Kareem Tayyar

Requiem for a Welterweight

I.

My father was that rare individual who felt there were no heroes or villains in Vietnam, only tragic figures of varying degrees. The soldiers, draft dodgers, rebels, farmers, Lyndon Johnson, Ngo Dinh Dieu, even Robert McNamara --all were players in a Shakespearean revival that never should have been financed. So far as my father was concerned, by the time the curtain fell in 1975, and American choppers were leaving the rooftop of the embassy, all that was missing was Prospero burying the American Constitution five fathoms deep. Though he rarely talked about his tours in Vietnam, whenever he did, an overwhelming practicality most often predominated. He wasn't angry; nor did he place blame. He simply wished that none of it had ever happened, and, given that this was an obvious impossibility, that those who had been lucky enough to have survived deserved, at the very least, not to have had their dreams indefinitely haunted by their participation in it. Whether such a blessing was granted to my father, he never said, and I never asked.

Whatever the case, the war made a religious man out of him. And it was not because, at some moment of heightened danger near the Black River, he had encountered, Merton-like, a sense of God's enduring presence -- just the opposite, in fact. As he would later put it, "God will never show himself. But if you look hard enough, you can find the places where he has sometimes been."

For my father, this process of spiritual private detection was defined by an almost samurai-like devotion to public service. His main job was as a paramedic for the city of Huntington Beach, a place where, spurred by a desire to be as close to the ocean as possible, my parents had settled upon my father's return from combat; his second job, which he worked two to three afternoons a week throughout the springs and summers of my childhood, was as a lifeguard for the stretch of densely attended coastline on both sides of the pier. It was also an occupation that often caused my mother to joke, "Your father was the only black surfer in all of Orange County until 1986."

But it was on the weekends, Sundays, specifically, where my father's devotion to service was most pronounced. After a morning spent as an usher at the church located a few blocks from where we lived, which was nestled in between a coffee shop and a vintage clothing outfit called Hazel's Dream, he spent the rest of the day delivering food, clothing, medicine, and other items to the infirm, the elderly, and the otherwise house-bound throughout Orange County. Luckily for me, this Meals-on-Wheels style endeavor was one my father felt should provide the foundation for his relationship with his son.

On that particular morning, my father had just finished an extended monologue on why Jackie Wilson was the most underrated soul singer of all time, when we pulled up at Tom's Deli, a sandwich shop owned and operated by Tom Miller, a Chicago transplant who was as devoted to his version of Christianity (a conservative Roman Catholicism), as my father was to his (a liberal Protestantism). On Sundays, Mr. Miller transformed the back of his shop into the chapter's unofficial headquarters, and it was there we had come to load the trunk of our forever-on-its-last-legs Oldsmobile sedan with the requisite bags and boxes, each of them bearing a sticker with the name and address of the intended recipient.

"Charles McCoy," Tom said upon my father's entrance, his elocution possessed of the type of overt formality usually reserved for actors announcing Academy Award nominees. Then, a few beats later, Tom, as he always did, nodded at me and asked, "How is it you're taller than you were last Sunday?" Then he, my father, and the few other volunteers who had already arrived spent fifteen minutes discussing the local and national events that always seemed to dominate the week's news cycle back in those days: why Congress kept big-timing Jimmy Carter; whether the Lakers were a dynasty in the making; how it was that Stevie Wonder never seemed to make a bad album; when, if ever, Tom Bradley might run for President.

"Reagan could win this thing."

"This country isn't stupid enough to hand the car keys to an actor."

"California was."

"Good point."

"One of these days I'm going to run myself."

"You don't have the necessary prerequisites to run."

"And what's that?"

"A brain."

"Anybody see McEnroe last week at the Open?"

"Forget McEnroe. He's no Borg."

"Borg is no Connors."

"None of them are Ashe."

"You all hear about the guy who washed up at 32nd Street missing both of his ears?"

"What about the girl they found in the trunk of her car on Harbor Boulevard?"

"Sixteen years old."

"My God."

"Don't I know it."

"It makes me doubt He even exists."

"He'd better," Tom would say, breaking the tension. "Otherwise the Cubs are never going to win the Series."

"Give it up."

"Seriously."

"Not even God is strong enough to make that happen."

All of this was followed by laughter, handshakes, and a few pats on the back, before, as everyone started to disperse, Tom’s phone began to ring.

Upon answering, he handed the receiver to my father and said, "It's for you."

