One time I asked Billy why he didn’t try on one of them Indian-eyed honeys down there. Respect, is what he said, for the older folks, and specially for the young men, you don’t want to take a man’s pride.
“When you’re invited to a party,” said Billy, “act like you care to be invited back.”
That was Billy Clancy; you don’t shit where you eat.
My deal with Billy was working in the gym with his fighters for ten percent of the purse off the top. No fights, no money. I didn’t see him for days unless it was getting up around fight time. But he’d stop by, not to check up on me, but just to let his boys know he cared about them. Most times he was smoother than gravy on a biscuit, but I could always tell when something was pestering him. ‘Course he wouldn’t talk about it much. Billy didn’t feel the need to talk, or he saw fit not to.
I know there was this one time when the head manager of all Billy’s joints in San Antonia took off with Billy’s cash. Billy come into his private office one Monday expecting to see deposit slips for the money what come in over a big weekend. Well, sir, there was no money, and no keys, and no manager, but that same manager had held a gun on Billy’s little Messkin office gal so’s she’d open the safe. The manager had whipped on the little gal, taped her to a chair with duct tape to where she’d peed herself, and she was near hysteric.
Billy had some of his help make a few phone calls, and damned if the boy what did Billy didn’t head for his hometown on the island of Isla Mujeres way down at the tip of Mexico, where he thought he’d be safe. Billy waited a week, then took a plane to Merida in the Yucatan. He rented him a big car with a good AC and drove on over to the dried-out, palmy little town of Puerto Juárez on the coast that’s just lick across the water from what’s called Women’s Island.
He hung out a day or so in Puerto Juárez, until he got a feel for the place, and so the local police could get a good look at him. Then he just pulled up in front of their peach-colored shack, half its palm-leaf roof hanging loose. He took his time getting out of his rental car, and walked slow inside. Stood a foot taller than most. He talked Spanish and told the captain of the local federates his deal, made it simple. All he wanted was his keys back, and he wanted both the manager’s balls. The captain was to keep what was left of the money.
That night late, the captain brought forty-six keys on three key rings to Billy’s blistered motel. He showed Polaroids of the manager’s corpse what was dumped to cook in the hot water off the island, and he also brought in the manager’s two huevos — his two eggs, each wrapped in a corn tortilla. Billy Clancy fed them to the wild dogs on the other side of the adobe back fence.
Billy checked out some of the Mayan ruins down around those parts, giving local folks time to call the news back to San Antonia. Billy got back, nobody said nothing. Didn’t have no more problems with the help stealing now he’d made clear what was his was his.
There was only one other deal about Billy I ever knew about, this time with one of his ex-fighters, a failed middleweight, a colored boy Billy’d made a cook in one of his places. Nice boy, worked hard, short hair, all the good stuff. First off, he worked as a bar-back. But then the bartenders found out the kid was sneaking their tips. They cornered him in a storeroom. They had him turned upside down, was ready to break his hands for him, but then he started squealing they was only doing it ‘cause he’s black. Billy heard it from upstairs and called off his bartenders, piecing them off with a couple of C-notes each. He listened to the boy’s story, and ‘cause he couldn’t prove the boy was dirty, he moved him to a different joint, and that’s where he made a fry cook out of him. The kid was good at cooking, worked overtime anytime the head cook wanted. But then word come down the kid was dealing drugs outta the kitchen. Billy knew dead bang this time and he had one of his cop friends make a buy on the sly.
See, Billy always tried to take care of his own business, unless when it was something like down in Mexico. Billy said when he took care of things himself, there was nobody could tell a story different from the one he told. So he waited for the boy outside the boy’s mama’s house one night late, slashed two of his tires. Boy comes out and goes shitting mad when he sees his tires cut, starts waving his arms like a crawdad.
Billy comes up with a baseball bat alongside his leg, said, “Boy, I come to buy some of that shit you sell.”
Boy pissed the boy off something awful, but he knew better than to challenge Billy on it. So the boy tried to run. He showed up dead, is what happened, his legs broke, his balls in his mouth. No cop ever knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but drugs didn’t happen in any of Billy’s places after that neither.
It was a couple years after that when Dee-Cee Swans collared me about this heavyweight he’d been working with over at the Brown Bomber Gym in Houston. I said I wasn’t going to no Houston — even if it was to look at the real Brown Bomber himself. Dee-Cee said there wasn’t no need.
Henrilee “Dark Chocolate” Swans was from Louisiana, his family going back to Spanish slave times, the original name was Cisneros. Family’d brought him as a boy to Houston during World War Two, where they’d come to better themself. Henrilee’s fighting days started on the streets of the Fifth Ward. He said things was so tough in his part of town that when a wino died, his dog ate him. Dee-Cee was a pretty good lightweight in his time, now a’course he weighs more. Fight guys got to calling him Dee-Cee instead of Dark Chocolate, to make things short. Dee-Cee said call him anything you want, long as you called him to dinner.
He wore a cap ‘cause he was baldheaded except for the white fringe around his ears and neck. He wore glasses, but one lens had a crack in it. He had a bad back and a slight limp, so he walked with a polished, homemade old mesquite walking stick. It was thick as your wrist and was more like a knobby club than a cane. But old Dee-Cee still had the moves. The time, between now and back when he was still Dark Chocolate, disappeared when Dee-Cee had need to move. Said he never had no trouble on no bus in no part of town, not with that stick between his legs. Dee-Cee had them greeny-blue eyes what some coloreds gets, and when he looked at you square, you was looked at.
Way me and him hooked up was chancy, like everything else in fights. ‘Course we knew each other going way back. Both of us liked stand-up style of fighters, so we always had a lot to talk about, things like moves, slips, and counters. Like me, he knew that a fighter’s feet are his brains — that they’re what tell you what punches to throw and when to do it. Since there was more colored fighters in Dallas and Houston, that’s where Dee-Cee operated out of most. But he had folks in San Antonia, too. He showed up again, him and a white heavyweight, big kid, a Irish boy from L.A. calling himself “KO” Kenny Coyle. What wasn’t chancy was that Dee-Cee knew I was connected with Billy Clancy.
Dee-Cee got together with Coyle, trained him a while in Houston after working the boy’s corner twice as a pickup cutman in a Alabama casino. The way the boy was matched, he was supposed to lose. See, he hadn’t fought in a while. But he won both fights by early KOs, and his record got to be seventeen and one, with fifteen knockouts. Coyle could punch with both hands at six-foot-five, two hundred forty-five pounds, size sixteen shoe. His only loss came a few years back from a bad cut to his left eyelid up Vancouver, Canada.