Suckerpunch: (2011) by Jeremy Brown

the people out of the crowd and put them in a sedan chair and carry them around the dance floor so they could act like an emperor or empress. Some of them did a good job, holding a hand out and gazing above the plebeians. Others clung to the arms and gave out high fives like free bread.
     
    The music and people were making it so we had to lean over the table to hear each other, Marcela talking with her hands and almost smacking me in the face more than once. Each time she stopped what she was saying to put a hand on my cheek and apologize until she finally said, “Here, hold my hands on the table. It’s the only way.”
     
    I laid my hands palms up on the table, and she dropped hers in, little hand-shaped cookies, and I closed around them lightly and waited.
     
    “I can’t do it.” She laughed. “I need them free to talk.”
     
    “That’s why I’m not letting them go,” I said.
     
    “Oh, you like your women to be quiet?”
     
    “How would I know?”
     
    She closed one eye and freed a hand to point at me. “You are going to be trouble, boy.”
     
    I tried to do a who-me? face, but I don’t have one.
     
    Marcela turned my hands over and ran her fingers over my knuckles. She inspected a scar on my left hand near the base of my middle finger that looked like someone had smashed two front teeth into it. “Why did you pick fighting?” I opened my mouth and she said, “And don’t give me the nonsense about fighting picking you.”
     
    I closed my mouth.
     
    She said, “You seem pretty smart, so that’s why I ask.”
     
    “Who said fighters can’t be smart?”
     
    “You’ve met my cousins?”
     
    I said, “Jairo has his head on right.”
     
    “Psh. That one, maybe he’s wise, but I don’t know about smart. Someone looks at him cross-eyed and he’s got his shirt off, ready to go.”
     
    “He’s Brazilian.”
     
    She didn’t have an argument for that.
     
    “You know, it used to be some of the best fighters were also the smartest guys around. Socrates was a soldier in the Athenian army. He treated battles like arguments, no retreating.”
     
    “Let me guess: he died in battle.”
     
    “No,” I said, “he was imprisoned and given a death sentence. He drank poison.”
     
    Marcela lifted her glass. “To Socrates.”
     
    “You want me to apologize for being a fighter, but I’m not going to. Fighting is fun. It’s honest. You can’t hide from yourself in a fight. You should know that from your jiu jitsu.”
     
    “No, that is grace and strength. And there are rules.”
     
    “MMA has rules.”
     
    “Ah, but that’s not where you started. They talk at the gym, and I listen. You’re just like Jairo and the others, fighting since you were little for no good reason.”
     
    “I had a good reason,” I said.
     
    “What, did they take your cookies? Pull your hair and say you stink?”
     
    I almost let it slide. But she was testing me, pushing me to see if I’d push back. In my experience, the best way to gain the advantage in an argument is to tell the truth; it throws people off. I said, “No. They tossed me in an empty pool when I was eleven. Then they threw another kid in. He was fifteen. Guess who climbed out?”
     
    Marcela eased a cherry tomato into her mouth and chewed it a few times. She pointed her fork at me and said, “You’re joking with me.”
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “Somebody put you in a pool.”
     
    “An empty pool,” I said. “A full pool would have been more dangerous. I have a tendency to sink.”
     
    “Who put you in?”
     
    “There was a gang of Hispanic kids who hung around the school. They were a chapter of the San Chucos gang, called themselves the Thirteen Bulls. Smoking, trying to look tough, selling drugs. Graffiti. They found an abandoned house a few blocks away and turned it into their hangout, and it had a pool in the backyard. I think they skated in it for a while, but that got boring. One day I was on my way home, and they grabbed