My father sauntered over to the receiver with the casual happiness of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be at that particular moment in time. It is the gift, of the many my parents gave me, for which I am most grateful. I often joke with my wife that you could drop my mother down into the middle of the Gobi Desert at the height of summer, and she would comment on how lovely the weather was.

"Yes?" he said into the receiver.

In the car a few minutes later, my father said, "We're going to do a second round up in L.A. for Curtis when we're through down here."

"How come?" I asked.

"His wife’s gone into labor. And she's struggling a bit."

With that he leaned over and turned on the radio. A few seconds later Erma Franklin was in the car with us, her voice sounding like a cross between Christ's mother and Mary Magdalene.

 

II

The L.A. shift took us from one side of that labyrinth of a city to the other. We delivered a week's worth of groceries to a wheelchair-bound woman in Baldwin Park, then delivered the same to a family of six living in a converted garage in Eagle Rock, the father bedridden as a result of an illness whose name I couldn't pronounce. We hit an SRO just off Central Avenue, an old bungalow on 190th Street, and a house in the shadow of the 110 Freeway whose barred windows and iron screen door looked as if its tenants were expecting an advancing army at any moment. Somewhere along the way we stopped at a house whose floor was leaking so badly that grass had begun to sprout up through the boards.

What we spoke about in those particular hours has been lost to memory, but without a doubt there was 102.3 FM to supply the soundtrack. Week in and week out, that station introduced me to the music that would score the next several decades of my life: Smokey Robinson; Gamble and Huff; Eddie Kendricks; Jimmy and David Ruffin; The Commodores; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and my favorite, a mysterious, gender-bending wunderkind who went by the one-name moniker Prince. If I were ever to produce a film about my life between the years of 1976 and 1981, the opening scene would feature an automobile radio playing the first few bars of "I Wanna Be Your Lover" or "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" There are days, even now, when I am convinced that time travel has already been invented. All I need to hear is the intro to "When You Were Mine" for me to be nine years old -- my father behind the wheel with Los Angeles still a few years away from crack cocaine, AIDS, the Bloods, the Crips, and gentrification.

The rundown four-plex apartment that had been built into the side of a hill a few blocks from USC was to be our last stop of the day. We climbed the stairs slowly, as if to move too quickly or to entrust too much weight to any one of the stairs might result in the entire staircase crumbling beneath us.

My father, as always, knocked patiently, aware that whoever lived inside might need a significant amount of time to reach the front door.

Finally a young girl, four or five years old, appeared at the door. She looked up with the kind of rapt curiosity that only children can possess. Indeed, with a young son of my own, it never ceases to amaze me the way a small child can stare at a pair of drapes, or a blank wall, or a parked car, with the kind of transfixed attention to detail an adult couldn't replicate even if he were gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Two or three seconds after that a second child appeared. She was a girl of nine or ten, and her hair had been lovingly braided. She wore a Spanish blouse that, while clearly second-hand, had been carefully washed and pressed.

"Hello," my father said. "Are your parents home?"

The girl nodded, before stepping away from the door and silently beckoning us inside.

The apartment consisted of a small living room, a kitchen, and, from what I could see, a slim hallway that appeared to lead to a single bathroom and bedroom. A few feet from the television sat an old woman, whose eyes were closed, and whose chin rested on her chest. As my father and I began to place the groceries on a scratched wooden table near a curtain-less window, a woman emerged from the hallway.

"I didn't hear you come in," she apologized.

She looked a few years younger than my father, and the small crucifix she wore around a slim necklace reflected the light of the sun in such a way that I temporarily saw stars. A thick streak of gray ran dramatically through her otherwise black hair, giving her the kind of sensual gravitas I thought had been exclusively reserved for film actresses and Diana Ross.

When my father looked up to greet her, the air seemed to go entirely out of the room. The feeling was palpable, as if suddenly we were in a zero-gravity module meant to mimic the experience of outer space. The moment, for the rest of my life, has always made me think there cannot be anything lonelier in this world than the life of an astronaut. However unparalleled the thrill of setting foot upon the surface of the moon may be, the adventure is in no way worth the corresponding feeling of solitude. In other words, the look that crossed my father's face was of an alienation I hope I never experience in my own life.

Nothing was said for several seconds, as my father and the woman -- who looked equally stunned -- stared at one another. Meanwhile, a sitcom had begun to play on the television, which meant the silence was suddenly filled by the sound of canned, prerecorded laughter provided by a studio audience.

Finally, the woman said, "Well, you don't look a day older than the night we went to see Bonnie and Clyde at the Chinese Theater."

