone would make me a crowd favorite. I’d been wrong.
Jack, one of the two brothers who ran things, called me into his office early on to ask two things of me. First, he wanted me to improve my kicks.
“You box great for a chick,” he’d said, “but if the guys out there just wanted to see boxing, they’d turn on the TV. They come here to see a mix of styles, street moves and Asian stuff, and kicks are especially a crowd pleaser. You’re making enough money—go find a dojo you like and learn to mix up your moves a little.”
“All right,” I’d said.
“The other thing is,” he’d said, “do a little something with your looks. Hey, don’t get hot. This place isn’t all about good fighting. It’s a spectacle. The guys out there aren’t gonna get behind you if you’re dressed like a college girl on her way to lift weights. They’d rather watch a hot girl with sloppy moves. It doesn’t matter how good your chops are—if you can’t get the crowd behind you, I can’t keep giving you fights.”
Jack and I probably never quite saw eye to eye on how I should look when I came down to the ring, but I made some changes. About once a month, I went to a small salon off Melrose, redolent with the scent of chemicals and pulsating with Eurodisco music, and I let the girls brighten and streak my hair. I got temporary tattoos, flames up my arms from wrist to elbow, a sunburst rising over my tailbone. Sometimes I thumbed black kohl thickly under my eyes to create an angry, deadened gaze.
As Jack predicted, the guys liked it. But everything I changed about my hair and body was short-term; I never did anything permanent. I suppose a shrink would say it was my way of declaring that none of this touched the essential me.
I didn’t always win. In particular I remember one girl, white like me, from somewhere out in the Central Valley. Five-foot-eleven, hard fat, staring at me with the impassive gaze of a bear looking at a wildlife photographer. That was one of my hundred-dollar nights.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to hurt the next day, win or lose, but Serena always had Vicodin.
“Come on, baby! Head kick! Kick to the head!”
Being a good fighter, it’s not any one thing. Technique is a lot, of course. But size is, too, because reach lets you hit opponents while staying out of range, and weight lets you put more force into the blows. It’s just physics: Force equals mass times velocity.
Kat threw her first hook, and I dropped low over my heels, letting her fist graze above my head. The men whistled and jeered.
Experience matters. That’s a close cousin to technique, but not the same thing, because experience also means a fighter who knows that bleeding stops, bruises heal, pain goes away. That lets you keep your head when things aren’t going your way.
Kat dug a low left hook into my ribs. I couldn’t get out of the way in time and had to absorb it. It wasn’t a very hard blow. Good. If that was all she had, it wasn’t enough.
A lot of people think anger helps. I tend to think that’s a myth. An angry fighter with no skills may throw more punches, but flailing blindly will get you knocked out fast.
Confident now from landing a blow, Kat stayed in close, trying again to hammer my ribs. Mistake. I threw both my arms around her neck, taking advantage of her proximity.
The other thing that doesn’t help as much as people think? Brains. You hear about “thinking fighters,” but those individuals are rare and very, very good. Maybe, for them, time seems to slow and they can anticipate, plan on the fly. I can’t; most of the guys I know can’t. The firstie who’d coached me and the rest of my company’s boxing team used to say, Learn as much as you can outside the ring, but when you’re in the ring, stop thinking. Let your muscles think for you, because your brain won’t do it fast enough.
Still clinching Kat’s neck, I threw my right knee into her midsection and both heard and felt the way it punished her. She would have doubled over, except that I put my hands on her shoulders, then shoved lightly to get her out at the end of my range, and threw my hardest straight right into her face.
I’ve heard men, experienced fighters, say they’ll sometimes block body blows with their heads. I believe them, but I’ve never done it. Next time you see a picture of a human skull, notice the gap, the absence of bone, at the nose. It’s a fantastically vulnerable place to get hit. Something about it goes straight to your brain and rattles you to the core. It’s hard to recover from.
Kat didn’t. She backed up, raised her arms against another blow, and then waved me off. She’d decided to have a hundred-dollar night.
After she was out of the cage, Jack’s brother, Mav, beckoned me to talk to him through the mesh of the cage. I went over.
“Short fight,” he said.
“Sorry.” But I wasn’t.
“You want to go again?” he said. “I’ve got another girl who’s ready.”
I wiped at a bit of hair that had come loose from my braids and fallen into my face. “Sure,” I said.
I’d like to say that was how I had a thousand-dollar night, but it wasn’t. It was how I had a six-hundred-dollar night.
The Slaughterhouse had real locker rooms, left over from its days as a working factory, but there was no water service anymore, so no showers. Cooling off, I checked out my reflection in the tarnished mirror.
“You look fine,” a voice behind me said.
She was younger than me, Alice, a white girl of twenty. We hadn’t yet fought each other. I’d seen her once outside the fights and barely recognized her. She was a clerk at Home Depot during the day, and her pale blond shoulder-length hair was curly in a way that could have been natural or could have been an unfortunate perm. Her face and eyes were both round, giving her a vacuous look, and under street clothes her body looked a little plump. Her middle-class customers at Home Depot, the ones pricing Corian countertops and hardwood flooring for their home-improvement projects, probably looked at her and thought white trash, then double-checked their receipts for mistakes.
At the fights she was someone different. She laced her hair back into multiple narrow braids against her skull. The blankness of her face became cool hardness. And in sports bra, board shorts, and bare feet, the roundness of her body was clearly the roundness of muscle, like that of the dray ponies that had once worked in coal mines.
“Go kick some ass,” I told her. Good luck wasn’t something we said. It wasn’t about luck.
Alice went out to the ring, and I got my backpack from a locker and took out my street clothes. It was after ten, probably just cool enough outside to justify changing from my shorts into the jeans I’d brought, and my simple white T-shirt and crimson hoodie. I was sitting on a bench lacing up my boots when I heard my cell phone buzzing. The number on the screen was Serena’s.
“Hey, ésa, where are you?” she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, “You shouldn’t be on the street, wherever you are. The cops are looking for you.”
That was fast, I thought, remembering last night and the truck robbery. Then, “Wait a minute, just me? Why not you?”
“It’s not about last night,” Serena said. “A couple of people got killed, up in San Francisco.”
“And?”
“You’re the suspect.”
“What? You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, it’s on the news,” Serena said.
“You mean, like, last year, when I lived up there?”
“No, it was yesterday, they’re saying.”
“Well, then it’s a mix-up,” I said. “It’s just somebody with the same name. My last name’s not uncommon, and my first was only the most popular—”
“I know that, but it’s not just a name thing,” she insisted. “This is who they’re describing: Hailey Cain, twenty-four years old, blond hair, brown eyes, birthmark on the right cheekbone. And—” She paused here. “Hailey, they’re saying that your thumbprint was on one of the used, what do you call ’em, casings.”
That’s not possible.
I was silent so long that Serena said, “I know, Insula, I didn’t believe it, either. It was Diana who saw it on the news first and called me, and I said, ‘No way, that can’t be right.’ ”
Then she said, “The other thing, the big thing, is that one of the two vics was a policeman. Prima, they think you’re a cop killer.”