Pound for Pound by F. X. Toole Read Free Book Online Page A

and the 605, the Pomona and the San Gabriel Freeways. Her driver’s license permitted her to transport young passengers, and she usually dropped kids off at home after giving signing lessons, or following other events closer to the clinic. This was the farthest from the clinic Lupe had been allowed to drive the kids, and she felt honored by the trust placed in her.
    The arena was a privately owned horse facility, but concerts and boxing matches were often held there as well. It was built like a
rancho del charro,
a scaled-down version of a bullring, but with one section open that led to the corrals, and it served mostly for
charreadas,
or Mexican-style rodeos. Horses were roped and bulls were ridden, and during breaks in the action, decked-out mariachi musicians outfitted in
trajes de gala
played trumpets and violins. Behind the brightly painted red and yellow structure, a long line of steel pylons ran south along the 605. Crackling high-voltage lines were strung between them. Puddles and pools of the shallow San Gabriel River stagnated beneath the pops and sizzles. Reeds and weeds and squat trees grew along the river’s cement banks. Minnows and pollywogs flourished.
    Riders and stable hands allowed the children to examine the saddlery, to touch the horses’ big chests, to stroke their tender noses. The children had never seen or smelled a live horse, much less stalls and corrals full of them, and the kids’ little fingers danced with excitement and awe as theysigned to each other and played cowboys and Indians beneath corrugated roofs and turned the tubular metal fences into monkey bars.
    Outside the arena were well-tended lawns, shade trees, and picnic areas. On the weekends, Mexican vendors stretched their stalls along narrow, curving streets to display everything from serapes to plumbing supplies.
    Inside the corrals, Lupe wore boots and jeans, and taught her kids to feed and water the animals. Many of them were scrawny hacks and nags that were mercilessly knocked down during the arena’s weekly rodeos. But there were glistening pintos and curried palominos as well, and big muscular bays and dark chestnuts that twitched and shone in the sunlight. Nearly all had owners who were too busy to groom them. Lupe paid for her riding lessons by grooming such horses there. And, riding sidesaddle in full, ruffled
Adelita
costume, she also appeared at the weekly shows, and broke hearts every time she did.
    Lupe, the nickname for Guadalupe, as in
nuestra
Señora de Guadalupe, our Lady of Guadalupe, was just budding into womanhood. She wore her lustrous black hair in a
trenza,
a long, thick braid laced with colored ribbons that complimented her aristocratic features and hooked, Indian nose, her dark skin and almond-shaped eyes. She was a looker, moved with grace and assurance, had her daddy’s straight white teeth.
    Lupe lived with her mother, the widow Soledad Ayala, and Lupe’s younger brother, Jesse. Mrs. Ayala’s mother, Rosario, had been a seamstress in Guadalajara. She’d made the tiny white dresses for little girls receiving their first Holy Communion, and the “grown-up” gowns for fifteen-year-old girls celebrating their
quinceañera
rite of passage into adulthood. But Rosario had also specialized in ruffled riding dresses, and the traditional Mexican
charro trajes de gala
for men and women—the studded jackets and tight pants or long skirts—all worn with white shirts and floppy bow ties big as two hands, the fingers laced. They wore their moon-size sombreros like crowns above their dark faces.
    Soledad had learned the trade from Rosario as a little girl in Mexico. From her home in Los Angeles, she produced the same Holy Communionand
quinceañera
dresses, but there was not much demand for the rest. She also worked full-time as a coffee-shop waitress at a major downtown hotel that catered to tourists, working the morning shift so she could be home when her kids got there from school and could be with them at