"You always were a bad liar, Selma."

"And you were always terrible at staying in touch."

"I was busy trying not to get shot," my father said, in the most direct response to his military service I had ever heard him articulate.

"Well, you succeeded."

"Success had nothing to do with it."

"No? Then what?"

"Dumb luck."

"You were never dumb."

"Of course I was. Otherwise I would have gone to Montreal."

"You would have hated the weather."

"Saigon in summer wasn't exactly paradise either."

For how ever many questions I had in that moment regarding my father's relationship to the woman, all of them were transcended by the simple fact that he seemed to be speaking in a language -- clipped, biting -- he had never used with either my mother or myself. With us, his personality was defined by a constant sense that things would always work out for the better. There were times when he reminded me of a tirelessly enthusiastic game show host who seemed like the only thing he hated in life was when someone had to go home a loser.

But in that apartment he was none of those things. He was no longer even the thirty-five-year-old man I knew him to be; he seemed both younger and older than that by decades.

The woman said, "You would never have let Ruben go over alone."

"A lot of good I did him."

"You did better than I was able to. He didn't disappear on your watch."

"No, he just got his head shot off while I was headed to Paris for R&R."

The woman stopped cold. "What are you talking about?"

"Forget it. None of it matters anyway."

"But Ruben isn't dead," the woman pressed. "At least he wasn't as of six months ago."

"Bullshit," my father answered. It would be the one and only time in the entirety of his life that I heard him curse. At the utterance of the word, he shot me a glance that clearly signaled all rules of decorum and expected behavior had been suspended until further notice.

"Well, then I've been living on and off with a ghost all these years," she said, before adding, "which explains a few things, actually."

My guess is that the conversation that followed was one that occurred in households all over America in the years immediately following the end of the war. Or, as my father would later say about Vietnam, "There were rumors everywhere. And you were never in one place long enough to confirm or deny whatever it was that you had heard."

As the ensuing conversation would reveal, my father and his best friend, Ruben Detroya, had enlisted in the Army together after having learned that a third friend of theirs, Demarius Sans, had been killed in a firefight near the Mekong Delta. Selma Rodriguez, the woman whose apartment we were standing in, had been Ruben's girlfriend since their first day of high school, when the two of them had met in science class.

Selma went on to describe the difficulties of Ruben's post-war life: the years spent trying (and failing) to regain the championship welterweight form that had carried him to the title six months before he'd shipped out; the eighteen months spent in and out of VA Hospitals in Los Angeles and Long Beach to quiet the ghosts in his head; and the most recent three years, he spent on or near the streets, sleeping on park benches and in alleys, once being rousted by the police while crashing in an abandoned roller-skating rink a few blocks off La Cienega. And finally, his disappearance six months prior.

"Last I heard he was living in St. James Chapel, out near Angels Flight."

"The one that used to have the haunted house each Halloween?"

"Yes. They ripped out the pews to make room for a hundred or so bunks. The priest who runs it is a vet himself, is what I heard. Which makes no sense to me."

"Why is that?" my father asked.

"All you guys come back more certain than ever that God exists," she answered. "While those of us who waited know he was nothing but an invention of the poets to begin with."

"Yet you wear that cross," my father said, nodding to her necklace.

"Ruben gave it to me," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "If he'd given me one with a dolphin on the end of it, I would have worn that one instead."

The evening had arrived when none of us were looking. Through the windows the last light shone into the living room, casting a soft haze that enveloped the room. At some point, the old woman had awakened and wheeled herself away, and the children had turned off the television and vanished as well. The only sound that remained came from a radio playing in a neighboring apartment. I recognized the voice. It was a singer who had been famous from the time before the Second World War. My mother often listened to him when she was cooking. I found the music, at that particular moment, to make the entire scene inside of the apartment even sadder than it would otherwise have been. I've never understood how, exactly, music seems able to do this.

"Anyway," Selma said, as I refocused on the conversation occurring in the room. "It doesn't matter much now. He might as well have died over there, for all the good surviving did him."

"You shouldn't speak that way."

"Why not?"

"Because as long as there's life there's hope for resurrection."

"You've got that wrong, Charles," Selma countered. "A person"s got to die before he can be brought back to life."

My father had no response to that, instead choosing to return Selma's stare for several seconds while the two former friends tried not to let their respective sorrows destroy whatever was left of the bond they had once possessed. It was why, I am certain, Selma broke the silence by saying, "You remember that night the three of us climbed to the Hollywood sign to share a joint?"

My father, after momentarily seeming to battle between whether to maintain the image he had spent years carefully constructing for what he felt was his son's benefit or embracing Selma's gesture of shared nostalgia so as to smooth over the anger they had both allowed to bubble to the surface, chose, thankfully, the latter. I was only a few months from being ten years old that summer anyway; the days of a blind idolatry of one's father were coming to a close.

"Ruben always knew where to get the best stuff," my father said.

"That's one of the many things I loved about him," Selma said.

"Was that the night Ruben said he was certain wings were beginning to grow from his shoulder- blades?" my father asked.

"It may have been. He was the only man I ever knew who reacted to pot like it was mushrooms. He would have been a great hippie."

"I wish he had been," my father said. "I wish I had been too. I've always liked Golden Gate Park."

While I thought that shared memory had possibly created an opportunity for a second chapter to the evening, I was wrong. A few minutes later, Selma had shaken my hand and said it was nice to have met me. I was standing at the bottom of the steps while I watched as my father and Selma paused at the top of the landing. They shared a few words that I was too far away to make out. Nevertheless, their exchange ended with an embrace that lasted longer than I would have expected. By the time it was over, tears had formed in Selma's eyes, and my father turned from her with the expression of someone who has turned away from the country of his birth for the very last time.

 

III

Years later, in a college literature course, I would read Steinbeck's To a God Unknown, where the author writes that there are times in peoples' lives when a "door would open," and through it individuals who rarely talked with a complete openness suddenly found themselves doing just that. This door would never remain open for long, but while it was, both parties were obligated to walk through it.

Such a door was opened on our drive to St. James Chapel.

We were in the car, moving through the relatively empty Sunday evening streets, when my father, rather than turning on the radio, kept his gaze fixed on the road and said, "It's a strange feeling when you realize someone you've already buried was never in the coffin to begin with."

Perhaps if I had been just a year or two older I would have known what to say. But on that evening, I had neither the self-awareness nor the vocabulary to offer anything other than, "But that's a good thing, isn't it?"

"Good or bad's got nothing to do with it," my father answered as we turned onto Figueroa Boulevard. "All it does is remind you that there's nothing in this world you can know for sure. Even the things you thought you were certain of."

"Do you think we'll find him?"

"No," he answered. "But we'll try anyway."

As we paused at a light, both of us looked at a man standing on the corner and holding a sign that read: The World Ends Here. He was roughly my father's age, maybe a little older, and he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and a tightly knotted bow tie.

"He's wrong about that," my father said. "It ended a while back. And it can't end twice."

"You mean the war?"

My father looked at me and nodded. "Once you've got a gun in your hand and you've been ordered to shoot anyone who doesn't look like you, that's when you know everything's over. The rest is just trying to clean up the mess you've made."

"Do you wish you hadn't gone?"

"Wishing isn't going to make any difference," he said, as the light turned green. "I did. And that's all that matters."

"What if I have to go someday?"

My father slowed the car to allow a man on crutches, who looked as if he hadn't showered or changed his clothes in days, to jaywalk.

"There's nothing I can tell you on that," he said. "You're going to have to decide what to do for yourself."

"Where's Montreal?"

"Somewhere they don't go to war very often."

"That sounds nice."

He looked at me and smiled. "It does, doesn't it?"

By the time we'd made it to St. James, the door had closed again. My father, seeming to sense this as well, had a few minutes earlier turned the radio back on. I looked out the windows at the city we moved through. All I can say is this: the less description of Downtown Los Angeles in the summer of 1980, the better. It certainly put to rest the idea that America is a first-world nation.

The church looked as if one mid-sized earthquake would send it collapsing like a stack of plates resting on the palm of an inebriated waiter. As we climbed the handful of steps that led to the entrance, an old plaque stated that the church had been built in 1884, and then, after a fire burned it to the ground nearly twenty years later, was rebuilt and rededicated in 1906. Both years seemed still too recent to me. The plaque could have said the cathedral was a thousand years old, and I would have believed it.

Inside was exactly as Selma had described: the pews had been replaced by rows and rows of bunk beds, and where the altar once had been, there now were desks, telephones, filing cabinets, and, even at this hour of the evening, a handful of volunteers. In the aisles on each side were bookshelves, boxes stacked six and seven high and deep at a time, and large cupboards featuring combination locks.

Men ranging in ages from 25 to 75 sat up on their beds, or slept soundly, or played cards, or milled about as we approached a young woman who sat at the main table and appeared to be in charge.

"Good evening, Miss," my father said. "I'm here inquiring after a friend of mine."

The woman, whose face featured a birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon just above her right jawline, smiled kindly at us, and said, "And what is the name of your friend?"

"Ruben Detroya," my father answered.

The woman, about to write down the name of the man being inquired about, put down her pen, and lifted her face to meet his.

"Wait here," she said, standing up and stepping away from the desk.

My father watched her disappear through an open door in the back before turning to look out across the church's interior. In the years since, I have come to think it must have looked an awful lot like a war hospital to him. All that was missing were gurneys and the sounds of incoming mortar shells.

A few minutes later, a priest, only a year or two older than the woman, emerged from the back. His thickly gelled hair and deep tan made him look more like Central Casting's version of a priest, rather than the real thing. He was not the man in charge, but the man who had been placed in charge while the real boss was away. And my father didn’t like him right away.

“"You are a friend of Ruben's?" the priest asked my father, without offering a handshake or introduction.

"We grew up together," my father answered.

"I hear Ruben was quite the boxer back in his day," the priest said, trying to make small talk. "He said he was a better boxer than he was a soldier."

My father, always uncomfortable when discussing the respective qualities of any former soldier with someone who hadn't served, answered, "That's because those fights were fair. There was a ring. There was a timer. There were places where you couldn't punch."

The priest, unaware of the thinly veiled sarcasm in my father’s words, said, "Ruben left us about four months ago. He'd been struggling for some time before that. Nightmares, refusing to eat, shouting at the top of his lungs about a wrong he felt a fellow resident or volunteer had done him."

"So he was asked to leave?" my father said.

"No one is asked to leave. Ever." The priest paused, as if he were waiting for an apology for my father's inference. "That"s the difference between us and the world beyond these walls: we don't turn our backs on those we feel responsible for."

"Yet he isn't here."

"The night staff said one night he stepped out to smoke and didn't return," the priest said, turning his palms up to the ceiling, before adding, "Have you tried -- "

"We just came from there," my father answered.

"I wish I had any additional information to give you. Ruben was -- "

"Yes," my father said, cutting him off for the second time. "He was."

The slow revealing of another side of my father's character that the day had inspired was continuing. It occurred to me that seeing Selma Rodriguez had activated an emotional trip-wire that triggered a fusillade of previously suppressed emotions in him. When, seventeen years later, he died of a heart attack at fifty-one years old, I immediately thought back to that afternoon and evening, when it had first become clear there were more rooms in the mansion of my father's psyche than I had previously realized.The priest looked down at me, as if wondering whether to say what he wanted to in front of a young child.

"We just finished speaking about what he might do if another Vietnam should arise," my father said. "So there's nothing you can say that he isn't ready to hear."

As I swelled with pride at my father's defense of my maturity, the priest nodded, and said, "Ruben seemed to think there were certain orders he shouldn't have followed."

"Just about every soldier I've ever known feels that way."

"I imagine you're right," the priest said, before looking past us and nodding in the direction of the residents. "I just wonder why it is that some of them can move beyond it, and others can't."

"You'll figure out why God never talks back when you call for him before you get an answer to that one."

"God always answers when I call for him."

"That's the danger of a uniform," my father said, no longer even attempting to mask his rage. "It makes its wearer think he's more special than he really is."

"You're speaking from pain," the priest said.

"Of course I'm speaking from pain," my father seethed. "But that doesn't make it any less true."

Whatever ensuing attempts were made by both the priest and my father to steer the conversation back onto less contested ground were not successful. It was a dilemma as old as the world itself: two separate and incompatible truths coming into conflict with one another -- the man who knows his faith is reason, and the man who knows there is no such thing.

When my father and I were back outside, standing on the steps of the church and looking up at a downtown skyline that, even in the final hour before darkness, was bathed in a sepia-tinged smog that made one feel as if he had stepped into a Dorothea Lange photograph, I knew better than to try to pull my father out of his silence with mention of the fact that I was ravenously hungry. Instead, once in the car, after we had put on our seatbelts and started up the engine, my father, in an act that was as meaningful to me as it must have been to Lancelot the first time Arthur told him to point the way, nodded towards the radio and said, "Find us something good, son."

 

IV

The months that followed saw my father and I, after our usual Sunday rounds were done, driving up to Los Angeles to look for Ruben Detroya. At times our search possessed an understandable logic: we would visit every homeless shelter and tent encampment we could find, and show his photograph to as many volunteers and residents as possible. But more often than not the needle-in-a-haystack futility of what we were doing was apparent, as we were reduced to simply criss-crossing the city and studying the faces of as many people -- both homeless and not -- as we possibly could.

Needless to say, there were no second rounds of the type of conversation my father and I had engaged in on that first Sunday after leaving Selma Rodriguez's house. On most of the trips, the minute we crossed the county line into Los Angeles, whatever conversation we had been having would stop, and we would shift into a semi-permanent silence that, looking back, made those entire days seem like scenes from a silent film.

And then, a full year after we had first begun our search, we found ourselves on Sunset Boulevard, exiting a nondescript building which functioned as a halfway-house for veterans. As we headed back to our car, I happened to look into the window of a pawnshop, and there, among the assorted used guitars, nickel-plated pistols, and out-of-fashion clothes, I saw a pair of brown boxing gloves, beside which was a small notecard articulating their heritage:

Gloves Worn by Ruben Detroya
In His Fight with Helicopter Smith, May 7th, 1966

My father, who had been otherwise occupied with his own thoughts, had walked on up ahead of me, and it took several additional seconds before he noticed that I had stopped. After he had walked back to where I was standing and seen what had caught my eye, he smiled gently, and said, "He was something that night. The Helicopter had twelve pounds and a six inch height advantage on him. But Ruben just kept coming. By 11pm, a group of us were at Selma's grandmother's house, eating takeout and playing The Temptations so loud the neighbors finally called the cops on us."

I have never been in a pawnshop before or since, but what was there to describe about that particular place other than to say it felt like a cemetery with all of the headstones removed?

At the counter stood a Vietnamese man, his hair completely gray, and with several tattoos etched onto both of his forearms. He wore a faded blue polo shirt and wrinkled khakis. He watched us approach with the pair of gloves the way Peter O'Toole once watched Omar Sharif appear out of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. When my father placed the gloves on the glass, the man looked down at them for a moment, before looking back at my father and studying his face.

"You are a boxer?" he asked.

"No," my father said. "But I knew the man who owned these."

It took the man nearly thirty seconds to say, "He was your friend?"

"Yes. We grew up together."

The man didn't answer. Instead, he checked his watch, lifted the partition on the counter, and walked to the front door. After turning off the switch to the electric sign in the window, he locked the door from the inside, and turned back towards us.

"Come," he said, motioning for us to follow him.

Though confused, my father looked at me and nodded, and a few moments later the two of us were in a small office, separate from the main room, which appeared to double as a storage area. There was a metal desk, two metal filing cabinets, assorted trash bags, a small refrigerator, and a portable television sitting on a wooden shelf broadcasting a Dodgers game with the sound off.

As we stood in the room, the man opened the door to a second room, and vanished from sight. A few seconds later, we heard the sound of a combination lock being turned, and then a safe being opened. When the man reappeared, he was holding something in his arms that had been carefully covered by several towels that had been taped together.

The man placed the bundle on the table, cleared off the assorted papers that covered most of the desk, opened the top right drawer and removed a Swiss Army knife. After carefully sliding the blade beneath the duct tape that held the towels together, the man slowly pulled back the top towels to revealwhat had been hidden beneath: a prizefighter's championship belt, its gold inlay the fanciest thing I had seen in my young life. It looked like something that had once belonged to Kublai Khan or Alexander the Great. So struck was I by its beauty that I hadn't noticed my father's expression. After the initial wonder of seeing the belt had passed, I looked up and saw that my father was equally amazed, his eyes looking upon the belt with the same type of disbelief of a man who has witnessed a mermaid appear at the shore.

The man waved us to the desk and stepped aside so that we could have a closer look. My father ran his hand over the belt like a blind man reading Braille for the first time.

"I kept hoping he would come back for it," the man said.

My father looked at the man and asked, "When was he here?"

"A year ago, almost," the man said, and then added, "When he left, he thanked me in my own language."

"Well, you have done the same in his," my father answered.

The man gestured towards the belt and said, "You must take this."

"You must let us pay you."

The man walked to my father and, shaking his head from side to side, extended his hand. "No money," he insisted. "A handshake instead."

I stood and watched as they shook hands. On the television behind them Fernando Valenzuela was waiting for a signal from his catcher. The clock on the wall said it was nearly 5pm. Soon my mother would begin preparing dinner in our kitchen, while my sister played in the front yard with her friends, jumping rope in the fading light of day.

 

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